Ramblings of A Wander-Lusting Neophyte (The Usual Blur of Words)

Are you ready? For a copyright infringement

That will go down a storm

In the right pair of ears.

Are you ready? For a right-inky-mess,

Neurotically depreciative of its own engineering.

A slippery sex-on-the-beach-monkey-nipple of a thought…

Discerning baggy-clothed and barefoot to be the happier option.

Do I dare,

And do I dare disturb the universe

With a cacophony of half-baked words,

Amounting to an ‘I love the bones of you,

That, I cannot escape.’ (?)

Some mirror ball, in an empty disco hall,

Reflects a similar sentiment –

That of Everything In Its Right Place,

Everything Has Changed.

Tonight the city sounds were violins,

Tonight the stars were multicoloured.

And whilst I reiterate, whilst I regurgitate,

Somewhere the last echoes of a snare drum

Fade out to a quick acoustic death.

Lets then. Yes lets – entertain a myriad of impressions

Fantastic and evanescent,

A sharp steel shard of the refreshingly ordinary –

Something like ‘world peace, less pollution

And butts that look good everywhere.’

…put that in your cocktail shaker.

Lets have a powwow

A Boom-Boom-Pow-Wow

To welcome Dawn’s eternal throes

And grasp earthy tufts of fuller life

To glide the highs and ride the lows

And help rebuff a word, a world, of strife.

The airwaves hum (Zumm Zumm),

The transatlantic, London to Brighton

“ Problems of an extravert”,

So peculiarly foreign.

The Exotic Other?

No. The Great Unknown.

Physicians are a good sort.

They want to do the right thing.

And yet all of us, behind closed doors,

Would kill to hear the Sirens sing.

…Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

Cold and calculating, knowing all –

Nothing left to imagination’s sense of adventure.

Well, you’ve the wrong weather forecast.

That life, you know the one set out for you by others,

The one that has the universal-thumbs-up,

You-can-do-it-Facebook-official,

Chew-on-yer-pen, follow the leader

Yellow-brick-road

In red shoes kinda deal;

The one constructed in all futures but yours,

Set out in all plans but yours?

That’s the one you think hardest about.

Think harder, and then contemplate it in full -

Just for good measure.

Then, with your head in circles,

And out of kilter with Daddy’s Five-Year-Plan,

Look up the word ‘wanderlust’ in the dictionary.

And whatever your mind falls to

In the pending moments,

That is what you

Chase. And be happy(ier).

So say all earnest generations previously.

So say I.

The Montepulciano agrees.
Do I dare to eat a peach?

…Out to the windy beach,

Far from the twisted reach

Of crazy final moment’s

Sweet surrender, fragmentary,

Paradigmatic, post-modern,

Dada inspired sorrow. 

It’s OK. I was a neophyte once

Upon a time, dressing so fine…

With bones on the table…

Feathers in the garden…

Clothes on the line.

   

Dystopia eat your heart out

You have the right to know that my heart is in this matter. So when I know you were here before, that you left a wet footprint on the bathroom floor, a ghost of your presence, a shadow to the wind, a whisper to your essence, the likes of which I can conjure up without a second thought, but might be tinged with the smallest dose of pain sometimes, remember my heart misty murmur is in this. We all have to strive, and strain and seek what is good and where the silver lining that is the only thing on God’s green earth worth shouting about, and if not then no one’s got a chance. And everyone wants a chance…

     …The moon, yes the moon. I haven’t howled at it, but it outshines a mid-night metropolis. Streets sleep, pavements are empty but the city has a pulse that cannot be stopped and a thirst which cannot be quenched, no matter how many hipster jazz cats bop to the underground night beats that no one can see but are always heard.

     Lets be me, whoever you are, and entertain a world of furies and wear Nike ironically in pretence but covertly think it the thing to wear, and everyone else thinks the same and nods and passes narcotics in your direction, as if it’s the cure, the remedy for times of insecurity and despair – one of the two.

