My Gran's House 2

Hung in the hall by the stairs, and on the wall ascending the stairs were pictures. 

There there was a framed picture of the Turin shroud. I always found it fascinating and slightly disturbing, an inexplicable image, one I didn't understand. The incomprehensible burn-like marks.

Three-quarters of the way up the stairs was a shallow landing where stood a large plaster Sacred Heart Christ, gesturing to his heart which stood outside his chest, with an appropriate sorrowful-compassionate look on his face. 

On the back wall, high up, somehow ominous and frightening, stood a huge framed print of the Declaration of Arbroath, gloomy there among the shadows. The yellowed tattered ribbons of parchment, the gouts of sealing-wax, frightened me more than the Turin shroud and the plaster Jesus. 

The upstairs of the house scared me somehow. I fancied that the Jesus statue followed me with his eyes. It was gloomy and dark up there, and there was a hatch to the loft, where my brother told me that a mad woman lived, and I believed him.

Up there were several bedrooms... My gran and papa's room: It was completely dark and dominated by a huge bed. Around the walls were cupboards. Hardly any light seemed to filter in. On top of the cupboards were old and fragile stuff, an ancient moth-eaten fox stole, a hat box, things that seemed arcane and ancient to me. 

I began to entertain the notion that the upstairs hall was haunted. I thought about it every time I went up there, to use the bathroom, that smelled of green soap. I was worried that when I opened the bathroom door the ghost would be standing there in the hall. It was the ghost of a woman. I knew this idea was irrational and yet it obsessed me. I would hesitate a long time before opening the door. 

She looked like the Mona Lisa, this woman-ghost, like a woman in a painting. She had a kind, glowing face. But I was afraid of her. 

My Gran's House 1

At the other side of the village was my gran and papa's house. To get to it, you'd go through a swing park, a wide grassy area with a set of swings in it. 

It was a house on the corner, in a quiet little street called Forth Gardens. 

There was a narrow door, and on the door, to the left, was a small door knocker in the shape of a piper. The little metal bagpiper. 

You'd go in, into the hall. The smell: it smelled old and comforting. 

To the left were the stairs, carpeted with faded orange carpet. On the stairs, the dog, Ben, would often sit. He was an English sheepdog, and grew dull-witted in later years, and would lie on the stairs with his head propped between the bannisters, staring at himself in the hall-mirror opposite. He had a warm, comforting dog-smell.

In the front of the house there was a box-room, where odds and ends were kept, and which sometimes contained a spare bed, where me and my brother would sleep if we were staying over. 

We would rather have gone home, where conditions were freer, but sometimes, circumstances were such that we had to stay. 

There was also a cupboard next to the box-room, which contained an old leather flying-helmet from World War II. The atmosphere of World War II pervaded the house. One almost felt that one was in World War II, filtered through the seventies. 

The things in that box-room: a Ray Charles vinyl album, with Ray in a loveheart on the cover. Sitting on the bed, reading a Beano comic library. Staying there with my brother, one night. 

He got the bed and I was put up in a camp-bed. My gran gave me a boy's book of saints to read. I took it all very seriously. My brother mocking me from his bed. The idea of being pious and reading a book of saints was funny to him. Him in his bed, looking at me darkly.

I also had a big book of mythology to read. It was very seventies, with painted illustrations. I read all of it, though much of it was strange to me. Daedalus and Icarus, the huge Minotaur dead, the face of Humbabu in Gilgamesh, based on one of those grinning Mesopotamian masks, the strange Finnish myths.... I possibly liked the Greek epics the best. 

The next room after the box-room was the livingroom. On the left was a fireplace, and above it hung a large print of Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross. Christ hung there transfixed, suspended, floating. 

On the right was a couch, old and comfortable, and over by the fireplace was the soft chair where my gran typically sat. On the opposite side of the fireplace was a big wooden television, and another easy chair. 

In the corner was a window looking out on the front garden, and next to it, a glass sideboard or cabinet containing plates and so on. The smell of the dark wood of which it was made. 

On the mantelpiece and surrounding it were various trinkets, a gilt griffin of some kind, perhaps an ornamental candle-stick holder, and, near where my gran sat, a wooden plaque on the wall enscribed with a prayer called St. Patrick's Breastplate.

