what there is to have

saturday, october 21st

There is acid in the wind today. There is more phlegm in the spittle on the pavement. There is a heavy violet greasiness to the waft of product that remains like an unwanted hand on my shoulder from passing by the groups of haircutted yuppie-emulators. There is a wolvish honesty that the sharp drop in temperature has brought out from the practised protocol behind the smiles.
"Hello." You sound like a violin out of tune.
In summer, the new arrivals mistook it for a yodel of introduction.
Now it is yelp of that bastard inequality. We are all piano tuners under the skin, we've been pitched into unease.
Now is the time to refashion yourself into a Russian, what? English? it does not turn my head, does not resonate with me, I have no response, and you are left there, breathing your own air. How does that taste? While then, a ripple of reassessment mellifluates everybody; the terms of composure are dwelt upon.
Sometimes a non--answer makes you investigate the question. Warm your heart, cool your blood, come back from the frost, blink.

frame

thursday, october 13th

"... is only one child and they keep getting born over and over and what makes different people is the lives and the conditions of living. So "different people" just means different versions of the person, of all what it can mean to be a person. Like the one child has split and is dealing with fractions of themselves. Or is dealing with themselves on a time-fractured basis. And the loop of population, no I mean demographics, ok, ok, no, both and also a general climate of social conditions, what if that looping is a self-referential and sensitive logarithm?"

Why do I have to be held back by the maths teacher and be the last one on the bus and have to sit next to Max?
Why today?
And I'm certainly not going to put a why question to Max.
I mean, it's interesting talking when it's summer and we're on the trampoline and the universe is really big and it's easy to think and talk like this. That's one thing. But dude not here and now.
I'm on the bus going home and your clothes are stateless, they are refugee clothes, man, you really should be a little more aware.

and I look out of the window and am confronted by squares. Everywhere man, just like every shape of thing I see out there is a collection of squares and, if not square, a whole damn lot of right angles.
I've been doing that a lot lately, feeling smacked over the head with squares every time I open my eyes and the teachers at school got a snitch, like pack mentality, about where my eyes are. I mean, they say, about me not paying attention. In class. But I can hear and think and look just fine justthe same on separate tracks.
I'm kind of noticeable to teachers, or they have radar for when my eyes are either not on them or the board. Or on my desk.
I like being in lessons and it's kind of soothing hearing an adult's voice making continuous connections for like, thirty minutes, even when they repeat themselves. And as more and more arrangements of squares keep coming into view, I have additional draws to my attention and the thing is they're on a grid, so moving your head, it's like all the crystals get redrawn. And the teachers don't like it. They start holding you after class and blaming things on things. Now, that, I don't know why. If it was last summer I would ask Max and he might talk it through like he knew.
But what with all the squares in sight at the moment, what am I going to do, not notice them?

From The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark Haddon

This Poem is Certificate 18
When you open a collection of poetry or attend a reading you need to know that the poems you choose to read or hear are suitable for the audience.
To help you understand what a poem is like you can look at the certificate it has been given. This poem has been classified as 18. That means this poem is unsuitable for anyone younger than 18.
A poem with an 18 certificate may contain scenes of a violent nature. Carlos de Sessa burning at the stake, for example, his hot fat bubbling like porridge. Or Erymas, stabbed in the mouth, the blade smashing clean through to the brain so that teeth, bone and blood spray from his ruptured face. The slow death of a parent, often from cancer, is particularly common.
There may be sex, too. A man may be sucked off in a McDonald's en route to the airport, a babysitter may masturbate on the kiln-fired tiles of her employers' bathroom and an arsehole may be described in more detail than is necessary. The word "cunt" may be used.
In a poem with an 18 certificate the syntax may be knottier and the meaning more opaque than in light, narrative or straightforward lyric verse. A phrase may have as many as four different interpretations, all intended for more or less simultaneous comprehension. Conversely, when the hedged sun draws into itself for self-quenching and these modalities stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith, the intention may simply be to confuse the less intelligent reader. Sometimes a line or phrase is used simply because "it sounded right".
A poem with an 18 certificate may be written according to occult rules which are not made available to the reader. A parallel universe may be assumed wherein the expanded inkling undergoes an allusion and, at the climax of frogging, binges in the Bermuda. Some 18 certificate poems purport to be translations of work by Finnish and Romanian poets who do not, in fact, exist. In others a lightbulb may be granted sentience.
Like plumbers and dentists, poets are fallible, and the possibility of genuine nonsense cannot be ruled out. Unlike plumbing and dentistry, however, poetry is slow, frustrating and poorly rewarded work which fails more often than it succeeds and is therefore embarked upon largely by men and women labouring under a sense of almost religious vocation, grandiose self-delusion or some combination of both. As a result, many poems with an 18 certificate are written by people whose minds you may not wish to enter.
The language of a poem with an 18 certificate may be denser and more powerful than the language you are used to dealing with. And though it makes nothing happen it may, like a piece of ice on a hot stove, ride its own melting into your soul and bring you face to face with the madness of space.
It is an offence to read or supply a poem classified as 18 to anyone below that age.
Poetry certificates are there to help you make the right choice.

