Wednesday, November 29, 2006

A Flower To Try Its Currents

A lonely town, adrift in a sea of waves: an island. On all sides there are barriers to prevent the meeting of land and water. A dry moat and the children who run within it.

In the centre, just past the railway station, a curve of shop doorways and the street lamp that lights them. From the glass, reflections and shadows bring warmth to the youthful proceedings. Steps, mainly, back and forth, the odd jab, the occasional cigarette, the smallest touch of laughter. It is cold tonight but no rain. The dryness has a snap that could maybe break their heads.

In the summer, the sun takes the town, turns it around. The oppression of the heat, everyone indoors, air conditioning, dry throats, faces etc. A kind of death of the town. Despite the heat, a cold, shimmering disc floating in a sea of warmth. No swimming, just bobbing.

The spring brings gambolling and all the virtues of new life and.

The spring brings a fade of wetness that reinvigorates the town, restores its people. Rehydrates, rather. It’s all about life. There are children, of course, clacking down the cobbled streets, chasing the coal man, the rag and bone man, the ice-cream man. There are children on low curbs, their knees past their ears, always looking down the street for the surprise that may turn in at the bottom. The surprise of the motor car, an errant bus, the run of a lost squirrel.

The spring fetches up the sea, filled also with new life and.

The sea is a surround that rises. It keeps an eye on the landlocked inhabitants within. The sea thinks it is the keeper of the land. Fish swim in it. Mermaids cut through it. Shopping trolleys sink in it. It is a stew of sorts.

Self-sufficiency is a curse to the sea. But who, after all, needs fish and saltwater? Health animals, heart attack types, nature bores, kitchen fanciers, letter writers, wine fanciers, wind chimers, hill walkers, real alers, documentary watchers, cottage dwellers, property owners, herb fanciers, tree climbers, river drivers, cyclists, recyclists, bedwetters and you.

The landlocked inhabitants, the lubbers, are held in a particular moment. There they are, standing against shop windows, rolling marbles, passing each other in the street, undressing through window frames, dying at the bottom of the stairs, peeking up through coal grates, flashing their knickers at passing strangers, kissing in the front seats of burnt out cars. They are activity driven, of one kind or another. The sea will not slow them.

The sea, how many times? How many times has it spied over the wall and dreamed of filling the moat, of drowning the children? Four? Three thousand? Countless times? The latter. Because the sea, every day, dreams of filling the moat and drowning the children. Every day. But the children, through generations, are aware of this and cock their appropriate snooks to the sea. And does the sea care? You can bet your salt it does.

Man-made barriers are a barrier to the sea’s success in the town. Let’s stick it to nature, the Mayor often says, when he’s addressing crowds against the backdrop of the angry sea. Tempestuous sea, naturally. He wipes spots of sea from the back of his neck. Drops of sea. Let us celebrate, he continues, the miracle of this town. Let’s stamp our feet on dry ground and make butterfly angels when it snows. Let’s hop from pavement to street, avoiding the curb, and tap in the gutter. Let’s crane our necks and twist our heads in admiration of the manmade steeples, skyscrapers and telephone masts that punctuate the unbearable aridity of the sky. Let’s whistle in appreciation to the vigour of our advertising boards. Let’s celebrate the triumph of the motor car. Let’s leap to it when the factory whistles blow. Let’s sink our pints, throw our darts and rub sawdust on the floors. Let’s say we like music when we mean we like music. Let’s dance to the music. Let’s stand, in rows three deep, watching the shop television screens in silence when our leaders are slaughtered. Let’s raise banners against those who raise banners. Let’s throw balls against old people’s walls. Let’s blow hard into sucker wrappers in order to get to our suckers. Let’s stand on park benches and make out like trees. Let’s hang our washing on the thinnest of lines. Let’s tell all the backwards that we want to go forwards. Let’s burn our electric lights and blaze them all night. Let’s go to smoky jazz clubs and make a noise for rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s tell our best children to sit on their desks. Let’s repair our railways when our railways have broken. Let’s drive our cars when our railways are broken, when our railways are working. Let’s hold hands before we step on to the grass. Let’s dress all in black when our people are dead. Let’s hate death and celebrate life. Let’s tear down old monuments to make way for new monuments. Let’s smile at radioactivity and get to know our nuclear. Let’s smoke ‘em if we’ve got ‘em. Let’s make one thing clear: we will not be slaves to the sea.

To which the people, oh, they cheer. The blank of the sky soon dotted with hats. Banners trailing behind planes. Cheap flights carrying the working-classes round the town, out of the town and faraway over and above the sea. Hooray for the working-classes! Hooray for cheap flights! Hooray for Israeli fruit and veg!

