And a

Soup and a sandwich

But just mind your language

You'll do irreparable damage 

To your reputation.

And as for spelling

Don't you try selling

Books and education

Think of your reputation.

Try to talk about sex

You say sex with your ex

You say send me a text

Text away your reputation.

If you have paranoia

Well I'm here to annoy ya

It's as real as you make it

Reputation? Just fake it.

So soup and a sarny?

The world has gone barmy

There's a surrealist army

Stealing your reputation.

Evolution

A certain strange nastiness that prevails in hearts of people. You recognise it and turn away but it grips. Some explain it and excuse it as sin, original, inevitable and ultimately divine. That makes sense only if you want it to, if you want to shift the blame. It's not animal it's god. Not my fault. I see it more simply. It's man, desperate and frustrated  and ignorant allowing the lower part of a poorly evolved nature to rise and dictate. It's a blinding, ignorant light, a lazy angel drifting into a pool of poison. It can be avoided. It does not have to prevail.

This has nothing to do with the above, it's just a good illustration.

I arrived here in the rain,

there was a flood,

then it all began again,

rising from mud.

Are you surprised to be?

Are you in shock?

Here in the midst of chaos,

Taking a walk.

J & the macaroni pie

He said, "It's really up to me

Who I do, what I eat, whom I love, how I see,

Breakfast, dinner, snacks and supper are mine,

My dreams, my deficiencies, my nature divine.

When the pie first arrived I couldn't really know,

Like some existential experience or fire down below,

I doubt my loose thoughts and my reckless intonation,

My life, my death and any predestination.

But the pie answered questions I'd just never asked,

Laid bare secrets and stories, revelations that flashed,

I held it for minutes, maybe hours, even days,

The scripts and algorithms, preprogrammed, preplayed.

Sense will someday prevail, humankind will reveal,

All dark struggles and plots, grievous injuries heal,

For I am what I am and I am also I,

When all fails, I'll remain with my macaroni pie."

Love Hotel

Love Hotel

Something to sell?

Scatter the magazines

Run like Hell

Just ask the manager

Taxi driver's yell

We're trapped in secret

Love Hotel

You press a button 

You can take a bath

Make an expression

The madcap laugh

Here is the climax

And the epitaph

Everyone relax

One thing for certain

Time will pass

Love Hotel

She spilled her drink

And lost herself

You like the decor

Sweet souls who dwell

Within this microscope

Our Love Hotel

Love Hotel

December

Its December, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. In the freezing of the night and in the cowering of the grey day I could have settled for less. I could have explored less; I could have expressed myself less colourfully. I was not perfect and in this case and in my case less was much less than more. So much less than more so as to be almost insignificant. I thought of how the pantomime season always brought with it bad weather, horrible atrocious days that forced us to wrap up and move slowly in some winterly discontent and discomfort. In this land great crowds would gather in lukewarm theatres where they paid good money to be entertained. I just thought that there was something wrong with them all. They were like a plague and not a good plague either just in case my meaning is unclear. I summed it all up in long paragraphs that droned on; cheap tricks and diversions. 

The government were no help either; mostly bone idle well educated types who were short on real life experience. They tried to compensate by staring into screens were short films and skits gave representative performances of how life could or should be. Often they would scratch their heads in disbelief or on account of some infection or hideous skin disease. You could never tell. It was about this time that I began to fall in and out of tense, some past, some present, some indistinct to the point of being disturbing. When I say disturbing I mean not only for my self but for others in the vicinity. I tried to bottle it up but where does that ever get you? Being true to yourself, whilst remaining self indulgent and aloof does at least have the hallmark of honesty somewhere in it but your head still is like a kind of museum tableau displaying distorted and confused scenes from  your life. Unvisited.

Eventually all those things, the artefacts, will come to life, will populate, will talk back. At that point a little lapse of reason and a good dose of forgetfulness might prove useful. A strategy to escape the drivel. The people who talk in riddles are doing exactly that, that’s why you can’t trust them unless you happy to be good at solving riddles or role playing. I stand some distance from that type of behaviour for the sake of safety. I’d often say to myself, “this is no place for the likes of you” and be quite right. I just had an uneasy feeling inside that grew into something unintended like a bad lyric. I faced the fact that I wasn’t very good at things and that problem was compounded by the fact that I wasn’t sure what it was that I wasn’t sure I was good at. I began to compile a list.

