Classroom

I took a long walking holiday across the Scottish Highlands with one of my best friends. It was the first extended expedition i'd ever taken by foot, and I was graciously put back into my place by the rain, the fog, and other aspects of relentlessly normal Scottish weather.

As we approached the Island of Skye on the ferry, we were bouyed with excitement, trepidation, and wore on our windbattered faces the slapped grins of two men decided upon the fact that they know exactly, no really, exactly what they're going to do once they step foot on land. We approached the island with dreadnought slowness, eyeing up the black, stuffed mass of clouds above the land slowly melting into view. Through some chattery conversation, my friend was reminded of a memory gifted to him by his father. His parents were travelling around the world, and they had trekked up to the lip of a shallow volcano. In this volcano were thousands of nesting flamingos. The sight of so many flamingos nestled amongst this large crater must have been breathtaking. The sky, the pink bodies shuffling, the occasional upward swing of an unfurling wing, the expansive orange, rocky terrain, and a sparkly white sediment crusting the lip of the volcano, must have been an impressive sight. Taking all this in, my friend's father noted in full chested confidence that this was, in fact, evaporated salt, as the flamingos, in fact, eat algae that grows in very salty water. In fact, it is this same algae that gives the flamingo its famous vivacious pink hue. To prove this point, he reaches down to the nearest white patch, drags an index finger through the mud, and plops it in his mouth. No, he says turning to his wife. That's flamingo shit.

The week long journey would be a test for me, as I found out, and we would have many converstaions, fact sharing moments, and orienteering predicaments that most of the time veered towards flamingo shit. We turned out to be busking most of it, or at least, I definitely was, as my friend was an experienced walker who could settle himself into his pace in a matter of seconds with a meditative blankness that kept him flowing over the terrain step after step. I plodded behind him, thumbs tucked under the straps of my pack, gleefully oggling the lumps, bumps, lochs and vistas of the Highlands. The peaks were arduous, but rewarding, and the troughs, both physical and mental, forced my overactive mind to calm down, and subsist on the tactility of navigating rough terrain by foot.

The hardest moment came when I had to make a decision to carry on, or turn back. We had trekked up and down across fourteen kilometres a day, with very high inclines, following a trail of our own making across a ridgeline. On the third day, we awoke from our tents we had pitched on a grassy peak overlooking the whole of Skye to an otherworldy morning fog. There were sparsely scattered lumps of sheep blending into the middle distance, mistaking themselves for rocks. Occasionally they revealed themselves to be alive, gauntly raising their heads up from chewing the grass to throw us a completely apathetic stare, which was in stark contrast to the pangs of our aching legs and the breathless wonder that snuck up on us when we occasionally paused from our trudging to look back through the fog and and attempt to figure out which way we had come from.

We carried on, and trekked through the thought that the rain would not let up, and down, and up, and down, and up ridges with drastically steep inclines, until we were completely sodden. My boots had become so wet that, rather amusingly, the detergent in my socks had decided to fizzle, and so very bubbly white foam was erupting from between my laces. As we sat down for lunch in a riverine valley, looking up at the next enormous hill in front of us, I had a moment of clarity that settled on me. I looked down into my lukewarm ramen with mashed potato powder, and back up at the next hill. No. Something sighed away from me like a distance gong echoing from the back of my mind. The previous hill had wrecked me. I had no energy left to go on, and no desire to walk another two days.
"I can't do this." I mumbled to my friend. Im not sure if he heard me at first, but he has, and we both enter the new reality. We debated for a very long five minutes over whether he was to continue, how I would get back alone, and both of us ended up rationalising ways in which I could, which eventually, I discovered to my own suprise, were batted away by my blunt frustration. It was my birthday the next day, too, I realised.

"It's alright" he said after a pause "I'll come back with you." We hugged. I needed it, frustrated in myself, and embarressed to be the one to fall back. But I had found my limit. We packed up our stoves, hoisted our bags back on, and jointly committed murder through a 180 degree turn. The journey back we got lost, almost died on a scree slope, found our old camping spot with disasterously impressive ease, got down to the road, and hitched back to Portree.The next day, we dried off and recovered, and then we set off again, on a different route, which is another story.

I am thinking about this on the train back to London. In the end, my friend decided to stay on the island for another couple of days with some serious, long legged walkers we had met in the pub on the last day. My friend had more in him, I suppose. But I, now, sit hurtling smooth along rails, rocking side to side occasionally in my seat, with a G&T slopping about gently on my tray table. But the cup is nestled in its little cup holder cavity and won't spill. A little rain is crossing the window which I'm looking through to whatever Glen is thundering by. Possibly, the Smiths could be playing, but that might be a bit much. I take a sip and I think to myself that there's not much at all that really matters to me apart from experiencing places and people.

I thought about the moment that I had announced to my friend that I could go no further. I thought about hearing myself say those words. But, there's a little dance between hearing and listening, I decide. When you are given the opportunity to find the tempo of experience slowing down to a complete, courageous pace, therein lies the truth of the matter before you. No flamingo shit, just a descending moment where you are thrown upon an impasse, a steep edge in front of you, a wall, or another seemingly impossible challenge. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can find yourself hearing that small impulse, which pushes back, quietly, and slowly against the overwhelming weight of the moment, which feels like a rapture of unmeasured distances, and then you find that those walls arent as strong as you thought, and that they are built up in haste. I had spoken quietly. Real mountains and hills are built up over achingly long expanses of time, and with this reckoning there before you is lain out more terrain to traverse, more land to map out and understand.
Seeing that expand before you, you see things once again for the first time, and I think to myself that I should want many more experiences like this, to learn of that moment and speak again and again, until I am familiar with the feeling, and to remember that some experiences predate my life, like a child learning of the dawn chorus alone.

