words, mere words

There was one moist gargle The drum of finger and thumb The vengeful hiss of fire And the flickering light was gone.

[enulcy]

So Damn Proud

I went and I read all those books, with their tightly-woven symbols and profound themes, and I wrote what I thought about all those books, and they gave me a certificate (off-white, like when you soak paper in tea, to make it old-timey). And my daddy would be so damn proud with every breath in his lungs, if he had breath in his lungs to be so damn proud with. I went and I sent letters and letters and letters to important people, to let them know that, I, too, was important and one of the important people read my letter and must have thought 'yes yes he is important' because they gave me a desk and a computer and things to do every day. And my mummy thinks I'm important too and you better know she's so damn proud: I'm the youngest, she's got experience in being so damn proud now. I went and paid money to go in a building, with lots of shiny machines and heavy things, where I make sure my young body isn't being wasted and I bought leafy things and vegetables and good hearty chunks of animal flesh and (apart from the weekends when I drink beer and smoke cigarettes) I kept myself healthy. And all of my friends must be so damn proud to know that I can keep so healthy, so damn proud when they've known me all this time. I went and I sat on a bus and I read, and I did my job, and I worked out, and I ate fruit, and I even read on the bus home too, and when I got home I wrote and I must have exercised nearly every facility of my body in one day and I really made good use of my time. And really I should be so damn proud but instead there's more a feeling of just knowing that, no matter what, I'll never be so damn proud, (not of myself, at least) a feeling of there just being nothing to feel.

[enulcy]

Letter (Confessional)

I don’t sleep well because I haven’t yet bought curtains. The night seeps into my bedroom. I have strange dreams. I have little idea what to make of them. I fall in love eight times or more a day. At home, I sit and read Infinite Jest. I listen to the Archers when I cook. I don’t find it interesting but listen anyway. I have too big a family, too many friends, to miss them all properly. I feel guilty about this occasionally. Sometimes, I remember that it’s been eighteen months since my father died. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels more like he was never alive or never died. This all depends on my mood. When I travel through London, I take long and complicated routes. I like to avoid the Northern Line. This narrows down my chances of running into you from virtually impossible to actually impossible. On trains, I listen to Tyler, the Creator and Jeff Buckley. I listen to Radiohead and I feel strange. The wood in my guitar grows stiff from the cold. The tips of my fingers are soft now. I think I should pick it up again. I could play Divine Intervention and sing softly and badly to myself. I don’t feel existential. I am not unhappy. I am. I just am.

[enulcy]

Song to Myself (I Love You But You're Freaking Me Out)

There will be time, there will be time, for all these walls and figures, metaphors and allegories, to flee you and leave you exposed; a naked body that sees only itself and knows only what it is; the realisation that the cracks are not in the shiny screen, but in the old film reel that winds around the heart of your projector body; the knowledge that a vagrant madman has taken over your flesh and lived a thousand lives and scattered it full of the debris of a thousand lives and that now you must take it back from yourself and clear it out. And I lay and wept, the sound of silver poured in my head, I was scared and alone and I didn't want to go home.

[enulcy]

Taurus

Fuck your horoscopes. Taunting white scleras, translucent on black eyeshadow. Pale shine in a mirror, darkly telling of the death of an embryo. A blastocyst. A mere bubble that floats, bursting in the air, before it even alights anywhere solid. Has it occured to Orion that he is an accident? Just vacuous, tired primates; weary of a lack of knowledge; pointing, grunting, imbuing gods. Did it occur to the Great Bear that he could as easily be two men with their heads stuck in a canoe? Stars will compel nobody to action. Kalopsia- infected thoughts will not stir Ozymandias from his desert. Nothing shall compel me to action.

[enulcy]

Cathedral

For my father, a year on. In a city, there was a cathedral. Everyone bustled into it, and out of it and in the days they when it was sunny they looked up at with awe and in the rain, they sheltered inside. They used its halls for their worship and their games and their weddings and their funerals and their lives. They almost forgot how tall, how majestic the old cathedral was, as they lived their lives in the bronzed bricks of the city around. A year ago, the cathedral was closed down. And although there were no more services, the citypeople still looked at its dusted remains and felt happy to remember the days the cathedral had served, standing proud at the heart of their land. Drinking a coffee outside, I saw the cathedral loom over the horizon, casting shadows over those milling about in the lazy afternoon. 'When I am older' I thought 'I hope I shall turn into a cathedral.'

