We owe a cock to Asclepius

We owe a cock to Asclepius

We who have renounced this life, 

Therefore on the morrow rising

Do not neglect the sacrifice, 

But dispatch the victim swiftly,

Brandishing the silver knife.

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A serpent on his staff entwining, 

The god demands the price.                            

So that the soul when pining,

May be delivered twice;

First to Hades' shady halls,

And thence to paradise. 

We owe a cock to Asclepius,

We who have renounced this life. 

A report of a gig

We went down into the basement. The band was playing downstairs. The support band was on first. They were some local band. We went into the bare room and hung shyly back. He said into the microphone, "You... can come closer". The slight awkwardness.
I thought it was unbelievably loud. The guy in the band on stage was long and hippyish. They did a cover of "She Don't Use Jelly". I went to the toilet, a tiny closet of a room under the stairs.

I wasn't wearing my glasses. The American band was on stage now. The room was full of bodies. People sitting down near the stage. The clear smell of cannabis from their ranks. The darkness.

The band came on and did their set. It sounded like their records. The singer: An American in leather.

The lights came up and there was some kerfuffle. I didn't have my glasses. It transpired that someone had stolen an effects pedal from the stage. Someone had taken advantage of the darkness.

There was much hubbub and waiting. The venue manager got up on the stage, very irate. A blur of a balding, sweaty man. No-one was allowed out until the wah-wah pedal was returned. Someone in the audience shouted at him. He shouted back, "No you shut up ya radge!". The band waited, nonplussed and brooding.

The pedal was sheepishly returned. We filtered out into the night. I had gone almost deaf, my hearing was drastically muffled, as always happened for a day or two after these punk gigs. They were always too loud.

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight

And it feels almost like a subterranean highlight, grimy gret toothed old patchy walls all concrete and haunted and no wonder if whatever band backstage, the singer thereof, or more likely geetar player, finds himself most lonely at that point, knuckles cold and fingers raspy and ready just prior to onstage. Haunted is the true name of this stage, this gloom onstage illuminated only by these spectral lights that loom large upfront to fright the eager night. A little doomy club or, nameless word, venue, ripped-off and secret walls, needless hangings, doesn't matter, terrible topfront lights, perhaps seedy memories of sweat dripped on the caverny floor. Echoing loves of spirit up from the lusty ground.
Here is the heart of secretiveness in the heart of that anguished sound, guitar riff, combined with the blind hysteric numb of the dark and the throb thru the feet of the waiting patrons healthy to be crushed, in their hearts a tremulous, approaching love, awed under artifices of star, all the more awed for the artifice, all the more ready for joy, death to leak out in the sparkling night 'r under the subterfuge drink of sweat and fights that turn and twist in the moulting pit, perhaps some shirtless white trash saint, like a ghost, 'll stagedive or splitting thirsty for angst and sweat, make supplications on the creaking floor. The girls down there all clothed and gloomy'll surge scattered and treading with the upsurge of the crowd, hearts awakening, moving onwards, nonplussed in the momentous void. Hear that just then that cry, that rasp of sigh, that delicious escape of shriek that held a dark unlawful promise of condensation and glorious sin among an animal limb?Collectively drawn like grimoire puppets, delicately driven under an awful wing, of music slowly becoming death.

From "Palestine" No.1

Their feet stumbled down snowy slopes, and crested little knolls and hills. Now and again one of them spat, making a little dent in the snow that tufts of grass also pushed through. They were coming closer to the most built-up area of the neighbourhood, and as they once more gained the grey main road the buildings began to loom up ominously around them. They were dark-windowed and grey, marked sootily from years of traffic fumes and only washed by rain. On either side these hulking tower-blocks stood, many of them disused and vacant. Here and there were boarded-up windows and gaping doors. But there were also, as they progressed, windows lit by cheering yellow light and sometimes mysterious twinklings of red light in attic rooms. The architecture of most of the buildings was sparse and industrial, as if they were nameless factories, office-blocks, high rises. As their feet crunched through snow M and Robert grew used to craning their necks to see far above them. Now they began to see tenements and brownstones, run-down and shut-up. In this part of the city most of the buildings seemed to be great dark granite office-blocks, that at night became giant monoliths of silence, and that looked down, as if despairingly, on M and Robert wandering below. Further away, against the horizon, they could see the great sleek skyscrapers of steel and glass.

M knew that they were traversing the perimeters of the Chicago suburb called Palatine, nicknamed Palestine. This was a fairly bland and unobtrusive little town, an outgrowth of the great lakeside conurbation of Chicago. M liked the place, the quietness of it, and often came here to drink, and sometimes just to think. He always called the place Palestine, and for him the name had a cheery feel, biblical, almost Christmasy. Just like the great familial mass of suburbia that lay beyond the place where the towering high rises began. Pacific blandness of the mid-west, that great land holding its Illinois like a vast plain of sleep. From the dull roofs of the suburbs, you could transgress the limits of the great city at night itself, with all its dark towers and endless secrets sleeping by the lake. 

Tree Studies

A Flowering Cactus, drawn in 2015

Poem of April 2016

What of your loves, your errant loves,
When men have loved before you?
They have already traveled that weary path,
They have already written that story.
What does it mean if there was a park
Where you glanced at her, and she glanced back,
At the back of the trees, in the gathering dark?
What of your loves when a man long dead
In an old photograph, turning his head,
Loved as you loved, a sturdy wife
That once was young and full of life?
Was there not some summer when they wrote stories
In love letters, and stopped to smell roses,
Is it not possible that pair knew
Something pure, something true?
Faded glory, the stockbroker's bride
In an old photograph, turning aside,
You can look up the dates when they lived and died.
Marrying a widow in an Anglican church,
With nosegays and posies and perfumes and such,
And a new inkwell and a Sunday hat,
What does it matter, all that?
My grandmother's fox stole,
My grandad's straw boater,
For the sad milkman
And the minister's daughter.
And they taught them to write in copperplate
And hesitate slightly at the gate,
With an opera air, and a popular song,
Battling for glory now gone.
What kind of eye did they look from but mine,
Our forebears in time?
And what makes us live, what makes us divine,
They must've been shown a similar sign,
They must've been able to read the lines
That we can read, and be resigned?
It has all been done a million times.

For they did nothing thoughtlessly!
It was for them as it is for me.

"Idiot bard! I wrote this poem,
He wrote it too, that predeceased us,
This is his kingdom and his realm
That he has leased us,
I am the first and everlasting man
That ever speaks thus".