     Call Lane reeks of the failed artistry of European song, once shot in the chest, but he’ll ‘give you a sheet of his unpublished music genius ‘cos you played Mardy Bum so tight considering the time of night and the alcohol percentage of Red Stripe.’ He digs it. Man, he digs it.

     If only Cadillacs were from Yorkshire. We could get one second hand, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows Cadillacs. Real cheap. Real good nick. Real great Nike. Real good spanner in the works, and we could bomb to the coast and get high on grey waves and white wine or try to find the Pennines and make our mark. But the roads are too small, incorrigibly acute and sheep and rain and old stonewalls ooze obtuse Shakespearian anxieties, a kinda rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind notion and the Rozzers wouldn’t be too keen.

     If you ask me, I think we’re too middleclass to revolt enough to see ourselves as we wish. This may not be the case. I hope it isn’t. Hope being the main reason why I write. To be free of the fear. THE FEAR. To be free is to write, but in writing, I address what it is I cannot surpass (I think.) And I am left nonethewiser much like when you find yourself on Call Lane. Although how much like it it is I have no idea. The similarity lies in the searching, I would suggest. The big fat gypsy nothing we wish to fill in – colouring in the spaces between the lines that define us, like the train journeys that are the gaps between our sense of life. And to find articulate brevity that matches what it is in our minds we cannot verbalise of vocalise – to find and capitalise on that is what those on Call Lane search for. Or so I like to think… that’s why, certainly, I’ve found myself there a few times.

     Mixing it with the revellers – pretending to be on a level of loss, which I can relate to, but find weary, both at the same time, at the same instant when handing over moola and looking down the sticky neon bubblegum drum rum bar at my own reflection, and the mirrored image of myself I find in others, those Sambuca fiends give me back a knowing look of ‘yeah I got a loan out for this shindig’ and I’m like ‘yeah I can’t relate as much as you think I can.’ And the music swirls and gyrates, people swim through it and come out the other side dry-wet and grinning helplessly, it heats the room, and more time than you think is spent looking at the floor and your feet and the sink in the toilets. Then you’re gone and you hit taxi tyres and fumble wallets and shout at some cat that was meant to be sharing a lift to our neck of the woods. But before you know it you’re shouting out orders for Styrofoam boxes with extra mayo and go easy on the garlic and why would I want salad, swearing for the lack of fizzy tin pop sweet drink, then reaching for the payment in your pocket you’re nine pennies short of, and after incredulity think that although worn out, home is close and the chirp bird dawn chorus don’t get heard by many.

     Stagger past steaming green bins and you crash into dark kitchen space at first light and smash silently up hollow stairs and look into space before closing out that same caffeinated city spectacle scene that now twitches awake while you twitch for sleep, a big fat gypsy nothing of sleep that your soul yearns for until afternoon. But your liver moans, then it groans and turns inside out with self-satisfying disgust. Throwing a window open for cold air to ice lungs and face, unconscious gasps of invisible nature quench stripes of red unease, and you watch an obese sunburnt blue belly hero sort in a panama hat toke a Cuban, while you momentarily remember we’re out of matches, you get Spanish strings and woody acoustic type vibes and sounds and the Samba pulse through thoughts best left for a smoky room full of mahogany and whisky and moustaches singing snooker and the tap’n’echo-click of billiard balls on verde velvet. But that’s a place you haunt too often and discard it from cloudy mindset and lean and teeter from a window, which once held the moon misty and the street-lamp-lit skeleton frame of urban immortality, but now frames a pylon wire web spread to the horizon and a dead-electric black Mercedes-Benz and a newsagents that charges to pay on card. The moon the moon the murky orb hovers the city swells and shivers morning’s unstoppable beckons. This is where we eat ourselves and in doing so recognise our self-destructive hardwiring. But all you know you need is a roll of toilet paper and a lined notebook for the degree you should probably start working towards. But you justify coffee to the list to make it worth your while and squeeze downstairs and into sunlight, vile and deviant and unforgiving like a frowning adult who’s never had a hangover. You rock to and fro and think you’re rocking aviators for the light-pain, but really you look like some sort of televised talent show boy band member dropout with hair to match, and end up crashing on the sofa because the guy on ITV turns out to be a thief and a severe neurotic and you pity him more than you dislike him, and anyway Grand Designs is on plus one in a quarter of an hours time… Dystopia eat your heart out.  

