If any man have an ear, let him hear

Nod to Spleen

2009-08-13T14:59:00.003+01:00

I know a lot about life,
things, and stuff
so when they question
the credence
of my knowing
I get angry and have to
spit. Then feel
better that they don’t
know how much
I know about who
they are, and remember
they know nothing
of me and what
I know about
them, things, and stuff.

No snow so go.

2009-08-06T15:08:00.006+01:00

Letters from the past tell me things,
thoughts,
snippets of truth from other men:
“There is no snow in Hollywood, there is no rain in California.”
Some chap once said,
as I thought of clouds and planes and the
beating,
burning dream
of the endless American sun.

The Disconsolate of the Land

2009-04-10T00:00:00.016+01:00

Buried basements of the free-butveryexpensive-world behind heavy hung doors, rusting industrial bolts and locks, dripping alleyways linking subterranean darkness, mystery flickering in networks, a lack in linking that never reconnects. The body of darkness, the spirit of the dirt. The soil of turmoil, the filth of the earth. Mouthgagging relations to silence family discussion. Terrorists shopping in supermarkets, posting love letters, smiling in the sun; how we shock, they are just like us. We snap and kill, crimes of passion, the desperate hate of endless loss. All in the name of love. We sit and watch the grotty hovals that blister and brim, spilling out with symbols of uadaltered, universal sin. We forget before we found the hole in which Sadam lived, above ground in light is where he, we, me, sipped from the rim of that diet-coke icon global tin or considered in passing which tooth paste would give us the Hollywood ‘ching,’ that plastic smile of shining white. Human, all too human, the philosopher would say when we try to make the distinction between them and us. We must remember that it is we who have plotted the points along that axis of evil, we who absent mindedly forget the lies behind this axis of diesel. And so they hide underground, the tribals fleeing from genocide, the infecting rape of the other side, contaminating and splicing traditional blood lines. Fugitives, the bankrupt, the destitute. Because towers of gleaming New York can never understand the psychological materialism of secret gentrified desire. The desperation of the wretched. The west can never understand the freedom of difference born in thought that bubbles in night-blooming foam from back-bedrooms, from cellars down steps, from the illegality of squats, where mental masturbation reawakens the pleasures of the soul and the skin. Because when beautiful Narcissus stare eyed that dark pool mirror, only a dollar sign stared back at him. We glue eye the TV screens watching the protruding bellies of famine, the shining bling of poverty glittering under the African sun. With eyes that are really more flies, than eyes, they look back at us: “oh dear oh dear...awfulawful” Aren’t we glad that this isn’t us? There are no glimmers of hope on the dry desert sand, just the coruscating sparkle of millions of swollen abdomens, writhing reflections of the burning midday heat. Meanwhile, lazy, laggard, indolent hicks plug porcine bodies into the inorganic grey of the machine. Living out lives in the glowing radiation of LCD lucidity with tortilla chips spilling from between folds of corpulent skin. Shielded from the world behind the windshields of carbon spouting automobiles how can they know the ache of bitter anguish, the violent throb of misery, the helpless throes of despair? How can you ever know the hopelessness of the world when your feet never feel the dust and the heat of the naked earth, feel the cracks in its skin, feel where the poison is seeping, working its way in.

2009-03-26T19:05:00.001Z

It seems that the only thing keeping us from our sense of human responsibility is the vacuous shallows of our cultural superfluity.

p.s. i well like fashion.

Back step

2009-03-18T01:34:00.005Z

Just off my way
your way, high way,
dawn light bounces softly over glasses
and the eyes of awakening cars
light up in kindness
they spill out sideways
underfoot of lifted limb
helping me find my way
back home, stepping in.

2009-03-10T16:43:00.002Z

There are only the wanted, the wanting, the assiduous, and the exhausted.

Crestfallen

2009-03-06T17:26:00.004Z

when I was young I thought doctors had all the answers
the inalienable truth found in the figures of mathematics
or the authorial voice of school science text books
that, in which I could depend
in the same way they would say
Mothers always knew best, in the end

but these are only of the past
not of our collective history
but of a childhood
lived universally
when the sun shone brighter and the days were longer
and the big questions only had
small answers
to sate inquisitive hunger

now I fall down in the potholes of mystery
barely keeping my head above ground
whilst the trenches and chasms that litter history
mean that truth is somewhere buried in the sand.
when I turn to my mother all I see is someone older
a façade of age where wrinkles map out years
and those lines never drawn out in knowledge,
fail to mark x in axiom’s discovery tears

I can see doubt in glinting eyes,
that maternal sparkle that never lies
but can neither tell the truth
so I sit on the steps of perception
and wait
for fading parental precepts
to pass under itching feet.

