Saturday, 30 January 2010

unwittingly complicit in a sadistic ritual

...
hampi,
last night, been here ten days, because its so easy, because of fest, and because we were both writing and working and we found Café Gopi for flagons of coffee and morning writing … and P under the cosh
first beer in three weeks, this is a holy town so no beer, or meat, so we had to buy it over the river… it was something of a commitment to cycle a mile to the wineshop … uphillish at the end of a 20km tootle…
and it might be a holy town but I just went for a last subtly beautiful sunset… of orange orb fading into wan… from the ruins above the temple… and there is crap pretty much everywhere… and by crap I mean human shit… cos the fest was big… and the young men don’t care
the same leering adolescents we’ve had enough of… and who make watching anything difficult because they’re so hyper and gangy and... well… every generation of forty year olds and over looks at their succeeding generation in their adolescence and thinks, we’re doomed, civilization is doomed… the ancient Greeks thought it, the ancient Hebrews thought it, many others must’ve thought it, an ungenerous English mind might think it now… and an Indian here could think it too
and it might be a holy town but… never is the sky wholly blue cos there are mines and factories and big cities and what have you well out of sight behind the bouldery hills
...
so we’ve had five hot days of walking… of cycling… of temples and ruins … of a jolly interlude tubing down some kinda rapids… of light climbing …and light bouldering… i.e. clambering up down and around the large and small and very large boulders which are the landscape... of trotting thrice out to the waterfall which isn’t a waterfall as we know it… but a underground torrent down beneath the smoothed rocks of this gorge-to-be …where the water has made Henry Moore sculpture after Henry Moore sculptue …and there are cool shallow pools for the slow swimming… [though mind the monkeys cos they love to steal your bag and taunt you]… of cycling along the rice-paddy valleys around below and between the high boulder hills
the fest was ok.. thick crowds… as with New Years Day Parade in Cochi, the fests are the only time the girls and young women are allowed out … and girls just wanna have fun ….and a mixed bag of dance and music … all difficult to judge cos well, its difficult to enjoy yourself when everything stops and starts so much, and its an alien tradition and you’re not sure what constitutes good… so you enjoy the faces of the performers… though too many of them look like professors surveying a class… and only a few are full of glee and zeal and wonder… and the music only rarely seems to syncopate … and only rarely do the dancers do something new and rhythmic… something with the body utterly compelling to the eye … which a good few do, but not enough, not enough… and none of the ensembles are wholly competent, so you have to watch the good ones and not look at the bad … and only a few are so good they can be playful with the form… and they are the ones to enjoy the most
...
...
and we did watch something truly awful, unsettlingly ugly… which made us feel unwillingly complicit in a sadistic ritual… enacted on a twelve year old girl… cos she’s dressed up in coloured silky finery and dances to recorded music, which cuts out for ten seconds of every minute… and after a couple of minutes the music is broken up by a voiceover which, we assume, explains the tradition of the form… which, we assume, isn’t karnatakan… and while the voiceover goes on, and on, the girl holds the same one-legged pose… but then the broken-rhythmed music gets in to it for fifteen or so long minutes, yes fifteen, where the poor girl is just whirling, and whirling, and there is something brutal about the rhythm and she is whirling whirling exactly the same whirl again and again and again, gamely never ceasing to go for it, and go for it, as it goes on for five minutes, ten minutes, with still the ten seconds of no backing track every minute, fifteen minutes, whirling, whirling, with men appearing from side of stage and looking at her, some with clipboards and conferring, and interfering with the spectacle, which hasn’t happened with any other performer, except this spectacle isn’t pretty, and we`re asking each other, what is this? why are they putting this girl through it? why? what moron thought this up? why did they think could be good? why isn’t someone stopping her? and some goodhearted souls to our left start clapping, loudly, as if hoping this will end it, cos no-one is enjoying it and we’re relieved some of the Indians are uncomfortable as us and STILL SHE SPINS DIZZYLESSLY ON to the brutal rhythm, the poor girl, and this is awful to watch because we can’t stop thinking, this girl is being tortured, this is awful, she is spinning spinning whirling spinning in the same againsame clockwork pattern without ceasing over the CD screw-ups and still going for it, keeping her rhythm her composure her smile but there is no point to it, and we, and we’re sure we’re not alone, we are angry this can be happening, this should not be happening, what career advancing proud parent or teacher or instructor or cultural commisar or shithead thinks this is good and then it stops, stops, its over and she get the biggest round of applause of the night, less for her dancing which was ok, but she’s only twelve, but chiefly we reckon [and we think we’re in sync with the audience] but chiefly FOR HER AS A HUMAN BEING cos that shouldn’t happen to a dog, to a Republican, to Osama Bin Laden…and then one of the clipboard cretins gives her a mike and she thanks the people of Karnataka for listening and I can only think of the Spanish Inquisition who would expect the tortured to thank the torturer afterwards…