Monday, November 27, 2006

Remember It Hurts

How much more joy can one life stand? How much more passion, excitement and meaning can I cram into my already brimful life? How many more times can I sit back and let the pleasure, the euphoria, the positive energy just wash over me? How much more happiness, truly, can I take?

The thing with exercises like these is that they have to be followed to the letter. To the absolute letter. Just a small veer from the path, just a tiny detour from the plan, will result in instant failure. Not delayed failure, instant failure. There and then failure. Think about that for a minute. Chew on that for a second while I whistle into my thumbs.

I despise lettuce juice and could just throw up at the mere sight of radish paste. But if life has taught me anything it’s that you have to learn not to trust your senses. That is, your traditional, conservative, capitalistic senses: the so-called big five. You have to learn to fall back somewhat, to give up the old reliances and focus on the new. The new you. The new you that hides somewhere within. But first you must locate, and learn how to use, your vectis. Without your vectis, your journey past those big five senses will be a tiresome journey indeed.

Action is the ingredient. Knowledge is the fuel. It’s time to put your foot down and go!

The love/hate balance is, of course, something that few, if any, of us, could ever hope to control. In fact, it has been said, as I’m sure most of you know, that this state of love/hate achievement has been attained by only the very few. And it has been written, throughout time and through the dustiest pages, that only a certain elite, a certain few, have ever conquered, or mastered, the ancient arts of the love/hate balance.

Who, in the Energiser versus Drainer showdown, will you be rooting for? Whose side, missy, will you be on? You can become a Drainer and drain the living shit from out of your friends, family and acquaintances until they’re nothing but dry, empty husks who neither know nor care. Or you can, conversely, be one of life’s Energisers and fill your friends, family and acquaintances with the very stuff of life and even re-energise, re-life, some of those dry, empty husks back to life. That’s right, back to life. So what will it be, missy? What will be your choice?

Curb entropy! Plug that open hole!

The road to empowerment is a crossroad meander that will lead you by various paths and nooks until you will at last find not just empowerment but also contentment, satisfaction, self-love, self-esteem and real, genuine empowerment all in one neat little package that can be bundled up, held in your heart and carried just about anywhere you go to light the way, to strengthen your resolve, to kick-start your life and to give you a real, genuine sense of empowerment and achievement that will enable you, in time, to become the person I truly believe, and you truly believe, you truly are.

Common side-effects that you, the Dynamic Mind, should be watchfully mindful of:
Self-loathing.
Pastoral angst.
Jealousy states.
Boredom.
Crater-faced crabbiness.

Faith-based meditation is a brand new enlightenment technique that allows the user (i.e. you) to participate in a new kind of religious experience that is designed purely to help you out of your old state of mind and into your new state of mind. It is as if God were, so to speak, your personal counsellor, offering best advice and real guidance that can equip you for the challenges you face in the modern world. It is your doorway to genuine spiritual enlightenment and, best of all, requires nothing more from you than the desire to hold fast to faith. Go on, you can do it. Anyone can do it.

Eating disorders are all too common among the middle-classes who take for granted the abundance that Western society has seen fit to pour upon their plates. This abuse of abundance tends to go either one way or the other: towards either a state of fatness or thin-ness, depending on which way the particular disordered mind is (at)tuned. Accompanying this appalling, self-imposed, self-aggrandising state is often the self-pitying whine of a mind that is also crying out for the attention it feels is its due – a mind that believes that being a bag of bones or, conversely, a bucket of lard is not enough to bestow upon the so-called ‘victim’ the all-important and highly prized victim status. Attempts to further encourage notice by way of self-harming rituals and endless fucking whittling on about absolutely nothing are all par for the course. It is enough, as this controversial yet totally empowering book makes clear, to make you puke.

Do you remember when you were small and your dreams were big? Not just your night dreams but your day dreams, your morning dreams, your afternoon dreams – all your dreams! And do you recall how you dared to dream? How your dreams were never too big, never too wild, never too impossible? Do you remember how, in those long gone days, your dreams seemed real, seemed touchable, seemed possible? You do? Then it’s time you dared to dream again!

Friday, November 24, 2006

May I Feel Said He

Breasts that heave, rise and undulate beneath the tastefully decorated veneer of the frilliness of her almost see-through blouse that, surely, is a size too small. If they were any closer, he thought, he could reach out to them, touch them, maybe rest his head and sneak the smallest kiss, take the tiniest bite. Look at them, just look at them, heaving there, rising (the word tremulous comes to him, suddenly), look at the way they sit there. With his erection, his arousal, just a touch away beneath the table, he touches himself lightly. Somewhere, in the background, the ocean swells and pounds. In fact, it hammers. The sea rises and drowns the beach. The river rises and creaks its banks.

