Misfire

Postscript

What logic is there
In our failures
To communicate ?
There shouldn’t be
Such a kind of disruption as this

Is there a reason
That these failures
Are seismic shifts between us
Between the baggage that we’ve carried
And the road ahead ?

Are we to continue
With this folly ?
Are we wise ?

You broke down at the weight
Of your geology
And exclaimed their burdens
As I listened
Trying to articulate
My understandings

And now you will not rise from the bed
I have brought you a little food
And whilst I am hopeful
That this reunion after battle
Could lead to a deeper
And more stable reparation
I see the possibility
That your habits of defense
Will fight for you
Against me
To another bitter end

Breach

In the chair,
Where I am now,
With this brown leather case on my lap,
And the sun on my back,
I can hear the wind in the pines,
The birds,
And a car.

On this veranda,
Where I am,
I know,
I feel,
That we are past.
Especially since,
And it was I that suggested the metaphor,
I had shrunk.

We are strangers again;
Reduced to islands,
Bridges drawn,
Separate,
Scattered,
And foolish now,
Too,
I think,
As tempting as it is to attempt a crossing.

And now that we're disconnected,
A wind bares down,
Deep,
Into this uncrossable river,
Wide enough ahead of me from where I am,
The two of us,
No longer together.

But,
In the realm Of the finished,
Where walls can be breached,
The end that is open...
Is an end that can once more
Brings us together.

La Chute

Last night I stood on that balcony,
And whilst the both of you,
Inside,
Talked about this and that,
I suddenly threw myself over.
Neither of you noticed at first,
But I'd disappeared,
…Obviously over
Where else could I have gone ?
Twenty stories up
That Parisian block
It just occurred to me to do it.
I hadn't considered it;
It was the lights and the distance;
I was staggered by the view,
And
It’s unforgivable,
This must be certain,
To have just gone like that,
Without a warning,
And now the shock that you are in
And why ?
And what for ?
I’d only just gone out there for a peek.
Then I would have come back in and
Had a little more of the wine that I’d poured.
I’d had every intention of finishing it,
I’m just as ashamed as you,
I’d indulged myself
Showing off.
I thought,
In that instant,
Like a snap of electricity,
"They won’t be expecting that!"
And so there it is,
Unsolvable for you lot.
But for my reasons ?
Nothing more than, I’d been overcome
By one last bout
Of self sacrificial childishness.

Mountains

You've told me
And I try to understand
I can hear the meaning
But
I
Can't understand you
This
These movements of yours
Like
Thrashing
You're thrashing about
And It's
Complicated if I care
And simple if I don't

Last night I was angry
You kept me awake
This morning you flew
About the room
Your dark spectre
In my head
Violence rocked
I fought with blood
And filth
Spitting

All I want to do
Really
Is hold you
In my arms
To make peace
And start this thing over
Hold
Each others eyes
To our minds
And see clearly

But this storm that has raged so hard
Here
Against us
Is so born
Of our mountains
This damned topography
That it has made us
Both
Impossible to climb

Alchemy

I’m back in England
Slotted in
Grasping my crayons and tools
Steering ahead
And picking up tables
Offered gratis
In somebody’s drive

And you’re still here
Shadows dancing
Slightly away
Tangled for moments
There and there
Grasped by pensive reeds downstream
Along the current of minds time
Out of which
I
Become
Always become
Be
Come
Be

I tend to your pressures
And tap the glass
Shaking fluids
Stirring up humus
Ambrosia
Prime material
Distillation
Marks
Indexing
Charged
Particles
Your invisible currents
Dispersed
Immersed
Within blooms carbon fruit
And times needy patterned symmetry
Bearing words
And images
Painting
Invisible
Marking
Bearing
Riding
Holding
Forming
And finally

Loved again

In forgiveness

Connections

I was walking back
This late afternoon
From Christina’s studio where
I’d scanned
Laboriously
Work
That I’d done for a magazine

