A couple of things

Firstly, an event;

And Lo!

Secondly, a book;

a sotto voce shuffle of words



Sam

GhostSongs

I like these songs..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMTKb-pgxGI


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d1G7BLWwg


I suppose what I like about them is that they kind of leave a legacy. Epistlets from the dead. I like the Arthur Russell one because it has such a depth. At first you think it's just a standard break up song but then you think about it a bit, you remember he recorded it when he was dying of Aids and furthermore it was only to be discovered posthumously and you realise he's not breaking up with you, he's- by the time you hear it- already been taken away in the hands of another lover.. death. Not many songs can devastate you so delicately. It reminds me of a couplet in Jonanna Newsom's You And Me, Bess that goes, By the time you realised I was dying/ Must have been too late, I believe you were not lying. How do you follow such a line? You L' La Lala/ L' La LaLa..

The Little Prince & The Lamb

The Little Prince & The Lamb

It was not long into spring when the little red mark appeared upon the left leg of the little prince’s white cotton leggings. What was ominous about the mark was that it formed a meticulous little circle, unmistakably symmetrical. The gravity of what the mark signified was realised when, in its place, there appeared a purple mark identical in shape and size with an intensity of colour which could not be dulled by water either from well or river, impervious to the scrubs of maidens both fair and seasoned. The matter was grave but not incurable, such a malady had been cured in the past.

  The prince’s grandfather had displayed such a mark when he was a boy and had gone on to lead a long tempestuous bloodstained reign, dying in his old age, in his sleep, dreaming of battle and glory. To cure the boy the court’s surgeon organised a grand ceremony to be called The Ceremony of Innocent Blood in which distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, dressed in the finest cloths of the land, gathered in the palace’s grandest hall to witness the boy play with the first lamb of spring before the animal was slain and the boy’s mark, then blue almost tipping over into black, was bathed in the blood which had once flowed through the young animal’s veins. It was observed that the boy’s mark disappeared instantaneously. Thus it was ordained that the same ceremony was to be held to cure the prince.

  The prince’s Ceremony of Innocent Blood was organised as swiftly as possible in order to limit any progress his condition may have been making. There were a few problems which arose but the counsel to the crown resolved these matters over a night’s discussion to prevent any hiatus in the proceedings. On the day itself distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom filled the hall, wearing garments of sapphire, ruby and emerald, clad in cloths of orange and plum. The hall itself was fitted with a woollen carpet dyed magenta to foreshadow the events of the ceremony, emanating what looked like red smoke in the afternoon’s sunlight beaming through the high windows. The king sat upon a throne upholstered in silk shimmering the colours of a lake in the sunlight wearing rich brown robes. The queen sat next to him on an identical but smaller throne wearing a dress which looked as though it had been woven out of gold. The prince was placed in the middle of the grand hall’s large floor wearing a white night dress.

  For a long time the prince sat there under the strange silent stare of distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, feeling abandoned to it. Silence filled the air deafeningly, flooding into the prince’s ears as though it were water. He sat unable to move, shrinking into the silence. The silent stare’s spell was finally broken by a small bleat echoing off of each of the hall’s four walls as the lamb was led into the hall. It echoed last within the lad’s heart. Unlike, as with, the previous Ceremony of Innocent Blood, the lamb was black rather than white but because it was the first lamb of the spring the counsel to the crown had decided it were the one to be slain. On seeing the prince the lamb rubbed its head against the lad’s face imbuing his cheek with a trace of redness which had been wholly absent since the mark appeared on his leg. Some of its black hair touched the lad’s brown curls.

  “Now for the slitting of the animal’s throat” announced the court surgeon.

  “So be it” decreed the king as two court hands grabbed the lamb causing it to shriek out a startled, terrified small bleat, again echoing off of each of the hall’s four walls. Again, echoing last in the lad’s heart. 

  “Wait!” cried the prince.

  The hall plunged into silence once more.

  “The mark has gone, I felt it leave just now” he said to his father.

  “Is this true my lad?”

  “It is” he said, showing his father a leg unblemished by any mark.

  “So it is,” exclaimed the king, adding, “yet, let us not be too hasty my lad. Let us finish the ceremony to ensure thy treatment is complete.”

  “No father,” pleaded the prince, saying without a lie, “for if you kill this lamb I shall die. In my heart, I know, I shall die.”

  “So be it,” decreed the king, “as long as my lad, the little prince, lives, so too shall this lamb.”

  So it was that the lamb was allowed to live and the events of that day came to be known as the Ceremony of Unspilt Blood. Only the prince’s sister, the princess, dressed in a dress the colour of a rain, noticed that her brother had shown their father his right leg.