[enulcy]

Portrait

In the shop, I see a man. He comes in most days nown When I was there in the summer, he used to come in the late morning and he would buy a half bottle of wine and ten Silk Cut Reds, each time. I thought about him sometimes. When I was back in the winter, he would come in and say hello, and he would buy a bottle of wine and ten Silk Cut Reds, each time. I thought about him often. Now I see him in the mornings, he buys two bottles of wine and twenty Silk Cut Reds, each time. I cannot shake him from my mind. Perhaps in the summer he shall have stopped coming in all the time. Perhaps I shall not think about him, in the summer, sometimes.

[enulcy]

Night-mist

I feel that night-mist creeping in; on my skin I see it deepening. Maybe I should lie, I think, under one of these streetlights, that seem to stretch down from the sky. If I do, in an hour or so, will I sleep? Will I wake to sunrise, on top of my asphalt bride?

[enulcy]

Dead White Males

I heard you talk, so abrasively, aggressively, about those 'dead white males'; I hope that by the time I die people will have started to think about those who are alive.

[enulcy]

Mother's Day

My bank account ran empty the other day. Dried up completely. I spent my last money on beer, and cards for my mother, on chips and presents as well. I might have been drunk all weekend but nobody can say I'm not a good son.

[enulcy]

Garfield

James Garfield got up one morning and he brushed his teeth (or at least, he might have done I don't know much about the dental practices of the nineteenth century) but he at least splashed water on his face. Having got dressed, he crossed some familiar lawns until a very unfamiliar piece of metal flew past, followed shortly by another which lodged itself in his side. However, that wasn't quite the story I wanted to tell. No, what really got to me (in that way that you can laugh at death when it is so far away; like how babies chuckle to themselves) was that Alexander Bell, inventor of the telephone, made a metal detector to try to find the bullet. So in a room somewhere, a century or so ago, the President of the United States of America, lay in bed while a Scot waved a rudimentary electronic instrument over his body. Oh, but here's the kicker, the real absurd tragedy: Dr. Doctor (here the Wikipedia entry helpfully notes: who was a Doctor of Medicine but whose given name was also 'Doctor') wouldn't let Bell test his entire body and so they never found the damn thing. Man thwarted machine through sheer ignorant fear and President James A. Garfield died. I think when I began there was going to be some point to all this but I seem to have forgotten it. If you can work it out, let me know - or better, tell Beckett ; he could make a great play out of it all.

[enulcy]

One Born Every Minute

On the telly a man with tattoos down his arms looked at his daughter (she had just been born) and said - "I don't want her to go through the things I had to" and it was a nice thought but then again, it made me sad for him. You can go through a lot, as a person, you can really take a beating (if you try) and it's hard to say it because you're not supposed to but if I have a child, I hope they get it bad. You see, you gotta take a beating if you want to be anything more than the skin and blood you were born with.

[enulcy]

Olfactory Thoughts

I read somewhere, or someone said, that your nose connects directly to your limbic system; it's all somehow hooked up, like an IV drip, feeding into your amygdala and hippocampus. So I took a walk down the road and I stood and I breathed in the harsh salt smell, charging in from the east. I felt better.

[enulcy]

San Francisco

In music and words, there once was a way that burned through the night and on to the next day. So play those old songs and read those old poems; go write all those wrongs before the light starts to dim. I can see the photos now. Please say it's San Francisco... I can see where you go to now. Please god, it's San Francisco... From speakers and pens, they once drew a map and the blue of the river flowed to white mountain caps. So dust off that old atlas and look to the east; go hit the road at last and live what you read. I can see where you go to now. Please say it's San Francisco... I see those photos now. Please god, it's San Francisco... I live my life through stories in my TV and my books and last night what I saw is that you're not gone for good.

[enulcy]

The Sea & The Moon

Under a calm and absent circle of moon, the sea rages hopelessly, pulsing, urging, thrusting, pulled so violently by the bright gravity but unable to bring the weight of all its stretches of ocean to bear upon that o so foreign surface. He storms on and she feigns ignorance and in a mere two point eight billion years time the sun will die, leaving no trace that either ever were.

[enulcy]

My Favourite People

My favourite people are the ones whose daddies hit them on the face and mummies passed out in the kitchen or teenage romances left them awake and best friends ran in front of cars or were thrown out on the streets without coats or scarves or hats because having been given so little, having been robbed by the world, they have left only their infinite love to draw on.

[enulcy]

Sierra Nevada

There are certain times when silence is the best way to speak your absolute defiance; there are trees that have stood for millenia and I'm telling you now they never said a goddamn thing.

[enulcy]

Prometheus Spurned

He keeps bringing me fire, and setting alight the things around me and all I can do is throw some water on it, roll over, and get back to sleep.