next stop badami, another ex-capital, now only 25000, which, in India, is small… its not far but its six hours so the roads must be… an … entertainment...
...

Wednesday, 27 January 2010

a concatenating syncopation of phantasmagoria

fest is truly starting to fest
and
its already getting very difficult to describe out there
and it hasn't even properly started yet
succinct simply isn't possible
unless you're satisfied with
a concatenating syncopation of phantasmagoria
and i'm not
...
but if i try and describe it the desc will run for pages...
...

bicycle repair man

i've had this line i've been wanting to use for decades
i've been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but i've never got round to it
but have never used it as its the kind of in literary joke most people find annoying and i do too ... but in fact, i have been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but have never got round to it
have got as far as page 4 in the past
and page 40 in the past
but i either left town or it fell in the raintub, probably both ...

and who's afraid of virginia woolf ? well me well i'm irrationally intimidated by her and was annoyed by Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose in The Hours ... i'm not sure what gets me about Virginia Woolf but maybe its just that i see her as one of those intimidatingly Upper Middle Class women who always put the frighteners on me the uppermiddle class mothers of college friends doing their best not to look down on pleb me
in retrospect these mothers were dead nice but at the time they got to me ...

so today, as Priscilla is on a pushed-back deadline, the best thing for me to do is toddle off and leave her to it ...so, as its looking cloudy, i rent a bike and head off... i just motored through White Tiger by Aravind Aviga, which is an excellent read and Cafe Gopi, the rooftop where we go every morning for flagons of coffee, while writing with the clear-head of early morning, has a bookswap shelf but the only half decent book is... To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf... so i get it and take it with me in the bike's basket as i belt way too fast up the steep hill which confronts immediately you leave [which right now has fifty drummers, 10 Gods, including 4 monkey Gods and a couple of coconut-macheteing Krishnas, ten fanfare-type trumpeters and eleven bedecked elephants winding their way off it] ... so the hill half ruins me for the rest of the day and, having realised after the first hill that my thighs are whacked and the bike is even more severely decrepit, is in fact rubbish, i cycle 15 or so km, head into a long dead-end between a river and power station...whereupon i get a puncture...
ollocks
so i'm reduced to walking the damn creaky thing of a bike back in the ever-heatening sun... stopping at tea shops and amazing temples... with nothing to do in the tea-breaks and shade-breaks except ...read To The Lighthouse... laughing at how things turn out...
so i walk a good few miles thinking, this is gonna be a long one, i'm gonna finish the book... with kids jeering and catcalling and helloing at me, motorbike teenagers sneering at me, and with old men on cycles, passing me at a very little more than weary walking pace, giving me what i think are smiles of fatalistic sympathy...
when, as i approach a town, two ragamuffins kids, bruv'n'sis, find me and say, puncture... puncture... and point me to a bike repair shop ... which, being deep in the misery of reading Virginia, and sometimes being a decidedly unproactive person [much too loath to consider bettering my position] hadn't occurred to me...
do you remember a Monty Python Tv sketch called Bicycle Repair Man...?
well, hoorah, he was my superhero... and fixes the bike so... Monty Python save me from Virgina Woolf ...
while i'm sitting there, with chickens getting butchered me in a small stall 18 inches behind me, a motorbike with a man and two kids stops for a second while the bloke throws a cat on the gravel and they drive on with bike repair man and others shouting at them... cos they've just dumped the scrawny bigheaded scared-looking kitten on a random roadside...
so i tip the kids and i'm off...hoobloodyrah i was already despairingly thinking, i'm only on page 45, there's seven times more of this... SEVEN
i mean, its lyrically written... and there's something appealingly human about well-observed it is ... and the sentences do roll very nicely... though frequently they disturb the clarity of her description... but BLOODY HELL am i relieved?
so i can still do the joke i'll never do... i've been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but i've never got round to it ...
...
meanwhile rereading the above i realise i'm been getting a bit self-centred... a bit wholly me-oriented with my punishing introspection when of course the interesting bit... the bit that should be expanded is ... is the bit which went ... the main-drag / bazaar of Hampi which right now has fifty drummers, 10 Gods, including 4 monkey Gods and a couple of coconut-macheteing Krishnas, ten fanfare-type trumpeters, and eleven bedecked elephants complete with satin-uniformed mahouts, winding their way off it ... more later
...
speaking of intimidating middle class women, one thing you never get in england anymore, that i see anyhow is women who wear heavyish overcoats and walk about with their hands in their pockets creating a unique kind of silhouette
you see them in old english movies say, a canterbury tale
well... you might not get those women in england anymore ... but you do get them here
the vicar's wife in Ooty
busybodies, purposeful, no-nonsense, intelligent
they're another thing you used to get in england you don't get anymore ...but do get here ...
...
kids with catapults
kids playing with a wheel and a stick
groups of kids playing cricket
leyland cars and trucks
royal enfield bikes
standard fireworks [?]
a complete disregard and loathing for the poor
...