  In the days that followed the Ceremony of Unspilt Blood the prince would go to visit the lamb each afternoon. He would sit and watch it frolic with the same kind of energy that he himself used to exhume before the mark appeared on his leg. This was how he came to behold the joys of spring that year. On the fifth day of making his afternoon visits the prince hugged the lamb by his neck.

  “You look like coal but feel like a cloud” he said before leaving for his chambers.

  The princess had been looking in on her brother each evening ever since seeing him show their father his right leg and for the first four nights she had left feeling quite content, though never fully so, at seeing the lad in his sleep and dreams. However, on the fifth night her brother stirred heavily in his sleep and dreams as though he were drowning beneath the heavy burgundy bedsheets he lay under. With a foreboding dread she entered the bedchamber. Examining her brother’s left leg, now clad in black cotton leggings at his request, she saw a black mark forming where the red mark had appeared, almost shining in its deep blackness, dulling, in comparison, the blackness of the black cotton leggings. No sooner had she seen this black mark begin to form did the prince jolt up, his eyes open, though he were still asleep with a brow overflowing with sweat and mouth agape, staring with abject terror at something she could sense but not see right before him.

  “O brother,” cried the princess, “what is the matter?”

  But the prince did not answer. In despair the princess clasped her arms around her brother. Feeling his sister’s head against his cheek and her black hair touch his brown curls the prince’s consciousness returned to the room and he returned her embrace. His eyes cried warm tears onto her shoulder, shading the crushed velvet of her dress from pink to red where they fell.

  “O sister,” he said patting her black hair, the look of terror dissolving from his eyes as his body relaxed except for a frantically shaking left leg, “such dreams I have been having. I was being swallowed by a black ghost. Such pain my leg is in, too much to bear.”

  “Let me get father” said the princess.

  “No,” cried the prince, “I do not wish it so. He understands me not as a boy but as a prince. No sister, I know my fate. It is too much to bear and too late. One death would feel as though a release as though a passing of a cloud, whereas to die on any other's terms feel as though doom. Not that this may make any difference after the fact but for now one outcome I wish for more than anything whilst the other scares me stiff.”

  Her heart abashed as though it had been struck, the princess touched her brother’s cheek. For a touch between two people who share a history which has become inexclusive to either one of them, entwined, can express the feeling of a moment in a way that no words can and she did not know what to say.

  “Lay your head down,” she said, “and allow me to place a cloud upon your face” as she softly pressed her brother's silk pillow onto his face.

  Lifting the pillow from her brother’s face the princess regarded his calm, relieved expression for a while before checking his left leg. The mark had vanished entirely, leaving no trace on either the black cotton leggings or his skin. Feeling herself caught in between a state of loss and contentment the princess sat at the foot of her brother’s bed and cried awhile, tears forming little red marks all down her dress.

  To mark the occasion of his son's death the king ordered for the black lamb of The Ceremony of Unspilt Blood to be publicly slaughtered in the palace's grandest hall where the distinguished guests from all four corners of the kingdom, wearing the finest garments of the land, finally got to see the blood which once ran through the young creature's veins.  

Amanuensis

I remember the Scots composer
-a lapsed Calvinist-
who once told me that
'there is a deep and dazzling darkness to God'
to which I asked him
'whadadahelladya mean?'
to which he played me a tune
Amanuensis
as the raindrops adorned soft the pane
like liquid earrings the colour moon

Kastin's Cultural Cabinet

Things you hear on the radio;

"You know how it is, people talk a lot of shit. They can't help it. They're bound to when you've just got a record deal so lucrative that your black ass may as well be gilded gold. This is an inevitability of humanity, though the peeps pay their dues to Caesar there's always a little bitch like Brutus trying to claim the throne. I don't care what shit has been chatted about him, I once saw him perform a miracle bigger than turning the water into wine. It was one of those Make A Wish things. You know, kids that are ill, that sad kinda shit that I have to smoke a blunt when it gets into my head to stop my brain from hurting. This boy wanted to meet Fiddy for his wish. Fiddy took that shit to another level. He turned up at the little guy's homestead at at two in the morning with the hottest strippers in town, Sweet Gene on rolling duty, and all the Bacardi and coke a boy could dream of. That party was buzzing. The little guy was loving it, chillin with his icon. Fiddy even gave him a nickname, Shorty, it was like he was christening him after he'd been reborn. Cops eventually got called by his no account ho momma to shut the thing down. You know what white bitches be like. 'It's not even his birthday,' she said. Fiddy just laughed and told her, 'You know we don't give a fuck it's not his birthday,' and the night on to da clubs. In the Escalade on the way there Fiddy wrote his biggest hit. Ever seen that film Fantasia? It was like that. Magic, man, no other word for it. We tried to hit Shorty up to be in the video. Breaks your heart though cos.. shit.. shortly after Shorty died."