I remember being in a classroom after school is over, learning how to read, being singled out after a good, day long session casting my attention through the window. And now, instead of being outside in the world, im still sat in that happily tired, musty room, being prodded towards answering some questions that, for all intents and purposes would go to show that I am a good student. But here, at the end of the day, I actually have no idea how to give the answer. The expectation is on me to balance out my window watching with the fitting ideal of a good student, and that I might, one day, teach someone else the words on the page in front of me. But, instead, I think now, perhaps I have just become very learned at busking it, I have learned by gleaning the answer, the word on the page, from looking up at the teacher leaning over me, by watching the word form itself as a shape on their lips, as the word inches closer to being inanely obvious, just like whatever image of success they are seeing as itinerant inside me, and the teacher is now barely barricading their need to get me learned behind a wall of expectation and excitement, just that a little lap of the first letter gently passing into the space between us. "F.. Fla...?" And in that moment between us I just say it.
But I just read the lips, I've just said the right word, and I've got the praise, but I never really learned out how to know what it was, or where it's supposed to come from.
So I think to myself, now, on this train back, that learning who you, and how far you've got to go, happens in a slow moment, and that is when you start to get it for yourself.

Why there is hope

We are standing on the edge of a new dimensional plane, a way of thinking so much the forefront that the words we need are being sewn together as we speak them, new issnesses, vibes, dimensionalities. We are beginning to find a way to reckon with the flow of things, having come to realise that what we are currently afforded does not allow awakened individuals to flourish. So we are creating that air, that air space to breathe and grow into, and speak together across layered networks of meaning as a unified counter culture. We are of the age, now, our generation, that we are faced with a frighteningly simple binary choice between authentic growing, personhood and an appreciation of the dance between forgetting and remembering, discovering and doing, and between ignoring and falling asleep again, misunderstanding the chaos of machines and excluding all our wonder to struggle within a territory of hierarchy and superiority, all the while losing touch with our choice, and our moral and ethical duties. These duties are aligned with reckoning with the earth's climatic forces, with humanities propensity towards reacting emotionally and blind, within which, sensitivity is disregarded as weakness, rather than an extraordinary power towards understanding. Each of us has a mode of sensitivity that ought to be understood from experiencing the melting of flows, individuals, creatures, forces, are not to be placed in and of themselves as a reaction to the way things are, but as a nation towards what is always becoming. Each of us have reference points to discover along plateaus within our lifetimes, which are not postive modes of being to apply to all future problems, but rather they are negative spaces, alignments, some being more resistant to being washed away by the flows of forgetting than others, and it is these resistantivities that connect us, and differentiate indivuals by the path by which they are found, and the way in which they are collectively remembered in conversation with friends, enemies, and strangers. On a societal level, this burgeoning wonder, this new stage of counter culture, that which seeks Flux and flow as a way to co opt the static that has been gifted to us through decades of cultural growth, has to have new ground to territorialise, there must be a rift, already sown, a space, waiting, a language, a time slowly weaving itself into being, from our own sense of direction, from our own becoming.

Dead Hamsters Dont Talk

It’s like you are a part of a crowd, knowing your difference, but so coaxed into small time satisfaction Being, snapped up in moments, that you forget that you are borne of fire and chaos in the forest itself. Lightning struck a tree, once, and you were born. And now you find yourself, (really, you’ve found yourself) with a characteristic horror,

In a well-kept garden, someone else’s garden, at a garden party, at a pub with friends, out the back, having a smoke, alone

It’s because everyone is trying to be something new, and make themselves in each-others image.

And you, really, on another level, are their hidden source of change,

Your potential sings volumes in a silent universe.

You could go back in there, right now, and because you understand the absurdity of it, could call them all koala fuckers digging their claws into trees, and then fuck off!

But you’ve been so often furled up and trained to shut yourself up, you resign to keep yourself quiet,

Somehow with a determination, with a thin face on, everyone’s got to do it

The same determination of a hamster in a wheel,

Spinning, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around,

Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around

Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around

Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Around, Until the hamster dies and someone chucks it in a bin and gets a new hamster before little darling Sandra discovers the rigid lumpy corpse with one of the eyes a little popped out, and her eyes go as wide as that dead hamster, to near eyeball pop detonation, and she goes absolutely spare and in that high frequency, never-ending way that children do. Waiting for a carrot, you are, your own bloody stick so far up your arse you’re speaking like a puppet Or maybe a gap in the conversation to subvert, just hoping, you’re so weak. You’re so fucking weak. No. Stop that shit right now. This is what I mean. Those voices, right there, don’t dismiss them, take a moment to step back and listen without reacting to it. Look, I’ve just incited it, but characterise them as a reflection of something that is not a part of you. Recognise them as as just one medium, just one flow that is not of your creation. Do not alienate it, neutralise it, supress it, bounce on it, vomit it up, cut yourself, scratch your scabs off, hoover the carpet, hoover the carpet, hoover the carpet,  have another drink, havhe asbdotehr dirnk, starve yourself, cry alone, turn the pillow around at 4 in the morning, again, hoping for it to have regained a cool side, consider jumping, consider disappearing, destroy your relationships, beg for forgiveness, go around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around this cycle, again, maybe just hoping to reach exit velocity before it’s too late. Obviously, because you are you, you were born to lose your way, maybe you were born posthumously, and because you don’t know who the fuck you are but are told that there is something latent within you yet to blossom at some point in your life as a child (there’s not, you’re not a loaf of bread), you heed the force of self-correction, whichever ways it works. But heed it now and heed it good, just stand all ahenny, looking at it, like a grown up Sandra over all the live hamsters she has now liberated from children as a midnight vigilante,

Heed, dammit. Do not associate with all those things forces that are outside of your control. Heed and heedemgood. Heed their force! heed the power with which those voices and actions hurt you so and paint the sensitivity of your soul as lost in the distance, unreachable, something you cannot associate with and sometimes something that is too heavy to take responsibility over, and sometimes the pain sets it on fucking fire so much so you have to scream out loud and you wonder if nobody will hear you.

