For Tír Chonaill 2

Coming in a great rush from the east

From the purple mountains and the grey ash crags

From the pass by the mountain and the crag by the lake

They are marching.

To the southern sea they race; to the sun on the water.

They take rude ships on the water

And then they disperse into the sunless north

Cross the sea to a boggy land, of trees and ferns

And winter sun.

The damp earth, the sacred oak

Branches transfigure the golden sun.

And near the empty sea they give offerings.

Alas my brothers of the north

You are sorrowful now; and to the utmost west

You have been betrayed.

The hoard of your gold was great in days of old

Your back strong and your spear-arm great

The blood that flowed from your wounds was glorious

You were children of the raven and brothers of the sun.

Your heart was like a golden cup

And your sword struck like the rays of the sun

On the lake.

Like O'Neill cutting off his hand

You could dissemble;

Triumphant roaring soul, knowing no death.

Edinburgh poem part three

If I could only connect the valve of the heart

That courses in fresh blood, splumes and feints into action

With the glorious dip of red, chamber of the dead soul,

Soul unrecognised in post-modernity,

Soul is just a plastic cavity neatly sculpted like TV,

Like electronic memory.

Plastic dreams, manga, silk, vacant glossary

Of untamed desire. All make flesh arrogant,

Make the thought of love unkind.

Visions usurped by television,

Monstered in a cheap canned laugh,

All-accepted by the stunned masses.

Loneliness and its opposite, fulfilment,

Both as cheap as cheap cigarettes

Bought at an all-night garage-

Cheap as a vicious kick,

Meaningless, like smelling disenfectant

In a closing-down video store.

Evening does not bring hope,

The faces of the crowd do not change.

If only I could persuade God

That what I feel is not dead inside me.

Edinburgh poem part two

Air is cold and night is black

Under streetlamps. Makes night candied and future-assured,

Unsure. Black night like liquid, petrol, creeps in the bones,

But this is mere poetry. The sound lurches, dies,

Hip hop boys, sucka MCs, despairing faces, dies,

Or else are laughing emptily in arrogance.

The girls though! Who once carried hope, are warm,

But give no warmth. Beautiful twisted,

And I walk along a road loveless, thought

Disintegrating like a capsule,

Mass and matter, concrete, masonry,

Suffering electric light,

Points the way to- deep valleys of

Fresh despair- anxious like the taste of black blood

Mingled with sexuality.

A nightmare in flesh blooms in the mind.

Edinburgh poem part one

Ye antique spires, ye crowny glades... All grey-green.

That lone black tree, spire upon spire. What makes man make a church

Or an old mosque. all choked in traffic fumes blackened by age,

Innumerable deaths, crime, rain... pissed-on greenery.

Hillocks lead to grey sea rained on

Grey upon green, grey upon green, diffused in liquid light

Leads to more diffused Lothian grey, middleclass roads where

Matrons sleep. Stubble growing through in a shady bathroom.

No uproar on the bottom streets.

Autumn light springing. Light behind grey where... a summer

Sun sinks. (like Eire, more raindrops in light).

Makes me think of crypts, shrouds in the grave, a musty smell

Memories of park afternoons, sour-comical, when I was 10...

Going home to Saturday afternoon TV.

Shadows of old medieval hillocks, where despairing chainmail

Kings have slaughtered, choked, vomited, died,

Ignoble old trees, branches like sorrowful veins.

"Night is not coming"... It comes, disappointed.

Gothic grey.... no escaping grey. It is a pinkish grey

Auburn-shadowed grey, candy tobacco chocolate grey

Blackened like ash of ancient cigars. Wallace?

Industrial west- grey horizon. reminds me of my

Uncles half-drunk, makes me think of an afternoon

In 1982, football at twilight, fumes from automobiles,

Saturdays, Europe, ignoring old churches,

Like dreams of Rembrandt and masonry.

Names, a dream like a gothic spike,

Traffic fumes inhaled like eternity

In carboniferous lungs.