And creaks its banks. The silliness of this kind of situation is, of course, made sillier in the recounting. She had, as they say, great knockers. The things he’d like to do to them. Or rather, to her. To all of her.

The resulting wetness was all par for the course and what he’d come to expect from someone like her, the dirty little mare. All that leery winking, those fuck me eyes. How could he resist?

How could he resist? He almost had her saying: Give it to me big boy, as they fucked hard (of course, hard) on the floor of the restaurant toilet or out back somewhere, pressed against a rubbish bin so that all the attendant tastes and smells could intermingle with, you know, the act, and act as a kind of sensual posy for all the real, mechanical stuff that was hard, painful and deeply, beyond all expectation, deeply satisfying. Obviously. At one point, he had her on her knees, her face pressed into a puddle or a smudge of something appropriately filthy but also edible, somehow. When she looked up, afterwards, that grin on her face, the mess on her face, and the way she licked her lips, wiped her face with the barest touch of her fingertips. Well, it was enough to make him. Enough to just make him.

The silliness of this out the back of the restaurant business is, we hope, softened somehow by the knowledge that we have all, at one time or other, been there. Not, of course, literally behind the restaurant (or at least, not behind that restaurant), but on our knees like the desperate fornicators and women-haters we truly are. How did she end up on her knees on that cold, wet floor? How did she end up with her face in that pile of whatever it was?

He entered her and as soon as he entered her her body buckled beneath the weight – no, the sheer significance – of the multiple orgasms that raced through her and declared, in the most certain of terms, that, at last, her long years of frigidity were a long way behind her. Yes. Look what he did for her.

Oh, he thought, oh she’s going to suck me right down. Oh, he said, that’s it bitch, you suck me right down!

This character, this clown, is, of course, even more deserving of the contempt that, surely, has already come his way. He asked her, What do you want? Love. Love is what I want.

They were walking together, hand in hand occasionally, over the beach. The moonlight, the cooling breeze, something appropriately significant on the horizon or lighting their way from somewhere up ahead, the hotel maybe. They walked on the still warm sand, bare feet, and listened to the crashing, the pounding, of the sea as it crashed behind them, the dark making it seem that much more thrilling. For that brief moment, all of two minutes, she realised that, perhaps, she was in love. Perhaps. They reached the hotel and the manager greeted them, offhand, dismissive. Let’s go to the bar, he said, fuck him, we don’t have to go bed, let him wait on us all night, fuck him. So they went to the bar and joined, again, the crowd of youths they’d spent the previous night with, with their girlfriends and wives on another table in a kind of conspiracy of self-hatred. Yet with their arrogance. Taking their seats, drinks all round, the conversation as banal, as threatening and as overwhelmingly child-like as it had been the night before. And soon she was the centre of attention, held up as somehow different from those wives and girlfriends whose directed attention quickly turned to abuse and laughter. As she.

Later, in their room, he threw her to the bed, she remembered in the morning, slapping her, calling her the same names they’d called her, fucking her, fucking her up the arse, calling her those same, terrible names, telling her he fucking loved her and loved fucking her and all the fucking crap he came out with about spanking her so hard, you’d like that bitch, you’d like that bitch wouldn’t you, as his fingers, rigid, unlike his cock. You like that, don’t you bitch?

Don’t you bitch? Where had he, this young man of apparent outward respectability and maybe half decent breeding, acquired such language? From his father? From the movies? From his mother?

He knew he was on to a sure thing that first night when he saw how those sweet knockers, tight beneath her blouse, heaved almost in time to his declarations. Of how they seemed to cling tight not only to her blouse but tight, also, to his every word. It was like they were somehow attuned to him, somehow a part of him and he knew that he had to, as they say, get a good piece of her. And how willing she came to him and how trusting she was then, out in the night, both half cut, both heading home together for the rest of the night. Oh, the things he would do to her.

The silliness of the situation is undermined completely by just, even, a small insight into this tiny mind. The hatred, of course. Which could, naturally, be blamed on a million things that were absolutely no fault of his own. Naturally. And naturally, his hatred of women stood in direct comparison, direct proportion, to his love of men, to his love of all things to do with men. Even as he declared, as he often declared, his love for women. His love for the very essence of women.