All of this was daunting. It was unpleasantly old, but very comfortable and homely. 

At the back of the lvingroom was a dining table, with wooden chairs. The smell of the wood out of which they were made. Their velvety seats. Here my papa would sit and smoke his pipe, or drink his lemon tea. The lemon on the saucer next to the cup. 

There was a wooden serving-hatch in the wall which connected with the kitchen through the wall. 

The smell of: carpets, and cleaning products, and soap, and wood. The smell of a leather flying helmet from World War II. The coppery smell of that gilt griffin. The smell of something unutterably fragrant and ancient. 

In the top-right corner was a sort of tall cabinet, on top of which was perched a sort of Japanese doll. This tall dark corner-cabinet seemed incredibly high to me, and the Japanese figure atop it seemed incredibly ancient. It sat among voluminous folds, in its dark, elaborate kimono, smiling to itself, its china face looking out over the room vacantly. It was female, though.

It, too, had a smell. On rare occasions it was taken down for us and we were allowed to touch it. It was like handling a museum-object. The smell of ancient dust from the thick, dark folds of the kimono, whose endless layers you could attempt to peel back to find a frail china body inside, swathed in rough material like a mummy. I was frightened of it but I wanted to conquer my fear of it through handling it. 

In the hall, orange-pattern-carpeted, there was a niche under the stairs where the telephone was kept, which was of the old dial-kind, and beige, and there also were dark bookshelves and the big family Bible. It was a King James Bible, enormous and full of old-paper smell, I think illustrated with prints, and thumb indexed at the edge. The shallow, fragrant depressions along the edge, like the keys of a church organ, the leather of the binding like its dark wood, like the dark wood of a sacristy, full of mystery, slightly gloomy and repellent. 

You could stand in that dark alcove under the stairs. Among those shelves were my papa's books, a collection of bound volumes of Walter Scott. There were one or two John Le Carre papebacks, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, very redolent of the Cold War. A spare pair of glasses, thick and brown-legged. An old grey diary from 1969, with scribbled notes in it, and at the back, a calendar. 

It was World War II again there, it was the Cold War. On nights when we'd get to stay up late, the whole romance of it seemed to come to life again there among the shelves. My papa's old letters, his flying instruction booklet, his pamphlets of aeroplane identification full of diagrams of Messerschmits, now yellowed and useless, and his fussy spidery hand, scribbled in the margins of Latin books he bought second hand. I understood it all somehow, I understood the war, and everything subsequent to it, and it seemed to me to be still present there, something unspeakable and romantic and sad. 

Hymn Book

The hymn book had a blue-patterned cover and was called Celebration Hymnal. The hymns sung were always the same ones. We all knew more or less where to turn. We'd also sing the same hymns at school. 

"Sing Hosanna, to the King of Kings" "Spirit of God". I'd glance at adjacent hymns in the book, and wonder about them. There were some that were never sung, or ever mentioned. There were negro spirituals, an odd assortment, they seemed almost comical next to the Victorian hymns. The odd juxtaposition. 

On the other page from some hymn we sung a lot was a Caribbean hymn which began: "God looked down from his window in the sky, he said "I created man, but I can't remember why". I always looked at it, read it over, wondered about it. I pictured it literally: A cartoon God with a window set in a bank of clouds, peering through it. 

"Spirit of God" was a hymn written by nuns, or perhaps just by one nun. For some unaccountable reason it frightened me. For some reason the final verse of it was never sung. I imagined that that final verse had a curse upon it, and I dwelt upon this idea and it began to obsess me. I thought that that verse was evil somehow, and that was why it could never be sung. I imagined the stern, penitent nuns who had written it, immeasurably old, in their grey habits. The hymn seemed to me to be written in stone, with the chill of death upon it, and to be redolent of something medieval, something ancient. There was one line of the unsung verse which really worried me:

"I saw the scar of a year that lay dying,

Heard the lament of a lone whip-poorwhill".

The imagery. It frightened me. I imagined it as something inexplicably ancient, something from Roman times, something from the dawn of Christianity. That line, in the forbidden last verse, which was never sung, as well as its authorship by nuns, led me to suppose that the hymn had uncanny powers. I had an especially strong dislike of it, and yet it impressed me as wonderfully significant, even as wildly beautiful, above all as an expression of something fundamentally true:

"Blow, blow, blow till I be

But breath of the spirit moving in me". 