The scanner
Was artist placed
That’s awkward
And
Impossible to reach
So
Each image was at an angle
(I had to kneel to do this)
And also
Because
And probably everything because
I couldn’t make out application menus in French

I was punching buttons
Hoping that sense
Would bare fruitful function
From generic tools
But no
And I got annoyed
My irritation
Reverberating from the walls

Then I thought
I’ll just photograph these pages
Do these later
Or tomorrow
Borrow
A digital camera
It’ll look better anyway
And I can get out of there
Although
It had all been a complete waste of time

Walking back then
I’m thinking about
The wasted time
And how it can be saved
Doing it like this
With words
Dying
Assured

Then Angel calls
(That’s Gabriel)
Calling cautions to his dog
Scattering about through Paris
And I ask him if he has a camera
And his partner does
Michaela

And I’m wondering whether
I might be a nuisance
They have a baby
And on the way
To the house
He calls
To ask
That maybe
Because things are a little chaotic
That maybe
(I’m just outside the house)
That maybe
I should arrive in half an hour

So I go to the corner
Not enough Euros in my wallet
After the banana
And the nuts
The bar won’t take my card for a single drink
So I walk past
Once or twice
Dawdling this
In my head
And walk off to the bank
Walking
Thinking
I’m walking too much
And as this goes down
I think
I’m thinking
That I’m denigrating this project
To save wasted time
Wasting more time
Over this
But Christina calls
And says she’s glad
That I’d picked up her charger

3rd of April 2007

Look at that
Glass in front of me
And the time
To check
Four fifty three
French radio at the bar
And the sun falling
A little warmer
Though bitten
From warring with the wind
Than yesterday
At this same time
Where I was
Somewhere else
A little less clearer
Than I am today

I’m more confident
A meeting with an Englishmen
Who helped resolve
A few doubts
About my position
My Englishness
Here
As a plus
Rather than a negative

Looking at this glass
And thinking about the beer
I wasn’t enjoying it
So I thought
Well
Why ever not?
And that’s when I looked at it
And thought
Why?
And how is it that I go about liking it
When everything’s so fair

Okay
Of course there’s my new French mobile
That costs too much
Christina keeps saying that
“I told you so”
But
And I’ve looked in the window
At another that is so much better
And I have a sim for it
One I bought earlier
Another mistake
Thinking that my English phone
Would accommodate
But I was wrong about that too
I can chip it though
Christina says
More Euro

I’m mad with money
No real sense for it
Feel the walls closing in sometimes
And recently I’ve been
More attentive
To calculations
To orientate
Calm
Positioned
Navigated
That’s all it is I’m sure
About life
A little awareness
Checked against lights and horizons
Rises and falls
In preparation
For it all

The glass is almost finished now
And Gabriel
Still hasn’t called
On the mobile
Using the SFR network
That’s costing me so much
Or
Is it just
As the guy said in the shop where I bought it
“The usual price”
Or
Maybe just that
As a very cheap phone
I get a very bad deal

When I spoke to Yozke
About this
He said
(In response to how much time
I tend to stay on calls)
That
And he didn’t say it directly
I suggested it
That
Yes
I should be keeping my calls shorter
It’s because I haven’t been paying
It’s like his shelves
And how dusty they are
Because before
Growing up
He always had a cleaner
To do it for him

The Climbing Tree

Mark and I sat in the tree house
It was an end of a time
But which time I’m not too sure
I only know how I felt
And he said
“You will never succeed”

And now I remember which time it was
The end of school days where we had become good friends
And now I was leaving
With an ambition to sign-on
It seemed like a good idea at the time
And I don’t think I fully understood
The implications of that low horizon

I had low-grade mentors
And I had chosen them
Those that had condemned me for being different
Were placated by my decision
To stoop to them

And now it is
It is this
Now
That I’m forty-one
And signing on again
Stuttering
Stalling
Reaching up
And trying to get away

