7am, time to rest.

Despite my desire, I can no longer justify calling this an evening - the light has risen on yet another day and the birds are tweeting in what would usually be a charming manner, but at present it just reminds me of the fact that I am still WIDE AWAKE and it's 7AM.

Oh the joys of jetlag. This is my third night that has passed into daylight without a wink of sleep, and I've been told that I must break the cycle and set my alarm for 9am sharp tomorrow and get up, by hook or by crook.

I have diligently set my alarm for ten (well, 9 is just plain ridiculous), and will be dragging myself up in a couple of hours to meet the morning instead of stumbling into the outside world just as it is returning to its rest.

So after reading, listening to 'calming music', meditating, lying on my belly, lying on my back, arms by my side, arms flung out, swiveling 180 degrees in the bed for a change of scene, I am up and back at my computer - the one thing NOT recommended for a relaxing release. But fuck it, at least I'm getting some writing done.

I think somewhere underneath this somnambulistic state, I'm grieving. Yes, it is possible to grieve the loss of a city as much as any person, to feel a bond with it the same as one feels with a lover or kin.

Saturday night I made love to New York for the last time, stomping up rain drenched streets in unsuitable boots which got quickly soaked, cool liquid eating up my socks, creeping all upon my skin. A wild night, a beautiful night, where the wind came from all directions and the rain was all consuming. New York was sublimated, taxi cabs came and went, and I was adrift, timeless, a black halo bouncing in a room of light.

I will never forget the first time I set eyes on her. The plane had begun its descent towards Newark Airport, the air was grey as a dirty rag, mist swamping the distant landscape. And then, there she was, out of the corner of my eye, one of the strangest sights I have ever seen. New York, one of the biggest cities in the world: a giant, a deep complex force of laughter and aggression, splendid, unanswerable. But here she was beside me like the cutest toy town, her skyscrapers not menacing, not awe-inspiring, just strangely, disturbingly, endearing and small.

Shrouded in a charcoal mist, she looked so dirty, so smeared with grime: she was to me a filthy graveyard, her tombstones ludicrous and enchanting, blackened epitaphs to the pain of this city which was all I could see. The Statue Of Liberty was a stunted figure of mockery, looking out to the ocean from deserted swampland. And I knew, from this initial sight that this was a mystical city, born out of time and within it, built on dirt and grey, filled with the emanence of light.

I had told Chall a place we could meet in the city. We were to meet next to the painting "St Anthony In The Wilderness" in the Sienese section of the Met. A great, ambitious idea, I had thought, but as I strode with my weighty backpack in the rain and up inside the Museum doors, I was bluntly informed that I could not enter with such a large bag. And so instead, it was to be a first meeting beside the bins in the rain outside the Museum. As I waited for Chall to come out, I couldn't help finding the idea of this amusing. Finally he loped out, in a fawn coloured jacket, a stranger who had become a friend, who was still a stranger.

We went and ate a sandwich nearby. I felt ebulliant, he ate quietly, a pendant in the shape of a bird hanging from his neck.

Saturday, 21st April

It's my last day.
Chall left last night at about eleven pm to pick up his car in New Jersey and then begin the twelve hour drive back to Asheville through the night (crazy motherfucker). So we ride the subway back from possibly one of the best restaurants I've ever had the delight to be in, and he gets off suddenly at 14th to make his connection, hugging me briefly before jumping off, disappearing with the closing subway doors. I stay on, making my way up to Emily's place, jumping out at Times Square to make the connection...and there's this black guy with a voice like diamonds singing Otis Redding on the platform and everyone is joining in, singing along, swaying in time to "Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay". I love subway riding. I take the C train uptown, get off, and walk back to Convent Avenue. New York is feeling like it is becoming mine.

God knows where the restaurant we went to was, somewhere around St Marks. We were taken there by Gelsinger after roaming the Metropolitan Museum Of Art for hours until we couldn't take any more in. What an incredible place, the highest ceilings, blossoms in the foyer. In the modern art section, I came across one of Yves Klein's Blue paintings, enormous, across a whole wall. It was startling, and a loud "fuck" escaped from my mouth before I could do anything about it. The rest of the Museum faded into silence, the Picassos and the O'Keefes disappeared into fine dust. I have never seen colour like that, an all enveloping blue, so beautiful, angels singing out from the resin and the pigment.

That's the trouble for me with art galleries and poetry readings (cinema and gigs are slightly better, your face is more easily hidden) - if I don't like what I see/hear then it's pretty tedious, but if I do like it then I want to be able to respond accordingly, and that sometimes is tears, laughter, the odd yelp, a bit of screaming. At the 'Howl' reading the other night I got a surprise bout of hysterical laughter and longed to climb out of my seat and roll around on the floor behind the back row to the sound of Ginsberg's gorgeous voice speaking of watches and alarm clocks, anal sex and opening antique shops. Instead, Chall and I sniggered like Beavis and Butthead while the man beside us pretended to be engrossed, but was snoring lightly. Outside, the Underground Literary Alliance got ready for a wig wearing/mouse trap waving hijacking of the Howl reading, in the name of the true rock and roll spirit of Ginsberg's poetry. Fantastic. Thank god they were there, (even if they were a bit silly). But I digress, and that is another story...so I stand there in front of this painting, and of course I cry.. it is like the embodiment of every line from Rilke, truly terrifying in its beauty. And it shocks me that in a world such as art or a land such as poetry, that, let's face it are full of eccentrics and crazy people, that I feel so self conscious about having a strong response to something that I presume is meant for, well, having a strong response to. And somehow the polititude of artistic appreciation feels alienating, wrong. Even so, I stifle my tears, turn my back quickly on the Rothko (just to be on the safe side), and try to give the semblance of an impression of a concrete human being.

