Doubles and Trebles

Amber lit and lost at 2am.
I came here and lived a poem,
Of deep stirred river water and
Foggy air, that slid beneath my layers,
On this liquid Liverpool night.
Yet beauty wrote itself,
She walked beside me,
Beyond alive with feeling,
Married to the stonework and
Questions written high on walls,
Our year's potential deep in
Our gloved pockets as the
Best of apples and snakes
Clamoured in our ears.
I fear for my photographs
but not for my memories.
Our eyes drew the visions in,
considering the full picture,
Noticing the yellow of the lambanana,
is still with us in the fries and cheese.
An absence of guilt and a public
order charge to go, as life
affirming as the silences
between us,
Strawberry pink and dark,
Singing as loud as we could,
in this sad determined world.

Cpc 2010

Strike One.

I saw a cold, frightened,
Old looking man today,
As I crossed the road.
I didn't recognize him.
His clothes seemed shabby,
Although it wasn't helping that
He didn't carry his-self well.
He half ran towards me
Across the wide street,
Apologetic almost at the
Too fast cars.
Everything about him
Seemed on the run.
He was drowning in the
Icy downpour, having lost his
Umbrella, or was it laid in
His silent flat, waiting for him.
I only knew this because
I suddenly realized, it was
My reflection in a plate glass window.

Cpc

Morning Pages

Adam smiled, as he came in the kitchen. " Have you ever looked at the reflection of the water and watched the poop come out of you?".

Mel turned from the stove and gave him a withered look, "Why can't you just be normal?". She said the words under her breath quietly, meaning Adam missed them.

She loved her son but sometimes he could be so tiring. She wondered if every parent felt this way from time to time and if she was particularly callous, since it seemed to be something of a continual thought as far Adam was concerned. His rhetorical thoughts only ever had a discursive half life of a second and oblivious he sat down at the table, checking his i.phone for messages and texting friends in return.

Mel levered a fried egg and bread from the spluttering pan, onto a plate and in one move slid it across to him. "I see your hangovers gone, so what are you doing today about finding some work". She saw the upward rising of his eyes as she spoke, his signature expression of discontent and then waited as he sighed and shuffled in his seat.

She knew the question would push them both towards battle ground, where he would wield his defence in the form of a band, who as far as she could tell, spent more time smoking spliff than they did making music. She on the other hand would cite the fresh batch of utility bills, fanning out across the table, inches from his breakfast.

He surfaced from the cyberworld and addressed the food, skewering the egg with his fork. He hated the loose thread his joblessness presented, enabling people to pull at it, unravelling the cosy cloak of immaturity he wrapped around himself to keep out the cold realities.

A twinkle came back into his eyes and he smiled. "No" said Mel " you're not going to try and charm me the way your father used to. We need money, and you need to show me i've brought up someone who is more than just clever and feckless."

She grabbed the local newspaper off the fridge, folded it in two on the employment page and calmly laid it in front of him. He saw her biro ring around one of the ads.

Forewarned

The TV tells us; "minus nine"
Our gothic pile the coldest place.
The radio repeats the line,
T'will sting the ears and pinch the face.

I wrap her car in cloth and foil,
Rebuff the frost to ease the start.
Lucky too; I changed the oil,
It's how I should protect my heart.

And yet 'the friend' won't run or leave,
Forewarned, will only feel what's right.
Loving, as I slowly freeze,
The brightest star in the darkest night.

c:PC

Wasp in the Window

Six postings in, and invariably the "elephant in the blog" shifts its weight to another foot, crushing you against the wall, and you feel some vague explanation of the title at the top of the page is due a mention.

Wasp in the Window, was the winner, because of twenty extraordinary minutes in Mid Fall 2009, when circumstances came together to freeze time, space and clarity of thought into some Einsteinium serendipity that comes under the banner-name, of my eventual autobiography title; 'You had to be there'.

It could have so easily been called 'Cow on a Motorbike' or 'Ground Squirrel by Canadian Lake' after two stunning photographs that appeared on the Net this year, that both encapsulated the running metaphor for my human view of what I can only term the Ultra-natural, which is the antithesis of "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist, right?"

