A Tired Night & Dead Tomorrow

A Tired Night: Memoirs

These two poems and thrown-in quote come from a fantastically fatigued night four or five years ago at Mr. Beaven's residence...

Mr. Jean Man

He now wears jeans,
Where there once was silk,
He deserted khaki,
In favour of denim,

He is Mr. Jean Man,
He wears whatever arouses him,
And owns a very fancy tie,

Mr. Casualoleon,
Mr. Spicy Chicken Breast,
He is Mr. Jean Man.

By Ashley Beaven


Excerpts

I don’t exactly rave,
Scrambled eggs for brains,
Electric isn’t everything,

The smell of cumin,
My lungs are all bad,
I think the chlorine fucked them up,

Pray to the butterfly,
The multicoloured butterfly,
Sheep of Iraq, that’s what the carpet is,

The best isn’t good enough,
It’s like he’s sending radioactive beams
Into my sanity, mindshredder,

Gone through tired,
Lost the bit of me that’s completely awake,
In a word he’s a fucking psycho,

I’m an arse-ist, arsetits,
Switches that got really dirty
And no one touches anymore.

- Collected from conversation by Daniel Bristow



“I don’t know what the point of living is when you are 40, but hopefully I’ll know when I get there.” – Ash Beaven

Dead Tomorrow

Tomorrow holds a lot in its hands; can I win the world over
With the whirlwind in the written word; taking matters on one’s own
Terms, unconditionally? Reply to me reciprocally; we have taken things
Too quickly; in trying to clarify, in trying to classify; we’ve taken them
Apart: a part of me is in a part of you, as is a part of you in me.
We haven’t consummated yet, a consummatum est, a Word,
Heard, from you, a signal of some truth; we should see where we
Could go, before we fear to tread; we’ll be dead tomorrow.

Liar (Chippenham), Oui?, The Muzzle, The Chisel, The Rope & a bonus musing

Liar (Chippenham)

I sometimes feel like a liar,
Cutting those yellow strips of paper;
The amalgam of my knowledge
Numbered by markers; a step taken
Toward ambush reimbursement.

What’s your handle? Are you
Packing a piece? William Burroughs
Fucked me up, and those other
Disgusting masquerades that tallied
High. A Richter scale downsize -

Smoking Dunhills, and lost the plot;
No one returns to this here spot,
Because there’s nothing to it; but
We make it what we make it, and
I’ve made it the end of the earth.

Will you
believe me?

14/07/08


Oui?

Gouge my eyes out bloody Mary,
It’s a brain of thoughts,
Black plus white is grey,
One and one is naught;
Ought the slaughter of not carrot cake.

A villainy in trepidation; hiding
A prohibition spake sleazy
Sonumbitch; the austere stumble,
Stunted, scorching loss of heedlessness
With words. A magic thwarted.

Gargantuan perambulation; thumbing
Pages of catalogues, listing
Cheap tack for the plebeianite dregs of
Swollen eyes. An easy existence
In a moss of thoughts. Don’t sugar-coat shit.

Scrubby toes for bunions on the end of phone:
Expiring customers, expiry date and card no.’s,
Toile de Jouy jour après jour, jar,
Of Long Island Iced Tea, with
Crème de menthe? Clash like chicken and banana.

Different dioptres in each of their eyes;
Fourteen to twenty-eight days; long enough
To pass away. Poor little withered men
With skin-wrapped racks of ribs;
Spindly women dying of cancer, holding to Beethoven.

Feet a different shoe size each too;
My dad said “You may have won the contest:
Do you want the prize?” I called him a Seventeenth-
Century Chauvinist… I keep waking up believing I’ve
Swallowed books in the night, and trying to puke out staples.

Working at a call centre screens my sleep.
Pushing for approvals and deliberating over liability
In non-fault accidents at weekends’ night,
Sludging through the sewer in the weak
And pale light of you lost to an
Abyss of cleaved-to meaningless histories.
- Abscond, insist, elope, card number, chronotope,
Will we be?


The Muzzle, The Chisel, The Rope

The Muzzle: sweltering scissors sawn through the gauze of hot muzzle,
Warm, boiled muzzle, pressed against face, of leather
This muzzle, quashing snarl, dampening beak, and day
Mirage like gauze; gaunt day, emaciating face, muzzled, sewn up.
Shawn facial hair, around muzzle, glaring with grin, inside mouth;
Your mouth, my muzzle, kiss me.

