Writings

I carry a black book with me wherever I go to record my random musings. Until now I have kept this part of my creativity under wraps. Here is a selection of my writings which were delivered by dreams, dilemmas and diversions over the last 40 years or so.

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In the Emporium of Light  2020

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   I exit the tunnel into a dazzling overexposed photo negative whiteout, which squeezes the iris and hums through to the core of all bodily sensation. Here is clarity. This is sobriety presented as a stalactite chandelier revolving as I move through it- the clean cut shards of moment and memory, where a carousel of ocular excitement meets with the peaceful enjoyment of just being there for the captured moment.

 

Sieved and graded
black as the colour of Saturday
and lazy as a diamond
falls in the autumn
around a stovepot of tales
from the lives
of artisans and legends
sinking in the aether
for the fairies in the swamps
a bag of gold for trading
in a life that knows no other
the board that flies to ground
like a magic carpet sketch
pulling on the critic
for a racetrack made in leather
and switching on a candle
at the start of fading night
so crisp is the ice of safety
where the lightning never strikes


Doppelganger
   I meet my doppelganger. We talk at great length at our take(s) on life. It is a conversation that is so reassuring- life affirming.

His existence is confirmation of all I believe, and holds the answers to all my as yet to be formulated questions.
I say to him, “you are a true friend". He replies firmly, “No…a true friend is one who is willing to challenge you and invite you to examine other options- one who reminds you to stay open to what you are yet to consider".

Dreams 2005

First cold pressing
   An elderly man arrives for a mandolin lesson in an antiquated room I don’t recognize as being my own. Certain ingredients, like the pine floor are familiar – less so the Chesterfield and glass fronted cabinets. 
The man has brittle white curly hair, his face thick set behind a wispy mop brush beard. He is flagging and dragging, so at my suggestion he stretches horizontal to rest himself. I then too close my eyes, almost to journey into another landscape were I not to be brought back with a crash by a sound akin to the thump of a shoe heel on a wooden board.
I inspect the man’s face. His eyes are tightly shut. A pool of ominous green liquid is collecting just below his bed facing eye, like an oily incandescent piece of a jigsaw. I address him firmly by his name, commanding him to wake up. I repeat the instruction, slightly louder: “Wake…up”.
   The lid of his uppermost eye raises with a flicker or two, and I recoil in horror as his optic muscles lose control, his gaze swiveling lifelessly towards gravity.
   A house fuse blows and we are engulfed in darkness. I fumble through black air…telephone and lightswitch playing with the pendulum of priority. My recall is numbed. A quarter century of previous addresses are flying round the room in a triumphant denial of chronology. The emergency number only invites a long wait whilst I am transferred department to department, as my creeping hand feels it’s way to a box of matches. I strike one.
   Vision is gradually restored as I will my pupil to come round to consciousness. But on the floor lies a small pool of blood next to a poisoned hypodermic needle, and one and a half bottles of extra virgin olive oil have spilt their contents, gold staining the yellow pine, challenging me to reconsider the shadowy chain of events on this leather-bound paraffin scented evening.


Le Mat au Matin 1/4/05
   A python has an alarm clock glued to side of head. Fast moving. Python escaped.
   A refectory of people of the past. I play with a previous band that has too many members for acceptance in Sussex. So I pack up and walk along the road swinging my six blackbirds on a string around my head. This live-baiting antic attracts no tree dwelling predators, so I kneel on the pavement to untape the birds replacement shirtcardboard wings which I’d prepared earlier. My friend is proud of my good deed.
   I open my case to find one leg of my spare trousers bleached with birdshit .
I borrow a white gown which doubles as a handkerchief.
   I’m expected on stage, yet I realize my shirt is at the back of the hall, behind the audience.

Frost
   The edging of an aluminium lipped suitcase is welded with the dawn frost. A discovery of whim.
It has no name on it, and has not been singled out for my attention. I look over my shoulder and it’s still ok. Curiosity bites, yet accountability is lenient. Tools required.
As usual, the street’s deserted again. If you squint through the mist you can make out the drifting clouds which are floating waist high concealing daggers.  Proceed with caution.

   A door creaks in the snowblind lane but the glove conceals the hand. There’s a code for the combination lock on your tensed to breakpoint heart which escapes recent memory. Back to square one.
The edging of an aluminium lipped suitcase is welded with the dawn frost.
I need do nothing.
If it were translucent I could just go home.
 

