The Song of the Sea

A sailor was I from the day I was born

On a ship listing mercilessly

With the salt in my blood , my head filled with storm

And my heart singing songs of the sea

Of the sea, of the sea

My heart singing songs of the sea

With the salt in my blood from the day I was born

My heart singing songs of the sea

For years did I travel this beckoning world

Strong winds in my soul did blow me

Restless I was for adventure and grog

My companions the storm and the sea

And the sea, and the sea,

My companions the storm and the sea

Restless I was for adventure and grog

With my heart singing songs of the sea

We stood once together, I recall your touch

As you cuddled ere closer to me

Your sweet cherry lips in the briefest of kiss

And my heart sang the song of the sea

Of the sea, of the sea

As you cuddled ere closer to me

Your sweet cherry lips in the briefest of kiss

With our hearts singing songs of the sea

My soul swam with angels on waves of pure love

On a voyage toward ecstasy

On a tradewind of happiness sent from above

As the gulls circled triumphantly

By the sea, by the sea

Where the gulls circle triumphantly

My soul swam with angels on waves of pure love

My heart sang the song of the sea

For a week we were lovers, my sweet Juliet

Unravelling the world’s mysteries

But every day must have its crimson sunset

As the night closes over the sea

O’er the sea, o’er the sea

As the night closes over the sea

Yet every day has its crimson sunset

Then the dark shrouds return o’er the sea

And as time creaks his weary bones, so we must go

Tumbling blindly on life’s cruel journey

A year I returned to the salt and the storm

All the while I was yearning for thee

On the sea, on the sea

Stumbling blindly through life’s cruel journey

Those months far away on the salt and the storm

All the while I was yearning for thee

I came back, though grizzled and scarred O I was

From a voyage through hellish high seas

I espied you a-draped over some salty sea-dog

Where once you were draped over me

Over me, over me

Where once you were draped over me

Laughing and kissing some salty sea-dog

When once you were happy with me

In the tavern the rum flowed, and I fell to thought

Of the ere-changing moods of the sea

And I smiled though my tears, though I was distraught

The solution smiled clearly to me

Clear to me, clear to me

The solution smiled clearly to me

Two pistol shots, and I never be caught

As two bodies are drunk by the sea

Originally a song, music by me. Flute arrangement by Russ McMahon.

Drums: Mike McMahon; Guitar: Dave Taylor; Flute: Russ McMahon; Me: Bass; Vocals: Owain 'Oz' Wright

x

Soundtracks and Sweat (2009)

 

AKA: What it was like to try and work remotely reviewing records for UK mags, whilst living in the Caribbean.

__

Here in front: My Heart Rate Rapid by Metronomy. Doctor Who noises and vocals from Carmina Burana, also known by Google and now by me as the Old Spice music. Behind: the whirr of the fan.

A taxi beeps. You don’t hear many of them, not in this part of town; everyone’s got two, three SUVs against the H-day of H-2Ohshit puddles and driving storm. And there, in the distance, behind Metronomy’s stereo call, grumbles the very soul of the sky. Something is waking up through the heat haze.

This ten minutes it’s descended; perspiration from above and now inside, a sauna sans smoke, sticky, humid, heavy. The skies have swarmed and lower themselves. There’s nothing here as gauche as a cloud; I’m within the rain now, within the mugginess and deliciousness. The sweatlines drip down my face, teary with the heat; the trees shimmer and tremble as they await what may bring them life, but what has often brought destruction. The rumble comes closer, louder, a lion roaring over its territory: it spits and the sky breaks, finally. Huge drops hammer down and the sand-strewn roads are puddle and mudful.

The advance of the beast has begun.

All else seems silent: the birds have stopped singing, the cars have stopped fizzing by, the chirping insects disappeared somewhere safer. They won’t take this one on. They’re burying themselves in anticipation.

The lion passes by. It shakes its mane and a craggled coconut nearly – but not quite – thuds down. The tension remains. Metronomy sing Holiday, Kraftwerk gone Devo, disco bent sinister. The sky still sweats; the electricity is not yet visible.

