in shadows, we see nothing

I relate to the battered and the bleeding, the used, old, worn-out and wretched, skulking along dimly lit passageways, caught in the head-lights on a wet zebra crossing.

I relate to the whites in peoples’ eyes, and the hole inside. Those with burnt fingernails, brown and staining from too much foil and broken bottles.

I relate to the thinned out man who has soiled himself in Canal Street, and his fat wife, screaming at passers by.

I relate to the two soft, pink children, left on a mossy bank of the East London stretch of river, wrapped in plastic Asda bags and newspaper, and dirt and mud and too much poison filling the air.

Now, my face is bright with innocence. My cheeks flush young, my neck graceful. I was made perhaps for harp playing, and clear mornings in April, and romance.

But my world is that of the beggar and the bugger, and my music is down and dirty with the rest of them. I am Welsh, born and bred, my mother from a steelworks town, my father, Llangollen foothills. I never knew honour or chastity or blessing. Love was hollowed out of me from as young as I remember.

Still, I flew round our garden with the small feet of an infant angel, searching out the scent of dewdrops, sniffing the heather and crumbling it between short fingers. I worshipped grass and wetness and the pink falling of Spring time, and the rustling of Autumn, death of Winter.

Summer was hoses, and tennis rackets and me circling the driveway on my boy’s bike, a silver racer. Days were long and sweet, like the soft fluffy sponge that my mother turned out upon the old wire rack on the vinyl kitchen unit, her lip curling inward in anticipation, me hiding behind the white counter, not wanting to distract her from her moment of perfection. We would both cheer as it landed, safe and sound, with a light thud on the metal below.

This is what my eyes still show. Eight years old, eight years old

But between this steps a darker figure. When night came, doors slammed tight, the house creaking, riddled with daggers and fear.

And for this, my face betrays me.

I come from a common breed. I come from what the books and scholars and right on tellers of how it is call ‘dysfunction’.

And life was never a speeding bicycle, and success comes despite, not because of.

I sit with my two sisters, in a triangle. One is beside me on the two-seater, the other, on the purple armchair. We all look at each other, our palms turned upwards to the ceiling, and all we can do is shake.

I’ve always longed for love to be a soaring, beautiful thing. I lose myself in words and notes and singing to find this elegant bird, to fly with it.
But love, it cuts me up, and I am serrated, bleeding nothing.

And so, I will always want the misfit, I was born for treachery and losing and blank evenings and mystical eyes weaving secrets……I was brought up to look reality square in the face…and to run out screaming.

And I write to lose the pain, to find the pain, to roll it into a ball and stick it under my tongue in silence, eyes looking right, eyes looking left, hands clasped behind my back in fake nonchalence. I write because I don’t want to do self-harm, I don’t want to go the way of the beggars and the buggers, the drinkers and the crack-smokers, the saboteurs and the sadists.
Writing is life, and life makes sense in the word.

My father bred us and broke us, one by one.

So I’ll climb atop Snowdon, and I won’t stop my eye from roaming, across the bleating of North Wales’ smoke filled pubs and hedgerows, to the borders, and England, to cities, the sea.

I won’t stop searching and I won’t stop running and I won’t stop the blood from gushing in my veins, because I know that life is almighty. You may crucify yourself again and again and again, and crawl to heaven on dislocated knees, but today, I saw what they might call Divine. It was in my sister’s pale shaking hands, and the frost covered pavement as I walked slowly back home to the tinsel, the tea, and the table where my mother’s arm was resting. It was in the sight of the back of her head, watching television, a fake pink rose holding her hair in place. It was in 5 music boxes, lining the top of the television, shaped like a snowman, a Christmas tree, a cottage, a soldier, and a teddy bear. I opened them up and tiny scarf clad figures were skating around and around on the ice inside to the music from ‘Swan Lake’.

It is in love, despite everything, refusing to be broken.

It has been a bitter Christmas.

We all saw our father for the first time in nearly 8 years, and my whole family stood in the same hallway for the first time in more than twelve. We were all together again, a family, for ten minutes.

