BLUE HALLOWEEN
The village store has, just this minute, closed.
It’s drawbridge has gone up-portcullis down.
An aproned granny smirks behind the door
and labours the cruel bolt into its case.
My eyes weak pleading falls on stony ground.
I curse her and her brood under my breadless breath,
And curse ‘life in the country’ milk-less on halloween.
A youth observes this frieze of unmet needs
In the dark hunching of Milnthorpe Square.
Just then, Death walks past, blood on his shining scythe.
‘You’re the one that I’ve been looking for
these past two years and more!’
I shout
and push him in the back of my old van,
pleased he’s at my shoulder once again.
Then a little witch walks past with a broom,
a-hubble and a-bubble, lovely little witch.
Suddenly, I feel so sad for me.
No kids or pumpkins or those vampire masks.
Just me, and all my dry and dusty books.
Writing down the bones
Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
29.9.10
What is Poetry? Poetry is the weather!
A very long time ago way way back before iphones and Nintendo's and electric cars, and Tony Blur, I used to live in...Blackpool. Yes, that's right, Black-pool. In gaelic it's Dubh-lin. I don't know what the gaelic is for shithole but that would have been a more appropriate name for it. Though, thinking about it I did love the architectural vanities of that long sweeping promenade against whose walls the Irish Sea used to fling itself with relentless vigour.
The point of this ramble is that when I was in my late teens/early twenties I was hitting the pubs and clubs and almost everyone I knew was, or claimed to be, a writer. I found an actual poet and we used to huddle in pubs reading our latest works to each other and casting lustful glances at any girls in the vicinity. I never saw any of the other 'writer's' work, it was always in preparation. I came to realise that though these people could pontificate on any and every aspect of the art of writing as a theoretical exercise, what they wanted was the perceived cachet of being a tormented writer without the somewhat stolid and unromantic activity of sitting at a desk for hours at a time while nuclear explosions go off in the imagination and then trying to confine that to the blankly unrelenting page.
I came to realise then, that any productive writer even if they are producing rhyming couplets to their poodle, is worth so much more than the phoney writers who've read everything by the oulipo group and can post-modernly do a wicked gender/transcending relativistic critique of whatever you have produced and whose wicked insights can leave you gasping as you are crucified on the poisoned barbs of their wit. These guardians of the literary heart, will leave you feeling like a drooling idiot for daring to offer your poetic baubles for their distinguished attention. You realise as you stare into the narcissistic depths of their peepers that you are in fact, no writer at all. What you are is a scumbag, a running sore, a leprous pretender ringing your little bell in the darkness of your own pustulent ignorance.
Whoah! Where did all that come from? This is straight from my Id-quill, spilling over the page in poolings of naked truth. Please continue!
2.50pm: The poet lumbers away from his desk of dreams and stumbles downstairs to find some coffee. (To be continued...)
5.35pm: Children fed he shuffles back to the desk of dreams trailing his sisyphean mortal coil behind him and commences: What is Poetry? Ah that is the question. Once he responded 'let me go away and think about it'. Returning aeons later he said with all seriousness-'If the World is a tree then Poetry is the wind in it's branches.' Minutes passed....then:
'Why wind? Why not the seed-ripening sun? Or the all-encompassing rain? Why not just the weather?'
'The weather!' he bleated weakly, 'you can't say that Poetry is the Weather!'
'Why not?' Minutes drip from the branches of the World Tree...phut...phut...phut. A poetic wind softly rustles it's greens.
'Because, because, because it's just not right, damn your eyes! And another thing, if you barbarically plough my metaphorical allusions you will expose my poetic roots to the harsh winter frosts. You will destroy my crop, my potatoes will blight and my carrots will bolt.'
'Well then,' replies the torturer 'so what is Poetry?'
The point of this ramble is that when I was in my late teens/early twenties I was hitting the pubs and clubs and almost everyone I knew was, or claimed to be, a writer. I found an actual poet and we used to huddle in pubs reading our latest works to each other and casting lustful glances at any girls in the vicinity. I never saw any of the other 'writer's' work, it was always in preparation. I came to realise that though these people could pontificate on any and every aspect of the art of writing as a theoretical exercise, what they wanted was the perceived cachet of being a tormented writer without the somewhat stolid and unromantic activity of sitting at a desk for hours at a time while nuclear explosions go off in the imagination and then trying to confine that to the blankly unrelenting page.
