You Can Hear Me In Your World

Of terrifying loudness, the bluebirds of happiness are, in reality, the white doves of mischief. From their perches, these feathered brains are pure flights of aggravated motion. Only the clouds can keep them down.

The blackbird of pushiness flees the scene, a rainbow pebble trapped in its beak. The glass it leaves behind will brim over forever.

Yesterday, along the path - the perch - of doom, I crawled carefully to what, at first sight, appeared to be an enormous round mirror. Which later, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an enormous round mirror. My tiny face in it, looking back, all pockmarked and scaly. And next to the enormous round mirror, one of those cuttlefish bones.

The enormous round mirror, when viewed from the other side of the room (when viewed through the wires of cage, the mist of cigarette smoke, the blaze from the telly, the light through the window, past the shadows of the mourners), was a mere ten pence piece circle of shimmering silver.

And Florence Varsity was dead. So who then, asked Sylvia, will look after that little tweeter of hers, that poor little Joey, now that she’s gone? At which mention all eyes turned to see Joey, at the bottom of the cage, his throat open from here to there. The blood-soaked newspaper and its still discernible headline: Callaghan tells firemen to fuck themselves.

Such are the winds of ill-blown flight. Right?

The Motion Sickness Roar

The artspace unit cum gallery floorshow happening event was in full swing. At the same time, coincidentally, the city fathers were aglow and warm at the prospect of tearing down the best buildings in town. Hey, said one of the fatter ones, let’s start with that artspace unit thing.

Upon hearing the news of this news, the artspace unit fillers – those peasant scratchers, parochial crackpots and naïve dabblers - rose up. Banners were carried, children were held aloft and flaming torches were put to the effigies of the various council members.

And to top it all, art with something to say became the order of the day.

Art with something to say!

Locked into a tiny room, the lights down low, Pandora K’s white, plastic-coated, steel wire frame cage is suspended from the ceiling and stuffed through the slats with a number of notes and messages that, in as crystal clear plain language as possible, get across the exact nature and degree of the pain and anguish she is suffering and has suffered, both through her childhood and adolescence, and also as a full grown independent person/artist who, naturally enough, feels even more keenly than mere mortals, citizens that is, the slings, arrows and crippling blows that come from the belittlers and haters who cannot seem to appreciate how her sheer sensitivity and spirituality makes her ready for, and open to, the full pain of life, life itself, not to mention the difficulties of life and the business of simply existing, as hard and as painful as that is on its own terms. She is, of course, the very challenge of life.

Cornered like the rats they are/were, the city fathers had no choice but to surrender and accede to the demands of all those local artists. We, they shouted in unison, are a mere fine line away from making that tread into the realms of arts and crafts. We demand our stalls for the Sunday markets!

On the walls, floors and ceilings of the artspace unit cum gallery floorshow happening event there was a conceptual scramble to see who could be first to not only pose the important questions but also, at the same time, to answer the important questions. Naturally, with all of this scrambling there emerged a good degree of blather and detritus that, siphoned off into the corners, was used as a kind of backing track for the art with something to say to riff over. Man, it was one happening cacophonous howl of beauty in the shriek of the night.

And so the art with something to say continued to confuse itself with art that has something to say.

Come Back to The Shores of What You Are

The travel of Cadillac along empty highway. The sweet toot of the hillside train. Lonesome? Mournful. It chugs, this Cadillac, somewhat, and its occupants are oblivious to its stutter. Soaking up the fact of their journey, in all its epic significance, they are captured in the frames of an eight-second view. The train eases away from them, forward, the great privilege of the American railroad.

By cactus and bush, the Cadillac. Its occupants squat, four of them, all women. The horizon balances the last of the sun. Rain? A fall in temperature, a hang of moisture pulsing the air. They hurry inside, the clunks from their doors synchronised to the drop of the light. No horizon, simply the dark. This engine had better ride, someone says, from out of the black.

Crawling into a barn, into the haystacks, they would have done it for sure. Three of them dreaming now of barns, of haystacks and warm crusts of bread as the car shifts, lunges deeper into the road, moves warmer to the dark. The driver keeping watch, looking hard for the constant threat to these four women on the road. Tired? Beyond it. Morning is further away than she ever thought possible. What if she just turned off the road?

That You Shall Have No Envy

The elements of blind chance are, for once and for all, disturbed to the point of whereby they can be consigned to the recesses of etc. We put things in this end here to see what comes out of that end there. Sometimes goodness. Occasionally evil.

Our purpose, to bluntly extrapolate, is to hammer home the point of being no longer bound by our shackles to the, you know, biological fascism that ensures we are short on this mortal coil by a distance not in keeping with what we, crazy fools that we are, believe is, at the least, something that could significantly be longer. Thus our banner campaign slogan strapline of: We are all Methuselah now.

Mice though. They shuffle through their metaphorical baffles, emerging as extensions of their former shortened selves.

Pelting Up From The Shallows

We are, in the end, long feet. Like cornered blue canoes. Like cornered blue lagoons.