My father was tall and his hair was shoulder length and silver. And I tell myself, he is no monster, he is dying. But in the glare of the lunch-time sun, I turn away, and I wonder.

Fear Of drowning

And what if the book and the pen must become my only lover? What if no one else will be able to… love me this way…make love to me this way…with the power of such feeling?
(a thousand valiant horses pounding on my brain, dizzying sex like opium or headlights, flushed breath, insane noises, all flock towards me… eaten by birds)

A deranged spinster in an attic flat filled with birdcages and Venetian death masks, radioactive rocks and black and white Audrey Beardsley pictures on her wall?
Muttering to herself, giving herself completely, surrendering all she is, legs akimbo, a sad hallucination, all adoring to her art?

Is this horrifying beauty?
Is this the only way?
Already, no one sees me for dust these days.
Who can match up, how can I match up any more

when I am an overgrown forest, a babbling brook, an overcast shadow, a yellow crab with pincers, a veritable feast, unknown still, misshapen, god, who will take me with so much emotion?

Too many tectonic plates moving, sliding.
I got Ethiopia in my twisted right foot, full scale blizzards in my cheeks, aurora, red, snowdrops, a wealth of peonies, fickle shadows, black legions of marching men, all tramping through the silent place where pleasure soars and danger beats (it’s here, sniff, the light between my thighs)

My writing voice is that of the wizened and post nubile.
Anonymous, androgynous, without form, shape, breasts.

Take me out of this place and I’m ceasing to know myself again.
Alien to me, with my lustrous hair, fingers soft and simple, and they still call me a beauty.

I shed her in these blank pages, dead as a door nail, voiceless abandon in a ferocious wind, graceless.

Such freedom tears me, all abrupt, seeking triumph, absolution...to be faceless.

I fear total submersion in my own rivers, death by drowning.

Tits, Ass and Cuteness

I ended up lost in blog land today. Frenetically clicking on different sites at high speed. Does anybody else encounter such a strange and addictive phenomenon here? Anyway, I ended up on someone's site where they had all these tests to assess what kind of person you are, mainly, it seemed, in terms of sex. Well I had to have a go.
   I have found out that apparently I am a kinky, confident, submissive lover who prefers to give ('What Kind Of Lover Are You?'), who is not into cute girls but instead attracted to curvy and naughty girls with larger than average breasts, arses and sexier composures ('The Tits, Ass and Cuteness' Test). My favourite kind of gal would be Angelina Jolie and apparently I am 'A Good Fuck'('How Fuckable Are You?'), but most disappointingly, smart but not gifted ('Are You As Smart As You Think?' Test). Well, glad I've sorted that one out. Am wishing now I had not resisted the 'Would You Have Been A Nazi Fascist?' test. Next time.
     I've just arrived home from a Christmas drink at The Neptune with someone from work. I drank whisky and ginger, she drank Guinness and we talked about families, plasterwork and putting on weight in your thirties.
    It is a strange phenomenon being in my early thirties - all the things that older people used to whinge about, is now making sense. I seem to be followed round on a daily basis by an anxious voice hanging on my shoulder cooing "go on, do it, it's now or never", or on a really bad day, "you've blown it, you're too old, you've missed the boat". When I was twenty, the years seemed to stretch out in front of me like something from an American road movie. Now it goes as far as the cornershop, if I'm lucky, and I am beginning to sound dangerously close to some Bridget Jones type caricature.
     Oh, the one thing I felt pleased with, reading the results from my various 'tests' on the internet, is that apparently, in this 'How Much Feminine Or Masculine Are You?' type test, the results showed that I am 'Androgynous', thus showing an equal balance of masculine and feminine qualities. I do feel quite androgynous at the moment, a strange hybrid of voluptuous earth mother energy and the spirit of some 18th century bisexual teenage boy (!). I am enjoying it, and yes, one joy of thirtiesdom is losing that tiresome desire for male approval, to realise there is much more to life than worrying whether males that you aren't often even that interested in feel an irresistable urge to run their hand up your leg.
     Nowadays, I find writing and music the sexiest things I can think of, and real soul, the biggest aphrodisiac.
     So I am off to an unexpected party tonight, with people from my friend's art course. I'm already feeling that warmer than warm glow from the whisky recently drunk, and a kind of sexiness I doubt the writers of those tests really have a clue about. Because yes, as a woman I have many secrets under my skirt, but so many more behind my eyes, like every woman, if you just take the time to look.

