Our bodies are made from the lands and the places we come from.
Scratching at the surface, clawing at concrete, washing the glass, trying to find the cosmos beneath
The secrets might be found in the ingredients of noodle packets or in a near death experience who knows
Hospital letters are the only declarations of love and attention these days
Remembering that meeting of the poets and my near drowning at midnight at the sphinxes and obelisk when the two goddesses pulled me up out of the current of the cold slimy Thames. I really thought the depths had taken me for a moment…
The Fleet under Fleet Street meanwhile is just fleeting ghosts of the old media tide, flotsam and jetsam washed away by the digital currents, where go those drowned men now…
I remember sitting in the café in the park, the one the council closed recently, listening to the thud of tennis balls, watching the falling of leaves, enjoying a walls ice cream in the autumn sun, a leaflet about cancer and your sex life left on the table, an incoming text off a too absent friend and the thought that NUFC beat PSG still lingering in my head, oh how my dreams become the times
Getting up and walking on I see new glamorous murals on the sides of shop walls already obscured by stinking piles of ripped bin bags.
Whoever controls our future is going to have a field day with our pasts
Confidential Data Destruction
Daily Black Bag Collection
What happened to all the graffiti on the walls
Where did the old fly postings go
Why are things so anodyne now
When the corruption runs so deep
Where are the old mavericks
A memory. This is just where I am now I kind of recognise the fact I don’t understand my moods and can’t control my emotions but that’s alright the night lights are so bright that no body notices at all in fact everyone here is running on wayward impulses and underlying psychosis and if I presented some good straight behavioural acting it would look so odd and out of place in itself
I had no feelings but gratuitous need no values but gagging greed the blinding light in my eye the thought of my hand on her thigh that third bottle of red wine the never ending line my soul was gone to the night and it was savage beautiful and mine. The thing about the night is there is no room for noise in your head the noise is all around and I’m lost in my mind, thinking about the different styles I’ve lived through in my life, the way my time was spent in all the places I used to frequent. I did everything wrong. I am flush with regrets. I would do it all over again. I wish I was somewhere mispent with you right now
This body is city and concrete its electrics and its toxin, the glass citadel, the metal shopping trolleys, those unclaimed penthouses, this rusting bus shelter, all the sleek shops and every overworked service centre that props up the nation, these unloved places and misbegotten lands, these are my soul my ills my health my dreams.
I watch the pigeons as they watch me, I see the rats and the foxes too, I’m up to my elbows in your grease, you whisper your smears, I clear away your lies. People love seeing pain and failure, they don’t want to see people winning, what they want to do is watch idiots like me and go ‘I’m having a really bad day but he’s having a worse one’ I’m on the ragged arse end of your cruel hurting bones sure enough.
I watch the pigeons as they watch me, I see the rats and the foxes too, I’m up to my elbows in your grease, you whisper your smears, I clear away your lies. People love seeing pain and failure, they don’t want to see people winning, what they want to do is watch idiots like me and go ‘I’m having a really bad day but he’s having a worse one’ I’m on the ragged arse end of your cruel hurting bones sure enough.
The city is still a dream to me, every street a miracle. I spend so much time in café’s a trembling mess of catgut string nerve, of bovine spine spit sawdust, a subjugated alien, an ageing weirdo. We are what we are, we can be good or bad and make corresponding impressions or get lucky and make an impression out of character that we may deserve or not, an impact a splash a great kerfuffle.
Or we may make no impression at all, forever just negligible skin bones heart soul, always mindful of the fragile mind, knowing every gesture, every action, will never affect someone somewhere. Obscurity is good. I want to just make peace between the past and the future, me and time have been at war for so long, the culture obliterated from my song. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…
We are all of us living with regrets, facing the consequences of our actions. There are dreams we still can’t get over and yet here we are. Gross sabotage attention deficit and split personality disorder. Salaries corruption addiction and concerns over personal styles our only means of expressing ourselves, of proving we’re still alive. For sure, for sure, for sure.
It’s better they say to burn out than fade away. We all know it doesn’t work out like that. Most of us hang on grimly as defeat after defeat, loss after loss, chips away at the very essence of us. The lucky adapt the sensitive are wracked. We lose ourselves in records and films, keep notebooks and make plans of escape, exit strategies shine like telluric lines of mystery in our minds. I am not so golden.
I still believe in the notion of love as a positive force. Soon enough though we will have to go out searching for water. We will fight for food to trade for love. All humanity will pray to a discerning god above that we might return to the days of Lawrence Corner and Sex and just dressing up for each other. We invent new atomic bombs instead though; we are just a bit too clever for our own fucking good.
Spa day for the jellyfish mind. My thoughts have burned on empty lately. I have the nagging sense that I am some kind of subjugated alien, a notional humanist detached from the world set in front of me. I order another coffee. Do I really care at all? Traces of explosives found at sites of gas works and all through the night I feel for life and death in this new world that is not of my own making.
We sit on plastic bin bags scrolling on our phones as stray dogs scratch in the poison dust wondering all the time what happened to our heart, the integrity of our being, now a dying spirit is blowing down the crumbling boulevard. Wayne Shorter is Dead make of that what you will, Race crossing gender blurring sexuality where can we go? what can it be? what does it take to set a hurt feeling free?
I look at humanity and I scream inside. I know there is nothing I can do the way this world is going. I know that my phone distracts me too much. I can’t do the things others do, I’m just not you, no better or worse, neither straight or more perverse, convention slowly creeps up, but the older I get I realise more and more I’m just not you, I feel secure in knowing I never will be. I don’t want to be you.
This body is city and concrete its electrics and its toxin, the glass citadel, the metal shopping trolleys, those unclaimed penthouses, this rusting bus shelter, all the sleek shops and every overworked service centre that props up the nation, these unloved places and misbegotten lands, these are my soul my ills my health my dreams.
Our bodies are made from the lands and the places we come from.