Thursday, August 31, 2006

It's Cloudy in the West

Like Nero sleep, the westerns point to the facts of bolting horses: the gates breached, the railings trampled. As they say, revolutionaries don’t get old, they just get chubby. It’s time to move on.

Western revolutionaries take part and take apart the last remnants of the tatters of civilisation. On the mound of plaster, beyond the gold leaf of the sun, the totem of respect and good luck stands tall for them. They, these westerns, are beyond the grasp of diktats, outside the reach of fear. On the ground, the cold grass, they are at the least preoccupied with leaf chewing and tea drinking: the best way to spend their days.

And here I am. All over you. My western tendencies, such as they are.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Pulling Up The Stakes

What chances sleep from danger when all around, tumult? Blasting their way in, cutting through steel doors and sliding, vaporous, beneath faulty air tight seals. There is no escaping them, these monsters.

Except when you zip up your sleeping bag. All the way up.

Thick socks are ballast and a hat to warm your head. Protection from a torch, boxes of matches, one of those air gun things. Shadowed shapes, on the screens of the tent walls, may distract the kids from the terror outside.

Through grass the creeping of dust. Above dust the low-lying mist, the unbreathable air. Needless to say, the family bundle, out through the flaps, is enough to alert them to your previously guessed at -

- presence.

They are mostly blobs. Splats of gore and pus. Spikes of black, scaly. They hiss, wail, sigh. Terrifying screams that, of course, keep you up all night. From his farmhouse door the farmer motions to his wife the glow of your tent. His lit pipe, a sway against the moon, also like your tent. The farmer’s wife, her touching lament:

I am at last a part of this that surrounds me, the blank, the heather, the escape of space. Oh brrr, how I fought against it once and how I now laugh to think of it, especially how I embrace it now. Please help me. We have butter churns and cobs that rotate. We build wooden things and feathered things to sell by the roadside. Please take me away. My husband, him and his tractor, you would not separate them. We milk hearty and all day long. Sometimes the weather, sometimes the moon. That glow from the tent. I could crawl inside and they could take me. I once wished hard for children.

Outside the flap. There, beyond the aluminium pans, past the low hiss of the gas, above the frame of the windbreaker, certain figures – spiny, scaly, black – dancing on the line of the horizon. It is too dark and too far to see. Are they moving toward us or are they moving away from us? If the former, then what were those noises we witnessed before?

Those noises we heard before?

Dances are what they do in the countryside. Music to the movement of the trees. Beware you and all of your tents.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Way Inside

I am a pull of gravity and I pressed to the ground could not move not even when I commanded my legs to lift me from the ground defy gravity defy it. I was lain there all broken and shabby my knees snapped beneath my curl of bottom and broken ankles. Help me with my glasses smashed and the glass and the frames just out of reach.

I am tongue tied idiot when she walks by me past the school steps and into the corridor where she makes her way to her class and I follow her. So say the teachers who ward me off her like her mum does until I am taken to a new school and a new girl who I like the same. The headmaster says I must stop and I say to him I will even though I don’t.

My mum is like lowercase and my dad is like uppercase but they are both of the same font family maybe my mum in italics and my dad underlined. I stamp them out on the screen and I stamp them out through the printer where I get them to say all their things over and over again. When they’re not looking I switch on the colour and mix them between themselves sometimes uppercase sometimes lowercase.

In the telephone box I looked out of one of the small windows just in time to see his face pressed against the window with the swearing and shouting. I mean I was talking on the phone and so couldn’t hear nothing what was being said I stuck my head out and fucking hell they dragged me out and I got some and all. When the police came I said it was his fault as I pointed at the guy who with his broken nose and teeth looked like he was more trouble than me.

I was with my sister and her pitter patter and we were travelling down the pavement in the buggy shopping trolley when we realised we had left the baby at home. Not really. We walked past them to pretend that the baby in the blanket was just a bunch of blankets and it was a good job they didn’t decide to set fire to the blankets or anything else like it.

I am and I wanked all over the place until I was empty my sac and nothing left to give. Spilled myself on magazine pages and over the keyboard pubic hairs all over the keyboard until I soaked it up with tissue paper and dried. I was stiff and tight and snapped back in when the doorbell rang and I was scared but hoped it might be her so I could come over her tits and come inside her arse all the way inside.