Act Your Age

2009-02-27T10:45:00.004Z

Ours is an age
in which the combined wealth of the world’s
550 billionaires
exceeds that of the
3 billion humans
who constitute the planet’s poorest 50%

Ours is an age
When number crunching means money
and not lives
when giga-mergers and nano-second transnationalisms
mean baked beans are 10 pence more
than we can afford

Ours is an age
where a light shines ever brighter on a small spot
and the rest is left in total darkness
screaming
unseen and unheard
shuddering under our shadow

Ours is an age
where if you stop looking and get used to not seeing
then things will start to disappear
out of sight,
gone out of mind.

Ours is an age
where you can just fly away
on a global voyeur tour
but there is no real plan to get us out of here
no plan to see what living really means.

2009-02-04T16:41:00.001Z

Its obvious, the semblance, when they get caught in the streetlights or the beams of the speeding car headlights. They reveal at night, the façade like the intuitive insight of x-ray machines that radiate a clinical white light in hospital wards, showing the bones, the flesh, but never the soul. The latter is something that remains to be seen, and will forever remain unseen by the eyes of us, but only by the drives of others. It will be illuminated, in personal action, written in lights above innumerable heads like the fluorescent strips that hang over grotty east end fish bars. ‘Open’ and waiting to be filled with hunger. Souls are not dissimilar, as it seems they are, figuratively, either open to us or closed to us. They will either let you in or shut you out. Some will be open to information, to points of view, to feelings or thoughts, to affectations and to passions and yet other minds will be locked shut, like a solid impenetrable nut, impossible to crack.

Grate-ful

2009-02-04T16:36:00.004Z

You take my mind off
with miniature cheeses
that case of self doubt
And, the recurrence of
the other
falls by the wayside.

Whiteout

2009-02-01T22:19:00.003Z

The sound of snow is deafening. The constant buzz of a silent bright white hum that fills the air like the hideous crunching of a white-noise-snow-storm from an out of tune television set. I want to lay down naked in it until my body melts in numbness so that I will no longer feel anything anymore. Maybe it would freeze everything still so I would be able to just lie unmoving, unerring, buried in the moment for a little while. I want a brain freeze. A temporary overnight sub zero stasis before my thoughts turn into sludge that people will walk upon in the morning. Everything is up in the air, flaking away, and all I can do is wait for it to settle.

Coin your thought.

2009-01-07T00:44:00.006Z

I hide my thoughts underneath the freezer
or between sofa cushions
like old dull coins
waiting under me
to be spent

or old pens leaking ink
bleeding unwritten words into fibres
stains that would squeal in preserve
of strawberry enjambment
if they could

What does a dose of glucose?

2008-12-16T23:18:00.003Z

Mother used to
make marble
of pinky-orange,
more of a gradient
than a colour
really
on gleaming
silver tea spoons
or double-ended plastic
that induced
sweet infant suspension
and the request for
another tsp

Now I
like to mix
the pink Calpol
with the orange,
to make the colour of a
winter sunset
that paints
in sugary syrup
quadruple dose,
a glowing halo
that hangs
over the end
of icy days.

red volley, yellow volley

2008-12-16T17:23:00.003Z

buttons and levers
switch on receivers
function and voice wait and speak in stereo
switching on and off lives and feelings left in mono
fingertip interaction forming waves that emit
beaming coded secrets of what we emote
“no ideas but in things”
ringing true, then repeating

red button
not emergency stop
"in times of crisis, we must all decide again
and again
whom we love."
they said
before flipping the
are you sure you really want to push this?
plastic safety cover
and extending a shaking digit
to ignite ominous glow,
a christmas wink
on the dash board of
god’s cold-war control panel.

Missing you miss your train.

2008-12-09T16:16:00.006Z

You picked up the one way ticket

From inside your wallet

And you put your hands too far away

From the small of my back

I told myself that I wouldn’t look. That I wouldn’t open my eyes and see the hands that I held behind the glass.

