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Friday, 30 June 2006
Symptoms and treatments.
How many times have I written of illness? Does it punctuate and order my sentences? These times, stretched across three cities, are they pioneered and held upon a balance, only just a movement away from illness?
You look at me again, kindness in eyes. A recognition and reluctance eases the words toward me. You have been here before, this is where you are.
This time it is easier, there are symptoms and treatments. Steam, essential oils, baskets of fruit, the dull tingle of spiced lentils, the lemon slices and honey, paracetamol. There is a period of retraction and growth afoot and you are coping beautifully, making me both sure and unsure. It is like holding my hand and covering my eyes, a dual action of comfort and discomfort, resting upon trust.
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Monday, 26 June 2006
Done dance.
And of course we all give excuses as a blur. Days ago, I offered anything - bread, women, souls - for a purpose. And now I have one, all I see is lists.
Monday is a refuge and by arriving into it late upon the wake of dreams I render it unnecessary. Too many things, not enough somethings. So I abstract dissertations, present calls for submissions, saunter around the dim supermarket and drink tea, lots of tea.
Words here have been unapologetically poor. I must take root in the performances of Friday night, all the blushings of contemporary dance, the fascination with bodies but without the haughty pretensions. These were amateurs and showed and endeared themselves to the audience because of it. Within the flexed limbs and crooked torsos was a fluidity, a pacing and movement that I can only wish was present in these stilted, jolting grammars. It was here, but is lost.
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Monday, 19 June 2006
Scree & pine.
To wake with aches and a lifting happiness, can only the consequence of walking in hills.
The circumference of a dale, paced and climbed with a little trepidation, lagging at the rear of the group, looking obsessively at the short slide and drop onto the crags where the smudged carcass of a sheep lies, decomposing.
Handfuls of friends, a descent into scree and bracken, the dark charcoal line of incoming weather - all is lost upon Patterdale. And what joy in a name! The location of something, here things exist; our pass is called Hartside.
Now I sit watching the house opposite shift furniture into a tall van. Croydon, Dilston, Brighton, Sidney. These are our own grids and movements, we experience this for ourselves.
Back to the weekend, to great arches underground and the constant, consistent fall of water through bareheaded thread moss and slate, the dampened branches of a fallen tree proividing limbs to climb. A memory rests, hidden, something of which we cannot speak, something which became a resolution and a reminder. The constant, consistent drip into an awareness will not end. Every tree and rocky spur, each cloud snagging atop the peninsulas, each lake slant and watery beck - all become features.
Somewhere in a place that a poet is unable to locate, the legions of pine, racked against the wind, touch tips.
12:52 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Friday, 16 June 2006
Green & red fingers.
Despite busyness, tonights poetry reading, the uptake of another blog-project, dissertation research and humid streets, I still found time to do the gardening and was bitten by an ant.
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Guestimate.
Fire On the Lifeboat is currently guest-editing NOISEblog, the dialogic face of NOISE festival - a virtual showcase for young creative talent. Visit for hackneyed opinion, excessive use of hyperlinks and promotion of online talent.
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Thursday, 15 June 2006
Pushing nouns.
To approach anything after the inactivity of yesterday seems foolhardy. Today, a long day of work ahead, finishing just before sundown no doubt. The heat has begun to stir life into the air, and I wake with astute timing and a sense of needing to get up. Immediately out of the house into the warming, fresh air. To the local shop, butter and milk.
Yesterday, I pushed nouns around and got nowhere. Taking genius modern poets as stable and hay, I thought long and hard about location and leaving, the dynamics of a twosome, your feint sleeping breath. All was abandoned under the heat of eleven though and instead I turned to losing myself in wound plot and tightened narrative, the antidote of poetry's permeable fences.
A walk in the park, sat awhile watching people exercising across the newly mown moor, a little haze propped up over the racks of houses stretching away, firstly up to the west road and then down towards the river. Three towers stood solemn, shimmering. People played in teams and rode bicycles, fathers grew competitive.
Then an evening of listening. To each other, to guitar and drums, to droning IDM, to comment and speculation. Interruptions aside, the heat fell from the night. We continued to listen, slow and with intent. The road rose occasionally with the sound of tires. The diagonal scuffles of a night-walker dropped in through the held window. He, drowsing by street-light, faltered at each kerb and held his hands up to the sky, approaching nothing.
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Tuesday, 13 June 2006
To leave.
Bereft on interest and respect, where are we left standing? The crumbling hallway should be a site, is a site, of reflection and contest. The subject has been chosen. The carcass is prepared, careworn adjectives bleed the nouns dry. A piece is formed.