Maybe not today, says the driving densensess. A minute passes. In the midst of this brine another tune insinuates: tinkling, trite, out of kilter. Hilariously out of place, the ice-cream van’s tune shatters the moment. After a beat three kids shout and jostle for position. The world snaps back into place.

The lion goes back to sleep.

For today.

Watching the Watchers (Sex Pistols gig, 2008/9)

This one's labelled 'for Charli's book'. I don't know which Charli, or which book. 100% true tho.

BudizZegzBizlsman, geridzdownyerneg

Getting fucked-up always seemed appropriate under the circumstances. This wasn’t, after all, the 100 Club in 1976; it was Manchester in 2008. Not even Manchester Apollo, an old theatre ripe with the ghosts of hundreds of punks and pricks of the past. Nowhere near the Lesser Free Trade Hall, where Johnny Rotten and the boys had kicked off the northern punk scene with a gig attended by everyone from Buzzcocks and Tony Wilson to Mark E. Smith and Morrissey.

Nope, this was at the MEN Arena, one of those glitzy, airbrushed piece of crap sit-down venues more suited to ice hockey and Neil Diamond than green-toothed cultural destroyers. So drinking was always going to be the way to dull the pain of the realisation of the ultimate music-industry subsumation/subjugation of the punk spirit. And it also made them look, hopefully, a little less like the fat old bastards they’d turned into; a horrendous cabaret pastiche of themselves. I was tryna explain all of this to the guy standing next to me, who kept nodding his head sagely in a dislocated kinda manner. Maybe he needed a bit of power fuel to get on board the Pistols pissed bus.

Eere y’arhmate, I zmuggledidin

Then again, the geezer was a bit scrawny-looking so maybe the absinth-n-coal cocktail I’d skilfully blended on the train on the way over was a bit much. I smiled, he half-grinned a little warily

The Pistols had a bit to answer for, I told him, like that time in Bangor Cricket Club when we weren’t allowed a soundcheck for some reason and me and Trifle necked all them sleepy pills and vodka before our band launched into a set that went at about a hundred clicks a second and I broke two bass strings before stripping off all my clothes and trying to knock the PA stack down with my head a bit like Sid did in Texas really and finally running up and down a table full of S4C presenters who’d thought they were there to watch Gorkys Zygotic Mynci but instead had to look at my little winkie flopping around worryingly near their drinks. Talking of the latter…

Juzzabit man, you shure?

He shook his slightly simian head and crossed his weirdly floppy-long arms, moving back a little as the lights went down and a roar rippled from front to back of this cavernous paean to Americanised entertainment. For the next hour and a half Johnny and the gang hammered out all those songs that had got us all here, all in music, all not in real jobs, in the first place. Rotten/Lydon was nasty and acerbic but in the way that your old farting uncle is, not in the way that your fifteen year-old snotty cousin is; Steve Jones was tanned and dreadful-haired, half LA and half lager n lime.

I swigged the last of the bottle and as the last chords of the encore rang out turned to see Ian Brown scurrying from his seat next to mine and try and get his scrawny arse backstage.

I fucked off to the offy. It seemed the right thing to do.

Social Media Memories (2008)

 Again an ancient piece from an ancient HDD. I am pretty astonished at how prescient this is. Originally written 4th February, 2008.

_

Facebook.

I don’t much care for it.

We’ve lived through the home computer revolution; the internet and web revolution; the social networking sites’ revolution attempt, and it’s all down to selling things. Selling ideas, selling TV shows on demand, selling snapshots of lives. Buying, or stealing, or downloading, or lying, and everything new and changing.

But amongst this polished newness: old faces popping up.

Older faces.

This is a shock.

Old faces.

Wrinkled, and distressed, versions of those I remember, ten years back or more when we all truly were the new breed. Strange, digitally enfeebled versions of the new faces and bodies and minds and dreams and daftness-chasing goons and happy adventurers now waving croak-happily to say hello again, to catch up. I can’t be fucked saying no to it either, despite not talking for fifteen years or whatever and whatever may have happened before to sour matters, it does no harm to join in, smile sweetly and bat polite questions back and forth awhile.

