From a Night Bus 1

But it's back on another bus for me, another nightbus, where I seem to spend my life...
There comes a point on a south-bound dusk bus where one can no longer even sleep, but has to gaze, stupefied, out of the window. All significant loves, hopes, terrors, epiphanies, have happened to me on lonely buses, commuter buses, bridge-crossing buses...
Into the city of melancholy crags, the acropolis enshadowed already, over the steel bridge with the dark water below, and what if the suspension breaks and the bus plummets far below into the sea...
This being a congested commuter link, we get in late into the Metropolis bus station, night it seems is falling.
I'm sitting down near the front. I've struck up a conversation with the girl in front, who I vaguely know. As we get to the bus-station she turns around, asking if I'll be staying the night, smiling politely. A small, plain, blonde girl, common and with a coarse, insipid face, tending to ingratiate. Large anaemic blue eyes. I'm taciturn and awkward- "No, I'll be going back over".
For I have to make two trips. Tedious. So I can't spend long in the city, it's already getting dark. No place to stay anyway as night deepens, except the sister's, who has a warm, welcoming flat in a peripheral suburb.
But at the bus station as I roam over the floor of the huge entrance foyer the blonde girl sidles up alongside me and forces her warm little hand into mine, keeping pace and starting up a bright, breezy chat. Sounds of departure, shuffling feet, dust on pillars and abandoned doorways, buzzing electric light... Shadows.
She wants to go record shopping. But it's closing time. We walk down the long dark street that leads eastwards out of the city, partially gentrified now but once grim and rough, and still containing endless Asian foodstores and halal shops, Greek butchers, Chinese laundries, shops where Turkish cassettes are sold, windows festooned with Bollywood stars in green and red, near tattoo parlours and the smell of Indian meals.
This street is exposed to winds, and on the other side is a closing-down video store, a discreet sex shop, a glass-fronted beauty parlour. A city clock, a traffic island, a dingy basement newsagent where an Asian man stands behind a counter, a picture of the Kaaba pinned up behind him. This street is long and dark. Worries about bus times, I look at the glowing digits on my fat-faced watch. 17:45.
The girl has put up the hood of her sweatshirt but still grasps my hand, leading me onwards determinedly. She halts at an esoteric music store, even though it's closing: The steel shutter is already half-pulled down. She peeps under it and exchanges a few words with the man cleaning up behind the counter, a portly bearded man in white, he smiles slyly, says "Salaam".

Thoughts Before Sleep

Just think, we are on a planet, a ball of rock, that is moving through space which is so vast that we could move through it forever and never see another star. We're clinging to it like ants.
And everything that we do will be obliterated and forgotten about. Everything will be lost, all our doings undone, as though they had never existed.
All this time we have been fooling ourselves, giving names to empty collections of atoms, and thinking that they had substance. In reality, nothing and no-one had a name and our concepts were uncatchable will-o-the-wisps which we willingly allowed to deceive us.
What a frightening pre-sleep thought: That to do was the same as not to do.
I insist and declare therefore that all of us are star-crossed and  must laugh in the face of fate, defying it. To do so is the only heroism.

For My Sins

For my sins since I have come to this town I have been a fool and continue to be so, eschewing all masks and roles but for that, offering genuinely, and without scruples, the most intense compulsions toward wholeness, even truth. Rage, envy, regret have been my burden.
From soulless nightclubs, allnight bakeries, reflected electric light I have been able to draw a kind of sustenance, noting that the poet must be indestructible, even if he has to creep like an insect across a dirty floor, the city, any city, is his Revelation, his Koran and Torah,  his Old and New Testaments seen in inscrutable flashes, on the fresh-lipped faces of friends, behind their human eyes and on their mortal noses, behind windows, too, where liquid light wanly flickers and goes out.

Little shards of redemption, always ungraspable. Always fleeting, transitory, illusory. Always ephemeral, the gifts of music and wine, vacant-eyed girls under sodium light, dropping forth from their mouths scripted sounds of assent or delight, weariness or boredom.