J-Kwon talking about Curtis James Jackson III on Radio Four's Great Lives.

POPPIES

Down on the Lingfield Trish does a cheap deal for the boys back from Afghanistan. You know, the ones like Prince Harry. Heroine for Heroes, she calls it. It's shit gear but every little bit helps, doesn't it, and you've gotta support the troops.

Introduction to Poems For Children

Introduction

Firstly, nothing in this booklet is to be taken seriously. Take that as seriously as you want.  ;)

Please accept my apologies for this long introduction.

The title of this booklet, Poems For Children, is just that, a title. Poems For Children are not just poems for children. It’s a name that has stuck, I think it sounds nice. It isn’t restrictive. Conversely I do not think Poems For Adults sounds nice. It is restrictive. It sounds dumb. It is also deceptive. We are all God’s children after all. Just think of Jesus Christ for a second, he wasn’t much over 30 years old when they nailed him to a cross, just a baby. He was a very naughty boy. He was a bum. So was Buddha. They never could have been rich without being so poor. Take a look at the universe for a second, it’s as old as time itself but it does not look a day over 0, still starry eyed. As Dorothy Parker once said, ‘Promise me I’ll never get old’. That was on the morning of her 70^th birthday. She was an old woman. Time is so impermanent. So is a river. There’s no time, there’s no river just a flow. Flowers. Life exists in minutes, days and hours as much as the universe exists in yards and meters. That’s not to say that it doesn’t. Everytime I quote Dorothy Parker I start with as Dorothy Parker once said. It is the start of an old song. Most of what I know, I’ve learned from old songs. They don’t write ‘em like they used. I don’t at least. Just one of those things.

That Poems For children are not poems for children does not mean they should not be read by children. That would be restrictive. Perhaps, here, I should warn parents that there are some bad words in this booklet which they may deem inappropriate for their child but I need all the readers I can get so I shan’t. It’s probably real easy to tell if a poem is inappropriate for children, if a poem is inappropriate, they won’t want to read it. Some of these poems may be inappropriate for children but not because of bad words.

Most people would have knocked these poems out in less than a week. Not me. It took a long time to write so little. In other words, ‘I’m walkin’ ere! I’m walkin ere!!’ An anchor helps you see the river move. There’s a story about Fats Domino, after his car broke down Fats Domino, who had his biggest hit in the charts at the time, was walking to the nearest service station when a fan, driving by, saw him and shouted, ‘Hey, look at Fats Domino, he’s walking!’, Fats then thought to himself, ‘Yeah, I’m walkin’’ and wrote his second biggest hit I’m Walkin’, in his head, as he carried on walking. He also wrote Walkin’ to New Orleans and I Want to Walk You Home and When I’m Walking, Let Me Walk. Everywhere is in walking distance if you give yourself enough time. Yes indeed.

Not all these poems rhyme. Poems shouldn’t have to rhyme all the time.

It’s strange, there is a pleasant cohesion to the work in this booklet. This was beyond my control, too big for me, the cosmos of ideas. Think of the strange cohesion of the cosmos of which we are part; scattershot stars, wand’ring stars, comets, pigeons, Hailey’s Comet, Bill Hailey, Kosmo Kramer, Michael Richards, Armitage Shanks, icicles on mars, icicles in hell, the strings of a harp and string theory and coffee stains; your good self; there’s a cohesion. They are all in the same cosmos, afterall. It’s not like they are from another galaxy. All in the gutter, afterall.

Anyhow, I do not believe in bad words. Only words. They are all I have to give. Tread softly. After all, we’re in nor rush. The alternative title for this booklet is Play It Again…

As time goes by.

Sam

That We Are In Fact It

As If Sixteen Years Ago

I'm trying to say this as softly as I can

So that it disappears when you're not looking

Like light on a soap bubble soon to pop

Popping as you turn around

If that makes any sense

An almost ode

To the concerto you heard

Where the maestro struck a bum note

Or two

And what you heard at the last apologists for the half arsed effort meeting

That Hey, I kinda liked Rocky Five

.. Just sayin‘
And the carnival girls taking a five minute fag break 

Global tragedies eventually form a backdrop to our mundanities

Adding shade to our little potterings about

For instance

I was washing the dishes when the first tower was hit

Just think about the myriad unsexy little tasks

Such as a shopper allowing the person behind them with lesser items in front of them in the queue