Tuesday, 26 January 2010

with hindsight/ i'm shite

so priscilla is rereading midnight's children for the first time
and i'm thinking how my two favourite books of last year were
lolita
and
midnight's children
and i'm even more keenly thinking how i didn't like either the first time
...
cos if i didn't like either of two such fabulous books then
doesn't this mean my judgement was off?
well off?
horribly off?
and how do i know its still isn't horribly off?
meaning
what's the point of thinking when there's such a high likelhood of my thinking being rubbish
...
with hindsight/
i'm shite
...
!

plus
good books are hard to come by
and i've just belted through john dickie's great book on the cosa nostra
and am belting through aravind aviga's white tiger
which is being killer and a great book to read here
...
so it looks like midnight's children again
...
plus its five hundred years since krishnadevaraya came to power here and they are having a giant festival to commemorate
there's at least five stages being built
the lights are looking good and it takes off tomorrow and explodes on the 27th
so its gonna be one joyous monster party
great stuff, we hope
and speaking of
with hindsight
i'm shite

i just reread the play i've been writing and got so excited about below
and, sadly, its nowhere near as good as i thought it was
nowhere near
Trollocks
the fact its quite appropriate to the piece
that i should get excited about it,
and then have my hopes/ expectations dashed
again
is, of course, scant consolation
...
of course
very scant
...
though its nothing fifty decent gags and some more good ideas can't sort out
...
mind you
isn't everything?
...
ㅑ누'ㅅ ㄷㅍㄷ교소ㅑㅜㅎ

Monday, 25 January 2010

wrote a play by mistake

...
whoops
wrote a play by mistake
how did that happen?
am meant to be writing a poetry show and i go off on a flight of fancy
follow it
keep following it
wake up in morning thinking about it and
pretty soon
crashbangwhoops have written a play by accident
...
twenty years in the thinking
three days in the writing
forever in the revision
two hander bedroom farce
couple stuck in eternal hotel room find they are writing the same acutely self-referential piece about a couple stuck in a hotel room
rapidfire dialogue... post modern pisstake...
where post post modernism turns out to be modernism all over again... because ... [but that would be giving it away]
which passes for a happy ending
...
four cheers for modernism
...
90 mins, 11000 words [currently 8] so probably unusable
...
what normally happens is that i decide a piece is crap and forget about it for five years before deciding it might just be ok
...
which is much like how i buy shirts
... buy it, decide its awful, wheel it out five years later and think, it ain't so terrible
...
forever in the revision
...
and how long is forever?
...