But it’s not possible to catch up, not really.

Here online’s a family guy, balding and bright, and with the eyes and grin of the dealer from whom I used to buy, and get ripped off for, oddly sticky slabs of hash, when hash was good and grass was the poorest of poor relations in the pre-hydroponic days where a drought was a serious problem.

The questions I really want to ask aren’t apt; how can you distil a journey of fifteen years into ten minutes, into a couple of hundred words, or into a banter over a cheating-both-sides game of online scrabble?

You can’t, and I don’t want to either. Cause these faces aren’t the same, and neither is mine. I’m shocked looking back at the photos. I don’t recognise myself anymore. I’m too healthy in them, too full of ideas (unformed but no doubt brilliant and if you forget one, no matter cause there’s another coming over the horizon) and too full of unfocused excitement about the near-present. And the future, as I was always fond of saying, would take care of itself.

And as the baby-coddling and still-sexy ghosts of the past pop up to spam me about Musicmatch Quiz Profile Games I bleed a little because these faces regained confuse me. These pictures of the past they, and I, post are one-way vortices that lead to a worldview I can’t change and don’t want to aside from to say:

You will one day know that those days are gone, and it will be ridiculous, and you will laugh with gritted teeth.

And I know as I always knew back then that one day I would need the young faces to sneer at me and say:

Shut the fuck up, granddad, I’m immortal.

Now when I look in the mirror I can, if I squint my eyes, and my brain, squeeze out of this moment and somehow remember when everyone was alive, and everyone was alive – here and now it’s too early to expire, and too late to regret too. Cause here we all are, and these faces and rashes of return are important, vital, reminders of mortality. It gets harder, and harder to resist it, so I dive in again because all I have done so far has wasted enough time for what I have done to appear significant by sheer weight of hours spent wasted on fluff and bluster.

Tonight, my temples grow tight and my ankles ache.

Cause I know, or hope, or dread, that one day, in fifteen years of wherever-next, I’ll look back at myself through the fug of the intervening years, and wonder exactly why I was so worried, so nostalgic and so still-filled with angst and indecision, but this time it won’t be about how old I look, or other people look, it’ll be about how young we still were, and how I felt – but didn’t ever quite grasp the nuance – but how I felt so lost but deep down hoped, or knew, that this feeling was down to the fact that somehow I was on the verge of a new chapter.

The difference between the current past and the future-past of now, is that in the current-past it always was the now, and I would never even dream of fifteen years hence; but now, fifteen years from then, I am terrified of the fifteen-year future where I feel the walls closing in on me: either of finally turning coat into a dreary and humdrum stagger to dismay and broken-hearted weariness, or of wilful, ever-more-tragic lost chasing of something vague and equally wearying and sad.

I don’t much care for it.

There must, and will, be another way: to marry the flash and lightning of those pictured years with the quest to adventure, and to realise that knowing nothing is OK as long as you smile whilst you try. And to find the energy and the vitality to believe that a photo of a pint in a long-demolished pub is as worthlessly beautiful as that of the toddler in the playground fifteen years previously; that there is as much a difference between those two iterations as there is between I back then and the older right now.

And in that future-now I might, and probably will, wish for chances to chat with some of these faces, these reformed, revisited compadres, but they may be gone forever.

I wonder what version of myself I’m selling right now?

An ancient script idea from ages ago

 I think some of this actually got written but fuck knows where that is.

Obviously I was looking for something else - which I can't fucking find - but that's alright for now. It's somewhere.

Everything's somewhere isn't it. 

SIBOLS.

1. The piece starts with a Heavy Rock number, Kill’s dream of stardom.

He is awoken by all his family coming in to his bedroom one by one - his dad is supposed to be waking Kill up but moiders about his latest ‘failsafe’ lottery winning system. His sister comes in and taunts Kill into waking up. Finally Kill’s mam comes in and gives Ewart <dad> a row for not getting Kill up. She also hands Kill a letter from the dole office that says he’s got an interview with them in half an hour.

