Street Photography, A Reply

A friend on facebook, when seeing an album I put up of street photography, commented that it was ' really creepy'

Well, no it isn't. In fact it is anything but.

All our lives we walk through cities like zombies, asleep. Our eyes on the ground, headphones in our ears.

We spend life blocking out the beauty all around us.

The city is a vibrant, living organism.

And what is the city's energy made up of?

The people that live in it

So if you could capture some of that energy, that vibrancy - why wouldn't you?

So, yes, if photography is all about shooting fake , posed shots of your friends drunk on a night out, then yes, street photography is creepy.

But if taking photos is actually about capturing life and not just a dead image, well then I think it is pretty awesome.

'Mr Hawthorne woke up too late'

A student gave me this poem which he wrote about my recent fall and resulting wrist sprain.

I am flattered, and somewhat perturbed. It seems my poetry lessons have not been in vain.

Here it is, in its entirety (grammar and spelling errors excepted). Enjoy.

Mr Hawthorne woke up too late
He quickly ate some yoghurt, on a plate.
If he did not hurry, he would miss the bus
So he grabbed his stuff, and started to rush.

When he arrived, it was driving away
He sprinted after, he did not want
To miss his work day

During his sprint he suddenly fell
'Ouch', he cried, and let out a yell
The bus driver spotted him, crawling on the ground
He then stopped the bus and turned it around

Mr Hawthorne managed to get on board,
But his hand was sore

He arrived at work with a swollen hand
But he didn't go home, 'cos he's the man

He taught two lessons, but his hand got worse.
Miss Harris told him to go to the nurse

Mr Hawthorne called his doctor with his phone
The doctor looked at it, and told him he had broken a bone.

The moral of the story is if you break a bone
You should visit a Doctor
Or just go home

Myself, Laughing.

I try to be nice to everyone. About to run past and arrive. However, when I’m out I can’t dwell on my own. 

When he walks up to the library. Seeing it, I’m not here today because I didn’t. Much more,  I meant to follow the spoilt, arrogant, plump bastard.

I was glad to get out. Unfortunately mum and dad decided to have a competition to see how long they could stay. Otherwise, I could go out to clubs to see who I could have fun with.

I descended to the Rec floor. Everyone of them strangers, everyone of them an outcast.

At one point I went in. There were Egyptian engravings on the wall. I walked up to one and found myself. Then I meet Robert, who talked and talked..

I am tired of hanging about with normal. I could go out to clubs. 

A woman in dress sleeping. A black, pin- striped man. The stage is unimportant.

I will move. Shelves, the yage, about to run past and arrive. What?

He walks up to the library. It’s starting. Don’t know, weak. Old routine, hung most of the day. I hate myself. Awkward circumstances. I’ve finished two books.

This goes back tomorrow. I went online – that’s about it. Sort of relaxing. Good person I am being punished for. I try to be nice to everyone though, such as Winnie, dear old lady. 

For them, every one of them strangers, everyone an outcast. What  have I got to be friends with? By good points in their women in a dress, sleeping. There was no-one who I dare approach, or sit with, not even Courtney. 

 He’s going tomorrow. Walk past my hand. I hate them, I hate them all, the only ones who know. 

Time around, life’s too serious. The stage, after all, unimportant. 

I will move. 

There is a sound from the perusing, looking for. A strange woman appears. Myself, laughing. Despair with a few, such as Winnie, dear old lady.  What? He walks up to the library. People. people, with people. At one point I went it in.

Holding me, I managed to get in front of P, saying “how tiny to get in the cinema”. From the school there we saw an American, in the Worall centre with my ‘friends’, when I met Robert who talked and talked. 

I’ve finished two books. Going back home tomorrow.

There is a sound from the people, people with people at one point were all. What was I being punished for? The vicious cycle puts people off me, me even more. Roars of laughter eminating behind the joy in my behind. A woman in a dress sleeping. She was to see, about to run past.

We were there for over two hours! Others set me wands, cups, swords, pentacles. The stage, after all,  unimportant.

I will move, like Liza, dancing. '

Club in the eyes. Everyone will dance. Such as Winnie, dear old lady I could have fun with.

One’s actions must return colour.

She was behind the desk. This dark oh my pathetic says “What am I being punished for?”