I came to realise then, that any productive writer even if they are producing rhyming couplets to their poodle, is worth so much more than the phoney writers who've read everything by the oulipo group and can post-modernly do a wicked gender/transcending relativistic critique of whatever you have produced and whose wicked insights can leave you gasping as you are crucified on the poisoned barbs of their wit. These guardians of the literary heart, will leave you feeling like a drooling idiot for daring to offer your poetic baubles for their distinguished attention. You realise as you stare into the narcissistic depths of their peepers that you are in fact, no writer at all. What you are is a scumbag, a running sore, a leprous pretender ringing your little bell in the darkness of your own pustulent ignorance.
Whoah! Where did all that come from? This is straight from my Id-quill, spilling over the page in poolings of naked truth. Please continue!
2.50pm: The poet lumbers away from his desk of dreams and stumbles downstairs to find some coffee. (To be continued...)
5.35pm: Children fed he shuffles back to the desk of dreams trailing his sisyphean mortal coil behind him and commences: What is Poetry? Ah that is the question. Once he responded 'let me go away and think about it'. Returning aeons later he said with all seriousness-'If the World is a tree then Poetry is the wind in it's branches.' Minutes passed....then:
'Why wind? Why not the seed-ripening sun? Or the all-encompassing rain? Why not just the weather?'
'The weather!' he bleated weakly, 'you can't say that Poetry is the Weather!'
'Why not?' Minutes drip from the branches of the World Tree...phut...phut...phut. A poetic wind softly rustles it's greens.
'Because, because, because it's just not right, damn your eyes! And another thing, if you barbarically plough my metaphorical allusions you will expose my poetic roots to the harsh winter frosts. You will destroy my crop, my potatoes will blight and my carrots will bolt.'
'Well then,' replies the torturer 'so what is Poetry?'
28.9.10
The Writer's Alamanac with Garrison Keillor and 'Gas' by Charles Bukowski
A few months ago I remember reading in the London Review of Books an article by August Kleinzahler fulminating in a mouth-foamingly hostile manner about poor Garrison Keillor and his poetry and new writing site-The Writer's Almanac. What particularly irked Kleinzahler, who is anyway I think something of a manipulative bad-boy as regards the media, was Keillor's midwest accent and his homesy soft spoken wisdom-bull. Kleinzahler may be a hustler but Poetry needs bad boys and girls to hurl shit-bricks into the whirring fan-blades of it's complacency and self-regard. At the end of the day it's only the poets who get covered in shit that have anything to say that's worth listening to. Beware the clean, sensitive, milky-skinned lily-livered twats who masquerade with their metrical poses and anal scansions and their wine and poetry evenings. Give me the mad drunken buggars like Bukowski any day.
Below is the link for Keillor's slightly dead-pan reading of Bukowsk's 'Gas'. I'm reading Bukowski's Collected Poems at the moment and loving their ferocity and dark power-The Pleasures of the Damned Poems 1951-1993 (Canongate 2007). I don't know why 'Gas' isn't in it because it's great and always makes me smile.
Thanks for reading. Success to your work. Love and Will in Balance.
Gas
by Charles Bukowski
my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.
we only saw her on Sunday.
she'd sit down to dinner
and she'd have gas.
she was very heavy,
80 years old.
wore this large glass brooch,
that's what you noticed most
in addition to the gas.
she'd let it go just as food was being served.
she'd let it go loud in bursts
spaced about a minute apart.
she'd let it go
4 or 5 times
as we reached for the potatoes
poured the gravy
cut into the meat.
nobody ever said anything;
especially me.
I was 6 years old.
only my grandmother spoke.
after 4 or 5 blasts
she would say in an offhand way,
"I will bury you all!"
I didn't much like that:
first farting
then saying that.
it happened every Sunday.
she was my father's mother.
every Sunday it was death and gas
and mashed potatoes and gravy
and that big glass brooch.
those Sunday dinners would
always end with apple pie and
ice cream
and a big argument
about something or other,
my grandmother finally running out the door
and taking the red train back to
Pasadena
the place stinking for an hour
and my father walking about
fanning a newspaper in the air and
saying, "it's all that damned sauerkraut
she eats!"
"Gas" by Charles Bukowski, from The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain. © Harper Collins, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
Below is the link for Keillor's slightly dead-pan reading of Bukowsk's 'Gas'. I'm reading Bukowski's Collected Poems at the moment and loving their ferocity and dark power-The Pleasures of the Damned Poems 1951-1993 (Canongate 2007). I don't know why 'Gas' isn't in it because it's great and always makes me smile.
Thanks for reading. Success to your work. Love and Will in Balance.
