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An urge to write and think that is amongst many things, many other dissipating fritters and fripperies, the urge to wallow in unhappiness, because it is the urge to battle against unhappiness, by which i mean my own and everyone else’s, by which i mean my own and everyone else’s stupidity and normality because, to properly battle it, one must know it, one must not just be in it but have been in it for some time, be marinated in it, steeped in it, sodden through with it, burdened down by it, sunk beneath it, must be in that place, that universe of places, that everydayness, that accustomedness to shit, those brutely enduring everyday stupidities and miseries and sufferings where thinking is hardest, where saying anything that hasn’t been said is seemingly impossible, and beyond you, and beyond anyone else, where saying anything that isn’t ludicrously cliched and hackneyed and-done-to-death-while-doing-no-damn-good-to-anyone is laughable, impossible, a task only a fool would set out on, where new words and thought, new thinking and writing, is of the utmost difficulty, where, facing the grand enduring edifice of an unbroken updown history of wanton brutalities, of brutal maximal exploitation, of unbroken herd-instinct, of heads-down-gotta-eat-ness, of the unceasing flows of the channels of shit which have overwhelmed all for seeming eternity, where one stupid-enough-to-try, one sufficiently foolish to want to, and incorrigibly blinkered enough to think he can, can spend whole stretches of hours days and weeks, and even months, where one never writes even two consecutive work-together sentences of workable cliche-less words and ideas, only phrases, couplets, by which i mean two words, two consecutive say-anything words, where one has to have, long have, wallowed down there in the shallows and depths of oneself, has to have thought and hard and repeatedly and repeatedly over the same ground, have fished the same water, breathed the same air, air now stifling now eluusive, trawling my own shallows, gridding my own stagnant waters and working through each section of the gridded mudflats hour by hour by and day by day to net nothing, and be happy i have netted nothing bar two words hooked together by some strong and, for now, unfriable wire, where one has to have walked ten thousand streets, and met ten thousand people, and seen ten thousand films, and read ten thousand books, and heard ten thousand songs, and seen ten thousand skies, knowing all along there was nothing that could be learnt from any of it except a deeper faith in the only working no-bullshit exception-free truth you had to start with, that its all shit and stupidity and misery and suffering and all you can ever do is enjoy the ones the tens the twenties the hundreds the thousands the ten thousands along the way because the bastards were winning, the bastards are winning, and nothing you’ve seen heard read or thought changes one slightest iota’s slightest dot the view that the bastards are going to keep winning and you are simply left thinking and wandering and writing and enjoying, still seeking onwards as if there is something that could be learnt, some crack in the thick and thickening crust of dried shit where some light might get out, which might show, or make possible, or just cursorily sketch out some new thought, or angle, or voice, or tone, or even some as-yet-undone fresh way of describing a stone an egg a sky a sea a face an eye, anything, and where one has spent months on the same long beach of rounded stones, and will spend months again on some other beach, slowly working one’s way up the beach, picking up every rock one by one, looking first under it and then holding up the stone, examining in from every angle, flipping it, feeling it, looking at it again and then discarding it and picking up the next and looking at it, first at random, and then from every angle, flipping it, feeling and then discarding it and working, with equal measure of stoic patience and edgy frustration, over hours days weeks and months, without knowing what thing or kind of thing i’m looking for, without knowing how i’ll recognise it or them when i find it or them, yet having a quiet inner faith, borne out by time, that i will know it and-or them when i see it and-or them, and spending two three months a year in this way, november into january or february, trying to find a stone, the stone, an idea, the idea, an angle, the angle, of interest, of any interest, of any newness, any workability… and then having, after the exhaustive search, while bending too much too often the aching back yet breathing the clean and cleansing air of possibility, the invigorating fresh sea air, to finally and at such laborious length half-fill my plastic basket with ideas and phrases and angles, half or more of which will be eventually discarded and most of which will be ultimately unrecognisable when eventually they feature in some constructed and quasi-finished piece, which itself is most likely to be discarded before ever reaching the eye of another human being, though frequently pieces have languished for a number of years in some internet message i sent myself from edinburgh surrey london leicester norwich goa kerala montreal bowen island, wherever, before i have dug them out and realised that time has treated them well, they do work, can work, might work, should work, must work, so again i battle and struggle over them, knocking them into some kind of palatable finishable workable presentable performable listenable readable writing, a half-full basket which will soon, finally, be worked with, the stones laid out on a bench somewhere, as lines in a computer file somewhere, as socks hung on a line, but which will all be used in the forthcoming battle struggle tussle and wrestle with the hardest the most inexplicable and unwordable interfaces with the world, where i may try and shine the strongest lights i can find on all of them, trying to see them at their most naked and unnatural, their most divorced from all on a white background or