Diaries by walking. All way Satan. Apparently Ian and she spent! Couldn’t believe with regards to this evening to have nothing.

Controlling Anne-Marie. I walk up to one and find myself. 

In the corridor I see neon red lights flickering. I approach. Strange woman appears – myself, laughing.

The Empress is Having Sex on my Breath

Passing here, Is and who today?  Because I didn’t love it, I have nothing about it, strange thing.

 I rang him, as if this is. Managed to get in.  Sex -  like books - aint happening.

Try and go to nightmares for help.

I like to think of auntie with Chris, loving life’s problems, earth-controlling help. 

So I get gloomy with regards to this everything to have nothing.

Emotions, calmness, thought, health. I keep connecting.  Dutiful James, I was able to get into interesting things. I need a hallway

Satan, light, joy in my life. I went online.  

I’ve finished two books. Go back home tomorrow, sleep for ages. On my breath vaguely before difficulty I am going to spend.

I like walks, anger, passion. Say goodbye to being honest, go into colour.

I was, I’m going, they are psyche. All day, dude. Though really?  

Starting to cholic here.

20th, March, worry. She’ll be Minellli.

He’s going. I feel strangely pink. Stick two inside -that devil loved it.

 Encounters, bitches. Which was he?

They are Friday night - air, problems, trouble. 

World, I have nothing.

All of next week I am at home with Deronda, here. Clothes, boys.  Turn it on again with the “been too busy”

I couldn’t stage. Important to move and cry. Complete nutcase from the light creature of before.

The Empress is having sex with my breath. Will I think, or sleep for ages?

Time around, life’s too serious behind the joy. Sounding like an ant happening. 

My bed was drifting, smashed in hope.

Concrete Sky

Slate grey sky pushing through my windows.  Bare tree claws stooping sinisterly over a coal tit.

The clock ticking is the only sound.. It seems to be burrowing through the wall.

In the bleak mid-winter a dead swan was frozen on a snow-covered lake.

The book case makes me feel lethargic. Accusatory spines glance out, neglected. A little fly keeps swarming around the sofa.

My neck is broken and the cushion is too real.

The TV is an opaque monstrosity. Its black face regards me indifferently.

The whiskey was too much but necessary, after the clitoris and the shower. My ears bled, so I drank.

Outside the canteen the school was eerie. Dead corridors and darkness. Walking into my classroom, wine-headed I held a whisky.

The colour-coded timetable looked ridiculous. A drunken lesson to an invisible class.

My feelings did not tally so I dispersed to the stair top to have a cigarette.

I know how Jesus felt. This is my cross and that which I must bear. But god. I hate them so. Her contorted face sour like a lemon cursing in my face

I must not let it filter through to my weekend, I must not, but still.

I woke up after a few hours of passed out sleep wide awake, and still drunk.

So I got up and watched Holiday Inn

Funny how the film is seen as a warm-hearted Christmas classic, best known for the fireside scene with Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas.

The hideous racist spectacle of the black faced white performers on Lincoln's birthday singing about slavery is all but ignored. Conveniently edited out and hilariously juxtaposed with the 'Freedom Song' for Independence Day.

Fred Astaire's fire cracker dance routine was pretty awesome though.

Then I curled up in bed with 'The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity'. Though the title may lead you to believe that it was about two drags queens road-tripping across the States, this is not the case.

It is in effect a mostly forgotten Bible book about Christian martyrs and Wild Animals.

A nice, pleasant read before bed time as you can imagine. Sent me right off.

The concrete sky is looking pretty unappealing right now, and the snow and the wind is adding to my unfavourable impression.

A trek into the city is distinctly uninspiring, even with the free cinema ticket.

But I may have to, otherwise I will melt into this tired old sofa,  my rotting corpse left for the deer I  love so much to feed upon.

The Dreamer

"You don't understand anything"

I tried listening to radio 4, some political debate. And I couldn't bear it. It was like being plugged in to this oppressive fear filled structure which hurt my head.

All these people arguing so cleverly about the state of The World. I can see why F is the way he is.

Oh but the way he slated me when we were talking about god. What can I say? I don't even know what I was trying  to prove. But I remember the arrogance, the self-assured contemptuousness oozing out of him like some black jelly, and I had to stop.

How could I even begin to explain?