So I wouldn’t remember, in the future, the past moment, forever replaying the drop and fall of the fingers and the opening of the doors and then klink closing again.

You were on track, on time to take a different track. The train takes you where it wants to because it has all the power of steel and all the gleam of lacquer. It learnt to roll before it could crawl. I don’t think they would have been proud though, the Tophats I mean, there is no way of letting off steam when you run on electricity.

Everyone sat. Apart from those who stood. I didn’t know which was better so I just ran.

I couldn’t know how you left. Whether you nearly smiled, or had goodbye eyes, or whether you sat in a window seat or an aisle seat or silent screen window mouthed to people who don’t know you, asking whether you could sit next to them.

They wouldn’t know how you like to sit by the window and watch the trees slide their autumn leaves past your outside-to-inside blushing cheek.

When I reached the steps I sat and waited

You would come round the corner in a second

For sure

Just any second

Any second now...

Make me Quake

2008-11-19T16:18:00.005Z

Curious eyes flutter under eyelids
that hold and hide excitement epicentre
chin rests on gym biceps
darkness sculpts curved devil horns,
deep muscle fault lines crowning hips.
an insatiable heat burst efflorescent
shooting through my lithosphere.
bodies rumble in tectonic collision
converging skin plate boundary
in night time cohabitation.

I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel your seismic kiss
I feel a volcanic eruption
there is nothing compared to this.

Coordinated Handover

2008-11-17T21:00:00.009Z

Sometimes all I need is a hand
to hold while im reading
or working
or cooking and eating
when i’m speaking
and blushing
or when i’m sleeping.
an arm around my waist
between shadowed sleepy sheeting
a digital comfort
mid night finger meeting
of links binding
ones and zeros
to keep my heart still beating
my feet from tripping
my hand to hold on
forever gripping.

Silent Accretion

2008-11-15T14:24:00.009Z

I’ve come to understand that kiss
Is quite impossible but to miss
Secrete your silence from every pore
I can smell you through the walls

The phone rings.

Theres a noise in my head
There is a noise in my head

By the time you get this message..there will be silence.

The noise said.

Half eaten books litter the otherwise tidy floor. They fill me up to breaking point. I need to purge. Shout and scream words that are not mine but a dream. A feeling, a nightmare, a lucid acute terror.

Wake up, you cannot stay.

Feet beat the floor to the meat of my heart on a journey that is never traveled. I hit the ground crawling.

Books pile up and crush my chest,
I can’t breathe under the weight
Of the boots of a thousand dead men
Of a thousand poisoned voiced acumen.

Subdural hematoma bubbles and pulses words in my head spilling thick read pools of thought at my feet. Schools of thought, crimson blood red, spooling data that cannot meet.

Slump.

Total cranium collapse. Sanity in passing doffs his hat.

I’m going home.

No one can hear me but
I can still remember you.
I wait here
On the shores of the future,
For how long I don’t know.

R&R

2008-11-12T15:57:00.012Z

Today, I was a boy of sleeping clocks in reverse,
time hands pulling down into slumber,
oxygen lack and thick superfluous autonomy sink my eyelids as my
mind peregrinates out the door.
Limbs slump
limp slip
lost in cotton patterns and thick polyester dream
fractured semblance
ephemeral minute
rotating hands to hide expressions on an ageless face.
It feels good to emerge from nothing,
to lie
and lay
and layoff of life.

The fall of all

2008-10-26T14:52:00.003Z

Autumn days dry up too soon,
falling like burnt auburn leaves as they always do,
leaving their shriveled husks disintegrating
under piles of tangled memorial junk.
I wander home at night and get lost in the glare of streetlights
and the eyes of passing strangers
none of them knowing how I can see how they look at me,
the way my vestigial form grazes their primordial brain.

The clocks take me back an hour
To a time when I felt brighter
A time that is now weary and wild
fading in light and sound
into vapidity.
Blanched white fingers struggle with buttons and zips
Of tops and ties round scarfs that bind
Anything to hold me in, hold me together
while Frost bites at my finger tips and whispers in my ear:
‘To yield with a grace to reason,
and bow and accept the end
of a love or a season’

Running late

2008-10-15T17:28:00.009+01:00

I love you is only
A Hollywood affectation
An otiose promise,
Figurative.
Like a cat stroked backwards
Stick your ass out
Put it on the line
Just make sure that you
Get out on time.