Have I only ever sought to meet your expectations?
Staring up at your words
When I should be scaling them

The Car Club

Black dog old friend
With rolling eyes
Ripped down and pulverized
Taken
Gone

Those that let you out have forgotten now
But your blood still pours out onto the street
Your last breaths etched out
Upon my mothers thighs

And the guilty
Two boys
Lacking common sense
And unforgotten
Are available now upon the net
Old friends sharing wedding photographs
And tips about Cortinas

Again

It’s this time
And again I’m scraping
Barely in beneath the door

And again
My mothers wrapping paper
Another tube
Or wraps
Saved up
And folded from before

And in this little room
Where I am keeping
I embellish gifts
Bought for me
To give to family

Again

The gold paper
Flitters a little
Above the heat
Of this little electric fire here
And downstairs
Everyone

The others

The crazy people
They always smile at me
I can spot them
It's an overall thing
We have an instinct to spot them quickly
But some of us are numb
Big
Beaming smiles of knowing recognition
Large
Lolloping
Jolting
Body knowing contact
I realise
Of course
That they might think I'm one of them
When they're smiling
Passing me they think
The crazy people
They always smile at me

From these things

I am this
And all the past is gathered up
And I
I am not a collection
But from these things
Objects and memories
I have become

Balcony

Here at the balcony
Leaning out into the wind
All the words I cannot speak
That cannot be
Are only being and I recall
And I feel
All that shall be lost with me forever

These words

Your dark eyes
Have been inside me for a thousand years
Like the water through my skin
My blood through this and these salts combined

Divinity starts with the first embrace
And Hearts meet with but bones apart
We are tissue thin between
Swimming within our own dark drops
Of this great ocean
Our lottery composition

We fragments of sun
And these mortal arches
Supporting sky crashing in and
Squeezing us deeper down into
Polyrythmic despair

Holding court in this small way
Our fragile grip upon sliding beauty
Layering our lives with the skins of memory
Our painful recipes stewing
We hope for a gentle end to all our beginnings
And all that we defend

Thread

I’m mad

Wittering to myself
Treading streets
Ranting to audiences
Whom
Often
Find themselves in disagreement

They leave

At this point I bend over
Laughing
Crying
Laughing
Crying

And it hurts
To feel this way for you
After so long
To be so careful
And unsure
If it’s something

At all

And

Terrified a little
After each call
Wondering
If you should
Tracing echo’s over later
Re-running
Ruminating

Walk away

And then
Surprise
They’re so glad you called
But always
Always dangling
Waiting for the fall

I do not know what it is

I get the feeling
And this is because I think too much
Maybe
That I say too much
Write too much of the wrong things
That my words are too many images
And you've said
Sometimes
Just that
That my mouth makes too many images
And it's because
I am so unable to do the math
The math that so many others do
The careful calculus of the clear

I'm a slave to this
It must be so
Perhaps
There can be no vindication
And that in all truth no solution
That I might never grow
That I might never need to
And
In truth
Perhaps
This shape I'm in
Is as well as I'll ever get

I see that your secret garden is filled with rage
And that the marks you make render your unspeakable
And that you are Chocolate and I am cheese
That one of us is earth and that one of us is water
And that together we can make life
Diving in from one
And finding safety upon the other

And again
I feel that I've said too much already
So I revert to something outside
And point as one does in distraction
Towards the million other suns
Invisible as they are
Out there
As Whitman said
'I do not know what it is but grand,
And that…
It is happiness.'