The Butcher Speaks

These are strangling hands

That cannot learn to caress,

But bear away breath in every stroke-

In every pass and passage of their work,

Ineptly damaging wielders of the light.

What's in that light? Compulsive, strange,

My desire to flicker it out,

Becoming the flame,

Licking it up, namelessly

Acquiring a name.

These are clumsy hands

That dare not write desire's name,

But might break down the doors of shame,

Desirelessly desiring fame-

So all the world might know my name:

He that wanted to love, and by loving

Quenched the flame.

Alice's House

Invited for tea up at Alice's house. Alice a 35-year-old, fleshy-armed lady, in threadbare top, a T-shirt of smooth cotton, in green, as if picked up from bedroom floor and flung on.

Getting up the spiralling stone stairway into Alice's flat I immediately perceive she has been crying, her dark hair obscuring her face, grinding her wrist into her cheeks to exterminate the tears. Amongst her snivelling she is making an effort to disguise her grief and even to offer polite formalities.

Alice had been a TV presenter, had sung pop songs, and in my mind her sadness was connected to her fame or partial fame, the whole uncertainty of it. Now she stands in her kitchen in commonplace jeans, and a forced smile.

Up two steps is her long and narrow kitchen, projecting outwards, or so it seems, from the rest of the building. Above the sink and cooker etc. all three walls are glazed.

Out of some curiosity I step up into her kitchen and advance along its central aisle. Till out the farthest window I see row upon row of headstone, some ancient and weathered, some fallen down altogether, others new and shiny. Close by is a big intricate marble Victorian headstone, looking like white chocolate. Alice's kitchen apparently looks out immediately on the cemetery.

I draw back, disgusted by the sight. "Not very good Alice, hardly prime property" I mumble. Imagine it at night! The walking dead clawing at the windows...

Out of one eye I then notice that in a far corner of the cemetery a funeral is even now in progress. Half-fascinated and half-sickened by the thought of a room where you can prepare food while watching the dead being buried, I self-consciously examine the mourners.

A dismal party, all of the family unnaturally thin, clutching damp bouquets in the half-light. Reminded me of that Courbet funeral, but more comic than that, like a party of mourners rendered by Hogarth. Two sturdy, bucolic grave-diggers have leapt from the hole, having thrown up great mounds of fresh soil. I have a feeling a light shower of rain will come, and a lazy wind will stir the scene, bringing with it the reek of dusty funeral garments and fresh turfs...

The real thought that has been in my mind all this time is can I get a ride off this Alice?

memory/paradise

I try and dwell on memory to succour and save me. Pleasant memories. Moments of delicious pleasure, fierce joy, or fresh hope engendered. I'd like to have a machine to stop time, or view like Scrooge unseen familiar moments, over and again, till I tired of them, satiated, glutted with beauty and satisfaction. So I try and do this via memory, corrupted and unreliable as it is, vain and forgetful as I am, rash and embarrassed, foolish, naive, pathetic, I appear to myself in real moments to be all these things, in the pain of real life, the sudden realization.

What I want above all is to preserve some corner of the earth, or at least of my world, as a kind of paradise, red-blazing, vivid, meaningful, receptacle of my passion, and midnight-blue too, peaceable, dreamy, like the streaky seas of Neptune. Pinsharp shall my paradise be, absolutely personal, seen from every angle, subjective-objective.

Say farewell to Art as a concept. Think with the whole heart, like a good closet romantic. A predicament-ridden modern man, fated to sell. The backbook blurb. Any sophistication, folly, or artifice can be merely sold. Cheat the advert, then. Plaincover. Your worst reviews are your best reviews (Warhol). These tangles are not enough, as conclusions. Not enough even as a pose. I must go so much farther in questioning what needs to be questioned. I myself am hardly free from the shopping-impulse, the buying-frenzy,a little petted capitalist-american baby. From one angle I am certainly that. I will be the Picasso of thought, for the mind, like the eye, does not operate on one plane. It is the convenience of narrative novels that events are coherent, that the mind is poised and accurate and consistent, all a pose and an artificial scene, like non-existent perspective avenues in renaissance paintings.

