Blue Room 2

There I sit wit my cup of sugary tea, trying not to seem babyish but sulking a little. At least no bib has been provided. I'm secretly and tentatively at work on something among my creased sheafs of notepaper. Also scattered here and there are some flyers announcing upcoming gigs or the release dates of little records. I am secretly at work among all these, and the purpose of my design? It is slowly and painfully taking shape on various bits of paper: my plan to get into college.
Oh dear... I had been quite absorbed in the details of my secret schema, incorporating timeframe and logistical goals and all, when I'm afraid a jog of the elbow brought on by a certain agitation made me upset and partially spill my cup o tea... Then having to stem the sticky stains on the plastic tray with bits of flyer and yellow notepaper, cursing to myself.
Up comes daddy dearest and, while I'm distracted, snatches my most precious piece of paper, containing my secret schema, my sort of five-year-plan.
Daddy is a fifty-year-old, rotund, melancholy, great beard like a Tartar bushily outgrowing, pince-nez. "What's this? Ho ho... What have we got here?... "plan to get into college"!? Ho ho ha ha... You'll be lucky son."
..."With your qualifications, your lack of application, your record of failures and unreliability... Don't you realise you've no chance?"
Now in this dada spake wisely. Universities are not known for their eagerness in investing in the education of difficult, unqualified ne'er do wells, such as I am, a ne'er do well who, it must be added, has consistently made a hash of every venture he put his hand to.
Now dada is rather cross. Now and again he gets in a mood like this and, with something like penetrating insight, begins to carp and complain. "Thrown away the benefits of a perfectly good third-rate Catholic education" says he. "The rot started back in primary school, oh I see it all now. At that tender age, say about seven, the onus was on you to think of your future. You had the choice of subjects. Why din't you take Baby and Child Care? You could at least be decently useful in some ways."
"Because I didn't want to" I rejoined bitterly. "Takin' care of kids don't interest me. What, I'm sposed to take Baby and Child Care when I could take somethin interesting like... like Modern Studies?"
"Naw, you're sposed to be just really miserable". This in heavily sardonic and sarcastic tones. The level of debate has obviously sharply declined.
"Good, cos I will be!" I sharply retort, getting ready almost to shout now we have reached the level of the playground slanging match.
Well, the fact is I am often accused of being miserable, sour-faced etc, and notwithstanding the contempt implied for me in this my father's statement, I fell back rather stupidly on a certain stubborn pride I have in my own melancholy and lack of grace, you know a certain darkness and taciturnity can be attractive if cultivated properly. So I sulked: "If there's one thing I've always been good at, it's being miserable".

More stillborn memories

I do remember though, some distant year, musta been 1980 or somethin, a dim recollection of the massive brooding castle of a brick house, as it seemed to me then, all humdrum with the idea of my dad inside it.
I remember emerging from the dark door in some idyllic evening, setting off to play with toys, being humble and disappointed, having to rush down some dark stone steps, I was too chubby and slow to keep up with my brother who was all blonde and dashing, going to cavort in fields with his eager friend.
Taking off into the afternoon perhaps, he was two years older than me.
I was usually red-cheeked and jovial, bumbling along to play happy games, yet I was left behind on the dank step, glumly... I seem to remember the idea of my mother pitying me in the doldrum hallway, brown memories, I remember maybe the idea of some plastic pullalong toy in one of these vast, fragrant bedrooms off the hall... It's all jumbled together and maybe I dreamed this too, and yet it's all connected to the idea of wild blue yonders and buzzy fields of vacant grass and stalks of thinny reed by the house as well as ancient buckled iron fences, where the kids can caper...
I seem to remember the idea of my sister, only 7 or 8 herself, sharp black hair and vampiristic red lips laughing along with a little girl joke inside.