So when Gelsinger said he knew a great Indian restaurant, but wanted to just check neither of us were claustrophobic, I did feel a slight wave of trepidation. When we arrived there, I could see this was no ordinary Indian restaurant. In fact, as we climbed the steps and looked through the front door, it became clear that it was totally insane. Gold and red decorations hung from every single space of ceiling, as well as strings of plastic chillies, beach balls, happy birthday banners, merry christmas banners, globes of the world, lanterns. As we entered, it was like going into a crazy gypsy caravan that was about to start rolling down the hill. We got seated at a very small, very cramped table by an Indian guy in a wide American flag tie, and the music was some fusion mix of Bhangra/funk/electro/gay-beat (!), and it was LOUD. Chall went off to the shop to get some beer, and the second after he left, all the lights went out (actually pulled out at the wall by one of the waiters), and this strange Indian camp version of "Happy Birthday" came on loudly over the stereo, everyone in the place began cheering and singing and clapping wildly, like some insane camped up dionysian rite complete with tinsel and drunkenness. And then, just as suddenly, the lights came back on and all proceeded exactly as before. We ate shrimp puri and samosas before being requested to move to another, even smaller table..

So today I am waiting for Emily to arrive back home as I have her key, and then I'm off to the American Museum Of Natural History to look at dinosaurs . I fly home tomorrow. But there's still time for more adventures before my plane takes off high into the sky. Fuck, there's been too many so far to begin to tell.

friday through to sunday

Woh. New York, timeless and of time. Falling out of the bus I am met by hard lines travelling upwards, my neck craned backwards like a cock crowing. My eyes leave the sidewalk, again I watch yellow taxis pumping their fastness, steam from an extractor tube swipes the traffic lights out of sight momentarily, and the street is frozen in an image of perfect disaster and automaton.

The bookshop is closed, it is Easter Sunday, but chocolate cake is moist and runs down my tongue in the padded booth of the nearby diner. It is two days later. I sit silent with Chall, not eating, suspended before the front glass of the window, passersby craning back now and then, to meet our staring.

Unknowns and Knowns

Well its nearly two a.m. and I'm almost done packing. In a few hours I will be winging my way to the airport, and some hours after that I will be landing in Newark airport. And then, I know I will be setting eyes on New York City for the first time ever, alone, quite alone. And I know the buildings will be tall, and I know it will be beautiful.
The music on my stereo sounds so plaintive, so cuttingly, achingly beautiful. Meetings and partings. I leave those here for an unknown, unseen future. And I can't deny the wrench, the tear on my heart. But then I will be meeting my own future, as it comes into the present, and I will be meeting a certain Chall Gray, in some back room, somewhere in the city. And from there, the story will unfold.

Blood

I have had a hell of a day - the kind that when you arrive home from it, you want to cry with joy that it is nearly over. I tumbled through my door, on my last legs, my brain feeling like an oversized pea, my heart like a battered ocean, my only thought being how I could jump in the bath.

As I entered my hallway, I noticed a bright red puddle oozing under the door of my hall cupboard. Amazing in its brilliance, this red was the red of postboxes and London buses. It is also the colour of fresh blood. It had gathered into an alarming sized puddle on my hallway carpet.

I breathed in slowly and walked into the front room to collect my thoughts. Then I re-entered the hallway and approached the cupboard. An entire tin of vinyl matt emulsion had fallen off the top of my painting bag and landed face down on the floor. It was carnage.

I decided denial was the best strategy for now, since facing this devastating mess felt sure to send me over some proverbial edge. I checked my e mails. The phone rang. It was Jo. At the end of the conversation, she urged me to get an early night, look after myself, get some sleep. I agreed, "after I've cleaned up that bloody paint".

We hung up and I re-entered the terrible scene in the hallway. I'd decided that the best strategy for protecting myself during removal was to do it naked, and once I was, I set to work. Almost immediately though I stepped in a dribble that had separated from the greater puddle, and so, in order to prevent myself from treading it into the rest of the carpet, I began hopping about on one leg towards the direction of the bathroom.

Of course I stumbled, treading said paint into carpet and grasping at the wall with red painty fingers, leaving streaks all across it. I was scooping the paint into a tray, but it was going all up the walls. In the bathroom, red streaked the walls and towels, the inside of the sink. A futile hopeless affair. The hallway was looking like the scene of some terrible massacre, bloody hand prints up the walls, globules of red across the toilet seat. Grim.

You have to realise the state I have got myself into today. By seven o clock this evening, after an incredibly long day painting ceilings, filling holes, clearing up rubble, and vast long ruminations about my life, and my imminent, and now, slightly terrifying feeling trip to New York, my mind felt like it was capsizing.

So I gave up trying to clean up the paint, grabbed the spatula I was using to scoop it up, dug it into the fresh red, flipped it up and stroked it across the bare skin of my leg. Then I dived in another time with the spatula and did the same thing on my other leg. I didn't stop until my entire body and face was covered in red strokes, until my flesh had disappeared under a skin of bloody pigment.

I looked a fright. Like some kind of menstrual banshee. But the freedom felt compelling, and as I added each stroke, the day, and the hopeless circular workings of my ego left me, somewhere back at the traffic lights on London Road.

You know, sometimes counselling or a cup of tea just won't do. Sometimes I need to paint myself all over in bright red vinyl matt emulsion to get to how I feel. Now my flat really does look like the set from "Psycho", and the red puddle is still there, taunting me.

Afterwards, I sat in the bath. The paint had gone hard on my body, I looked less like some ancient warrior heading into battle, and more like some kind of voodoo doll. I peeled layers of the rubbery stuff off with my hands, red skin, revealing white skin, scrubbed and faintly stained pink. The water was turning ruddy, the water billowing gradually with colour. It looked like an image from a Sylvia Plath poem.

