Monday, May 15, 2006

Nebulous stanchions, expansions and contractions, heart-sighs and starbeams,Heart-speared and swooning, stuck with arrow and moonspear.Here now, inhaling and exhaling, drifting through starfields, on peak and precipice,On mountain-top to overlook,
Dense expanses of limitless space, immensities and prodigies,dark, compacted infinity.Fiery nebulas, stellar implosions, the spiralling of vast orbs, flaring comets…
Shivering in dark valleys while lights tremble, twist and spiral like smoke in a sunbeam.
Expansion, outreaching,Space, the star forest, fluid light moving through heavy darkness
Breathing, heart-bud opening,Skin peeled back, naked nerves flare and tremble, church with no roof but the sky._________________________________-
Crows circling the seminary,Starbeams and snowflakes, a thousand tiny deaths.Expirations.
Light which is white and cold. Quite pitiless.A brilliant fire burning with a cold light.
Circuitry. Symmetry. Cemetery.Solitary.In thick, dark nightCrepuscular mountain, crabbed and sinewy, with trees, hunched in the rocky scree, with no fruit in the branches but crows.Dwarfed, limbs tormented, knotted, twisted and deformed, forced into contortions, underwind, clinging to rockface. A strength born under duress.
Willows stroke your faceLight pours through the holes in the skull.
Lust-led, and possessedBorne along on swollen riversOn floodwaters carried, half-conscious, fearful and exultant, trusting and not trusting,
Blind tarantulaSharkhead nebula
Copper canal. Copper sky. Dead conduit.Copper conduit under dead sky.
Empty,Minded cosmosGrandiloquent and casually dishonest.
Torpid purgatoryBlank fathoms. Compressed air.A thick and suffocating silence.A feeling that gravity had increased, the limbs felt heavier, the body fatigued, the nerves leaden. A smaller store of energy from which to draw. Air like sawdust.
Men grown pinched and distrustful. Guarded.
A coded language of intimation and suggestion,The insult, the taunt or threat, the expression of contempt and disgust, the dismissal, disapproval, censure, hate,Coded into small talk, a subtext of hidden meanings, the id of any conversationCruel, barbed and violent, hissing and scratching beneath the surface of polite conversation.
Paranoia tunnels. Doubt tunnels. Cave complexes of fears and social anxieties.___________________________-----
Emeraldine meadows, and streams bell-likeWoozy pastures, hills and scything valleys, grass squirming beneath bare feet, courting butterflys and birdsong, cicadas, the soft breathing of woods and meadows.Perfect summers. Lolling daydreams in haystack shadows. Warm, shimmering Arcadys.
In faultless love, lamb-like, gambolling on summer pastures, trysts in fields vivid with sunlight and wildflower, playful kisses under shady oak and a race to crest the green hill.Happyville! We made it!
And down the hill walk to Happyville, hand in hand, through streets in early evening.
The sun setting, the shops shutting and the cats purring on the porches.Gentle evening. One evening in Happyville. We can never return here/________________________________--
Time, a trickle of treacle.Eye in the hand.Lights in the skyAscend!
Blood of the saints!Toenails and beard clippings. Earwax and phlegm.Win them all! Relics of the Holy Saints! Most revered and Sacrified!A millstream. Tombola. Old women in coloured tights. Ginger cake and currant buns.Betwixt hell and heaven, not deserving of either.
Church like a dog, threatening, with shoulder squared.cobweb of shadows on white stone portico.
Strange attractor, broiling seaGrotto of expansions and contractions.Fleshpot. Bilious vice.A stormer of fortresses. Dark-centered explosions.Lust led him by the nose, an accomplice, and willing tooAiding and abetting.
Adrift on a strange ocean. Or pond in municipal park.Swamp of illusions. Fervid hopes and fears both, casting strange figures against the sky.Arabesques and curlicles. Minatory engines. Sound of thunder and angels.Impossible promisesSpinning madalas. The opening lotus. Peacock. Eagle. Owl.Flowering turbines. Wheels turning. A-spin. Horrifying wheel.A-turning.Rolling pitilessly.