You have to heed that power over you, because you have to harness it, co-opt it, recuperate it, treat it as you would a chain of wild horses,

Red eyed and foaming at the mouth

Red alive with passion and fierceness, such that you have no choice but to be in awe and that awe turns it from self-destruction into self-preservation, like picking up a hamster cage and bashing life around the head with it. It has the capacity to destroy you over and over and over and around and over and Just, Over. You hear it? You don’t need sympathy. You need someone or something to kill with kindness on the back of a flaming fucking horse, you magnificent bitch.

Moments like these are moments of knowing

Knowing how you might act, with all the potential you have. The potential to turn what is prelogical and infinite into something finite, like making yourself a sandwich with your own two hands, with what is in the fridge of the universe, and knowing that ultimately, a sandwich is pretty finite, and that’s OK, and anyway, it’s made by you and it’s fucking delicious. And even if its not delicious, you tried, and it’s the trying to make a sandwich from the fridge that is great. Anyway, enough theology.  

All im saying is, to look at the question of how you ‘should’ act, as a travesty in the heavy handedness by which it is laid down, because it is obvious that this goes to uphold the order of things. Now, how you ‘might’ act, is a better question, because it gives you room to play. There is no real order, there is nothing to become, there is literally no way you could strive any further towards becoming something of worth, there is no such thing as that sense of worth that you seem to endow people after a well-made observation about life down the pub, after it seems that they’re so damn well qualified to do so after finally figuring out their place in the world. Well they sure have their shit together, huh. Yeah? Well they haven’t seen the tiny trebuchets lining up on the ground over there, each carrying the promise of dead hamster gone dramatically airborne, each hamster solemnly trussed up how they used to truss up Vikings for their funerals on their boats, with their arms crossed over a little sword and the little bouquet of flowers, and the hamster is lain in a small wicker hamster hamper on the business end of a primed trebuchet.

   

To not bring new connections into the world

To not know your difference,

Is the real hamster cage.

Im not saying you should go on and have something to prove
Unless you really give it a good go like Sandra,

Im not saying you should go on about hamsters all the time,

But your strength, your creative potential, for all breeds of conversations

(Yeah and to the one that heard breed and thought about hamsters, just learn to deploy hamsters at the right moments, alright)

In channelling a brimming ladle of chaos is,

Still, No?

So you’re going to choose to blame yourself with all this energy,

And that energy diverted to look at the floor,

So nobody sees your light except in reflection.

Ok, let’s talk about Them for a moment, not, all of them, just some of them that and the ability of Them to make you forget about You.

It gets told as a children’s cautionary tale, here’s the start.

Some, they cannot handle you, your words resonate but it is too scary. You may resort to love bombing them with absurdity because you are not scared, and know intuitively they shouldn’t be either. Some of these, you will drive them away, and some of these, you will lie to yourself and get trapped in thinking it’s your duty to help them to find their dead hamster again, probably because you want to bang them, or they want to bang you.

Some, simply don’t get it, never tried to get it, and cannot, for whatever reason, see strength in weakness and vulnerability, but fuck are you gullible when you want to bang someone, so you’ll get confused again, and forget again, and for a couple of days just live in that thick wispy musk of your own interpretative reality.  

Some, they truly believe there actually IS something to get, something to BE. I know. Absurd. But, here’s the kicker, rather than decide they’ve got it, they want to keep being in a state of trying to get it because someone told them once that it’s all a competition where it’s a glorious and virtuous  thing to just keep trying to Be Something. They were probably drunk and saw an advert with David Beckham’s face on it back in the mid-90s. So they see you, and then subliminally demand you to keep yourself from constantly becoming, by constantly BEING something Becoming. Right? They suppose that its just LIFE to be constantly rising up to whatever static state of being they believe is best. And then they’ve got something to prove, but only once they’ve hoarded all the David Beckham memorabilia they can, (joke’s on them, because you can just as easily make up another piece of David Beckham memorabilia right fucking now in front of their face), and then after scratching off poor David’s face they superglue printouts of their own smiling deluded face onto them. Look. You’re not someone else’s icon, and you’re absolutely not on this planet to be someone’s moon to pull their seas into waves, when you are, actually, the entire night and all its possibilities.

Oh yes. And then also there’s some, the most malignant, by greed and jealousy, who see the endless possibilities of you as a threat, because they have probably experienced chaos and endless possibility as a threat before in their life. So instead of recognising that fear, they just become that fear and replicate it. In some senses, they’re actually to be thanked, because in odd ways, they remind you of who you are and all the hamsters that died, all the hamsters that will stand tall to fill the gaps of where another hamster fell. But no, they will fight to keep you down with all the possible power they have, to scratch that itch to furl yourself, always, to demand their way is the right way, so that they can transform you, and poison everything and everyone around you, so that you can never have the opportunity to remind them of what they cannot give, which is non-transactional, good old, run of the mill, ever present, multifaceted, ever changing love. Poor fuckers.