My Munch painting hung above me, on a red wall, painted with the same paint that had spilled so violently. This is not the kind of life my mother had cut out for me. And though it may have been some kind of necessary catharsis, some kind of shamanic re-enactment, at the end of it I sit, cold in the bath, exhausted, unrested and still full of a nameless raw fear about going away.

My ego is crying out "something must be wrong, you can't follow your dream like this!" My identity is shifting, and I am leaving important people in my life behind. And who will I be when I return? Will Clare as we know it even be coming back?

The answer is clear - I don't think so, I can feel it in my blood, I can see it in the stained hallway, this is what it is revealing : there is no taming my blood, no stopping the redness, I am taking my rightful place in aliveness, and the colour is too bright, I can barely look at it.

Living Out Your Love

I am on the right path, I know it, I can feel it. This is where I was always meant to be, going this way, along the high road, following the signs for my life as it should be.
This feels good, so good. I have been dogged by a feeling of 'wrongness' for so much of my life - opportunity, I felt, was for other people, not for the likes of me, happiness was for those folks over the horizon. No, in the family I came from, it was always tragedy I felt running in our blood, or, in the words of Coner Oberst, " i could have been a famous singer/ if i had someone else's voice/but failure always sounded better/ let's fuck it up boys/ make some noise.."
That is, except when I was small, before I started taking notice of such things as teachers and adults and stupid boyfriends. Before too much self-consciousness took hold, before I started believing them when they said my world was weird or pretentious, or just "too much". It can take so long coming, sometimes I stopped thinking it would ever appear at all, but I kept plugging away, sometimes without even knowing I was still plugging away, and then BAM! a wave of glory or fever or triumph or just plain, no frills joy, hits the bank and washes me away with it. Or else, tender moments of peace and wholeness come climbing up my back in the smallest shiver of perfection.

And I am writing this not to swell in my own sense of personal triumph, but because today, as I listened to a friend's download of music off his new website, I thought, fuck, all my friends are doing this too. I am surrounded by people living out their love. And it's hard work, living out your love, it can be lonely and harsh and embarrassing and maddening. It can, in moments, tear you apart, it's winds can be bitter, it's fruits, sometimes hung too high to even reach. But we all know the pith and the juice and the swell and the taste that such labour brings. And I am inspired to know and be connected to such inspiring people. I am moved by their triumphs and as equally by their failings, and, most of all, by the fact that they keep going. And the creativity keeps growing, it all has a knock on effect, a web of something so beautiful I dare hardly touch it by description here.

So I am writing this, to express my pride and my gratitiude to all those people I have connected with, and am connected to, who have touched me with their beauty and vision and inspiration. If you want to know some of whom I am talking about, just look at my links list, they're all there, as there are others who do not have websites and blogs and the like, by whom I am also equally inspired and moved, by their art or their e mails or their conversation or just by their presence.
So I am raising my palm, turning it upwards, and from it, blowing a kiss, through the airwaves, to thank you, my dear friends, allies, maybe some of whom I haven't even yet met, all of you who endeavour, however it may be, to pull some punches and push the river, to whittle away at your art and bring life force back into fashion, to sail the seas of tomorrow's dreams, to live out your love.

New York Dreaming

Today I have been reading John Keats, and I am choked up with feeling.
I haven't read his poetry for years, but now a soft backed book of his words lies by the side of my couch, or sometimes up on the bed, or crammed inside an ancient plastic bag ready for work; a thing of awe in itself, even to look at, even just to know the worlds that reside within its tender pages. I am lost to his beauty, and crumpled by its glorious weight.

At the same time, I feel air borne. The night welcomes me in and takes my shoes off. I'm wrapped in a blanket, little and small, my feet, two brown birds perched at the edge of my computer desk. It's cold in here, I forgot to turn the storage heating on again, and so my hands search out warmth within each other, holding to one another briefly between each sentence I type.

I keep forgetting it is now spring, and I'm strangely mourning the loss of winter, which is often my happiest time, because then that I can feel free from the anticipation of having anything particular to look forward to, and can just enjoy the solitude, the quiet intense opening that slips by without almost anyone noticing.

Winter is for pleasure behind closed doors, soft insides, long woollen scarves and hugging your knees. It is for introverts such as myself, it is the excuse we long for to just shut the door and send the troops of life away.

But the daffodils are making me smile. From the bus yesterday I watched an entire family stealing huge clumpfuls of them from the gardens just up Lewes Road. They then proceeded to hand them out randomly to passers by, and to a perplexed looking woman standing at the bus stop, before marching up the road, a trail of yellow heads behind them.

Daffodils are cheap to buy and light up a room like the first of May. Unfortunately, tonight mine hang wilted in the vase on my living room table, their sad heads crowded together in some secret act of mourning. I should throw them out, welcome in freshness with a new ripe bunch bursting with life. But I feel attached to my dead ones, to my old ones, they are poignant and somehow regal, sad and they look like they are whispering about things I can never know about, in the hush of this room, when I have gone to bed.

It's eight days until I leave for New York. I'm feeling unprepared, and I like it. I like the fact as well that I simply can't imagine how it will be. It doesn't feel real somehow, like I am about to somehow slip behind the screen at the cinema, and find myself in some Woody Allen film, being neurotic and gesturing wildly, or else becoming a line from a Velvet Underground song, trying to score smack with Lou Reed up Lexington 125.

I've so many images in my head. I've been reared on New York mythology, and so my quest is to ride the Staten Island ferry, find myself in a bookshop entirely devoted to murder mysteries, and to stay at the Chelsea Hotel. I throw that last mission in casually, as if it were some passing desire. But the truth is, the Chelsea Hotel has resided in my mind for too many decades to not feel an incalculable pull of excitement when I think of it. Probably every artist I admire had stayed there at some point; it's been alluded to in so many songs.