The Chisel: hammered to flinch and sever the flitch; the chisel
Makes a hole, a carving, a craving of ruination, attacking, when
Bashing with hammer, the chiselled grizzle of your look as are hammered;
Deconstructing and chipping shard as hammer, as chisel, cracking and filling
As chisel pummels, pneumatic drilling, tearing concrete limb from limb,
Chiselling in, is sex.

The Rope: your tongue, so loose, is ropey, stringy and furred-up, cotton-like,
Talk to me tongue, noose, the rope, is hung, in words, tied, tightened,
Roped, together, into doing, things, in the world, unseen, with pulley,
With winch, tug of war the platonic side of sucked-together is
Rope, grope me, tie up my brain and rape me inside-out
With wound manipulative rope.


MAKE MEANING

- Sense is the unfathomable hierarchy of fallacious states, humanly devised for the purpose of order.

- Taste, the separation of equation, to distinguish classes of persons, with the objective of rule.

- Morality and aesthetics are the offspring of sense and taste.

- Or vice versa.

- Either way control is the forefather.

- ‘Meaning’ is as transgressive a term as it is transcendental and transient.

- It does not serve the purpose of control; its signification is individual; it is salvation.

- In a post-ideologically-unified epoch such as ours, it is (once again) the individual’s responsibility to make meaning.


- There is no salvation for the truly modern reader.

- As scholars we must wear gloves and approach the canon with neutrality; be clinical in our excavation; like archaeologists, leave no marks.

- Reverence and distaste are no longer at our command.

- John Ruskin is dead.

Not Canon Fodder & Jar

Not Canon Fodder

We were well before reading, and becoming one with Man; alike the unslaughtered lamb
That lay at the greedy aesthete’s feet, succumbing, prettily, pettily, before heedlessly pioneering
Profiteering with the profligate shitstorm kicking in from the West. The socio-historic nipping and
Tucking to keep the malign aligned in line, conjugating a loss and terminal continuance in this
World of boiled worms. We allowed ourselves to saw; and beholden, what wonders! An ocean of
Thunderous crashes as the waves turned to ashes and all was dissolved in salt. An extinguished
Existence besought, before we could possibly contemplate the other; love, and all that entails it:
Severin and Wanda’s relation, and Nietzsche’s abstention fraughted by rejection in the twilight of the
Idolater’s secret frolicking and feasting fireside. - We were Christian in our morality, unflinching,
Before we read those books, before we allowed our ideas, and their predecessors, to penetrate through;
Dragging our brain, looking for drowned souls and answers among the dust and decay of lovelorn
Yesterdays. We builded an empire of made-up accordances; they projections of our well wishes;
An ideal unsustainable unless reskinned bi-monthly; grafting varied scales and gills on old pores;
Meet the world on waking, its ugly truth, the same as when Pygmalion made his statue to menstruate.
A vampiric notion overcomes me, the urge and want for staleness, we are but wont of entropy; to lie
Basking in ennui, we! Torpor, meat me, by the bridge, let’s go dancing, come!
Embedded, so deadly the love of all encompass, so beautiful, powerful, shackling, manacling, all, all, all;
The pantheistic love; between two intrinsic, ah love! - Books; the Kamasutra’s alien philosophies and
Weltanschauungs bending my mind until it fractions; in directions it doesn’t want to go.
The boomerang mystery, love; Egalité, love. The absence of animosity in intimacy surprised me;
You’re my chemotherapy. Stuck to you by a string of dribble; smudge my skin, rub it in. Who’s to say
It’s not doable? The canonical disarray!


Jar

Jar of eye on table whitened wood
The eye singed with Bunsen burner
Marching orders delivered by rood
Forgot the char jaw on skull yellow
Tea-stained.

A hobnailed vision visitation pre
The world’s deflating eye blink
In the jar of vinegar looking out
Milk unbottled flows down cabinets
Crockery cuckold.

Fire stoked with rotting coals of eyes
Eye embers staring glowing pink
Empyrean jar full of pickled eye
Staring vacant out alight, focuses
A subbituminous eye sinking to bottom jar.

Bristol (Derelict), Preset's & Fridge Magnets and Owen Pallett

Bristol (Derelict)

Life’s the metal-stud beams
Holding floors up; via window frames,
On derelict buildings.

The infrequency of your eyes
Disturbed my soul; I’m glad
You looked at me again.

Monolith of heroin-squatting parasitic;
Dead electrical receptors, greyness;
Algae-stained walls; graffiti-junked posterity -
Opened nothing; opened pane, no glass;
Veins opened; loss, death - Death denied -
A building begging euthanasia; woodrotten,
Paintfaded, metalrust history forgotten.

Aching, shouting, shat on by birds,
Begging to be knocked down -
Enjoying every last
Minute of it.