So I shall set the bitter scene. There is one man, one woman: sitting on one uncomfortable couch eating one cheap chocolate cake with one swirl of sauce in the middle. The man says "It's all because women have to twist sex into a problem, they always have to make it about emotions".
     He might as well have said, "Here, take my testicles and put them in a vice until I scream for mercy. Then tighten the screws". Because that was all she could think would relieve her frustration and, if the truth be known, at that point, her pain.

This Is My Rock And Roll

It's getting late in the evening again, the moon is nearly full and i'm a tired rag of a thing tonight. Nearly Friday, nearly the weekend, nearly Christmas. I'm kind of contented in my exhaustion, a spent battery that's been on full power all week long and can now, well almost now, rest. After I've finished writing this, that is. There's a bath with bubbles nearly up to the ceiling waiting for me, a cup of tea just ready to brew. But something won't let me stop until I have connected, no matter how feebly, with this blog.

On Tuesday night I went out to a gig of some friends of mine. I've been pretty reclusive lately, working in the days, and in various states of writing frenzy by night. And it was only there, out in the relative social whirl, that I realised how much my twilight hours of writing and obsessing over music has affected me. I have changed. All those hours, labouring over books and pages and computers and printers, endless cups of tea, glasses of rum, pieces of toast, so little sleep, so much adrenalin, turmoil, trouble, bitter self - doubt, envy, joy, alleluiahs in the dark...and I stood in the doorway of the club, watching figures on a stage, and all those pockets of fear, all those holes of inadequacy and insecurity built up over a life time had gone. All the avenues I have gone down to look for myself, I never realised I would find myself so completely through the words from my pen. And I feel so much gratitude that I started doing it when I did, that I didn't turn my back on it, I could stand there and fucking weep.

I think I need heroes and religion. I need figures and rituals and a vision to pour my obsession into. I have poured it into lovers and teachers and musicians and buddhas and characters from books. I get obsessed with Rilke, and I see all reality as a terrifying angel, I get into Lorca and I see only blood, sweat and a dying bull in the sand. I watch Pete Doherty on Newsnight and I feel the spirit of Rimbaud back in town. I worship rock and roll as the last rite of Dionysus. But at the end of the day, I've still got to live with me, and after all, all those people and all that energy, it lives in here, in the heart of me, where I tap tap tap with my own fingers. And tonight I feel full up, there is no one else to go to, no other place I would rather be. The need for someone to validate my existence, to say I'm alright or not alright, to hold up a mirror that I can see my own reflection in, has gone. Is she beauty or beast? Ugly or fair? Righteous or slovenly? Young or old? With it or failing?And I think that may be what they call contentment, or perhaps it's a little bit of grace that's touching me on the back of my head, at this cluttered and uncomfortable desk. The only mirror is the page in front of me, the only person who's holding it is me.

I was going to write on all sorts of important matters tonight. I have been thinking about it all day as I wiped woodwork and listened to Radio One. I was going to talk about libertinage and integrity, men and sex and why they are so obsessed with the bumps on our bodies. I was going to issue a call to arms in the name of militant feminism, moralistic hedonism and anti - success. But the bath awaits, we can't have it all, and I am a shameless happy one tonight.