And so for me "staying up for days in The Chelsea Hotel writing "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" for you.." has become legend in my mind. Jack Kerouac wrote "On The Road" onto a twenty foot roll of paper whilst staying there, "Naked Lunch" was completed there, Andy Warhol and all his motley crew used it as a base and made a film of it, Dylan Thomas staggered about there, and Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in one of its bedrooms.

If I can't afford to stay there, I shall pace the streets outside, pressing my nose to the glass beseechingly: me a writer, a songwriter, a lover of music and words - a girl from England staring into the place that has housed all her greatest aspirations, all her wickedest and most sublime passions.

And this feels like the greatest thing to do - to travel across the world to not only meet the place I have dreamed of visiting for so long, but to meet a fellow writer, whom I have never met before; except in the dream time of words, through consonants and syllables, vowels and question marks, and the occasional voice on the end of a very far away phone.

I feel grandiose, silly perhaps, but I don't care. I'm doing this for me, and I'm doing this out of kinship with another writer, and to become a better one. I'm doing it for the love of the narrative that goes like this: two people travel thousands of miles between them, to meet in a far away city, to see the lights, to drink coffee, and because somewhere there is some understanding between them, the exact nature of which as of yet is still unseen; and to live, for even only a few moments, without big reasons, but just take up a pen and let a story unfold.

Little reasons, they cut through living with a more touching beauty, they leave a fragile trail of consequence, like tiny spots from a poet's cut, like stolen daffodils from a roadside park.



" I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were talking so brave and so sweet.
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street.
And those were the reasons, and that was New York,
We were running for the money and the flesh,
And that was called love for the workers in song,
Probably still is for those of them left.
But you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you"
And all of that jiving around.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
You were famous, your heart was a legend.
You told me again, you preferred handsome men,
But for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said "well never mind,
We are ugly, but we have the music".
And then you got away, didn't you babe,
You just turned your back on the crowd.
You got away, I never once heard you say
"I need you, I don't need you,
I need you, I don't need you",
And all of that jiving around

Now I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best,
I can't keep track of each fallen robin.
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
That's all, I don't think of you that often."


Leonard Cohen 1971 for Janis Joplin.

You are the Sun

I'll bring the diamonds of my beauty to rest here on this table. I'll smash the fruits of my withering here, on the pale kitchen floor. I will watch you in a mirror, when your hair is down; I'll be a stranger, the best friend you ever had, tormentor, aid, your clown.

You're sitting on a black crate by the plant pots, in the aching ray of the sun. We are circling memory together, putting pieces back where they came from. You remember the old house, just like me. The cherry tree, the dark evenings, Grandma's boiled egg sandwiches with the yolk yellow and running. Dogs, haunting, daylight, and all that we wish we didn't remember, or remembered better.

I never felt as close to you as this, this moment, not in years. And suddenly you are ageless - seven or sixteen, new born, or nearing forty. My sister again, after years of barren yearning, cold shouldering, guilt.

How can I tell you the ways that I love you, that I understand, that I know you? How can I let you carry on pretending, when we both see the way the sky is falling? I wish I could hold you, I wish I were older, or that the sky were bluer. But wishes grow wings that bud and then wither, and I am only a child in this garden of ivy and azelea, and too much scent is wasted on dream and failure.

You stand up now, you say your hands are shaking and you don't understand why. And you love me, I can feel it, you are glad I am here, glad we are talking. As I am glad, for this is for what I was waiting.

But I cannot cross the grey wastes with you, I cannot tramp these marshes. I am tired of loss, but more tired of hoping for sunlight to filter through the cracks in the weather. For all that was pulled apart to be mended.

I can only mend myself, and watch you in the sun, beautiful as ever, soft as a grey mouse, tears like downy feathers. And hold your hand if you want it; and a hug means everything, a cup of tea means the world, when it is made by hands that are like your own, when the sun is leaping in the water, when family means blood; that is running through, circling, shedding, drying, flooding the arteries of our lives, apart and together, unstoppable, ferocious, simple, untethered, precious liquid metal, inexplicable.

Tuesday 28th March

I was lost to bees.
Slipped under
the carriage
Before you ever
were born.

Out Of The Fire, Into The Fire

Tonight, I am sad, and it seems that I'm not the only one. My shoulders are creaking with a tension that has remained undetected, but building up over the last month or so. It hurts to stretch, my tendons giving themselves up like wounded serpents uncurling, my heart is too tender.

I am off to Wales tomorrow morning, to see my Mum and my sister. My Mum is coming out of respite care tomorrow, where she has been for two weeks whilst some exciting renovations have been done on the house. So now my Mum will have her own specially adapted bathroom, so she doesn't have to go to the day centre for a bath or to get her hair washed. And her bedroom is bigger as well. So I am going to help my sister clean and put back all of Mum's bits and bobs, and make it all new and nice and homely for her.

I always have a lump in my throat and a tension in my heart when I know I am about to embark on a trip home. The last time, at Christmas was so terrible, I feel I'm only just about getting over it now. But without the strain of Christmas festivities and the brief return of my absent father, I am hoping for a much calmer time.
I shall be endeavouring to blog whilst I am there, now I am in ownership of a new swanky mobile phone with pen, keyboard and just about everything but the kitchen sink on there. It's just figuring the damn thing out, that'll be the interesting bit.

Yes, tonight I am sad, inconsolably so. The kind of sad that makes me wish I was a dog, so I could sit on someone's kitchen step whining mournfully at the moon. So someone would throw me a bone. But I'm not, and they aren't, and so in the morning, I'll finish packing my red Habitat trolley with partly clean, partly dirty washing, run through twenty to-do lists in my head simultaneously, make the train with just enough time to spare, and go back to the place of so much memory, so much loss, so much..muchness. And I'll become another Clare, I will be born again into a different world, one I feel so comfortable in, and one that is so alien.
So, see you at the other side, when England is but a mist following the back end of a train carriage, Brighton, a haze I left behind.