All of the people who come into your life up until this point, it seems, drive you towards having to constantly explain your ways, and they reinforce in you, a mode of living, a mode of being, where you can keep excusing your sensational difference by crafting your outward actions and appearances- always with an apology attached, like a little tag on a cow’s ear, and this leaves you feeling as if the only options you have apart from going aroundaroundaroundaroundaround are to suffer in silence, with all the multivariate forms of suffering, sneak away in the night, or even bounce away in a dramatic flareup of fuckyouall.

Well as a wise man once said,

“Sometimes you’ve just got to stop apologising and just fucking get on with it, you know?”

Because the world owes you zero apologies,

You owe them, zero apologies.

In fact, if and when those motherfuckers who reinforce that will to apologise come to play, they owe YOU an explanation for their often malignant conformity.

Why should you stand in this garden, pruning yourself with some very well oiled secateurs, accepting secateurs-oil from the next bloody secateurs-oil salesman coming on in, someone offering you a fucking dirty old rag to wipe down your secateurs when you deserve pure silk, you fancy bitch, and what are you even doing polishing secateurs anyway, you're not always gardening, but you just stand there chugging down another dead hamster juice like its a bloody mary and crying about having to live in a garden when you know full well that there is always a new plot of land to be found, right under your own two feet? If the world had a goal, it would already have been reached, and all the plants would not bother to grow towards the sun, and the sun wouldn’t bother to rotate around a black hole at the centre of our galaxy. If someone else tells you how you should live, it would preclude a story untold, all the way from the end, to the beginning, here and now. When your gift, your power is your own, is already singularly unreactive to ANYTHING,

Apart from your own agency.

Only fear can make you forget this,

And even death is not even the end,

Cos when you kick that bucket,

That hamster blood is gunna flow down the drain

And into the drinking water. So do it fucking right.

On Being Back A Week

Being a 23 year old artist in 2019, I am going places, for no apparent reason. 

Today, transporting myself around London, going places, my thoughts turned to readjusting to London Life after Six Months working on a cruise ship. It was a transformative experience, and now I have no idea what to do, but I have an idea of how to find out what I want to do. That somehow is position myself in places and spaces, places with an ineffable sense of calm, feeling like well placed plant in a garden bed. To this end, I sat in a coffee shop above a garden centre, in a sandblasted high-backed wooden chair, transcending the usual levels of unphased pretention, to figure out the what. 


My happiest obsession is towards contriving witty observations and sudden affordances, and scratching them with a blind hope in their relevance and potential into a small black notebook resting in the palm of my hand, reporting on the state of the universe, talking to myself in the past, present, and future. IUnderstandably, this means that once I flip back a few pages, I have absolutely no idea what I have written and why, but its always fun to try and work it out by piecing together the contexts. I have about 15 notebooks, of different shapes and sizes since I started doing this a few years ago. Over the course of my contract on a Cruise Ship, I filled three and a half of them, and brought one full one along as a kind of reminder to flip through, as it contains gleaned comments on what reality I actually choose to believe in, when I forget, and lose centre.  

Sitting here, now, in front of this one, It would seem now that I am being drawn back into London Life, its pace, and its senses. Social Media platforms are engineered to keep you on them as long as possible, and it feels like whatever sense of centre, or being happily lost in The Distance Between is harder to come by.

This, I feel, is the readjustment. A quick and abrupt re-adjustment is London pulling focus suddenly whilst your back is turned. This can be depressing. I've found its important to allow myself to notice, just notice, not attribute too many meanings to things whilst in this liminal state. In some senses, I feel that God, that sense of centred calm, is [citation needed] a long way off [citation needed], himself [citation needed], scrolling through his own black mirror, sucked into cyberspace, past reams of memes that appear before Him, after having been pumped out at lighting speed from the maw of complex machine with a kind of hopper on top of it, a machine that is kept fed by hypnotised facebook mums on a mixture of human and cat hair that is ripped out by the fistful from the destitute heads of vacuum cleaners that apparently once roamed cyberspace free and clean in a golden age. 

There is a knot here, and it is worth unpicking. It is not just about readjusting, blindly feeling your way back to reality like a mole scratching though mediums. This ties into having faith in the idea of centre, rather than having to consistently prove to myself that it exists. I do this by testing myself against people, against contexts. This is exhausting, and I forget that there is a certain invulnerability to being vulnerable.


Driving, I was beeped at a fair few times when turning, and saw the frustrated silent head shaking as I moved into poisiton at junctions. To these people, I thank them relentlessly as I swing out. On foot, a concerned citizen behind me in the self check out queue calls out "UM 'SCUSE ME'" as I left the machine momentarily to get a plastic bag. I turned around and said "Almost There", with a patient smile. Here, in London, in a Tesco that looks the same as every other Tesco except with different corners and a different temperature, I was Talking Back. I think she thought "This man must be from Up North/Is Talking To Me/Frequently Buys Lemons at Tesco." I'm not. And I havent bought lemons in six months. Ship Life has obviously made me a terrible driver with no spatial awareness, or maybe im just aware of how much people have somewhere to go, even though they'll never get there long enough until the next destination rears its big grinning neon face. Being away for six months, away from the Brexit Gloom means that I have lost the ability to be London-efficient in every act. I no longer dance with the lemons across the barcode scanner with grace and the ever present, ineffable threat of time-pressure. I no longer furtively stuff my purchases into my pockets so I can say I don't need a plastic bag, hoping that on some high frequency thats one more win for the Green Team.