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Dance Their Low Light Steps

Does she look like a sheltering bomb? Or like a crumpled ball of words? Does she, moreover, remind you of your mother before your mother turned grey? I mean the blackness of her hair and the blackness of her eyes? They do say, as you well know, that we men are attracted, first of all, to that something about our mothers.

She is well-worn, it is true, and well past the clichés. She does, indeed, walk in beauty like the night. She is, also, the possessor of the cherriest red lips you ever did see. She knows, more to the point, that all of this is true. And as you know, we always favour what is true over the cliché of dirty lies.

She stoops to conquer, bends in the middle so that the over-ripe fruit falls heavily from the top of her head. The way it lands on your shoes, the sickening splat. You step back as if to admire her further, wiping the toes of your shoes on the backs of your trouser legs. Still she bends and you feel like her master, although you know that the pain of her stoop is the reason for her bend. She should straighten herself out, you say, later, to gales of ill-won laughter. Her shoes, glass, on the other side of the room, crack from the height of the pitch. The pumpkin escapes, the mice meander.

Her caution thrown to the wind one morning as she sat next to the bare table of small candle and hard bread. From her window, the London Victorian rooftops, the jump of the chimney brushes, the steam from the factory whistles. You, your snap in your hand, it was your turn to stoop, bending in the middle, just a little. Your daily morning promise of better to come and her new life of stardust and stardom. The happiness she sat, all day long, just dreaming of. And you, out at work all day long. For what? So she could sit on her ring and while it away with her dreams.

Her cross wilted somewhat and bent also in the middle, the other way, affording a nice fit. She climbed the stoop, past well-wishers and enemies, slowly made her way to the top. She called to you, one evening, called your name through an airborne whisper that curled like gravy through the turns of the city, down byways and flyways, up pavements and through gutters, reaching you as you slept. Her gentle tones enough to stir you. And you too made your way up that hill, your progress impeded by the threats of death and the reality of pain, dragged on by the calling of her voice. You made your way through it all, finally reaching the top days after your departure, weakened, limbless, about to drop. And she, her bend still apparent, telling you how she could see your house from up there.

Her heartbreak against the brush of your letter is no less real against the lies that you write. Her tears force the push of the ink, your typewritten safeguard washed clean away. In careful slumber your letter is inserted, between and beneath the oppression of, uh, rose petals, potpourri and happy herbs. Every time she opens the drawer, the sniff of decay, the whistle from your ink. No less though the story of her broken heart. It is like a funeral parlour in there.

She is, at first, the only place you would want to be. Her openness guarantees you those walks by moonlight, the trips along Cantalaga Bridge where the pavement widens before you, rises up like a shadow to meet your feet. Your arm around her, your fist in her pocket, the moon a perfect frame as you are captured before it. Its flash searing you against the surface of its grain.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

A Certain Slant of Light

The dark fills. The boy straps on his wings and throws up into the fountain. Flecks of earlier happiness.

His explosions are brief descents. His stabs of anger, loose, for a moment free. Ranging wildly, they rise but fall. This brevity matched by

(The brevity of the boy, his coal dust coat enlivened by flecks of happiness. Glisters of tiny fallen stars. The dazzle from his angel's wings.)

a sustained cruelty, an elongated turn. It goes on. Forever, so it seems.

This boy with his angel's wings and his winning smile sits on the roof, gazes out across the village.

Arrive into the village, through the main road from the north side, and your hilly descent will reveal the startling image of this boy, in full colour, perched upon his roof. You'll say, to your travelling companion, Christ, look at the size of that bird. Jesus, your travelling companion will reply, stirring himself from his view-induced stupor. But wait, you'll say, look closer and yonder, that's no bird. That's a boy. A flying boy. Look out!

At that moment - at your words of flying boy - he'll leap up, flap his wings and empty himself into the mercy of the tender blue sky. A flying boy indeed. A plummeting boy more like. Right on to the bonnet of your car.

Yes doctor, will he? His mother. Flew up, never seen anything like it. He's a good boy, just a bit. Will he, doctor? Where am I? Oh my! Hush now my darling boy, hush now.

The dip sits in the corner all day long and all night long. She would send him to school but there'd be no point. Or, at least, there was previously no point. Because the boy didn't speak. But now he has. A miracle. Where am I? Did the boy say anything after that? Five weeks later and so far no.

