On the Void Number one

Here i am in a void. What is it? A space left by the failure of activity. Reading, viewing, eating, speculation, have all failed. How do i fill the void? Or, why do i wish to?

The void confronts me with myself, a thing which is repellent because full of truth. The self here is different from the body and different from the image. The body is that which acts, it is not seen except peripherally. A photograph is an object, a piece of glossy paper. It is external. A mirror reflects back an image; it is what we show and take ourselves to be. We are filmed, and we get a different image, perhaps more accurate.

But none of these approach the self. The self always reveals itself as and with a void. It is full of silence, and the terrible message of this silence is that it bears no message. It is incapable of messages. My thoughts are repelled by it, and stray to sordid doubt, self-pity, fears.

What can be known with a certainty about the future? That it will contain good and bad. That it will be somewhat like, and yet wholly unlike, this moment. And what can be said, in particular, of my future? That there will be nights when distractions and amusements will fail, and a void, a frightening silence, will intervene.

What to make of this space? Most will say, in effect, distract yourself further, take your mind away from it, place your attention somewhere else. For this void results from a mere drift of attention, the drift of attention is what makes it known, what reveals it. I think rather that it has lurked there all along, as it were behind everything, while i pursued my distractions, a full and complete thing before which my distractions were shadows. But this fullness and this truth is frightening because it carries with it not only a mute finality but a suspicion that words are useless, that thought is useless, the truth being that truth itself is fugitive and all my endeavours intricately futile, my grasping at facts to find that they are like snowflakes, they turn to nothing in my hand.

Impressions: indifference.

Impressions: indifference. Space, air. Modernity.

Distance. Music chords. Effect on my glumness, does it appease it? It enervates me. It is a stimulus which i want to reject; it is an irritant. Because to show one's annoyance is fully taboo. And the mistrust of the body is complete; To act is to trust one's body, face, voice.

And to draw sustenance from what is behind it.

Opposition: thin wild mercury. Warm leonine self-assurance.

Saturnine extremism in my corner. Austerity, involuntary and partial.

Till six. Is it a compromise to seem? And then, the competition.

Painful heart murmurs. Youth.

Apolitical noise

Apolitical noise for an apolitical revolution-

Non-factionalised. General... and therefore of the heart.

We are condemned because we associate too much with the past and its mistakes its factions and its limitations.

No race war no class war but a war of the spirit against death... the third millennium... the summer of the world enfolded on the earth. Post-modernism is a maggot on a corpse.

Purge fame, annihilate celebrity. The myth of the great man.

Celebrity makes irrelevant so much. The principle of concision and simplification. Ideas always packaged, a packaged and digestible idea, not an authentic one.

Celebrity, fame is the western distortion, that warps all values and conciliates the masses. Attractive and distracting, a new aristocracy of vacuity and trivia.

my pet (dream)

My pet is a small mammal of some kind, skittish, flighty, furry with a weak back. Pink, wary eyes. Whitish fur, downy and milky. Almost like an overgrown mouse, a cat-size mouse, but with a sorrowful big-eyed appearance, weak and insipid.

A cat's tail, elegantly arching over the back, but altogether not quite a cat. It is too trepidacious, milky-white and pink-eyed, with the skittishness of a rodent. The blank, trusting eyes of a dog, none of the self-assurance of a cat. But a tiny little thing, weak-backed, mewling in the grass as helpless as a kitten. Could easily be trampled underfoot unnoticed. In the front garden, on the open grass, i let it play. It scampers and gambols on to the neighbour's lawn as well, blisfully appreciating no human boundaries.

Very quickly, however, it died. I felt cheated. Like when you win a goldfish from the fair and it dies three days later. Apparently, these things have a short life expectancy. The heart gave out.

At the edge of the lawn almost hidden among the grass i found it, on its back. Like a baby mouse wretchedly stillborn, frozen in a grotesque attitude. The folds of its pink and hairless skin, the body contracted. White, translucent claw frozen in a spasm. Hollow, like the end of a quill.

the question is...

I could touch the table with my fingertips, and taste, taste it...

I could see her shoulderblades beneath her shirt, her brastrap as she glanced away. My heart was afraid. I was left, again, to corridors and footsteps, emptiness of humour blasted away. My dreams were full of her. Every darkness welcomed her presence, as if death were her very face. There are words i could speak now, that would make the world itself halt, as if retarded, with its traffic, its winds, its empty suburban houses on Saturday night about five o clock. The laughter of children used to resound on such nights, along with the bone-dry canned laughter of forgotten televisions. Do i want her? I ask myself, alone in streets, a minimal, uncertain smile, sad, wandering eyes.

There are times when i wish i could enscribe my love on the wall, but i guess i haven't the necessary tools. Only sleep is better than life. Instead i should write, on every available surface, these five words- "I am no longer sad". The question is am i in love. The answer is yes.

The only plaintive note the belly-voice can scream is "give me!". How odd, then, that it should be thwarted every time. And yet how natural, bare, animalistic. Loneliness is a marketable taste like strawberry vanilla. Do you know what the great philosopher hears every day? "Give me, give me, give me!" It turns out that that is the only voice one is able to hear.

Every day i knock on a different door, and am refused. Something poetic even in failure. What good will it do to write "she had blue eyes" or "she blushed, laughing"? We are all transformed into corpses as we write. My heart is not another's.

I will go downstairs, and put it in my hand, put it to my lips, put it in my heart. Never tell me its name. "If i'm going to die then i should die for a reason". Repeat that to yourself in rooms lit by cheap lamp-bulbs.

Give it to me in the wind. Transmit it in a voice. Let me sleep on a mountaintop, or let my ghost drop in the high street. Let me be in the graveyard in the afternoon. Don't even give me sight. I am strong enough to die every hour for you. Repeat, "i am no longer sad".

And to think some still dare to say that there is a light that shines.

suburban reflections part 2

Pink, soft-faced, lipsticked girls alone, always alone, in loneliness sanctified, made whole, renewed! Windows, t-shirts, magazines, circumstance, swearwords and sex-jokes, all your's like TV and bedsocks, all the massing signs of death as you exult in life.

How stale, shallow, silly it all is! How it saddens me and makes me turn away! We have no creation here, nothing to do, no tales to tell. Instead, the screaming television, the happy, blooming, murderous box screaming its insanities, as if madness was the status quo, as if hatred were OK for participants, voyeurs, the last heroes seduced, and made dumb. I am dumb along with them.

Can love, the love that made the great cities, pounded up mountains from dust, carved great sculptures, composed the most beautiful songs, survive here? We want no more of love now. We think no more of it than of the last soggy fagpacket or sweetie wrapper on the pavement, trodden underfoot in lamplight.

