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:
Avid Gaile
Limited
Licensed Sex Shop
W1/W2
Drizzle-ridden
Like an
Without the gusto
Neon umbrellas reflect
The electric rain
The gherkin in the pickled evening
The gangrenous penis seen
From Bank balcony
After
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
Quiet in the even, isn’t Stephen’s Green.
I’m not a big fan of the
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
But this is the poet’s city:
Something ethereally; underground
As much as o’er, creative of woebegone
Wonderment, more than
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
And
Angels;
No little lost bear there though;
With a red hat and a blue coat,
Who could never mix his paint right:
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.
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