Thursday, October 11, 2007


Trouble and Famine.

Ntaw Ntae - all those meaningless syllables. I wait in the rain, revelling in the local time which makes me happier when I am outside the things that bring me down. I wish I could write what I hear in this place, the conversations about nothing that mean everything but the language of these people just escapes me and becomes my own internal rambling. They are talking about Tsunamis I think - maybe one of them had relative out there when it happened though do they really know what one is.

This is a place I have been back to so often, just to sit with my single, cooling coffee as the night I always see, drags on around us insomniacs. I would love to think of myself as one of those Nighthawks in the Hopper painting but then again they don't look like they would want to speak much at all and conversation - mine or other people's - is all I want in these hours. It burbles in the background over the sound of all-night radio, though that seems dull, and I think that is because it is taped during the day. I can see the studio lit with the grey of winter or maybe the sun of some tropical place where a company offers bespoke pre-recorded radio shows - any genre - for any time of the day. Maybe someday all radio shows will be made in one place when the monopoly of production overcomes the spontaneity of real radio.

A few hours left until the dawn! These are nice people, truckers waiting for an early sailing, travellers saving money by waiting for the early boat as well. Occasionally an insomniac craving speech and company - but that is me. My sleepiness overcomes me and my head is on the table. In the background, the voices and the music turn to gibberish and then reform as bizarre things in my head. Those strange syllables that might be language or could be just irrelevant. Sometimes I think these sounds are genuinely meaningful but deep down even when asleep, I know that they just pass a local test of having meaning. Scrawl and Rawk! The messed up tails of language are like fruit, like bats and fruit, spilling sweetness over the rain-forest floor and turning the day to something stranger, like a third state of time - there is day and night and the new state that is different to both but never comes between them. It is separate and different and yet still a time. Maybe it is space time, maybe it is real time and let's face it, day and night have meaning on only a few planets in the universe. They mean nothing to the gas between the stars, lit uniformly from surrounding suns.

Fruit and sleep. Correlations of drawn out syllables and stretched words. Nothing between us and space but a few kilometres of air and ozone. I can smell it sometimes, brought down to us and poisonous. That smell at the seaside - that was supposed to be ozone but if ta is then we would all be dead - it is rotting seaweed and decomposing gulls, taken out with old age - more victims of time and plague. The world does not seem real though I think I am awake now, where the beauty of the lights on the rain has given way to the syrupy feeling of the early-risers moving through their tasks - picking up the just-delivered bundles of papers, opening the shutters on the cafes either side of this one that cannot cut it through the night. I must leave. I must leave. I would sing sometimes on my way home, the last ear-worm from the radio , but now my head makes up its own sounds, the echoes of my dreams mixed up with the gentle indoor sounds, create a permanent buzz for the first few hours of the day, tinnitus that fades as the nerve memory of those night sounds leaches away into the atmosphere.

I am home and almost silent, despairing because this room is light, grey light, and I want it to be night-lit, subtle greyness mixed with the promise of happy colour from outside, defined yet hiding things with silhouette and edges. Indoor TV studio light. You can always tell the studio from the real but perhaps that is just the type of medium they record it on. We have left those strange ntaw ntae sounds and started up the accelerating sounds of daytime, the urgent rhythm that is supposed to mean so much. Trouble and famine is so untrue. Ask for anyone.

Sunday, October 07, 2007


Kate Light



A visit to a relative this weekend has provided this sketch by my Great-grandmother which we think is a self-portrait from about 1890-1900.

Friday, October 05, 2007


Scaremongering

Listening to : You Can Do Nothing Wrong (In My Eyes) by The Scaremongers




The cover of their CD is a painting which is based on a photograph of Ian and Deborah Curtis though Ian has been removed and the background is taken from another photo of only Ian.

On Missing National Poetry Day

I am an oil tanker,
On fire and sinking,
In the sea,
Burning, sinking,
With all the dreams,
And left alone,
By crew abandoning,
And floating home,
To keep the oil price stable,
High for profit,
Sunk by proxy,
Business wrecked,
To keep some afloat,
And restless,
for a billion more.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007


The Dread, Municipal

The summer ends in static,
called to judgement
by the shorter days of weather,
clouds that sink to us,
to bring the skies to our place,
fog and chill in endless time,
sketches of the wild, black-coated things,
that are our generations,
flowing to oblivion,
and wished-for history,
class wars in the shrubbery,
the ambience of mild things and songs,
which flow from travelling gods,
bringing our divinity to mundane houses,
the dread, municipal in faded parks,
and murder scenes,
without the bodies hidden,
or locations marked for ever.


Poem For a Found Cigarette Lighter



Amongst the autumn leaves,
I find a cheap lighter,
the colour of barley sugar,
dripping with the strangely thin
and clear fuel,
half-way between two states of matter,
and a dream of manufacture.

I want to stamp on it,
to make it into shards,
to let the fuel flow
into the atmosphere,
across the grain
of this grainless, sooty bench
to lift the mood of birds
in their end-of-day routines.

I play like a kid warned not to,
holding the switch down,
until the cheap flame,
cheap as plastic,
makes the whole thing too hot to hold
and I drop it forever,
into the leaf litter
and conflict of near winter.