skraeling island.

Mind, I am in some kind of hell
All of my own making.
This frontal lobe will soon burst
Cramped in familiar vices,
Preoccupied with worries beyond my words.
And I wish I was away from these idiot people
And their idiot lives full of
Idiotic things exaggerated to the heights of gods.

Idiots of the world: get a room
And leave my idiot self alone, ta
Your demands make my mind cramp
And my guts submit and surrender
All this shit I've accumulated
In listening to your draining monologues.

And how I despise all my sisters and brothers
Who call me names and who have driven me
Back here to skraeling island,
Back here to my adopted family and illegitimate children.
In the colony's club-house there,
Stirred by the raw and syrupy fire-water,
I stood on a broken stool and cleared my throat
(The locals were shocked: I'd been
Morosely silent all my life)
And declared:

We are not beautiful
We are the last of a tribe of
Asexual atheistic robots.
We have no skills to share.
No talent for communication.
We sit about gawping at lights
Whilst digesting sugars.
Punished to terminally doubt
All fidelity of good deeds.

They clapped and cheered dementedly.

CRYSTAL WINDS!

Life is not an infinite series of opportunities for self-development. Its moments and its grand scenes and its hopeless gestures where the most emotional seismic shifts occur are not like the anodyne blue doors in some crystal corridor of mirrors.

Understand: what this is I can't describe, but nor does it fall within the mediocre and familiar realm of druggie poesie. They shred through all sensation like crystal winds. Poetasters like me only blurt through grinning masks, sleep-deprived, forever running, a question of an hour late? How we punish those who betray us with smiles. We, the multitude, we, small-minded arsewipes condemned to onerously thinking - about what? - oh love, absolutely nothing. Hence the anxiety of being. Constantly being this schmuck with the name me, I. The responsibility of waking up and leading this life - it's yours, it's yours, it's yours. Oh mother. What am I supposed to di with it? Get a job? And when I've got one, then? Be purposeful? But what if I discover all will to be deceit? And the anxiety returns.

And yet the beautiful winds noted in the title of this piece suggests a fleeting sensation (but have you seen CRYSTAL WINDS!? - you may. Look out for them. They crush you like the wisdom of children). You beautiful scallywags know from all your fascination with ignoble sweethearts and pioneering teen films that life's most moving sensations are not fleeting perceptions but obsessions, long-lasting, residing from the bliss of caress to self-denying combustion.

Anyhow. Stalking through the rinds and cat-skins of suburban pavements, oppressed by chewing gum, unwanted adverts and fliers, taking on various forms, hey - now I swagger like a scarab beetle: now I hide my body into my coat, each lock exchanged causes stress or followed by a sharp sad pain, a donkey no less, perhaps. He paces ahead, brutal nike trainers and jutting elbows, arranging plans with a man in town. Or I glance quietly into her steely blue-grey eyes, dear silver, impossible to read when unlit by any copper winter sun. Each of these encounters of intimacy between strangers or unlikely friendships, the harpoon jolts, you feel as you talk talk common-place philosophies, and you see deep within yourself, amongst the cod-philosophe claptrap, you see THAT THERE IS A MILLION DIFFERENT YOUS, a million ones you have been, devoted in monuments that dream like you, teaming at their toes with flowers dedicated to you or your sister, no less.

But these encounters are just electrified connections, exposed parts finding a quick union as sacred as mutual masturbation, conjugal coitus, as natural or frightening as anything you might spot through a brief scan through the trees of your local park.

All my problems spill out of me. I have too many holes in my head and sides, and when I drink I start to leak all this rubbish. The worst of myself, the unresolvable conflicts of repressed desire and feeling, come on stage! Express yourself! In an age entirely lacking in understanding of what might be sincere feeling or desire, what is the most abject self-denial and prostitution than clambering on stage and expressing yourself? When will people realise that life cannot be understood without spending a significant amount of time in your birthday suit?

the north-west passage, no less

In search of the north-west passage.

I travelled and unravelled weary and wary, in search of strangers to confess my loneliness to. I hoped for intimacy but expected harsh words and several elbow-jabs in the face and belly. The crux of everything begins and ends here, in the miserable mind. It's a good world if you don't weaken. I ask for nothing less than the prison of my own bed.