Café Noir

2008-10-08T13:12:00.000+01:00

A cigarette at 5pm, a coffee a bit earlier; a group of words in the pauses of the day, followed by a sight and then a deep thought. Green tea in the morning, a glance out of the window and a prayer for another day. A kiss in the quietness, a big thai dinner on Fridays, a beer and wank to help break the routine. An unexpected hug, a casual smile, a sweaty game with colours and clothes of different tones and frowns all around the act of the actor, theatrical atmosphere as my only protector. A long hot bath and single square of dark chocolate, a Smiths record on repeat A rough casual fuck, filling a hole to fill a hole, an eternal emptiness never satiated. A cigarette again, this time at any time and a coffee to help a thought in my head to rapidly run away...

Penned In

2008-10-07T14:09:00.000+01:00

I can’t write myself in italic ink
as the nib loses the point
the wit is never sharp enough
to spell out what I mean to be.
I can’t cut out in paper shapes
by slicing them from the page
scissored indecision means gash
is lost from bladed document.
White sheets are never deep enough
to hold my chasm thought,
they can’t absorb the dripping mess
they cant withstand the weight.

Deep Cut

2008-10-03T02:17:00.000+01:00

cutting out is harder
than cutting around
but I’m not sure
I never am.
because it never was
what it needed to be
and what it wasn’t
was all it ever was.

Penguin Canard

2008-09-24T17:30:00.001+01:00

I had often scowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it palpable
As I knew it would be, the dreaming spires
And pearly domes, carved cotswold stone
All reflected concisely in punted waters-
Not knowing then that Malley perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have sunk
To a meddler, thief of dead men’s thought
I had read in books that art is an infection
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In their ignorance the vision of myth. You are still
The black swan of trespass on ecliptic waters.

I hear America Spieling

2008-09-23T21:18:00.000+01:00

your only time is an open mouth Caligula
waiting to speak its present day vernacular
the yawp shits out in laser-jet diction
singing the American experience.

your eager ears beg the confluent prick
geographical waxwork model hypodermic
multiplicity that divides in difference
in levelled term of state unites.

I hear America screaming advent carol song
vanquished thought cut by sermon tongue
lunar ticks Pandora’s box of spatial exploration
yet solemn and silent Alps never intervene.

Throw a punch

2008-09-02T00:10:00.001+01:00

punch would flow
down open throats
from clenching fists
liquid lickety-split.

mouth would throw
punch down u-bends,
words down pharynx
cant help but spit.

Crackling clavicle.

2008-08-27T20:21:00.000+01:00

wanting. beggars attention.
a spare kiss please;
those minutes have been missed.
count down in liquid measures
lay your livers down to rest.

I can play at waiting
dressed up in numbered outfits
adding up to equal negative--
not me. xerox attack.

then you came with your unwanted bus
drop
clavicle smash up with a bus stop
broken bones are nothing when you’re drunk.

roast dinner. sunday pig blister-bubble crackled on monday.
underwear: funday best.
forget me nots not enough, but bed knots and wound sticks-
around for the light to fade and the penny to
drop.

Rêverie

2008-08-15T14:43:00.000+01:00

hardly keep my thoughts in line
perforation of space and time
from torn knotted shadows
to synaptic blackout
I need shelter
so I stand in the sun

a sweat, a jolt,
I wake up and find you’re gone
you’ll discover this is no dream
languid is as real as it seems
sleep images seam unstitched
morning sun melts into dust

hope is a welcome back
memory phalanx tapping on glass
winking from lights of London's stars.
umbrella’d umbra hides paused
skinny figure in the dark
face a shade of dream.

Mad as a hatter.

2008-08-14T18:54:00.000+01:00

The quicksilvers dart around on the bath mat around my feet as I sit on the toilet in the evening. They are exactly the same colour as the grey slate floor tiles and I only notice them at night as they scuttle around in the artificial light of the overhead 100 watt bulb. I've seen three of them at one time so now have established that there must be a family residing in the cracks rather than my previous observations of only one of the little future pods. I named the first one Freddy Mercury as not only did he look like the elemental silvery seamless liquid, but he glided gracefully across the floor in a suitably metallic, robotic fashion. They are something reminiscent of the flying machine in 'Flight of the navigator', only earthbound, mute, underlined with plenty of scurrying legs and far less troublesome. I've never seen them before but now I've discovered that they all seem to be living in my bathroom.