Its this reaction to my own action that I am afforded in London,  and just learning to let go is the key. Slowly does it.

(NB: After writing this, I briefly flirted with the term "Lime Pressure", fantasising about true artistic integrity. To my suprise, it flirted back. There was a beautiful spark, there, at the beginning. That term promised me a one man Edinburgh Fringe Show, previewed in some pub by 15 corduroy friends, and an eight hour drive listening to alternative dreampop, smiling with a glazed expression from pink windows, going on the little rocket ship outside the service station and falling over, walking in cold dusks hand in hand until the blue of the sky makes the orange of the lights reflect in the eyes of lime like hot coals of promise, and then it promised me all quick meaningful hand gestures, and high banked seating, and just four lights on me, cold, warm, cold, warm, and for me to be received not even lukewarmly by extra adventurous fringegoers, and then it left me. And I was cold and listless, confused after such a rollercoaster of expectation and hot lime sex. The lime rolled down the royal mile. Nobody paid it much notice amongst the noise of the Fringe. And as I watched that object dissappear around the Cursed Statue of Adam Smith, I looked down to find myself holding a now hopelessly thick stack of flyers, flimsy and stupid now, wet with the perpetual drizzle, some stuck together, the top layers fluttering pathetically in the darkening breeze, plastered with my stupid face, and my stupid idea to turn citrus fruit into a sharp social commentary, and the words 'debut', 'promising', 'hilarious', once smouldering with passion, now fizzing out beningly, and promising to myself that i'd never really love again, but then a small voice at the back of my heart now picking me back up and saying "well there's always lemons" with a kick and a nudge). Lemons. 

The Cycle

Distortion arranged in chaos, loud, undending, enfolding,
Balances Out,
Centred on an emptiness
Dances always with order to wash it away. 
And sometimes, often, more often, eventually, always,
They annihilate- 
But the hope of those small moments rests on being helped back up, or talked back down.
What you have to reach out and catch between time is the emptiness. 
Needing Love, Giving Love.
Growing Love. 

When you are superimposed, you are in between two slices of time.
So, what slices of time are eternal, 
Pulled forward by the spinning of the earth?
The cycle of the simulated universe
Is the cycle of the seasons.
It goes like this: 

I heard a small bird once, after a violent and black storm
It pierced a silence so loud.
A little gold glimmer.
It feels like spring.

Then I woke up on a morning with dew resting, 
A sharp tang of countryside bonfire,
lit by the love of some eternal groundsman (who more often than not is just passing by)
fields blossoming deep blue and green,
a cold nose, a blunt stone pavement to stand on,
and to walk on back to the city.  

And in that walk back,
A road lined with hushed trees
Every step summoned summer closer,
Nature bloomed full and luscious, 
ruby red apples hang like jewels and shine,
and inaction leaves them there-  but the air is warm, 
little stones get thrown into ponds
the fire burns, 
we sit around it 
devour the smoke
and drink to quench the sun
such is the season of abundance. 

The apples are rotting! Cries the badger.
Fuck, Wait, What?
LISTEN TO ME. I SAID THE APPLES ARE ROTTING. PICK THE FUCKING APPLES YOU LAZY CUNT.
The Badger hisses, upset, as it shuffles, or waddles, back into its den, or hole or whatever, the bastard. A fox ushers the badger into the depths and flicks a contemptuous look back at me over its shoulder. A barn owl is peering out from the branches of one of the trees. "...WHAT?!" I yell at it, palms out, shocked and indignant. It raises a tufted eyebrow and flaps away. "What did I do?" I say quietly to the wind
The wind just shrugs past me, she caresses my cheek with icy indifference as she leaves me listless. 
I dont know how to pick the apples 

All through Summer into Autumn I heard myself say this.
I watched murmurations of birds dancing in formation against the backdrop of a summer thunderstorm. 
Yet there was one bird lagging behind them all,
This one bird, a shepherd, risking distance, unable to catch up
This bird with long gaps between graceful flaps
broke off, on its own path, flying south,
Over the trees, the city, 
and me standing there in the evening humid air,
I heard myself say this: 

Take no harvest now
Before this season's end.
Slick in shades of umber and crimson, 
The fog lies low and cold over hunchbacked hills,
Woodsmoke smell will hunker indoors
Along with you and the mold 
The harvest, the rejoicing,
You have been at play too long,
You are being willfully blind

The fields that I see
Are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth,
And snout and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through dead wet pages of leaves. 

Then the trees are to become skeletal. 
Some will wither and die and give themselves to fungus. 
Nothing is wasted,
Those apples on the floor are better suited
To being in love with the worms and the rot,
Than being given to others in a summer feast.
The trees’ branches will be like grasping fingers
Holding themselves, harnessed, like orants to the bone white moon! 

My eyes redshot now with power and hope I go on:
It is the Turning Time!
Let it Burn!
Let your fields burn in a raging, razing fire!
Run to the Sea!
Embrace the water,
Immerse yourself in chaos!
All this will give haste to the march of Winter, the silent kingdom! 

When, in that scarcity of love and abundance,
the fearsome cold will harden it all,
and leave gold in those cracks, so furrowed by plough and root.  
The radiance of the flames will have left such a vastness of scorched earth,
That standing on it there can be nothing but a lightness of being, 
In reverence to the newfound empty land you stand on. 

And when you are ready, after all this,
You will see soaring overhead a phoenix, 
Death into Life,
As Spring into Summer.
As Autumn into Winter.
As Spring into Summer.  