We have no need for it. The boys turn their stallion-like, hair-flopping faces away from it to grimace in a tobacco-stinking joke. The girls are so soft and complacent in their breasts, silken hairs, and gossip magazines that they have lost the will, in shadowy bedrooms, for anything but editorial cyncism and electronica.

An empty laugh just echoed in the street- Words no longer mean anything. On every door is written "there is no such thing".

suburban reflections part 1

There is nothing worse than colour. Nothing more i wanted to spit out of my mouth, and i could only find destruction at the end of my good intentions. Never mind. Cracked knuckles, broken hands. The fact that i have ceased to believe in my vocation.

/

Grins softly, makes no sound. Has as it were a grimace, an absence of sound. Speaks instead of shadows and empty courtyards. Silly facades of fate on flickering television screens, the aborted foetuses of backyards. Wants grim council estates, or phantoms in rainy nights tracking down the latest fashionable hatreds.

We are their children, you and I. We are the true lost roses, the kids defiled, the unborn satirists of a neglected dream. We are the children of the skies and the ferris wheels, autumn nights outside the playground in nineteen eighty-six.

How we could dance if we were only joyous children! What words, poems, curses, we could whisper to each other, waiting, as if in rigours of love, for the phantom of childhood and easy steps home... To lit chambers, untold duvets of awful bed.

There are no paths left where once we wandered. The girls we loved have all grown up, have gone home to sleep or be happy in grimoire pubs with landlords and bright lurid flowers of electric light like semen blooms, that pristine white. Instead we have a series of empty rooms, and emptier streets, lost even now to their last inhabitants, who are afraid even to dream.

Poem written in June 2009

That girl that spoke of greyer days
Than those we now discover,
Who told me of her stolen rays
That now arrayed another:
I saw more clearly than i dared
Where ran her weary steps
Even to the heights and to the depths.
"That dream that came to you, when hopes were few,
That we could win, and would win, through
To places where the storms are stilled:
Such is a hope that will be fulfilled."
Like this, i tried to win her heart,
Repeating every line i knew:
But even as i played my part,
I felt the sullen lies depart
And, in that instant, every word was true.

from a god unknown (poem)

Fair are fallen all the days that i had thrown unwillingly away,

And the screaming of the friends and faces never to come again,

Blown like money at the dogs and doldrums of a vacant game,

Known and unknown, remembered, disremembered, waxing dull and grey.

I had known the names of knaves and villains, fools and princes,

Kissing and blessing, loving every one by name, seeing their faces

Shatter and reframe,

The full surfeit of life's expenses

Spurned and sundered all the same.

I am cold cities like a rock is solid, i am lone streetlight like a sea is deep,

I am the question mark scrawled over knowledge, i am the drunken loner in the street.

I walk from here to urban deserts, where, like a joyful column, pilgrims meet;

I am not sad or dully cowed, i see the limits of the crowd,

Full of still movement and with joy replete.

No, no, no, it is not sad, to be so full of spirits and of doubt,

Couples in shadows that fully yearn and drag, and never cast their eyes about;

There is a diamond in the desert, there is a summer in the fall,

Only the precious hope is holy, only the heart can never pall;

It's hard, hard, soft reality, mother and mistress of us all,

That kicks and kisses, hits and blesses us with gall.

So in the silence of the moment i can give up tones,

Those chords that grow melodiously, dischordantly from men alone,

So frightening and foolish, so deftly thrown

To mortals in their sorrows from a god unknown.

untitled poem

This is a lonely continent,

And every city street

At five o clock on a weeknight

Reflects the same conceit;

Lassitude, oblivion, boredom and defeat.

And we are a race that has been reversed,

And risen in retreat,

Though our empty dramas are still rehearsed

To the sounds of a faltering beat;

"No end yet to the old refrain,

To the song that does not fade,

We sow the seed, and reap the grain,

And thus is the world remade."

It is not love we seek, but only release

From captivity

Only a shadow on a wall, a march in time

To a meaningless beat.

Yet, my mouth wants to speak:

"Silence, cease breath, do not speak of Death

That can speak for itself.

The shadows that form on the wall

Contain our fall,

And all the shapes we see therein

Are merely dreams.

The love that we exude;

Useless as a dog's breath in captivity.

The passions we pretend,

Uncovered, are clouded forms of common vanity.

And these pages come from a cheapskate muse, plastic and immutable;

Petals of that ancient bloom long proven to be mythical. 

(a dream)

I had a dream that i was weightless and strong

And could glide in dark valleys under a black sun.

In the dream my breath was cold and my eyes closed.

But i soared high in the sky like an eagle

And saw below the sea.

And i tasted and kissed the sea

And i swallowed salt air like acid champagne

That stung me awake.

And the words of the flight still hung in my head

As i woke up in bed

And the black sun's shadow that crawled on the sea

Still shivered for me.

And in my dead heart

I felt blessed flight

Ascend like the night

And depart.

Horror Film

Watching horror film- pulling mask off

Too late to spin the bottle, balance the ouija board,

Give us angry kisses in rooms.

Memories of television newsreaders we had forgotten,

And silk hosiery, the femme fatale's lipstick-

Her vampire mouth.

I will bottle out of this horror movie.

I will watch fake blood pour, hear the silly screams

Until i dream... and march out on the fuller, papery street

Where bums still drop in paper diapers, pursued

By hot winds, and night, like mother, calling them home.

I could search all night for a phantom to equal my heart's-

"There are no words to express it. I am naked".

I whisper this in cheap unconscious 1950's rooms,

Bleeding like a pauper Christ,

Crawling back to oblivion,

Via the broken elevator.

The Execution

Have you idols for me, love?

Or kitchens of night

Spilling pools in pornographic railways?

Why then elastic night? Why murder on my wallpaper?

I have a new horizon, but i was spoiled

And left confused in kitchens of night.

Blindness would be a mercy,

A heart is always a curse-

Every colour is a shifting hue,

That forms the lover's gaiety,

The executioner's delight-

Cezanne's apples

Were last seen before being led to the condemned cells

Or the afternoon glint of old-style fairgrounds

Every red mocking him in his sleep,

An inch forward, led by laughing crowds

Toward the hangman's noose.

My Dialectic Seasonal-Decade Theory

Winter late 1900s early 1910s
Spring late 1910s early 1920s
Summer late 1920s early 1930s
Autumn late 1930s early 1940s
Winter late 1940s early 1950s
Spring late 1950s early 1960s
Summer late 1960s early 1970s
Autumn late 1970s early 1980s
Winter late 1980s early 1990s
Spring late 1990s early 2000s
Summer late 2000s early 2010s.
Note that crises occur in late summer.