Indeed it could have been any photographed pet or wild or Zoo animal staring down a camera lens, in blank incomprehension of what is going on, or of the world that their image is transported to, a world where they operate only within their own wondrous lines of feeling and function, but a world where they don't know about Australia, or of Martin Luther King, or that I have a strawberry jelly setting in my fridge right now, all the million myriad things I know, because I am a Human.

Yet in the vast mind numbing calculus of the Universe, I am but a Chihuahua forced to be pictured wearing a dolly's dress at a kid's party in a Mexican Suburb. I can claim to know what I know, but like the eponymous wasp, bumping against a window pane, there is a sheet of the same incomprehension that may well let the light in of where I want to go, but that's where my brains ability to understand, or get through it, ends.

Wasps rank the highest on my respect-to-size ratiometer, not least that I tend to swell up alarmingly when stung by them. Tragically too, a pal from the village I was born in, when he grew up, died on that most ignoble of lists; that of folk who at a garden party chug a drink into which one of the hapless striped jacketed fiends has fallen, and being stung on the tongue, chokes to death amongst the sunny chatter of floral dresses and paper plates.

My own last involvement was at a Blenheim Palace Horse Trials, when in a sudden rainstorm a wet, and far from nest, wasp headed up, and tangled in, the sleeve of my Belstaff coat and jabbed me, and I have never been so glad to see a St John's Ambulance tent in my life.

So all this background brings me to my best "Wasp in the Window" moment that I trailed at the start of this post:
4pm Saturday 19th October. I was due downtown at an "all day" Music Event, a five mile bus ride through the suburbs from my home. I figured I'd eat later, in between the shows, but before setting off I ironed out my creases by downing a bottle of Poachers Ale, the dark licorice taste setting me at one with the world.
Unusually, the single deck lo-rider bus was empty when I boarded it. Empty of passengers maybe, but when I sat down midway along the left hand side, I found myself right next to a wasp in the window, airborne in that Harrier jump-jet like way they have, calmly working all its senses overtime.

Immediately aware that Vespula vulgaris and myself had history, I stood up with a "whoah" and decamped to a few seats back on the right-hand side of the bus, spreading myself across the bench with my back almost against the window so that I had a clear 180 degree view of everything the critter was up to. Relaxing, I waited for the next person to board and watch the results.

Extraordinarily no one did, the entire journey, and the driver took every opportunity of this freedom to speed up and hurtle and undulate towards the city. At this point, everything appeared to polarize; my blood swimming with beer, the houses and Syringa bushes of the northern suburbs a blur of redbrick and green, and the interior of the bus appearing vast with the tiny being of the wasp leaving the window to hover quite stationary in the aisle.

The bizarreness of the whole cosmos seemed to now come down to just me and the wasp, as if we were both transfixed and rushing through our own Deep Space, which on a wider scale I mused, we were; on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in an expanding universe, and yet, the wasp, poised in the air, still as it was, didn't even realise it was really travelling at 35 mph in a street, or even at 17,000 miles a second on a yearly orbit.

The end came sweetly. Above each large pane of glass on the bus, was a smaller, long thin strip, that hinged inwards on its base. At each end of the openings, to deflect the airflow from the passengers, were triangular sections of metal, so the chances of the wasp ever making it down to the opening and out, without being swept back into the bus were next to none. Amazingly though, on the fifth attempt butting the window strip and feeling that the coolness of the outside was at that point, it arced perfectly into the one place of dead air in the gap, and was gone... liberated, miles from wherever its nest was, but free to do whatever wasps do with their time. Spontaneous applause from me, and a quizzical look in the mirror from the driver, unaware of the philosophical drama that had been played out behind him. So now you know. Its simply not knowing.

The slow death of Billy Dancing

Hooked to the pulses,
Billy felt it too,
Right as rain, he showed it
To the margin of fainter faces.
With unfailing feet he
Wooed and married flight.
All by his-self, don't laugh,
It's Billy Dancing.

Sweat, light as watch-oil,
Welling beneath the hairline,
Arcing over temples,
Swims towards the bass-line.
To see it was the breath of imagination,
A volume of desires in
Animate sweeping curves.
Its what he thinks, don't laugh,
It's Billy Dancing.

