The Bloggers Ball

The Bloggers Ball
My blog seems to be very slow in taking off. I know that numbers aren’t everything but 49 visitors in 4 weeks means if this was a dance I’d be a wallflower. I’d be sitting there in that morbid collective of boring bloggers. In fact not only boring but physically clumsy and ugly with ill-fitting cheap clothes, no money and to cap it all, a crushingly sensitive self-consciousness. We’d be staring out at the dance floor watching all the beautiful bloggers moving with a completely natural and easy sensuality and laughing into each others smiley open hideously successful faces. And we would want to knock their blindingly white teeth right out of their mouths. Spider -thoughts of herding these scumbags into Abhu Graib and causing them hideous sexual humiliation with dog leads and electrodes would crawl across our synapses while we outwardly smiled and took nervous sips from our rum punch.
This is how it always is. The internet has acquired the competitive tendency like a teenager acquires pimples. You must have followers. You must make money. You must have hits. You must acquire ‘marketing skills’. You must imbibe the writers discipline even if it be boiling oil hot from the nipples of Lucifer himself. And don’t forget you must make money. You must surf the limitless wave that is the next big thing in publishing. Oh and did I mention you must make money?
I have been a writer since I upped like the sassy little twat I was and wrote a poem about a deer being killed in the forest by a hunter. I must have been thirteen. I was at boarding school in Hampshire in the UK and it was just about the point I realised that everything, absolutely everything I had been told about the world, politics, history and especially religion was utter bum-twaddling, brain-mouldering, arsewipe. I was like the guy in those sci-fi movies who goes walking on the spacecraft and ends up having an anti-magnetic moment and spins off into the limitless vacancy of the Cosmos screaming soundlessly and tumbling like a gnat into the gaping maw of the Mandelbrot Dragon. Just writing these words I am also suddenly aware that it was also about this time I gave up on becoming an astronaut as an unrealistic career choice.
Anyway…My poem went down pretty well with the guys (all guys at my school) and I realised I was already what I wanted to be-A WRITER! A STORYTELLER! A WORD-ENCHANTER! A TEACHER!
My poem by the way was utterly crap. But I learned something about the power of the written word, for both good and ill.
In English class I started writing stories about satanists and rapists and death and people who did unpleasant things to horses, and writing I saw, could become an assault on the status quo. Words were weapons and the powers that be were fair game. One day I’ll post on how auto-erotic writing got me through puberty!
I wrote through my twenties, thirties, forties and now into my fifties. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful in publishing terms but I am in every fibre of my being , a writer. A word-onaut spacewalking out on the flight deck of story, awaiting my own anti-gravity moment!
I don’t need your internet publishing be –a- writer- in –thirty- days scams. I’d rather be a wallflower with a literary grenade held surreptitiously between my arse cheeks, waiting for the propitious moment.

Orgasm in 61 lines

UTTERING THE WORDS OF LIFE

Last night when I

licked the wet walls

of your mouth’s cave,

nibbled the sweet

shells of your ears,

palpated the soft creamy

down of you,

and slipped inside you

between your peaches…



I became a secret cannon.

A huge tube of steel!

Cunning symbols wrought thereon.



My swelling balls

the spherical wheels.



And I discharged from

the mountaintop to

the great all-encompassing

lake beneath.



Became the cannonball

then a pinball

rushing through tubes,

mazes and passageways.



Then with a great spurt

of red fire gushed

fire-workingly through your head

with a shout! Aieeee!

And you breathed:



‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’



Me, I hurtled through air

still rising!

Till, reaching the zenith

of my whirling arc;

I plunged,

fell with grace,

disappeared o’er

the crested ridge

and landed with a thud

in a field of disinterested cows.



The ball I was flattened

on the sweet earth,

its grey skin merged

into hands, eyes, legs.



On the faint breeze

wafting from the next valley

I heard your voice,

laden with urgency,

uttering the words of life:



‘I’M COMING! I’M COMING!’