Some Called Him Vincent

They tease only because they like what is true.


That is why you call them friends.

So when, in avocado skies,

With the fragrance of fuchsias, 


And perhaps even focaccia, 


And other salty, honest facts of life,

Droning like blue hummingbirds

And Manuka bees,

You seep through my weak and ailing

Ego, out onto the blotting paper of my conscious mind, 


I shall consider what it is they cherish, 


And come, perhaps, to feel the same.

And do not berate me when I do, 


I tease you only because I like what's true!


But here's a precursory thought or two,

Already noted on bibulous blue...

While I write a bottle’s worth

Of evasive attempts at articulation,

The following transpires:

That I have more in common with Van Gogh

Than most care to know, or notice.

That some called him Vincent.

That all I’ve ever written does not sum me up now,

And that the whereabouts of Brighton really doesn’t matter.

That you are the closest I will ever come

To understanding the stars,

And candidness is more attractive

And captivating

Than anyone cares to admit.

That lousy house parties

Are sometimes better than expected.

And you are braver than me,

And I thank you for it.

That speech is, more often than not,

Inadequate, and

Words seldom do justice

(However hard I battle with them.)

And that self-confessing,

Asymmetrical smiles

Are secretly my favorite kind.

That some songs have a hold on me,

That I could never explain much,

And photographs are not my favorite medium.

That poems are often incredibly hard to write,

And it’s all your fault.

(That you’re forgiven.)

And that even the spectrum

Of browns, golden and dusty,

Azul, virescent and viridescent,

Warm and hazy, igneous-red,

Flushed in sunset,

Curled in blazing amber;

The hue of gloriously tawny,

Shaggy apertures

Of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

Are no match

For the honeyed morning's 

Beams of light

Dancing on your head.

'But how can words express the feel of sunlight in the morning...'

  

Aunties that would

I pace a space of limited freedom.

A space where, when love’s concerned,

We’re rarely in our right mind.

And times eternal lines wash out

Onto white pages in elegant contours of black -

Outlining all it is I cannot say,

Like ink on a body bathed in caramel.

Tonight the roof is open. And enigmatic

Shapes fill the void above our heads;

Incandescent shapes swirling and burning

At night before the eyes of stars,

The stern staring bright shafts of winking white,

And yellow and crystal.

Oh, Pompeian Girl – the old me was young!

Oh, reckless indecision,

Ever evading good sense,

Like shapes in the black;

Light evasive figures of light-lost spaces –

Pinning at hope in the dark.

Oh discontented winter of your youth,

You have been weighed.

You have been found wanting.

You’re going down

And I’m coming with you.

Electricity hurts,

And the Hippie-code is broken.

Placid indifference envelops my heart.

The city reeks of Urban Folk, miscalculation and conceit.

I eat my hand, fingers first,

Contemplating the Epic Cycle,

Like Plato in the shadows of the Beule Gate.

And write drivel

With the neurotic mind of a sonneteer –

Past cure am I now reason is past care.

Still no star-fangled shape of blurry

Minds eye reveals itself.

Still the work is not yet done.

Tilting for months-on-end

Upon the abyss of some nauseating

Overheated, drug-induced-calm-before-the-storm.

I lose my touch,

And touch loose ends

Of quasi-philosophical moments

Of enlightenment, or revelation,

Or some other nonsensical,

Unimportant bullshit,

Like the etymology of

God and good.