Autumn 2

Cold cheeks and knuckles will rap against root and bark
As if to ring in this new time
In what is hollow, we find the whole

The great rotting of the summer hoard
The transfer of all energy to the silent kingdom
Masters of death dancing
Stagheaded mushrooms
Feasting on the waste of summer
Which seems naive now
Childishness has left

The havest had been in play too long
The fields are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth
And snouth and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through the wet layers of burned up leaves

I have hoarded all I can
But cannot stop this mold and mildew and the must
There is no more fruit to pick
I have to catch myself now before this all decomposes
To continue would be like peeling off my own bark
The same tree that bore sweetness and joy
Now is the time to grow wild, untamed, unpicked.

A manifesto for autumn

Take no harvest now,
Before this season's end.
The havest has been in play too long
The fields are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth
And snouth and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through the wet layers of burned up leaves

Soon the trees are to become bonelike
And curl in on themselves
Slick in shades of umber and crimson and sepia
Fog is coming to lie low in cold humid air
Woodsmoke and musty leaves and the rot
For it is the turning time in this forest
 
Let it feed into your body
Let us grow wild
Untamed and unpicked
Let the fruit all drop to melt away

As small new buds
Like tiny bones
Grow from the razing fire
An uncontrollable burn
Set by turning with the world

Let it all fall again like a wildman
Coming back from the forest
Let him in again
You thought him lost
As in spring everything is prim
And squared off neat tidy
Buds of white and pink and yellow
And in summer bulging all

Now we go down to what is real
Let the cracks show
At the base of the tree
And the branches will hold their fingers up
Like orants to the bone white moon

Order was a priviledge
It was a drastic step towards heaving green masses
Direction from above
The great eye
Projecting silver linings all around future interactions
Masquerading those benefits as motivation
All the while filling the void with fear, lethargy and dogma
Staying inside a raincloud just hoping to catch the sun
Order is fakery

Long live the wildmen!

We cower for no one
Our eyes glint redshot
Mudded and mad
We speak for no one
The forest speaks through us
With a grin we shine within
And wait for Autumn to come

That fucking dense one

It's like retaliation,
It suits being rooted in the ground.
This lot of land was given water
Motes and speckles float
Falling here and now revolving.

In the heart of the ancient city
Only luminaries sit amongst stone
Their ganglion limbs wrap around
Their little inklings winking.
Growths and pores leak spores
And rush to flood the sun.

So small they live in all
So small they live in the air
Reflecting a fiery presence
By a thump and a rattle
in the deep den there.

Grey fields stand tall as shields
Tumbledown round huts emptied and
ripped apart like wet cardboard.
Under a slip of leathery mud and grit,
Hands turned crust black and meticulously scabbed
Held up like orants with the bone white moon
Pitted and stopped in orbit.

That other city

This city falls through a fragile sleep. It is a place of vivid dreams, and streets that are like coral canyons, nooklike, in a warm sea heaving and flowing with people. The tropical heat forces dark green weeds and lush grasses to burst through the brick and concrete, filtering up like insurgents through colonising stone slabs. Fruit trees, wild and untamed, stand along the long and straight roads that lead into the city, opposing old colonial lamposts that flake black paint along the empty paths. The city itself is surrounded by a vast orange scrubland, and the fruit of the trees droops down unpicked into the short yellow grass by the side of the road, melting and deforming under the humid sun like the skin and bones on a corpse left to rot.  Inhabitants drift down the footworn streets with dead eyes, trailing vortices of musty smells that mix in the wind. Living here means understanding existence and death as less a mere certainty giving room for wilful ignorance, but just a long way off. Life becomes nothing more than a process gone grey along the way of lain down tarmac, the soles of your feet grinding slowly as you shuffle out of your house, along that relentless pavement conveyer belt, until you reach the end of the road, the self checkout, life support beeping again and again, over and over, tolling like a bell for all your worthy achievements are worth until death herself packs you and carries you away in a big black plastic sack for life.

But then there are those with wild eyes and swaying step who cross the road, down off the pavement, into dirty alleys on the outskirts of town, where each footfall lands almost silent, a dull tap that reverberates around on towering buildings that creep up into the sky and hem in any wanderer or traveller. Looking up at the dusty bricks that tower up high, a one can see spiral of lush tendrils, pockmarked here and there with delicate star shaped flowers. Dark purple petals and waxy green leaves curl towards the sun. And down on the ground, as you walk, very occasionally a glint of one the many lords of the city catches your eye as a random copper coins. A coin first spent so long ago, spent for you, indebting you to this city even before you’re dragged out screaming into this unforgiving world. Born into a life of debt but nevertheless feeling the dry air on your wet skin lighting up your nerves like a blanket of ice, eyes wide and bloodshot, your gumless screams stifled by scratchy blankets covering your new nude body, trailing umbilical all over the shop until the doctor finally comes to decide if you’re an innie or an outie, your bellybutton sealed like your fate.

Most people in this city are poor, living on these outskirts. Here the streets have no signs, each twist and turn designed in absentia- a secondary effect of the decision to build homes so desperately needed by a burgeoning population. The blocks separated by dirt covered paths cross over each other like tree roots exposed by the rain. Together the children of this shanty play, chasing eachother, dry smears of dirt settling into the crags of their palms as they laugh and scrabble like feral little magpies for any shiny flake by the side of the copper coloured houses. Each house is topped by its own patchwork of corrugated rust, and the walls slant into the ground, at different angles, sinking back into the earth. Within each thin home lives a large family, so close to the next that they can hear the life next door. Screams of anguish, moans of pleasure, laughter, arguments and everyday conversations seeping through the cracks in plasterboard just as privacy relents to mold.  And as the sun goes down you can catch glimpses of soft, wind dried limbs through stained linen blinds that gently waver in the breeze.