Sunday, 24 January 2010

morality as dead a language as morse code

like John Bolton said
or was it his fellow iffy republican, Gonzales
the Geneva Convention is quaint and obsolete
...
an ominous phrase is ever there was one
and morse code is easy to understand the principles of
though slightly harder to learn so well its instinctive
but no-one goes there anymore, anyway
...

Saturday, 23 January 2010

A Mockney History Of Hampi

Hampi

Vijayanagara

So what does it look like?

It looks like some posh tosser’s brother had this job lot of nice stone he couldn’t get rid of till he niftily manages to palm it off on some royal tosser, Prince Muggins the Mug and, how`s yer father, before you can say tenth wonder of the world, hello Hampi... then this little number turns out well lucrative for the family of posh tossers cos King Mugbad the Crap and his kids and their kids are a dumb bunch of suckers and, cor strike a light, how’s yer father, hello Hampi bigstyle

And then cos the Mugginses wasted all the dosh on all the stone shit they ends up in this big battle where they might have the numbers but the other lot have got some big shooters and they’ve got shorter bows and arrers than the other lot cos the Mugginses have blown all their readies on some concrete bloody Mandapams stretching right aross the horizon... cos simply everyone and his status seeking wife had to have a Mandapam.... and where the muslims have got cavalry and what have King Muggins the Buggins and the Mugginses got? a stone chariot, yes stone, looks nice on a postcard to yer Aunty Mabel but bugger all use to anyone

So next thing the Muslim so-and-so's from the north are all grinning from ear to ear while Muggins the Last is having his head paraded around the Deccan bloody Plain on the end of a bloody spear, and’e ain’t gonna see his toes again this side of Doomsday, and next thing the still grinning Muslims are dismantling the place pricy concrete brick by pricier concrete brick … so that this city which was compared to the best in Europe is turned into ruins pronto and no-one ever really lives in the gaff again… while only a few lucky fuckers get to do a runner east with as much treasure as you can carry on 550 elephants, which is a lot yeah?... where no-one ever learns a lesson and soon some more Mandapams are going up like there`s no tomorrow... or yesterday... and more money gets spent on concrete you can`t eat or fight with and the Muslims are in the Deccan bigtime till the British show up, stick a sword in some guts and pretty soon everyone is equal cos they`re all stuffed

...

Friday, 22 January 2010

creepy creak

THE ANTS

The biggest ants I’ever seen
Well close
An inch long
And black
Yet not scary
Except when they turn their big
black
flat
heads
I’m sure I can hear a creak

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Would the British still be in India if they hadn't been so racist?

Would they?

?

For every other invader swiftly married in… the Mughals for instance

So that within a hundred years or so they were pretty much of local blood

Well the British, being a new kind of racist, didn’t

Within their Empire mindset it was unthinkable… a British man marrying a Indian woman … with the opposite being even more unthinkable …But, imagine if they hadn’t, they would still be the upper class here…

The British were better armed… they were taller and therefore stronger and more imposing … they had the mystique of the incomprehensible… and the undefeated… and they were whiter ... after all, the Indian upper class revere fairness of skin… and you see a form of this every day in the uneasying skin cream adverts aimed at teenagers…and, as with many other upper classes in ex-colonies, like the Malaysians, the Indian Upper Class model themselves in so many ways on the British Upper Class as was, though rarely in religion… [Independence Square in Kuala Lumpur has a cricket pitch on top of it… which is like turning Trafalgar Square into a Gridiron]… and had those Anglos sensibly become Anglo-Indians, then those Anglo-Indians, like the Indo-Mughals before them, would have stayed in power till something else dislodged them… like the British dislodged the Mughals…

Which racism was all very good news for the Congress Brahmins, who got this country, which had never existed before on such a scale, with very little effort… the sudden weakness of the British Empire was, for them, a very fortuitous happenstance indeed … like the weakness of the Mughals for the British before that