Even the melody seemed profound, expression of an ancient and austere Christianity, profoundly serious and spiritually clear, like the leaden skies, the wind-strewn heath, the cold waters. 

Church

The pathways, and the roads.

The summers, the fences, the houses where the old ladies lived.

The road that went down into the wood. 

The church; it was far off among the woods. You'd have to be driven there, go down a road, under a bridge, through the ancient medieval wood. 

That was a mysterious trip. That road seemed a priestly road, and it reminded me of the priest. Sometimes we'd play around there, one time we were on that bridge, throwing things down on the empty road. All around was the wood. It seemed half-neglected, half-abandoned, medieval and yet industrial. There would be found wreckage which was industrial wreckage, or a patch of burnt ground. 

The trees clustered around the dark road, overhung it. 

You'd be driven down this road, and eventually you'd come to the church, on the right side, in the middle of this nowhere, standing on a slight green rise, denuded of trees, white, and clean, sometimes startlingly white in the sun, and shaped, it seemed to me, like a rocket ship, vertical lines pointing upward. 

There was a curving gravel path that led up to it. 

Inside it had a powerful, yet subtle smell. It was like dust, it was like polished stone. By the door were stone fonts full of the cold holy water, wherein you'd dip your fingers. 

The smell of the church: it was an incense smell, a dismal, holy smell, an ancient smell, a serious smell. It spoke to me somehow of years of suffering, centuries of pedantic and meticulous faith, millennia of mysterious labours. Genuflecting awkwardly and taking your place in the bright wooden pews, the glossy modern pews, with their padded green seats, that smell would be in your nostrils. It was the smell of the holy water in the stone fonts, and it was an incense smell, and it was the smell of the ashes on Ash Wednesday, and it was the smell of the emblazoned altarcloth, and the wooden board announcing the hymn numbers, and the plaster statues. 

It smelt almost like Christmas, almost like tinsel, but much more serious and grim, much more concentrated and monkish. 

The altarcloth, emblazoned with a chi-rho. The mysterious back parts of the church. The wooden pictures. The statue of the Virgin. The upper galleries of the church, with stairs leading up, where it was  never permitted to go. 

I hated going to church. It bored me horribly. Try as I might, I could not concentrate on the words of the priest. There would be an interminable homily, which I could pay no attention to. I'd resolve to listen this time, and follow for a minute or two, as he'd pick a Bible verse and expound upon it, but my attention would always fade away and wander around the building. I'd look at the wooden board with the Latin numbers on it, at the wooden pictures, at the windows, at a patch of masonry, and I'd wonder about the Middle Ages, about the monks, about the martyrs, about the sufferings of the saints, and be impressed and repelled by it all. 

It seemed to stretch on for an infinite amount of time. I followed mechanically the responses and went through the required motions, always feeling awkward. Many times I committed faux pas through inattention, and knelt at the wrong time, on the hard wooden frames of the pews which swung down, or fumbled with the hymn book and couldn't locate the hymn. 

The priest, Father McNay, had an odd voice, he recited the Mass like a poet intoning verse. 

"He took the bread, gave it to his dis-IPLES AND said.... TAKE THIS allof youand eat it... for this is my body, which will be given up for you. DO THIS, in memory of me".

The repetitions and the atmosphere, impressed me and moved me, but something about it would irritate me. Perhaps it was the glum coughs of the parishioners, the squaling baby in the back row, the depressing hymn book. The chanting voices, repeating, over and over again, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again"... The voices of earnest aunts and old ladies, in unison, as though reasurring themselves. 

"Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world". The imagery frightened me slightly, and I didn't understand it. I knew only that it was old, and significant, emblematic and allegorical, and that it was to be taken seriously. 

The Christ invoked was a suffering Christ, a Christ of the Passion, a serious Christ. Somehow I understood his suffering very well, understood the blood, and I dreamed in my bored moments of Christ himself there at the altar, a tortured Christ among the woods, mounting his rack, and the smell of the cold water in the stone font, and the polished stone, and the masonry, was like the smell of his Blood. This Christ was a Northern Renaissance Christ, emaciated and haggard, with a pragmatic ladder leaning on his cross, and under a leaden sky. In such a place, in a church near the woods, in a clearing of its own, by a dark road, he could still be conjured up, and primitive voices could still intone his name, all the iconoclasms and battles had after all not eradicated his enormous, theatrical, significant suffering, had not after all stemmed the blood that poured down his face. 