Slowly

“I’m a wanker…”
A little dark mantra
A kind of wrap to rock me in

“I’m a wanker…”
Or just a fucking twat
“A fucking twat, a fucking twat…”
And over
Those words
Like that

Walking around
And often in the basement
I deprecate myself
For being me
A fucking twat
For this or that
Nouns of birth
Seeking end
At least picking at the edges
And scouring the skin
My oral theater of self-harm
Bearing dark clouds down
I
Defacing slowly

Whatever

I’m nobody to you and me
That’s nothing
Sometimes
When misunderstood
Whenever

My lies and deceits
My perpetuations
This crawling filth
It’s all nothing to you and me
This loathing
Boiling
This bastard joy
This prodigal son
This memorandum
This sum
And I’m nothing
But something
To you and me

And yes
I scan the tree line
And spot preferable foliage
Some other kind of bark
And think
Yes
How about a Yew, Willow, Cedar or an Oak
Shrugging blindly from my own special bark
Too far up in to the sky
To notice
Roots
Firming
Solid
Just like you
A nobody
That’s nothing sometimes
Whatever

The CV photograph

That man in the photograph
Taken in the Metro
Behind a blue curtain
That revealed to commuters
His lower legs and feet
As the only indication
That an I was sitting there

An I inside
But not without
Dismissed even
In that half revealed
Peculiarity

That man
This existence
That mute uncertainty
Ripples of terror
Radiating
From a deep
Black and infinite centre
A pane of glass to be smashed
Or even
For one true and unconsummated gasp
Some kind of breathing
That he might never do
Some necessary circulation of life
Where securities are barriers
And that he might let go
And push off from the side
Kicking in a freedom of carelessness
Without concern for exceptable codes
Of dress and behavior
To find comfort in unlaundered items
The courage to lie in the street
Strengthened outside of the walkers
In the confirmations of all their fears
The full terror
Realized and absorbed
Alive in the dissolution
Of fetid recline
In the smiling
Watering eyes
Rising
Leaking into the sky
Where
But for the grace of God
Go I

The van by the river

I see by the river
A man who lives in a van
The front seat filled with shelves
And that
Not something to drive
But to live in

Organised violence

The fire eating objects
Collected themselves
Not on a stage
But gathered together
In a mass media campaign

The marvelous nature
Of
THE CAMPAIGN
Was pure spectacle
No one
Would be selling anything
And airtime would be donated
From a secret frequency slot
For this one
Almighty
Twenty four seven
Fire eating extravaganza

Although
At first
A majority appeared critical
(They thought that flame swallower's
Were primarily useless)
They ignored the dancing exhaustion
Of televised ignition
The plays of gases and fuels
The bare sinews of the invisible
Apparently dismembered

But
Slowly
They became enthralled
Mesmerized even
Extended
Away from
The flameless pornography
Of the sugared mediocrity
Like Stretch Armstrong
If
You’re old enough
Or
Savvy even
To have heard of that particular toy

And soon enough
It seemed
As though
A proportion of humanity
Was melting
Like dolls heads in the glare
Of some unsafe
Unchecked
Electrical
Heating appliance
Once used to lightly scold
The barren toes of post-war
Children

However
The more popular they became
The less they remembered
Why they were
And they got mean

Basically

At first this couldn’t be seen
Was only a private cynicism
Amongst the objects
Who spat with knowing irony
But it wasn’t long before
They could no longer contain
Their spite
And sometimes
Not only
Did they not light up
But they refused to appear

They were

They became

DEAD TIME...

And many sat
Still
To watch the silence
Waiting
But soon
The begrudged masses
(Dismissed
As only that;
Entranced by difference
Missing the point
Or even
Just plain foolish)
Clocked the ruse
And revolted
Demanding more
They liked it
They wanted it
And not
Just in defense

And soon
All the other channels
Could no longer compete

Silence

There was silence friends

For us (Against loose stuff at 4.59 on Wednesday)

Again
It seems that my climbing this incline
Brings down
Fragments and unnecessary debris
And so
I must speak

It rains heavy hail on me
White sludge drools down windshields
Reprieve (as I’d intended previously)
Finds me
In Le Bastringue
With a pint and a cup of nuts

This writing is the motivator
Why I’m here
And of course I know that it won’t employ me
Not upon this old earth at least
Referring to the literal
Ground binding beneath my feet
Undulating at the cruise
Of bipeds and all their swine entanglement