And he would never have guessed that she mistook this hatred, at first, for a kind of naïve longing, a naïve desperation amid his naïve sensibility. She imagined that he was somehow engaged in a faintly heroic struggle against the clichés of that kind of thing but was, for whatever reason, and through no fault of his own, failing. It was then, she thought, her responsibility to help him get through it. She would help him to get through it.

And so, for a time, as she threw herself into the lovemaking, as she called it, and threw herself into this and that, she came to know herself more fully. Which is, of course, the main thing and the whole point of this kind of story. In fact, the really funny thing about the whole business of their relationship was that it all turned out to be much more than just a meditation on the misogyny of a certain young man and an exploration of the differences between the men and the women. Because, as we all eventually come to realise, the differences between the men and the women are so full of cosmic (and comic) possibilities that it would require something that goes far beyond tawdry hotel and restaurant scenes, far beyond the use of certain clichés and thingies. Far beyond anything at all that could be described as insightful, illuminating or - curses - entertaining. You get so far and then you have to get out.

Still, he did get to fuck her up the arse. Or ass, as the saying goes.

Monday, November 20, 2006

The Flowering Of The Lesions

From, let’s say, the moment he moved here, he managed to contrive himself as the sworn enemy of that gang of kids, the Above The Law crew or whatever they were called. The ATL. Whose only point of existence was to

(Whose only point of existence was to what? Those kids who cried only for the open, unfamiliar arms of good, good loving? It is understood, surely, that there is no such thing as a rotten kid?)

Well, those rotten kids were at least responsible for a good deal of the pain he felt since the moment of moving here. Not even two feet out of the removal lorry when an egg hit him, right in the face. The laughter of the group and the abuse aimed at his daughter, nine-years-old: fucking whore, fucking bitch, fucking slag. Not yet even on the pavement.

They ran, those youths, and in time he caught up with one of them. Floored him, took his ankles away so that he fell on his face, teeth flying everywhere, blood etc. The howls, the obvious pain but also, surprisingly, the grim defiance. It would have been enough, that fall, but the continued threats and abuse, even as he tried to walk away, could only have led to: a kick in the face, a kick in the stomach, a punch in the face, two quick punches in the face, a kick at the back of the head. Then he walked away.

No, he didn’t die. The kicks and the punches were real, their ferocity muted. Bruised, battered, bloody and with a full crowd of witnesses, the kid took himself through the whole process, through the police, the court, the papers.

‘Rotten little cunt’ attacker freed

A father jailed for six months for attacking a youth he said was harassing him and his family has been freed by the Court of Appeal.

David Roley, 39, of Daffodil Crescent, Kelston, won his appeal against the length of the prison sentence given to him in April at Kelston Crown Court.

The term was reduced to three months, resulting in his immediate release.

Roley had pleaded guilty to three counts of grievous bodily harm, intent to injure and intent to cause fear through extreme violence.

Although his sentence was reduced, his counsel, Beaker Lestrade, failed to persuade the judges to follow the decision in the case of teacher Harry Smelts. His six-month jail term for waving around a blowtorch in a confrontation with yobs was quashed by the Court of Appeal in May and replaced with a conditional discharge.

The Recorder of Cardiff, sitting as a judge of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division, said the facts of the Smelts case were "truly exceptional" and the court was not persuaded that Roley fell into that category.

Announcing the decision of the court on Wednesday, he said there was a "good reason" for Roley's offending.

Odious little bastards

The judge added: "The victim and his friends were clearly behaving like rotten little cunts and were doing all they could to intimidate Mr Roley and his family through threats, abuse and gratuitous name-calling."

Mr Coode told the court: "When these youths stood outside his house, they were clearly looking for some kind of fight and would have probably administered some level of violence. It was fortunate that Mr Roley, through his actions, ensured that this didn’t occur. He attacked the boy in an attempt to warn him off and to send out a clear message to others."

Summing up, Mr Coode added: “If only more of us were as civic-minded as Mr Roley. These odious little bastards, these dreadful, nasty cunts, running round our estates, ruining the lives of decent people. We should hang them. Fuck them and hang them. And people like Mr Roley should be paraded through the streets, awarded the highest honours and given the freedom of every city. Hurrah for Mr Roley, I say. And boo to all the little cunts."

In the court's judgment, the Recorder of Cardiff said, it was right that there should have been an immediate custodial sentence, but it should not have been longer than three months.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

To Speak A Body Untethered

I find that I find inspiration in the smallest of things. Such as, for instance, the songbird of flight that slammed into my lounge window this morning. His broken wing and the cat that tore him apart. Not my cat. Some cat, from somewhere next door, who showed no mercy. Absolutely none at all. The most perfect tweeting could not have saved that bird. But it was part of the raw aspect of nature that, to a greater or lesser extent, informs just about everything I do. I mean, that is, my work. I guess you could say that I am some kind of jackdaw. That songbird though. The poor thing.