The roots lead to central area of the city where tall white and blue glass skyscrapers hang. At a certain point the curved dirt paths give way to planned streets, each polished building casting a shadow and cooling the pavement. Every cornerstone and angle looks to be so heavily designed and ordered by architechs looking down from cold, dry, air conditioned offices. Black cars careen down wide silver highways lined with trees trimmed so perfectly by unseen hands. On weekends the city is paralysed, and warm winds flow through the square streets, the only sounds around being the gentle clatter of some thin plastic wrapping dancing down the alleys, before it disappears from view. The dull roar of the motorway that feeds the centre of the city is hushed for now. And as the work week begins the air begins to fill with a chorus of intermittent horns in harmony, distant sirens grow to scream on top of cars that careen like speeding violins towards their targets and out of earshot. And people in black suits appear out of nowhere to walk purposefully, their heeled tapping shoes crackling together and their heads bobbing up and down as they flood into their buildings hurriedly, to sit at their desks, plugging in letters transformed into demands and sentiments sent hurtling out the aeriels wobbling at the top of the buildings to other headquarters around the world, codified, encrypted, reaching satellites that perform handshakes with the reams of data beaming between computers, beaming down to be transformed back into light that appear again reflected, on the dead eyes of the ones who read it. 

A City

A beaten brow

Raised atop a rooftop

Drums a slow decay

It softly slips away

And away

Insulting little feather downs

Plucked and brazen
From a trailing vine now

Caught by masters of war to pound

There are little hands

That touch the muted swan’s song

Three brass buttons slipping to shimmer

Too full to fly out

Seeping inside a silent cry

But hushed and keen and hollow

Where outside armouries are packed

Motes lift along a wet crackle

Little radio hath come to life

Turning past the point of static
Pushed by the wind

To tune in is not listening

Choose to move to the absolute

Tall reeds and glasses raised

belie a lotus flower

its roots plunge turning low

and if unless it is let go

that is ever to be picked

and clinked again

then again risen

and to try not to again because

follow not I 

Where worthless folly

In striking at everything

creates nothing

but emptiness

What can be forgotten
Feels like losing touch
The shadows melt together
Our fingers have gently caressed
God's weathered face
He slaps it away.
What did you expect?
That's our lot.

The tip of this triangle

Folding forever

But to be settled
Where it started.

Roaring dust where it belongs

This battle lines the lungs

Grit falling in time with thy breast

To turn over again

Correct Change

The car door slammed shut like a gunshot. Tim was behind the wheel and he sighed to himself softly, noticing the soft cloud of his warm breath floating around him. Tim was a delicate man on this bitingly cold morning, emotionally delicate and slightly unsure of himself. He sat in his dark blue, 2001 Vauxhall Corsa, mentally preparing himself for another day of work amongst his fellow co-workers, who Tim regarded as a brain-dead hoard of wankers, by vacantly staring through the foggy mists of his breath at the dark wooden slats walling off the cul-de-sac of where he lived. Tim didn’t know what he did for a job. He knew how to do his day’s work, though he didn’t know to what possible ends his job could take him. Tim had no idea how any of this effort went into creating a better society, a world he would be proud to live in. He shook his head slightly, to shake off the drudging tiredness that enveloped his whole being, dismissing the idea of yet another Monday as just another Monday. And so Tim slid the key in the ignition and turned. The car came alive after a few slick coughs. He clicked down the handbrake. He put the car in reverse and readied his feet against the accelerator pedal and the clutch, throwing his arm around the empty passenger seat next to him with grim determination to crane his neck around and look out the rear window, except it was completely fogged up. It seemed that he would have to wait for the air conditioning. Tim blinked. Tim remembered his seatbelt, wrapped himself with it with a rustle of his waterproof jacket, and clicked it in. Tim looked at his watch. 8.22. Fine by him. Tim looked at his hands resting on the top of the steering wheel. He imagined them covered in blood after stabbing someone brutally. He started to shake his hands as if wracked with guilt, as if acting in a play, wet crimson trails running through crags and down his pale wrists like a river through a desert, his mouth contorted in a silent scream. Tim stopped himself and glanced up at the rear view mirror. A small patch had cleared on the window behind him, revealing two story semi-detached houses, made of sandy beige bricks, and sitting in a pleasant, symmetrical line all the way down the road. That small patch would have to do. Tim had seen enough. And so with a buzzing whirr, the car reversed, did a U-turn, and bumbled on towards work.    