E: Have you seen those silvery bugs in the bathroom?
Me: I know! What the fuck are they? I've never seen them before.
E: Yeah me neither, they look like mercury.
Me: Yeah they do, they kind of move like it too. I like them though.
E: Yeah me too.

I've grown quite fond of them now. I always look out for them and enjoy studying their little movements, each time trying to spot more to get the number up to four. Careful footsteps are needed as to not squash them, they are obviously endangered or something as i've never seen or heard about them before, and just like fish, I know bugs. Maybe they are trying to repopulate from the safety that my bathroom sanctuary offers, or maybe they can only survive here as the slate tiles provide the right exact shade of grey that is needed to match their silvery backs and give them the perfect camouflage habitat. Ive tried googling them to no avail.
All I really know about them is that I am glad they are there.

Two pints of lager and a packet of love hearts.

2008-08-13T02:20:00.001+01:00

Its 2am and drunken wailing gibberish comes sailing through my open bedroom window, the one above the door to the balcony that is always open because it has to be operated with a stick with a hook on the end as the window is too high up to reach unaided. I'm always too lazy to get the tool out of my wardrobe so the room often gets icy cold during the night, the duvet gets doubled over and feet are sandwiched between pillows. Any warm bed-building tactics seem less taxing than the actual act of clambering out of bed and walking the few feet to the window. Silly logic really. So as this drunken slurring comes in from the usually quiet street below I instantly think "What an inconsiderate asshole...people are sleeping..I could be sleeping." So I go to look, I see a stumbling man on the phone then I begin to make out the words coming out of his 8 cans of lager mouth until they piece together into a love song. The drunken idiot man who I hated only but a moment ago is singing a love song to his lover. I'm suddenly touched. It was my preconceptions that made me angry, it's not like i'd actually been disturbed from my sleep. I now saw him as some modern day romantic figurehead, drunkenly and unknowingly changing my perceptions as he staggered past my window and back into the night.

Chrome splashback, retroactive flashback

2008-08-06T00:11:00.000+01:00

Sitting on aluminum chairs and brushed chrome tables with gays on rooftops. Same old sexual terraceists. Sipping on white wine spritzers under moonlit, fairy lit, sky down spits.

Talk of loving sex and sexing up love and life and age and how you'll never be happy because you are too "happy" in another way meaning you can't procreate. Can't nurture, can't teach, can't pass on your legacy, can't have someone to care for you when you're old and don't know what can't is and when there is no-one to lift your legofftheseat.

Worth it though. Money, penthouse, chrome in the kitchen, sharp corners, sexy floating steps, cream carpets, death traps, lots more chrome..no crayon on the walls, right? Stainless steel means the painless is real.

I only eyedrink the pint in front of me as I have to watch my figure. Six packs are needed to make sure you can find a man to love you within the clean white walls of your pristine chrome penthouse...forever. So you're not alone. And you're not alone in thinking that, or thinking you're alone. Muscles don't last, they make good fishing hooks though, flie fishing I think they call it. The drink tasted bitter anyway, but a deeper, stronger bitter than just in my mouth. It ran along the back of my tongue and right down my throat reaching every part of me. A steely bitter, a mouth and a future full of metal.

You put your whole self in, your whole self out, do the oki koki and shake it all about.

2008-07-30T19:44:00.000+01:00

The silver screen once said: Failure isn't an option

I can't really remember where I heard it though and I know i've heard it repeated countless times over, it's probably from a war film. It sounds suitably militarian. "Failure isn't an option!" they'd say as they lunge over the parapet. It's very Alan Sugar. Failure, in life and war, isn't an option for me either....

I have 2 options :
1. To win/achieve/and any other synonyms which are of course not really that synonymous with me.
2. To not do it at all.

I used to think I was lazy, and that the real reason for not applying myself, or switching my internal wit switch from..um... stun to um.. kill was because I could never really muster the drive to achieve my full potential. I've realised now this was always an illusory set of smoke and mirrors that I used to fool my brain into thinking that I just couldn't really be bothered. I was hiding from myself a crippling fear of failing. If I didn't apply myself fully then of course I wouldn't achieve my potential, but at least then the reasoning behind it was because I didn't actually give it my all, rather than going at it full throttle and coming last. I can't think of anything worse than giving something every inch of my being and every ounce of my ability so much so that I have almost given it my very self, my whole not hiding behind my own excuses completly exposed totally true self, but to then not achieve my goal would destroy me. That just screams at me: "you are not good enough." Not how hard I tried, or how much I applied but actually "YOU" as a person.