servitude

Saturday, September 17th, 2005
might I suggest she said i love you and leave it at that
well that was how she poured coffee, that waitress whose collar was creased so sharp you knew she was wearing the shirt for the duration - but it was early only Tuesday - sprayed wet and ironed in the important places.
Funny, these outlines of people, "waitress", her attire a line-drawing of a coffee pourer, taking notes on floppy paper. Dark hair.
leaving and returning, that was what she did and how she did it, pouring coffee we didn't want into our stained cups
when she spoke, we looked at her, and suddenly she blurred into the haze of cosy ambience, less outlined than imprinted against the circus poster prints, the dragonfly lighting
and Carlos couldn't disagree.
His MO like his DNA was impervious to her guile. He was the one dealing with the object of his affections, and he was it had to be said, by me, who had been listening to an everbuilding code of versions and episodes as they worked their way through his emotions and psyche, my hardworking friend who could only take so much, being dealt to by a master operator.
so anybody could suggest anything, because advice is only offered. It's a very light thing, comparably, wrapped up in sparkly paper. But you know, and Carlos I think felt it, because it occupied a lot of his time this relationship, that the material form of a thing has no bearing on it's use in any situation, it is not an all-purpose measurement, the dimensions of a thing.
Carlos had to fit his intentions to the will of another human being (mentioned earlier I do believe).
As sensible as those words were, as perfectly formed a statement as it was, Carlos could not simply say truth in as loose afashion as that. By all accounts, it would be a betrayal of the web they spun together, and here he was just trying to give a little struggle free of the stickiness of the relationship to a sympathetic, that is to say, silent, ear (me). So he just smiled and we ordered moccacinos to walk out into the night with.

what is water asked the child

tuesday, the thirteenth of September

water is what makes everything work. It runs between and keeps everything running. Water is the clearest of evidences on the capacity of boundary, as a theoretical term, and it is resplendent in it's permeability.
Impermeable is an example of vanity. Isn't everything permeable?
The degrees to which things are unitary, are 'not-the-other'; the quality of the persuasion which will resonate with their structures; what are these if not instances, faceted through sensory perception: reductions from the entity of life: a formulaic partiality?
These are what they are and highly dissolvable, increasingly submerged. They are what they are and absorbed or exposed, they come from the genesis of water.

attenuating circumstances

Saturday, the 3rd of September

how many people are going to be awake like they are the only ones, moving like they are a minority within a routinely sleeping group?
what are the dimensions of this solidarity?
worldwide, between the ones who feel their solitude acutely and come socket-to-blade keen in connivance with the boundaries of their impulses and the ghostly framework of solitary agitation?
how even when it's happening it has the quality of memory and how your feelings whisper into the atolls of the nerves of feeling which are tenuous at this time because even while they are as clear as they are, in this ante-time they are liable to become something else as you squint or swing it.

lifts you up

Tuesday, August the 23rd

perched before the tide, on fine sand, blonde like the mats whose strings hoisted them lightly concordant with the sun in the South China Sea, on this afternoon and this island where it was happening, the barbeque began to rustle, the air rose, the concrete kept its amusement to itself, flat beneath the chef's weight, strewn with cotton about its pillars, our pavillion accomodated the light breaths that remained with all the people who had flown to be here.