My appetites turned, this way and that, fingers could never be successfully placed on feelings. I might have to get some supplies. Outside trumpets blared and seasonal songs were playing on some kind of perpetual loop and the excessive consumption of dairy produce and guinea fowl was promoted. We were at a loss of what to do next. Sometimes, sick of heart I’d just take all the text and convert it into Windings. Then using a magnifying glass and a set of tweezers I’d look at the patterns forming in the spaces. I’d look for repeats and clues, for messages and instructions. Occasionally I’d come across some useful string that would lead me on, tantalising and interesting for a few moments. Then it would all stop as suddenly as a bus full of wood shavings had collided with a wall built from feathers. When it became too much I retreated back into the familiar territory of my shell and my spelling mistakes. It was as if it wrote itself but I still had to use force just to cover the great white wilderness of paper and light that assaulted my field of vision. I tried to make lists, tried to fathom it. What was it that made life so dreadful, so complex and hard to avoid? The truth and that truth is out there someplace but nobody is looking.

I’d been away far too long, the place was no longer my home anymore. I was a stranger but the liquid familiarity that seeped from every image was comforting. Slowly the light grew, pale at first, indistinct across the woodland. A slow glow that was emerging from behind the grey shapes, touching them and changing them. The shapes and patterns emerged as the light, like some floating, shining treacle twisted and formed around them. Hard lines were drawn by invisible fingers, distinction has spread across the world like deep charcoal and white chalk, blurred and smeared in places and the sharp and crackling like spiky toffee and incredible spirograph and spiders web pieces of detail. The light drew across the dark and made sense and gave meaning as we looked on, jaws dropping and eyes widening. This was the place to be, here on the threshold to a new world only minutes old and still growing as we stared into it’s emerging and vital new complexity.

Nobody here is nice

You can call me a lick spittle but that will never stick

Mention anything you want but you better do it quick

There's a hundred ways I'm dead and a thousand ways I live

There's a recipe for hell and that's something that I could give

She said "you're the one I want "I said "I'm the one you need"

My feet never left the ground but I was travelling at speed

I wiped the insects from my face and we met up in a kiss

She said "you're still the one I want but I didn't think of this"

I saw the sun burn down just behind the refinery

The smoky tails and restless whales and that industrial scenery

There was moment when I flinched like footsteps across my grave

While  fossil fuel's fire up the sky artificial intelligence is safe

We cracked devices and then cracked walnuts with our arms

The depravity knew no bounds but they said they meant no harm

Some set alight to books  so we didn't ask for trouble

The barman whispered "drinks on the house" then please make mine a double

You can take the things you like and carry them outside

They won't amount to much and you'll be punished for your pride

Here's some humble evidence here's some terrible advice

Real men only growl and howl they don't use words like "nice"

Nobody here is nice.

in the blue and warm

i'd make you meatballs

and Mediterranean food

we'd sing like we were in an opera

and ride horseback in the nude

i'd make you famous

like a word or a restaurant

on film or stage in some poem

wrecked with mixed up words and meanings

our love would be beautifully deceiving

painted and made up like art and plaster

happy ever after

a pot at infinity

you know that feeling you get

when you're not quite depressed

somewhere not fully stressed

before the black crows and before the rainbows

appetite's shot and the coffee's too hot

nothing seems to be a prefect fit

and the mirror distorts every day with it's 

habitual lies and moaning

stomach groaning 

from sugar rush and digested mush

those who have and have not

push you

you just might take a pot

at infinity.

You know that hunger that comes

when you hang by your thumbs

all cymbals and drums

all sticks and bones

everybody else face down in their phones

face full of fruit and fly by the seat

of your pants like some bitch on heat

you consider your options

you toy with concoctions

and memory plays tricks

like a slowed down eater

who is and who is not

open to taking a pot

at infinity.

Facepunk

A story I once wrote

A story I wrote about the ghost of Thelonious Monk (who the spell checker calls him felonious, it may stick) was built around a picture now reproduced on the skin of a drum. A tight drum skin for hammering or thumping, tapping or just running the brushes over. Soft and low. A painted drum skin showing a dead jazz man. A story about a ghost. New York and the pale forgetfulness of black and white images, drained away with tired music and rapturous journalism, drugs and scandal. Spinning dark disks that create a sound scape fashioned and released new to a waiting world via the latest hi-fi speakers of the day. Deals and contracts, cigarettes and taxis, they wear us down brother. People who talk piffle, pseudo and false, sincere and loving. You can never tell, all the eyes are dark now. Gone back to shadow. All stammered out, broken eloquence and waiting for the latest new wave. It's a tough life being a ghost.

