A bleary eyed goodbye, the last of them all,
Leaves me to pick at the scaley remainder of parting sentiments,
That murmer below the baby wail birth of adventure,
That scar, and snag painfully from time to time.
Through shallow dusty windows,
I crane my neck to watch the land recede.
Nostalgia, gratitude, fear and best wishes
- fit awkwardly the glass speech bubble, fooling no-one.
Wanting to encapsulate, yet bound to be free,
Scattering their ashes, I cross the folding sea.
2. Birthday Blues
Stalking through the city so beautiful yesterday,
Second coffee by 12 o clock,
Goodbye 25 you´re all I´ve got.
In the courtyard, children playing hide and seek,
Charming and pitiful, do their best to deceive.
Their shiny chops consume the moment,
All smiles and concentration,
Nothing else exists.
The anniversary wants to take this away from me.
Rub my nose in things that have past:
Grains falling through the exquisite sand dial.
The forever stare blinks.
Death to the melancholy melodrama!
Tomorrow I´m born the same as today,
A breath to catch then end the delay,
To bottle the memories before they leak
And resume the search for hide and seek.
3. Stationary Traveller
People trudge out to a sad harmonium,Plates leave the kitchen like buses.
I want to get on:
Watch people and the view change -
Shrub plains to tall trees,
Who can reach the highest?
Birds with sharp wings, air watch out!
Contours like a woman´s body,
Or sharp, jagged, crumbling, subtle,
Barren, fertile, all a blur like a Turner
Or too grande to see the top and bottom at once.
Landscape, manscape, icecream exchanged for coins through window.
Expectant shopping bags chatter excitedly in the breeze,
Disappointed animals that came in threes,
Hands that lay wrestless about the knees -
Going to church with a runny nose,
Contented eyes that follow the prose
Of paths and pleasant gardens;
Tin rooves that do the job;
Fruit waiting at the roadside like orphans.
A happy mess of hedgerows,
All neighbours here.
Man and matter all getting along.
The mid afternoon sun.
The fear of loneliness,
Like flatulence in a crowded room.
The fear of failure,
Fingers groping, frantic in the gloom.
Let them rest, the eyes adjust:
Tongues that capture flies when they must;
Eagles and angels and brilliant things in brilliant times.
Ostriches in a sandstorm of infinitescimal everything,
Addicted to the impossibility of perfection,
So worth striving for.
The inadequecy of words.
Of everything but a glance or feeling.
4. Still Stationary
Waiting for my chips in the Power of God.
Waiting for the religious radio same as yesterday.
Fry me a fish and I´ll pay with my pesos,
Souls no more. Just one sun again.
The ketchup gets it, but the mayonese isn´t sure;
Is less worldy and more suspicious.
I hope the top´s screwed firmly on the salt sellar,
Not like last time, I ended up with batter brine.
The pepsi bottles are small and globular here
- Little peguins for whom the end draws near.
Chips not so good today, nor the batter neither,
I gulp down my disappointment, doused in lemon.
Its fair possible I´ve done something to upset the big fella,
Take it as a sign, I´ll be more compassionate next time,
Take my turn as bait on the line,
Receiving payment in kind for things that were mine,
Trading televisions, sharp knives and olive oil for time.
Time to wait for something worthy to do,
To get a good lead then I´ll search a bit too.
Time to wait for things that are unique,
Use them as plugs when i find a leak,
In veins that run a tight ship,
That carry belief to doubt, breath to frustration,
Life to stagnation and allow me to sleep.
Time to learn turtle from tortoise,
Eat oysters, walk cloisters,
Ride dolphin and porpoise.
Time to work out what the fuck´s going on,
Or at least get a little further along.
Time to consider if that´s even any closer.
Time to discover another unproveable truth,
Time to think of pretty words to put it in
- A beauty in a dress, in make up, on a mountain.
What´s it all worth?
Possibly so pointless its priceless: there´s no meaning but that we make.
Time to accept that´s no bad thing.
Time to realise it can hardly go wrong:
To walk to run,
To go to come,
To sit and talk,
Or stand and think,
Or write and drink,
To work and rest,
To fuck and grow old,
To wait for my chips in the Power of God,
Where service is tidal and the choice of name odd.
To listen to sermons and pop music,
And fish theoretical cod.
5. Doldrums
Got a negative mood on
Yeah, I got my brood on.