The Elegant Universe

The rain is warm tonight. I didn't need much of an excuse to get me outside in it, or to the sea front, past the patch of green at the end of my road and the ornate shelter where two figures were standing side by side, their heads low, murmuring.

Still I took out the rubbish bag to sling in the huge plastic green tub behind my house, and held that as my excuse, despite the fact I've never before felt the need to empty my bin at seven thirty at night. And knowing that, it made me laugh out loud, because when I was nine, I never needed a reason to be in the rain.

And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes. The sky is empty of stars. As I watch, several thousand layers all come falling, a series of images: birth and ceasing monuments and facts and figures, and timeless shadowing of this life line, and the line is interrupted by a bang that never stops flinging itself into unknowability. We are here. That is there. Uncompromising universe I could fit myself into, if it would only let me. But I am a signpost in the humid dark. The universe is gaping. Too many equations. We can never sew it up.

And the reason I am standing here isn't even because I want to feel this rain on my face, or on my back, or my hands. It isn't because of the way the sea is stretching into a black nothing, so that I feel infinite, travelling, unsung and triumphantly lost. It isn't even because of the way the liquid in the air mixes with the evening heat to give off a quiet radiance, a gentle buzz, a comfort...

Little reasons and big reasons fill our universe up, and maybe that's why it burst in the first place: too many reasons and not enough, all bickering inside a point as small as the end of the end of your nose. Too much certainty inside a void. Too much void inside certainty. Too much that is too little, swimming with what is never lost, but always going. The balloon fills the box, the box is always breaking.

And I'll try and tame what surrounds me. It will become a poetic universe, of dark matter and rainbow light. But this is still my equation, my lassoo, my very own reason. I bring my mother and my father to all creation, the kids at school who thought I wasn't too bright, a yearning for the sublime, the shock of existing.
Wah wah baby coming out the womb. Old man dying. People on the roadside, diseased, raw sewage sliding by. I will make it add up, I will make it all add up. I will bargain with an unfeeling universe, else, without reason, it all grows too cold, too cold for human habitation. An icy galaxy, deathly, alone, feeble, wandering. A crack in time is all we are for. A bang that lasts as long as the pieces are travelling... then, what?

The rain is warm tonight. And stars hum, distant and unseeable. Micro waves fill the furthest reaches of world, beyond air, reflecting the face of our immediate birth. It doesn't take that much to see them, if you turn in the right direction.

I need no reason to be here. I need to reason to love. No reason to die. I need no reason to book a cheap airline ticket and fly to New York next month, nor to come back again.

And I am a signpost in the humid dark, white froth lapping at my toes.

I never needed a reason to be in the rain.

from " Ravings II, Alchemy Of The Word" - Arthur Rimbaud

My turn. The history of one of my follies.

For a long time I boasted of possessing all possible landscapes, and I found the prestige accorded to modern painting and poetry ridiculous.

I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, backcloths for mummer's plays, inn-signs, cheap coloured prints; I loved unfashionable literature, church Latin, ill-spelt pornography, novels for old ladies, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

I dreamed of crusades, of voyages of discovery never recorded, of republics without histories, suppressed religious wars, revolutions in manners, movements of races and of continents; I believed in all enchantments.

I invented the colours of the vowels! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green - I made the rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language which would one day be accessible to all senses. I reserved translation rights.

At first this was an academic study. I wrote of silences and nights, I expressed the inexpressible. I defined vertigoes.

Far away from the birds and herds and village girls, what was I drinking, on my knees in that heather surrounded by soft hazel copses in a warm green afternoon mist?

What could I be drinking in that young Oise - voiceless elms, flowerless turf, overcast sky!- drinking from those yellow gourds, far from my beloved cabin? Some golden liquor which causes sweating.

I made a cross-eyed inn-sign - A storm came and chased the sky away. In the evening the water in the woods trickled away into virgin sands, the wind of God threw sheets of ice across the ponds;

Weeping, I saw gold - and could not drink...

I accustomed myself to pure hallucination: I saw very clearly a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school consisting of angels, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a music-hall poster could conjure up terrors in front of me...

I ended up by regarding my mental disorder as sacred. I was idle, the prey of a heavy fever; I envied the happiness of beasts- caterpillars, who represent the innocence of limbo, and moles, the sleep of virginity..

..If I have any taste, it is for hardly anything but earth and stones. I breakfast always on air, on rock, on coal, iron.
Turn, my hungers. Feed, hungers, on the meadow of sounds. Suck the gaudy poison from the convolvuli.
Eat the broken stone; the old masonry of churches; boulders from old floods, loaves sown in the grey valleys.

The fox howled under the leaves, spitting out the bright feathers of his feast of fowl; like him, I consume myself.
Salads and fruits are only waiting to be picked; but the hedge spider eats nothing but violets.
Let me sleep! let me simmer on Solomon's altars. The scum runs down over the rust, and mingles with the Kedron.

At last, O happiness, O reason, I removed from the sky the azure, which is a blackness, and I lived, a spark of gold of the natural light. Out of joy, I took on the most clownish and exaggerated mode of expression possible:

It has been found again! What? eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.
My immortal soul, keep your vow despite the lonely night and the day on fire.
Thus you detach yourself from human approval, from common impulses! You fly off as you may...

