Ghost 5

Alone in yellow-lit bedrooms, contemplating fat mattresses. Alone, breathing, half-awake, knowing sleep will come soon. Remembering, remembering... In my T-shirt under the duvet, weak at the remembrance, half-thrilling, half-despairing.

Switch on the delicate yellow lamp, or the bold bare bulb on the ceiling, wake up and be adult, alive in the brave life of the real world... Consider your loves rationally, like you've seen other men do. Conceal the depth of sadness that constitutes your emotional state, give yourself over again to dreams.

Alighting into dreams, give yourself again to the knowledge of real images spurned bitterly from real life, achingly remembered, visions, images, messages, things that actually occurred long ago in summer streets, where the sunlight slanted from concrete to concrete, now rained-on, now degraded, now unspeakable. Consider her in her porch like a roadside Madonna, stolidly encamped there, clutching her suitcase, surrounded by porticoes and railings, baroque embellishments of yellowed concrete as the sun glimpsed between buildings and lit where she stood, streamed down the street, got in the eyes of all the white transitory ghosts that glided by, glinted on the windows of angry cars racing downhill, reflected, slid away, faded again as the crowds dispersed, back to darkness again where all days return.

Struck by the memories of it, struck by my pink, frightened soul across the street, suddenly frozen into love but afraid to follow its lead.... I was saddened and glum in my bedroom.

Ghost 4

Imagine perfection lowered into earth, in silk skin, with no barriers or boundaries, but flawed, female, sulky, full of jokes! Imagine a latter-day Venus that could sit so solidly, with such an effervescent and mysterious beauty that it would take your breath away. How often have I dreamed in nights that I could see it again, her face, framed in brown hair that fell prettily in her eyes, her lips, her eyes a quiet blue. Her arms sturdy, her mouth laughing, her waist I yearned to grasp, slip an arm around. All that was beautiful in sixteen, all that was wicked, laughing, joyful, glooming and sad in a woman, in her, brought to life in her. She was a phantom that passes, she was the dream of beauty that disperses.

Wrapped in a uniform, in the quiet and commonplace uniforms of nineteen ninety one. A dark, blood-red jersey she would wear in lowering autumn afternoons, everything else black and comfortable. Outside, of course, the air bloomed, welcomed her, even the dark rainclouds wept, comforted her. The broiling smokes of autumn were her companion.

Her red lips, that spoke evil, that told jokes! Her brown hair and disgruntlement! Her sleeps in Sunday night silence. As she laughed like a débutante in the prefect's room, as she stalked, affronted, late for another class, through the corridors, loved and loving, sweet-lipped in sour glances.

I first saw her in the Modern Studies class, which was quiet and pastel-shaded with

it's Venetian blinds and sunlight slanting on the bare back wall. There were groups of brown school tables...

Ghost 3

I was in two minds... That marvellous girl, her fringe, her legs, her perfume, smiling at me, close beside me. She had silken brown shampoo-smelling hair sweeping down like a curtain, a red mouth and a vicious grin, a solid body full of dark-clothed promise, varnished nails, a quiet prettiness that sometimes turned aside in gloom.

We met, as usual, in the Art class, me hardly daring to believe my luck, desperate almost. One day she elected to sit beside me and I struggled to keep my heart from pounding as she quietly worked beside me. Ah, her dark brown hair, her blouse, her breasts beneath.

She was a popular girl in school, liked by boys and girls, outgoing, glamorous, sainted in my eyes. I didn't know much about her and was afraid to ask. As we began our conversations, our casual discourses on our likes and dislikes, I could barely restrain my sense of wonder that she would even stoop to talk to me. I hadn't, for any length of time, been so exposed to a girl in school and I let it go to my head, quietly, with a secret sense of rapture.

To me she was all the warmth of autumn embodied, everything pure, a Venus for cold nights. A sixteen-year-old, red-mouthed, in blue nights in the atmosphere of hometime. Her silken skin in bedrooms, her dark jokes. In school, with such dignity and grace, she carried a practical woven bag filled with her essays, everything non-serious and light. She cracked jokes with the teachers, chuckled disgracefully, but always with a drawing-back, an inner reserve, as she leant at stools with her soft skin, exuding a secret, unspeakable perfume.

All enacted in the empty atmosphere of nineteen-ninety one. She was left to empty suburban rooms and duvets, to the humour of streets and wallpapered rooms. Outside the bright yellow lamp-post burning all night long, while she swept about her brown hair, whispering secret joys to herself.