The crime of the village when they shut down the colliery. When they turned off the lives. The boy is a product of this. There, in the foreground, gleaming, mute and startling in his angelic gesture. Behind him, the backdrop, colouring the cracks. Put the two of them together and

(He is more than just some kind of product of the strike. He is, in fact, possibly the son of the scab of the village. Who was responsible for, according to village lore, at one extreme, a couple of deaths. At the other extreme, the loss of the battle. In reality, he was responsible for neither.)

you get the open road of possibility. Flight maybe. Take off.

The boy on this day, the day of the fountain, his stabs of anger etc., is imagining the sky and imagining how nice it would be to be taken by it. To escape into it. The sky his friend. Up there he could flee through flight, loop back occasionally to check on what he'd left behind. But it doesn't work as an angel. The flapping, like a bird. He needs to soar, to fly into flight, not fight against it. It should not, he decides, be hard work. Do angels glide?

They ascend. Symbolism is not enough to carry them.

On this day, the same day, he has been introduced to the man he knows could well be his father. A return to his home, all those years in America. The big car, the unbelievable brass fucking neck. His mother, tongue-tied and trembling, introduces him, this man, and makes no mention of who he could be. She doesn't know that the boy knows. If we were that way privileged we would see that his father - and he is, indeed, his father - knows that he knows. They recognise each other in each other, as the cliché goes. But the boy doesn't need

(His weirdness, his oddness, is most often taken for sullenness, for arrogance. The wings, of course, add to this. The boy could defend himself but chooses not to. This lofty height, such as it is, is better than crawling on the floor.)

a father.

This father, this Ted, has returned home on the occasion of the death of his poor red-haired mother who, because of her son, spent many of the last years of her life alone. These village people, these salts of the earth, knowing an open wound when they saw it. Yes, they made her pay. Her grieving son has taken the opportunity of her death to go through, first of all, a reflection process: hearing of his mother's death by telephone, he dropped the receiver and gazed into the fireplace, or at the TV, for almost two hours, ignoring the repeated hellos on the other end of the line. In that fire, in that TV screen, his reflection. The error of his ways, the mistakes made, all those memories, the past flickering, the glow of it all. His wife, herself dead, who could never bear him children, she too in that fire. And licking away, sparking up and out in tiny explosions of light and life, his son.

The boy is drunk. The droop of his wings tell us this. His various scenes.

Skimming small stones across the fountain. They plop.

Setting his camera on a rock, on the shore of the river, he takes a picture of himself. At the shutter's release the camera snaps back into the river. A bigger plop.

He watches birds somewhere and notes the similarity between them and himself. What with his large feathered wings and they with their small feathered wings. There is some kind of connection between them that goes beyond the literally physical. This point, just in case we miss it, is hammered home when a couple of the birds settle on his shoulders. He has a choice here: zippedy-doo-dah or Alcatraz.

Necking a can of Special Brew behind the Co-Op before setting fire to a pile of old chip wrappers. He singes one of his wings.

A girl his own age - what, fourteen or so - slaps him hard around the face. He reels from the blow, spins theatrically. The boys she is with kick out at him as he pirouettes.

Standing at the bus stop. The bus pulls up. Empty except for the driver. Something tells us that this driver, although being merely a bus driver, has depths you just wouldn't credit. Real wisdom and insight. Pearls. And all delivered with true grace and style. He climbs out of his cab, lights a cigarette, offers one to Angel (let's call him Angel), wearily blows out smoke, gazes up at the early stars and says: You know, there are some people who say - you get the idea. He climbs back into his cab, winks at the boy - that is, Angel - and goes on his way. The lone bus driver of the lonely fucking night.

He falls to his hands and knees, retching, in the gutter.

He falls into a ditch, cracks his head on a rock. Closes his eyes.

The next day, already late afternoon, and there's this Ted and Angel's mother (let's call her Rachel) telling their own stories in the best way they know how. They wake to the light through the skylight, climb to the roof where they gaze out over the village. They see, in the distance, on the other side of the village, the funeral coterie arriving at the house, Ted's mother's house. And does Ted dash away to make it in time to his own mother's funeral? Does he fuck. The view - in all senses - is much better from up there. Not a word between them as Ted lights two cigarettes, hands one over and - at one point - waves slowly, sadly, as his mother passes below. And would she, were she alive, have understood or appreciated this gesture? Would she fuck.

Would she fuck, says Clive in response to the question: Do you think she'd have wanted her Ted to have been here? Clive is some old fella at the funeral. He's one of Violet's (let's call her Violet) oldest friends.