No hope, never; and no orietur. Knowledge and fortitude, torture is certain.
No more tomorrow, satiny embers, your own heat is the only duty.
It has been found again! What? - Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

I am terribly hung over. From tequila and gin, from life. I am shuffling around my flat with the grace of a dying dog, and I'm sure I have pulled a muscle in my neck from all the pogoing and head thrashing I did last night to White Riot and Common People and, oh dear,a bit of Jamiroquai as well ( thank god someone started to play The Clash as most of the guests drifted home, thank god for a dimly lit basement with only the hardcore or desperate left!).
     I danced until my feet could no longer keep up, met some lovely men, mixed my drinks, wafted around in my bright red scarf, came home and howled like I did when I was 13 years old and found out The Smiths were breaking up forever. So today, I'm feeling like a cross between Gollum and .. well Gollum. And all my openness, my zeal to fly into the glorious impermanence of living, feels like a rather silly idea. Far better to hide under my duvet and not come out til Spring 2007, I think. I did feel like a warrior, now i feel like a bit of old paper, blowing down West Street, smelling of fish and chips.
     Yes, it wasn't a straightforward jolly affair last night. W. drank 6 shots of tequila straight and fell out of the loft, spending the rest of the evening crawling around on his hands and knees. I narrowly avoided being persuaded into a table dancing show in M's kitchen, despite being given offers of cash for the privilege. There was this strange invisible stringy thing weaving it's way amongst certain people, of mixed boundaries, unrequited longings, tattered egos, fragile connections, sideways glances, battered hearts.
     Today I wake up lost and confused. And you know the most annoying thing? I can't now very well announce to the world or myself that I am giving up on this life and love thing, banging on as I have recently about how it's what I want, and given it took such a toll on me over the last couple of years to not do so. But I ask you, how do we not burn ourselves out? How do we pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and charge ahead, knowing full well we are 90% sure to be heading towards:

a: certain disaster
b: almost certain disaster
c: disaster for someone else
d: mere disappointment.

One of my highest tantric practices for a while has been watching Eastenders ( you may scoff but I grew up in North Wales, we didn't have Bach or Bertollucci there). On Friday, Martin had to face the fact that his wife of several years was leaving him for her best (female) friend. I used to think he was an appalling actor, but as I watched his rejected expression, as he sat alone in Paulione Fowler's front room, his face creased with the direct knowledge that he was now alone, I thought, yeah, we all go through this don't we, every fucking human being. We have all been there, will continue to go there again, and still, we will be ok, carry on living, maybe even carry on keeping our souls alight. It was a comfort and an insight, in these times for me of quiet and not so quiet unrest and change, to know, though I may feel it, I am never alone, and, in the words of Paddy McAloon.. ' nothing is ever lost'.
     I'm off now to the sea front to meet one of my closest friends, someone whom I have shared so much with and also been through hell and back with in some ways over the last two years. She's feeling shit too, we can sit and eat ice cream on the pebble beach, shiver a bit, and know that we understand, that we're there for each other, and that, we're ok, we really are. After all, it's an icy cold day today, but the sky is bluer than I've seen it in a long time, and the sun is definitely shining, even if I can't quite feel it.

fridge magnet poem (2001)

sing
cry
of a thousand tongues

love rose
in the sky
like
blue over summer

dream
you fall into eternity,
void

one
ache

skin, shadow

place of no language,
sleep

recall my gift
and
worship
the bitter diamond

Eta Carinae

Throughout this blog I have made several oblique references to Pete Doherty. In case you aren't familiar with him, and haven't been reading the papers lately, he is the ex- founder member of The Libertines, frontman of the band Babyshambles, a musician, songwriter and poet. He has also been heavily under the eye of the media for some time now, his escapades are reported almost daily in our newspapers and on television. He has been likened to Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, the new punk hope of this generation, a British icon, a genius with a death wish. He has also been again and again dragged through the eye of the gutter press, as "Potty Pete" or the "Druggie Boyfriend", due to his link with Kate Moss last year, and his infamous heroin and crack cocaine habits, numerous arrests, and spells in Pentonville prison.

     In contrast, media attention for his music or his poetry has been slight, apart from within specialist music papers and magazines. Some would say that is because the 'phenomenon' of Pete Doherty is all just a whipped up media storm, and that at the eye of it, there isn't much of significance to tell, that he is overrated. It was even going round the internet recently that Pete Doherty was in fact an entirely media created fiction, and that he didn't exist in real life at all, but his part has in fact been played by an Elvis impersonator from Blackpool. But he continues to make records, play gigs, write for a poetry publication, and do the odd poetry reading.

     The original catalyst that turned writing my own blog from an ambivalent idea into reality, was watching the "Killamangiro" video from Babyshambles, back in October last year. From that I felt inspired to write a piece ( which became in fact the first piece of writing on this blog) entitled "This Beautiful Hunger That Kills". I liked the title, drank some rum, and from there felt inspired to begin and name a blog after it.

     I don't quite know what happened to me in those minutes watching that video, but I felt like I was staring into something profound, something I could not quite locate as either being inside or outside myself, something mysterious. A theme that has figured in my life in a major way ever since I can remember, a riddle, a coan, a bitter sweet truth, an inspiration, a thorn in my side. Something to do with creativity and something to do with destruction, and the line between them. In a sense, though I have many storylines and subplots running through my life experience, this is one of the biggies, one I am continuing to work out, despite knowing, on some level, that to work it out is ultimately impossible.

Lester Bangs tells a story of going to see his therapist. The therapist says to Bangs that the reason he thinks he is so obsessed with the sound of rock and roll music, the likes of Iggy and The Velvets, is because when Bangs was little, his Dad died in a factory fire. And he tells Bangs that he thinks that the feedback noise on all those songs reminds him of the sound of his father burning to death in that fire.

    Somewhere, rock and roll, whether the spirit of it, or the music of it, has always figured big in my life. I grew up listening to punk and mod music from the age of seven, my tearaway sisters blasting it out at top volume every day and night without respite. I became fascinated and obsessed with 'alternative' music, heard The Velvet Underground's "Heroin" and "Waiting For The Man" when I was twelve, and nothing was ever the same again.