I got so bored, lost in the interminable Mass, that I lapsed into fantasies, and, in an agony of faith brought on by enduring the Mass, attempted to conjure up Christ himself, to see him. I used to imagine him, by the altar, mounting his cross, spotlit among the shadows, the drips of blood marking his face clearly, just as if he was a plaster statue. The Mass stretched on so endlessly that finally all I could prompt myself to do was imperfectly match my suffering to his, to this Christ who was supposed to be present in the Mass. 

The Hostage 1 (version)

It was an autumn afternoon when the high school building was shut down. Everything was done quietly, almost secretly, as the wet leaves drooped from nearby trees, and slight whisks of wind stirred them up into piles.
The school itself was grey, solemn, with dark windows and a fearful, forbidding air. The hostages were grouped together in a high room, overlooking a grim parade-ground. The room had formerly been utilised as a headmaster's study, and was filled with collegiate accoutrements, rather dusty and old-fashioned in the dimness of the room. There was a mortar-board, an old globe beside bookshelves crammed with leather-bound volumes. The window was of a handsome old construction, rusted-shut long before. In that room one had the feeling that something beautiful had once taken place there, looking from the windows had once been a joy, you could gaze on a bright emerald cricket lawn bathed in glorious sunlight, and wet with dew.
Beyond the window you could see the crumbling granite cornices and cupolas of this neglected building.
Incongruously, though, there was also a large, old-fashioned kind of double bed in the room, with crisp linen and a heavy wrought-iron bedstead, which took up a lot of space so that the people in the room had to manoeuvre around it uncomfortably. Assembled in this brown, dusty room were perhaps a dozen people, all of them frightened out of their wits, for they were being held hostage. All of them were confused and sweating, afraid for their lives.  

When will we Drink the New Wine?

When will we drink the new wine,
Promised to us in olden time,
And when shall the honoured bells sound,
With new-resplendent chime.
And when will the gates that we laboured to build
Be opened for us that endlessly tilled
The unforgiving ground?

When we will we dwell in the palaces fair
That were built on the backs of our sorrows and care,
And when shall we glimpse the wondrous things
Which are imprisoned there?
We who trod the grapes and tended the vine,
When will we drink the new wine?

Beside the Shore

Beside the shore. A battle is taking place.
It is the Stone Age.
We have attacked a rival group and slain a great many of them by the shore. Piled up beside a rocky outctop in the surf is a pile of bodies.
I notice a severed head, grey and skeletal. I begin to throw largish lumps of rock at it from a little distance, squatting there in the sand.
One of the enemy group is left alive. As I continue to throw rocks at the head, I think to myself that it will eventually be destroyed, perhaps one more rock will reduce it to pulp, like a rotten fruit.

The remaining enemy is struggling among the small waves breaking over the sand, floundering. Perhaps he is to be taken alive. Before anyone can stop him though, one of our party mounts the rocky outcrop and heaves onto the enemy a large, smooth slab of pink sandstone which crushes him and pins him down where he struggles, coughing and drowning.
His foetal position in the water. Suffocation.