I haven’t shed a tear yet;
As much as I’ve squeezed;
Means this is real.

Could you love that? -
The boy who licks the train tracks
To taste the trapped death of the world? -
The insipid remains of a smouldering
Force; a boy who sucks the smog of
Death to taste life’s sweet breath?

If it is sweet…
- He wanted to taste it nonetheless…

- The building looms; that building looms -
It always has. Plastered previously in utility,
A skeleton covered by shawl -
Soon enough it will be dead. It lived longer
Than us, but not by long.

Allusory to decades drenched in suicide,
Serendipity; peace of sunshine; disturbance
Of rain; disinheritance of shared secrets.

For three days it’s been raining.

Could you love that?
A cynic, a pessimist, a judge?
A derelict awaiting detonator; both
Shawl and skeleton - a pretty picture of
Rotting brown leaves in the disused conservatory?

Bristol’s a grey light, a copper roof,
A constant nonplus of something;
Its magic is the gloomiest,
Until he winds the dirtied sign to
Severn Beach.


Preset’s

I’ve chosen mine, through the denied choice of
Water spilled on my head when I was but a cub.
I look on your bodily pleasures as the realm of
Higher morals, compared to these low Christian
Cowardices and ineptitudes.
- But my hands are tied, I feel.

This libidinous hell that I’m sinking into,
Could be, for some, an innocuous and warm
Hiding place, from the suckling guilt of nothingness,
But mine’s a guilt-bolstered balustrade at beginning;
A parapet-trumpeted flyer.
- Trumped-up little pamphlet.

Ere the precepts is the preset machination, life:
That unaccountable void, an androgynous amalgam;
That we formulate a plan for, a posteriori of the
Crucifixion of coming into this world.
So, it is the Christian I take into my trust,
- Into my belly and chest.

For she can’t do me those wrongs, with God, that
Bastard middleman, at her right side. Narrow eyes
That squint at ways non-New Testament keep in check
An errant little mistress, bound by a Kantian duty that
Means nothing more than a blowjob.
- Callous seamstress, web of lies.

The preset’s settled score is thrashed about in the
Gossip of the world. Peaking, peeping, peering;
Each religion, each politician, driven by a desirous
Vat of cold, half-solidified grease; artilleries in arteries
Clogging the flow of a lusty blood; a blood that ran dry
- Years ago.

But before ever having circulated the blood knew
The erect phallus and pulsating clitoris, the beating
Heart, the anxious brain, each limb, and even eyelids
As one. Undivided simple cell, entrap me! Protect me
From the slashings of such evils as monogamy.
- Preceptor, Schizophrenic!


Fridge Magnets and Owen Pallett

He said he’s looking for love, but he’s just staring at the fridge magnets;
They’re reading like the journals of some desperate housewife on Prozac.
He can’t differentiate now, between the buzz and the pulse, they’re all Cyber-
People awaiting virtual victual in the gigabytten bit-rate of chatroom chaos.

The RomCom T.V life eats their heads and the dot-com sex life protects their
Sex, condom.com’s sheathed the rest and saved them from the flesh, pretend.
The little sustenance’s a lilting substance streaming in the afternoon or sunset,
Milked from a veal baton or, to put it like those magnate magnets:

Smooth and bitter his
Under sausage has luscious produce
Only an elaborate chant felt delirious
Ask were they weak

They say, they say:

She will love the purple peach
And must lick at power pole
But my mother said raw pink delicate apparatus
Can take woman like honey for black rust

What they say?

- Repulsive drunk
Finger her sweet tiny moon
Fiddle breast and cry she may
So smear the man meat milk on her head
Lather in
Picture it

He said he’s looking for love, but the fridge is making that buzz and the kettle’s
Coming to the boil and stuck behind the grate and rail are termites terminating
That little libidinous telegraph pole, receiving the signals at 3 o’clock on the dot;
Toshiba Bathsheba’s got the whole shebang and Final Fantasy once sang:

“All the boys I have ever loved have been digital
I’ve been a guest, on a screen, or in a book!”

Welcome! - London (pts 1 & 2) and The Absentee

I've decided to take a leaf out of Mr. Williams' book and join him here in publishing a blog of stuff... As some of you may know I've been writing a series of books for a series of years now and am coming to the end of the conceptual whole. The (more than) semi-autobiographical saga AutoFiction should close before the close of this year, with the completion of my fifth novel. Running sequentially then the books will flow Halcyon Nights, Auto-Fiction, Lying By Your Side, The Neon Searchlights and Emperor of the Weirdoes: A Collection of B-sides and Rarities. Lying By Your Side being the one in production right now, so look out for the collected pentalogy of polyology on www.lulu.com in the coming months...