What does this Ted really want as he carelessly lets slip some nugget or other as he's tying his tie as she, Rachel, looks on adoringly? Looking, we may add, some ten years younger than she did the day before. What is this nugget? What exactly did happen on that rain-soaked night, twenty years ago, when Bob Duffield and John Barryton met their ends in the fireball of their car, forced from the road while on their way back from - get this - a key NUM meeting? Eh? What do you know Ted? Why have you

(John Barryton, as it happens, was Rachel's husband. Angel's dad. Although not his dad, as we full well know.)

come back? As she leaps up, covers herself, tells him to leave and composes herself, tears falling from her face. From her face. A sniff or two, a throwing back of the shoulders even as she slumps, for a second or two, when from the window she sees Ted making his way down to the village pub, The Pandora's Box. But her Angel is

(The boy and his mother. Years together, alone. She was somehow soiled, according to those lovely village people, those rumours of Ted. No wonder the boy's a fruitbat.)

not in his bed. Not even slept in. Don't panic. Ted! she shouts, running from the room.

The ditch. Morning. A small bird hopping next to his sleeping/unconscious/dead head.

What bird? A Brent Goose. A Common Scoter. A Fieldfare. A Knot. An Oystercatcher. A Red-Throated Diver. A Redshank. A Rock Pipit. A Sanderling. A Shorelark. A Short-Eared Owl. A Water Rail. A Wigeon. A Whoop-de-Doo. A Bratwurst. A Common Strumpet. A Farmer Faggot. A Boiled Beef. A Loose Change. A Dancing Murraymint. A Tender Riser. A Slow Diver. An Ear-Muffed Duffer. A Bloated Fool. A Captain Cricklewood. A Liverpudlian. A Blinker. A Brentford Nylon. A Poisoned Arrow. A Laughing Car. An Empty Promise. A Guided Missile.

Oh, there's this Andrew who, for a while, was knocking around Rachel, doing his bit, trying for a little while to be some kind of father to the boy but not quite managing it, never getting it right. A drinker, a bully, a man hiding something. Why did he show all that interest? And why only after her husband had died? She'd known him for years. This Andrew, something not right about him. But she needed someone at the time.

This Andrew sat now, in The Pandora's Box, nursing what he believes to be just one of many of that evening's pints. And what a state he's in.

Angel stirs. The bird hops away. Just out of vision, out of focus. The boy stirs, groans.

Ted marches into the pub, to Andrew who, looking up, shows his first signs of life through terror. He takes the bit of paper Ted pushes under his nose. Ted smiles. Says, See you there. Leaves.

Angel stirs. That fucking bird, still out of focus. It's getting dark. The boy falls back, drifts off, but that bird, squawking or whistling or whatever it is that birds do, stirs him again. Slowly, the bird into focus. He rises, the boy, pulls out his wings. The bird hopping nearby. Angel rubs his head. The bird runs, hops, takes off and soars - really soars - into the fullness of the sky. The boy climbs to his feet, spreads his wings.

Ted, she says, Angel's disappeared. They are at the war memorial, their names livething for evermore. A rise up, a marble angel. Oh, the symbolism. Don't worry love, he says, I'll find him.

The old colliery wheel. A loom over the village. As it starts to rain.

The son of the scab of the village. He dresses, this boy, in angel's wings. He hangs around on the roof of his house. The hilly descent into the village reveals him in all his symbolic gesture and glory, the insufferable little twit. One day he'll leap out into the tender mercy of the blue sky and

(This boy, by the way, doesn't speak. And this, of course, all adds up to a bigger mysterious picture. As a device, however, his muteness is mute.)

find himself flattened on the bonnet of a car. Your car. He crawls from the bonnet of your car and throws up into the small fountain. Flecks of earlier happiness etc.

Monday, August 07, 2006

More Sweet To Me Than Song

Entrails take the business of taking themselves out of the body, warm and squish, and into the welcoming mush of, say, the collected squash of bits of fruit: mango, peach, nectarine, plum, apple, pear, banana. You recall, of course, the Carmen Miranda touch? She too, without entrails, bent at the middle slightly, stooped somewhat like you, like the way you stoop. But at least she had fame, fortune and, it was said, a certain degree of happiness. Not to mention the film star good looks. What do you have but your stoop, your mushiness?

The neighbours are fully aware of your seedless ambitions. The groves that line your yard have not gone unnoticed. The bushes, the trees, the low-flying aircraft spraying insecticide – all spied upon and noted by that loose affiliation of neighbours, now a form of gang. If they do nothing else this year, they’ll at least ensure they get you.