     Family life was always dysfuntional. Violent outbursts, an absent bullying father, self destructive and aggressive sisters, no boundaries or stability. I became the little voice of sanity and order in my family from as young as i remember, dodging flying tea cups and holding my mother's desperate head while she wailed, was as common a part of my life as going to school. As was going to gigs, clubs, experimenting with drugs, from an early age. I lived with the motto that I wanted to try everything illegal before the age of sixteen. I did pretty well.

      So I think when I hear certain music, I feel a sense of coming home, and the rock and roll life, with it's mixture of brilliance, blindness, genius, mess, rawness, chaos and addiction, reminds me of how I grew up.

      But there is always more. The myth of the tortured poet, and the link between creativity and self-destruction, genius and madness, and my fascination with those themes, is not something I can simply boil down to my upbringing nor to some general psychological model, even if all those elements are there. It is a more mysterious thing, like duende, (something i have also alluded to in this blog), it can't ultimately be rationalised or explained, but has a life and a force of it's own, in fact is the force of life itself, and the wish for death, together, in battle or in union, in dangerous, glorious tension. Not everybody needs the stick of suffering to propel them to create, but most of the artists and poets and songwriters that I love, come from such a breed. And maybe I can say this - the more sensitivity and pain you have in your soul, the more, if you direct that away from destruction and towards creation, it can burn and become a fire of insight and power and beauty. And it's a double edged sword, and that edge is always a slippery one.

     Pete Doherty's talents have largely been missed in the mass hysterial exposure. But the 'craziness' of his life, and it's witnessing by thousands of people, seems somehow a part of the picture. He has lurched from being utterly down on his backside, knocking, as it were, at death's door, to the utmost heights of success and brilliance, and back again. You couldn't make up a more impossible tale of highs and lows. And through it all, he has continued to make music, to inhabit that realm of the senses, in that which he himself calls a "complete infection with music and melody". And to me, that constitutes a rare found integrity and purity, amidst all the clear delusion and addiction that seems to be part and parcel of the story.

So this blog entry I am writing here, is partly to explore and explain to you, invisible reader, and to the mysterious universe as a whole (and possibly myself), more of what makes me tick, as a writer, an artist, a human. It is also because I want to, in some way, honour this person who has inspired me, my creativity, and this blog, as someone, who, whatever the rest of the stories and myths around him, is committed to writing and playing music, to breaking creative boundaries and conventions, and who has artistic integrity and spirit. Or to put it another way, to be true to being an artist, you really have to not give a fuck, to be utterly guided by your own drive of genius and not by what other people think. And whatever else, whatever drama and self delusion and evasion, whether or not you like his music even, somewhere I know this guy can walk the walk, and that he's for real. And that inspires me.

And for me, rock and roll is a love, a passion, not my only one, but a significant one. And I believe that when Pete Doherty sings "...I believe in love..", that he means it. Just as in my family, amid the flying cups and broken records, there was always music and singing and dancing and life, and a love so strong it could knock you off your chair.


some video clips:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4106249.stmnews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4692166.stm

A Sad Affair

Apparently it's Friday, and it's a damp day today, sunlight intermittent on the horizon, a swell of sea mist ebbing up my road.
I am restless, feeling heartless, but that probably just means I'm feeling too much of something I don't want to, and so it turns around into nothing at all, except a quiet sense of outrage. The worst kind.

I vowed as usual to stay off this damn computer tonight, coming down, as it feels I am, with some strain of cold. And I am far from full of grace, resenting, a slight taste of malice in my mouth. I feel miserly and miserable, calculatedly fucked off with the whole caboodle, though I can't quite tell what that caboodle exactly is.

Tonight I want to be to be a raging child, telling you all what I think of you, whoever you are, slamming doors, stamping my foot until it hurts all the way up through my shocking little body. I want to jump up and down, and if anyone dares tell me, "go ahead then" in a therapeutic kind of way, I'll knee them in the bollocks, or if they don't have bollocks, some other suitably soft and tender part of their anatomy. I also want sex. Not the kind that filters through my entire body like sunlight through the droplets of rain on an open glass window. No. I want the kind that is like an engine charging up, where you can hear the revs as he turns the handlebars again and again. Vroom vroom. I want hot steel on tarmac sex, burning rubber with no trail left behind in the distance. The kind that hurts my head, and makes laughter come demonic from our throats, the kind that is acute fever.

But enough of what is elsewhere. I realise the symptoms. That desire to wear a tight red dress, one size too small, slightly vulgar. The dark sideways glance I give at nothing in particular across the room, reflected in my mirror. That longing for anything illicit, anything with the word 'Affair' in it, for anything that burns deep and scarring. That mild hatred of humanity, the simultaneous loathing and utter desire for MEN.

It's hormone time, it's a blood red moon filling up on death and chaos time. It's a particular place in my cycle where the devils come out to play, and wreak havoc on decency and upstanding citizenship. It's 'leave me the fuck alone unless it's to play The Stooges top volume non stop till collapse, or read Baudelaire until we drown in a jagged union of sorts, burned up on all manner of death and fire' kind of time. Shit.

Not the kind of time you want to be caught at your computer, alone, 9.53 at night, dressed in a green woolly jumper, the nearest dionysiac pleasure at hand being Roget's Thesaurus and a bar of raspberry chocolate. The edges of the walls are too polite and my neighbours won't appreciate the screaming. So what do I do?

I must send out a search party to the wanton overlords to save me, from my pink spotted curtains, from the tedium of pleasantry. Come on, I'm waiting.

And oh, it's Thursday.

TELL THE STARS I'M COMING, MAKE THEM LEAVE A SPACE FOR ME...

I know you know, we can fall in love to lose ourselves, or we can fall in love to find ourselves. And what we think we are seeking is not always what we are seeking, and the unexpected always turns up, just in time. And permanence is never lasting.

I am a watt in a bulb that lights up at that time of night when eyes start to strain, and faces appear in walls, the cat lets itself out, and the kettle is empty. It is 3 o clock and the day is not yet up.

