Ticking Clocks

You may argue that it is ducking the issue, but I try not to think too much about my health or lack of it. I like to keep my cards close to my chest, my pain hidden up my sleeves; once problems are vocalised they become the reality and complaining does nothing more than excarbate the issue. Although I would never go so far as to admit it, I am actually pretty scared about the implications of the illness. Who wants to die? Only the lost and the hopeless. It has been three and a half years since I first became sick, and the sun is fading fast on the horizon. My outlook, my career, my 'sunny disposition', all these are long gone victims of this suffocating plague. But out of the ashes has come a rebirth. These days I live for the now, the moment, the eternal. I put my friendships to the top of the pile and leave the rest to come out in the wash. I have lost much, but I have gained more. I have learnt to love, to feel and to achieve. I have done the impossible, and known the greatest of people. Frankly, it's been a blast. But now, sadly, I am reaching the end. Things must either change or decease. This sickness is grinding me down day by day and the cost is becoming too great. I have found my love but each dawn I lose her more and more to this waking death. For how long shall my family suffer my insufferableness and tolerate the intolerable? Drugs have stolen my essence, my core, so that I no longer recognise my thoughts and patterns and my actions are strangers to me. I am a shadow, a pale shallow shadow evapourating day by day. Once you have lost hope, there is not much left to lose. Peace out.

Munched

Anyone else have this? Yesterday I put my card into the cash point and the machine said:

Thank you for feeding the card monster!

- Blip blip blip blep blep blop blep! -

To see this again, please insert another card...

van Dali

................................................................... ~

Untitled (Female Worm with Trail of Diarrhoea)

Driving Lesson

Ha ha... ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife eh? Isn't it ironic that after railing against the inadequacies of the bouncer, I get a call yesterday offering me a job as... yep! a security guard! And what a great sounding job it was: guarding a film set from five in the morning to evening, twelve hours with nothing to do but read, write, ponder and paint. I quite fancy myself as a security officer, single handedly thwarting the dark powers plotting to corrupt the cinematic forces fighting all evil; although I'd have fled like a kitten at the first sign of trouble. But I lost out. I was outrageously disqualified due to my non-vehicular handling ability, my lack of motorised relocation capacity. Ok ok so I don't drive. Never! I choose not to indulge in the petrol driven consumption of our environment. I have taken umbrage at the extortionate level of road tax levied on this country's fractious economy... I.. uh... I... well, I don't exactly actually know how. At least, not legally. So? What's the big deal? I grew up in London! Everyone lives on top of each other! Open space is a long forgotten urban legend! It's quicker to walk to work than drive, and if you do that you might not make it anyway, saving you the trouble. Worst case you'll probably get a ride in an ambulance. Goddamnit. I think I'll take my case to the office of discrimination for the transportationally challenged. You're out of order! This whole system's out of order!

On the Rebound

I really really don’t like bouncers. What kind of sick person chooses a career where your raison d'être is to reject people? How low does your self esteem have to have sunk to make a living in denial? Bouncer is such a fun and happy sounding name, it should be a puppy or a clown, anything other than a six foot thug of a lug with hair growth issues and an IQ the square root of minus one. Personally I am suspicious of any job that requires the wearing of an earpiece. To me an earpiece is the one overriding sign that in the grand scheme of life and the universe this job has strictly no importance whatsoever, and the only reason a monkey isn't doing it is that they couldn't afford the peanuts.

Dream a little scream for you

I will be able to tell my wake from my sleep for not much longer. Each day, each hour, I have small flashes of fictional events, occurrences that seem as clear as day but when reality dawns only as near as night. And currently while routine eludes me and sleep is grasped at any waking moment, my dreams are my life and my life is a dream. All edges blurred. If life itself were more stable and reliable I would have a chance of discerning the daylight, but life is overshadowed, outweighed by the piles of profundity and the mass of mundanity mounting on either side of the scales of consciousness, unbalancing them. Life should be boring. I long for boredom. I crave it like the nicotine I don't smoke. I spend my daytime in the crazyland of circustown, then go to sleep and dream of queuing. Why do I waste time with these pedestrian incidentals? Dreams should be for flying and dying, not waiting in line or taking a tube. I don't know, since the opiates stopped, the night-time trips aren't what they used to be.