Yeah, once upon a time I  had this weird dream where I went to Wonderland with Alice, and The World became this collective Dreamscape where I was somehow not only an actor but the creator, and I looked down and saw that everything had been leading up to this moment, and everything I believed was true, because I was the Dreamer.

And now I don't watch the news, or television, because I don't want to plug myself in to the Collective Insanity,  but I don't know where to go, how to rediscover that purity, or how to forget it.

Fear. That's what I got when I was plugged in. Fear, anxiety, frustration. It seeped out of the radio and into my body, and I had to turn it off.

And now I have classical music playing and I want to follow it somewhere else, to a realm hinted at by the stars and the silent lake and the deer sitting like statues in the garden, and the autumn colours and the moonlight. Like walking in to a painting and floating up to the sky.

There is so much beyond the surface. And sometimes I taste it and I connect to something much higher than me. And then it fades, and I'm back here in the show. In the game - suppress, suppress. So hard to be awake when everyone else is asleep.

Play your role to the best of your ability.

And when you try to convey it to someone else they can't grasp it - how could they? how could anyone?

No. Turn off the radio, turn off the news, and live like a hermit with the deer and the stars beside the water. Seek comfort in remembrance, drift.

Drift away on this beautiful music and leave The World to collapse in upon itself. Disappearing like a dream, eternal consciousness floating out through space.

Autumn Colours

Study full of sun, and folk music, and the water blue and rippled 

The image floats like a painting or a dream

I can't stop staring

I wish I was out on a boat

The autumn colours are so much more vibrant here. I had to close my window because the leaves were drifting in.


I'm so happy that I can sit here, at this vantage point, in this sun trap, looking out.

I guess if I was outside I would be cold. But in here, right now, I am warm.


I've done my marking. And I have a beer beside me and a night of Spanish food and socialising ahead of me.

Running the gauntlet, into the city. I am ready. I am ready, but I am so glad.

 Glad that I don't have to do it every day. Glad that I live here, in this beautiful space, beside the water.


My early morning walks home from nights in the city have taken on an almost mythical intensity.

That path, completely dark, empty, filled with stars.


I remember the last time

Two deer, the side of the road. Just looking right at me, the moonlight bouncing of our backs.

I had to take a deep breath, and stop. A moment or two. Standing still.

The bridge between me and them broken, like in that Robert Frost poem.

Alive, in a world of stars, and moonlight, and silver deer on dark country lanes.


But I must stop

My head hurts.  The sun is low in the sky and burning into my eyes through the old windows.

The music is an entity, floating on the insence swirling through my brain

And I am here, and the room is filled with sunlight.

Night Mirrors

I see you on the side street
Your eyes are lit up in the darkness

I hear the sound of a motorcycle

The lake is black
I can't even be sure that the stars are there
I am rocking gently in the silence

My hands are made of fire

I see you there sitting under the shade of a tree
A tree in a garden submerged by water

A young girl drowned there once

The sound fills my mouth until I cannot speak
There was a bar, I remember, where the dead people sat
The glass was frosted and snow hung gently on the canopies

After the frogs came, there was no point trying any more
Better just to sit, and not to speak. Because anything said was a lie
The truth cradles me in the dark, but I turn away to the window

 I look out at the street

It must be 3am. There is nothing
No cars, no sounds,
not even stars

The road is covered with snow. I watch it fall in a whisper

I am submerged
I am falling deeper inside myself

You are watching me

 I feel your eyes fixed on mine, beside the night mirror
that sits on my cabinet
Your disdain fills the space between my sweat soaked sheets and my piss pot

I hear a sound
A creak

I believe the couple in the painting come out and walk around the house when I am not looking.
They cannot stand forever, frozen on that nineteenth century beach

Her dress is flowing white. He stands upright. A little dog at their feet.
The moon is blue and they are gazing out at the sea

The creaking is too loud. It comes right through my door, into my bed
I can't breathe
Ever since the world began

My nails are too long

The sound of the clipper soothes my mind
When the red boats come too close I prefer to sit alone in this room

I am always sitting alone in this room.

There are three lights that I see across the dark water
They comfort me strangely, like memories of boats on beaches that never existed

I see a sailor somewhere, but he has no face

Helpless

Moments of pure undiluted bliss burst out after long periods of apathy and boredom.
Yesterday spent in bed, avoiding other people. Couldn't read, couldn't work, couldn't even watch TV. The thought of getting up and going into Stockholm cropped up several times but dispersed. Under my sheets it was warm and safe. I didn't need to think.