littlun

sick of the sight of all you fuckers with your windows and your bright red shoes. sick of town and sick of the river and sick of bloody poodles with their curly hair. sick of sea fronts, sick of back streets. sick of lovers with their blazers and a school tie humour. sick of charities, sick of fleet street, sick of pay day, sick of lozenges and my sticky throat. sick of weekends, sick of trade. sick of flight sickness, sick of swashbuckling heroics. sick of driving, sick of being a passenger. sick of those who laud the lame, sick of television, sick of bagpipes and the Welsh flag. sick of babies, sick of the grit in my teeth. sick of shaving, sick of fireworks. sick of the end of the day. sick of waiting for morning. sick of sick bays and false teeth and words about being sick. sick of alone. sick of crowds. sick in spirit. sick in long pauses. sick of trying
so sick of trying.
     whip up my feet on the mattress, write a song to take me home...back to where the gypsies and the trees are together, where i am a green one, fresh out of the ground. and Grandma, she bakes sweet smells in her oven and foxes hide in small holes where no people go. in this time, i did not know enough to feel sick of anything, and everything was a new seed, we all sat by the fire and whispered, treasure was in the stump of an earth, and daylight was a running girl, chasing through hedgerows.

I love Lester Bangs

Now its time to get out of that armchair and take some notice it may be late but late is good and I’ve been a slob too long, I’ve taken the easy way out and greased the wheels of a soft life just like you but enough is enough (enough is never enough is never enough). Throw out your cheap prayer books and your fancy mantras, here’s the holy fucking dharma and it comes courtesy of Lester Bangs. Did you ever hear a voice so real? I’ve been waiting eight years to hear truth spoken with as much guts and eloquence and raw nerve as he does. Makes me ball my eyes out. Makes me stir crazy. Makes me ashamed to be so smug, so scared. No, religion won’t protect us, nor will art or the fancy words you or I could say. I’m biting my nails like a teenage son , while he sits amongst the cans and the litter catching the epiphany, making it dance. I’m posting just an extract of his piece on Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”, writing about “Madame George”, it has served me well so please read more…

"What might seem strangest of all but really isn't is that it's exactly those characteristics which supposedly should make George most pathetic - age, drunkenness, the way the boys take his money and trash his love - that awakens something for George in the heart of the kid whose song this is. Obviously the kid hasn't simply "fallen in love with love," or something like that, but rather - what? Why just exactly that only sunk in the foulest perversions could one human being love another for anything other than their humanness: love him for his weakness, his flaws, finally perhaps his decay. Decay is human - that's one of the ultimate messages here, and I don't by any stretch of the lexicon mean decadence. I mean that in this song or whatever inspired it Van Morrison saw the absolute possibility of loving human beings at the farthest extreme of wretchedness, and that the implications of that are terrible indeed, far more terrible than the mere sight of bodies made ugly by age or the seeming absurdity of a man devoting his life to the wobbly artifice of trying to look like a woman.
You can say to love the questions you have to love the answers which quicken the end of love that's loved to love the awful inequality of human experience that loves to say we tower over these the lost that love to love the love that freedom could have been, the train to freedom, but we never get on, we'd rather wave generously walking away from those who are victims of themselves. But who is to say that someone who victimizes himself or herself is not as worthy of total compassion as the most down and out Third World orphan in a New Yorker magazine ad? Nah, better to step over the bodies, at least that gives them the respect they might have once deserved. where I love, in New York (not to make it more than it is, which is hard), everyone I know often steps over bodies which might well be dead or dying as a matter of course, without pain. and I wonder in what scheme it was originally conceived that such an action is showing human refuse the ultimate respect it deserves.
There is of course a rationale - what else are you going to do - but it holds no more than our fear of our own helplessness in the face of the plain of life as it truly is: a plain which extends into an infinity beyond the horizons we have only invented. Come on, die it. As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out a fifth floor window rather than even read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken to casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boiled down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to.
If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other assholes' problems, until you feel like an asshole yourself, so you draw all the appropriate lines. You stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die. So you tussle with yourself. how much of this horror can I actually allow myself to think about? Perhaps the numbest mannekin is wiser than somebody who only allows their sensitivity to drive them to destroy everything they touch - but then again, to tilt Madame George's hat a hair, just to recognize that that person exists, just to touch his cheek and then probably expire because the realization that you must share the world with him is ultimately unbearable is to only go the first mile. The realization of living is just about that low and that exalted and that unbearable and that sought-after. Please come back and leave me alone. But when we're along together we can talk all we want about the universality of this abyss: it doesn't make any difference, the highest only meets the lowest for some lying succor, UNICEF to relatives, so you scratch and spit and curse in violent resignation at the strict fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you. At such a moment, another breath is treason. that's why you leave your liberal causes, leave suffering humanity to die in worse squalor than they knew before you happened along. You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. viler than the ignorant boys who would take Madame George for a couple of cigarettes. because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed. Such knowledge is possibly the worst thing that can happen to a person (a lucky person), so it's no wonder that Morrison's protagonist turned away from Madame George, fled to the train station, trying to run as far away from what he'd seen as a lifetime could get him. And no wonder, too, that Van Morrison never came this close to looking life square in the face again, no wonder he turned to Tupelo Honey and even Hard Nose the Highway with it's entire side of songs about falling leaves. In Astral Weeks and "T.B. Sheets" he confronted enough for any man's lifetime."