When stood against the barrow though you plenty of bag of joy, your fruitiness is, like, way past the threshold and into the realm of unutterable beauty. Your shimmering form and your skin of hair, or perhaps of smooth. Your odour of faint stabs of death and the way you bruise on contact are all the endearing things I look for in a potential girlfriend. And it is just as true to say that I love your inner form as well as your outer gorgeousness, whether seedless or full of the rum rattle of stones and seeds and perhaps – and let’s not give too much away here – the empty skeletons of long-deceased worms. You could crush me like a grape, as we used to say. And the spray from Spitalfields, all that old past and the ghosts of grocers haunting the gulleyways and barrydowns on the exact spots where you now can’t move for four-eyed twerps carrying coloured plates and wooden things wobbling.

Your settled grace, however, balancing the fake grass slope that flies terrifyingly down to the pavement below is just some of the proof I need. Your bruised response to the gentle pressure of fingers and thumbs, the way that, despite your all-encompassing desirability, you somehow save yourself from the terror of brown paper bag. What worm holes do you hide there missy, what poisonous side do you show to your suitors?

Plucked, left to ripen on the window sill, you are a visible spot from the tread of the ground and the fall from the air. Clouds rise above you, the sun beats its path to your door. Unripened at first, your silver hardness is soon worked down into the sponge of mush. Your pungency, your sweetness, enough to turn the heads (and stomachs) of the beautiful young men walking everywhere. The swell from your harp the finishing touch.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Like Small Movement, A Turn

The number of film critics, diminished. As per the art world ticking off of the poets and stuff. You know he moved among them even though you couldn’t see him.

He who moved among them, anonymous at first, went by the fancy name of Carlenea. Which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is, at best, a girl’s name. No wonder the pigtails and lollipops. Those long socks that go just above the bony knee.

Anyway, this Carlenea was a flap all over town. At the time of the power cuts – twelve hundred people, drinks in hand, forced out on to the narrow pavements of a bright dusk an’ twilight – he took off his shirt and wiggled. To the applause of a certain group of young women who, both pissed and stupid, really knew no better. He moved among them. So fast that you couldn’t see him.

Later, the stars were out and the beeroffs were closing. Our Carlenea – now with his shirt on – decided to get himself a few kegs and fags and make his way round to his interesting web designer friend’s flat/unit where, at least with the few feet of crippled balcony on offer, they could stare down the moon – the moon – and annoy the fuck out of the neighbours who, themselves much the fucking same anyway, had no room to complain. Hoxton kind of way etc. But as luck would have it, the beeroffs were now all closed. Kegs and fags be damned.

This Carlenea by morning though was busying himself behind shades, circumnavigating, as he so aptly put it, through the open plan artspace unit that comprised the area where, you know.

This Carlenea by morning was a full link in the red hot chain that, tight like a noose, was strangling the life out of this part of London and that part of London. The picture of it all, so broad and obvious, you could scrawl it out with a thick piece of chalk

So this Carlenea then, suddenly transported – perhaps by way of one those electric stand-on scooter things – to the other side of the city where, in an alien moment, he comes face to face with something that forever changes his whole being and thing. Such as.

That is, something from his childhood or the ghost of his dead father. Or the passing stab of a stranger, a punctured lung and the stranger now a feature in this boy’s now suddenly empty life. The mystery of what happened to his once friends. The true nature of his Hoxton web designer pal and that balcony, now occupied by another, host to a thousand more shouting at the moons. Staring down the moons.

Staring up at the moon, oh night, from ‘neath the symbolic lay of the cardboard crust. Beneath the lay of this merest wisp of cardboard, piss-soaked and rotten. But up there the moon. On its surface, the chalk drawing of a face, his face, and a hint at a better and brighter future. He sees space clods and landing pads, the scorched earth – not earth – the rocket descent. Oh what moon tonight with all your fancy ways and, you know, your fancy movements, and mystery and, you, you mysterious silver orb and all.

Dimly lit and staggering, a noxious figure as he passes the wine bar coterie and full set. Those girls now not so impressed with his wiggling. We get right up into one of the girl’s faces and register the disgust and hatred that twists her stupid pointed face into a paroxysm of hatred and disgust. Oh, how we fucking hate her. Again, again, give us another close up. Give us a reason to hate her all the more. Um.