And they were doing a dance, which was really just hopping on one leg, while waving a ceremonial spoon over their heads.
All I can say is that it worked.
It doesn't have to make sense.
1.02.01
I would rather die
Than be eighteen again,
Which is fortunate.
10.02.01
Cheddar
- the historic city of cheese.
14.10.01
Sliding skin,
Lubricated love,
Beckons me in.
10.02.01
Always
More conversations with the invisible man.
16.02.01
Savouring
The freedom
To be reviled.
24.02.01
It was only once I had recognised that sex is just recreation that I realised I had believed it was some sort of social or cultural duty.
An obligation. A prerequisite for validity as a human.
And after I believed that, I recognised that sex is just recreation. It was a curious and joyful liberation.
10.02.01
I think more interesting things when I am standing up than when I am lying down.
4.03.01
Have you ever gone skimming stones on a lake?
I was crouching down, skimming Cadburys chocolate buttons over the surface of the goose bucket, bouncing them off the surface, and over the rim, and failing.
I remember what Rory said. That I was teetering on the brink of insanity.
If this is teetering, I'm happy with it.
I'm coming back. After this blow, I will be coming back.
It sounded like a thud, but it was a bounce.
I'm coming back, but I can't speak to you now.
Sometimes they say that I am evol, that I have love all back to front.
And I have a secret smile. They will all die too. For all our differences, we will share that togetherness.
An ideal tonic in cases of bufoon deficiency.
8.03.01
I suppose the first person to love me was my mother. And certainly she has loved me the longest, though it is different now. It seems like less
of an obligation now. More of a habit perhaps.
And she tells me that my father loved me, though he's dead now, so I can't ask him.
It was always quite hard to tell from his behaviour. You had to sort of guess it from the absence of hostility even when provoked. To be fair to him,
the absence of hostility even when provoked. I think that perhaps as a child I was more interesting than I felt.
And my dog loved me. I used to think only a dog could love me like that. No explanations, no trade offs.
A good meal every day.
And it didn't even need to be good.
Most recently there was Michael. He loved me more than I expected. He loved me like a puppy dog.
It is strangely appealing in a dog.
Which is why the relationship ended. All too canine. Too unconditional.
Or maybe he just wasn't hairy enough.
17.01.01
He was tall and dark
And more Irish than his Guinness
Which was made in Surrey.
Moorland hair and peat pool eyes.
Misty conversations about tomorrow
When things had to be left until.
Turns out he was made in Liverpool
And preferred Vodka.
I took him home
But left the best of him behind
Amidst the smoke and nicotine.
6.11.03
Larry Kramer said,
The fucking we're getting
Is not worth
The fucking we're getting.
I think
We're all getting
The fucking we deserve.
6.11.03
There is something un-erotic about tuesday evening.
The sex that happens is just a distraction.
10.11.03
Keeping your distance with a look.
Imperceptible disinterest.
Objecting too late to matter.
Qualified passions.
Unspoken expectations.
14.1.03
After the lies and the thin alibis
The pointless deceit on your breath.
You evade and obscure and protest and deny.
But you made my day when you left.
21.11.03
You tried your heart in the hands of a man
With smiling eyes on show.
And the months that pass outlast
The momentary glow.
And you wait all day for the kind of man
Who can bring your dreams back home.
But you pin your hopes
On another night alone.
24.02.01
We recycle
Like plastic and paper
A grievance remembered
To be used again later.
03.11.01
I remember your dreams.
I was in them once.
03.11.01
A kiss on the lips,
Light hearted eyes.
Genital deceptions,
Self-indulgent lies.
- I don't remember dancing.
03.11.01
Watching the bubbles escape from the tonic.
Breath shot with silver.
Cover my eyes.
03.11.01
On a sunny day
By a wall
You could hardy tell
Which was the shadow, and which was the man.
26.01.02
Many years ago, I read some graffiti on a building site in Reading , which said "The urge to destroy is a creative urge", and I liked it.
Now I have found it's origin, in Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian Anarchist thinker, who wrote in the 1860's "The passion for destruction is also a creative urge."
These ideas and slogans sink deep within.
28.01.02
I find ecstacy between your thighs,
And disregard your pubic lice.
16.02.02
A little too much education,
He could smile and not mean it.
But not quite enough
To change anything.
17.02.02
If you're frightened, you can't do anything.
17.02.02
Shelves are a diagnostic feature of civilisation.
Nobody else needs them.
20.03.02
Maslow's hierarchy of needs implies that the issues of concern follow a descending pattern, but it does not imply any end.
As each problem is resolved, the next rises to significance.
It also seems that the emotional significance of the issue increases as you descend the hierarchy.
There is an implication that suffering is not a consequence of an issue, but a human need. The issue is just the context it is faced in.