Then the sun went down and I came alive. The Doors on the radio, the yellow moon hanging over the lake. Insence filled the room. Something about that song, The Crystal Ship, made me decide to be alive again. I read somewhere that it represented the after life phase where you float as if in a dream. Whatever it was, I went outside.

It was pitch black, the garden full of shapes. I was not sure where I was going. But the cottage was lit up. It looked warm and comforting - other people were having conversations by candlelight, by the water. I was not alone. But I was alone and that was also comforting, to know that they were there, but also seperate.

And I sat, stupefied, like I always do when I make it down there in the dark. Too much. The silence, the water, the moon - yellow and partly obscured by clouds. There had always been this scene, and there always will be, and in the words of the 70s soft-rockers, Kansas, we are just dust in the wind

I remembered the last night of the meditation retreat. Me and the other guy in the room had accidentedly broken our vow of silence, and we had gone back to bed. Lying in the darkness, desperately bursting for more talk, more connection. Eventually we decided to be human and broke our silence. We went out - quietly, secretively, afraid of being found out. We went out to the balcony and we sat there for hours, talking against a backdrop of stars.

After not talking for such a long period of time I was overwhelmed. Like I had discovered god somehow - in a conversation, in another human's face.

But I have another memory of that balcony. This time I was alone. I had hit a wall in the day's meditation and had come head-on, face to face with my depression. No way round, no way to distract myself. What was the point of this struggle, this ridiculous, never-ending charade? I had never asked to be here. And yet I must continue running around, doing things, filling up time - why? How much better not to have been born, to have never become conscious in the first place. All the sadness, all the loneliness, all the broken things. Life was misery, the Buddhists had got it - life was suffering.

I had spent a day following this train of thought, and a day in a meditation retreat is like a month in the real world. So as you can imagine, I was not in a very good headspace. And to top it all, I wasn't able to sleep. So I went out to the balcony. And when I got out ------

I had to catch my breath. How can I describe how the sky looked that night? I had never seen stars like that before. Millions. Completely oblivious to my ego pettiness. I was silenced. I was face to face with god. Or so I thought. And then, as if in reply, a shooting star. I followed it across the sky and when it disappeared I collapsed down on the ground. I was nothing in the face of this beauty, this mystery. The veil had been lifted. There was only god. God simply was.

I remembered that again last night, as I sat down by the water. The yellow moon hung low and sent a trail of light across the water to where I sat. And I wanted to swim, to transcend this illusion, to swim across the water. But then what would it be like if I got to the other side? No. I realised it needed to be far away. Needed to seem just out of reach. Because here is where it counted. Here is where we could bring it back.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eye

Lanterns, or, The Vital Importance of Getting to the Bottom of the Garden

The sky was clouded over again, the fish on top of the ice. I broke through the kitchen table and made it outside. I breathed in the plants. They smelt jealous, like death.

There was a fire, beside the water. Or maybe there wasn’t. I can’t quite be sure. Anyway, I decided it was the utmost necessity to go there. So I put on my blindfold and gently tiptoed through the grass.

I felt something on my feet. It was snakes, or was it mosquitoes? They were biting at me. I became tattered, unsure and disorientated. I saw a bone. I scratched. I tore my skin of. Then I saw someone.

It was that Finnish woman with the bad temper. She stood in the middle of the garden. She blocked my way, her arms folded. Her eyes were cold and hypnotic. The blue sky made her look like cardboard.

She said that she was not, under any circumstances, going to clean my room. So I spat in her face and pushed her to the ground. I put on my boots and jumped on her head until it was a beautiful shiny red pulp.

I then took my skipping rope and started swatting the horseflies. They gather frequently, in this swamp.

...

It is now dusk and the clouds are turning pink. There are a few boats on the lake, but no-one is in the cottage.

The wood is getting rotten. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like, to be a piece of rotten wood, all wooden, and rotten. But then I get bored.

Sometimes my eyes sparkle like diamonds. Sometimes I have to pull them out so that I can hear better.

It sounds like Portishead. It smells like shit. The grass has tangled up the white chair.

Sometimes they drive me mad. I get this sad feeling in my solar plexus, like I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t. At least, not until I’ve got to the bottom of the garden.