being here and being able

saturday, the 30th of July

The feeling was as though the blood at the tops of her legs was on spin-cycle. She stopped just before apartments, where the parking space flattened out the tarmac, and the white-blindness came on. Blank flakes beyond which the world escaped its pictures. Her own hands appeared to be insubstantial. And yet she recognised this feeling as being alive, her blood being rediverted along all the routes that kept her alive, operating on such a precise level of efficiency that she experienced the dips in availability fully and visceral. The warmth of the sun on her skin came justly, into her fingers even, and it was welcome. She seemed to be running a slight temperature these days that cooperated pleasingly with the outside weather conditions. Her heartbeat sped up to a count of 5 for each in breath and decreased markedly to 2 for every out. It was like running a tap through a sensitive hose and being able to monitor all manner of readjustments the intelligent liquid within the casing was making. Yes, indeed it was, she thought, it was like being able to do both these things simultaneously. The pounding behind her ears, where her neck became her skull bucket, would soon subside, swoosh into a resting frequency, she would think it had stopped. The general faintness would pass into a lightness of being and she could set off down the dry-cleaning street feeling happier and happier at being here and being able. There is a trick of letting the optimum time evolve so that she can walk the length of the apartments in the sunshine having had the more insistently mechanical preparations of her body dissipate prior to turning left into the oncoming at full stride. No counting, just breathe through it.

light fantastic

Monday the 25th of July

the pudgy hands from under the computer console, jerking the other one off, in the cartel of childhood, always must playact, complete with the mock authority voice, the brusque ineffectual smacking away, well aimed slaps, but the legs remain, the legs are out of combat, you know we know you know where the fidelity lies.
and it makes me an anger of sorts, because the deflective sensationalism that makes up most of the reportage on this subject, has groomed indignation to be the first reponse, and in a process of misnaming and batting all the little cruxes that build the symmetry of encroachment and complicity and release and relief away, makes it a vortex of common sense hermetically sealed.
look at me, the kids are screaming. they shriek it. there is a vein of laughter within it, you know the cunning laughter that is closely tempered to cleverness as it winds itself around revelation upon revelation. look at us , we are hurting the other, look at our bad behaviour, you are not invited to our bad behaviour, this is private, this is our choice, look at us. this is private, look at us.
ha, got you there. but nobody has been got, the conventions of respect, autonomy, expression, and protection have got themselves into a tangle in the uncertain terrain of responsability.
to be frank, i am not interested, i know this memory of shadowy anger to be a fake.
i remember maths lessons with clarity here, and water polo, and ballet classes before the teacher arrived, and scavenger animals caught by children beside the club kitchens, and the coldness in my eyes wanting to scream at the white fuck up by the blackboard. Don't be ludicrous. abstract thought and general principals, are an odd screen for an immediate education in neglect and blindness.
So much is a product of bad behaviour. The conditions of today are the product of an earlier set of circumstances. Something happened to somebody once, sort of thing. Things like this will keep on happening, to you, by you, by me, for me, for the ancestors, because it's good for you, because you deserve it, because this is who you are, because this is who we are, for no reason, why are you asking so many questions, why are you asking such stupid questions.

Mothers who cannot protect their children for one - who are mothers today because they were unprotected and who receive no societal fortification today, cut down and endlessly self-justifying. Subscribing to rationalisations for their own inferiority, invented by the people whose existence they support.

Share your food.

mechanical wings and solider things

agate husked beetle
animate
on red granite
the tiny resolution of rock crumbling the slab cut in heat and water
as impartial as each other

Which brings me to "Sah

saturday the 1st of July
Blatant
is hollywood as selfdestructuve as to advertise it's own crapness in the tidal wave of crapness currently washing over the neon plastic cinema houses, in crap areas of the world where the people are supposedly sub-optimal and thus receptive to cinematic representations of themselves as disposable sidewatchers, invisable, unwarranted until they are patronised.
Blatant
the abscess of a hero (what, you thought i was going to say absence?) coupled to anthemic music to which the lyrics "Make Way for the Idiot" are too easily fitted might actually be by design.
The storytellers-elect are embarked on increasingly bloody and violent creation myths. Bang an empty oildrum 'why don't you?' for all the hollow resonance they provide. If you are accustomed to recognising the stirrings of a redemptive heart at the existential cavity of human endeavours, the redundant premise of soulless mirth (yes i think i bled that phrase from somewhere else) is faintly disturbung and highly destructive and as insulting as it is possible to be - as the bigot castigates the seagull.
Repulsive crapulous crapsousity, crapscular extrapolations from a mind unsatisfied by it's inability to relate to the social space in which it's physical body receives information on which meanings are ascribed to it. And so whole fake epics are knocked up whose only message is to herald the haggard ego of somebody's child who cannot fathom his relationship to his penis. Skin-numbingly arrogant aggressive spiels of all things under the sun as manipulated by a one-eyed belief in them as functions of an appendage. And fanaticata, ad nauseum, a scary appendage.
I have never met an American who didn't seem normal, but yet there seems to be an institutional obstacle so that the experience of empathy eludes them. Maybe, in addition to not hearing the voices of those in the conversation with them, their own voices and words are deafened by the din of their ideology. They do seem to have a ideology that blocks out the actual living realities and subtleties and delights and sensitivities and the possibilities of diverse and responsive proclivities to keenness. One that kind of pfluffs like a fat yellow cushion inside their minds and callously invalidates independant expression and meta-systemic organisation.
Yes, it is true that I never want to go to America for this reason; that from the pallor of their skin and the quality of their eyes (dull, it seems to me and that is a cause for concern), and from the arrangement of their skeletons (the girth of their bones perceptibly augmented), their food sources are acting upon the population an experiment, or several ill-thought-through experiments on biodiversity, on behaviour. A commercially readjusted pseudo-controlled reality.
It makes my skin numb with the aggressive arrogance of it all, and I am disconcerted by the obtuseness of Americans that I know.
Ponder the attempts some people make to respect and give respect to those who do not respect them.