Yasmeen

(a sort of mix n match)

Home from the wars

a beautiful Indian girl steps out from the livingroom

name: Yasmeen

I tell her this yoused to be my friend's flat

Oh (almost a groan) and he didn't leave me a forwarding address?

She says after he tried to come on to me

my mum called him a (expletive) and kicked him out.

Kicked him to the kerb. Toe on buttcheek.

Wie ein hund.

Looking at her I'm not surprised he tried it on with her.

Her full bosom, the depth and roundness of it.

Top of diaphanous material. Pattern like rose blossoms

trapped in glass. Beneath, cup of bra enticingly visible.

Or the straps pinching the flesh of her shoulders.

What I want, standing here in the hall, is to caress her

soft back, between the shoulderblades, feeling where

the braclasp is.

I am a lover of women if nothing else.

On Confession

(What a pretty pass we have come to. Imagine if all over the world great lamentations took place. for the burning of the fire. On the grassland.)

Before you confessed you were given to study little booklets. You'd go into the classroom and sit at desks in silence, the leaflets having been distributed. They were very old, frayed, on greenish card like parchment. Their function was to list the sins to which it was proper or appropriate to confess. The range of sins one could confess to was surprisingly wide and varied. It sometimes seemed to me that almost anything, thought, word, or deed, could be considered a kind of transgression.

We'd sit there in the classroom, each in silent contemplation of his leaflet. I'd try and pick a few things from the leaflet, something not too bad or fairly neutral-sounding, to repeat in the confessional box. I'd admit to "selfishness" a lot, a non-specific transgression but one which I had surely indulged in over the previous months. The alleged selfishness and greed would be more effective if mentioned in relation to one's siblings. One could confess to bad language with a fairly clear conscience.

I often had to wrack my brains to think of something to confess to. It would seem churlish and ungrateful to roll into the confessional box and claim complete innocence. The process was completely artificial. I felt silly, embarrassed, perplexed.

Florida

Florida- state of sunshine. State of swamps, angst, hate and love. Grass banks and green verges and rolling lawns of golf. Fronds and palms. After twelve the sun after its zenith begins to think of home and rolling westward sends down blazing beams to the white-trousered golfers, who take no notice.

Florida of retirement homes crocodiles Cubans and Crockett and Stubbs white-jacketed. Impersonal millionaire homes. And Fug, an Asian boy with prominent teeth and rich parents, went on holiday to Florida and sent us back a cliché postcard of girl in bikini. "Wish You Were Here".

The kind of afternoon when in Florida shadows of flags are seen on green grass of golf lawns and the thwack of a ball is heard.

Sunlight in holiday homes- reminds me of old holidays in theme parks. Alton Towers with its rides, its discontented English families, harassed at wooden picnic tables in safari parks. We sit nearby on an unfurled mat, eating boiled eggs.

Mood is post-entertainment, afternoon, aftermath, the brass band has packed up and called it a day.

And wouldn't you know it those English families always leave litter behind, a white packet motionless on the grass, an abandoned straw, child-suck'd, crushed.

A lazy and agreeable impression or mood: post-holiday themepark. The sun westing. Isn't it about time we were getting home? And leaving litter behind, drifting white specks in the grass.

I am in the pagoda-bandstand. A marquee where the oompah bands of Oktoberfest come to play n quaff mugs of frothy beer.

The Marquee of stained and fragrant wood, immeasurably ancient, railings constructed of Flintstone logs...

...and Modern Love

And Modern Love degraded into popsong,

And Modern Love in teenage magazine problempage

Love for the hunk and the babe

Not for anyone else.

