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.)