My latest release however was a short collection of poetry called Disparate Measures (also available from lulu.com) and it is to my newer poetry that this blog Circumstanzas will be dedicated. I will update this regularly with the latest verses from my pen, starting thus with the poems London (parts 1 & 2) and The Absentee. Enjoy:

London pt.1

Avid Gaile
Limited
Licensed Sex Shop
W1/W2
Manette Street, Charing Cross Road
Drizzle-ridden Soho
Like an Amsterdam opening
Without the gusto
Neon umbrellas reflect
The electric rain

The gherkin in the pickled evening
The gangrenous penis seen
From Bank balcony
After Camden, reforming…
Shisha pipes drawing the
Close of day, as Cedric
And Omar take the stage
We discuss your conclusions
Met in collusion; on the
Error of my ways.

Sylvia Plath accompanies me now
In this place where life is so immediate,
On the tube trains to Mile End
And Notting Hill Gate; where the
Realists must call ‘real,’ and
Wyndham Lewis still exhibits.
Study every face on an escalator
And fall in love with every other
Woman’s. But even Hyde Park, when
Quiet in the even, isn’t Stephen’s Green.

I’m not a big fan of the London
Ales, but the Guinness is good in
Sawyers and Dickens; stowed
Away in a coved corner of the
Pub on a rainy day; medium,
Late and grey. Claustrophobic and
Disinterested; stories starving to be told –
A tale of a tube, of a pub, of
The little boy lost, drowning sorrows and
Morrows in London’s prosody.

But this is the poet’s city:
Something ethereally; underground
As much as o’er, creative of woebegone
Wonderment, more than Reading
Or Didcot, clasps the county-
Boy’s hand and racks his brain socket,
Filling his head with ideas,
Stifled by the heavy breathings
Of those buried tunnels.
- It’s yours, mover and shaker.

Paddington Station arches grandly;
Wood, glass and metal above me.
But Paris Nord has better destinations;
Bruxelles or Lille over Greenford and Radley,
And Amsterdam’s station was full of
Angels; Madrid’s streamed golden light.
No little lost bear there though;
With a red hat and a blue coat,
Who could never mix his paint right:
London had coloured my morning’s night.

London pt.2

It is beautiful to return at the end of the day,
Being met by a warm redolence of the flowers
In the garden.
The vegetable patch sleeping soundly,
And the ginger cat mewing for treats.
But isn’t it awfully quiet?

There’s a hollowed-out feel to my memories
Of those ticking clocks, rotating
Numerically; Londoners led by their ways.
A harking back, to the youth of the city;
The vitality needed to withstand
Its opened pores and chomping jaws.

The road here hums a little buzz that
Neither wakens, nor sends to sleep,
But it’s the lights, those manmade lights!
The lights that make the difference;
A risen row of flats like floating in front of us
Is lit as a movie set, and everything can be seen,

The golden gleams, a cadence of light in which
Every thing is unhidden. Better than the sun are
The lights that shone on the miniature lawn,
On the emulsion railings, and low redbrick
Retaining walls of those hanging Babylon tenements.
Acres of dark here, and silence, at best an ochre lamplit road.

The future fantasia that is London! A land
Of all levels, follies and wisdoms. A history
Of the greatest nation, seeping out the weird monuments;
A dystopia like Metropolis, all underground, this
Beautiful, suffocating nuevo world, steeped in hotchpotch
Design and mosaic life; it makes me small.

Someone I like being, in the multitudinous posturings
Of London town; a small fish, who left his tiny pond
At home. The many people I see and never see again,
The many musics heard but not retained, the sense-
Perceptions made of a goliath; pandemonium township
The capital; a bedlam that calms my soul.