A traitors meeting in the pine forest. Where moss muffles the footfalls and the treetops blot out the moon.
A fox wriggles out into the night, den beneath a gravestone.
coral. minarets. smog.Don’t betray the desire.
Here, the great dining hall.Hall of cobwebs and dim chandeliers.Banquets of medlars, snuff and wax fruit. A ghost sits silently in the corner.A cold wind stumbles through the room like a drunk, knocking objects from the table, disturbing the bats.Fog rises in the dining hall. Silver, moonlike in the fog.The mounted head of a stag looks out over the fog. Two glass eyes.Two mice, giddy with love, run and leap across the floors, skidding on marble, tiny paws on marble floors, scrabbling for grip.And furniture burns in the fireplace. Things are not as they were.
Fire on Moon Beach. Orange star-embers fading on black sand sky.
Unattainable.
Blind swarming terror.Keening ice. The sound of icebergs clashing and splintering.A descent into polar caverns. Pillars, bridges and arches of ice. Lifeless, unable to support life.Floating, a frozen music, ice chimes and polar winds, grief of great beauty, aching, beauties which do not belong to us, music not for our ears. Beauty of eternities and the communications of stars, migrating winds, glaciers and of all those who die too young.
Trains of Bedouins.Begone!Legal secretaries in pencil skirts.
Ice age, Venerable Icybeard.Heart- stone entangled by ivy, like a gravestone.Frost in his beard and eyelashes.
Contraction. Indwelling, gathering inwards.Tiny point of light. Ball of impossibly concentrated matter. Atom containing all potentialities. All possibilities. World-seed. Progenitor of all things.The earth’s core. Centre from which all path radiate.A fruitful silence.
Twinkling streets. Dusky. Heartsore.Walk, through the noise of traffic and drunkenness, in a tunnel of silence.Lights twinkle.
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The hands of Gladstone's statue in Bow have been painted red.The missing hand of William Booth's statue has been replaced.___________Whole buildings go missing for weeks. Churches disappear only to return, two streets down, as nothing has happened. In their old location, a cash and carry, or a community centre, or a Turkish cafe.No one notices. Minds are altered alongside reality. Memory mutuates alongside reality.
'Excuse me sir, do you know where St. Kilda's church is?''Just round the corner boss, take the first left onto Whey Street and you'll see it, opposite the video shop.''Has it always been there?'Long as I've been around mate, be a job to move it'
I consult maps, yellowing A-Zs with pages missing, not one contradicts the present reality. Not one remembers.Reality becomes capricious. Devilish. Turned from frozen solid to liquid. Fluid, constantly in motion.
The changes become more disturbing. The bodies of family members are switched for those of former American presidents, matinee idols, heavyweight boxers, opera singers, Arabian princesses, pop stars, war heroes, emininent historians, historical personages...
Personalitys transplantedintroverts turn extrovert, boors become charmers, puritans rouesmy mothers voice from my father's mouth, friends become parents to their parents, breastfeed thri mothers, scold their fathers
Reality has melted. There are no more boundaries.
Here, an old battlefield. Where the battle still rages while we, denizens of a later time period, wander past, unseen and unscathed.
Crows turn to swans mid-wingbeat, from swans to sparrows, sparrows to parakeets
Radios broadcast your secrets. In the railway station your fears and fantasies are announced over the loudhailer.
Beautiful Zion.Raptures overcome passers-by like epilieptic fits. There is nothing you can do to help them. They are in ecstasy.Look! There's one. A woman in a grey trouser suit and patent leather pumps, writhing in a puddle, moaning like St. Theresa.Another, a young man, clinging to a lamppost for support, speaking in tongues, gibberish to me an you.Visions of your life after death, roiling in hellfire. Prodded by the devils pitchfork.