Happy Image

Put on yr happy image
Look at yourself in the mirror
Walk in the windy street
In the image of the
Happy city.
Put on yr happy image
And face the crowds
Of your own dreams.
Walk in the happy-image'd
Street on Saturday-
Walk to the bottom of the
Road. At night,
Turn and face
The shards of yr happy image,
Shattered in the grate.

Angel of Death

Angel of death come n take me away
Angel of death let me listen to yr ghettoblaster
feel yr wrinkled fingers yr lips so cold
Your face like alabaster Your limbs like marble
Your face is not cruel Your face is kind
Angel of death you got a machine gun a Kodak lens
Angel of death you're a cyber machine you're the static
The gap between the ad break and the TV show
You're a broken voice on the stereo
You're what is written on the blank white computer screen
Your face is as impassive
Downloading pictures of epiphany-
Drawn by Durer in red ink ... captions
Scribed by Goethe in black.
You stand in the corner of my room
Yr face turned away Yr shadow is my shroud
The dust you bring shall cover me.
You seem to sniff the white plaster of my blank walls
I should have laid out pictures- The agonies of Christ
The Holy Spirit- The Holy Virgin sacrificed.
Touch me with your hand o Angel of Death
Teach me to love
And on my smooth shoulders place wings (like Jim)
So that i may fly into a boundless night
That will be your benediction, your prayer
Your majesty and might.

old thoughts of school

It's funny this dry dust of classroom, the misty windows, the grey sills.
And teacher, a slob like you, with his loosely-held "authority", in his meaningless shirt and trousers, starch-washed, as meaningless as your uniform.
It's strange the primitive knifemarks of graffiti on the desk, the anxious scrawl. It's strange how many things go wrong from the teacher or tutor's mouth to your ear, how much is misunderstood or forgotten, how the vain preambles of language result so often in nothing.
What a void is education. It's energy dissipated and ruined, cast forward into the classroom, trampled over, wasted. It's the bleak and dissatisfied teacher, that clumsy, fleshy human just like you, with the same arrogance and emptiness. Formalised education is just a ritual played out for ritual reasons.

Mors

Mors
The Angel of Death comes to the King's Room at Night;
His Face shines.
Les chansons soutterrain.
Singing, singing.
The Angel of Death in his flight laughs deeply;
He knows his destination.
It shall be through a dark dream
Into a new life.
Vita Novus.

(...If there had been TV in Paris in 1789, or in Russia in 1917, would the populace ever have carried through their revolutions? It seems doubtful.)

Athens 2

(In all the Great Cities of the World
Walk Secret Cripples
And fools like me, disturbed
By thoughts of purity,
Naive to trust in what they feel.)
Oh, i act very wise
But my all-perceiving eyes
Betray me into countless traps.
Baited with beauty, briefly tendered
Triggered by blundering passion
And left dismembered.
My eyes are fools. They seize triumph,
Clarion-call it to the quick heart,
The heart bombasts the news to the blood
Whose course runs all over
The Sad Republic of my flesh.
My eyes should be ashamed, downcast
After seeing so many false dawns.
And yet, neither eyes or heart
It seems, will learn to be as stone.
Even my curses are cliches,
Even as my hopes are banal,
And in my desolation i only utter platitudes,
Repeated so often before
By stranger's mouths.
Can there be a soul that will not walk
Machine-like to money-making
On these streets,
But will stop and regard me?
Can there be a face of human form, of flesh,
That will neither scorn nor fear me?
Is there no flame that flickers like my own,
Among the striding robots,
Among the smiling statues,
So clear, so clean, so prettily repeating...
What seem, at least, to me...
Banalities?

Athens 1

The roads are long where i walk
The shadows deep in Athen's streets
The people pale
Wearing disenchantment upside-down
On awkward faces
That i see awkwardly.
My response, instinctive, streaming out of me?
It streams briefly, bitten off
Replaced with a peculiar angst.
It is in the inter-connections
Brief surges of hope, sombre rejections
That flicker from eye to eye
As hand gestures to hand.
Should i stop and talk
To the distributor of leaflets
Advertising half-price clothing sale?
She hands me it so neatly, so concisely
Prettily smiling.
Should i stop to ask
The young man on the street
To tell me his life-story?
Would it be short, prosaic, unadorned,
Or might it ebb and flow
With something like beauty?
May as well ask a question of a crowd.
Just as effective to be polite to a mob.
Than to tumble out clumsy words
At an individual.
Where are you racing to, fools?
Short-order march to there and back.
And i, unseen, amongst you.
"I am the secret cripple"
This is what i think to myself on city streets.
Clumsy automaton, tries to fit in
At the Automaton Convention. (no invite)
I am the Secret Cripple
Whose connections are all cut off
Whose loves by every step
Are disrupted.

Edinburgh 2

O loneliness. Every city has a thousand phantoms walking in it and i am but one. And all the phantoms seem to whisper, as they step forward, as their eyes flicker, faces hesitantly turning away- "There is no city but this, there is no city but this."
Western civilisation's greatest and most meaningless achievement has been the concrete pavement and the lonely crowd walking thereupon.
An old sexual brewery smell, magical, moneyed, expansive like battlements and respectable cadavers. A sad taxicab sexcrime got in the papers. Skeletal homeless and drunkards look on joyless and stoical.
A mad old guy stops me in the street. He has a great Russian bearskin hat and huge purple alcoholic nose. He tells me blankly that he had expected the museum (the building we are standing in front of) to be open. I explain patiently (for he seems hard of hearing) that it is not a museum but a theatre, and as such is not open to the public. "I thought i was gonna have a walk roun' and look at all the artefacts." he says with a strangely childish moroseness. He then shuffles off down the street, huffing, with his humble porous nose. A guileless search for "artefacts".... I think that maybe he was a Glaswegian.
.... What a traitor is desire, what a false friend is pasion.