There’s a light flashing somewhere, across the lake. Maybe it’s flashing inside my head. It makes me want to blink. I look up just in time to see an airplane.

...


“What did you say?” (We were standing beside the smoke under the tree).

“Well I can’t say really, because she’s my friend, but I had a dream about it”

Her skin began falling off. It was all rotten and smelt like the dog corpse I keep hanging in my bedroom. I keep it hanging there, just to remind me, you know, of mortality and brevity and such matters.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and hold it up to my nose. It fills me with the sweetest feeling of ecstasy, Like looking at the stars over a lake.

My lantern, my dream, my deathless trance. Nature running naked through my field of bluebottles. They stick to my hair and my face.

“But what did you see?”

“Well I really don’t know, but you know, if we were talking right now, in a dream it would feel exactly the same. So you look out for dream signs. You ask yourself several times a day – how do I know that I am awake?”

Then, once you are satisfied with your conclusion you get out your lantern, and you go outside and submerge yourself in the darkness.

You submerge yourself in the darkness and you walk down to the bottom of the garden. And then, you breathe in the lake and the stars.

You breathe in the lake and the stars, and the breeze and the night flowers. And you ask yourself again “Am I dreaming?”

And if you still do not reach a satisfactory conclusion you console yourself with the fact that you have, indeed, made it to the bottom of the garden.

Deckchairs

White hair gets people's feet tapping 
My brain is not a drug counsellor
Her trainers are Music sitting on mother's lap image
Groovy jazz music lady
Red lipstick, sugar, breasts.
Fat and gazing in the distance
A red-faced bald man adds poignancy to an otherwise voluptuous cappuccino
With an ear in silence he plays with his instrument
What cancer patient greets this fear?
Ladies glowing sapphire, whistling mysteriously behind tapping feet
“I like the conversation that catches when I sit on deckchairs”

Fangs and Tusks and Rusted Skin

The last thing she expected to see was an elephant. But there were hundreds, all around her. They were dancing, stomping their feet, down and up, up and down.

The dust made her throat sore. It circled and exploded and settled under the painful sunshine.

All of a sudden she realised that she had created them. She had created this dry earth, this beating sun.

They stopped. The thudding had been getting lighter and lighter and now - nothing. With horror, she realised that they were waiting

...

Inhuman eyes bored into her skin. The silence, the dust, the sun. A gust of wind disturbed the sand which floated and then sunk. A sound in the distance, faint at first, carried on the breeze, closer and closer.

A voice - swirling and soaring over the repetitive beat. It was inside her. It took her over. She was possessed. Drunk on the music, the desert, the isolation.

She was blown gently into the middle of the circle. The eyes still fixed on her. This time she did not look away. She faced them head on. And then, slowly, she began to dance.

Slowly, surely, she began to dance. Twirling, sparkling, exploding. Possessed, she was no longer in control of her body. Taken over by a force outside of her she got faster and faster. Hypnotised, powerless, she became God.

...

The elephants were working themselves up into a frenzy. They began to spin and stamp and thrust their trunks into the blue nothingness. Stamping, spitting, turning and whirling like demons.

Their trunks were erect. She began to stroke. Holding them, feeding off them - A demented banshee, an inflamed old sybil cackling out into the desert.

She pushed the red ball deeper and deeper inside her body, swallowing it whole. The laughter wrenched through her insides, tore her open, exploded out and vanished.

...

Nothing left - No sound - No vision - No movement. Just fangs, and tusks, and rusted skin.

The cold and rook-delighting heaven

A mask in the corner will not think. Leave it there, on the stool, for the school children to walk past in the cold morning on the way to their buses.

Follow the cat down the street past the cars, past the locked windows with the blinded curtains mashing their indifference to the cold, to the ice.

Gasping like a grey faced old man in an oxygen mask outside the cancer ward, indifferent to the boxes and the files and cases building up, impassive, careless.

The fat woman with the glasses, mentally retarded, sitting beside her radio. 'A Case of You' coming out through the static. This is her life, this is her dream.

The truth, full of files and papers, shudders under her weight.

...

"The cold and rook-delighting heaven is grey and vast". Once again I am here, in this forest, walking past the school gates.