Ghost 2

Colours of broken street; painted with swathes and swashes of grey, rainwet, sodden and perhaps brokendown, ignored by everyone. Somehow though, i always remember it as yellow, a welcoming, sultry, Mediterranean yellow as ancient as time. Constructed by shiftless Scots, the purposeful bunnetted Hen Broons of time, smoking cigarette-butts, haunted by work. Ignored by endless faded-grey shopping-bag old ladies past the moulting autumn trees. Spat upon by all the drunken teens of a hundred years. Ignored by me heading past in some species of anxiety. The old grave walls ignored, the midnight church with its stained glass windows, the crumbling bricks, the sad monkish cell with its ancient pane of glass, and some sort of sad tumbling bookshelf behind. Here's the lofty, rainwet tree at the side of which i once pissed freely coming home drunk in the night, uncaring. All of this a black valley spotted with electric light and mock regency facades that look down with blackened eyes on the heat of drunkenness and carryout and eager, sexual, redhot 21st century spurned in the alleyway fucks and sweats going on in chambers over the road. Where in the modern apartment they have two TVs and all the glossy superfluous paper they could want, a fat computer and an excess of useless information held dull in the weighty brain at bedtime, as the occupier stumbles over the carpeted floor to snooze. Or at some nameless three in the afternoon, a guy clashes the door of his sportscar and is already grappling his mobile phone like a moviestar. Ambles into the Italian restaurant like it was Sunday afternoon...

Ghost Part 1

Drink for tonight, O ghost, on the elixir of the past...

Let's begin with the normal street, High Street, dark of course, post-cinema and utterly empty... Here there was sometime resonance of post-Star Wars, the Star Wars movie had just finished and we had grown sleepy inside, not realising the evening had already come on...

Or it was a pale afternoon out of nowhere, in this deserted street. On Saturday long ago. One day i'll tell my full vision of Saturday as it really is, of the perfection of yellow childhood Saturday, full of rejoicing in streets crowded with ghosts...

Ghost (prologue)

Silence, utter silence, loaded

Down with broken shards of glowing

Glass; profoundly shattered,

Scattered on the grass,

Hope left battered, in a grating,

Bastard blast.

Ghost, o ghost, that walks the breach

Between the holy host of days,

And melted beaches, endless childhood ways,

Or giant cinema boulevard of tears,

Or bankjob in the suburb's uptown fate,

Or Angel that arrived too late.

Ghost not nameless, ever seen,

But fleeting, ever fleeting, on the brinks

Of madness, joy, surrender,

Dancing on the Psyche's weakest beam,

Flickering in its grandest scene,

That ghost upon the streets of midnight cities

Is sometimes seen:

Serene, but haunting,

Ever haunting,

All the backward realms of wanting,

Every passion's deepest dream.

For Tír Chonaill

I came from the west, with the sun in my hair

I came over the green hills, with brown eyes

In the morning.

I came with a song on my lips

From the western lands.

I came complaining from dim parlours

And a fish-moustache, and a cursing hallway

Filled with old wallpaper and swearwords

In the pub.

I came with eyes of brown, like blown, rich-blooming fields

In which the sun still shone.

I wandered, my hair brown too, and ample,

Like Cuchuillain's in the morning.

Memories of hallways where we struggled and wept.

Disappointed, embittered, tousle-headed,

Full of sorrow in sods of fields. Ah this or that

Commodity, crop, or coin.

What good is that? What use

This looming earth?

Evil-teethed, we loomed in yards, unshaven,

Avoiding zealots of the lord.

Rat-infested townhouses in Donegal, burst water-pipes,

Turds in the drainage, courtyards full of refuse and must.

So we stayed indoors and prayed.

The room, high up, and dark,

As dark as rosary beads.

The Queen is a horse thief from a long line of horse thieves

A picture of the Queen in a tabloid. She is naked.

He finds it in the centre of a greasy-inked newspaper. The picture is the full length of a page. It is for cut-out and keep.

The face is a photo taken in an unguarded moment superimposed (via computer) on a body which is apparently a kind of realistic artist's impression. Her face is anguished and manic, with rabid little sharp teeth projecting from red gums. Her eyes behind her big glasses seem to roll insanely. She wears a light tiara.

She has a round, flabby, wrinkled belly, under whose rolls of flesh can be seen a growth of sparse, insipid pubic hair, like reluctant weeds. Her old teats are mere spent flaps of skin that reach her belly. Her thighs and upper arms are masses of ravaged, mottled flesh, that droop sadly.