The people I live with, that live around here, are, I imagine, mostly good people. Decent-ish, you know. There’s Carter across the road, the waver, with his bare torso whatever the weather and his studied career, or so it seems, of smoking cigarettes. Melinda, a few doors down, is like me in some ways: alone but out, most of the time, who knows where. There was an attempt here, some months ago, now I recall, to form some kind of association, a residents’ group to which I was asked to join but didn’t, couldn’t. The world closing in on us, they said, and we’re trying to keep it out. But I, on the other hand, wanted to invite it in, the world.

My art, as it is sometimes called, is, above all, the very thing of my self expression. It’s what I do it for, so I can relate to the world and to my own self, either through the me of the me here and now or the me of my yesteryears, my history and personal ancestry. My mother’s Native roots, my father’s Lithuanian bent. I do this, mainly, as I said, as a way to express myself, as a full mode of self expression. Without this, without this release, this big blast of art, I would be just another of the freaks with my methadone problem and potential alcoholic leanings. But as I am, now, I can see that Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson and The Pixies were me, were really me. They were all mine. In fact, they are, still, the very definition of the middle-browness that I craved and that which gave me so, so much. Without them, literally, I would now be dead. Literally. Oh, and The Clash, too, of course.

Right now I have invested myself into the business of helping to create a tribe which is a state of description I prefer over the word community because, you know, it signifies so differently. By which I mean that it tells us that we are especially different. I would have used the word gang but you can only take these things so far, can’t you? Tribe, I’ve been told, carries with it a certain sense of the ritual and gives off, I hope, the pungent whiff of a warrior’s raw call. And it touches, as I previously stated, both my mother’s Native heritage and my father’s Lithuanian saga from over the sea. Moreover, it justly identifies the intimate relationships that are birthed from a nomadic, ever-shifting, de-centered centralised energy that belongs more to the rough of the land, the urgent and to other bodies than it does to, you know, society as a whole. Or rather, society as a hole, a sinkhole. It is plural, this thing, cosmopolitan, egalitarian, eclectic and permanently fluid behind and beneath the whole power of order and pull.

And what, you may ask, of the songbird?

Smeared lightly on the glass of the window, the songbird’s general grease, plus the pulse of tiny blood droplets and no doubt a whistle of spittle. After impact, it not so much slid from the window as dragged, fell and bounced from the surface of the window, its glass, all the way to the floor. By the time I got close enough to see, the songbird was being ravaged, or savaged, by the neighbour’s cat. My frantic glass banging and howling did nothing to deter that cat from the business of, as I said, tearing that songbird apart. I tell you, by the time the cat had finished, I was spitting feathers. Just, in fact, like that cat was also spitting feathers.

But seriously. It is incidents like that that somehow rise to the occasion in order to provide my life with its richness of meaning. Without that songbird, my morning this morning would have been a search for inspiration that I may or may not have found. What was particularly gratifying was that, even without taking into account the whole symbolism of birds and flight thing, it was, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, quite literally a gift that fell from the skies. The only pity of it, really, was the fact of the cat.

Although, naturally, the real business of it all is primarily concerned with how moments like that are a gift for my self-expression. Not just as an artist but also as a woman. That is, and more importantly, as a woman artist. A wartist, in fact. A term that carries both the sense of my femininity vis a vis the w signifying woman and also the declaration push of serious intent as connoted by the prefix war. That the very act of my existence, including the acts of my making, are, to all intents and purposes, first and foremost declarations of war. I am, as they say, fighting a good fight and am in good fighting spirits. And besides, we all know how difficult it is to get rid of warts.