6
   The menu in this place is just like any other, so let’s not waste any more time there.
I sense the trees are too far apart as I struggle to join them all by rope. 
8
A poisoned heart sits in the broken gardens, coughing out the dragonflies
9
   Go and come back, come back and go and come back, come back and go.
The street has many window distractions …ratio of footstep to distance traveled= 2:1/2. Everything is here, but I am drawn to looking into an old-fashioned barbershop where is seated a well seasoned bald man. As a large needle is being inserted into the pinnacle of his scalp, through the skull and presumably into the brain, my tongue is awash with salt and the sky cracks like the gentle smashing of a porcelain doll.

Downstairs, many hands are needed on ship. The engine’s only running on three.
9B
Sometimes the surface isn't enough. We dream of scratching away the film with a rusty fingernail. 
I’ve listened to so many songs and poems that my ear waxes lyrical.
10
PostScript 
   Every night I could just dream of returning to each and every building I've lived in, each one as dark, desolate and dusty as could be expected from such neglect. An '80s trimphone rests on a nylon carpeted concrete floor number 9 in one. Another dwelling's phone harks back to four digit days.
Brittle enough to snap like a winter match I recount that world of the stalactite path under a sunrise of redwine ink. I am no secret.

The Mount
   The Dreamer goes in to the house of his childhood and sees a large timber beam that lies across the loft entrance. He moves the beam to find his third birthday’s tricycle. Over the back is the old monastery of fantastic buildings. Tall, gothic. A pagoda on stilts like swans legs:
I take you there. Through the dovecote mists our love expands as vapour. We follow a path of steaming wells.
A friend waits at the entrance preparing the sandwiches. It is dark. All the buildings line the oval courtyard.
I read the inscription on what appears to be an old schoolhouse. It was the hometown brothel.
We go back to our friend and climb a hill. As we approach the summit we see the brightly coloured beaked sheep walking past us. They are very happy to see us. There is sweetness and danger in the air. As we follow them down the hill I call out to remind you not to touch one. 

20 year return

   At the end of a room is the dark oak painted door held by fleur-de-lys ironwork that dropped a key long ago through the board cracks. The apex hangs low and you crouch to clear the hanging timbers. The still air has been breathed before- it’s the same air breathed by some who have died now. There are eyes in the eaves to keep watch on you. A window has a small tree growing in its glass and this is where miasma and memories meet. A table bears a jug and an upturned insect holds a sticky rope as a hairball cloud rolls in the draught. When you were younger you’d have been wary-scared maybe. Now there are no children’s stories.In gentle acknowledgement you realise that there is nowhere else to be and that you are the haunting.
 

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Spring .... with corrected vision

…is like a Seurat by the Seine 

Layered as if seen through a stereoscopic viewer one looked into as a child. 

Sometimes it's as if the textures of every tree are painted onto staggered flat surfaces and the sharp outlines of people and what you see within is all that they are.

Buildings burst through with eyes in their windows,

And green copper flumes form a towered roof over a balcony on stilts, every blade of the surrounding grass yields a forest.

Cowering berried branches spread like the fingers of an ageing hand.

Paris Story 2014
1
   He awoke to the rumble of traffic and high heeled footsteps on a cold spring pavement outside his window, two floors down. Courier motorcycle engines were grinding and sub bass pumping trains thundered under the hiss of buses in the city situated just around the corner.
Something wasn't right. He'd woken up this way many times before and as the picture was unscrambling itself he became aware of a tightness in his chest and a heart bearing the heavy hunting of a mistimed engine. Scanning the white cotton desert to his left and seeing his wife was no longer there, he knew he had a duty in putting an immeasurable puzzle together.

Always distracted by incomplete thoughts yet accepting his life would be this way he engineered his perceived destiny on this premise. 
And now, where the curtains hang in the room he is drawn to acknowledging that in their opaque fabric lies his protection. The walls suggest the cold breeze block structure grasping its concealing plaster as he pins the sheets down either side of his chest, lying in wait for change.

Two days ago, he was on a tube train seated next to the woman who gave his life meaning. As the carriage rolled and surged, a man's voice was planing the air; his throat enveloping what sounded like a mantra or a call to prayer. Our protagonist turns his head discreetly to put a face to the song and as he does, the chanting messenger turns his head too and for a nanosecond they hold each other's gaze. Being perceivably cut from the same cloth as the other passengers, he, at this time in his life felt well within his rights to follow the masses and ignore the man, yet was momentarily taken back to occasions in his youth when, given a similar situation, that man's face would have looked straight into his soul and invited him to the realm of visionaries -the otherworld that lay in wait for him prescribed for a time when he could find a conduit to show it to him. But now in the sober and skeptical light of later adulthood he was free to decline, knowing that naive vulnerability had been his daily broadcast in his formative years, and this qualification alone was the essence of his attractiveness to other lost souls. And he savoured this epiphany with the sharpness of a cardboard ticket in his left hand and the warmth of his wife's hand in his right.