This photo-spread in the centre of the tabloid has several purposes. It can be cut out and used as a prayer mat. It can be pinned to the inside of your cupboard and used as a dartboard. Ideally, it should be reproduced endlessly in chain form and used as bunting in the streets on jubilee days and important anniversaries.

M. wants to cut out the head and use it as a sticker. Put it on his desk drawer next to his sticker that says "The Queen is a horse-thief from a long line of horse thieves". M. having found the greasy old newspaper in his cupboard for the moment looks at the picture amusedly by the brownwood cupboard door.

He'll put the new head next to his sticker of the 77 safety-pin Anarchy in the UK Queen. Blankly reproduced in black n white.

Dream of February, 2001

Glancing from my bedroom window i notice suddenly that outside in the back garden there is a large fire, like a bonfire, which has been started accidentally and threatens the house.

I rush downstairs to put it out but by the time i get outside it has burnt itself out.

I stand and examine the remnants of the fire and notice among the embers twisted pieces of steel, and also large globules of molten metal, oval in shape like medallions, which contain fiery, twisting forms, and which also emit a continuous low sound, like voices coming through static on the radio. By bending closer to the almost extinguished fire i can identify what this sound is: the sonorous, long-drawn out voice of the muezzin, repeating over and over "Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar"...

Blacknwhite George/Impressionist

From a heat-filled family-filled summer room back in the early days in a black n white film the youngest moptop, George, escapes.

From his anxious sisters he shins up the drainpipe of his dad's council house in a middling area of Liverpool, wearing his leather waistcoat and white shirt. George was the youngest and most naive Beatle, anaemic and easily led, but harbouring depths. But here in the early days he was still grinning and wacky, shinning up drainpipes like a boy's adventure story, past the frosted glass window, the stone cladding, till he reaches the guttering and lays the flat of his palm on the rainwet tiles. The roof is a good place to be.

The neighbour watches, a potbellied retired factory hand. George has reached the pinnacle and now he can't get down. He will have to drop to a whitewashed milestone post, a debris-littered weed-strewn yard, full of sawdust and rubble. An adjunct to the semi-detached council house.

Imagine if black n white George went through time to his modern bedroom and found in his place a latter day hipster rolling up a big fancy joint. Reclining on a low bed, some unobtrusive dance track trickling from a shiny stereo. This geezer is an old raver, has a colourful T-shirt and a baldy head. He's delighted to see George and of course offers him a puff.

But this is early pre-hippy George in his leather waistcoat, and he pretends to be disgusted, sticks quite well in his naive role. An innocent working class lad, always up to high jinks but not into all that stuff.....

(That female impressionist guest stars in sitcoms and appears on chatshows. Camera angle below. As a spy as superwoman as a superhero sidekick. In the dressing room talkin to the comedy hero. What is she there for? Her versatility, her sex appeal, a certain token of comedic value.

But, then, says another voice, what is their relationship were to degenerate, and become that of the hooker and her client. And she becomes intent simply on getting the movie hero off, with a callous humour and disregard. Because the English sincere movie actor is a secret kerbcrawler and in this dingy dressing room sweats and opens his shirt and pants compulsively, his dark mop of hair in his eyes, to the shiny costume of the Impressioniste.

Dressing-rooms are anonymous spaces, like bathrooms, warehouses, alleyways. Full of shadows.)

Bus Trial of the Century

Bus drivers wanted for redbus metropolitan On the Buses 70's routes, in caps and flourishing smiles. Trainee drivers welcome, dahn at the job centre. Slim naked comedy women bus drivers for the trial of the century.

For a fat student girl with a brushed-over fringe who claims the driver has made her pregnant, and she now sits like a widow on the upper deck, clutching the steel railing in front... like the aggrieved party. The driver has a girlfriend back home. This student girl contends that they met in a club when both were in an inebriated state and that they went back to her's where their passions were consummated. Now is suing for child support and maintenance, sits silent playing the wronged woman.

Trial is to be broadcast live on TV; a relaxed format, a charming middle-aged French man hosts, a panel is referred to, and cameras click and whirr when witnesses take the microphone-laden witness stand.

I step up, relaxed, with my sunglasses, my black suit, my just-extinguished cigarette. I mildly put forward my case, and not unsympathetically, that i had heard from interested parties, the friends of the plaintiff, that the said plaintiff (and here i ask the judge to excuse the lapse into the vernacular) puts it about a bit.

This causes a furore among the assembled press, whose camera lenses constitute the only real arbiter and judge. One outraged woman reporter bitterly fires a question at me: "Weren't you young once? Didn't you go out and have fun when you were her age?" I concede the point, mildly, diffidently: "Of course".