There was a young man from Devizes
Who discovered a tear in his trousers
Although he was glad
For the access he had
He isn't as pleased as his spouse is.
26.03.02
Growing towards the winter.
18.05.02
The Bake-It-Yourself desert island.
Extruded plastic housing.
The man who lost the truth with aphorisms.
16.06.02
God was looking down from his heaven
And he said
"I think what I need here
Is more clouds.
That way,
I won't have to look at them."
More clouds formed, and God said
"Oh shit,
I guess I must be real after all."
22.06.02
Eleven rings.
(Eleven sea rings.)
15.07.02
Nobody is actually lovely.
Human beings just aren't built that way.
We are all more or less repulsive
In our own unique fashion.
24.07.02
I was watching the television news a while ago.
And the pictures were coming from Australia, where bush fires had been raging for weeks.
The report was coming from an area where the fires had passed, leaving the landscape blackened and devastated.
In the background, behind the reporter, you could see a charred roadsign, still smoking, but you could still make out the words.
No smoking.
No camp fires.
I had boarded a plane, and we were rolling slowly along the tarmac, so I was looking around at the fixtures and fittings, like you do,
pretending to be nonchalent, when I saw the illuminated sign at the front of the plane, which said:
No smoking.
We reached a cruising height of thirty-eight thousand feet and tha captain came onto the intercom to tell us that the "No smoking" sign
would shortly be switched off, and we were now free to smoke.
I'm relaxed, and trying to switch my mind into that quiet blankness that allows the journey to pass, when the light blinked off and I snapped to attention.
I'm shooting through the sky at 430 mph, 38,000 ft above the ground. I'm in a tin box with 400 other people and three tons of aviation fuel
and the captain is encouraging us to light tiny fires.
It was a very long flight.
29.07.02
I'm hanging around
In a box on a string.
I'm going up,
Im going down.
It's my elevator music,
Just my elevator music.
People come.
People go.
Doors open,
and doors quietly close.
It's taking me up,
It's bringing me down.
It's my elevator music,
Just my elevator music.
The pit of my stomach
Tells me now
If I'm rising up
Or sliding down.
I'm hanging around
In a box on a string.
It's my elevator music,
Just my elevator music.
09.08.02
She seemed like a likely dyke.
25.08.02
Alain de Botton
'The Art of Travel'
Describes human life as
"Dust postponed."
01.09.02
I haven't even begun to understand how the mind set influences experience. I am simply aware of it.
With the innocence of a traveller on a train, I look out and see it all fly past me.
03.09.02
In those days, Paris was a city of art and culture, not as it is now, the mythical abode of unfeasibly tanned French love-gods.
A sort of Mount Olympus of Playgirl Magazine.
03.09.02
In a cover illustration to Alain de Botton's 'Essays in Love.' Nicola Ackland-Snow describes love as "preserving the flavour of apples".
05.09.02
It was broken, and the more he tried to fix it, the more apparent it became.
15.09.02
Some lonely sleeping night
You come to me smiling like an undertaker.
Suddenly the story ends with a small flurry of fluff.
They had begun to understand eachother.
Not the meaning, but the words.
It's just early morning nerves.
A sudden rush of light to the brain.
23.10.02
The postman arrives, delivering the morning.
29.10.02
Where is the aspiration in your life.
What is it that is drawing you forward?
02.11.02
If I were a capybara
I would wear a pearl tiara.
A charm against calamity
From deep beneath the sea.
My eyes a little moister
For the sad fate of the oyster
Whose body's torn assunder
For this nacreous plunder.
17.11.02
Caught between a vacuum and an empty place.
I wish I could stand on my skateboard without falling off.
I wanted to share it with you.
I never really understood why you fell in love with me.
17.01.03
A Czech photographer talked of walking down a street in London and meeting a "whuman".
The pronunciation was both woman and human.
It was a moment that was more than a photograph.
22.01.03
The impossibility of three.
A number that doesn't exist.
Just one and one and impossible.
25.01.03
Unexpectedly cold legs
Amidst the heat of passion.
A surprisingly honest phrase
From the lying body.
A tiny dance
With wrinkled knees
Midst legalistic briefs
That tells that these
Fires of passion
Are just convenient
And temporary.
16.02.03
I stood on a bucket
To see over the side
But the bucket gave way
And I missed out.
18.02.03
Looking back, going forward.
Banging your head.
24.02.03
I've got this feeling gonna fill my heart with sand.
I've got this feeling gonna crumble in your hand.
I've got this feeling but I don't know where we stand.
It's just a feeling.
I drove to meet you but I missed you at the station.
I cried all morning and I think it was elation.
The sun keeps shining on a scene of desolation.
It's just a feeling.
Don't whisper to me that you're really gonna miss me.
Don't feel like dying, so how difficult can this be?