Gas
by Charles Bukowski
my grandmother had a serious gas
problem.
we only saw her on Sunday.
she'd sit down to dinner
and she'd have gas.
she was very heavy,
80 years old.
wore this large glass brooch,
that's what you noticed most
in addition to the gas.
she'd let it go just as food was being served.
she'd let it go loud in bursts
spaced about a minute apart.
she'd let it go
4 or 5 times
as we reached for the potatoes
poured the gravy
cut into the meat.
nobody ever said anything;
especially me.
I was 6 years old.
only my grandmother spoke.
after 4 or 5 blasts
she would say in an offhand way,
"I will bury you all!"
I didn't much like that:
first farting
then saying that.
it happened every Sunday.
she was my father's mother.
every Sunday it was death and gas
and mashed potatoes and gravy
and that big glass brooch.
those Sunday dinners would
always end with apple pie and
ice cream
and a big argument
about something or other,
my grandmother finally running out the door
and taking the red train back to
Pasadena
the place stinking for an hour
and my father walking about
fanning a newspaper in the air and
saying, "it's all that damned sauerkraut
she eats!"
"Gas" by Charles Bukowski, from The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain. © Harper Collins, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
27.9.10
MILIBAND BREAK-UP!
Yes it's true, after a string of heartbreaking No 1 hits and a five year domination of the album charts with such essential rockers as 'Pimp my Pinstripe Pants Baby' and 'Pricks in the Parliament' and the classic jazz fusion concept album 'Expensive Sandals and Expense Scandals.' it seems the Ed and Davy show is about to go solo with Ed signing what is rumoured to be a highly lucrative contract with the heavily unionised Don't let us down or we'll 'ave you recording company.
Davy on the other hand has been coy about his future but has indicated he may not even form a new band and may instead spend time with his family discovering his musical roots though he is rumoured to be imminently releasing a highly dubbed version of 'What's it all about Alfie?'
Some prominent music critics have described the brothers highly selective childhood experience as meaning they have no idea of what it actually means to be a normal human being while others, of a crueller disposition, have suggested the brothers are not actually human at all and arrived here in pods along with other well known performers of the nineties and noughties. It is not known where the originating planet was but it is attested by several sources that the Mothership was simply called 'N-E-W-L-A-B-O-U-R'.
Professor Bumpn'dink of the University of Hollywood has suggested that the brothers strangely fixed facial expressions are clear evidence of aliens simply trying to copy genuine human emotions.
'Only a feckin' eedjit would believe a feckin' word to come out of their alien orifices!' The professor said.
Others have pointed out that the boy's father was the famous Ralph Miliband who was a sociologist. The conclusion is that if your dad is a sociologist you must know...lots of things.
Heart of Balance wishes both Ed and Davy all success in their latest scramble for power...er...we mean...career move.
Davy on the other hand has been coy about his future but has indicated he may not even form a new band and may instead spend time with his family discovering his musical roots though he is rumoured to be imminently releasing a highly dubbed version of 'What's it all about Alfie?'
Some prominent music critics have described the brothers highly selective childhood experience as meaning they have no idea of what it actually means to be a normal human being while others, of a crueller disposition, have suggested the brothers are not actually human at all and arrived here in pods along with other well known performers of the nineties and noughties. It is not known where the originating planet was but it is attested by several sources that the Mothership was simply called 'N-E-W-L-A-B-O-U-R'.
Professor Bumpn'dink of the University of Hollywood has suggested that the brothers strangely fixed facial expressions are clear evidence of aliens simply trying to copy genuine human emotions.
'Only a feckin' eedjit would believe a feckin' word to come out of their alien orifices!' The professor said.
Others have pointed out that the boy's father was the famous Ralph Miliband who was a sociologist. The conclusion is that if your dad is a sociologist you must know...lots of things.
Heart of Balance wishes both Ed and Davy all success in their latest scramble for power...er...we mean...career move.
26.9.10
We all get a little down sometimes! A poem to read down the phone to the samaritans in the wee smalll hours and dedicated to those amazing people who work for them.
TONIGHT MY HEAVING HEART
Tonight my heaving heart has laid me low
and shudders in the holes of its dark cave.
The fractured rhythm of some loathsome row
beats out the brutal measure of my days,
rasps against the roof and dripping walls
and builds into a tune that mocks and crows:
A dirge, lament or elegy that drifts and calls
over the dead white fields where nothing grows.
A Glasgow child stands on a slivered rock
and in his eyes there is no trace of fear
as Chaos lumbers down the steely Clyde;
a hairy beast wrapped in a kilted frock;
to lie in wait for forty frozen years.
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