The mythical trial on the doubledecker bus. A show that never got commissioned, that was dropped after the first pilot. But someone has to fight in the corner of the driver, who is incommunicado in Belize.

suburban garden

Then, the suburban summer back garden.

K. comes home from work and asks what i've been doing all day in the garden. "I had visitors. Meg came to visit. She sat with her legs curled under her, occasionally shifting to a cross-legged, hippyish position. Very shy, not saying much, smoking fags. Now and then though she smiled pleasantly. She has a beautiful face, i've often thought, round, modest, full of acceptance. I can see her there in her white top, stubbing out a fag.

But i was nervous and, attracted to Meg as i am, i was anxious to impress her. Restless i paced to and fro in the garden, now and then clutching or circling a washingline post unhappily. In an effort to impress her with my erudition and depth i hummed an old folk air, "Fordell Ball". She eyed me curiously, with an air of toleration, smoking a fag.

But then her brother Jack showed up. He looked immediately suspicious, paranoid, and ill at ease, grimly frowning beneath a large, floppy hat, and with a goatee and straggly black hair. He sat on the bench with an impatient eye on Meg, and, all too soon, had conceitedly whisked her off to another engagement.

But i wasn't lonely long, for, later, Britney came, and similarly sat in the grass with her legs curled beneath her. No makeup and with her hair carelessly tied back, chewing gum, her light voice, with it's rolling southern drawl, passing earthily from mundane reflections on the vagaries of life to naive flashes of humour or joy. In contrast to the silence of Meg, Britney starts up a monologue, and her style is very southern back porch philosophical, interrupted by yawns and platitudes, mundane complaints, or the beeping of her cellphone..."

suburban home

Back to my beloved suburban bedroom. The upstairs front master bedroom with its solid bow windows, so suggestive of calm and rest. You can even climb on the roof, the pinkish tiles, sit there and meditate on life looking out over the rooftops, a very relaxing place to be. Very private too. A place where can be seen, the broiling sun going down behind the far purple mountain top, illuminating briefly its august crags, or diverse weather conditions, glimpses of sun between drifting cloud, flashes of inspiration... and beneath stretch the polite and empty suburbs.

Where in drippy autumns i can invade discarded master bedrooms. It's instructive to measure the proportions of the casements to bolster your sense of ownership. Balance on the radiator, your fingertips clawing at the top of the sturdy windowframe, the trusty double glazing. If you swing it open you can see reflected the familiar sleepy street, but in reverse of course so it looks like someone else's street, someone else's slumbering driveways and chimneys and rainwashed tiles. Then when almost shut the mirrored surface, smooth and clear as a real mirror, shows an unexpected reflection; straight into next door's master bedroom, where the woman of the house is sitting. Outside black night has fallen, making the few lighted suburban bedroom windows blaze like so many jewels in the dark. She's a sturdy suburban brunette, she hunkers down by the bed to read the instructions of some self-assembly desk she's received. I see her thick white brastrap fall from out of her sleeveless top and remain against her plump upper arm, her face concentrating. My hand inches toward my fly.

Until i lose my balance and fall off the radiator.

O autumnal somnolent suburbs, plush-carpeted bedrooms, yellow lights in windows isolated amongst blackness, where the voyeurs stumble...

Boys on the Bus

On the bus, two boys are contending:

"Ye'd huv tae get past me. And that's a hard hing tae dae."

"Pit it this wey: I could batter anybody fae here or Ballingry. The only person i'm no sure aboot is Davey Gow. That's one hard cunt.

The last time i was up in Ballingry i goat jumped. Ah ken who it was eh, it was Davey Gow. We were walkin up the road and they started followin us. Ran after us.

He was pure screamin and greetin. They goat him on the groond and started kickin him in the heed."

"Fuck sake."

(later) "I've got a wee razor in my pocket".

Now talkin about someone else: "He's a fanny anywey. Wee fag. He's a poof".

"We were in the adventure playground, ken by that big wooden hing, an he was bein cheeky eh, so i ran up an smacked him.

He fell on the groond, and he went: "Ye dinnae hiv to bang me, like!" (this in terrified, crying tones) So i smacked him again."

"What age was he then?"

"...primary five..."

(later) "He's quite hard actually. He gave me a brilliant fight the last time."

(The way they talk, their excitement, it's as though violence has taken the place of sex. They never indulge in sextalk with the same level of exhilaration.)