Don't want to see the lies inside your eyes each time you kiss me.
It's just a feeling.
27.04.03
I watched for a while before I realised it was videotic.
3.05.03
Are you comfortable trapped in the past
In a world we no longer inhabit?
I never see you now.
I remember the warmth of your skin
And the way when I looked at you
I could see the background over your head.
Are you comfortable now you've broken free
Of my tyrannical memory?
8.05.03
The day you got sunburnt
I offered you cream
That I got from the chemist
Just off Palmers Green.
But you wouldn't take it
Because you couldn't see
Quite how red your body
Was going to be.
And later that night
As we lay far apart
The distance between us
Drew you into my heart.
If you were still here
The decades might
Have covered that moment
With despair and delight.
Now in the summer
I lie on the grass
While I stare at the sun
And bask in the past.
8.05.03
If you weren't such a pain in the arse
I'd sit on your cock much more often!
8.05.03
Fashion for the almighty.
We're standing naked in the eyes of the omnipotent power.
It could be sung by a naked boyband to an audience.
This is a song for the rat in my attic.
There's evolution in my roof space,
And it frightens me!
15.06.03
Love poem for a sheep.
I want to knit you into a jumper and wrap you round my body when the weather's cold.
You only want to follow blindly.
We're dancing to a different bleat and you're pretty lame.
And these are just the reasons why I love you, and you disgust me so.
You would stand and wait for me forever, until it got dark, and you wouldn't mind.
I don't think I can see you any more.
I want to pull the wool over your eyes and it's no surprise to find that it's already there.
You're just a sheep and I suppose that this is just the love poem of a slaughterman.
15.06.03
As the sun went down, the men's behaviour became more colourful.
18.07.03
There was a young man from Lanner
Who walked in a very strange manner.
A strong Cornish breeze
Would blow through his knees
Till he tightened his nuts with a spanner.
23.08.03
My life is packed with all the stuff I have accumulated
Over here, over there look over-full and over-rated
And so I greet the new day with a groan
Reflecting all the things I own.
Their omnipresent knick-knack status
Inviting all the world to rate us
And all our hopes and dreams
Along the scale of rich or poor
Succeed or fail, or so it seems
Worthwhile or not, worth less or more
Than the common mass, a shining junkyard measurement,
A tin-pot trophy of everything I represent.
August 2003
'Rice Crackers'
A golden shell with a shiny lacquer
Conceals a peanut within a cracker.
August 2003
You used to think best when you were moving around aimlessly.
Brownian notion.
20.10.03
Porridge is like eating a cloudy sky.
Always different, subtle , changing.
Every time an unknown quantity, unpredicted.
And roaring with laughter like the sun.
6.11.03
I want to lie back and spread across my life as thick as butter.
22.01.04
Mistakes of all sizes.
26.11.03
As I get older I'm getting wrinkled. I'm going bald. I find it harder and harder to stand up for long.
They say that young women turn into their mothers. I think I am turning into my penis.
I'm terrified my jumpers are going to grow up and suffocate me.
26.12.03
..., and just move on down the road.
30.12.03
There was a young man from Devizes
Whose life was full of surprises.
His schedule was framed
Like an ancient brocade
But he was awfully good in a crisis.
14.01.04
Bed like an inferno
I just want to returno.
22.02.04
A young ladybird called Scarlet
Was accused of being a harlot.
She was vacuous, but colourful and glam.
She said "I'm a little too fat
For a lifestyle like that
Though frankly my dear, I don't weigh a gram!"
29.02.04
"Let's face it,
You wouldn't."
For a T-shirt. 29.03.04
I wish I missed you
but you just won't go away.
I found your trousers in the bathroom
And sad to say, you were still in them.
31.05.04
Hard to see.
26.06.04
The fingered vine in lax recline,
yet searching for a lover.
Cleave not to one, to touch, to shun
And reach out for another.
A frantic reel, to flow and feel
Each hedonistic notion.
Yet slow at length to grasp the strength
Of lust and raw emotion.
The wild dance has led by chance
into his petalled bower.
Then tendril tight, embrace the night
And charged with passion, flower.
17.08.04
Do aromatherapists use deodorants?
2.09.04
I have a digital alarm clock with a wry sense of humour. Every morning, 7.58 ... 7.59 ... BOO ...!
10.09.04
Carol Caplin, one time health advisor to Cherie Blair, was talking on the radio about ways to relax.
One thing she recommended was a good book. A good one-and-a-half to two inch thick book. Lay it on the
floor and lie on your back, using the book under the bony part of your head.
She said that in this position a book was excellent for cranial stimulation.
10.01.05
I was talking to a friend about the attraction of buildings and towns and he said that what he liked most about Edinburgh was that it was wall to wall architecture.
11.01.05
Oh, please go away
Say the sleeping to the day.