Good God, and giddy aunts,

And aunties that would put the sophists

And the pop world, and the upper class,

And parliamentary embarrassment, and

The football score, and grammar, and

Self-induced debt, and man-flu, and

‘off days’, and awkward dates, and

Broken phones, and insufferable library fellows, and

Hangovers, and the middle class, and first world problems,

And second world problems, and no signal,

And problems with the ex, and

The wrong coloured flowers,

And the fickle whims of fussy eaters, -

The repulsion of grown men at the sight of blood,

Or a reasonably dirty kitchen surface;

A broken string, a bad day, a long week,

A bad long week, a weekend cut short,

A short changing, the wrong sized internet-delivery,

The trivial pursuit of ancient notions of justice,

And early mornings, and morning sickness,

And the evasive nature of

Soul-mates and talent and happiness,

And fucking myxomatosis,

And dissertation proposals

And dissertations, and deadlines and pay-cheques,

And checkups;

Anything that is not fighting for your life

Or for those you love…

…Aunties that put all this to shame.

She is strong.

She eats Odysseus for breakfast,

With his affable, sneering, divine assistance.

Lighten her load if you can.

My helpless heart and I are here all week.

And my velvet tongue will inflame

And be an irritant.

My unconscious will tell me that you scoff,

Though you don’t,

I know you don’t.

Yet doubt and delusion will prevail,

And I find myself

Pacing a space of limited freedom,

Crowded by celestial forms, looming deadlines

And unfinished sentences that... 

Un-poem ( for D )

I ache somewhere I cannot touch

And long for something other –

Something I cannot feel or fathom,

For it has not been invented yet.

I will nurse this aching, this longing,

This yearning, though I know not what it is,

And then I will pioneer it, build it,

Shout it from the very mountains I’ve created –

I do not boast, or gloat.

This is not arrogance – just the facts.

Someone once hit the nail on the head, you see,

Suggesting “A quiet confidence.”

I will rise in the same breath others see as my downfall,

And in rising, others will foresee my plight.

A hard fall – fool-hardy descent I’m sure,

Whatever that means.

I notice that others are embarrassed about their strengths,

And I struggle to see anything but the same.

And if it weren’t for a tingling in my bones –

And the strength in my inky voice

Which, whether or not triumphant,

Gets me where I wish to go,

and gives me warmth,

And a comfort otherwise unknown.

I hope you feel this too,

For there is no space for elitism -

Stirrups and dishtowels are all the same to me.

I hijack races,

I do not boycott them,

Whilst waiting for your approving word.

You are me, but with a song to sing,

And at better odds with the world.

There’s no faster way to send a message than through song,

And you’re delivering the post -

Whether it be in how you deliver,

Or in what you enclose,

It will be with grace

And artfully,

And with authority.

So do not tire.

In the gentle hours you return.

Concentration is lost,

And as you enter I realise I cannot write,

And that you’re too big for the paper in front of me.

I dream of bones, and what you mean,

And what you mean to create.

I pretend to understand,

And wish I did,

And wish a myriad of other possibilities

Embodied by you.

Potential is something you have come to know,

Whilst for most it remains aloof,

And at the top of stairwells yet discovered.

Remember this.

Treasure this.

Utilise this.

If only for my sake?

Believe it or not,

You pass through my mind

Whenever I sit down to write.

Do not go ego-tripping –

I know you wont.

But know that I know that you know you have the confidence to succeed –

However Ehrmannian (it’s a word now) this might sound.

I’m sorry we have not been in touch

As much as we should –

Clichéd perhaps,

But true.

Come visit.

Yours, as ever…

Philosophie.

Pulling long strands of your lemon grass hair from my clothes,

I consider, as I watch them fall to the ground one by one,

Should I let you go as easily?

Coffee stains, you see my Darling, are not so easy to remove.

And amber stones infect my heart with rapidity.

I stole an esoteric kiss from red, enraptured, trembling lips,

While eyes deep and wide enough to drown in shot me through the chest,

And fingertips

Traced my limbs

Through candle-lit smoke rings.

And achingly beautiful birthmarks, scars and loveable idiosyncrasies

Swirl around my mind, awash with whisky,

And Puccini,

And suicidal Butterflies.

A dangerous, heady, Olive-green elixir.