From An Old Letter

There is nothing much more to be expressed. I have the most awful feelings almost all the time now. These are what I must struggle to express, but it's hard work. Only because she has something in her, some intangible thing, that is deeply attractive... a vast, unfathomable well, the source of another Nile.
There is a flame that still responds. There is after all a heart that beats. There are brown clothes, scents, rooms, that from this distance still come back to me. Her mouth, her smile, her hair, her eyes, all gone, done for today, wrapped up. And yet I know as sure as death that they'll recur, haunt my dreams of other days. There seems to be something in me that will not rest, nor be resisted. And all this fear is to another soul wedded, all this shame is to another life bonded, all at once, all in misery, all in love.
I love because there is no such thing as love. And I can't stop.

Poetry as Struggle

Force out creativity in blocks of earthy stone, onto the paper.
Unload your brain, all of it, in a tantrum Jackson Pollock mess with no boundaries except writer's cramp and sighings of existential fatigue.
A sick complaint of desks and empty bedrooms.
I decided to take the Muse and strangle her, till she vomited all of her beauties on the page.
All her nonsense and ugliness too, that just as relevant.
Trapped forever under stark, austere glass.
Poetry! Fuck it, almost kill or abuse it so that the muse herself either dies from shame or is driven mad with laughing.
Try and grasp reality, force it into sense and beauty, force it like a struggling animal into the cage of words and, before it can escape, pin it like a specimen onto the page.
Sheer poetry killed and hung up for spectators, all the exquisite poetry you ever dined on vomited back up, like Saturn vomited up his own children.
That bird of poetry becomes like a stuffed museum piece, poised forever in pretend flight inside the book covers, until the reader comes along, ignites it into life again with the power of his imagination, and it soars... and then falls, crashing, into oblivion.
Art or writing was to me then, some kind of awful struggle, a fight with myself to express some kind of beauty or meaning, to wring truth from madness, to take a zero and make it into a one.
Doing this I had to convulse, fatigue myself, loosen my wrists and grit my teeth, screw up my eyes to see more clearly.
Till some blasted, sudden, half-understood vision would force itself upon my mind, blooming vaguely into an explosion of words.
I had to become a godly creature striking jagged lightning into my own world of words, till it became ignited into quivering beauty.
It was ultimate focus intractably screwed down onto objects, all of the truth squeezed out of it in an instant, discarded like a flipping fish onto the page.

On Desire

Or, to take, to steal. What is it that loves? The eyes see, the brain thinks, the fingertips touch. To love is a function of what? The soul, perhaps they might have said. Something loves... the self, the soul, the will... The heart, it's function is to pump blood around the body. Affection is felt, but felt by what?
Passion is the function of what?

Analyse your desires carefully and you can find your true self, your true position. Honest to yourself and therefore full of integrity. What do I want? Away from clichés, separate from prejudiced expectations, I use my desires as a guideline, a rule of thumb.

Desire, flowing from me, is a bulwark of truth, something that can be counted on. The royal road to knowing yourself. Desire leads to unhappiness and pain, says the Buddha. Obvious truth. But what of it?

It can lead also to moments of joy, glimpses of fulfilment. I will not cut myself off therefore from desire, become an ascetic, seek to "transcend" the flesh. It is human to drink in life, seeking fulfilment, not accepting pain but fighting it, using your desire as a weapon, drowning your pain in sweet floods of love, aspects of joy endlessly renewed, eternally renewable. A guarantee of your life: That your desire is inexhaustible, and that your sorrow can be conquered.

Song of the Occident

Here is the dread land that the grey clouds sweep over,
Here the cathedral, here the summer shower;
Here the medieval, here the modern reigns over
An aching acre past its hour;
This is the round and utter West, the liberal West, the soulless realm,
This is the ultimate Occident, dreamed of by blue-eyed, cynical men.
Wonderful, wonderful land, first host of the grave of God,
A God that died, and went west;
We now accept your Gods, New World:
Lip-service sacrifice to holy Commerce.
With one eye on the hedonist future,
And one on the ruined past-
Between the Reich and Flanders Fields
We stand aghast: To turn and fan the flames
Of future parties, future games,
Clothed in paltry, borrowed hats
Purchased from bankers and bureaucrats.
This was our world but we let it go,
Our nation, our empire, in one throw,
Of an idiot die to the world below.
That was the world that was, it's over, let it go.
O what a world it was, it's over, let it go.