What lured me into the universe, at least the universe that I created, that created me and contains me, was the self-reflexiveness and mono-vocality that, quite literally, used to drive me insane. I long to collaborate and cannot see how I, or any other artist, can reasonably function within a world where the conservative nature of its writers and artists is something that has been forced down upon them by, you know, Reagan and then Bush. Outside of the moments of these regimes (because that is what history will prove them to be, momentary regimes) these artists were, of course, raging avant-gardeists and innovators. You literally could not stop them. So my mission, if I may state it so baldly, is to kind of kick open the universal gates into the universe I’m seeking to create. Which is to say, spaces within a larger space – the universe that contains them – where artists can go about the business of making art and doing all that they really long to do that is literally being denied to them by the funding boards, the book reviewers, the commentators, the media slags and the publishers and patrons who are, as we all know, directly controlled by the government or, if not, at least influenced and/or scared to such a degree that the conservative, mainstream agenda is something they promote as vigorously and as ruthlessly as if they were operating on party political lines. That is, what I mean is, that these conservative artists are conservative and middlebrow through no real fault of their own. How could it be their fault when it is they, unlike the politicians, who are the artists? So I mean that what I enjoy most is creating a dynamic space for writers and artists to, you know, just make. Especially the women. The women who I am determined to ensure get a real grasp of the modes of engagement so that they can truly engage within themselves their long denied need for diversification. Who cares? Well I care, for a start. I care from my heart. It is my heart that leads me. And sometimes, it really hurts, my wreckage of a heart.

Which is why, when I think harder about it, that songbird touched me so. Because he played out some kind of huger function that spoke to me perhaps on newer levels that I have yet to truly understand. He, like I said, represented not only all the symbolism and fancies of flight, but was also, literally, a smudge of smear on my window’s glass. I could, if I had been less driven by my heart, have wiped away the moment of him being brought into existence - the moment of him being brought into my frame of existence, into my universe. But my heart, I guess, stayed my hand. There was something intuitive about it, the reason for me staying indoors and staring at the songbird’s smudge. From the inside looking out.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Flicker Even Inside The Wet Wall

Tender nights were the barrier to my blazing as I, ablaze, took my ready pizza and travelled the twenty yards or more to the neath of the Brooklyn Bridge where I, art as pure artefact, declared myself a bang (a lesser bang to be sure) and, for a brief moment, blazed neath that Brooklyn Bridge while passers-above wondered down at my blazing beauty. That is, I was a human torch. A man pyre.

But yes, my heat adventures had begun long before my lesser bang neath the Brooklyn Bridge. I was, all you grapple fans, the notorious dog sizzler, the legendary bum burner. That is, the tramp torcher. I could fly, I was lighter than air, I had complete control over the nature of fire, the elements were mine etc. I chose, however, instead, to squander my powers on a few cheap thrills.

In time, over time, after the initial burst, the bomburst, I learned to control my blaze, learned to tame my flame. I was, for a time, a man of mere embers. I boiled free-standing kettles, comforted cold hands, caused molecules to run, erased condensation from car windscreens, converted toilet seats.

And then the blaze. Flame on.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

One Brief Glance at Waiting Jaws

Looking for a way to feel? Then you need a return from the dead. All those past horrors coming back to haunt you. All those cherished memories no longer there in the past but here, in the here and now, ready for your glassy eyed scrutiny. Do they measure up? Were you right to cherish them? Now’s your chance to find out.

The mixed doom, for Carlton Albright, was exacerbated by the finger he held aloft in order to create the illusion of capture, on the tip, of the vulture that had been following him around for the past three hours. There, against the explosion of the bluest, brightest sky he’d ever seen, that cunt of a bird, circling. And circling, it seemed, to specifically avoid Carlton’s illusory fingertip capture. Why, thought Carlton, can it (i.e. the vulture) not allow me even this smallest satisfaction? To which the retort, from somewhere behind the ginger bush: The reason, my dear Carlton, is because that bird isn’t actually there. You know those floaters you sometimes get in your eyes? That’s your vulture. A mere floater. There’s no point trying to look at it dead on in an attempt to capture it with your fingertip and gaze. It will move from your grasp, always. Who’s there? asked Carlton, not unreasonably, to which he received no reply. Except, perhaps, for a clue-filled rustle from the bushes. If I don’t get something to drink soon, he thought.

Drinking was by the wayside as far as Dean Camper’s long-suffering wife, Denny, was concerned. She imagined, for some reason, that Dean was off the bottle and somewhere back on the old straight and narrer. But Dean, as a matter of interest, was, at the moment of her thinking this, face down in a pool of gruelly vomit, gurgling and wishing to sweet Jesus Christ that he were somewhere else. My Dean, thought Denny, as she closed her trusting, tired eyes.