Or

A boy walking out of his way to retrieve a friend’s lost property

Being performed in Hiroshima just before they dropped the bomb

And now consider how passing a child on a swing

Calling higher, higher

Can bring back all that tender trauma of childhood

Realising that we don't leave the past behind

But that it leaves us

One cannot look at smouldering ruins without thinking of one's history

Those things you did

Those things you didn't

Things you said you didn't mean

Things you didn't say that you did

And how looking at a shipwreck

The shipwrecks in old paintings

Bring a word to mind

  The word family

Often with the prefix my

We're all so Goddamn fucking flawed

That should make us love one another

But .. shit .. the ego ain’t cool with that

Memories play in the mind's eye

Old movies make for Monday Matinees

In black and white

Men and women preserved in Kodak

Captured in sepia

As old and gold as nicotine stains

Like bugs in amber

Maybe life is just a series of mistakes one was willing at one point to make

Anything beyond death being gravy

   Or lemonade

From all those lemons God handed to us

I'm thinking about those Rothkoesque patterns

That form on the back of your eyelids

-Though front to yourself-

When morning sun falls upon them

That momentarily displaces the gloom and guilt your mind pinned there the night before

And a time  in the park

When approaching the dramatic conclusion of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

A bluebottle fly landed upon the page

Midsentence

And those days when we'd watch one another

And then we'd watch the water

As if it crept out of the river

The sink filling up

Brimming with fairy liquid

Warm

Wombish

Catching the day shining through the window

As I start to wash the dishes

Before I get distracted

By the announcement of breaking news on the television
   And wonder what comes first
                                        Is it the hurt
                                               Or knowing that it hurts?

Wave To The Ocean, Wave To The Sea

We were discussing clarity within the hall of mirrors
The one next to the museum of water
The the museum that keeps a little collection of tsunamis
Hidden in the basement
Covered in droplets

    The antithesis of dust

A burned out car waits outside
 or rather, it doesn't
Strange
But not hurting anyone
As if expressing something profound about something small
Something so small we hadn't thought about thinking about it yet
And looking at the rust you get a feel for all those who traveled in it
Offered lifts
With plans for their destination
Places worth more than their distance

   The clouds close by

My companion opens her infant hand
Something is melting in its palm
An ice cube?
  I ask
A diamond
  She answers

Secondhand Smoke

Young Ophelia

Hamlet’s old flame

Flameless

Out in the water

Amidst the reeds, amidst the rushes

Smoke in the distance

Wood

Or whatever that is burning

Leaving wood

As a ghost does a man

Rex's Homage To Catalonia

We don't normally talk sports. We don't usually talk, but this night Rex wanted to talk about what was on the telly.

  He told me that all sport should be blood sport. He asked where's the religion without the blood. He said that that silly cunt Cillic walking out of Wimbledon with his mortality in tact was an affront to civilisation. He got on to politics. He said that that dopey twat Nick Clegg would have saved himself, and his party, a lot of humiliation if he'd have committed harikari right there in the middle of PMQs. He went on. He talked about how the sun craves blood. He talked of the murder rates in the summer. He believed the Aztecs had it right with their sacrifices. He used our current bad weather as a case in point. 

  He had a suggestion. He asked why don't we hot wire the Jag outside and drive off into the sunset like a fist into a face and smash it into the dust of night, plummeting this God forsaken planet into darkness. I told him that although he wasn't too drunk to drive, I was too pissed to be a passenger. We ordered another drink from the barmaid with a tattoo of a mermaid over the scar on her wrist.

Written in a bar in Bratislava

Leopoldstadt

Let's suppose sufferance helps.

Around here even the sunshine looks false. Its deceitful rays fall upon the decadence as it burns itself out over the space of a few short millennia. They fall upon the king's plastic crown as he dances like a bear for an unseen master- for change. Boys laugh at the spectacle. The disdain in their spit is matched only by the hot hate in his tears. Yet his dance continues. He cannot do aught else. He paid the piper too high. He paid him fuck all. At least he has enough for cigarettes. When it comes to filling the void translusive substances always fit best, filling the gap without widening the cracks. They connect the space instead of expanding it like the ghost of time. The lack thereof. The only way of coming to terms with that missing card in the flush is to acknowledge it. Checkmate stares us all in the face. Lady death has the ivory piece to topple our game in her long fingers- appearing out of nowhere as if they crept out of the mirror. She's just waiting to make the move. Maybe she's nervous at first.

I keep on walking . I turn the corner. Beautiful horses stand there. Beautiful for show- hideous in its way, eyes blinkered, ears clapped. Caparisoned. My heart pangs with sorrow. Maybe melancholy helps. Why else would we feel such a delicate emotion? The soft sister of rage.    

Dominoes

winsomely

Winstanley catches his breath

'jus' a lickle small death'

he says

in the space between

the nothin' mo'

&

nothin' less