Because the British also got India in a very easy way… for the scale of what was gained… Delhi fell very simply to the British and they went from running Trading Posts to some seriously lucrative real estate in very little time… then they simply kept on trying to secure what they had, which got them more, and more, till they’d ended up with so much they felt they had to take it all… So they had to defeat first Tippu Sultan and then the Marathas in order to secure what they had… and the fact that India had no historical unity meant no-one was going to be of a mind to co-ordinate an all-India fightback

For few seem to stress how there might be a geographical India… it leaps off the map … but there is no historical India… and if there was it absolutely certainly contained Pakistan … India had NEVER been politically unified until the British who, suddenly having no-postwar-choice, found themselves forced to hand it over to the New Indians

What a marvelous piece of luck for the opposition in the 1940s?! what a very neat thing to happen?!… to be given this whole country… on a platter… this ancient country with so much glorious future

And before, having visited the site of Tippu Sultan’s defeat and very death, I wondered quite what I thought about it… was it… one bunch of brutal bastard toughnuts destroying another bunch of brutal bastard toughnuts?

Or is it an issue that Tippu Sultan was their toughnut, an Indian toughnut?… even though he does seem to have been responsible for the death of many Hindus and Christians… though his many apologists deny this, seeing him as a great visionary poet scholar and warrior…

Which is a tough question… does it matter that he was their toughnut?

After all, in Africa, the benighted Africans were probably better off under their rapacious colonial bastard leaders than with the bastard leaders of the murderous and fractured societies they now have… not everywhere of course but… in many places.

[And maybe not everyone would agree but I reckon, if someone is murdering you wholesale, the better option is the ones who kill the least…. And bollocks to dogma, or morality, or nationalism.]

Whilst the Indians were milked for well over a century by the British and their Imperial economic squeeze … Tippu Sultan might have squandered money on the de rigeur opulence …but he would not have taken the money out of the country… which was the whole reason the British were there… extracting the cash… which meant that India in many ways went backwards under British rule… before that it was undoubtedly a dynamic place, a patchwork of diversely antiquated and dynamic political unities… it seems to be common knowledge that the Indians had good boatyards in 1750 yet they hardly had any in 1950… because the British simply controlled everything and didn’t want them building ships… or much else for that matter

Whilst they had astutely instituted an iniquitous landowner system… the Zamindars… large landowners who were given the land and who, often absentees, extracted their own tithes from the peasants and were then taxed themselves by the British… which outside instituted feudal system of course made it much easier for the British to get their money… rather than impossibly running after every peasant themselves

It seems very difficult to judge if the British were more or less brutal than their predecessors, few of whom, if any, were saints… Were there more massacres under the British, or less?... Were the hospitals and jails worse under the British, better, or much the same?… What is not difficult to judge is that the economic squeeze of the British was much worse… Tippu and the others of course grabbed the cash for themselves, and maybe the most the locals got out of its was the small drippings of some old-fashioned trickle-down effect… yet he didn’t sail away with boatloads of booty

A book on all this would be good to read …

On the other hand, most Indians think corruption is India's biggest problem... so is it more corrupt under Democracy than it was under Imperial Rule?... most would say yes... is the same cut the British were sailing off with now funneling its way into greasy politician pockets?
...

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

shut me in, shut me out

Well, as I’ve said

I’m a performance poet

And I have to say

It’s a tough gig

The writing’s tough

And the performing is tough

Particularly the writing

Because at least the performing is a social thing

And one of the bollocks-ups in my whole time as a performance poet has been how I barely wrote for years

Because I was running shows

Like from 96 to 2005 I hardly came up with a poem a year

Frequently less

And as someone said, [well me]

You either administrate

or you create

...

