Friday, 8 May, 2015: The rain fell

This morning the rain fell and I

Shivered my right

Eye

Open.

Then the left one; I awoke

As the rain fell.

In each droplet was a poem

Of debris from the night

Fight

Done.

And I Googled the result

And the rain fell.

Puddles formed, reflecting the slate

Roof soul sucked sky

Aye,

Then

I sent Chrome off to Facebook

Whilst the rain fell.

Rage, rock-gnarled, piss-twist thistle rage

Everywhere: social media fire

Ire

Sprung.

How did this happen? Who made it happen?

Who made the rain fall?

Not I: the mournful cry on page after page

Update, helpless teary fight

Tight

Run.

Where hide these selfish evil fools

In this rainfall?

But Facebook is not life, it is a cage,

A strait-jacket willingly worn

For

Form.

A padded cell - with friends - in which to hide

Whilst the rain -

The rain -

Falls.

Confession.

Reasons and excuses and reasons to drink at home

• ·         I am celebrating Bangor City winning
• 
  
• ·         I am drowning my sorrows after Bangor City lost again
• 
  
• ·         Suzy has come back from Liverpool
• 
  
• ·         Suzy has gone to Liverpool
• 
  
• ·         I am bored
• 
  
• ·         There is really good TV on tonight
• 
  
• ·         There is nothing good on TV tonight
• 
  
• ·         I really, really want a cold beer
• 
  
• ·         It would be a shame not to pair this meal with a nice robust red / delicate fruity white
• 
  
• ·         I feel ill and am morose
• 
  
• ·         I feel great and light
• 
  
• ·         I have a cold and want to kill it
• 
  
• ·         I am nostalgic for Cayman and a rum and coke will help me get back there
• 
  
• ·         I have come back from a long journey and I drank on the way home
• 
  
• ·         I can’t afford to go out drinking properly
• 
  
• ·         I am feeling very empty of everything
• 
  
• ·         My brain won’t switch off and I want to shut it the fuck up
• 
  
• ·         I need to send myself to sleep
• 
  
• ·         It is my birthday or Christmas or some other occasion
• 
  
• ·         Asda has an end of line deal on ___________
• 
  
• ·         I had some left from last night so might as well finish it off and buy more to make sure it works properly
• 
  
• ·         I feel angry and want to hide away and blank it all out
• 
  
• ·         I hate the government
• 
  
• ·         I can’t reconcile my disgust at the world with my laziness in doing nothing about it
• 
  
• ·         I am not where I want to be
• 
  
• ·         I am not who I want to be
• 
  
• ·         I feel tearful and I want to make myself cry at nature programmes / sappy soppy family show / romance / cartoons
• 
  
• ·         I have had a really busy week
• 
  
• ·         I have a busy week coming up and I am nervous
• 
  
• ·         I am invulnerable to disease
• 
  
• ·         I am worried about my health
• 
  
• ·         I am scared that my family will one day die
• 
  
• ·         I do not want to think about mortality
• 
  
• ·         I do not want to think about the future
• 
  
• ·         Suzy is stressed
• 
  
• ·         I am stressed
• 
  
• ·         Hell’s Kitchen is on tonight
• 
  
• ·         I don’t want to grow up
• 
  
• ·         I always wanted to be a drunken flawed genius and it is easy to achieve the drunken part
• 
  
• ·         I love the feeling of being woozy and comforted by the booze blanket
• 
  
• ·         It will give me strange dreams
• 
  
• ·         It will give me a hangover which knocks out all my filters so I can produce leftfield insightful writing in the morning cause I don’t give a fuck
• 
  
• ·         I am lonely
• 
  
• ·         I did not ask to be born and I am still struggling with my consciousness
• 
  
• ·         I feel guilty that I do not appreciate life in the way I think I sometimes should
• 
  
• ·         Everyone else on this TV show is drinking and I feel left out
• 
  
• ·         I’ve had a shitty day
• 
  
• ·         Elections
• 
  
• ·         Wales fail to qualify
• 
  
• ·         I don’t know how it got there but there is a glass of wine in my hand
• 
  
• ·         Middle class guilt
• 
  
• ·         Everything else

Hasta la victoria, siempre

Today I woke up to find - somehow - that the UK has signed up to five more years of neo-fascists waging war on the poor, the weak and the different.

Life has been bleak time after time in these situations.

It made me think there was no hope.

That humanity was dead. And humans were doomed. You deserve the government you vote for.

No more NHS. Sanctions for being ill or daring to be poor.

Money rushing to the top.

Suspicion, fear, the destruction of society and the elevation of selfishness to a godlike level called 'ambition.'

And all this was true.