And for one fine moment
He was on the edge,
The final limit, and more than
Ever now
It was a slow death,
When age and appearance
Would determine how they thought
And wait for him to stumble
As a drunk.

Don't be fooled, here under the cutical moon,
Drowsey as an autumn wasp,
Twenty and eleven years has
Made a bigger soul.
Raw and unwitting it should never end.
He flirts as well as the young
Girl with him,
Still in him-self, don't laugh,
It's Billy Dancing.

c87

You can't take it with you.

Last thing at night I keep a day-to-date diary. A simple, pretty boring to read account, partly kept up; as i don't want to break a several decades old chain, and partly, for a too long to explain here reason, for alibis.

For a long time before computers, I also kept numerous journals on the go, Moleskines. Some still live in boxes in the attic, a couple though, important ones, that had been on many of my early travels, were mislaid and lost to me, many moons ago, in a West country town when I was backpacking some Cornish coastal paths. And although it may not be a big deal in the large scheme of things, as the saying goes, I think I know what Mr. Irwin felt when he pulled that stingray's barb from his heart.

But the past is just that, right? Yes, it's alive and no, it's dead. Sometimes it still does bother me where they might have ended up. Maybe a bunch of 20 something's howled with laughter and Stellas around some fire on a beach, taking turns to read and clown parts of one of the books. Or maybe some stable hand puzzled over starfish sketches I did of African cities at night from a plane descending into Mombassa. Perhaps some suicidal schoolgirl cutting class curled up on a bed, forgotten and alone, reading about that time on that bunk in Inverness when I wasn't feeling so hot. And maybe a word or line will save her at least till dinner.

But who am I kidding? They probably met a quick and quiet dispatch at the bottom of some dumpster, noticed as much, as a fish does a bicycle thrown into a river.

So maybe I subconsciously created this blog so I could communicate with those someone else's, so I can write these posts, which will likely be viewed as much as what those books were recycled into – maybe pencils to write more pencil material. A rolling space, kept, not so much for display but to feel in touch with people, the tribe so to speak, kind of like the ham radio set that Mark’s parents in the film, “Pump Up The Volume” give him to talk with his friends back East though he discovers he can’t reach them so he does this pirate radio broadcast to no one and nowhere special every night from his basement. I remember being taken with the idea, it’s kind of a cool thought to broadcast whatever you want, whenever you want however you wish, to no one or anyone wherever they may be. Or like setting a net down somewhere in a stream where fish, or something, can swim through.

I never kept a log as such back then – just a private journal and always with me in wind and rain, writing in cars, buses, planes, trains, kitchens, trolleys, gardens, lawns, tents, standing and sitting, restaurants and cafes, street corners, barber shops, malls, escalators and stairs and elevators, parks, beaches, boats, theatres, schools – the various books carried and represented every place that I'd been, seen, every thought and feeling I've felt and person I've known in those years even if not captured, a record of those years careening like a rickshaw through a Delhi night – a symbol of the moments, not of what anything could've been but just what it was, paper outside the head, of all that did happen, to ground you in times when you questioned whether all the faces, the pursuits, place and encounters and occurrences were true.

That they all must have meant something (and connected to something) but you never quite figured it out, right? And not that you ever really open the books these days, but that simply their presence holds a hope and reassurance that, yes, it all really did happen and that perhaps they gave the appearance of raw material that could someday in someway give or hint at the answer, an answer, the one people whether they know it or not are always trying to find ( if indeed there is one ) as to what it’s all about. Or in the least something for that girl curled up on that bed… To give that feeling like, okay, it’s all here and sure the journal, blog, and whatnot are going back into the river but at least what you now have is something that makes that all not seem to matter too much, at least now.

So I'm convincing myself that it is really all inside of me. Perhaps the journal pulls at that part of you that needs to get it out and perhaps the blog pulls at that part of you to write while knowing that, gosh, theoretically, any one could pop in at anytime though maybe no one, like my lost journals – so perhaps it’s all ultimately really in the doing.

Back to the beach boys, the stable hand, and the forgotten girl – I'd like to believe that the journals could have helped or bettered someone, but it was my life really – gone, and here again – I see what matters, what remains, and that you can't take it with you.