Edinburgh

On Princes Street a girl hands me a red leaflet for clothing sale which a little way down the street i crumple up and put in a litter bin. And old aborigines with beards, rogues of shellsuits and cheekboned blonde apaches. Near to signs and glassfront bookshops clustered sales and signs.
An American girl talking nearby. She says it'll cost maybe sixty pounds, a dull street conversation.
The blondes on this street are equaled only by the brunettes.
Coming up to street halt like great traffic lines moving enmasse.
The great video screen in the record store showing girl in bikini, a yellow sunny bikini and great red singing lips (Lisa).
Oh patrician glamour, oh curlicue, oh bankvault, oh perriwig.
Oh Frederick Street, oh grey David Hume loneliness- fagdoup strewn sidewalk. Give homes to the homeless, Give houses to the houseless. Simple as that.
A party of Japanese tourists giggling. Everytime i put on a videogame i say God bless the Japanese. What will they make of these old crags and oldtown ghosts, can they digest such occidental bleakness and confusion, such Sawney Bean histories of despair?
The most beautiful girl i ever saw on probably South Bridge one November. She was of medium height and build and had fairly long but very dark hair. Eyes looking downwards somewhat despondently or perhaps thoughtfully, a pallid face. It was indeed as though my desire had called her into being.

new poem

This will be a new poem
A grand poem for all the children who like me grew up dead
I will make of my unhapiness a rebellion
I will make of my sadness a great roar of change
That will come in like a swift tide
To drown my enemies.
For outsiders always know the truth
And those who burn with great rage
Will make lasting creations
Of bitter love.
And the poem will be broad and strong
And deep as stone, rough-hewn and true
And it will sing on desire-stung lips
Bizarrely ringing in dissapointed hearts-
To you who spoke of death-songs,
War-chants, or orations at the pyre,
Make for me now a new song.
Give it not to false beauty, packaged, slick,
Commercial, all false desires provoked and spurned.
Instead offer it to flesh and blood, weak and lawless,
Grimy, beaten, striven to a subtler, stronger passion,
Too real to be plastic-packaged, micro-processed,
Cleanly aborted on TV. Give us the real desire,
The upward dive, the ever-new, renewing pulse.
Give us words for our weapons, sharp and true,
Poems that penetrate and blast, songs that shatter
Like shards of diamond glass.
Return us to triumphant grave- so we can jump forth again,
Full now of an anxious fervour, a dancing pain
That will make the old ways fall
That will make the happy liars fail
And we'll cast bitter black roses on them
Shouting in sonorous voices
For a re-awakened joy
Long-lost, regained once more,
Restored.
We exiles will make of our beauty
A revolution.

the catalogue of the heart's delusions

This is the catalogue of the heart's delusions
Because the trend in design is toward simplicity.
Design is just the response to a problem.
(and the problem is man.)
You survive, and you do not survive.
I think the hardest kind of courage to have is the courage not to lie to yourself.
How to get through death, transcend death? A bloodlet, a sacrifice. Transcend death by absorbing and accepting it.
Life is never fuller in us than when Death's Angel places her hand on our shoulders.
What the process of maturity really entails is acceptance of death.
Something like sleep that brings down blackness on yr head,
a cancelling-out, its finality beautiful.
It would be like a black sleek amusement ride carved out of your
favourite silks beautifully dark
It would creep up behind you and boom like a ghetto-blaster
In yr ear so you'd scream in a nervous skeleton laugh
But its beauty is its democracy which is always welcome
And welcoming.
She creep up on kings with the same embrace.
Yes death is female not the illustrated comicbook skeleton
And yet his face was always a grin
And her embrace is
The simple joke of the absolute.
(And yet death is a jest that hides a truth,
A serious secret selfconsciously revealed.)

rock n roll fantasy

Wanna talk abouta revolution? I'll give ya revolution-
As long as you give me barbwire strangulation, PVC choke
Give me overkill nostalgia in a plastic poke. Red neon dawn,
Patchy psychedelic cyberpunk chick... oh i need it to live.
Let me be the dead rose that blooms n blossoms fragrantly,
Give me hot shotgun kitsch, bugshade drum machine, motorcycle,
Aphrodisiac scent package, o give me the killing desire.
Because i have seen death on television, cheap haikus,
Shortstops pre-packaged to sell me. As a child of this age
I love to sell and be sold.
"I have a rock n roll fantasy, is that clichéd of me?"

Empire Waits

Do you know there are places where the quiet heart can go
In the depths of the city where the winds forget to blow
Or on ghostly avenues where stand streetcorner dates,
Or round the penultimate corner where empire waits?
And here there are tinklings of something obscure,
A falling-down sound or a scent somehow pure-
Blown from backstreets of bridges, and burnt clocks that chime
That the night of the city is mine.
There she lurks, the sweet phantom, or anima-shade
Where the glimmers of Friday night fade-
And she steals my wan heart, and abandons it there
To steal sweet summer songs from the wings of despair.
(Do you know there is meaning when crowds leave the streets,
In the dust and debris, in the echoes of feet,
And in those dull echoes you hear a heartbeat
That sounds and resounds with memories sweet?)
..... and the sharp sound of triumph, that follows you on,
Till its echoes are gone,
One by one.
But in that there are secrets, and signals, and signs
Of a voice of salvation whose tone is sublime
From the sad wings of death, and the dull banks of time,
And it sings that the night of the city is mine,
Always mine.

After Reading Astronomy Book

It's known that stars are born to die
And change their courses in the sky,
If they must change, then why not i,
Whose life is borne so fitfully.
If giant stars from vacuums grow,
Then perish in a burning woe,
As endless eras come and go,
Shall i not do the same below?
And if the broad and joyful sun,
That ever keeps his daily run,
From depths of nothingness can come,
Shall he not thence, one day, return?
And thus it is decreed to be,
By forces wiser far than me,
Whose providence i cannot see,
But with whose laws i must agree.
For stars and men in this are true;
They keep the course they're promised to,
And all their cycles are run through,
Although their days are few.

The City's Heart

Where will we find the city's heart?
It's in the faces of the men that gamble and are gone,
Grey-faced like shadows they whisper sexual secrets,
Hands fumbling in pockets, lips loose with drink.
Speaking of nothing but collective and commonplace sorrow-
Felt by fat-armed mammas in brothels and hotels,
Eyes unbearably dark, bodies laden with tribulation,
Bodies upheld by a feverish, anxious love,
A string that sometimes twines thick,
And sometimes wears away to taut thinness,
And then, in long oppressive evenings,
Becomes as fragile as a spider's web... and yet as strong,
Enough to support the kindly hand of death, and not to break.
Behind windows of the city, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out,
And brooding faces are sometimes seen, biting lips, preoccupied
In the great windy gusts of life, in the nameless spaces of solitude.
But o heroic thought, that batters the brainpans of man,
And coaxes him delightfully from love to pain,
To sink and rise and sink again,
Like a pinball in a mad machine...
My heart goes out to nothingness but only finds echoes in things,
And thus the city's heart responds, in ready words of love and cheer,
That you can read, if you are able, in the blank blaze of bars,
In the eyes of strange girls, in the frsh-lipped faces of friends,
Behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses,
Like new forms seen in a joyful dream.