The people are having a party

The people are having a party... they elect a leader. The leader begins to abuse his position, for he is marked as "different". All the leaders congregate together and begin to talk among themselves. They see themselves as separate, and are seen as such by the other people.
Over time it degenerates into a "profession". The people cease to decide things for themselves, instead things are decided for them by a professional caste. How to deal with this problem? Where does the power lie? With the people, who originally bestowed power, or with the professional caste, who embody it? What in fact, was the process of transmission, whereby the power was bestowed, granted, and how was it wielded and used? Was it simply stolen by a sort of mafia, using force?
An elite decided to embody power in themselves. They recognised however that the other people would protest strongly or even revolt against this set-up if it was too apparent that the power was so one-sided. They came up with an elaborate solution. They developed, over time, ridiculous rituals to solemnize and lend credence to their authority.
I have always had a problem with Europe and its history because it is riddled with the concept of hierarchy. Which has always seemed to me to have something wrong with it. A truly modern person cannot accept it, it seems wrong, not just unfair but incorrect. Deference to superiors, actual or cosmic...
The gods were imaginary, mental superiors, an abstract hierarchy to complement the actual hierarchy, to bolster and support it. The advent of God merely strengthened this tendency, the diverse gods with their diverse attributes reconstituted in the one monarchical deity, supplied with all their power... As though Zeus had conquered or slain all the other gods, and demanded their obeisance, the servile principle magnified... We bow the knee not variously but as one and to one principle, one authority: the abstract father as higher concomitant to the actual father, the One God monotonously declaiming in turn to Jews, Greeks and Arabs.
The question of redemption was raised:
"Why does God carry out this extraordinary, complicated procedure, making himself his own son incarnate as a man, dying and being resurrected, ascending to heaven, all in order to secure the salvation of mankind? Why not simply enact their salvation, will it, without this preamble?"
The answer:
"The Messiah they spoke about was the people themselves: They suffered and died, they were sacrificed, they were reborn, they will come to resurrect their own dead, carry out a final judgement and establish a kingdom of heaven on earth. They are the anointed ones, the flesh of Christ resurrected in the mass. The father, the son, the holy spirit, all embodied in the people themselves".

Clutter

Clutter like dark leaves, or plastic moulding,
Or leather balls painted fragrant pink,
Bright varnish, glossy emulsion, scarlet lips.
Clutter like silken paper, fast photography,
Plastic masks, fragrance of dildos and boxing gloves,
Bleak lettering, garish type, and clutter of keyboards,
Clutter upon clutter.
Clutter everywhere, clutter is iron railings, cheap overcoats,
Cigar-butts, blue cars, broken machines.
And clutter is a symptom of the broken machine.
Of perfume, of silk, of dribbling nose, of the permanence
Of manly shavings and afterdaubings,
Either that or the slobbing belly under chaffing lycra,
The ozone stiffness, the video screen, and mascara hatred,
And tearing grey, and fashion crucified like string.
Formed from steel into a nine, a cynical, inhuman nine,
That boxed-in glamour puppets sing in cages,
Pressed like silk in fashion tombs of sex.
Clutter of sex, of flattened bellies, blazing eyes,
A solid, definite splat of ghostly semen,
A meaningless aim achieved.
Clutter of Love laughed at by red-faced ghosts, sunburned
By greed and fashion's lust, spurn the earth and grin
Like death in stained-glass window hate.
Laughing like clutter.

Star of Hope

As I stare at the wreckage of my life,

The fractured nights and days of strife,

The promises broken into frozen parts,

And love that yearns in fits and starts-

Lists of ambition dead as stone,

Unseemly dreams uncouthly blown,

And over all a clinging swathe

Of loneliness and bitter waste...

I see arise, as from afar

The figure of a fiery star,

That from this morass rises free

And clothes itself in seeming purity.

And that I call a hellish paradise

Is where this Star of Hope has fullest life.

The star of acid, star of cutting spite!

Whose hatred will illuminate my night-

And sorrow raised to such a pitch shall be

The friend of subtlest sanctity-

The star of joy and dull despair

Enmixed, can burn full bright and fair

Enough to burn the eyes of they

That cherish all the fullest day.

No, I have hidden from the sun,

And if that night is to be borne,

A Star of Hope must lighten me;

Like to the light that shepherds watch,

From Christmas to Epiphany.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.
What we formerly cast down as tyranny we resurrect, even exalt, out of a sort of cheap nostalgia for the blandness of safety. The flag of surrender is the flag of your banality.
Even the voice of heaven would not move you, nor the chants of the free nations moving under clean skies, never cursing life as you are bound to do.
Slaves, they dared to call us.

Your principles are a hollow bell struck without feeling.
We who adhere to a total revolution, a rebellion of the spirit, the affirmation of the third millennium, need no justifications.