Bound to make mistakes,
Bound to find the pages bonded:
Some past neglect, resurrected
and thrown in my face,
Some lurking paralysis
that won´t give chase.
Carrying round a bad smell,
Like to set it down a spell.
Like to just say ´yes´ and do,
Be it saving lives or sniffing glue.
Abandoned my good plans all too easily,
Curiosity got the better of me.
Carrying round a bad smell,
Don´t sit close to me.
Breaking my own rules,
Making fast fools
of my own feet.
Footloose and fancy free,
Or so they ought to be.
But I got my negative mood on
Yeah, I got my brood on,
And I don´t know where to be.
Minds need making up,
Mine does - I´m waking up
Seeing things all too simultaneous,
Imagining many outcomes, many paths,
Many more than the one I´ll wear down,
Wearing my thorny frown,
Dragging my feet,
Dragging a bad smell,
Dragging friends down with me,
Plenty of room in this gloomy cell,
Plenty of possibilities,
Swollen with possible hostilities,
Though all imagined, few possible.
Escape is not an epiphany,
Nor a manual read from cover to cover.
Not a possibility: a job or a lover,
Just one foot in front of the other.
6. The Naming of Species
Crossing over to the last bit of land,
The last inhabitable cluster before the pole.
Nothing north about this south.
Sun glaring on a featureless terrain,
Once lit by fires, huddled around by the fat greased eaters
of mussels and little else.
- The most primitive he´d ever seen - said Darwin.
The only able to survive down here too.
- More like animals than humans - he continues.
Unable to make such distinctions?
Maybe Darwin was right.
In the distance, the limit of vision,
Dark forms shiver out of the haze,
Arrousing suspicions in the mind´s gaze.
Causing the pupils to enlarge,
A chain reaction.
What giants hover in the mirage?
Clouds that have curdled in Fuegian skies turn petrol streak colours around the sun.
I develop an enraptured neck ache.
Seeing in impossible detail, I wonder, how much of these floating fjords have I imagined?
How much retina? How much mentality retiscent to leave it at that?
A mind desperate to recognise: stitch truth in lies; put name to form.
- Oh yes, its one of those! - A categorical relief.
Keeping moments of mystery brief.
Why such satisfaction, such mental peace?
In fixing forms in allegories. Substitutions.
For things felt and remembered.
The metaphysical, metamorphical, immeasurable mescallany of that self same mind.
Is it nature or culture? That needs certainty for security.
To navigate by join the dots,
By constellations of associations in a universe of words.
Strewn like litter from a car window,
The packages of every thought, sight and sensation consumed,
Utilities picked up, put down and resumed.
Uniting and dividing,
Through lines drawn across maps.
And between we call it and what it is.
Putting things in boxes to build a world:
Cathedrals and public toilets, factories and gardens,
Anything you like as long as its not already something.
Divide and conquer - thats the rule. Divide and shackle.
Create a meaning from a mistrust of plurality,
Undoubtedly real but not the same as reality.
A picture kills a thousand words,
A sound or sculpture a thousand more.
A phrase is a vulture, a paragraph a whore,
Picking over the carcass of intuition, and renting out ribs
to brandish in a war of understanding.
Solemnly, we play our parts in the pantomime.
Driven by love and compulsion,
Warped by greed and revulsion,
At difference and the unnameable, uncontainable, shameful instinct,
So difficult to shake.
"Prejudice: roundly condemned and wholly upheld - part of being a human"
The dictionary doesn´t read,
"Part of an intransient need, to know what is from what is not."
A flawed system but the best we´ve got.
The last inhabitable cluster before the pole.
Nothing north about this south.
Sun glaring on a featureless terrain,
Once lit by fires, huddled around by the fat greased eaters
of mussels and little else.
- The most primitive he´d ever seen - said Darwin.
The only able to survive down here too.
- More like animals than humans - he continues.
Unable to make such distinctions?
Maybe Darwin was right.
In the distance, the limit of vision,
Dark forms shiver out of the haze,
Arrousing suspicions in the mind´s gaze.
Causing the pupils to enlarge,
A chain reaction.
What giants hover in the mirage?
Clouds that have curdled in Fuegian skies turn petrol streak colours around the sun.
I develop an enraptured neck ache.
Seeing in impossible detail, I wonder, how much of these floating fjords have I imagined?