An entity that made sense Unexpected and unsurprising

monday, the 27th of June
She is more than herself in so many ways. Her household
and the considerations of the offspring who make report to her in the circuits of their own timetables
and the employees who know that there is an invisible weight that is brought to bear - in excess of her face which smiles upon them as they make their schedule. She marks the passing of multiple man-hour days. And more insistently, unspoken, many people meld their conscious activity to her, she who lives not in her own life, but in theirs as their cash-flow incarnate
and the logisticians
the merchants
and the entrepreneurs
the clients
and the restaurant lunches
The priest who makes his mark and the importance of the authority in whom he brings to vast avenues of society some humanity and sense and succour
As she turns in her own life, the visage that is turned to her is the workable guise of an understanding deity
she is always welcome in this house
the people who are with her who know who she was before she took on the lacquer of tangental generation's perceptions
the people who know her beyond knowledge and the details that provide that knowledge

She came in a car with me and she did something unutterably kind. So kind that a great store of magnanimity radiates from the mantle of the Earth and through the torque of its spin. The world is very good
and it is more than human
Tomorrow and the next day it will keep on being and she will
and so will all the things that rely on her likeness a little less permanently.

much of

which things define the way you understand the style of life you live?
how much is supported- exclusively- for the pleasure of old men?
really?

do a little dance

Saturday, June 11th
like the consistency of pond-weed saturated H2O, like Zurich, remember? the sky is murky and it's dark, too, so the buildings avoid notice.

They are all high-rise here, more spaced out than in comic books.

and the lights in the windows look like eyes with glaucoma.

"By your own logic...", the accomplice took leave

Tuesday, the 7th of June

Television. People over a certain age thought it had stopped. They remembered it as a distinct characteristic of an earlier time, a time when people were still open to the idea that everything was being reduced, and indeed, could be reduced. This was years ago.
But its uses and the urge to represent forged a panoply of mediums, variously as popular as tv.
And there still was tv. Sound, movement and colour. The simplicity of its information, so suited to the anthropological predilection for recognition, delivered a visceral comfort and those who chose could always make it available.

It was lifestyle. A lot of lifestyle was going around though. All of them different, and in different lots, but generally around, no changes there.
One thing was different now. Something from before had stopped.
The overfed old, white men, podging obtuseness as they touched the young, other people's children, dropping words like education, poverty, opportunity.
The images of scrub and anthill and the non-transmission of the dust and the smells.
The silent young and the incredible import instructing and canvassing, canvassing.

A pandemic susceptibility, noted here, in some observations on a condition, known as "rice butt" that afflicts the local population.
Despite its negligible taste and consistency, it is cooked over and over again in the course of millions of lifetimes, and people choose to have a rice dish. I reckon rice has an addictive component.
I don't believe that the body is equipped to process rice, not in these quantities anyway, and while they are being saturated with rice, there is a toll exacted on human bodies by deficiencies in nutrients and valuable minerals.
And by the age of 30, the ablebodied adult population (which is what 30 years old is here - the pinnacle and pivot upon which to hinge and swing the sum-total of understanding in the net of society) are built like tanks.
With every mouthful of excess rice consumption they wage a war on their genetics and physiognomy. In the lifelong process this takes, bone and flesh are inexorably compounded and eventually they look like a sack - smooth-skinned bundles of compromise, mounds of pointless muscle. Boys of 16 to 28 have rice breasts, rice pecs. Girls have puffy forearms and glutinous legs. Like jelly in gladwrap. Everyone has inflated fingers. The skinny ones do not eat.