The Absentee

When we were younger we used to launch missiles
Over houses to hit each other. Now that seems almost
Impossible, and unsafe. We have an auden mistrust
In every thing, as the dust settles and the mould
Is a fur which, when blown, softly stirs and shivers
Blue and straggly-white in our lungs. Causing coughing
And fragmented conversation: “Hello.” “How big is the moon?”
“At least four by five.” “Ah, right, and the sun?” “Um, triple
That, I think.” “What are you listening to?” “Hymie’s Basement.”
“Oh, say, what are you wearing?” “A ‘T’ and a ‘G’.” “And, what’s
Your favourite car?“ “An Opel in the sunshine…” We’re older. Four
Play five, a hand looking bigger than its bite, a finger
Taprooted in clay-clotted soil, sprouting further roots
Until unretractable. But then; bouncing ideologies off one another
Under the moon silky pink, and resounding gunshots
From the hunters in the wood don’t bother us, as we chase
Chickens with sticks and boil ants with water from the kettle.
Childhood’s an ecstasy of shapes and defiled dreams, unordered,
Specifically for engineering reminiscence and anticipation:
Remonstrance in the morning with the mother that bore you
Into the world; resisting the love heaped on us by closing our
Eyes and seeing a little paradise that keeps us from falling, like
Cotton wool kids. Mary Magdalene mothers my world, and her
Sugar-daddy’s a Little Lord Fauntleroy. A pompous nose protrudes
From the ignominious fool looking through that hole in the wall,
The one you always asked what it was for when you were younger;
I hope you still don’t know. We played with knives, crowbars
And air-rifles, and crushed stinging nettles underfoot; it was
Understood by all and sundry that we were to stand on a Sunday
Upon any mound in the cemetery and let all the dead know,
Through a bullhorn, that we were the kingdom that God looked upon,
Not little rotters like you. And so, in an August somewhen we set dynamite
Off in a little hole under that bridge, and as it echoed, we lit Roman Candles.
Sparks flew and nobody clapped that night, Littleton Drew was silent,
But golden still as ever will it be; the church an idyll and grass greenest,
Grew unlike any other blade that cut the smut of tomorrow, yesterday:
You saw me through the window, playing cricket, when I was looking
Perversely at lingerie in a catalogue, and I wielded an axe once and
Destroyed a machine. You were always there lingering over me,
Quietly conning me.

A desperation in youth that could be sweated out; the improper anxiety
Of a fickle glimpse and passing worry. Serenity - serendipity; a treasure trove
Under the tree; a kettle, a headstone, a blue bottle of poison, a strimmer’s blade.
Guilt-gilded thieves running through the forest until we come upon a soggy bag
Containing cut-ups of pornography from The Mirror and Star, and in that forest
The mushroom spores that make us blind; a Homer in Savernake without a cane.
We used to write little libels about giving birth to eggs and dancing naked
In front of the Queen, and we’d make films with plots of intrigue and blood.
And then there was you, who spilled food down between the keys of your keyboard,
And whose mosaic life laid unpatterned and shattered in the feral outside; a hill’s
Protection and shadow. I was taught piano by arthritic fingers that could no longer
Depress a note, and the guitar frets stung. At night my parents told me I had been up long
Enough; I wondered if anyone hid behind the couch. Constipated monotony is life when small,
But less insignificant than now… only for the reason that we couldn’t fly.
Only in dreams, and they stung worse than any sermon under the monkey tree that caught
Our ascending words and gave us more bad luck than a thousand cracked mirrors.
A thousand fish to feed a person, that’s the kind of life we craved, in the assembly hall,
Being read all those silly stories from Matthews and Johns, and singing those meaningless
Hymns out of tune like a clown, like a prancing moonlord, and recorder practise with
Busy bees and drippy tosh was enough to set teeth to rattle. Dragged teeth down the
Blackboard chipping enamel bits on the carpet. A portrait of the young dog as a platypus.
Reverberating shame at the chamber pot filled, a beaker in the urinal, though it wasn’t us,
Nor is there anything suspect in our lunchboxes, except crackers and cheese; he never
Could spell Cnut right; all the trouble, “This is cocaine.” Felt an infection coming on
On the red gra; morsels of muscles deposited on the ground after spillages and pile-drives,
Made to eat a mole-hill, made you eat fibreglass candy-floss, we wore knickers and weren’t
Entertained. A parlayed appraisal in R.E once; only shower-time in P.E, and fingers too
Cold and hard to undo shirt buttons, hit him with the hockey stick, he kicked a girl in the
Stomach; pushed against a window-sill by Wesley and Smart punched through a window. We
Just stood at the side, yo-yoing and throwing two-penny pieces onto the shed roof from the
Second-storey windows, and looking down Miss Marsh’s cleavage cavern as she took the register.
In D&T you were a rebel and told those werewolves where they could run at night; we laughed
At B.J Cox and Wayne Kerr and the man in pink trousers and green shoes who called you a
Blithering hound for breaking a Petri dish, but that was before you threw Kevin through a window.
When we were younger plums were our bullets and tennis rackets our guns, we plastered the wall
With purple, and rode bikes over tables; we played knuckles and bled and we yawned yellow when
The Christians gave us the Gideons; that’s when we went and weren’t put on report for truancy.
Were you ever there, God? - I never thought that fair.