How much retina? How much mentality retiscent to leave it at that?
A mind desperate to recognise: stitch truth in lies; put name to form.
- Oh yes, its one of those! - A categorical relief.
Keeping moments of mystery brief.
Why such satisfaction, such mental peace?
In fixing forms in allegories. Substitutions.
For things felt and remembered.
The metaphysical, metamorphical, immeasurable mescallany of that self same mind.
Is it nature or culture? That needs certainty for security.
To navigate by join the dots,
By constellations of associations in a universe of words.
Strewn like litter from a car window,
The packages of every thought, sight and sensation consumed,
Utilities picked up, put down and resumed.
Uniting and dividing,
Through lines drawn across maps.
And between we call it and what it is.
Putting things in boxes to build a world:
Cathedrals and public toilets, factories and gardens,
Anything you like as long as its not already something.
Divide and conquer - thats the rule. Divide and shackle.
Create a meaning from a mistrust of plurality,
Undoubtedly real but not the same as reality.
A picture kills a thousand words,
A sound or sculpture a thousand more.
A phrase is a vulture, a paragraph a whore,
Picking over the carcass of intuition, and renting out ribs
to brandish in a war of understanding.
Solemnly, we play our parts in the pantomime.
Driven by love and compulsion,
Warped by greed and revulsion,
At difference and the unnameable, uncontainable, shameful instinct,
So difficult to shake.
"Prejudice: roundly condemned and wholly upheld - part of being a human"
The dictionary doesn´t read,
"Part of an intransient need, to know what is from what is not."
A flawed system but the best we´ve got.
Empanada Argentina, tan tierna y cariña,
Oh empanada, no mi dejes nada!
Sabrosa y crujiente, ha cautivado a mi mente.
Rellena de carne o queso. ¿Que quiero? Pues eso!
Rellena de tomate y cebollas, damé una, calientapollas!
Empanada la recién hecho, mas provocativa que un expuesto pecho.
Empanada de éxtasis, voy a morir por ti,
Mi colestrol llenará muchos baños, mi quitas muchos años!
Pero no me importa, si mi vida sea corta,
Porque todo me apetece, es una empanada a que Argentina pertenece.
8. Potosí Miners
Crouched and crooked, struggling for breath.
Going down fast, further out of my depth.
"Into the mouth of hell", one chronicler put,
Under the mountain at twelve thousand foot.
Fumbling through the catacombs,
Dust encrusted nostrils cave in,
Claustrophobia threatening.
Ghosts in the rock,
The forgotten of the flock.
Unseen, underground,
Turned to stone through centuries without sound.
Choking, scrambling on all fours,
Palms cut on jagged debris.
Pause to heave air in,
A tenth of my strength.
Up again, under helmet and overhanging crunch,
Potosi miners, hard hattest of the bunch.
Pulling minerals from the mountain,
Dragging them up and out on defiant spines, through impossile passages.
Pushing the wagon: two by two, a ton along rusting rails,
Plunging coca into their mouths, all day with blackened nails.
The leaf their only alimentation,
The green teethed symbol of this vocation.
Dense heat, stooping torchlight and broken beams,
Distant chisels pick at the seams.
Silver, Zinc, Copper, Tin.
The periodically able, where do I fit in?
Square shouldered great grandad in the ground for coal,
Saviour hero when the pit fell in.
Great man they say, but neither I nor my father's him,
Potosi miners doing themselve in.
Living forty, fifty years,
The lungs pack up and succumb to the tears,
Of wives, mothers, sons and daughters,
The numbers stack up, the sum of their fears.
Inheritance, conscious inevitability:
The miner's son joins the fraternity,
Wears its gowns but seldom frowns,
Earns more than they do in the towns.
Answers to noone, commitment to collectivity,
A creed of positivity, a law of reciprocity.
Empowered, the cooperative sets its own hours,
Selects its holidays and shares what it pays.
The living mine's memory,
It wasn't always like this:
Forced labour, six months without daylight,
Now death has a sweeter kiss.
Families round the table, dining on meat and rice,
Potosi miners, brothers in proud sacrifice.
9. Staring at the Dead
Mummy shook me from my trance,
Many years of minimal feeling.
Mummy shook me from my trance,
Her half open eyeless gaze, for days it sent me reeling,
Reliving and peeling back layer upon layer,
Stories unfelt in self protection,
Stored inside my onion vault mind.