Stillborn Recollections 1

At first there are dim memories, stillborn recollections all faded ingloriously.
I can remember the most distant, farthest day, or rather maybe I can recollect the dim dream of it, the fantasy notion of what it should've been. This memory is so distant and over the years I've categorized it so many times as "the earliest" that I can no longer tell if it's real or just a fantasy...
I remember being in the house, which was a simple dubrown brick house, dark and dull, thought to me it seemed like a huge homely brick castle all full of massive dark rooms, the utter idea of HOME...
I seem to see a darkened livingroom, remembering the siblings who were themselves tiny infants at the time, me padding my little infant arse around the rooms. It's apocryphal and foolish to think that I can remember actually wearing nappies, and yet maybe I can. It was early evening, all was blue hush and home, I'm really beginning to think this all happened in a dream but I seemed to see a bright yellow kitchen, looking up to my friendly mother young and flared turning round peacably by the grill or by the antique glossy kitchen tiles all yellow and flowery, plastered linoleum and wallpaper smelling sadly of the 70s...
I seem to remember my dad or maybe the simple idea of my dad's presence there in that house, in one of the dark, warm rooms, far-off, perhaps pressing together his lips, half-amused by the ruddy TV, lounging with his vest and with his beard...
In my earliest memories my dad is seldom present, just the ever-present, inevitable idea of him.
This is my rememberance of being a joyful, glad little baby waddling around, but maybe I fantasised it.

Blue Room 1

An argument with my daddy- who is alternately a gawky and bold-faced boy with reddish sweptback hair, a bearded patriarch looks like Trotsky, or Kojak mouth clumped stupidly like Joe Klunk on a lollipop. A big Greek nose and bald head. Manhattan skylines in background.
Mummy dearest is an anxious and angsty housewife, in a frock and with tight-curled hair afraid to express an opinion. Wrings hands. Like a 50's housewife with an apron.
I have been playing the stockmarket for a while now and baby I think I know the score. Those traders in the City are busy boys, and I am of them.
Absorbed sweatily in my laptop, why it's quite easy to forsake several million in a single afternoon. Those stocks and shares are impressive and volatile things, leaping and bounding so savagely. One must have respect for 'em.
The millions having been lost through an unwise investment at an inopportune moment, an argument has been occasioned with daddy. The parental career talk.
All this takes place in the spectral ideal homes livingroom, lounge of the future. Padded walls and floor, of soft pliant material. I sit by the side of the room, in my tall umpire's chair, a tray in front containing the following: Notepaper, pens, laptop and a cup o' tea.
Now the house of the future has no ceiling, the whole structure being protected by a sort of transparent and indeed invisible glass dome arching high above our heads. It is therefore possible to straddle the angles between the walls or partitions, all of which are sturdily reinforced and thick with foam cushioning.
Umpire's chair did I say? Why, that suggests impartiality and clear judgement. As I make my sets of calculations, I begin to wonder whether this chair has been appointed to me more as a kind of infant's high chair, and the thought is born: Am I infantile, imbecilic, not to be trusted?

Hollow Discourse on Passion

There follows a hollow discourse on passion...
Passion is nothing. Nothing can be gleaned from it, and those extractors and expositors of sexual heat are at their bases, echoingly empty.
As empty as books, gifts, televisions, and computers.
Ponderously, painfully vacant, solidified lumps of arrogance and dolour.
If all those energies were joined, if every sex was combined, it would do nothing but spur itself up, make some loud noise and a tumult of friction, some cataclysm of cosmic fire, and then... and then!... it would collapse disgracefully, almost obscenely, in the aggressive waste of its promise.
Amounts to nothing more than grittings of teeth, clenches of fist, rushes of blood, seemingly for no reason.
Yes, and beauty is a void...

18th century parody on autumn

Now that pale-eyed autumn is once more a sojourner to our shores, treading the joyful grapes of summer into bitter wine, weaving the tapestry of regret with the distaff of memory, and, like a mourning bride, lighting the first tender lamp of melancholy in the hearth of the soul, it behooves we mortals to return to the contemplation of that serene tableau of autumnal ennui which is like the obverse of vernal splendour, and, like it,  precedes and acts as herald of a sterner season, which is even like that season in the life of man unto which all due obeisance must in time be paid. 