Thought Fullness

Molehills of abstraction surround me, piles of chunks of metaphysical dirt grow beside me as I furiously tunnel to find the core of whatever it is that we call reality. Knowledge is a distillation, a reduction on our own terms, and in the process of absorption we stain the purity and message of the originator. Whether it be the understanding of a daffodil's ascent or the rhetoric of a right-wing post-liberal idealist, our interpretations are filtered through a lens, so far from the source that they lose their essence in compression. Like a magnifying glass we focus this beam of no-how on the puny dry leaves of our intellect and small forest fires ignite in our minds, tearing through friendships and devouring community. I stare at the ceiling. It's been either three minutes or four days, I have found it difficult to tell recently. When I shut my eyes I imagine I am staring at the sun, looking into a light bulb burning with tightly focused white fire. And when I open my eyes I have the afterglow of this imaginary image dancing before my eyes, a retina burn from a fictitious flame. Make of that what you will.

Ghosts

A sleep with the curtains wide, I look out at the midnight sky, the ashtray of light littered with stars, each one a paradox of nature. A star is something that seems so possibly unnaturally factitious as to be naturally only possibly fictitious- a ball of gas suspended billions of light years away, burning at billions of degrees, shedding its light for billions of years- come on now!? To make all this harder to accept, the light that we see has taken so long to reach us that all we have left of these supposed celestial orbs is a reflection of the past, the shadows of existence. And as this memory from millennia past burns brightly nightly, all I have left to reconcile the improbability of all of this is a few comforting crumbs of my creator-led faith, a faith that is daunted and dwarfed by the extravagant swaggering conviction of unbelief that the more athiestically persuaded of us possess.

Out of Control Freak

I'm a pretty instinctive type-a-guy ya know... Last week it occurred to me to see if a friend needed any models for haircuts. I could have waited. I could have paused and delayed but Instinct took over. Turns out she was just so in a need of a gifted young handsome long-haired chap for the following day. She said I'd do instead. And then the other morning I awoke thinking of a friend of mine so long out of touch and so sorely missed. Vowing to rectify and spread the electronic love, I trotted down to the computer to find my inbox glowing with her over-flowing wishes of warmth. But let's cut the crap. What is this illusion of control I live under? Like I have any say over these occurrences; I make appointments, set alarms, schedule meetings, all in a bid to defy the great unknown that corrupts my carefully penciled diary. I am powerless, I have an inherent inability to change the most mundane details of my life, other than perhaps the cereal I choose in the morning. I am a kitten in a washing machine, and Someone just pressed the spin cycle. The people I meet, the wake from sleep, the love I keep, all totally unguessable and yet somehow foregone. Life happens to me, to thee, to us, and thus we either embrace or about-face this fact, so roll with the punches baby and bring it all on.

Open Book

Love is a monkey in the snow
So out of place and nowhere to go
With eyes of water and teeth a-chatter
Alone and helpless and of no matter

I didn't say nuffin'

Nobody likes a secret. We have passed into the information age and hence forth data shalt be freely available, knowledge an entitlement. We suffer the mass of the media that pulls our strings, entertaining us with the scrutiny and divulging of the privacy of our beautiful and our damned. Inquests and inquiries suggest that the witholding of information is not only socially frowned upon, but punishible by law. As a magician, you understand, this poses quite a problem- to be the only ones in the know is our livelihood; the superior smug cloak of mystery is what keeps us warm at night. But today it is no longer enough to just dazzle a fellow human with your superior supernatural ability, today's onlookers have decided they must know how it is done. Unless you flee the country or lure them away with promise of jaffa cakes, you will not escape the demanded illumination of it. But why does everyone want to ruin it all? I explain it like this: think of Christmas, a Christmas present, the carefully wrapped box, the gentle shaking. The joy and happiness of the gift is contained not in the object, but in the endless possibilities that lay before us, in the not knowing. Once we guess or the box is opened, suddenly the mysterious and intriguing becomes the mundane and disappointing. So to those who wish to 'know' I say this: leave it in the box man.