Here is a dreamer. He is asleep and yet, here he is, living out his dream before us. He is with a beautiful Jpanese girl. They are both naked. It would be impossible to speak to either of them, the dreamer or the dreamed, as they wait for the traffic lights to change.He has a dream cock, huge and heavy.
"We shall suggest that it was on the basis of this exquisite vulnerability that the unreal man became so adept at self-concealment. He learned to cry when he was amused and to smile when he was sad. He forwned his approval and applauded his displeasure. 'All that you see is not me,' he says to himself. But only in and through all that we see can he be anyone (in reality)If these actions are not his real self, he is unreal, wholly symbolical and equivocal; a purely virtual, potetential, imaginary person, a mythical man; nothing 'really ' If then, he stops pretending to be what he is not, and steps out as the person he has come to be, he emerges as a Christ, or as a ghost, but not as a man: by existing with no body he is no-body."R.D Laing. The Divided Self.
Roads silvered by the sun. Roads which look like rivers.spires of spun glass. steeples of pig iron._______________There are many of us. Empty, all of us empty. There is nothing within. We have nothing inside to give expression to. Nothing to react to events. No desires to guide action. No goal to reach for. Pure neutrality.Our social selves are constructs, elaborate performances. Memory we have, but this is just a recording device, a mental log. Experience leaves no trace on us. We are not changed. We do not learn. We do no grow, do not hurt or heal, do not become wise, cynical, bitter or mellow as we age, no there is nothing, a vacuum, the purest vacuum.Soul Snatchers.
People are not what they seem to be.spies. spies of government, spies of shadow governments, opposistion parties and resistance movements. Spies of foregin govrnments and foregin resistance movements, spies of pressure groups and campaigners, spies of companies and corporations, spies of your rivals and competitors, infiltrators, plants, fomentors and antagonists, ulterior motives, plotters and conspirators, tabloid hacks setting up a sting, creating news where none exists, a honeed trap, actors rehearsing roles, investigative journalists, practical jokers, undercover agents and double agents, anthropolgists conducting field work, love-bombing cultists seeking recruits, terrorists on a test run, miltary surveillance, secret police so secret you never knew even existed, manipulators and hypnotists, market researchers, confidence tricksters and conmen, charlatans and hucksters, snakeoil salesmen, fraudsters and forgers, identity theives snatching the names of dead children, actors employed to advance the views of political parties, pressure groups, corporations, religions, empolyed to promote bars and club nights, churches, religions, gurus, comedians, paperback writer'I simply couldn't put it down''Everyone's going to Chantilly Lace this evening''Jesus changed my life'My chiropodist is simply wonderful, he inspires me, yes, William Gull, Penury Street''I only drink Vanderbilt'___________roads silvered by the sun.sparrows in the hedgerows.gutter rattling with pearls and rubies-----------------___________________________
next!
there is a railway bridge in Poplar which bears one of London's last remaining assertions of G. Davis' innocence. G. DAVIS IS INNOCENTin the classic style, white paint on dark brick, applied with a thick paintbrush, not an aerosol can.Time is passing too quickly, perpetual present immersed in the floodwaters. nothing left.the old woman said'they used to sweep the streets everyday, the street-sweepers''not now, they don't have time to do anything anymore'her husband said.
G. DAVIS IS INNOCENT.like the last leaf on a winter treelike a chimneystack above the floodwater
Time is the rate of events. Time moves fastest where the pace and the concentration of events is at its greatest. and so we shelter a while by the rivers, where the water moves slowly, for now.a heron on a peninsula of mud, surrounded by a retinue of seagulls.fungus, pushes feelers out into the sunlight, from deep underground, tests the october air, sends messages back undergoundbut all of this is temporoary, refugee camp for the out-of-time, on the borders the bulldozers are waitingredevelopment, tear it down, reintergrate it into the timestream, nothing can be allowed to escape the floodwatersall will be swept along