What matters, therefore, if in due time we are made poorer and our share somewhat diminished? To what god may we justly attribute such reversals if not to that deity which rules every pantheon with an irreversible will, namely, that first primal god, Chronos, he that wielded the pitiless sickle that with all due circumspection and in full measure, reaped? 

Such too is our measure and our fate, we that are subject to the mild or harsh weathers of the passing moment, and those whims and caprices that, finding their genesis in caterpillar-like sloth, give birth, betimes, to passing beautiful butterflies of fancy bedecked in much splendour, and that, like those short-lived insects, find themselves wind-borne and storm-tossed, given ultimately, but not as seems inappropriate to their origin and destiny, to futility. What but their pithy dance among the flowers is fair, yet but it is short, and in like manner, we mortals enjoy a temporary season, finding only, in such dance and delight, the bitter pollen of experience, culled from so many living flowers of circumstance, whose paraphernalia and appurtenances, giving the appearance of solidity, are like the petals of those selfsame blooms, shaken loose at a moment's notice, and descending once more to a lowly soil.

Even now, brethren, is the leaf descended, and the flitting flies of proud blazoned august given way, to that first chill which bequeaths the equinox with a breath of waiting decline, promising, but still deftly and subtly, the riotous, the dionysian, and the gay, among the sere and withered, the due traits and character of the harvest season, the diabolic Samhain, the ripe apple, the treaded grapes, and the arbor flaming with gold and scarlet, flourishing and blooming with the fire and fullness of the year, a ruddy festival before a long sleep, a banquet accompanied by majestic music, always with a note of melancholy in the finer and nobler chords, played relentlessly, and in that relentlessness, a quickening of the pulse leading only to a faster-coming weariness. 

Autumnus venit; Aestate fugit. 

It's impressed upon me more and more these days that life is the phenomenal side effect of reproduction, and like all side effects and side alleys and detours, fuller of riches than the main way, choked as it is by liars and charlatans, pandering to their biology with selfish moans, until they seem in their ultimate inevitable predictability to give birth to an infinitesimal and tiny orgasm, and, falling back disappointed, still claw at each other like plaster saints, like dying lovers in renaissance pictures, seeking some crumb of consolation from already cooling flesh, flesh that they see, already, crumbling and becoming dust, flesh that they see too readily was a nameless mass, a commonplace abode for an immortal soul, and not worthy of a word or of any effort. They have tricked themselves into love.
How many things are seen for what they are but not named. How often does the heart lie. How unceasingly do we deceive ourselves and invent language games to bypass the hole at the heart of life. We sometimes clearly see, but are always afraid to name, the void at the heart of life, the worm in the apple, the empty space in the middle of pleasure.
At night I'm profoundly emotional, tender, and full of serene regret, wondering at symbolic meanings of empty windows and streetlight. Alcohol opens up a metaphysical void for me, and leaves me strangely determined. It seems to me that I begin to see things in their true light, and how inconsequential they are. A door handle, that, sober, I would placidly turn, now seems like the merest dross, that I must reject, and batter out of my way, mere gross matter, and in every thing, only that, a turning to face sordid matter, concrete, streetlight, window-frames, masonry, all the monuments that man has built to his suffering, all the fucking utilities that he had blindly made to surround his wretched pissing and moaning. I see them in their true light, and cast them from me, painfully conscious of the time I have wasted in acquiring such rubbish.
I want something else, not petty matter, not petty orgasms, but things of the soul, the summit of some tremendous pyramid, made of spirit but clothed in matter, the pinnacle of some triumphant ideal, that one can sometimes achingly find, at last, in the arms, in the hair, in the mouth, on the thighs, between the legs perhaps, of some symbolic woman, standing in, as it were, for the ancient goddess that in the bronze age we all paid obesiance to, standing in for the symbolic muse, becoming the flesh in spirit, the spirit in flesh, and myself, the godhead, the drunk, completing the Trinity and granting myself absolution from the sins of the material world