just when you thought you got it broke

well hoo and howdya doo? gotta write to keep it tight and jailbirds are fleeing as my fingers press and my knees are kneeing. what to say today? well i am richoccheting off the sides of entrancement, i am a happy bloom in the night for once. and tears aren't staining my ragged pillow, and fireflies don't gather to see their loss. i'm alright jack and wonders never cease, not least when you live in battered england, home of the wretched and free. yeah, the cold was out, but i woke up to letters saying sorry and i love you, and i drink heavy and rum on an eve when all should go wrong but something like light flickers in the shadows and for a moment, a whisper, i am home. then another letter in the post, it weighs several tonnes, and each side laid out end to end crosses my living room five times or more. seven years seven years it says. and though i cry a child's tears, though i stamp at motown classics to let the cat out of the bag, resolution peeps, love it creeps somewhere to beside me, in my unlit room, save for the fairy lights and the shine of my eyes. i thought i'd be counting the pennies at my funeral, dragging the homeless from the streets to make up numbers. and now, life turns upside down and back again in the sore blinking of an eye. someone got it wrong. and something made it right. too many people in my life not in my life, if you get my meaning. but tonight i hold a wine bottle to my lips and i swig and all worlds are about me, all fire is in the step of my shoes (i never meant to hurt you, i only meant to make you you cry). i'm not looking for redemption this time, just not to have to cross the road, turn away my eyes, shut out the words and the news and what i'd heard them say or not say. and well, love may be a jumpy mule, but recovery feels fine, just fine. and i see here a sun about to shine, yep, there it go, its up and it just fine.

Just When You Thought You Got It Made

Well I’m here once more. I made it across the first relay point and a stuck up girl in a pleated grey skirt and nylon knickers has just passed me some kind of stick she calls a baton. I’ll take it, run with it anyway, though I’m not convinced of what this race is for, or why I am in it ( I always hid in the cloak room in P.E.). And my phone beeps on my desk like a needy child. Bless and blast, I’ll break this skull a hundred times before the night is through.

So here’s where I’m at: what yesterday permeated the horizon, filling it with colour so intense it threatened only joy, with time and hesitation, today begins to take on spectral proportions. So I have realised I must take uppermost care to spill my guts with regular abandon in this ere forum of hope, else it’s the chop for me…you see, its that morning after syndrome, it’s the worst kind of hangover. One day you’re wittling away with your pen, and you’ve somehow managed to touch the fucking fabric of all that ever mattered, all that ever could be created in one precious, glorious stretching finger towards humanity, within a chain of words which follow each other all the way home, you’ve solved the puzzle, ridden the riddle, broken the sound barrier and landed back inside vision like a meteor on the moon. It is a living miracle. Next thing, the tea is brewing, the shoes have come off and you look at what came from this bright stain of inspiration and, well, the terrible question rises like indigestion in your chest: is it, well, mmm, is it, really all that good? Does the earth really move for you and anyone else? Failure lands like a tripped up postman on your doorstep, letters all blowing to the local winds.