It is now long ago, quite twenty-five years, since there was a poor man who had an ugly and deceitful wife, and they hated each other dearly. They had, however, plenty of children, though they wished they didn’t, very much, and the woman prayed for them to die day and night, but still they did not die. Now there was a basketball court in front of their house in which was an apple tree, and one day in summer the woman was standing beneath it, playing with her Beatle, and while she was playing with her Beatle she cut her finger, and the blood fell on the green, green grass. Ah, said the woman, and sighed right heavily, and looked at the blood before her, and was most unhappy, ah, if I had but a dead child like that, covered with red blood and as white as a sheet. And while she thus spoke, she became quite happy in her mind, and felt just as if that were going to happen. Then she went into the house and a month went by and the summer fucked off, and two months, and then everything was white, and three months, and then all the flowers died, and four months, and then all the trees in the wood bent to nothingness, and the grey branches were all brittle and entwined, and the birds fell out of their trees and the shit fell from the squirrels’ arses, then the fifth month passed away and she stood under the apple tree, which smelt so sickly that her throat gagged, and she fell on her knees and was beside herself with pain, and when the sixth month was over the tumour was large and bulbous, and then she was quite still, and the seventh month she snatched at the apple tree’s apples and ate them greedily, then she grew sick and sorrowful, then the eighth month passed, and she called her husband to her, and laughed and said, if I die then bury me beneath that fucking apple tree. Then she was quite uncomfortable and miserable until the next month was over, and then she had a child as black as you like and as green as snot, and when she beheld it she was so horrified that she died.

Who knew that the dinosaur park was full of real, actual dinosaurs? The children I took there, all in my care, certainly had no idea. In fact, they were still blissfully unaware right until the moment of being pierced and torn by those giant, killer teeth.

The grass, as they say, was somewhat greener on the other side. Which is why Crispy the Christmas Cricket wasted little time in hopping over. He’d had enough of the desolate patch of nothing that he shared with his dad. Of course, as soon as he made it to the other, greener, side he immediately regretted his decision. Why? Who knows. Crickets are funny like that. The real trouble, however, was that hopping back to his dad’s desolate side was simply not an option. Not unless he wanted to fry himself on the six foot high electric fence. Go on Crispy, you can do it!

The fairgrounders were all astray at the thought of yet another year without the Boxing Booth and the Wall of Death. But fuck it, they decided, let’s put them on and fuck them all.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Till I Hear The Very Ash

I achieved a certain cancer of the bladder. As it raged within me, dripping its contaminated blood from stalactite nodules, I continued smoking even as I filled up porcelain piss bowls with endless streams of blood. Coincidentally, at the same time, my cancer of the bladder was an absolute coincide with a load of shit on my kidneys. What shit? Like barnacles, apparently. One day they will kill me.

Of my night or two in the hospital I was surrounded by the world’s oldest men who creaked and croaked throughout all days and ceaseless fucking nights, vowing, as they often vowed, that the end of their days would be the best days of the rest of their lives. They had cornflakes for their tea. They had, moreover, the nerve to gasp when I told them about the pissing of the blood. They set to work with their tired cemetery eyes.

When I got home from the hospital I was glad, for a time, not to be dead. I was pleased, also, that the young people across the street (having somehow found out about my newly shortened life) had the decency to keep the volume of their music right down to a minimum. What more could I fucking ask for?

Thursday, November 02, 2006

As Modern As Moon Travel

Popular culture advocates are made from meat. They are a saturation of meat, devoid, as far as we can tell, of additives. If you could skewer one you

If you could take one home and introduce it to your parents you would be making that first step toward, as Dale Carnegie foretold, a kind of controlled inner oblivion. Feel the peace, as they say.

And when the shine from your eyes prisms around the room. You know, if you could let all that out, while keeping some in, there’s no telling how far your popular culture advocate could go.

Popular culture advocates are a fizzle. This is their time and, boy, do they know it. They parade, yes, but their parading is always, kind of, if you’ve noticed, kind of low key. They’re always at the back somewhere, small banners, tin whistles, that kind of thing. Get to the front! the other paraders insist. But your popular culture advocates just don’t want to know.

Their manifesto is a similar whisper. Scrawled lightly on tracing paper or soft tissue – grey charcoal, easily erased – it covers the appropriate bases but somehow skirts. No wonder then that the popular culture advocates are often thought of – if they’re thought of at all – as mere pawns in the

As mere bit part actors, yes. You can’t, as they say, go around playing the (fool, martyr, injured party) and then expect people to take you seriously. As everyone knows, that’s where they go wrong, these popular culture types. If only they

If only they indeed:

Bell bottom ironies.
I was there in 1973. It was the year, for instance, that I watched Peter Shipstone beating his mother half to death with a rusty dustbin lid. His mother, a certain Nellie Shipstone, fending him off with a wide expanse of forearm that was, in its desperate flailing state, a small advert for the main feature of her twenty-five stone bulk. A big woman, yes. But with a bigger heart than yours.