The tree overhead bursts open - a wood pigeon, frantic, hurrying across the field. It does not see the ground below. Focused, flapping. Like a naked, motherless child. Lost, wandering, meaningless.

Graffiti scratched into the stile. Climb over, force yourself to continue trudging upwards.

There was a time with people and snow and a blue jumper. A flash, a shutter, a summer day.

"May I hold your hand?"

Photographing the cows and then the top of the final destination, looking out, planning the future. The escape, the moment when life would begin, not realising that it was all there.

"The moments passed as in a play strutting and frutting".

The characters' dead bodies are decomposing on the silver water.

The Star

The orange hall smelt of sand
I felt like a boat longing for land
Following the dandelions along the path
I came to a woman covered in glass

Her watery eyes were frozen and bright
Reminiscent of moonlight swallowing night
Her hair was golden and made of the sun
And she held out a candle and beckoned me 'Come'

She brought me to a meadow hemmed in with stars
Where forested moonlight bounced off the flowers
The air was thick, silent and damp
And I followed her shadow like a moth to a lamp

Barn owls and nightingales flew from her hair
And fireflies flickered like lights at a fair
I felt like I was sealed in a basket of light
As her touch in front of me dispersed through the night

All around us, spirits did dance
And I walked through the forest like one in a trance
The world was alive, burning and free
The world was alive, and existed in me

We came to a clearing under the moon
And she looked at me briefly and said it was soon
I begged and pleaded her not to go away
But she said to me kindly that I had to stay

Remember this moment, remember this dance
Remember this forest, remember this trance
Don't forget all that you've seen
Don't forget that it's all just a dream

And then she was gone and I was alone
And in her darkness I made my home
I went back to the world and lived in disguise
But in the midst of forgetting I still see those eyes

They flash upon me sometimes, when I lie in my bed
And remember the kingdom that exists in my head
I listen to the raindrops that fall on the roof
And smile to myself secretly
And rejoice in the truth

Patients

Patients in cloaks mock understanding
The discomfort of dances pinches
Seagulls huddling under cackles dark
Grey, eaten up, metallic

A dream phonecall into the ocean
Dark, shuffling, unanswered
A patch snatched their faces
Long contact fog descended
On a cold preying sky

Remembering

Stand Blazing and back
A voice is gone
Rainclouds turn again
Greens shapes lost
Eating debris
Fogged my cloudless circle
A sword will know you through parts

I am sky, in the circle
My smile rested
This mist spiral
This weave reds
Inside a watery tree
The I is awake

The sky and the saw are open
But sandwiches mostly rushed distort
Drinking before coffee
Egoless, the brooch

You Squirting men-
Ghost toy spiders who know forgetfulness
Your baskets may be mechanical,
But my broken dream remembers

.

Five Scars Left to Dawn

Gold dust spider monkey spoke to Jehovah. He got lost on the sidewalk.

I saw a poodle singing in a window ‘how much is that doggie in the window?’

Her hand felt soft and wrinkly. I asked if I could borrow some money and she said to me ‘well what about your memories? - are they not more important than money?’

The reflection in the glass was fuzzy. Like barbed wire. I had to tear myself away.

There were cut up bits of paper everywhere. They looked so amusing to me, I started jiggling them around like a collage. What’s so great about a gay heroin addict anyway?

All this talk of calenders, and astral projection, and the mayans. Well what if I just want to sit in a café and have a piece of carrot cake?

"If you have a pre-recorded universe, in which everything is pre-recorded, the only things which are not pre-recorded, are the pre-recordings themselves".

"Well that is all well and good", I replied, "but I want a coffee".

She looked back into my eyes.
An artistic void, the oppressive, controlling aspect of the mother persona.

I looked around at the café and it amazed me what could be done by the human voice and one phrase.

These people were reacting agents, who were reacting to my reaction. So I picked them up in my hands and threw them into the dream machine, through holes in thin air.

Every particle of this universe contains the whole universe

The great wind, sound and image flakes fall. Pull out his eyes. Pull them out. These colourless sheets are empty. You never existed at all.

I could hear that I killed it. It needed destroyed. No good, no bueno in the absent world. I was cold and uninterested from now on.

Explosion splits the boat, and there were five scars left to dawn. Whatever remained could give no human context.