An ethereal melee perpetuating unrest,

And thoughts of when I'll be seeing you next...

And other nervous questions,

Like where can you get a good night sleep round here?  

‘Reverse Cowgirl & Thinking of Death’

You grip my throat sporadically, erratically – not often.

And trickle in through passages and pores I can’t defend.

Treacle through fingers.

But you avoid me too, and I hate it just as much.

I wait for your hand to loosen,

I breathe cool air,

Then I feel your absence.

Your gloopy venom is addictive.

I tasted you once, and now my tongue yearns,

And eats itself –

It flickers and twists and spits its serpentine-self out. In vain.

A vague, dull shadowy lustre remains,

Undulating under baited breath,

For another foul injection.

In reality I fear you. I despise you. I hate you.

If you’d only never return,

I could spit you out forever,

And tongue sweeter, healthier, more benign stuff.

No more swilling,

No more idiosyncratic sways upon social norms,

High Society and empty smiles that stifle natural intentions.

You are a disease, and far from untreated.

You are the last drag, the last hit,

The very last dose that no one actually wants.

I rebuke myself wholeheartedly 
At even entertaining the idea of having you in my company. Yet there you are –

In every message, in every ransacked draw,

In every turned out rucksack, every old coat pocket,

Every dirty shirt, every unstitched button,

In every visitor’s news, every car back-seat,

Every dusty notebook, every empty fruit-bowl,

Every old, long-unseen smile, every dowsed fire,

Every man woman and child I sit across the table from.

There you are. Somehow. In some form.

Turning my sweat cold like cheap wine,

In what is otherwise an already disturbingly depressing

Struggle to maintain some kind of equilibrium or serenity,

Let alone with your smug mug cropping up scornfully uninvited.

You seduce me before I recognise you.

Helping yourself to the food on my plate with a wink,

While I do nothing as if handcuffed, and chained at the soul.

Then I move to eat.

Hand to fork.

Fork to mouth. 

And it tastes of you.

It reeks of you.

And if I were anything but human,

I’d spit you out onto the kitchen floor,

Stamp on the bile you’ve stolen from me,

Burn you with kerosene,

And wage a third world war on the very concept of you ever existing.

But I am a human.

And moments later you have me

‘reverse cowgirl and thinking of death’

As coy and Marvellian as you like.

I indulge in full-knowing paralysis,

Lapping up your unvanquished honeyed venom,

With a voraciousness that redefines Lovesick –

Giving it a whole new meaning

Going beyond the epitome of disgust.

Enslaved, you have me smash myself against the ceiling.

And eat myself over again from within.

Consuming me like the fire I found you in.

You have me rage and conspire against those I don’t know.

But I will conspire against you one-day.

You have me hate others, but I will forever hate you.

You have me search my soul and grate it upon street corners

And the pavement of city-centres,

While you gleefully, whimsically prod my past

Or polish vain, rose-tinted hopes that without you

I’d know were futile and unjust –

Until I ruin them myself, knowing all the while

That you are the author of my unnecessary devastations.

But I will smash your green demonic skull into obsolescence

In some back-alley where none will find your

Bubbling frothing corpse.

You will be utterly repudiated even by the rats.

And the flies will drop you,

Iota

By

Iota,

Onto the tracks at Dalston to be rendered into absolute oblivion.

And I will go, a man unshackled, about my business –

Whether it be of importance or not,

It will be with a conscience cleansed.

But for now, vile sham of an emotion that you are,

I do your inglorious bidding.

Zombified and putrid, my actions smell of you.

They reek of you.

You intoxicate what should be left alone

And endured with silence and rapidity.

Yet you elongate these private, personal trails torturously,

In some sensational Cold War.

It goes without saying,

The world would be well rid of you.

Yet godlike, you endure the ages

Just as we endure you.

Perhaps Keats was too afraid to admit it –

You are the original

La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Pluto’s daughter in persistent disguise.

To be seen presently

‘reverse cowgirl and thinking of death’.