So I had to stop running shows in order to write them

Which is a good exchange

Even though I was pretty good at running them

Only so many people on the planet are good at running them

Most people who try are actually bad

But me, I wasn’t bad

Not afraid of hard work

And willing to talk forever about performance poetry

And one of the bummers of writing is the amount of wasted work

Wasted thought wasted time wasted struggle wasted grief

Especially when you see how disorganized I am as a writer

As I said, my filling system resembles the childhood card game,

Memory

But the thing about writing is that you don’t know its going to work

I have pieces I’ve been writing for twenty years which are no nearer completion than they were ten years ago

And, as they’re exercises in lyrical beauty, they’re probably unperformable

Maybe they’re like pieces Russian writers would write under communism

would work on for years

without hope of their ever being published

so they would work and work on them for decades

purely for their own sense of art

painstakingly perfecting them

year after year after year

not in the belief anyone would ever see them

but purely to make them function perfectly as works of art

whatever, these days the optimum time for writing a poem is, i reckon, 3-4 years

which is alot yeah?

...they gestate

...

at length

...

lines attract other lines and it all coalesces

...

And the piece below is a classic example

I worked on it for a good six years

Editing and editing

And had it almost ready for 2005

Editing and editing

Almost ready for 2006, well I learnt it

Editing and editing

And for 2007 I rewrote it and relearnt it

Editing and editing

And actually performed it in Ottawa and Montreal

Editing and editing

Like 13 times

Editing and editing

But it simply didn’t seem to work within the show I had

Editing and editing

So I stopped

Editing and editing

And I may bring it in again at some point

Editing and editing

...
though maybe I’m a bit old for such full-on-ness

but its alot of work to have put in for zero product

and there's alot of lines and couplets and refrains i like

not to mention the flow

but whatever, its most likely i'll never use it

and as i know it does work, maybe its a good example of how a solid performance piece doesn't have to work on the page

or maybe it does work on the page

i'd be surprised, seeing how its essentially impressionistic

i honestly wouldn't know

and don't have to know

...

Whatever, here it is

...

To be performed at a right old rate of knots and with ever increasing gusto...

...
...

You’re going to spend a long time being

The you you become

So it pays to becoming a you you like

Yes, you’re going to spend a long time being

The you you become

So it pays to becoming a you you like


And me? …I want my heart

To bend and not break

To lend and not take

To quiver not quake

To river not lake

To bend and not break

To give and not take

To quiver not quake

To river not lake


But aah

the ifs and buts

and slights and cuts

and wrongs and ruts

and slammed and shut


And ahhh its

Your loss my gain

My pleasure your pain

My loss your gain

Your pleasure my pain

Your loss my gain

My pleasure your pain

My loss your gain

Your pleasure my pain


Cos ahh, we are the dogs of liberty, dogs of liberty, dogs of liberty

We are the fakes of liberty, fakes of liberty, fakes of liberty

We are the ghosts of liberty, ghosts of liberty, ghosts of liberty

We are the dogs of liberty, fakes of liberty, ghosts of liberty


And we are but rollingstock

for the poisons of the past

only in us can they be borne

into the future


AND SAMUEL BECKETT HE WROTE

I’M DOWN IN A HOLE THE CENTURIES HAVE DUG

AND JAMES JOYCE HE WROTE

I’M TRYING TO WAKE UP FROM THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY

AND WHO’S MINDSET WOULD YOU PREFER?