Frank
my father’s house
was lined with crisp linen
dried flowers
pressed in springtime
and sunshine on
an acre and a 1/4
of flatland
citing wide scarletfire sunsets in vibrant summer
and porthole laneview windows
focussed on fruittree horizons.
straw and carrot lined roads curling 
horse dung fed round a village hall
with empty choirs in earblast absence..
the bells of sunday drowned
with the crumbled cliff’s clergy
of neighbouring coastline cast to the swallowing void
where saltwinds scour the memories
and a hallway of collector's relics lights candles for
the propogators of fading worlds.
A walnut tree from a distant past, aimed at the afternoon sun, dangled a rope
Where lizards could climb to heaven.

2012
   My Dad's ghost is sitting in the visible chair. Whilst two friends are talking he looks straight ahead while I familiarize him to the surroundings. He remembers our hosts and my beautiful wife is new to him. I want to make the most of this opportunity so I tell him everything. I tell him about living on a boat. I tell him how much he's been missed. I then tell him all I know about death. I am such an authority on loss- I can almost match him. I tell him how I know about the transmigration of the soul, how it is absorbed into a charging river of consciousness - the consciousness which unifies all  beings like keys on a universal keyring of eternal light. 

"Oh no" he says.."It's not like that at all".

Vailima
On nights like this, I remember
The front door skylight framing
The peering of the low moon
The cold metal veins of the storm
And the melting pearls of rain

In chairs, a couple younger than I am now
Their arms resting on split-cane mazes
Sit in all time and no time 
Their silent souls seeking capture
In polaroid tints with torn edges

Through the desolate house I float
Across broken lino past the yellow backed chairs
To see the blossom frozen and fading
Through the webbed cuts in the window glass
Casting nets of memories

And questions of what will become

Recollections and replays
of first encounters.
And behaviours, in their infancy
Craft a fabric of familiarity
In all forms 
Eternal.

River
My river twists through winding glades and laps the sloping shore
She draws my tears and melts the years
She aids me to explore

The snakelike slough is stripped from me
The bones re taught to walk
In air I cast my anchors 
to new foundations in the chalk

My river knows the bark I wear, the timber sealed within
The parched and past- fragmented roots
The heart inside the skin.
A dried out carcass takes her drink
That bubbles through the veins
She pulls the splinter, binds the wounds, draws scarring through the stains.

She takes me to the wider stretch
Before the open sea
And moving through the mirrored past
She sets the bearer free
My budding branches reaching out
For springtimes sweet embrace
And under stars she glints and glows
The full moon lights her face.


Stray dogs
Outposted and orphaned
Warning and waning or
Wanting and warming
The beach gives them soft refuge
In the Chalkida morning


Valentines Covid Daydream 2025

   As the epic stilts supporting the canvas tarpaulin are pulled away in anticipation, I see the giant vagina landing and rolling to catch and eat me: rippling and uneven, smiling, and ready to pull me in. Isolated and vigilant it knows its prey but I am free from lustful attraction here in this dream. I’m at least for this moment free of libido as the immediate future converses with my subconscious.  It patterns a wing of half an insect with beautiful swirling detail displayed in this private showing. I have become a hobby horse- a broomstick Anubis held in a cupboard of clutter- vaguely distinguishable but carefully arranged.
  Today I am invited to play ‘stick’ - a game played by moving one’s body as if hinged at the pelvis like a marionette (if the marionette happened to be double hinged at the pelvis). The game is anatomical with no sexual motive or sensation despite the required thrusting. Relief is felt from having no innards- just having the cool air pass over the empty bones. A thousand early Disney animation skeletons are joining in the dance now as the inevitable fade out closes the chapter. 
  In a corduroy crease  at 100x magnification a family sits at a desert table amongst cacti and parasols for picnic duty. It is clearly 1950s here and a tray balances on the pointed wingtip at the left hand side rear of their car. A miniaturisation of the environment is both replicated in and reflected by the cocktail glasses on the tray. I don’t know if the family see me but I see them clearly and I like the lipstick and polarised lenses that permeate the scene. A couple pull a cracker that is also a train carriage from under a tree at Christmas, and as they stare rigidly at each other whilst applying tension, summer snow explodes from the chapel, the glittering angels sparkle and fly in formation holding onto the picnic champagne corks ascending magically into the cloudless blue sky.
  A grey car under dark trees holds many sheets of paper called ‘the questions of tomorrow.’

They don’t need looking at today, which means today can stay in beautiful colour and be revisited again and again.