Automobile Accident

On hot summer nights the race began
Moving sideways from steel-shuttered doors of tenements
Reflecting windows empty with dust inside...
The wreckage compounded
To break the forgotten movie's heart
As the midnite show was letting out.
....maybe struck a water hydrant
And the sudden rush of water fell on the dust of the street
....maybe struck a streetlight
Whose dull, dented bruise was seen by chattering gangs
Some nights later.
Like in the mafia movies, the despair was tangible
And, like in them, the horn was stuck in a blare.
And yet the blood looked less real
'Twas comedy blood from city veins
That burst quietly in shock.

The Date (dream)

Emerging from grey gates into a rainy phantasagorical Edinburgh full of drips and ripped billboard posters and afternoon.
I went through grey gates into an anxious colourful crowd. Some moustached and dark businessmen rushed by. Some teens in bright bi-coloured sports clothes, shellsuits or ski-jackets, brushed me.
Though contrary-wise to the lonely rush of the crowd, and their angsty eyes seeking and suspecting me, as if to say "loner weirdo and has no business in the city, up to no good standing on streetcorners." I felt good and proud because i was waiting for my date, and therefore grinned in an old-fashioned way, reproaching their blank glances.
It was in a perfect grey paranoiac Edinburgh, full of January dankness and sexual shadows. I wasn't sure whether my date would show up, and was scared and pleased, stood rigidly with a moritified grin.
But when the girl finally showed up i was happy as if i was justified to the swelling crowd of passers-by. Truly i had something to prove and here i was vindicated by girl on my arm.
But the girl who dashed up and seized me by the hand with a surprising earnestness and urgency seemed to have been crying. A big goth girl with a grey doll face and downward-looking eyes, neat mascara smear down cheeks. She had a heavy frame and dark clothes, and was sturdily-shinned, but with a curiously blank and panicky face, as if frozen into a china doll expression by some trauma. Her hair was a great ragged mass of dark dreadlocks as if woven from wool.
She pulled me with her gasping as if in an unaccountable rush to get away. Did not explain or justify this but merely pulled feebly at my hand. We walked off over wastelands of ruined cement into more purple horizons of cities, a memoried Oakley or setpiece Glasgow of tenements. We walked over a great expanse of cracked and dirtied ice, strewn as if with old garbage and shattered breezeblocks.
Treacherous industrial ice puddles lay underfoot. And halfway across the girl went right under the thin ice which cracked and gave way beneath her. Bobbing at the top of the ice-hole, among waste of dirty city ice, was her great mass of tangled dreadlock, thick and strong, which i grasped with my hand in an attempt to draw her full weight up from the water.
But she drowned. I reacted to this news almost in the third person, as something seen in an arcane New York movie or read in an old newspaper headline. It seemed a simple and dispassionate death.

In the Movies 2

The great yellow movie come-down; the most beautiful part retrospectively, emereing into the already night-time street, a peep of blue night-time intruding, as you move down the stairs from your artificial world of light and shade, sci-fi acid blast, all the great romances and ghosts, all the funereal love of cinema smells, whispers, anguished laughs in the back row.
So in the anxious lobby there's nothing to do but traipse out onto the pavement, halting outside for a while, murmuring to each other, movie talk giving way to silence as you ponder the walk home through grey-scuffed streets. The swishing trees, the shut-up shops. Back home to lamp-lit bedrooms and TV, bright-coloured comicbooks, cotton sheets.
Who says there is no sacrament in our lives when we can emerge from the movie house into blue evening, stark yellow lamplit, with full and melancholy hearts, replete and utterly satisfied with the knowledge of our own deaths, in a soundless heel-scuffing moment. Who can ever look at us and say we have no knowledge of love, if we only experience that moment, though we can never speak of it, though we can only watch and know. You take your salvation where you find it. Always deep tinges of death in beauty.

In The Movies

And on the scarred, fag-laden road
Still soft with evening dreams, molten lamp-light
Gentle haggard sidewalk.
Outside cinema where in afternoons the kids would gather
In long worried lines, buzzing all doleful excitement.
Sweet-shop next door, sleepily guarded but open,
Sunday afternoons the best, innocent leaning against hoardings.
We were innocent; i insist on that.
Soft and anxious for inside, inside.
There were kids wrapped in bright sports clothes,
Soft and full of lust for the movie.
Carpet hush inside, the spirit flickers and filters on the threshold.
Smell of hot-dogs on a lazy Saturday, yellow electric light in one cloistered discreet window. The proprietor, a bespectacled Englishman, calls out, shuffling businesslike to grey pavement.
We went sallow-faced after buying ticket up grey stairs, carpeted and winding to the secret summit. Oh plastic whiteness, oh unthinking technicolour. Eyes affixed on screen.

post-election

"What we need is a total revolution of the heart. What we need is honesty and open hands, fierce truth in new voices.
I have no country but myself, my country is my body, my nation is my mind, my parliament is peopled by dreams and legislates desires and acts always unilaterally. Everything is potentially acceptable to me, everything open. I will forget everything, everything, everything, and renounce it all except for a few key, lasting, burning, painfully pure principles. There are no countries, there is only what is present. I am inherent, persisting, immanent; god and the devil have fallen silent, fallen far behind, i remember them like figures from an old, sordid pantomime, a cheap cartoon, a Punch and Judy show put on for imbeciles. This is moral, this contains all morality, this moment, and all time is within it, all thought and fantasy.
I have no country other than the ground i happen to stand on. All the flags are beautiful fluttering thoughts, and all of them are irrelevant and insipid, and all of them are nonsense. Vulgar, vigorous, lovely, like children's games. Must i become what i am represented, expected to be? Let's get rid of these idiocies once and for all. I happened to emerge somewhere in this foggy, dew-bedecked, forsaken realm. I never think of my origins, only of my destination, and the journey along the way."

after the banquet part 7

Wandering, M and his friends had come to the main school building which loomed dark above them. In front of them was a large, open room used for storage, dark-flagstoned, its dim walls covered in graffiti. M had dreamily traipsed inside, not quite knowing why, and his friends had followed, sniffing, all of them remembering this strange empty room, this draughty alcove, as their hang-out in years gone by, where they would spit green snot on the ceiling or try to shatter dark frosted windows.
The place was cemented, grey, and most like a prison cell, except for the dank draughts that swept in from the playground chilling the kids in winters past, and a grim blue door set in one of the walls which led to who knows where, interior storage rooms full of dust and skeletons probably. This had been the gang's hang-out where they would read magazines and fight, huddle up against the cold, sniff and cry out...