She was soppy and daft, wet behind the ears. She stared for too long, confessed the desire for coarse and strange hands to envelope her body, wrapping her in protective caresses, as cold as possessed north sea water. Her banal fantasies were unheard by the sterile mob of the night-drinkers, yuppie-sprogs with enough spondoolies to sup pretentious mixers with enviable undiscern. The sort that can even afford taxis. You know. We all had fantasies that we were forced to routinely report to the office psychiatrist to pass through the tests. You had a better chance of promotion than dissent. And promotion meant wage rise, rather than the freezes for all these years. My poor father was near-starvation since they'd frozen his wage after 2011. Thank fuck he'd bought his flat. He gave all his money to this hopelessly destitute individual who had stolen his interest. It was the only act of sadism I ever understood.

I felt so bruised I wanted to laugh and curse, sabotage all happiness with tepid cynicism. Curse the wine-weary women, discontent with crime novels and monsoon pig-skin lap-bags. Or the balding men, checked shirts and mass-manufactured tweed, manic laughing chops HA HA HA U DUN SAY

I felt like a collector of sad, self-minimising, lonely lives as I trawled through this mob of blanched faces, assuming this 2% of existence to confirm 98% of all their essence. Social beings, even these words are my dialogue - my message in a bottle - to some bored and ill other, turned wrong by inside-out hormones, choking up her lungs in some sorry but well-sanitised respite home of the not too distant future. But words become a bad habit, like biting one's nails in public, providing as much (no, less) evidence of my existence, with the same contempt for public audiences. They said of Pariah Masculine Writer's prose: (picture Sinclair, Salinger, Self, Home, all those ras-clarts) unreadable melancholy prose! Wine-needy! Worthless and verbose!

I've had enough. Beyond sitting in a maisonette in Clapton watching Trisha-Kyle tv and accusing my lone child of psychosomatic sorcery, I chart glorious misery. The sort of gutsy chap who uses the ferric crust of a scab to describe all human physique. Improvement via critique. So I called on my darling to provide illustration, the one with that job, you know, the one with the friend, that one yeah, blimey, and that sick-headed lover. We moderns are incapable of myth, only rumour. Hear me.

Darling: sat on me jack jones in anodyne public inn on ratty high street, anywhere-on-Thames. My words are blasphemous, so I exert myself through pox-laden looks. Definition by attraction. Clothes, wear. Without wallet, tv or PC - are you alive? So I mutter, between halves of cider (thanks Clive, yeah, can I ponce a fag, ta). They usually leave us in the end. I would tell them I was pregnant with their bleedin babies, but it was only desperate fantasy, impossible talk. There was something terrifying about all this lack of feeling. I wondered what other people were talking about, but then again, that was only in white middle class books. I made peace with dying. It was as easy as melting the frozen crusts of the north-west passage with the blood disease on the edge of my tongue.

You shouldn't scratch that

You see her but you don't beseech,
Lecterns are lectured; besides,
Each to each, and
Let fools learns and lovers recover unlovely ways
Hear me =
Muse Nothing: we're empty,
Innocent like that
So beseech her to be truthful
There's little else beside.
Claim, bold friend, there's little else outside,
Be yourself one day, a deceit that may
Satisfy the rest. Eh,
We never stay reliable. Ask mother. Whose?
Choose. Trickery to end, spent friend.

His face was once an enchanting sight.
Need I say? It isn't any more.
It threatened bewitchment to a dangerous side
The sort that squats and pisses flagrantly
Against the walls of railway stations
I offer this:
These hands are safe now these eyes aren't sore,
And I see sweetheart for what she is, her core
Truly nothing more than guilty bliss, hands tussle
Whilst pelvises flex, clumsy manoeuvres indict sexuality,
Or praise it, depends on your sensitivity - see?

"God bless other souls, still
The devil take me down"
A confessor in 2nd century souls,
My lover taught me grace.
She birthed me to the cotton age
I struggle and I learn nothing.
Fortunately I have a challenging role in Shoreditch Cod and Chips where I have learnt organisational and team-working skills as well as administistarve abilities and managaging a tight budget and aso at same time teamwortk skills with my cousin mo who tells me what to do and i like that - I NEED STRUCTURE ERGO I WAKE AT 7, LISTEN TO POP MUSIC, EAT WHEAT, PERSPIRE FOR 120 YEARS AND PERISH.