Tim walked down the empty corridor towards his cubicle in the main office space. He was looking down. He hadn’t noticed that the carpet was actually fuzzier than he had previously realised. It was the little things he supposed. Sandra came out of an office to his left. Tim looked up at her, alarmed, as she walked by. “Morning Sandra.” “Morning Tim!” The smell of her shampoo lingered in the breeze she created as she walked past him. Tim relaxed, safer in the knowledge of a completed social interaction. He then carried on walking down the corridor, lazily looking through the door of the empty office that Sandra had emerged from. Tim caught himself in the middle of his next step. There was a vending machine? Tim took a step back and peered through the door with a confused and intense gaze. There was a vending machine. It stood like a monolith. Its shiny glass unbelievably clean, it echoed the names of the products it bore within as the harsh fluorescent lights reflected upon it and dazzled his eyes. Bottles of drink and packets of crisps nested delicately amongst perfectly created spirals that seemed to stretch into the infinite reaches of the depths of the machine. Its rectangular form was perfectly aligned to the centre of the room. But on the machine itself, offset, on the right side of this box a small blue display rang out in digitally formed words that beckoned. Insert coin. Tim felt a jolt through his core, as if the sound of the words within in his mind were formed of the resonant frequency of his soul. And then the words had changed. Select product. “Morning Tim!” Tim whipped round, startled and terrified, to the source of the clear and bright voice to his right, and locked eyes with Peter, who had appeared. “OH GOD. Um. Sorry. Morning Peter.” Peter paused, confused, and looked at Tim with a thinly veiled sadness, before carrying on down the corridor. Tim watched him leave. He was left alone with the vending machine again. Suddenly, without recognising what he was doing, he had flicked off the light switch of the office, and was walking swiftly towards his desk. He watched his feet shuffle on the carpet beneath him. Each step felt like he was walking on sandpaper. Tim reached his desk and turned on his computer hurriedly. He looked at his watch. 9.01. Of course.

Tim was obviously distracted all day. He watched over the top of his computer monitor, his eyes following his co-workers who would come in and out of that office like bees to a hive. They came with nothing. They left with snacks, all smiling at eachother like they were in some kind of sick, demented club. All day Tim heard the thunk of yet more bottles hitting the retrival tray of that foul machine, each time felt a little louder than the last, as if they were shells coming ever closer to his little trench, zeroing in on his position. To cope, Tim began to play a game where he would guess who in the office would buy which product, who was more likely to go for savoury snacks rather than sweet. Tim thought of himself as an expert at this game of his own design. This however, forced Tim to develop an intensity of emotion towards that room which he could not pick apart. This emotional knot developed inside him and clawed at his ribs all day, desperately trying to escape, perhaps, he fantasised as a scream so fierce as to shred his throat, and vomit up a torrent of blood, with little flaps of skin and lung into his small, plastic office bin. And he would tie up the minituare bin bag with a dainty little bow knot and carry it, fit to burst and bulging with his hot guts down that corridor. But Tim could do nothing, and as such, he was being driven towards radical action. 

It was now the end of the working day. Tim looked at his watch. It was 4.58. It would have to do. He had completed literally no work, and felt ashamed of himself. The excel sheet in front of him lied bare, its boxes lined up pristine, save for a single entry in A1 that simply said "fuck". He stared at the blinking line after the k. He felt for a moment that it might match his heartbeat. A figure blocked the light above him "You coming to the pub, Tim?" He looked up past his monitor at Sandra, her auburn hair hanging silkily down across a lovely blue pea-coat, buttoned up. Tim opened his mouth too quickly. "No" he said, "I think I'm just going to try and finish this, you know." A nervous laugh bubbled out of his mouth and fell flat. Sandra did not blink. She didnt look dissapointed at all. In fact she looked exactly the same, as if he hadn't said anything at all. "All right then Tim, I'll see you tomorrow!" Sandra spun on her heels and walked down the corridor. Tim watched her leave, for the second time, and looked back down at his monitor. Perhaps now he could finally complete at least a little bit of work. All day he had been fixated on what lay down that corridor. The office was now empty. Nobody would be buying any more snacks until tomorrow. There was quiet in the work environment, and Tim was at last, resolute. Tim began to press the backspace button very deliberately with his index finger, each press a step towards a brand new day, back through time, each press erasing the horrors of the previous hours. Fuck. Fuc. Fu. F. "You coming to the pub, Tim?" said a voice from behind him. He span around in frustration. It was Pete. "No." Tim turned to his monitor again, and paused, before turning around to Pete once more. "Sorry." he said. Pete's face was extremely blank, a mask, a perfect diguise. A smile appeared on top of it all. "OK well, if you change your mind we will all be down there." he said, extremely earnestly. And so Pete walked down the corridor, his gait laced with an added spring and enthusiasm, seemingly wishing for a landmine.

Tim looked at his watch. 10.33. Shit, is it that late? At least he had completed a substantial amount of work. Tim decided it was time to finish for the night. He saved what he had done, and shut down the computer. The monitor switched off and the computer fans stopped whirring. His territory was now silent, amd only the dull hum of the air conditioning in the office remained. Tim stretched at his desk and got up. It was time to leave. Tim began to walk down the corridor, and as he went, he became extremely self aware and introspective. He thought upon his day, how he had been so affected by what lay just within the office in front of him and to the right, how much he had viscerally hated every second of his existence behind his monitor, staring at the hungry coworkers marching in and out of that very doorframe. Tim then found himself in front of this door, and it was very nearly closed. That emotional knot, which had loosened itself throughout the evening, which Tim had managed to put out of his mind now bound itself tighter and tighter as he stood there, and Tim began to feel likewise constricted in his movement, in his thoughts. Each attempt to convince himself of the realities of the situation, of the car waiting for him downstairs, of the success he had sown for himself by completing most of his work for the day, was an attempt that came up against this dense and painful feeling, as if he was listless, beached, only to be washed away by huge waves of a cold sea. He felt that he could not allow himself to think of anything else except what lay before that closed door in front of him. Tim began to shake, and tears welled up in his eyes. These tears were borne of this frustration of emotion, and the office began to feel more empty, as if he himself were dissapearing, as if his presence was uprooting itself and soon there would be absolutely nothing. Tim closed his eyes and his tears, dangling delicately on his eyelashes, fell onto the carpet noiselessly. He leaned forward, and with a thunk, opened the door with his forehead.