Side effects

From a tenement flat dancing mardi gras girls out on the corner. As seen in times square. It's a corner installation, to tempt the passers-by into the show, hand out flyers. More often it puts the pedestrians off, alienates them, they look confused. An enforced feeling of festivity in the mardi gras girl who takes up her stance on the corner, her shift commencing. The Burlesque Dance. Arching her back she flings out her arms the glitter like sweat on her bare skin, her smallish breasts pushed out.
Unable to come. The drain that comes from the cock, from the base of the balls, from the bladder, the liquid waste products dispensed with; the small relief, exquisite and spreading like an opium haze, relaxes the muscles. So when you are unable to come you are unable to relax.
Meanwhile the hoped-for orgasm relief becomes an impossible-to-reach pinnacle, a spice that has lost its appeal; the relief lasts a second, the point at which the peak is reached is no longer sharp but has become dulled through over-familiarity, and the cum is followed by a white noise opium numbness, a void flooded by a vast metaphysical question without an answer.

The Flat

I have taken ownership of a flat in some distant part of town.
I visit there at dusk expecting to find the place empty. No place I have ever seen before. It's up a flight of steps, large, white, cubish walls, floor-plan is vaguely L-shaped. A feeling of repose or desolation. Reminds me of a bunker or an Arab sort of house. Worse, it has an atmosphere of Oakley.
Inside the rooms are dark. I come to a room at the back, to my left. In here is a bedroom which I want to enter, if only to walk around it, get the feel of it, have the pleasure of solitude in a backroom in a distant flat. The feeling being: No-one knows I'm here, repose, reflection...
Inside are a few beds with piles of cheap unruly blankets thrown carelessly over them. Again, the Oakley atmosphere of bareness and desolation. I see though that in the shadows a figure is lying asleep, at full stretch under the ragged blankets. It's Joe, who it seems has beaten me to it, come hours earlier with a similar intent and stolen my refuge of reflection, repose, and thought...
I close the door softly and head for the adjoining back door. I press the handle softly and the latch gives way. Door is of light white-painted wood. A flimsy back door and there are no keys to lock it.
I emerge onto the back green, strangely soft and reflective. Nearby a dank closemouth. I see, very realistic, the opposite end of the stairwell, choked with litter, the neglected grass. My breath comes out in smoke.
The feeling is merely of reflection, not sadness or hope. I reflect that now I can go to mum's but soon all that may be over... My place may as well be here. No particular bad feelings associated with this. Contemplative, philosophic. No despair.
The painful feeling though is one of distance, an empty space between me and the centre. And then, the crumbling blank-white interior walls.

Florida 2

O Florida! You are florid indeed, but I want no swamps, no humidity, no poison flowers. I only want green lawns and golf clubs in summer, sun-slanted hills clad in endless green scarcely different from old Eire. Great tropics, slants and the drip-drop of plants, another Antipodes.
The green lawns, the smooth hills. Pastoral golf-courses where old men play, in clean polo shirts and grim gopher expression.
O Florida, naked peninsula, sorrow of Spaniards, hothouse of the world, bottleneck, human-ruined Paradise! Who dares slant its sun across you from on high, marking the linebacks, punishing alligators, in a mild and commonplace day? And I wish I could escape into the hills, the swamps, the trees, go forth there and make great loves in the fenlands and forest, the surf and sunshine.

I was attached to a suburban golf club. It was a reputable place, mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so I felt rather out of place, being neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant, and only incidentally caucasoid. Perhaps I should explain myself: I am a hipster, a college boy, a gen x phantom of cigarettes and T-shirts. I like sneakers, fagpackets, and am lackadaisical about my hairdos. I frequently have a goatee in the style of Butch Vig, and a comparable expression of boredom. My hair at times grows scraggily long, at which times I push it behind my ears. I am the "slacker" but am too cool to call myself any such thing. I only mumble cursewords in answer to any queries about my job description. I am far too postmodern to have subcultural affiliations. But I have a nice line in ironic nostalgia.

How then did I come to be in this golf course cum park, this Flordia concourse, sun-splashed and genteel? I'm not gonna tell you. It's not important to the fundamentals of the story. Perhaps you may perceive, dear readers, gentlemen and ladies, that I myself do not know the reason.

Cemetery Nightmare

Nightmare: In the oldest part of the cemetery reading the stones. I notice, as in real life, many of them refer directly to resurrection ("When I Rise" etc.). In the ivy'd stone wall marking off the old section is a large gap of "window". I puzzle about the function of this.
Peering inside I notice naive statuettes placed in a sort of shrine, but very neglected and decayed. One seems to represent the conventional Death the Reaper, cloaked, with a skeletal jury of his peers. It seems I am indicted and condemned and must give an account of myself to this court.
Now I am half-conscious and become aware of the darkness and silence of my room, in which I can see the skull face of Death as a hanging judge. How Do I Plead?
Wake up with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and fear.