Only in our moments of greatest challenge!

It is only in our moments of greatest challenge that we are ever truly free.

Write Work!

Unless you earn your living from writing it’s a sure bet you’ve got to have a job. That’s because you have to eat and pay the rent in order to write. Writers are therefore like spies. They go to work but only in order to do their real job-Writing! They are not who or what they appear to be. And this may well go unnoticed by colleagues and clients. The fact is we are only pretending to be teachers, bus drivers, social workers and judges. It’s all to fund our dark secretive habit as riders of the imagination, observers and recorders of the peculiar, surfers of paradigms and creators of characters inhabiting wider created worlds. As a writer is it wise to, as it were, ‘come-out’? Personally I think we need to be careful about this disclosure. Why? because if you are like me you work your nuts off to get a project finished before deadlines then you write in the time left. If my employers knew, they might consider me defrauding them despite my delivery of their project in a timely fashion, they might want more of me. This, I find is in the nature of employers- VE MUZT IMPROVE EFFICIENCIES! VEE MUZT INTOLERATE VASTE!

Karl Marx apparently always had food remains in his beard but he was right about those owners of the means of production. So the ancient rule atop the entrance to the chamber of the Illuminati might be embraced by we motley clan of scriveners-whether garreted and starved or struggling to feed our muse amid the panoply of corporations-TO KNOW TO WILL TO DARE AND TO KEEP SILENT.

And be careful what job you choose. It is nigh impossible to steal away to whittle a quick sonnet off while labouring for a piece-work brickie. And call me controversial but these builders will not honour and respect your muse though they may feed your imagination.

No, a desk in a privatish office, a laptop and access to the internet are a good start. A bookcase helps. Long stints as a kerouakian fire warden in a remote national park are ideal. Night security jobs can be useful as long as there is no risk of being shot or taken hostage. We do not want real dramas at work because that would interfere with our creative ones. And then of course there are the jobs that are really not suitable for sharing with one’s muse. I do not want my brain surgeon obsessing over his latest gore-fest script or my pilot catching up on his reading on the night flight. I want them pinned and wedded to perfection in their work, ever alert and super-responsible. And of course actors, dancers, musicians, artists are their work!

So the next time you notice that solitary shelf-stacker with a dreamy look in her eyes or the street sweeper, silently reciting some rhythmic line or the taxi driver with the worn legal pad on the seat beside him; that could just possibly be the greatest living writer on the planet. Be careful what you say! Or you could just kill them!

God Almighty Folks! What's going on in The UN Council?

MAY 29, 2009
UN PRAISES THE SRI LANKAN MASSACRE OF CIVILIANS

In the Times:

Sri Lanka claimed a propaganda victory last night after the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution praising its defeat of the Tamil Tigers and condemning the rebels for using civilians as human shields.

China, India, Egypt and Cuba were among the 29 developing countries that backed a Sri Lankan-proposed resolution describing the conflict as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”. The resolution also supported Colombo’s insistence on allowing aid group access to 270,000 civilians detained in camps only “as may be appropriate”.

The Sri Lanka Ambassador in Geneva said that European nations had failed with their “punitive and mean-spirited agenda” against his country. “This was a lesson that a handful of countries which depict themselves as the international community do not really constitute the majority,” Dayan Jayatilleka said. “The vast mass of humanity are in support of Sri Lanka.”

Western diplomats and human rights officials were shocked by the outcome at the end of an acrimonious two-day special session to examine the humanitarian and human rights situation in Sri Lanka after the blitzkrieg of the final military offensive that wiped out the Tiger force.

The vote is extremely disappointing and is a low point for the Human Rights Council. It abandons hundreds of thousands of people in Sri Lanka to cynical political considerations,” Amnesty International said.

Sri Lanka, unable to stop the Human Rights Council taking up its case, rushed its own motion to the floor in time to beat a more censorious resolution tabled by Switzerland.