Do I just carry on playing life half heartedly, half ass-edly, cheating my mind and my future? Or can I take the risk and actually go for it, throw my whole self in and hope I get the whole effectuation feat out?

I don't think i'd be able to catch myself if I fall.

Song to the siren.

2008-07-30T01:22:00.000+01:00

Sometimes i'm made of songs. Of words and lines of melodies stuck together with sticky tape until it makes something that resembles my life. A picture of me painted with musical notes, copy, rewritten, a laser burning a line, cutting a groove, burning a hole. I'm a mish mash of sound bytes, of 120 giga bytes. Of I dont know how many love bites. Of all the things i've ever heard, seen and felt. I'll be *my* phonograph to play *my* favourite album back.

But how can I get back on track?

The most precise, brightest little light reads my every thought and feeling in raging red bursts from the coded sparkles of a shiny silver disc. I'm thinking with my ears and hearing with my head as it sings from my heart to my heart, criss-crossing then back again. I skip, rewind, play that same fucking track back. I sound like a broken record. Maybe I am. It still hurts when my heart misses a beat

Mother nature wears prada.

2008-07-22T01:57:00.000+01:00

Birds shoot in the air above at the speed of sewing machines, stitching up the gaps between the patchwork cloud cover by sealing away the taupe blue skies with their pointed needle beaks. Scintillating clouds appliqué over the city skyline, and ruffle over the shoulders of the horizon. This seasons style, the fabric of the day, meticulously hand-stitched by nature coruscate on the catwalk in the last rays of the sun’s spotlight before being finally hung in mother’s wardrobe at the end of each day. One of a kind Couturenature Gaian outfits sealed away never to be worn again.

writers (building)block

2008-07-14T20:08:00.000+01:00

Point with the pen and let your head flow till the end

Shut up your ears and speak with your fingers

Let wings of words unfurl and fly to the page.

Tear up the road, page up the tear

Tear up the eyes and let it flow till the end.

60 seconds till dawn.

2008-07-03T23:46:00.000+01:00

It is sixty seconds till dawn. Only one minute until the sun splinters across the skyline sending shards of gold into my eyes. It is not very often that I'm up at this time in the morning but whenever I am it's when I feel at my most hopeful. There is just something in the air that is almost tangible, a feeling of endless possibility and of countless prospects that almost condense in droplets on the window pane, the light mist of future refracting the sun's morning rays. But this feeling of possibility is somewhat confusing as there is so much that could be done, but the question is where do I even start?

Thinking about ones future path or position in life is often very daunting if not completely unfathomable but it is something I need to try to do, especially at the stage I am in my life where it is important in order to find some focus. We can't just sit and expect the future to completely fog up the window and write us notes of encouraging direction, like how I write messages on the mirror for my flat-mate after a hot steamy bath. It's just not that simple. The future won't make us, but it is we who must make our own future.

It must be just swell to have fur, walk on hind legs and dance with the dogs. To be an animal, inhuman and to only think in the moment. To be able to appreciate that single moment and not to think about everything in relation to what has happened or could happen and compare it with these things. To be able to fully grasp that moment with both hands, appreciate it and then let it go again. Of course memory has its advantages in being able to treasure those cherished moments of pure unfaltered happiness but that's only when you are capable of controlling the trans-historical relations between them. To be able to live unhinged by fear of the future must be utter bliss. But we are not animals, we are lateral thinking human beings and so must find a way of acting accordingly, of embracing the future, negating our worries and living for not just the present moment, but the moment passed, and the moment when that sun bursts over the ordered rooftops and emmerses me in complete momentary imminence. The horizon awaits.

The 8:15 to Modernist.