Seasonal Acrostics

So is come the signal of the year;
Proper is our aestival repose-
Round the tow'ring minarets we hear
In the silent bowers of the rose,
Now and then, quite gladly, without fear,
Glowing notes of birdsong in the boughs.

Soon is reached the apex of the day-
Unknown to those who dwell in northern cold,
Memorie'd, significant, honourable, and gay,
Most reverent, ephemeral, and bold,
E'er fragrant, clearing brazen clouds away:
Resplendent weather, florid to behold.

Ah, me! That lion days should pass away
Undreamt of by a crueller age,
Till drifts of dreaming crops betray
Unlooked for signs of silent rage:
Meant in the coming struggle of the day,
Not frowned on by the cunning sage.

When, o, at last, the perfidition comes,
In cruel-bound climes, enamel-cast,
No pow'r stern can beat its brazen drums,
To stem the grimy vengeance of the blast:
Even the joyful fowls are waxen dumb,
Roughly the fulsome branches are downcast.

Lucky is he that sees the beast

Lucky is he that sees the beast
Unknown to most of them that feel-
Celestial rapprochements cease;
Yearly the triumphal arches wheel,
Round vernal chimes the spirits climb
Obversely glooming in retreat;
Bearing overland proud approaching time
Born in oppressive aestival heat-
I dream of love, a commonweal
Emerging like a sensuous feast.

"Done is a battle on the dragon black":
Every schoolboy knows the score:
At noontide the shadowy dragon draws back,
Till dawn comes he prevails no more-
Hatred in every breath he will not lack.
Love, breath'd in response, becomes a trigger
Or motivates responses still obscure-
Verily, the promised spring set to transfigure,
Eternally renewing each renewer.

He is on a bus

- He is on a bus. All the other seats are occupied.
He is riding on a bus somewhere. It is a long journey.
He sleeps. S. is beside him. He can hear her breathing, feel her heartbeat.
The bus runs on through the night. He is in the aisle seat, with S. on his right. It is dark.
The nearby seats are occupied by blonde, young teens.
At one point the seat beside him is empty and he lies back snoozing on both seats.
During the night he hears about a plane that has been shot down.

- Images: The long aisle of the bus in the dark.
The floor of the bus. The blonde young kids chattering.
The ghost of the crashed plane, like a cinder, through the floor of the plane.

Going Along The Road

Going along the road... off to "college"...

I reach at the junction a confluence of lights. Neon glow, etc.
Rain-wet.

An evening class. At say five o'clock I depart into the dusk.
I have with me my bag. I have also brought my duvet with me, an amorphous mass slung on top of the bag.

Off to the western sector of the town, near a backstreet chipshop, before the suburbs peter out into motorways, unlit, near brownbrick streets.

At the "bus stop". How am I to get this cumbersome duvet on the bus. Then again I can't leave it here on the sidewalk.
Banal and self-conscious.

I walk back along Whaleboat Road. Nearing the garage... A busy road, constant streams of traffic.

I see walking before me along the pavement a girl.

Metropolis 9 (conclusion)