     So I have written this in defiance against all the time i've wasted worrying about such nonsense that plays havoc with my vulnerability, to give myself a firm talking to, as I'm a sucker for perfectionism and it never did me no good.

oh-but-oh-
there they go
out the door
here we are again
back to counting the pennies
and the driving test with the L-plates on,
and waiting in the queue
for ugly school dinners,
back to tea on your lap
and missing the end of Eastenders.
back to masturbation and misery.
back to Manchester,
back to the hidden.
back to clichéd clare,
zombied frenzy killer queen…

she little girl lost in the woods
with a crazed piano?
NO? she horror score writer
with her eye on the trigger?
NO? she a black force
in a terrible night
of ardour and small vapour?
NO? she a gig and a triumph
and a fully stocked larder?
NO? is she a crumpled sheet
without even any stains to honour?
NO. is she crimson?
is she Welsh and proud for once?
is she a titan or a muse?
forever baking bread at the witching hour,
she never even got this far
and she’s
none of those tiredly things,
she is splendid
fired up on crystal rings
and barbequed angel wings.
hey!
i just saw a play!
it goes: she think she one,
but that just ‘cos she think she is-
she become just that
when she is TWO,
she is not twat.
she is Two and she CAN
live like that,
stretched out beauty on a harpsichord,
and I’ve seen her floating in
a star spun nightly glass ceiling,
i have seen her moving on the
sheeted dance floor screaming
like wretched of desire
and tumble blazing afoot in it all…
so why all small?
why small girl who want to be tall?
why tall girl embarrassed to not be
more small?
why big feet too little,
little feet too large?
why ever-present witchcraft
hovering over gold-spun head?
trust yourself girl.
you’ve spluttered up way too much blood
for one
two three lifetime.

it’s never perfect enough?
and it never will be.
not got no ending?
it never will have.
and
that, my girl
is what you big enough to live on
if you thought on it enough…

you are big enough
(but you think yourself
a small tepid whitish thing)

and that never blew you out of
the Carolina water.
that never made you a star.
He said:
EGO DID IT
Ego made it SOAR.

and I don’t want him go alone in Abyssinia.
i miss the nights
and the absinthe
and that gun-shot
through a
hotel wall..

this beautiful hunger that kills

downloaded kill a man for his giro today am squirming in my own obsession am replete with the removal of a mask. feel like a dirty boy, a stained joy. not happy with myself, i see a way of coming to, out onto consciousness all i wanted to forget. and i no longer feel man or woman. there’s a girl fading out like a valium hit, and she’s watched by a hundred unwashed rock stars, all straining at their weakness. could wipe my own sickness across this computer screen for i’ve found my delusion, i’ve found everything i ever wished i was, in the dead of a library, at the opening of a scripture.
i could feel blessed and cursed, but i feel more ever lost on the highways i track to bedlam. i am doomed to folly, and ever closer to the truth. cold rum won’t soothe my soreness, it runs deep inside my tendons, under the fur of ache and safety.
i am losing the thread, losing thread you lost me again into the tattoos on his chest. is suicide the only victory? i wonder and i wonder. you won’t learn much about me by the way i smell, by the cut of my hair.
and this beautiful hunger that kills will not entertain ravens of mediocrity and leisure…it was born of grace left alone and suffer still will all come upon us and leave us saddened by a country wall. torment lifts you, a union jack dying in your arms.
and genius is an empty jacket floating down the river, it is death on the night of victory, it is hammer house of horrors. feel the landslide, lie on the back of treachery, not a prisoner or a priest, a popster or a poet. unsurrounded by hope, dreaming the impossible dream, a corpse without speculation, a narrow line of light between two walls that became god and was forever godless. if this is genius, i am a knocked down door. and we can be, we can be. brilliance fell out with words, with what is spoken. it became homeless, a dragged out party queen drinking only liquor, eating nothing, never asleep.
all this hunger is inside of me and i am unravelling rope, unravelled rope.