As I walked from Republique
I remembered that I wanted to invest these words
With a panoply of objects
Each significant of some point
In a certain pattern
In front of which
Curtains could be opened and closed
And fire eating tricksters
Paraded on stage

But the circus
As such
Will not be coming to town
T H I S D A Y
And
More importantly
I have to find solid
Damn
Ground
Like that earth of undulation
Below these feet
Constructed from a healthy array
Of mutually perceptive
Synaptic freeways
Bi-ways
Bridge ways
Overpass
Cycleway
And gutter
Cleansed thoroughly
By ordered economies
Of municipal cleansers
Attendant
To harmony
Peace
And love
But for the forever
Of short term
A song at least
That incorporates this shingle
Into rise

Sirens

Without working for days
I’m trying to get a job
And find a flat
Without the local patwa
To put me in
The right place
Always
For such a thing
As advanced doing
Or
Just plain doing period

I find myself thinking
While I’m having a piss
And this reflection
Is thinking about the image
And it’s the image
That always is
But Isn’t
Without working for days

And I was thinking
About the damned
Luscious inspiration
Of the work of others
Images made elsewhere
By artists
In magazines
So rich
Like sweets
Or chocolate mouse
Sirens
To help starve me
From mine

And I remember how
Last time I was in England
In Heffers
I thought
Don’t ever look at those magazines
Because they interfere
With the tabula rasa
Jumping in
And getting there before me

So I can only think
That as much as I’d like to jam this ship
Into that invitation
And drown meaning
With someone else's gesture
There will shortly be
A wind
That carries me
To that clarity
Where I cannot see

Bipedal slur

It had
Become more difficult
When the stumbling
Began in earnest
Like a purposeful Gait
Some tick
Of primal atavism
Seeking reduction
To become

The mind
Curious and open
To its carriages Fresh mechanics
Spectated a dazzling new world
Where the masses
Concrete on their planes
And horizons
Rebelled
In uncertainty
Capricious and twisting
Like that other world
Where gravity meets to compromise
And orientation has been nurtured
With the grace of currents and tides

Moan 10 (another urbanisation)

What kind
Of God damned
Smoking
Pissing excrement
Of sin is it
I ask
Screaming
Kicking
At the earth beneath;
A little builder’s dust and aggregate
Rising

To build
Warehouses and their showrooms
Of sofas
And pretentious
Plumbing appliance
At the foot of a mountain
Built in the instance
Of a million years

The van by the river

I see by the river
A man who lives in a van
The front seat filled with shelves
And that
Not something to drive
But to live in

The Drum

Beaten up
I depart
As long as I wanted this mess
I’ve said, “Whatever!”
A thousand times
And now my chest
Is going to burst
Like a plastic balloon
Because
I am this clockwork
Plastic toy
Tapping its little Asian made drum
Its tight little plastic
Like a layer of tissue
Taped across my tolerance

Shuffling

The last moments
Before departure
Always seem so empty
Waiting for arrival
Always seems
So drawn out

Shuffling feet
When all is done
By way of preparation
Must be a madness
To be ahead
Of oneself like that

How can it be
Perhaps
That this time
Be outside of doing
Or this not doing
Be wasted

(Note: A narrative unfolds
An arrival
Some rendezvous
Arrangements organised
Nevertheless interrupt
Times Janus faced corruption
Accidents
Somehow segued
Unexpected
And
Without inconvenience
Take us breathing
At a steady pace)

For this or that

There are words
And there are words that fail
But they’re all I have these words
And they fail like crippled limbs but I must walk
And so I walk
And I stumble though I mean well
And these words are only this
And that for this and that
And a voice not always my own
But skins for this or that
And they jar and fall
Like this limp
But no more or less than the handicaps suffered
By all the other limpers here and there
Who need this or that
For support and words
When you fall and crawl
Reaching out
And calling out
To one of the others
For this or that