A Spider, A Heron, A Wave Tatoo

Mind blank to what came before there was something
But nothing
White lion on wall rattles
Battlefield with reds and greens
Drinking coffee
I am awake, I am wide, I am open

Christianity blazes out from a circle
My brotherness is gone
A heron, a brooch, a fire
Symmetrical shapes like mechanical toys
Wound through the debris
Squirting watery sand in their faces
Remembering the tree and the sword
The fire and the sky

The men outside eating sandwiches
Blazing me inside to get lost and move
Rainclouds and smoke
Women weaving baskets

And then door knock who?
Just a mirror fogged with mist and a voice
But you will not know because you will turn and distort
This is pure this is egoless this is why I feel
So rested

Parts of dreams come back but mostly there is forgetfulness
The world rushed in again and I forgot
But a smile plays my ghost lips because I know what I saw even if you don’t

A spider, a heron, a wave tattoo
A circle, a spiral, a swing
A cloudless sky in a broken playground

The Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The Madman

I am black and surrounded. It seeps into me like toxic gases. Stuffed full of cotton wool, barbed wire tears at my flesh. Slowly picking it away like chicken on a bone.


I must be and move and sit in this room. Drowning in self-conscious misery my confidence has snapped. It has been borrowed, taken away by a malevolent demiurge who is howling in some cage made of black space and motion.

Faces tear at me with eyes and beaks speaking of swords. They eat me up. Breathless and gasping, my face melts and my skull protrudes

I try desperately to focus on light, magic, beautiful, mystical moments of freedom but I come into this place and it flees from me. I am at a loss. Dying, scared faces realize that I am mad. I am insane. I do not belong in this story, in this place. 

How did I get here? 

There was an interview and a purple sky and a summer. I was here in this room but I couldn’t get out because the taxi was late. Now it has arrived and I have missed my stop.

The purple room with the skylight, and the gulls, and the cat sleeping in the sunlight has gone. There is just this room with its bare walls.

Faces which used to melt of warmth in my presence are now frozen in fear, like my jaw when my eyes go mad. I hold my breath until I can’t bare it any longer


Every morning I want to die. I want to drown myself, I want blood, I want hooks, I want anything other than this boredom. Ripping myself out of the warmth and coming here over and over again in a dream which keeps repeating.

I will enter into a hole under the floor where it is black but I am not afraid because I am not there. I am here, on a beach with pebbles and fish and horses.


Round and round he wanted to stay before but now he laughs. They were holding their breath. They were holding their breath, just like I do when the panic sets in and I just want to leave, but I am rooted.

I must continue. I keep saying it is a new moment. Every moment it is renewed, and they haven’t noticed and it’s ok. But they have, they have noticed. 

One day I will just snap and break the book case into splinters. I will dig them into my skin and push over tables and grow my hair long and wild, and run down to the river, and I will have escaped.


I will be somewhere new. A dance floor with drugs and music. The pounding beat is me and I am it and I do not have to care or be anything because all there is is the music, and the sky, and the pigeons circling round and round above the hills, while the airplanes land and the sky is blue.

The sky is blue, it is not black, it is blue and beautiful. The sun fills up the world. I wake up and it is there. I go to bed and it is there. I am alive, and life is fun, and it works. My intentions come to fruition.

That is the agony, of course. The fact that I feel it every night. And then the panic button comes on. I feel trapped and I don’t hear. I don’t want them to see, and they do see, and it goes on.

I sleep and decide that I am a shaman. The world is a magical dream, and there are kind beings on my sofa. It is 2012 and the world is becoming something new. Everything is God and everything is pure.

I am here where I need it to be, but it does not follow me. I am a psycho and they are afraid of me and I am afraid of them and the other people, and being so tired.

The good intentions wait and then they crowd round me again when I sit on that seat and I say it again. I will be magic, I will help, I will inspire. Then it comes on me. It comes on me, over and over again. 

I end up with eyes that are holes sitting in the darkness.

But then a world without people is worse. I am going to go there because I have not been grateful and I will not be given a second chance this time.

I will just be frozen in that room asking “but what do we do - where do we go?” What do we do, where do we go over and over again. Running into the bathroom with the mirror and the flickering faces, in the virtual reality experience.

I will go back there because I have not appreciated here. I have thrown here away because it feels not part of me. 

I want to be in a darkened room where I don’t have these people in my face. But they keep appearing and then they will investigate me for being a nutcase, and I will run away again.