2. Walking through Bangor on his way to the dole office, Kill meets Steve and Bez who have been to an all night rave and are both still buzzing a bit.

Steve informs Kill that he’s intending to leave the band in order to concentrate on his ‘A’ levels. Kill replies that they will discuss the matter in their band practice later in the day.

Kill cops a bit of stick from some thuggy lads who have been banned from his folks’ pub, and on top of this gets a good old fashioned moidering from his old Headmaster about what he’s been doing in the year since he left school.

3. Loads of people have had the same letter from the dole and a small riot breaks out in the Job Centre, as well as a smart song. Kill manages to escape the scuffling and goes to see his Nain.

4. Kill and his Nain are on the pier. He’s knackered and buys his Nain an ice cream. We see that the two are close. Nainsays there’s a storm coming, similar to the biggest of them all that took place back in 1907. She tells Kill more of her big brother - who died when she was 5 years old. She can’t remember the thing clearly but she remembers the storm. She’s moidering because she knows she’s not long for this world. In fact she says she’s ‘going to join her brother before too long’ and says Kill reminds her of him. Kill doesn’t want her to die. She gives him a box of ashes, of her dead brother. A quiet reflective time. For the first time we learn of the Clio, a youth correction ship moored off the coast of Port Penrhyn at the turn of the last century.

5. The band are practicing in the cellar of the pub. Tensions are really coming to the fore. Kill isn’t there to begin with. Manon and Cliff go off together and say that they really will have to tell Kill. Steve says he wants to leave. Kill comes in and Fflur sticks up for him re. Steve.

6. After the practice they’re having a drink in the pub. Kill goes to the toilet and Steve puts some of the ashes in Kill’s tobacco tin. The hooligans from 2. Start a fight with Kill and the skull falls from its glass case.

There is a timesouping change in Kill as he smokes the rolled cigarette with ashes in. In the middle of the trouble the Clio Headmaster bloke comes up from the stairs. The pub is turned on its head, customers into whores, the bar suitably 1900s. Kill escapes from the clutches of the Cwchmeistr into the streets of Bangor and is taken into a whorehouse by one of the girls.

7. Kill is found by the cwchmeistr and marched to the Clio, where the riot act is being read to the boys by the head of the ship. Kill is partnered by William to clean the deck. When the two try and talk William gets a good hiding from the supervising master, more so than Kill - the master seems to relish whipping Will more.

8. A local dignitary and his wife <Lord & Lady Penrhyn?> turn up for a ‘surprise’ visit. Lady Penrhyn chats to the subdued boys and sees their injuries. Kill is the only one to tell the truth - that the master’s been battering them. Will says little and is in fact sticking up for the master.

Kill and Will are alone. Will says to keep his trap shut because it’s just not worth the hassle.

9. The middle of the night. William is grabbed by the master and made to climb the rigging naked. It’s a sexual kick too far and Will falls to his death. The master tells Kill to keep his mouth shut or he’s going to be next.

10. Back to the present time. Kill comes to his senses in the police station alongside a load of the other fighters from the pub incident. He gets interviewed by the policeman <who is himself a Hirael boy> and the message comes through that Nain is on her deathbed.

11. Nain’s deathbed. Fflur turns up to see how Kill is getting on. Kill tells his Nain the story of William’s death. His Nain starts to sing. Kill can’t take it and goes into the corridor for another fag.

12. Which of course transports him back in time once more. John, a new boy on the Clio, is singing the same folk song <The Song of the Sea> as Nain. It’s late at night. The master is telling the lad he sings very nicely. Kill is hiding. The master begins to assault the boy. Kill manages to knock the master out and rescue John, who promptly fetches the cwchmeistr. Kill is marched into a cell.

13. A fire breaks out. The master is taunting Kill. John has not returned to his bed and hears the whole conversation. John manages to let Kill out from his cell and in the confusion of the fire the two jump over the side of the boat and escape.

14. Kill is back in the present, at his Nain’s deathbed. He is telling the whole story to his Nain. She dies and the storm dies with her.