Love is tight T-shirt Love is short skirt

Love is toned muscles Love is blue eyes

For Love must be kept dumb and harmless

In the Top 40 by shiny videos

Love only for the unquestioning norm

Love only for boys and girls who accept every stereotype

Jump on every bandwagon

Obey every command

And their reward shall be:

Bubblegum wrapper disposable love

Cereal package primary-coloured love

Marketable thirty second advert love

Harmless twocent soap opera love,

Love for the anime girl in videogame,

Love for the pop idol on bedroom wall,

Love for anonymous robot actress,

Love unreturned from endless video screens.

Love sold to the highest bidder every night on primetime TV,

Love falsified and distorted on every page of glossy maagzine.

Modern Beauty

Modern Beauty on supermodel catwalk

Modern Beauty prostituted for dollar sign

Cupid crucified on Valentine's Day

In the gaudy window display.

Beauty sold to technology

For the price of a few glossy magazines

For the price of television static

For the price of safe corporate cosmetics

In the name of peergroup glamour

In the name of fifteen seconds of fame

In the name of pretending to be happy on TV

Or pretending to be alive in the marketplace.

To sell and be sold, like shampoos, hairgloss,

Lipsticks, wonderbras, happiness marketed quickly in a soundbite.

Beauty denied in the glutonous laughter of models,

Beauty denied by white-toothed overperfection,

Beauty negated by Barbie Doll.

Beauty was never nailvarnish or expensive perfume,

Beauty was never the plastic lackey of money,

Beauty is not in the heart of the corporation.

Burglary 3

What else? Funerals for the WW2 generation, weddings for the people in their 30's. births deaths & marriages. These events are the principal social outings for maiden aunts, a professional wedding- and funeral attender.

Or the aunt who is a frowsy survivor of divorce and world-weariness, troublesome kids all grown up now. Depression, self-harming. for the remnants of the working class. They take out their fury on each other.

the five day working week & two day weekend. whose idea? "nugatory paradise of weekends". the dreary Sunday evening feeling, one of the worst things in creation. What is the consensus? Friday and Saturday nights as drinking time. "The feast of St. Monday".

Open letter to the soap-opera watching housewife. Primary-coloured weekly TV guide, open on the couch. Endless, insanely complicated soap operas and drama serials. as escape from and alternative to real life. Proletarian female demographic. As well as housebound pensioners.

Yes, apathy. "democracy" as a very strong and effective cover for totalitarianism encourages apathy. Who's the hidden enemy in Britain today? You knew where you were with the top-hatted factory owner. The upper crust, to be seen at epsom and ascot. The working man in his bunnet at the shipyard.

Later, class fluidity. The trendy working-class millionaire. A media-saturated world. TV chefs, footballers, popstars, five-minute reality TV celebs. ultra-short term celebrity. generations of complete cynicism and godlessness.

The celeb career of a few months. Heat magazine. brief notoriety. brief fixation on ephemeral nonentities. Televised auditions for popsingers. Ideal: a clean, healthy-living, opinion-less popstar, fully controllable.

What do they want? The popsinger as product. The marketable teen. Feverish commodification of the individual. The whole process as completely demystified and in itself commodified. cynical, knowing little girls, eager above all to market themselves.

Take a look at the position of the "bland pop-singer". Product of the pop factory. A production-line of marketable teens. safe, non-controversial opinions. This is for the pre-teenage audience.

De-mystification of the whole process: humiliations at auditions as entertainment. Cruel put-downs n all. A whole generation of desperate-for-fame young people. You can sometimes palpably feel their dreams being crushed. Meanwhile, big profits for the record companies. Before the bandwagon grinds to a halt...

Current state of the left: old-fashioned trade unionism first of all. The laughable morning star: "the comrade moved a motion in favour of his fellow brothers...". The outmoded trots losing ground. New Labour: a centralist party. Their aim from the start: to become an electable party. they are adaptive. post-socialist. Imagine a post-political world.

"I am so happy to finally discover the free-market system" Latvian "glamour model".

It seems though that the same thing is written above the door, it still says "make profits for us". Same old British class system, slightly modified.