WHILE GEORGE SATAYANA HE SAID

THOSE WHO KNOW NO HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT

BUT I THINK

THE MORE YOU KNOW

THE MORE YOU GET STUCK IN THE TRAPS OF HISTORY

THE LESS YOU KNOW

THE MORE YOU’RE AN UNWITTING VICTIM OF HISTORY

SO THE TRICK IS

TO STAY BETWEEN, TO SURF BETWEEN,

KNOWLEDGE AND LACK OF KNOWLEDGE

AND THAT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IS

The tricky bit


for I believe FREEDOM IS THE LAND BETWEEN WHAT YOU KNOW

AND WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

And the only free mind is the mind which never stops learning

And I wonder if the freeing

Is in the yearning

So this is called


IF YOU’RE NOT GROWING YOU’RE SHRINKING


I was making myself feel queasy

so I tried to empty myself into the bin

but it ain’t that easy

seeking to meld

and weave

and thread

a newness,

but held by the

unsheddable

logic of my

head


seeking to live and create and be

on the beach where the shore meets the sea

to not get dragged far out into the chaos

with little chance of a return to land

yet neither be beached immoveable

on the sane grounded unchanging sand

seeking to be thrown and washed

and pulled and pushed

on the beach

and so retain the chance

the knowledge

the choice

of each


o roll me in roll out

wash me in, wash me out

pull me in pull me out

push me in push me out

no pretence at any pretence

a pleasure in every sense

come on now while we jest

lets go see about this mess

me I sought I sought up I sought the rest

born to be ripped off

me i got tipped off

and me I ripped the script off

i sucked it up and I chewed it

i built it i blagged it i blew it

i let the chaos overwhelm me

physically and mentally

this was me running round

and running aground

dispassionate at my own disaster

troughing and cresting from tears to laughter

life whole

never

no whole goal for the soul

ever

a life only possible in bits

in fragments

together


so shut me in shut me out

draw me in draw me out

wear me in wear me out

throw me in throw me out

the cars growl impersonal

the shopfronts impossible

the streetshow freakshow a sped up slideshow

of head after head after head

the old skin shed and

the new-skin noose-skin covered with

dead

drowned in the sea of gaping faces

spluttering abob in the tunneled spaces

stiff in the streets stiff like treacle

ricocheting blundering tripping slipping

through the cracks in the ranks of the banks of the people


with

a rhythm from your head to your feet to your core

running fast running ragged running slick running raw

a rhythm from your lips to your hips to your core

running wild running on running true running more


the rhythm becoming an energy

the sound becoming an melody

the choosing becoming a cruising

the choice becoming a voice

a collision a decision

an emotion a musing

a sound a booming

a fusion a fission

a rolling rhythm climbing higher,

the stretch becoming a reach,

the flame becoming a fire,

the rolling risen pulse of cadence,

now falling,

now falling further still,

and soon,

now,

scaling higher


so

draw me in draw me out

deal me in deal me out

talk me in talk me out

see me in see me out

so, no pretence at any pretence

a pleasure in every sense

come on now while we jest

lets go see about this mess

everything's been done, yet

the world hasn't even begun yet


don't you know you little fool

you never can win

wake up to reality

i got you ...

because yes, its a fine fine line

between the malignant and the benign

but, ooh, don’t you like the vibration

of being caught in the oscillation

between capture and liberation


so, twisted, hamfisted

pucker up those lips and kiss and

count me in count me out

talk me in talk me out

see me in see me out

shut me in shut me out

born to be ripped off

me i got tipped off

and me i ripped the script off

and became a pinball poolball

a bowling down the lane ball

a saneball sameball bouncing round the

trenchlike streets of the mazelike city

the pitiless suburban neatnesses

of the pretty suburban pretty


with

a rhythm from your head to your feet to your core

running fast running ragged running slick running raw

a rhythm from your lips to your hips to your core

running wild running on running true running more

the rhythm becoming an energy

the sound becoming an melody

the choosing becoming a cruising

the choice becoming a voice

a collision a decision

an emotion a musing

a sound a booming

a fusion a fission

a rolling rhythm climbing higher,
the stretch becoming a reach,

the flame becoming a fire,

the rolling risen pulse of cadence,

now falling,

now falling further still,

and soon,

now,

scaling higher


and I’ve some inner specifications to rearrange

for some increased acceleration in the rate of change

yes I’ve some inner specifications to rearrange

for some increased acceleration in the rate of change

the expansion of the possible

and the shrinking of the done

a growing sense of newness

and a nearing of the

unbegun

the backlog of new beginnings

the racking up of good reasons why

cos nothing beats a try like a failure

and nothing beats a fail like a try

its the quintessential trigger

of intellectual rigour

so blow me out of this one to the

sound of floors smashing

of a piano crashing

on rock

through every level of a high-rise block

cos its a disaster we’re not moving faster

and I’m not out of here yet

so find me in find me out

try me in try me out

fit me in fit me out

shut me in shut me out

no pretence at any pretence

a pleasure in every sense

come on now while we jest

lets go see about this mess

born to be ripped off

me I got tipped off

come on now before you guess

lets go see about this mess
...