sea of the perpetual present
_____sentimental tosh, reactionary rubbish.
music drifts like smoke from a nearby building site. i can see no workers on the building site. it is gospel musicbeautiful Zion the woman sings
the demolition crews are demolishing your past.see the hauliers trucks? rumbling procession of hauliers trucks-they are taking away the world you knew.what will they build in its place?mirrored cage. rpison with mirrored walls. sham infinity._________last night I passed a man sitting on a bollard in Ilford. His arms were outstreched, palms open towards heaven, beseeching. He did not appear to be mad, drunk or drugged.Who does he pray to? What does he pray for?He has made the street into a temple and talks to gods alongside the rushhour traffic.
queasy portents.a cockatoo falls from a tree as i walk past, lands on the wet asphalt by my feet. it cannot fly. it shuffles away, too slow to escape any potential predator. clucking forlornly. knowing its fate. a pochahontas. dying in an english autumn.
a young blonde woman in a make-up mask picks up a copy of the Polska GazettaPolish language only-Don't bother if you can't read Polish!from outside the Swan.
Further up the road, repeat offenders smoke Mayfairs outside the youth court.this is very sad.could any of us, while still children have foreseen this, tawdry future?the office workers behind panels of glass, worlds shrunk to the size of a computer screen. The security guards, alone behind CEO sized desks, watching the world through an array of CTTV monitors. black slacks, black leather shoes, black sweaters with epaulettes and company insignia.How all our worlds would shrink to the endless repition of a limited number of actions, gestures and phrases. The days have become indistinguishable, nights and weekends as predictable and as chorelike as the time we spend at work. tilting a pintglass, telelvisn screen buzzing, dedicated to sedation, to not feeling, to not living, anything not to live, not to feel, not to hurt or hope, trips from sofa to toilet and back again. trips from sofa to fridge to microwave, all we ask is to be left in our comas, unconcsious, leave me unconcious, don't break the routine, the repition of movements which have become instinctive, fingers on a keyboard, journey from home to work, journey from fridge to microwaveconversations we've had a hundred times before, that we know by heart like an actors lines, like a salesmans patter, all connection between word and thought severed, stock phrases, stock attitudes and opinions, recycled jokes, faux outrage and false laughter, a worldview foisted on us by parents and peerseverything has already been decidedmy heart is broken.______walking along a path which follows the course of a dead river I see the distinctive becasue unbranded carrier bags of off-licenses and mini-marts hanging from the bushes and the branches of trees like the banners of a defeated army, limp and ragged. Blue usually, though sometimes with a blue and white stripe.later past a cafe, front page of the Daily MailA CHARTER FOR PROMISCUITY
the mannequins in the windows of the Whitechapel rag trade outlets are as damaged and disparate as the people who walk past them. Polysytrene heads with scars like knife wounds, white women with 1050s hairstyles, makeup and stern expressions, resplendent in sequinned saris, men with moustaches and goatee beards drawn on in black marker pen, life sized baby dolls dressed in suits two sizes too big, vogueing dummies from the 1980s strike a pose in cheap leather jackets and hooded sweatshirts emblazoned with logos for unknown brandsshop assistants dress them, pulling trousers over stiff limbs, like an orderly would dress an incontinent pensioner in a nursing home.a balck ladybird on the windowframe. two red dots, with two black dots in the centre like pupils in an eye.a yellow ladybird with white spots.a ladybird drowning in a cats drinking water.cheated of our inheritance.the walls are closing in.__________________________________-----next!
Mongoose attack! Metallic sound. An eyelash brushing against a cheek/ A group of pubescent majorettes in sequinned leotards join a funeral cortège. Foul medicine. Blasphemers! Glass femurs. Oracular pronouncements. Shopping lists scrawled on vellum. The junkies have found out about our park. You hear them rustling away in the bushes at night. Nordic apparition. A football match in a disused aerodrome. Crickets sang and it sounded like the voice of the dry grasses. Leaves ran in circles at the wind’s behest. Trees sang with the voices of birds. The underside of a leaf is stitched like skin. A tendril of a vine wrapped twice around branch. A map of the Bow Backs. a rainbow and a volcano 6 androgynous theatre ushers visit a nightclub still wearing their faintly militaristic uniforms, navy blue with gold trim, and dance till dawn in perfect, robotic synchronicity. A bench looking out to sea.__________________-------next!