So, after the banquet, he had wandered with his friends, not speaking, across the flagstones of he old school building in the moonlight. The school building had been abandoned long before, and now lay empty, its windows vacant. M could still see, as he strolled aimlessly along, old broken apparatus in the science room windows, rusty sinks and cracked worktops, which reminded him blankly of the science teachers that had taught him, dumpy suburban men in ties and shirts who had graduated from dull universities in the seventies. Now all their classrooms were empty. M's friends walked a little way ahead of him, talking amongst themselves, planning some ragged-haired crime.
They walked up into the shallow basin of the school-yard itself, which resembled at this hour the bottom of a dried-up lake, with the sound of their heels scuffing the gravel echoing among the empty windows of the steel and glass buildings looming up around them, door like gaping mouths, panes of glass reflecting nothing. If the place itself, the playground and the surrounding buildings, had been montaged from sandpaper blasted grey, or with a ghostly kind of fatigue and decrepitude worked into the gritty pebbles and moon-blanched stone, had been erected vacantly, as a junkyard or a monument to failure, it could not have looked more hopeless. All the blood, semen, snot, spit and coughs of a million schoolboys had been spattered on the midnight walls there, all the ghosts of murdered teens still lurked there behind the pillars and in the piss-smelling alcoves, the dirt-flecked vomit of foul-mouthed goblins had been wept over behind the trees and vacant lots of the smoker's hangout, until darkness itself had dreamed of brick prisons, and made in its image, a high school.
There is not a curse to express its ugliness.

After the banquet and all the festivities had ceased, and everyone had gone home across the fields, so that the great hall lay abandoned and dark, just filled with the low light of smouldering embers and the smell of old candle wax.... The banquet had seemed to end with no conclusion, nothing gained. The room had become stuffy even for its size, the awkward schoolkids had pressed in upon one another, goading each other on, embarassed and sopascrubbed. Crowds of rich relatives had arrived with stiff propriety, and spoilt the moods of the young lovers.
Crowded in at the corner of the table, M. hunched his shoulders, with no appetite. He had gazed at the princess with her red cheeks burning in the candle-light, he had seen her awkwardness and embarassment, her cool grace in spite of it all, and it attracted him. He was troubled by his sickly-faced relatives and the stuffiness of the great hall, nauseated by the gaudy colours and the strong food, the restrained, school-classroom atmosphere in which nobody knew quite how to behave, yet everyone was afraid to show it.

Maybe her discomfort is feigned for fun, maybe she's simply an alternative girl with a point to prove, and if not in this outfit would be in doc martens and a t-shirt and with her hair messy, ready to laugh in a hoarse-voiced joke. For now she is subdued and looks downward, as the balding butlers argue good-naturedly about whether the next course should be fish or meat, and whether brandy is suitable for sipping by the fire.
She had come in at first, dolled-up but wondering why people were staring at her, through an ornate wood door, introduced by a butler who yelled out her name, past the blazing fire, sat down embarassed at the long table. A chalice of wine was placed at her elbow....

On the right side of the table sits the most beautiful of the maidens. She has long, straight hair of the darkest, richest, nut-brown, blue, sparkling eyes, and a quietly smiling red mouth. She is a proud, distant-eyed girl, about seventeen, popular, humorous, down-to-earth. She occupied her chair like a throne, she casts her eyes about gracefully, like a truw queen. Her right hand caresses her left. She laughs prettily at the joke of some acquaintance, puts her hair beyond her ears, every now and then casts her eyes down sadly and reflectively. The dress she is wearing is of the palest, most delicate blue, and the front of it is minutely overlaid with gold-silk thread. The front of her hair is tied-up and restrained by a delicate tiara, but the rest of it cascades splendidly over her slim shoulders. At her elbow is a chalice of wine. At closer range, she looks less self-assured, and anyone close to her gets an intimation of her as more introverted, even less pretty, for there is something in her face, perhaps the arch of her nostrils, or the configuration of her eyes, that is somehow displeasing and could even be accorded ugly. It is plain she is uncompromising in her presence, almost masculine as she looks down, with a bashful kind of worry, so that she could either be a great genius or a great whore, or both. It is clear, at first sight of her, that she lives to laugh and to cry, but to do both with all her heart.

The banquet proceeds where the pageant has come to an end, where the masque is over, and the princes sit astonished at their own gentility, schoolboys transformed to noble bearded princes, schoolgirls sweep forth like virginal maidens to the hall. Still, at first glance it resembles nothing more than a school cafeteria at some busy lunchtime, but instead of patrolling teachers and grim dinnerladies there are jolly serving-boys and buxom maids to dish out wine and pheasant, instead of harsh jokes and the threat of corporal punishment there is relexation and jokes passed along the table, mixing with the sound of sweet, tinkling music.

After the Banquet

On the white-washed castle walls silver streamers were hung. From the bank of TV's on the wall sultry presenters, plushly made-up, gazed forth, announcing the new banquet in the great hall. Venus herself seemed reclining among silk cushions there.
Everyone was dressed in white, the queen and her maids came in in silk brocades and dressfronts, giggling, the trumpeters delighted to see them, persian cats licked at pure white cream. All around were banks of cushions, sheen-red, luxurious, where the fat auspicious patrons reclined.
In the centre was a long brown-wood table, varnished and glowing healthily, set with candelabras, cluttered and laden with silver and gold platters of food, delicacies, jellied meats, glazed pigeons, stuffed pigs, exotic fruits bursting into ripeness. At the table neat chairs were drawn up, and the patrons that entered to the fanfares of trumpets sat daintily at their places, smiling prettily like medieavel princesses. Fat kings were there also, chuckling and biting at chickenwings. All the 4th year kids from the local sinful high school drew up chairs, licking lips, still half-ragged and smelling of eraser dust and chalk, but delighted, transformed in their raptures to princes and princesses, ennobled. They loosened school-ties, gripped wood, pilfered gold coronets which they set atop their touseled heads, relaxed with spiced wine.

part 4

Long-abandoned classrooms, offices,
Desks on which a century's graffiti has settled,
Endless glass doors, hints of promise,
Through which nothing was revealed
But corpse's memories.
Eventually, i opened the final door
And stepped into a corridor brightly lit
And polished endlessly by robotic hands
Till it blazed the whiteness of heaven.
There marched by a bureaucrat, an
Office worker, busy with his schemes.
He looked officious in a short-sleeve shirt,
A clipboard and tie. Going to check
Rivet five million in panel six thousand
With a grim mouth.
I spoke to him, asking for a way out.
Then, approaching along the corridor,
Came a cleaning lady. She had pink skin,
And blonde hair. Weary lipstick, but
Looked bedazzled, and bedazzling
In a white uniform, pristine, spotless,
Like an angel in my eye.
The bureaucrat stopped her, and entreated
Her to show me the way home.
She seemed annoyed, far too efficient,
Wanted to bustle past: "No time, too busy".
As if, she wants to brandish her mop
In upstairs rooms, or purse together her lips
Before the clock strikes twelve.