Thought to say the truth I begin to disremember the details of that movie, the Neverending-Metropolis movie. It was a long time ago now, or at least it seems so. Like pallid scenes from an unfashionable movie seen five years ago. Was there ever a city where wishes came true, or is that just my conceit, an awkward spin I put on it? Was there a director, and, more importantly, was he anything like I remember him? And, the Neverending Movie? Surely it's an absurdity to even conceive of such a thing, a grand folly. Impossible to make a film about every event that ever happened!  Yet how wonderful if it were true. That scene with the heavy metal band trashing the hotel room, now did that occur, or was it remembered from some other movie or constructed from alternate scenes by my errant mind. My mind which is always dragged back to the wish-city, the Metropolis...
I got so puzzled about it all that I went back to the local cinema. A dirty-grey facade on a little-frequent street, scene of a million dispersed dreams. The usherette seemed unenthusiastic about my excited queries, but showed me wearily up some plush-scarlet steps to a glossy-white door.
Inside was a comfortable brightly-lit office space. Perhaps some sort of show-room for the public. A set of plexi-glass windows up at one end. Rounded corners, soft carpet, unobtrusive decoration, friendly to the eye. Dominant colour is an aqua-blue suggestive of a neutral, compliant efficiency. From out of nowhere looms the salesman. Neat little moustache, telephone voice, kindly-efficient eyes, extremely polite but not in the least indulgent. The merest formality of toadying and "customer is always right" concealing an enormous blank wall of indifference. Wearing a white tuxedo so shiny-pristine it's an offence to the eyes.
"Can I help you sir?". I start to mumble about do you remember old movies from five or more years ago. "Yes sir, I quite understand. Please say no more." He leads me gently but firmly to one side of the room where there is a low magazine rack covered in glossy leaflets. I try to get out an objection, but am interrupted by: "Yes sir, yes sir, quite so sir. If I could just draw your attention to our brochures?" "But..." "Thanks so much. I think you'll find you will be satisfied with our selection".
He takes a selection of these glossy brochures and fans them out skilfully on the big desk. A myriad of colours. Candy for the eye. The guy has obviously got his spiel all worked out and is allowing nothing to spoil it. Like a valet whose job is to stand around in a bathroom seeking tips. Using his automaton-like obsequiousness to express contempt. Interrupting with his large, insincere mouth: "Thankyou sir. Quite so, sir. There's really no need to explain. I feel sure our selection will be of interest to you Sir". Like a malfunctioning robot.
These glossy brochures of his are labelled Forthcoming Attractions. Not what I'm after at all. He is quite intent on selling me some new variant on my warped desire. Like flipping the channel. A New Season of Programming. It seems that my Metropolis or Wish-city was only one of these old fantasies lost among these glossy leaflets, the Upcoming Attractions drowning it out with the fanfare of their newness, with their blaring cheapness.
I guess I entered the wrong room... I'm being sold the holiday-life insurance-virtual wish machine-videogame package when what I wanted was the straight-hit-to-the-vein nostalgia trip, clear and even... though I hesitate to use the word... "authentic".

Metropolis 8

The latest scene to be shot takes place in a large cinder block industrial-grey hotel. Camera-spectator stands unobtrusive in corner. This could be the old-style luxury hotel or mansion if it weren't so grimly stripped of ornament, so processed and bold. Look out the windows and you'll see a receding avenue of identical buildings, like a great main street or city thoroughfare carefully denuded of any individuality, monolithic shapes like banks and department stores, though not cluttered with bright eye-catching signs and displays, but blank-walled and vacant-eyed, uniform, like a row of tombs. Rectangle being the obvious form, and essential to the grid pattern, all constructed from the same dull grey-brown brick, cheap and dense. Oh blessed uniformity. Allows one to concentrate.
Up in the penthouse suite of this hotel are staying the personnel and entourage of a heavy metal band. They are currently partying. It's an interesting process.
They're also going through the formal tradition of a room-wreck, done with celebratory gusto and a sense ot showmanship. What outlandish boys. They bill themselves as the return of Hair Rock, that much-missed genre. Transatlantic accents, "decadence", androgyny, copious amounts of coke. We need more spandex strides and poodle perms in pop music. Shouts of "Rawk n Rawl!", the stoner aesthetic. Mixed with make-up and hellfire, thunder n lightning, flirtations with soft-focus Satanism. They are spraying fire extinguishers, their boots trampling the bedcovers, kicking in doors, sweating to live out the bad boy role. Arcane kiss-curls, curlicues of make-up, sharptongue grimaces.
The lead singer, Izzy, stradles the plush carpet, his lurex pants glistening, and with a fluid yet wildly uncontrolled motion flings his white swallowtail guitar through the window. The band's shouts and leers become louder and more stylised, more violent, as if grasping for something tangible in the rooms they occupy in restless, unstable huddles. Bottle of vodka and nosecandy in the bathtub. Someone already fucking in the hall. From the floor below all you'd hear would be boots trampling broken glass and fixtures being ripped from walls. A big Fender bass takes a long arcing dive from one of the low topfloor windows, followed by assorted debris.