I am also afraid. I don’t want to go alone in the sea tonight. I don’t want to be swallowed up by the forest. To stand my ground makes all the chandeliers shake, and the plaster come down off the walls.

I am breaking the spell of a lifetime and I can see no further than the end of my nose, yet my vision stretches out past the sea clouds on the dainty horizon, to a turquoise place of nothing special, only dust and filament and a quiet spectre of brilliance.

I strum electric tunes in time to long forgotten rhythms, and ache to Van Morrison and smile and cry at the man who loved bears, and the bears who ate him.

I will reach you in a gaze, then you are in a haze of cloud again, eaten up by past and future, the present hanging, a diamond in our midst.

This is the realest thing I can mention… the curve of your head on the pillow, your fingers stroking my nose, and a very distant image, blurred, cold seeping in, fading out…of an outline of your figure, on a ridge, by a freezing river, enveloped by the winter’s day.
He wants to die in the cold.

I become an immense wave born of infinite tragedy. And yet, I am travelling out beyond the stories of old, into places yet unborn, crashing through the ether, through a tunnel of light and a blank white crowd, glinting together, teeming. This is anew.

And I am still seeing angels in cocaine powder – they are ageless, divine, they speak the blues, sink death into sunlight, bring terrible beauty home to a hearth that is welcoming and climbing with moss and roses and ivy. The profound illusion of God, a shot at glory, at life, a moment of purity.

And that never came without a price, without the devil’s face in profile. No redemption without a fall, no fall without redemption.

At the same time, the story is reversing at the same speed as it is accelerating, and new pictures creep their way into burdened filing cabinets of hundreds of thousands of tired equations of living and loving.

Years ago, I found a Dharma, it was strong, it blinked with an eyelid that was laughing. And I am once again remembering that eye, and hearing the song, the drum beat that thuds so fierce, the Yogi down from the hills chopping himself to pieces with a damaru, the crystalline ancient wonder, perfect sea of change, a soft earth life, as delicate as the scent of a single flower from across the length of an open garden gate, from across hedges and spring lawns touched with wetness.

I can feel an ending and a beginning, a membrane in space locking me in frozen silence, a reaching out towards you, a pulling away, deep wells of understanding, unfathomable shades of unknowing and losing and we throw it all away but somewhere keep it precious, here, under heart strings and memories and hopefulness and decay… living, breathing, alive this day.

Life turns us over like a car on a speedway, but we are always only one step away from hope, and the words run out... but the writing is never finished

The Farewell

Journal Entry, 6th March 2004

and I am all these things…
a hall of mirrors, or a silent beast moving through the black night, a tangle, a spinning top, an empty space, a flight downstairs, a gypsy’s kiss, the unthreaded needle, untrodden snow, whispering, chatter, a pair of closed eyes, simple rest, wretched prayer, tumbling, tattered, born anew, pretty girl, small boy-woman, two shoes in the hallway, wrinkled brow, belly-ache, song, dream, failing will, shocking, true, terrible, false, little and soaring, scorching all the pathways, brave, a picture in your mind, blessed, cursed, holding a blanket, naked, tossed around, asleep, sparkling, dazed, drowning, helping, bewitched, summer in my veins, filled with dread, steeped in sorrow, red, flame red…white like the devil’s kiss…
     I am you. I am nothing you think I am. I wear scarves and I cry from my stomach when I lose the ones I love. Charming, fumbling, alive, driven, silly, cowardly, blaming, idiotic. I don’t remember colours or directions. I don’t notice moved furniture. I like soup and old films because they remind me of when I was little and watched them with Mum. I try to regret nothing. I probably regret a lot. I resent people. I can be scary. I generally feel inadequate in the world. I always thought I’d fallen from a far off planet. I used to run in the rain. I wish I could drive. I feel the loss of my mother, of what she was. I adapt and like to hear her laugh. I love dancing. Most of all I want to sing songs that have burst from beyond. I am an insomniac in temperament, born with fear. I dislike loud people. I wish I could drink Earl Grey tea all day long. The sight of cakes makes me light up like a Christmas tree. I am touched by the erotic. I hate logical description. I feel things a lot. I dwell on details of horror in the world. I am obsessive. I fall, fall, fall, I am full of blood and yearning. I mourn the loss of the romantic dream and I will never give in to the crippling numbness that sometimes beckons me… I try…try again...lose...win… and I am all these things….

Tarnation

We all want to escape the cycles we find ourselves trapped in. And seek out ways of coming to terms.

Now we don't all seriously seek out religion or heroin, but we want a way of reaching the truth of what stained us before we were even walking, and the sky light, cutting through the broken planks of a playhouse wall. To reach the other side of a dream we are not reaching, can never reach, only touch to pull away, feel the sense of, turn and curl back upon ourselves in sleeping and waking.

It all turns to gold anyway, and in the midst of living, we are ageing, and love will always follow, whether crouching or standing tall. And I'll be a poet before the night is out. And you will be formless as soon as your fences fall down. I will come upon you, light your feeble brow, cradle you in a blue nothing, stars will falter along our tides and ships whinnying to the night. But you are a brave one, a strange song, limpet fantastic and bright.

We exist through days, no one ever thought it would be this way, and the aeroplane comes down as the clouds are rising, the mother turns with a smile on her face. A man crosses a road like lightning on frail buildings, and we have all lost the race, upset grace, we have all lost the race. Winning proved too easy, feet got tangled up in white laces and grass like on a summer's day, except it wasn't summer, my laces were tied, and I am in this empty field, and no longer young and running...

and so... form is only emptiness, emptiness only form.. and we worship.. talk of degradation.. that sunshine.. a cold saturn.. winds allies.. they are weathered.. in such song.. we are hearing.. and looking.. looking.. come turn around.. blink again.. blink again.. the night is burning into ether.. two steps..one step.. and we're gone...