KILL: The storm’s dying down

NAIN: Fydd lot o storms yn dwad I chdi

KILL: Dyla fi bod yn iawn

NAIN: Ie. Fyddet ti

She dies.

15. In the pub. Kill and Old John spit on the Skull. Fflur and Kill hold hands.

Exit Music: Fflur and Kill performing “The Song of the Sea”.

Mills & Bozo

I was in my head again, I'm sorry to say.

I oughta not be worried about it as much.

It's only natural and inevitable isn't it.

Brains are strange. Full of chatter. 

 

- Unrequited love, love stories: have you considered there’s a reason people keep wanting to read them. A reason that people keep writing them. Keep publishing them?

- Uh. Cause people have no imagination?

- Joe.

- I know. I can’t help it.

- Hm, Or...

- Or I don’t want to help it, yeah.

- You don’t have to write a sloppy old piece. You can come at it from any angle, I would say.

- You know, I always wanted to write a Mills and Boon book. I thought that’d be fun. You know. Have one in my book list. It’d be funny. But have you seen their actual, like, requirements?

- No.

- It’s no cakewalk.

- No?

- No. They have to be…

- Good?

- Yeah. They have to be good. Fuckers.

-

once upon a multiverse

if

if she missed him for

one moment one dream one forgotten rhyme

did she still know that she could rewrite time

if she kissed him oh

if

only

if

x

-

I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to write that – poem I guess – and it never seems quite right. When I edit or write it I feel it but that’s all in my head and none of the longing or nostalgia, no, not nostalgia, that cheapens it, the love that comes back, the warmth of her, hair, etc, breathing, blah blah, breasts pushing in given and willing for more and the bodies so close but never close enough and every atom in that moment trying to pair and share and it’s not even sexual it is what is it I suppose it’s way beyond sex and some things just are if I can try if I can try to explain if I can just give a glimpse of what it feels to me when I write those words but the feelings that I can’t get down on paper – it’s like everything pixillates outside and the only high resolution is us not me not you but us a new thing from two separate things that should be or are only really correct as one thing.

All that comes back.

None of that’s in those words, is it?

Not unless someone reads it and in reading it the words which are there on the paper somehow bring back those – different, unique, individually-magical or poignant moments inside that person, remembering or longing or whatever, and those memories, those bodily memories and emotionally rising yearnings for something that’s gone forever take over.

I wish I could express things that well, so that a stranger could look at eight lines on a page and suddenly they’re timeless in someone’s arms and all that.

That’s what Mills & Boon require.

That’s what it means when things have to be ‘good’.

That’s why I’ve never managed to write one.

That’s why I’ve not done it.

I hesitated before I put the full stop at the end there.

With that in mind then let me indulge myself with the hope I try and hold. I would appreciate it if you’d allow me this one. Permit me to try and believe myself when I take a deep breath and broadcast this:

That’s why I’ve not done it yet.

JS: I posted this and didn't notice the little X at the bottom of the poem. 

I swear I didn't deliberately include it.

I'm going to leave it in even though it's kinda untidy, even though it softens the loneliness. It closes the open ending.

I choose to believe that somehow, something made it appear there.

To make the universe a little bit more joyous. Mysterious. Human.

A Ket-hole Jester’s Interface

Cyberspite redundancy, a crackpipe fire diplomacy

A buggled brainstem’s wild guesses constitute reality

Scribbled schemes amid misgivings, clusterbombs of culture schisms

Beach mandala washed away, reminder of mortality

Beautiful impermanence, a precious rare humanity

All actions have consequences, cycles of experiences

Whose holy is the holy land? How gracious is the gun in hand?

A ket-hole jester’s interface incepts the Western fash command

Dungheads dumbworms duping rotten, Luigi smashed the trolley problem

But even spirits have their limits, curse the world and all that’s in it

Mirror image man to pig to meth-soaked crawling beastly cryptid

Heathen prayers to absent Gods to call down crashing cleansing floods

Hold me like a sleeping otter washed away by filthy water

The metal spiking weir gets closer, grab me tight as we go over

All we knew has flashed on by so let’s get ready for the dive

Into delusion; cloven hoofs present the apples of untruth.