part 3

My heart beat. The way i had come
Under those bridges, through the rubble
Enmerged into a dark tunnel, dripping,
Descending, full of dank draughts,
Descending, descending, into the darkness
Till i met Hades. This path was not meant
For human feet. It was the train tracks,
Erected out of hell-fired steel, relentlessly
Marching on, echoing ghostly voices
As it marches, marches, marches on.
Now, relieved, i ventured forth
And walked to the wall. Saw the doors
Endless, row on row, face me. There was no light behind.
I put my hand to one of the doors, expecting
It to be silently locked, muffled, shut up.
But it creaked, sprung open easily.
And i fell inside.
Inside were empty corridors
Leading endlessly on, into a greater maze.

part 2

But then, the windows rattled
And the doorhandles shook. From behind
Hooted forth the midnight train
Arriving right on time.
The train was made of adamantine
Driven by ghosts who never reach their destination
Rumbling on blood-strewn tracks
With no passengers. Yet at midnight, in this courtyard,
Phantom porters disembark
And blow shrill whistles at the skeleton crew.
"Our graveyard is a train station,
Our death a train which never stops..."
This train, steaming, screaming, sightless
Bore down on me like a cyclops, so that i crouched,
And it seemed to me it wailed to me of death.
I leapt behind the garbage pails, frightened,
Past the scaffolding and refuse,
And finally, lay beneath a large red estate agent's sign
That had long since been abandoned
To the elements.
The ghost train flashed by, dispersing.

Prelude to After the Banquet part one

A long, grey road under lowering skies,
Dusty and swinging right. Under dark railway bridges,
I walk the path by myself, it is concrete, bare.
There is no sound.
At the end, under eaves and bridges, is a grey
Building of empty office blocks. Inside
The grey-blinded windows lights are turned-off
Computer monitors sit abandoned. Dust settles.
It was, perhaps, a vacant building,
A school once inhabited by gaudy teens, full of
Violence and lust.
Youth that flared up behind windows, blood that
Bloomed in cheeks. Even the strong rod of discipline
Laid down, abandoned.
In its empty courtyard, i wandered beneath its buildings,
Wandered, dreaming, over to the right
To face the shadowy wall.
There, outstretched, a long wing of concrete,
Reaching for emptiness, full of rusted-up windows
And the elegance of despair.
Frozen into solitude.
And, set in the wall, were fragile glass doors
Behind which could be seen
Emptiness, walls which once bore
Happy paintings; now not even the flicker of a ghost
Or a vandal's anguish
Lit the corridors inside.

Onwards, doll, doll of night
Or in my afternoon paranoia
Wideness of the arse surprised me,
Patience wearing thin.
Porcelain doll, i see my love expand,
Though it sees you, as, in me, grotesque.
Entropy of statues, teeth
Must be scrubbed if they are not
To turn yellow, breasts
Turn pendulous unfettered by bras,
We have to ingest
And shit out an answer
To our own shame every night.

prelude to the inexhaustible city part 2

Finally he ended up in a room with darkened windows, windows blackened-out or smeared in soot as if to conceal shameful crimes. The floorboards were chipped-bare, and creaked echoingly as he trod over them. He was by now in such a disoriented state that he couldn't tell whether he was in a basement or in a penthouse flat, nor did he care.
It seemed like an artist's studio, out-of-the-way, bare, with slim iron pillars that held up the plaster roof. The woman leading him in led him to a corner where there were the rudiments of a home, a red-shaded standard lamp that she clicked on and which emitted a dim yellow light, and a plump satin couch that she pushed him back on, and among whose cushions he reeled and sank. Half-comatose there, unshaven and ruffle-haired, M. saw her step forward into the lamp-light from the dust and darkness of the room.
Her curled hair was very honey-yellow blonde, and in it could be seen depths and tints of richer orange-yellow colour that shone and sprinkled in the light. Her mouth was open in a wide grin, and he saw the light blaze on her white teeth and red lips. She advanced as if to devour him, to mock or reprimand him. The thing that shocked M though were her eyes, that were madly blue, of a lifeless blue which seemed yet to have an infinite depth, which seemed to recede into her eye. Her naked limbs that thrust forward as she bent over his still form, and her breasts bulged sadly from her tight red dress so that the line of her cleavage was highlighted in shadow. She seemed vital, alive, blood pulsing through her veins, life-force so strong in her that it was frightening....

One

In deserted rooms in the inexhaustible city, passing from night to day, through half-ruined streets in yellow afternoons, basements with red-patterned wallpaper, large window frames, tinted glass and in the background industrial noise.
Or in deeper and more secret places like the places you can go to in movie theatres.
Monuments, fountains, vast unattainable cities of night.
Through these M. wandered, finding himself present in bookshops, arcades, over-horizon scenarios, markets and courtyards filled with afternoon light and red-blazing windows, filled with figures that now and then gesticulated to him, mouthing lines.
Drunken or sad he went with ladies into darkened living-rooms; there when quiet lamps were switched on he watched disinterestedly their glittering lips, the movement of their flesh, the fall of their hair. He saw the swell of breasts beneath fabric, he saw the flesh of knees and thighs. He saw all the phantom girls come alive and parade in front of him, mocking his excitement, and, falling in and out of shadow, bending and twisting and smiling, groping towards the final release, the final apex of desire, so urgent in its ferocity and yet so meaningless in its aftermath. Blonde women with well-fed faces warmed with blusher, smiling at his inexperience in the corners of garrets, dusky girls with pouting lipstick smiles that looked like grief, reclining in tight dresses. Flesh against flesh, touch against touch, daylight never intruding.

beginning

Through the endless boulevards of the inexhaustible city, where overhanging buildings shadow the sidewalks.
Driving through streets wet with afternoon rain, where little pigeons swoop and miss refuse...
Lumbering in the sight-seeing bus, past the museum and the bright flag and the endless Georgian terrace, or on the bottom streets past gardens, hedges, inconspicous Victorian weeds...
The bus was bedecked and painted with gaudy advertisements and messages, advertising in broad brown-red letters the sight-seeing tour. The top-deck of the bus where M. sat, dreaming lazily, was open to the sky so that mid afternoon breezes swept in as the stodgy bus meandered along, rifling his hair, scattering dropped sweetie wrappers up the aisle.