Shirt-lifters.
Once a derogatory term for poofers. But no longer. It is out there. Look for it and use it.

Warm lies.
These warm lies we tell ourselves. All that bad faith. Who knows when to stop?

Insect society.
That’s right, insect society. You realise, don’t you, how many of us are down here – cockroaches that we are – crawling round with our heads torn off, refusing to die? Oh, that’s us alright, insect vermin just crawling around, infecting everything we touch. Except for me. Well of course except for me. Because I am a proud lion or, at the least, some kind of mountain monkey. Which means that I can climb parapets and generally raise the bar. And while I do so I, of course, look down on you, you disgusting insects. I tut myself stupid at the sight of you all.

Poems that rhyme.
When blackness of departing night
turned yellow with the dawn
I watched a robin soft alight
upon my dew soaked lawn.
(Copyright Gerald Bosacker, 1998. http://www.seniors-site.com/poetry/harbinge.html.)

Success.
What is it about successful people? Who do they surround themselves with? Idiots? Cretins? Morons? Are they happy? Are they three rungs up the ladder or four rungs up the ladder? Will they give you a piece of their pie? Or will they spit in your eye? Will they encourage you on your own road to success? Or will they push you off your path to perfection? Should you trust them? What makes them tick? Are they, deep down, lovely people? Or are they the unbearable cunts you suspect them to be?

Black nights.
This takes me back. Black nights. Candles on the mantelpiece, dad placing mirrors behind them to double the light. Or create a new room. In fact, now that I think about it, there was something rotten about that new room. Inside, on the other side, these simulacrums of us just sitting there, taking whatever shit it was that the government was throwing at them. Insect society is right. For the mirror people anyway.

Captain Fastnet.
He was a blur of light superhero and an afterthought at the back of Popular Hero Comics, circa 1978, where he advertised, among other things: Twinkies, Twinkles, Twiglets, Twix, Twits and Twax. He met his end through his nemesis The Spark Plug who, naturally enough, electrocuted him to death and hung him out to fry. I mean, dry.

Happiness.
Pollyanna imaginings that you so despise in happy people. But you too have constructed a phantasy world (note fancy spelling) and immersed yourself in it.

Partly Irish.
You never know what waits for you across that stretch of thin green sea. Washing days mainly. And rocks by the river.

Your wetness keeps me dry.
The house was on fire. The streets were flooded. We had upturned tables and dogs in dinghies. Old women pointed to the tide mark lines in the kitchen. Lamplighters complained about the wet matches as they stumbled around in the dark.

Fashion.
Fashion?

Lesbian fashion.
The fashion for lesbians has now reached some kind of peak. Or apex. That is, if we are to believe the reports coming out of Monaco or Paris or somewhere. Lesbians, they say, are no longer ashamed of the things they do. And quite right too. In fact, I saw two today, at the edge of the road, lips pressed tight to lips, embracing as if to say goodbye. Don’t leave her! I shouted from my passing car, stay and be hers, stay and love her as much as you love being a lesbian!

Back to the trees.
My new planet was something of a plan. I put rings around it. I speckled it with zones of gas.

Pop groups.
People who don’t understand pop music – who don’t actually like pop music – would most likely agree with the following statement about Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry album: One of the best tracks on the record is King's rendition of her own "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," nearly unrecognisable as the Shirelles' thin early-'60s hit. King's version is sad and sincere, with haunting echoes of the chorus slowly building to a viscerally charged crescendo, as if, in asking her lover, King is also asking her audience: Is this a lasting treasure or just a moment's pleasure? Can I believe the magic of your sighs? Will you still love me tomorrow?” For those of us, however, who know and trust pop music, who surrender to its majesty and swim its simplicity – who, you know, understand the important differences - take one look at that word ‘thin’ and want to throw up. Maureen Tucker did a great version too.

Love.
The fat baker had fallen out of love with his wife. Not because his wife had done anything wrong but because he had fallen in love with his own reflection in the hot stainless steel oven door. Burnt lips.

Kingdom.
When I am king I will give myself the freedom to play with all the women.

The darkling thrush.
I awaited by the gate my own sadness my company and in that drift of my eye I spied, far away, past the cliffs, rising over the beach and far into the wipe of the horizon a bird I had never seen before. It was a speck I was pleased to have spotted. I turned to my wife, who I still loved, and told her of this bird, becoming her eyes for her as she listened into the wind, her own dead eyes not troubled by the wind as mine streamed their burning tears. That bird, I said, is my heart in flight conjoined with your heart in flight and after you are gone, my love, I will seek out that bird and take lift from the flap of its wings.

New York.
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.