‘Tedious. This representing yourself, desperate to get it right, as if you could.’ Iain Sinclair Salman Rushdie snogging Helena Bonham Carter in the girls toilets. A volcano rising from a boiling sea. The sky is black with ash, the sun blotted out. Somewhere else, something else happens. One moment of time- a multitude of events, a tumult of existences. summer and winter, night and day, birth and death health and sickness, wealth and destitution contained in the one moment, collapsed into one moment The whole of time in a fragment of time. A tree throws supplicant branches into the air. Ghost winds. A tree draped with a gossamer veil. Spider nests. A birds nest fallen behind the conifers. Inside, three turquoise eggs. The wet road reflects the blue sky, making it look like a river. Tulip fields in the evening, petals as garish as the sunset. Dandelions on a football pitch. A canal clogged with water-lilies. Ear nuzzled by a coquettish breeze. Wrought-iron staircases. Desert pilgrimage. A dog flung into the air by a hurricane. Film school students filming for their graduation project at the dog track. An Englishman smokes a cigarette in Singapore. His pink shirt is damp with sweat. His face is red and coated with a film of sweat. A woman walks past, he straightens his back, sucks in his gut. Steel sky. Bellicose cloud. Webs of discord. A clap of thunder- And the rain redoubles its efforts Like shop-workers when the manager walks in. Fireworks which never explode and fall to earth Which get lodged in the sky and become stars. Fracture of the fibula. Black holes inhaling nebulae. Blacksmiths making souvenir horseshoes in a mock 17th century village. Moneyed entrepreneurs with an eye for the ladies- pool parties in Malibu beach-houses, Caribbean sojourns in luxury yachts. Men with straggly white hairs protruding from walnut skin, man breasts drooping petulantly, dainty cocktail glass in a ham like fist. A slew of swallows, the air excited. Ungodly farrago. Travellers from the Antipodes, testing narcolepsy drugs for money in a London clinic. Nettle rash. A family picnic in Hampstead Heath is interrupted by Tolkein enthusiasts re-enacting the final battle from Lord of the Rings. In a moment of overexcitement an orc grabs a bottle of elderflower wine and brings it crashing down on poor Frodo’s head.
_________________________-----next!
sulphur belchesthe hills are slagheaps and smouldering rubbish pilesbirds are brought down by the black smoke, sententious headmasterscough up maxims, suck lozenges, impersonante partridges, forlorn chamber maidsmake daisy chainssing pop songs through a cardboard tube, dance with a broomlandlords of provincial pubs across the countryreenact notable suicidesvan gough, chatterton, plathleaving brains, blood and vomit across public bars, florid suicide notes pinned to dart boardsphosphorus leaks, spilled beerboys choked by a symbolic umbilical cordermine encrusted with gravy and egg yolk, glamour and squalor holding handsa fox in a trap gnaws off his own lega girl in a knee-length skirt, walks acorss hot pavement, calves quiver at every footfallheart removed with an obsidian bladeprobation officers taking early retirement, moving to Swindon, buying a place with a gardenhouse needs a little bit of work doing to it, plus some new carpets and a coat of paintplanes explode, everything happens simultaneously, in one eternal momentbit-part actors bitching offstageclerks, poets, abbatoir workers, train drivers, trade union treasuers, karate instructorsbridesmaids, forklift operators, truck driversshop keepers, waiters and barmaidsall of us, ants gathering food, obeying impulses, following pheremones, without the will or means for changing anythingbound by the social glue, held in place, even the unemployed, paid to be idleare working for the good of society, or at least, help it to functionwhat does good mean in this context?every pyramid needs its base if it wants to avoid being toppledevery pecking order needs one bruised bird with no one to peckpeople, almost without a physical presencebarely here, we, people of strawso aware of our own transciencelook out over landscapes that do not and will never belong to uswe climb these foreign moutainslegs