Mummy shook me from my trance
And my head begins to bloom.
Delicate petals: hurt, triumph, sadness, love and anger,
All class of colours burst in motion capture reaching for light and air
And blur into one stupifying sense of existence.
Perfect, speechless. The narrowest point of vision that cones infinitely and all encompassingly.
And dries the mouth, coats the body, invades every movement and seems like death.
I think back to those eyeless eyes as I begin to stabilise,
From total sensation back to my plateau of expected association.
Of things that must be because of where they are and what they are not,
Of cigarette butts and forget-me-nots.
Of waste and beauty and oh I could go on,
To list it all in some collage to look like life.
But I saw with my whole body in those Inca eyes.
Absorbed five hundred years without compromise.
Lips that seemed to mouth at me.
A little girl hit by lightning,
Expression preserved - a sacrifical offering,
Buried as close to sky as she could be brought,
In the claustrophobia of my existence I could not be taught,
To let a thing be, there being no other possibility.
The bird's nest of continuous alternatives imagined for every teasing moment starts to relax and unravel.
A boy that wandered into dark woods is coming home,
Unafraid to feel, friends with the butterflies,
Seeking less to justify,
Proud to spill ink and testify,
Or be a bulb uncompromised.
Safe in the certainty of seasonal flowering,
In the cold and dark the buds are ripening.
10. The Time We Met
Coming from where we came,
We’d seen a thing or two,
Could give a thing its name.
We’d grown in field and town,
Semi detached from the playgrounds
Through which our playdough personalities
Had so far been squeezed.
We had survived the barbs of adolescence,
Would tease out the thorns.
We were exuberant.
With spliffs and student bank accounts to burn,
We set out, twenty strong,
Rambled down florescent streets,
Reorganising traffic cones and road signs.
We marvelled at sound reflected on a domed pub ceiling,
Catching snippets of other people’s conversation,
We drank to our omnipotence,
And deftly ignored our ignorance.
We’d learnt new words and wanted to use them,
Like teleological, spectrographic, djuvet and blup.
We dragged ourselves, bleary eyed to seminar and lecture,
We quoted, extrapolated, deduced and conversed,
We spoke with authority on subjects diverse,
Over “ities” and “isms” we’d argue and curse,
Hated to back down and exchanged harsh words,
That were soon forgotten
Amid the hangovers we’d nurse.
We gleefully jumped into one another’s skins,
And bounded to music recently made our own.
We watched new favourite films.
Scoured art for significance.
Ate and learnt how to cook,
Cue Andy he wrote us the book.
We swapped clothes and opinions,
And borrowing authors,
We frantically tattooed ourselves, with each other’s passions.
We binged on naivety,
Said things that might now make us cringe,
But we were open,
And listened to life stories with earnest ears
Identifying and truth defying,
We stacked experiences with our own,
Played Jenga in the kitchen sink,
And laughed with delight,
To toss a coin into an unguarded drink.
We were maturing fast;
Half obeyed cleaning rotas,
And realised all the lies they told us at school.
We dropped childish prejudice;
Talked to strangers, read newspapers, accepted vegetables,
And felt pretty grown up about it.
We paid bills and insulted landlords,
Destroyed the house, but cleaned up afterwards.
We heard the thundering hooves of deadlines,
And ate biscuits.
Got jobs to pay for taste the difference.
We approached problems with reason and clarity -
How to hide a stain, get an extension,
How to film the girls and their girls only party.
Awoke from a long night,
To find we’d borrowed a board room door.
Scratched our heads, fashioned a table
And played ping pong forevermore.
In quiet moments, we looked back to where we started.
Had charged blindly down roads now clearly marked.
To arrive here. With coins tossed and decisions near,
We thought of our futures and flipped between ideas.
Paths branching out to potential failure,
If we walked up one could we walk up another?
The old adage guided those who knew it -
You can do most anything, if you put your mind to it.
Only first you had to work out what to do,
Who to be and how to go about your business.
From one another we got different views,
Got courage, love, trust and forgiveness.
Got calm words when we couldn’t think straight,
Leant on each other and saw the marks we make.
Felt hands on shoulders,
Over which we watched as we painted each other’s portraits.
Watched them grow and shimmer,
As we proudly hung them by our mirrors.