My crimes are scarcely worth report.

pickled kidneys

Friends, I'm in the city, the supposed heart of all things. But hearts only pump in circles, a despondent metaphor which only ecstatic mystics might take solace in. My bus shudders and jerks. I'm in trouble. I'm late for my love who expected me many hours ago. My fingers are threatening to bleed. I have drunk too much alcohol

Pallid yards of faces, eaten away with worry and work. In a moment of motivation, I choose to peel away the headline-spluttered pulp of some free newspaper. I pick through the bric-a-brac of classifieds, my empty belly salivating with the prospect of mean bargains and desperate possibilities. With mirthless absorption I come across the lonely ads, where I am not even surprised to see my soul has put in an advert for a new host. Typical bastard, she's stingy with the characters. LOOKN4NEWSTARTRUDA1? Pudenda ex origo, et cetera.

All these people I might've been, knew, even loved - friends, strangers, fellow prisoners in the human zoo some boffins have called capitalism, others bestiality. Now this chump chomps cashews, dashing their russet spent husks about the bus floor. Others yap on pieces of plastic glued to their mouths to the heroines of late 20th-century novels, or reincarnations of the pharoahs. I may perhaps be the only here truly aware of her/his own intrinsic dullness.

We escape with difficulty.

I'm fairly drunk with beer and the emotions of heart-scattered colleagues. I rambled a moment ago about friends and strangers, but really in this kinship of anonymity only strangers can be called friends. Pessoa bruv, back me up here. Our friends bind us to the misunderstandings of our younger former selves, they fix us into these selves. But the centre of all these experiences is no unified self. Like a dancing flame, ever shape-shifting. Yet I'm still here, aware of all these evasion of responsibility and maturity. In response to Thames pathos - I mean have you seen that bloody melancholic river - show me a painter who can do that justice - Whistler and Turner came close but no. That's why I use words, I use them to paint - However, I apologise, digression aside, in response to Thames pathos, I demand wine of every hue and tyhe reclamation of at least 6 hours of today. They should've been mine.

All aboard the ship of fools! The dead captain greynoose silently gestures with a three-fingered paw for us to come close. The galleon looks like something from a pirate film, all our memories really have probably been quoted from children's films of the 1980s and 90s. The pock-marked skipper gestures with his bird-gored paw for us to huddle into the helm through a small staircase in the centre of the ship. The rotten timbers stink so bad it suffocates, and as I gag the ever-widening and ever-expanding sky suddenly flashes from scrubbed steel to scorched black, and one of his wage-slave cronies grabs my boney arm and shoves me down the helm.

As I stumble and roll down the rotten staircase I realise that the ship was far bigger than I thought, that what I once thought was a small t0 medium size ship is actually gargantuan. A sudden crescendo of groans engorges me as I fall, and I realise I'm on some grotesque Amistad, the underbelly of the boat swollen with drunk and mad souls entirely complicit and enjoying their own slavery. There is nothing so reassuring as barefaced impossible lies, just as long as - for Gods' sake - they do not throw their weight around, all lairy and shirty, with a piece of rizla on their foreheads declaring what exactly they are.

My descent was stopped in a level below all the hubbub, and for a moment I could not breath as I struggled and wrestled violently to the top of the bloody cesspit, reeking of pickled kidneys. Once the usual vomiting and wailing quitened, I could hear outside myself some voice in the corner of the black pit murmuring. It was so dark I could hardly see a thing, and my eyes stung with tears, but I could tell somehow that it was a Spanish or Portuguese voice perhaps. I heard

...She was my sister. No-one called her baby or sweetheart. She loved too desperately. She fell for the most sickly. And they were too improper for her, too nasty, bad ones. Too impoverished to - ha ha ha - to have the means to love her back. Oh sweet lord. So she learned pain. She longed. She knew melancholy. She begged old Ironburns to stand proud by her. She begged but was too proud to borrow. To hell with pity he said, asshole! His prick was covered in sores anyway. I played the game. I despised her prudery. Through it all I did not desert my sweet saviour Christ. The one thing she turned to in the end was self-control. I hope God loved her, because fuck all else did. She now owns a string of gymnasiums across north-east France and BeneLux, and has a profitable series of self-help books.

I shut the pages of the free rag and sighed. I have always found the term 'prick' somehow disagreeable, and I'd come across enough maudlin mawkishness in my time to write a PhD on the Romantic tradition in certain places in the world. I had a text from my mobile phone network. It said "this night is as young as self-reproach, or resentment, depending on ability". I was like WTF?!!!!1LOLZ!