weary but obidient, following the stony path to the summitwhen, finally, we reach the top, we weep, for as high as we arewe still cannot see our homeland.we are not blind to the beauty of this world, but it is a beauty which digs into our flesh like thorns and bramblesrivers, enormous trees, mountains, gleaming, terrible citieswe do not cover our eyes or seek to deny any of the wonders before usbut will never feel free to pluck the flowers from the soil.there were never ours to pick.molten rocks, gold twinkling at the bottom of the stream, anemones and constellationsformica worktops, cathderel spiresartifical waterfalls in shopping malls, gunfire on suburban streetspottery, fumigation, oh, fulminating whalesriches beyond comparebut not to share, no map without bordersno object without its owner or idea without its patenteven the coding of your dna, or the colour of your eyesslow funeral march, the world all in step, marching towards its own burialand no one sheds a single tear, only a child or an idiot would bemoan the inevitablestand in the way of the incoming tide, as if any authority bestowed by man could stop the searabid dogs rattle fences, children steal motorbikes, tourists gored by spanish bullsthrow stones at birdsnests, fill in foxholes, set fire to anthillspiss on a sleeping trampfrom here to gravesendpast the planets, swim between stars, swallow suns, race cometscome home, repeat the same mistakes all over againlose and lose againsweet nothinglapped by zephyrs, whispered secrets to tombstones, threw entrails to gullswrestled for posession of your own soul, submitteddidn't even carefuck itsat outside till morning came and couldn't slough off singave upwent to seed'REBORN-and, like the falling leaf, the WIND IS MY WILL'endless, absurd cyclehope and despair, illusion and disillusion, moribund heartwith no room left for fear, what have we got to lose?__________________________________________-----next!
This man was made redundant 6 months ago and has been unable to find another job. He makes anonymous calls to the managing directors and shareholders of his old firm, night after night, sobbing down the phone until he’s hung up on.
Another man stalks a children’s televisions presenter. He sends her things he’s made. Things he thinks she’d like; sock puppets, potato-print paintings, fairy cakes and little figures made from pipe-cleaners.
What happens when love lacks an outlet?
A man watches children in a playground from his bedroom window.
Another man coaches an under-12s football team in Barking.
A man writes love letters to film stars. Never sends them. A drawer in a desk, full of them.
A basement full of mannequins.A man collects paper doilies to remember his dead mother by.
Another collects porcelain dolls.
Men whispering to tombstones.
crying.
Men waking up with a terrible sense of emptiness as they realise they were only dreaming. It was only a dream!
Packs of boys, drunk on lager, chanting football songs in unison, staggering down high streets leering at girls and going home alone.
A young boy in a big city charting the stars with the aid of an old book on astronomy, and feeling cheated when he realises how many are missing from the sky, usurped by the electric lights or drowned in the smog.
A tiger in the zoo.
Or another boy trying to discover the secret for transforming life.
Trying to find something which would make life worth the living.#
As if concentrating hard enough could impel the earth to relinquish its secrets.Otherwise-how to escape?Cut a hole in the net large enough to slide
Don’t want anyone else’s lonely eyes boring into meDon’t want to feel the pressure of anyone else’s yearning, the weight of their disappointments
Every night that couple walk past me, I always say hello and he says hello in return, but she just raises her head momentarily and gives me the briefest and shyest of smiles. She holds herself as if apologising for her very presence.
There’s something wrong there.
Don’t hurt yourself.
Sung to sleep by television voices
Men who can’t sleep staring out at the traffic going past the window like a lighthouse keeper watching waves._____________________________-----
next!

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