But actually, the battlefields of carpet have grown tiresome, the thrill for the chase has diminished and now these age old disputes rankle and murmur. The house stands alone on a row of identical terraces, near the corner and the park. We are the ones who are diminished.
In leaving, coming back is denied as an option. Drastic measures are spoken. There is no possibility of return; what has not been remembered and carried forward, will be forgotten.
11:31 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 12 June 2006
Wild flowers.
The insurgency of the heat has lifted, and so has my workload. Dispatched with a few cursory glances at references, now is not the time to be asking "have I done my best?".
Legs crosses, a slight ache in the thighs. Three wretched, tumbling, satisfying days of work this week. The daily bore bores us, but when it gets it right, we all wind up at home exhausted and happy. Got robbed, got excluded, got involved, eight nine ten salty hours in a row, each and every day, a million conversations, one or two decisions, infinite sleep.
At the beach momentarily yesterday, watching intrepid idiots wade over the submerged causeway to the white lighthouse, arms aloft, hoping for the sun. We sat in tall dune grass watching the gulls watching us. Two divers rolled to the surface, a bi-plane juddered overhead. Ball games on a cliff-top, an outreaching tide revealing steps, mentions of perfect photographs. Soon I will be able to expose everything.
Now, at home and easy. Trying to avoid football is a chore, so have taken to the back yard. Decided to sabotage the dull greens and greys of the vegetable patch by planting scores of wild flower seeds. The competition will bring the best out in them, no doubt.
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Thursday, 08 June 2006
oak and heather
you shook
at station
after three months
precursor collision
the train from kings x
a change
as good as
a rest
commisioned your fatigue
on the platform
full of arrivals and shivers
outside, streets
of millet and rye
leaden evenings
& drains poaching water
a pencil drawn sky
down sun
returning home now
country side
it has been three months
cause and after
slow and slower
ours and other
oak and heather
as good as
a rest
00:04 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 06 June 2006
The number of the bees.
Summer now, perpetuated by stinging insects. Slow-growing greens now sprouting and taking over, growing up through the hinges of the kitchen door.
The rewriting of a thing, is it an admittance of defeat? To carve out paragraphs and feel that routine, base frustration in the words as they take you in the wrong direction, move you towards an argument you can't substantiate.
Then, picking your way back through the terms and constructs, grasping the sentences like silver thread, you find the anomaly sticking out like a sore thumb, sticking out like a bad simile. A passage of misunderstanding, upon which you rested the progression of your thoughts, its weakness collapses the rhetoric, tunnels beneath it, incongruous.
Yet, this is perhaps a good sign. As Asimov said of truly good short stories, if one removes just a single sentence then the entire piece is comprimised, such is the economy and precision of the argument used.
Today will be both tentative and bold, scaffolding the ideas I have been building for a while now. All the while though, I have journeys in my head and the hope that I will produce something with at least a semblance of impact.
Float like a a lullaby, sting like sleep.
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Monday, 05 June 2006
Seek medical advice.
And what to say of the triedness that lies like cement inside me? I am urged by all to visit a doctor, to seek holistic surgery, to hunt down the apocathary. I am too exhausted to pick up the phone, an admittance of illness would perhaps break the stubborness of spirit. We are not ill, we have never been ill, I am not failing.
I fail nothing but myself.
17:57 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Saturday, 03 June 2006
Home and garden.
Of course, it is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy - and an apparatus of power - that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic categories. And it is of no detriment that those words are stolen and rent and wrought in the middle of a general, winding argument. Here they are given without reference, displayed without context like sculptures upon plinths in the whitewash glare of the gallery.
The sought materiality of the essay however, is a homegiving one. It seeks to constitute in its very make up - indeed, the very essence of the material from which it is created - a sense of belonging, a metaphorical leap into supportive arms. In this way, academia is self-referential and closing and exponential, it is for us by us. But which comes first, the home-giver or the home-seeker. And what is the movement between the two?
15:35 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Thursday, 01 June 2006
Cry river.
The monotone back-lanes emit an openness, the pockmarks of cobbles are open to the day. Dry rivers of brick-dust trickle downhill, the gentle wind stirring silt into breaks in the road's surface.
Trying to determine the passage of the next few hours, trying to instigate a positive response to what as being an underwhelming week. The lack of writing lies at the foot of a hill; it is a peak rescinded.
What cost these motivations? The driving of oneself to produce, to recognise, to be recognised? At which point does that callous upon artistic pursuit - integrity - begin to burr and harden? Surrounded by invisible targets and floating deadlines, we become disorientated.
Creating the ecstasy of completed work is a must. The means, not the ends, qualify and assist and help to draw the clouds back from themselves and shed light on the processes of living, at which point art and the day become infused like an aspirin in water.
11:46 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this