Inspired by Herzog

The small matter of what you should do with the rest of your life assuming that you in a real rather than hypothetical position and one which warrants some study and a little reflection. 

a) Looking out of the window may help.
b) Drink sugary beverages to stimulate the lazy brain.
c) Try on a hat.
d) Google profound words on the Internet and see where their meaning lead you.
e) Hold your breath.
f) Engage a fellow soul in some like minded conversation.
g) Study insects, are they busy?
h) Prepare a dossier containing what you consider to be solid facts.
i) Share some cinematic experience, comment on the highs and lows.
j) You can assume that there is no number 10.

And so it was

And so I was that the body of the woman found floating face down in the lake was traced back to the incident in which the owner of the black sedan had discharged the shotgun into the air and so killed two geese and wounded the best cow belonging to the irritable old  farmer who had just succeeded in capturing the escaping lion that had been in hiding in the barn following the tragic collision between the circus train and the school bus which thankfully was empty (save for the now badly injured driver) as all the children had alighted in order to attend the annual bread-baking and hog-roasting picnic that took place down by the river where there had once been a sighting of a pike so huge that it was rumoured to have been able to slice a man in half so large were it's jaws and so evil was it's nature that it would from time to time and completely without warning attack the boats of the fishermen who dared to drift out onto the surface of the deep pond where it was also rumoured a great and wonderful treasure had once been lost as the result of poor seamanship and a sudden spell of unexpectedly bad weather that had raced across the surface of the water like the cork from a champagne bottle and caused every vessel to rock and roll and had even shattered and blown out the windows of the country club and bar down by the southern tip of the shore side where every so often young couples would gather in order to tie a blue or a green or maybe even a yellow ribbon around a tree trunk  that was covered in old pennies that had been placed there during the years of the plague by young children and superstitious old folks who had made wishes and from time to time dream all sorts of strange dreams about a future in which there were none of the troubles that currently dog us all because the land was lit brightly with constantly changing coloured lanterns instead of some poor and unreliable sun that might run out of energy any day and mind expanding drugs were free for all in the water supply and their constant consumption and embitterment created a state of perpetual happiness and hope which rained down upon one and all despite the fact that none of these things wee reflected in their daily lives because around here and I don't know if you've noticed this there always seemed to be a serious of serious crimes that were both committed and unsolved and when I say that I am of course referring to that poor woman who was found floating face down in the lake who was traced back to the incident in which the owner of the black sedan had discharged the shotgun into the air and so killed two geese and wounded the best cow belonging to the irritable old  farmer who had just succeeded in capturing the escaping lion that had been in hiding in the barn following the tragic collision between the circus train and the school bus which thankfully was empty (save for the now badly injured driver) as all the children had alighted in order to attend the annual bread-baking and hog-roasting picnic that took place down by the river where there had once been a sighting of a pike so huge that it was rumoured to have been able to slice a man in half so large were it's jaws and so evil was it's nature that it would from time to time and completely without warning attack the boats of the fishermen who dared to drift out onto the surface of the deep pond where it was also rumoured a great and wonderful treasure had once been lost as the result of poor seamanship and a sudden spell of unexpectedly bad weather that had raced across the surface of the water like the cork from a champagne bottle and caused every vessel to rock and roll and had even shattered and blown out the windows of the country club and bar down by the southern tip of the shore side where every so often young couples would gather in order to tie a blue or a green or maybe even a yellow ribbon around a tree trunk  that was covered in old pennies that had been placed there during the years of the plague by young children and superstitious old folks who had made wishes and from time to time dream all sorts of strange dreams about a future in which there were none of the troubles that currently dog us all because the land was lit brightly with constantly changing coloured lanterns instead of some poor and unreliable sun that might run out of energy any day and mind expanding drugs were free for all in the water supply and their constant consumption and embitterment created a state of perpetual happiness and hope which rained down upon one and all despite the fact that none of these things wee reflected in their daily lives because around here and I don't know if you've noticed this there always seemed to be a serious of serious crimes that were both committed and unsolved and when I say that I am of course referring to that poor woman who was found floating face down in the lake who was...