a wide range

a wide range near the cracked sunken graveyard where the homeless sleep under the tombs at night and the traffic swishes by men in proud flannel business suit and with fat jowl are going home in the luxury leatherette smell of their sepulchral volvo to pressure cooker suburbs or fatigue and rugged crowsfeet rubbings and heart attacks at midnight in the middle of the afternoon underneath the flags of all nations and near huge regency department stores faded to rainwash grey just like the big acidic crumbling blackened spaceneedle monument all over in backstreet and college digs geeks are grinning and handsome boys combing back hair like skydivers and skaters and punkers and motorbike boys and pale fat goth girls all surrendered near a flaky pane and a tiled roof wet with pissy rain or bespectacled n smooth haired prowling and yelling with their confréres in a wild college or clapping bigbosomed and eager in a basement dark deacon brodie venue for the international art fools spangling on a stage or gritting their mohican teeths over guitars in leather or rancid jean diving into oblivion thrusting arms of sweat and little alcohol rotten gangs shavenheaded in estates knifing prowled serial killers clenching fists with plots of shallow hole not forgetting the changeling ghosts of a thousand centuries who were drowned here or were strangled with their own rabbie burns cravats in a spectral candlelit drawingroom on a shiny cluedo table and came back in empty afterdinner mirrors at 8 o clock while dickens freaked and hid under the table with pearly moustache and tophat meanwhile big bostonian automobiles rumble past in the street and on hot days festival fools celebrate heroin in a gutter and common lothian disgrace underneath the old burned troy jerusalem miles of paved disgruntled sulking reek respectable downtown in a greenbush on a picture postcard......

Roses & Cream (Dream)

I was in America. On a long road there was a traffic jam. From one of the vehicles behind me came a song. It was an old-fashioned love song.
Songs were issuing from the door of an old-fashioned carriage behind me. I was connected to these songs.
A romantic song came forth, entitled "Roses & Cream".
I was accused of writing the song. I went back to the carriage and found out the name of the author. The author of the song was "Ghandi".
I admitted to authorship of the song. I approached a car and told the girls inside, "Apparently, i'm Ghandi". There was a girl there, smiling, in sunglasses. She responded and then drove off.

A girl came to ask me for my autograph. We were on a long street bordered by a low wall. The girl was blonde with big breasts behind a white garment. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. Her face was vacant and equivocal.
I asked her what did she want my autograph for. She said, "You wrote that beautiful song". I hesitatingly wrote it on a small piece of card she was carrying.

On Insomnia

When i say, "i suffer from insomnia" to someone, they always look for reasons. In diet or in habits or in mood, in obvious places, in well-surveyed areas. I rarely meet someone who can grasp that there is no cause for night-time restlessness.

The restlessness inhabits and infects one, it propels one to lurch up from the mattress, to cast the clothes on the floor, to fight and wrestle with the pillow.

Is it depression? No, it is something deeper and more vast than anything implied by that word. That word implies a restful, dark hollow, a valley that one can slowly traverse, never raising one's eyes to the horizon. My experience is rather a dreadful, punishing activeness that grips the body and poisons the mind, so that thoughts are not thought and let go, but regarded and over-regarded, monitored and over-monitored, in duplicate and triplicate to an unbearable infinity of infinities, each thought interrupted by shoals of others, flitting like dull, lumpen fish in a filthy ocean enfused with the mud of over-familiarity.

Because the inside of my brain is sickeningly over-familiar, because that interiority and that subjective pause, represented by the pre-sleep stage, are somehow appaling and overwhelming, because my limbs apparently still want to wrestle, my legs still want to twitch ceaselessly like those of a man shot in the belly...

Because of all this i cannot sleep.

Fragments:
The chick who went on a killing spree. By some pallisade or sidestreet, beneath a terrace.
As always happens on these occasions it seemed unreal. The goths were still joking, for a full minute after the shooting had already begun, not noting the import of it.
Sylvia the goth girl was halfway through a joke, and her cracked laugh bit down on it.
To realise as though half-seriously... the chick had already drawn a snubnose from a purse and began firing pointblank. Quick, like a scorpion sting. Manic, n we only came in here to shelter from the rain.
Car backfiring. Firework. Some prankster, bored, is letting off a firecracker.
Artschool. The chick who came into to look for folios along the shelves at the edges. Tall, brownhaired, somewhat geeky with protuberant front teeth, breasts stretching top.
Excitable. Can't move close to her.
Who was she?

(Below the streets of Edinburgh are a loathsome race of vampiric creatures- they live in hollowed-out vaults.)
Meeting Pete a small blondeish boy in a pastel suit when on an anxious night errand in the west end of Edinburgh-
An old school mate. Somehow i get enveigled with him and his mates, a bunch of hulking bouncers, fashion plates, lads....
Down we go into a cavern for a drink, a kind of a cellar.
Me rather anxious and wary. Before i even ask for my customary pint of lager one materialises before me- yellow pale stuff. Which i sip.
Well now down here in this cellar is no ordinary pub. For a start admittance is only permitted for the young and fashionable. A Fashion Theme pub! Where the young ladies, fashion students, cut out textiles with cloth-scissors, squares of houndstooth fabric, cotton reels, smell of finance and sniffishness. So i feel rather out of place.
Fashion-Pub, Fashion-Gathering, Fashion-Enclave underground!....
Dark like an Italian bistro.

I hope, then, that this my ontology, in being constantly self-referential is not turgid and grey, or on the other hand wishy-washy and overly indecisive. It is about what lies beyond cynicism and irony, what landscapes and vistas are on the other side.
It is about a stubborn (but flexbile and shifting) subjective eye, an eye open to the subtleties, magic and poetry of the everyday. The soul itself is sometimes, rigid, monotonous, recurrent, it dwells often on the same thoughts, but it also tires of these and seeks vivid contrasts, playing before its unchanging ardour like flames before water.

"When you go again that weary journey from negativity to affirmation, and find after the lows and highs stretches of interminable blank terrain, frightening in its loneliness, would anyone be blamed for feeling nauseous, for rejecting the phenomena as they come, or welcoming them hesitantly?
Maybe i have been guilty of excessive gloom. It's clear enough that you can purchase nothing concrete with a noble soul. But your own freedom can be an unperishable commodity, resisting all buffets and shocks, and can lead to insights jewel-like and sparkling in their preciousness, their small, giddy moments of splendour threatening to burn a hole in the monotony of being."