It isn't much to say
But that won't stop them.
28.01.05
I was listening to a man on TV telling me about the state of the economy, or the state of politics, or the state of the state or something, and he told me
"we all live in a global world", which seemed like old news for a current affairs broadcast, but it didn't really ring true because I can go thirty miles
down the road and be a stranger.
I think is is always worth exploring how strange you can be. I can go thirty miles and be completely strange. A complete stranger. There is a sort of surreal
zen about the idea of a complete stranger.
I can go to almost any country in the world and become a foreigner. Suddenly I become quite exotic, and much more interesting than I ever was at home.
I can feel like I have sailed up a river on a spice ship and become a mysterious foreigner. Best of all, I can travel to the United States and become an alien,
and you would have to be a fool to miss out on a treat like that!
13.03.05
I've never really known what to do with latin grammer. Anyone who has ever studied latin will tell you it's like a failing love affair.
A little voice in the background that keeps telling you you're wrong.
If you go out for a meal, you can eat too much, and in the morning do one with a death defying diameter. You can look round and think, "Oh, shit!"
and the little voice says "Oh shit, oh mighty shit, vocative singular".
There is a part of you that says "if that's in the vocative case, it's the first one they ever made in porcelain". Finally scoring a good line over
latin grammer leaves you flushed with success as you pull the handle and think "sic transit gloria mundi".
13.03.05
A student in Coventry said that the chancellors budget would affect him later in the year, when he left university and became
"a fully working man"!
17.03.05
Now I can hardly remember
What you looked like when you smiled.
Only the dappled light
Playing shadows on your brow.
I said goodbye to you at the foot of the stairs
Long after you had left
And there was a silence.
So often there was a silence.
31.03.05
There are two phones,
And one phones memory holds a series of short messages
Charting the course of the relationship.
And on the other phone they have been deleted.
31.08.05
Men are made of cold stuff,
Engineering and the like.
Singing in public places,
Doing wheelies on a bike.
Men like to feel in control
Of everything they do
With their overbearing egos,
And women do too.
30.10.05
Wheels have no wits
They just go round and round.
So four wheel drive was not enough
And they buried him in the ground.
30.10.05
( )
(This is the corner of the universe reserved for religeon.)
14.11.05
I have just found a haggis in the fridge, and I don't know where it came from.
21.11.05
...or as they say around here, doing a Barbara Cartland, where you look the situation over in the morning and hope you haven't fucked it!
2.12.05
The Scottish team has won the World Elephant Polo championships in Nepal (for the second time).
7.12.05
It seems to me that there is what happens, and then there is the anticipation of afterwards.
22.02.06
'Rock and Roll'
photo of a rock and a roll.
'Milk Tray'
A frozen milk tray, with chocolates.
'The Froza-Lisa'
Mona lisa frozen in ice.
'S-Cream'
Edvard Monchs 'Scream' in clotted cream.
'Tectonic'
Dinner plates formed into a globe.
12.06.06
Bryophytes in your underpants, and other unlikely stories.
10.08.06
Mountains are, of course, entirely the wrong shape for the convenience of the botanist. Faced with the prospect of a mountain, there is an almost irresistible
urge to climb it, and the effort required to do so focusses all of the attention on climbing rather than the flora. You arrive at the top to discover that
there isn't any more to see, an attitude that frequently persists on the descent.
Entirely the wrong shape!
14.08.06
In my mind, I can fly.
In reality of course, I can't.
When I see myself in photographs
I always seem to look
Disappointed.
31.08.06
In the beginning was the word
But it didn't stop there.
It seems that words just aren't enough.
31.08.06
The story of life
A baby banging a rattle
A drummer
A heartbeat
"Nothing changes -
Nothing really changes."
31.08.06
News.
A man admitted in court to fraud and deception, taking out credit cards with no intention of paying the money back. The money to be used to end the occupation of
Afghanistan by foreign forces.
Interesting job to do with a credit card.
15.09.06
I was talking to the woman on the checkout at Tesco, and she was complaining that the management had no common sense.
She said "I've been here
for 35 years, and I've never worked in a place like it".
28.10.06
As the planet rotates, day becomes night. The International Date Line revolves.
I can look into the future
Just by looking East.
If I had a telescope, and some mirrors to bounce the light right round the world, I could look to the east and see what I would be doing tomorrow.
I could look further and see the time and place of my own death.
I would be fascinated.
I would spend my time looking to the east, until all I could see was the back of my own head,
Endlessly looking to the east.
If I moved to the North Pole
In small circles
I could walk forwards or backwards in time.
Winding and unwinding the celestial clock.
17.08.07
You cannot see it and I cannot show you
The years have passed and yet I hardly know you.
I'm not sure that my view has any utility.
Embrace both the man and the sense of futility.
08.11.09