For Emergencies Only

Listening to White Chalk (though not really)

Raceways

Jumping gaps, my view of the world has split,
a rarefied relief at empty, blackened thoughts
that I see dissolved to nothing.

Fear of failure in here, bigger than the actual risk,
captures systolic rhythm and releases it.
Open hands that concealed only air to air.

Exiling the failure, no more than undigested things,
two Lattes, two tablets taken close together,
make all things rational and real.

So Much SMOG!

The onomatopoeia of the aforementioned terpsichorean modelessness, must necessarily lead to historical and wide-ranging failure when compared to the overtly passive professorial readings of experimentation which, possessing similar intentions, could be described in terms of the logical positivism that we all aspire to. This nocturnal indecisiveness (obliquely referenced by many commentators) can almost certainly be described as anti-intellectual or possibly post-intellectual - even futuristic - when polysyllabic imagery is taken fully into account, while hirsute bovine criticism calls us to the archaeological excavations that occur biannually. Poetic readings of the aforementioned documentation are unbecoming to post-European houses that were exploded and scattered during the last war, where they coalesced into a pre-formed Diaspora and consequently became a psuedanonymous indicator of literary mightiness and musical ultra-education in the homogenous condensation in addition to the coincidental referencing utilised in certain extraneous divisions of the modernistic version of Charlemagne's philosophical discussions.

Holy Cow - I Wrote A Villanelle

Meadowsweet

Beware the Seely Court are out tonight,
With Fairy Glamour and with Meadowsweet,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

In dark they see by their own pretty light,
The villagers whose flesh makes fairy treat,
For all the Seely Court are out tonight.

So here they steal their human lovers’ sight,
And with them all-but-blind, lie down to eat,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

With heads thrown back in sated, cruel delight,
And black maws wide with raw and ragged meat,
All of the Seely court are out tonight.

Out for revolt in mornings seeming bright,
We find them dead and smiling to retreat,
From bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

We bear them gleefully as is our rite,
To bury them with fresh-cut Meadowsweet,
And know the Seely Court are out tonight,
In bloody restlessness of dull moonlight.

On Topical Posting

Well topical in one respect anyway.

To start - Something interesting from the giant that is Paxman.

All this and much Poliakoff as well. My DG - with all this drama you are really spoiling us. Joe's Palace was as good as TV drama can possibly get - rich, inventive, unpredictable, rooted in the real world and yet with a spiritual depth, all conveyed in simple dialogue and perfectly-framed camera work. On saturday there is a pivotal monologue (dialogue with both parts read by one actress - Ruth Wilson) which appears to be the link between Joe's Palace and the next Poliakoff piece - Capturing Mary.

Office Block Persecution Affinity



I do so much want to join the above organisation but I suppose it doesn’t really exist does it. It is simple walk-through ethnography and all that sound of buildings coming down amongst us might just give us permanent tinnitus. It will of course open up the sky but then again no one actually bothers to look at the sky these days. Well these guys do and I have joined them – and bought the book – and started a special folder called “clouds” in my photo directory – and learned to love the rain. I return of course to thoughts of hanging upside down on the railings of the bridge across the common where we used to live, looking at the clouds and imagining them as islands in the pacific. I thought maybe I was a pilot on my way towards Japan. Which reminds me that General Tibbets has just died.

And then this in turn leads me to the following set of pictures (which you may wish to avoid should you be of a delicate constitution – The “Tubed Pedicle” picture gave me a twinge of squeam, which is unusual - you know who you are.)

Click here if you feel up to it.

Friday Randomness

On a rooftop in this city, an early hour, watching the flickering lights down below, the bridges and remaining tall buildings – you become a memory, silhouetted, leaning against the fence, trying to be cool and attractive in your black clothes and handmade shoes. I hear the Cathedral bells and wonder why they ring at this time. Maybe being here is something special and this feeling makes our gods happy, like being in that express lift, going up to the eighth floor for more views and more posing. And all these pictures in my head just can’t be teased out into photographs to keep for ever. All we want is to remember this without having it forced through glass and electronics into some distilled little box of bits on some dusty disk somewhere.

We dart like fluid otters, over the rafters, above the ceilings of the run-down flats, dodging the occasional ambiguous bullet that pin-pointed a love-affair of some sort. And looking down, they are together, entwined in some aquatic, zero-gravity embrace, one arm each around the other, one arm each relaxed and weighted towards the floor, the gun still in one hand, maybe smoking, maybe dripping to lovingly applied oil to the floor. I see the cloth it came from, still on the table, above the open drawer. And the firearms licence .. and more ammunition, falling from it’s box, rolling to the floor, coming together with the oil, to make a sculpture for all of us. We pass on with time, still flowing over the dusty obstacles that hide in these unknown spaces, lit only by gaps between wood or through broken tiles. Up to eighth floor, through the heavy door onto blank concrete, narrowly fenced with brick to take us close to the drop that would obviously kill us should we want it to.

I am back on that high bridge, resisting the pull of the drop to the mud below but drawn to the view of so many houses and so much detail spread out below me. All those lives in those places, shouting and loving and laughing in so many combinations. And just me up here to see it. The city sounds mash together into some sort of deep white noise, the sound of traffic and trees in the wind, ice cracking, the noise of birds. I remember this from years ago, when I was so small and the city seemed so big. And then I moved out of town, out to the silent countryside and yet still there was that white noise, the echo of creation, and English deity, the green man making the fields and hedges from nothing, crying with most of us at the ending of the giant southern woods and the burning of the northern forests. And here is the fog again, covering up this new city and the trees the same, leading us into not knowing where up and down are, taking away our balance and dragging us over the edge to a bitter descent to that layer of dust breeding in the alley-ways below. There is dust everywhere, spreading and mutating into something living and intelligent, something that will take us all over. Dirt and dust will do for us – will have us buried like the ash-corpses of a modern Pompeii, lost until some playing child of another species finds a calcified finger pointing the way to safety to the rest of the human race dead and rigid behind and below.