We have, as they say, the technology to drain these pools and, for a change, fill them with sand. With long feet at our disposal we could walk this solid water. Maybe, instead, tread the tiny coloured balls.

We went to the beach, you and I, and beneath cloudless climes we clambered over the rusted remnants of sea defences, the once proud monuments to fearlessness and obstinance. We clambered those hulks, you and I, and the rusty cuts did not prevent us from hurling pebbles into the sky. With our contempt for the crashing waves, we knew whose side we were on. And do you remember, as it darkened and the water retreated in short defeat, we removed our shoes and fed rust flakes through our toes?

The more we position our chairs on this beach, the more we surrender ourselves to the inevitability of death by water. At the bottom of the sea, supine at the bottom of the sea. Picked apart.

We took ourselves off, you and I, to the ice-cream stand as soon as the morning hit us. The sky in shock from the night, we walked beneath its clouds in cold fresh shoes. You said, to me, so I could barely hear you: this way, I think.

The sky has, since the beginning of true time, been a boon to sailors and the lovestruck everywhere. During the day, when the practicalities of life are enough to make us bend, the sky is our guiding light, both literally and, you know, metaphorically. Its consideration, however, stretches further with the realisation, especially to lovers, that the sky will think nothing of dimming its light to create corners and moods that, you know, us lovers can fall into and really make the most of. Thank God, as they say, for the sky in its night. The sea, on the other hand, is the bastard that swallows.

We walked quicker, absented ourselves from that beach, when we saw that the sea was coming. Do you remember how tired I was? All my moaning and groaning, my dead feet ploughing furrows into the increasingly wetter sand as the limpets and barnacles attached to my legs panicked, knowing that dry land under the guiding blazing light of the sky would be the death of them. I remember how frightened you were as I scraped them away and they turned to you, somehow, and somehow communicated through seemingly lifeless shell and indecipherable smallness how they were going to get you some night, some night while you slept. And they did get you, didn’t they? They did get you.

Some Motion Ever Unspent

Opened up into the captain’s cabin, the first thing is the first class table with pig diners troughing it all down their taffeta ties, pearls dredging through the soup, pulling forth shreds of oxtail, dragging out the croutons. The ship pitches. The soup splashes.

I, my voyage, I’ve been lashed to this mast for the past three weeks and the substance of rope, my only friend, keeps me here tied, away from the rutting flash pigs and the foam-filled degenerates. Below deck the burning boys are holding their arseholes wide open, raw red against the twinks of the black starred night. Rum red. They are a rage, those boys, and in fine drinking spirits. Mutiny is among them.

The ship pitches so the soup splashes and the diners have had quite enough of these intolerable conditions. One of them, with foam literally sticking out from his ears, raises his hand, polite to the last, and asks, one might think quite reasonably, whether the cocksucker responsible for putting soup on the menu will be emerging some time soon to deliver his or her apology? The captain, in reply, says: Eat your soup and shut the fuck up. Which causes me, here, cocking an ear to the proceedings, to chuckle noiselessly.

Voyages like this are really something aren’t they? You get the fresh sea air, the pitching of the boat, the pallyness of the crew, all the limes you can eat, the bonhomie of the captain, the ship’s artistes (magicians, singers, comedians, dancers, puppeteers, curtain raisers, stilt walkers, clowns etc.), the roundness of the life belts, the calmness of the poop deck, the barrels of lucky rum. The lucky, lucky rum.

The sea at night is calm, without pitch. You could safely tread its water, framed heroically by the giant silver moon, on your way to a step over the horizon and into the speckled blackness of the sea sky at night. You could reach up, touch the North Star, and feel your way home.

Hidden in the lifeboats, suspended high, a young boy and a young girl. Bertie and Geena, twins, on board for a new life in the new world. They have escaped recent clutches after the death of saintly parents and, well, there they are, under canvas, occasionally peeping up at the stars. Below, pounding the deck, slightly nervous, the kindly frame of Dickie Bow, the portly porter. Under his tunic, some scraps for the kids. They’ll make it together, the three of them, and Dickie will set Broadway on fire, a queen among the johns.

Fast to this mast, tight pink ribboned, I spy, through my telescope, a bob of yonder land. Inching our way, cutting through the sark, we alight – or rather, they, the crew and passengers, alight – onto said land and discover, to their dismay, that the land in question is not land at all but the back of a blue whale.

This blue whale is the same blue whale who, leviathan, was host to Jonah, a cage for Pinocchio. They are in there still, camp fires and fishing, all kinds of wooden games. This blue whale pitches and shifts and the pig diners, now with cups of soup, splash soup down their tuxedos and ball gowns. They can’t win, can they? The captain tells them, again, to shut the fuck up and drink their soup while he sorts this mess out.

The anchor is pulled and we - me, Bertie, Geena and Dickie Bow - float majestically away, waving at the bob of blue whale land as it blips the quickly sinking horizon.