Loetics

I'm tired. i am so very tired. I am so very sick and tired of being so very tired and sick. I want out now. As I travel, cold steeled eyes stare straight through me, the million different people with their sight glazed and darkened, their pupils allowing no light past other than the dislove of a city trying to forget itself. I kill time alone, a knawing ache sliding through the middle of my back whilst a cup of coffee grows cold on the plastic table and the long metallic announcements echo unanswered. I hold a cigarette lit and watch the ash burn down as I fail to inhale. I light another from a sputtering match and observe the thin trail of wispy snake-like smoke, evaporating to annihilation. An old man takes slow, careful bites from his plate, holding his cutlery like grass on a cliff edge clutching. I stub out my cigarette, I get the check, I walk away and leave this slow grind of solitude to loneliness to play itself out minus my spectation. It begins to rain and I pause in a doorway for another smoke. A friend calls me and my cellphone flashes on and off in time with a neon sign illuminating services available. I fail to answer either and flick the half-smoked deathstick into a puddle. It lands with a hiss and I come to a decision. Later I loiter outside a theatre, hands cupping a cup of lukewarm tea as I queue. I get my ticket from a man with no smile and no coat, and as I hand over my crumpled twenty pound note, I note the muteness of this man, a worn picture so spent, gazing through glass pain, wearing his name badge like an epithet: a Mr Paul A. Bland. I take my seat and shed my coat, sat side by side the couples as the people watch the players make their believes on stage before us. Pain is like a loved one, until it's gone you never really miss it. This didn't really happen.

It's taken years to get this stupid

I'm a pretty clever guy. Seriously, I am. As a magician I get paid go to parties, I am a professional socialiser. I fool, trick and hoodwink the supposed intellectuals of our society; one step ahead of the game I am surrounded and adored by fans of baffle-and-bewilderment. I solve outrageous problems of logic in seconds, improvise solutions on the spot, and pick up terrifying new skills like a monkey to bananas. But underlying all of this vastly undeniable intelligence is a base level of stupidity so profound and total as to render one of accomplished speech suprisingly speechless; an ignorance so distilled and refined it induces a hushed awe in those unlucky enough to bear witness to it. I lose my keys and glasses like clockwork, I fail to comprehend the many and varied programmic cycles of a washing machine, I miss so many appointments I could fill an alternative diary, I say the most stupid irresponsible and reckless comments so as to make George W. look like Groucho M. Generally speaking, I am a sandwich with no filling, supremely inspired or fantastically misled.

Lifting the Lid

The toilet seat; that age old enemy to urinary masculine relievement everywhere. And why do I raise this? Well I think I might be missing something here- I always thought that when women complained about manfolk leaving the seat up they meant the cover, the lid, the bit with no hole in, and this being the case, I dismissed the notion as rather picky. So you can imagine the terror when I walked into a toilet to find the porcelain laid bare before me, all covering of wooden protection raised like some gaping boy-swallowing toilet jaw! You see the reason I was in such ignorance, was that never, not once in my short but oft urinating life had I ever lifted the lid to pee. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the habit of sitting down to water the garden, I have just always been able to aim. It's hardly a chasm is it? You're not trying to hit a fly from the sky dangling from the light socket by your ankles are you? I mean c'mon the difference between a seated toilet and a bare porcelain rim is about 3 centimeters. How can that make the difference? Worst still according to some nameless males that I have discussed the issue with, even a deseated toilet doesn't provide enough bandwidth, and half the fluid ends up sprinkled liberally around the base. Come on guys, we're taking a piss, not the piss.

halfdark [two parts]

am leaves are falling in my garden like cats from the ceiling another summer missed another autumn mist approaching

pm      late last night i'm outside standing      standing out by waif-like buildings      the smell of late night piss      the air conditioned hiss      encroaching

Devon, Help me

I'm trapped in a hurtling carriage, old conservatives surrounding me on all sides, young blood noticeable only by its absence. Opposite and opposing me a couple of couples of pensioners spend twenty seven priceless precious minutes discussing the duration of the station stops. As they waste these few moments of their ever decreasing lives, dithering between a declaration of sixty or ninety seconds, I fight the urge to scream in their faces. The problems of the middle classes; a life of such cublicled contentment that we are forced to bite back the bile every time a fellow loner strikes up small talk. We live to forget, we clock off the days as quick as we can in order to get to the next. And what is the result of all this? You see them all the time, the cold grey souls peering out of watery tired eyes, desperate for conversation, crying and bleeding out for something to say and someone to say it to. Away, I spend the week walking by the beach, passing old couples with wispy hair and unwashed cotton jackets, watching the sea, sucking toothlessly on ice creams despite the ever deepening dark grey clouds. Others in their retirement, not so able to find accompaniment, sit in their armchairs waiting to die, and I cannot help but wish them a speedy passage. In these times, funnily, I am thankful for my problems, my difficulties- a daily dabble with diseases, an occasional sniff of financial meltdown, a small glimpse of death every once in a while; because, despite all these "issues" I pretend to have, at the soft closing of each sundown I can usually say:

- 'at the end of the day, today has been ok' -