where, at little more than baseless whim, i may steadfastly, scrupulously, try to cut out all unnecessary light and therefore operate in almost total darkness, trying to see through the almost wholly obscure smoke-blacked window where the immuring dirt is on the other side and therefore inevitable, unavoidable, uncleanable, while battling against my most trenchant and stubborn excuses for inactivity, for loathing of all art, all writing, to make everything as immoveable as i can, to constipate myself to the max, to reject all artistic or commercial excuses for putting one word after another as if they could ever produce an acceptable couplet or sentence or idea, though remaining in great awe of those who can truly do so, yet regarding all such as way above, as unearthly, high above the earthly plain of shit i must battle across as i seek movement, self-generation, energy, excitement, in words strung out at something less than random, sparking words that do the thing, that work that jump the neuron from synapse to synapse, generating self-propelling words that heat up the mind, words that will be both yeast and flour and heat, air and fuel and spark, yeast and hops and time, height and weight and falling, words that come together and create their own energy, as the first life must have come from a self-replicating chemical reaction which finally, near miraculously, found ways of bringing more of the right chemical elements to itself, feeding itself, channeling food to itself, and thus enduring, self-replicating, living, creating, and battling for words which do all this, which suck oxygen into themself, that seem to exist with an energy before the mind reaches or reads or hears them, an energy for life, action, destruction, creation, love, hate, passion, all there in the words, which shoves and jolts and jacks and speeds and gusts the seeing eye’s mind, as your mind, doomedly creating, failing for the ten thousandth time, battles on and around and with all this in a very likely doomed attempt to come from somewhere honest, from some vestigial integrity miraculously undestroyed within me, and springboard me, my mind, and possibly, hopefully, unlikelily, the mind of some others, and dodge my cavils and exceptions, my unnecessarily thickly meshed bullshit filters, and leap my unnecessarily high series of bullshit barriers to actually finally say something, some what, some more than anything, some near impossible finally managed, though only fleetingly successful, only fleetingly holding together for the mind but, i, being fortunate, being a poet only of the moment, not needing to endure, not being so outrageously arrogant as almost every poet who ever lived, who believe that what they write will endure, can endure, should endure, but that in the act of glorious performance, can each day bring them, the random human beings of the audience, the words the ideas the chains the sparks to life, can breathe life into the words, my words, as a mythic god breathes life into mythic man, so that each day, for the brief hour of performance, i can animate them for the eighty ninety hundred human minds who have come to see me, can ascend, through face and voice and hand and body and theatre space, to a meaning, a joy and inspiration, an energy, which lives now, electrically, richly, now, only now, on first view, first read, or maybe even second, and every rarely even, still, a week later... before all meaning dissolves back into the cold soup from which it came... slimes back into the primeval sludge as an unbreakdownable effluent... crawls on its own flabby ill-shapen legs back into the swamp from which it bloatedly crept ... floats up into the clouds and, being, little more than air, merges with and is lost into them forever ... lands on the ocean as an unresounding drop amongst a billion other unresounding drops, produces a tiny and instantly vanished ripple amongst a billion other tiny and instantly vanished drops, and is gone forever, replaced by a billion other instantly lost ripples... but where, yes, for one moment, maybe two, on first reads, a meaning held together, unfakely, was there, held in the minds of others, the most that could ever be asked for, before the slime the soup the crawling the floating and the effluent have their inevitable reign
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and AHHH, the descent, the duplicity of words, their plain-as-day fakeness, their done-before-ness, and, THUD, the inevitability of failure, the vanishing of energy like breath in the winter, but AHHH YES, what a breath, what a clear pure white amongst the cold, but URRH the sapping the vanishing the goneness of strength, the passingness the fleetingness of momentum, but OOOHHH, what a momentum, what an energy, what a sense of now but, CRASH, the return of inertia, BANG, the disappointment of energy gone, of energy enjoyed but without fruition or culmination or succession, but AAAH, what a sense of freedom in the falling, but OWWW, the pain, of landing, the opening up of loss, of a vacuum within, but OHHH, what a filledness, what a sense of motion, of possibility, what an escape from the cavilling the tiring the wearing the crapness and stupidity of misery and tiredness and, WALLOP, the descent, the inevitable descent, the inevitable inescapable return of it all, the landing, the steps, the one after another, the hitting of each, the uneasiness of each word with the next and the last but, AAAAHH, when they surged together, they concatenated, they culminated, they soared, they flew, they built a thin sheet of ice strong enough not to stand on, but to skate on, to move on, to flow on, a tissue of words become a net of ropes just strong enough to move on before, UUURRHH, they collapse, they break, they drop you to, OWWWW, again land and, HIT, and, BUMP, and, BANG, and, CRASH, and, WALLOP, and, land, stop, be still, be unable to move, to only walk like ever before, limply, lamely, crippled by a language that can’t that doesn’t that won’t that hasn’t but that, ahh yes, did, found life and energy and possibility and zest within itself,