2008-01-17T01:11:00.000Z

Travelling on the tube, it is Modernism morning rush hour and T.S.Eliot's words resonate like rhythmic word pictures in my cloudy early morning mind. The train is jam-packed, filled to the brim, and suits periodically dodge and duck the sliding doors. Silence is riding in my carriage too, like every morning, I can hear him hum the same old tune over the clacking of the track. There are faces facing faces but not a word between them, with freshly clean-shaven jaws clamped shut so no words can drop from their mouths and into Ipod plugged ears. Inaction to interaction means a greeting fails to slide off the commuters tongue and into the smile of a surprised city receptionist who's eyes are glued with printed ink to the world outside her own. We can nestle into each others arm pits through Holborn and stand-up spoon each other past Liverpool street all the way to work but a mental connection isn't a destination on our tube map. And so we travel mute, each to our own separate compartments until we alight at our destination as a hushed "excuse me" slips from our clenched lips and drops unnoticed to clank around our ankles on the dusty floor. Nothing more is ever said because talking to each other, interacting, connecting isn't the done thing now is it?

We simply can't have that.

Lost for words?

2007-10-19T03:04:00.000+01:00

In recent days i've read in newspapers and seen advertisements for a television program about a documentary suggesting that 1 in 5 primary school leavers cannot read or write properly. I rarely watch the television anymore, let alone the news, but this really shocked me. I am mostly indifferent to newsrooms perpetual splurgings about war coverage, political injustice, and terrorism etc. Its all the same to me, it lacks any real relevance to my life and it's all been said before. The Iraq war to me is just a broken record, a bad one at that. Like a dexy's midnight runner's 12" with a huge gorge violating its intricate groove. This hit a nerve almost as much as someone who suddenly decided to play me the glitched record would.

As an English literature student the idea of being illiterate scares me more than anything else. I value my comprehension and utilisation of the English language more than any other of my character traits and find it difficult to comprehend life without it. Maybe i'm too far removed from the norm, but not being able to appreciate the beauty in language, expression and communication for me is just too unbelievable to imagine. Beginning life without the possibility of appreciating the allure of poetry, or communicating with people in a way in which is higher than a basic level must instantly set one back indefinately and quite simply prevent any possible social mobility. Almost supergluing one into their 7th floor council flat to once again begin the tragic cycle. A "Tragedy" is exactly the correct description in my eyes. But I don't believe its the educational institutions which is to blame which seems to be suggested everywhere, schools have curriculum, offsted, and of course educators are instinctively convicted to try to teach and nurture. You just wouldn't bother to become a teacher if this ethic did not sit well with your soul.

It's the parents. You cant force a child to learn, it needs to have the right receptive mindset otherwise its just as good as teaching a brick wall about the transcendental quality of Yeats' poetry- only this would probably come to a higher degree of fruition. It's the responsibility of the parents to provide encouragement for learning and teach the values of commitment, in a time in which these children need a figure of leadership and direction their parents are the only ones who can set the correct example. From what I witness and overhear just walking to and from destinations during the day I really do fear for the future of these kids. Do they even have any glint of hope?

The serpent spoke this unto me through gilded light and lunacy: If any man have an ear, let him hear.

2007-08-21T19:01:00.000+01:00

I've reached a point in my life again when I feel that blogging purely for my own personal benefit would prove to be useful. I once did but then stopped when I came to realise that I was no longer doing it for myself, but using it (livejournal) as a way of communicating and networking in a similar way to how I use my myspace account. But I don't want that. That's not what it is about for me.

And so my fully fledged adult life is only just beginning in written form even though I feel i've lived so much and through so many polarised existences. Its high time, high tide, to document it.

Recently after a week long grueling search I found a wonderful flat whose deposit has been placed and will soon to be impregnated with all my belongings, my life and eventually my memories. It's strange to think that I won't be living in my place in Mile End anymore, which despite its many unsavoury elements, i've become to love. Although living here has seemingly been the cause of much attrition- it has also been my home for a year and has helped me to realise that a home is really what you make it. But a new location means a new start which is always exciting and its wonderful to be able to experience another area of London which I haven't had much contact with before. High ceilings and fireplaces also keep me happy too. ;p

I'm also hoping that the change in location will mean a change in my outlook on things. I've recently lost sight of why i'm here and what keeps me happy and I need to find that again. It's time for my dreams to put on thier work clothes and stop being dreams any more. Motivation is what I need. And so my second university year encroaches and I plan to really concentrate this time around. Although I got a 2:1 for my first year, I know I can do better, and I know will do better. If I want to achieve my dreams then I really have no option. I need that 1st. Not coming 1st is not winning afterall.