but a mere invectory

What if there is no difference between anybody? What if we are all fundamentally part of the same creation and contan identical potentiality to anyone else and all that differentiates us is timing?
What if the long long pattern of the equations and permutations that are encounters over the period of human life on earth is non-repeat, with the pertinent question - does your mind lead you to this point? this is where i get interested in the possibilities of this "unknown" - what manner of things have occured and what entity has been brought into being and then to it's close, and how does this leave us?
If there is no more us, then is there any "what next?" to ask?
Some people think that there are things to attain, or things to jump over, or things to fulfill. Some people march forward in their minds with the invocations of another person's voice keeping them mindful of this prophecy or that.
Some people hoard the milestones that their predecessors have set up and meter out their days through a heraldic calendar of solid futures, each to be sought in the footsteps of their individual totem.
Some people have a lack of faith and rote their experience of light and air to a dogma of projection

of all things for God's sake! (an anachronistic injection from my appreciation of sense)

values imperfectly mediated and faultily voiced by idiots with loudspeakers.
Projection is a lie that covers nothing, it is an unnecessary lie at that. What if the lies of the projectionists were openly regarded as aural fabric that ennable said projectionists to be clothed for the duration of their life on this planet in regalia and insignia that dissemble the abject exploitation they require? What if that was all that stood between us and our own happiness and widespread generosity?
Is that all? Or what more can be said? What more can I say? All the other thoughts that I've been having while I was typing this, which shall be expanded over the next moments and through moments on other time scales, what other things/something elses shall come?
What if there is no such thing as an ending?

There is no such thing as an ending (from my appreciation of sense)

I am elated to ask the question.

with all the clarity of dust in the glass air of the approaching dusk this is knowledge that a satellite could not extract

friday, the 27th of May

The man had his back curved between us and the window. His elbows were handling the bar in a familiar way, which you do if you are a glass or an elbow, so the effect is total.
And so to begin to hear in their own speech, the words that call up an acknowledgement of the initiations and inductions that scoop a communities humanity as they chronicle the progress of 2 centuries of settlement.
We settle in and listen, made possible because in this place we are acceptable. The way for there to be a way, is to be acceptable. The printed word and all the faded photographs, such things are bandages for the illiterate. Call it "pride", call it "sacrifice", but it is just blood that has been let. The first senses - to be and, now, to listen - these accompany the recogniser in their path for truth, and we know that some combination of forces has extracted from an autonomous life some holy thing. I do not know what word to give it, I think to name it would take from it anyway.
Depletion of the natural resources, I keep quiet and hear it from your mouth. Fabric of history, obvious, continuous, now in these calm hours as you converse it, in this conducive environment, the acceptance makes ease and it can be transmitted, it can grow into record. Such things that are not transmitted, appear in the chronicles as glaring omissions that analytical, quick minds stare blankly at, unable to access. You need to have somebody whose eyes become their own as they talk to you, who speak in their own pace of the things that required certain calibrations made to the actions and capacities of others, always others, in the past that is a faroff country and know why these buildings were built. You need to have somebody whose hands make the most sense out of anything, this day, yesterday on a plane, these hands with a million ancestors.
And eventhough he has not said it, nor come anywhere close to saying it, if I wrote a book in the momentum of this encounter, and he was the sensitive protagonist, this much is what I know he knows:
As of yet, I still believe in unknown things.

This morning

thursday, May the 25th

Come this way, across the bridge, look left at all the lotuses. A bird on one, see, it quivers like life, like cotton on silk, and all around is buzzing - intermittant amplifications. Things with different numbers of legs keep chirruping. So deep down in the nutritious polluted lake the slow big fish track the slow big momentum, little scraps of fishes yap at the skin of the water, a clear slap noise. Stop and look, stop and look more innerly, stop and let the scene scan for you as you breathe the early morning lake air, bounce on the suspension bridge and hear the determined encounters of unhuman things. If it snaps, if the bridge should bend too far, it is only a short swim to the bank. Only that, not an eternity in rotten liquid, an intrusion into the quiet priorities of aquatic order, just a quickness to think about before sleep, that will happen then so will a shower and dettol, and that's the end of those clothes.
Come this way across the stones. They have laid them out along the curve of the trees, and straight from each bench, it is possible to wear stilettos, highly possible to wear stilettos in the moonlight poised in the open air observatory, a rat, look a mouse, a one with a commendable tail has just run by the scraggly mangrove bushes.
There's a coffee shop across the crossing, we passed it on the way when we didn't know where we were.

arcing from a moving car

Tuesday, the 24th of May
the hills against the underside of the sky. the road quite disappeared and out of sight.