But then I put Elbow's ace first album on and recalled one of the several times I've seen them live. This one was possibly the best of the lot.

It was in the Masque Theatre, Liverpool as part of some kind of Back to the Bars type event. Packed out - the band was huge by then - and Guy Garvey kept trying to start singing Newborn.

Listen to it.

It's a really confessional love song,  Tender. Self-searching.

But he couldn't because the scouse crowd was making him laugh so much. It gives me shivers thinking about the sheer love in that room.

That love, that shared vibe of possibility, of sound and music and emotion and fellowship. Of nothing but the present moment, the next cadence, the shared energy of pure human connection.

It is deeply poignant at the same time; to acknowledge that shared moment is to stand outside it and, by doing so, to destroy it.

It transcends all language; these rhythms amplify and caress the heartbeats of all in attendance. At times like that, I think I understood religion more than ever before; it is implausible that people, with their failings, their farts and their falls, could ever create such beauty.

But it is true.

So there must be hope. There truly must be.

Venceremos.

I bleed words

Too limp to fuck

Went to a party

It was rather nice

I took it easy on the wine

Cause I was driving in the morning

But now I’m tired

You’re out of luck

I’ve run out of Viagra

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

Too limp, too limp, too limp, too limp to fuck

I like your stories

Don’t approve of guns

Although there’s an argument that

The police ought to have recourse to them

But in my room

Please don’t take it personally

But you and I are old enough

To remember Eraserhead

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

I could do with a good night’s sleep

Too limp to fuck

I’m dropping off

I’m very sleepy

If you like, we can try and

Have a date night next week

Let’s just cuddle

And enjoy that.

Take out your false teeth

And put them in cleaner overnight

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

Too limp to fuck

I could do with a good night’s sleep, baby

I’ll try hard not to snore, baby

Oh, sorry, I need another pee

Too limp to fuck

Yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah

Yeah, yeah

ahhhhhh

Cosmic conversations with cats: 1

Ikey cat just walked in the door.
As he walked in the door he said:

"Miaow."
"Miaow-miaow."


I heard it as this:
"I am Ikey."
"I am a cat."

I asked him:
"But how do you know you are Ikey?"
"How do you know you are a cat?"


But Ikey cat just turned away.
As he walked back out the door he said:

"Miaow."
"Miaow-miaow."

2: Stuckiness x 100

1.  Stuckiness is not present
2. Stuckiness is not an absence
3. Stuckiness is a shapeless choking sphere
4. Stuckiness is not a word
5. Stuckiness is not a blockage
6. Stuckiness is free
7. Stuckiness gestates forever
8. Stuckiness does not begin or end
9. Stuckiness is not a fight
10. Stuckiness always wins
11. Stuckiness is a black hole full of expanding deadening foam
12. Stuckiness is all light there has ever been all at once in a moment that lasts forever then is gone
13. Stuckiness has no sense
14. Stuckiness is all senses
15. Stuckiness makes no sense
16. Stuckiness is the first note of every tune in the world all at once
17. Stuckiness does not repeat
18. Stuckiness does not revere
19. Stuckiness does not revive
20. Stuckiness is irrevocable
21. Stuckiness does not have form
22. Stuckiness is an excellent basis for a religion
23. Stuckiness is meaninglessly enormous
24. Stuckiness is not a conversation
25. Stuckiness is not brave
26. Stuckiness does not want to feel
27. Stuckiness will never make a prediction
28. Stuckiness relieves nothing
29. Stuckiness re-lives everything with no meaning
30. Stuckiness is older than everyone who has ever lived put together
31. Stuckiness is as old as everyone who has ever lived, put at the same time
32. Stuckiness is the cheapest way to make an easy living
33. Stuckiness is a capitalist’s dream
34. Stuckiness is stained with itself
35. Stuckiness can only be removed by applications of Stuckiness to the spot
36. Stuckiness does not repeat
37. Stuckiness is a great way to meet friends
38. Stuckiness does not want to leave the chair
39. Stuckiness is not scared of anything
40. Stuckiness is not prepared to do anything
41. Stuckiness is calm under pleasure
42. Stuckiness is lyrically dreadful
43. Stuckiness knows all the letters in every language personally
44. Stuckiness saw the greatest minds of its generation in neutral
45. Stuckiness is placed here and admired from afar
46. Stuckiness is a catalogue of itself
47. Stuckiness wilts if you do not water it
48. Stuckiness requires no nourishment
49. Stuckiness knows all definitions in every language and rejects them all
50. Stuckiness once threw your ball on to the roof and laughed
51. Stuckiness is a cretinous wizzing oaf
52. Stuckiness can see what you do on your own
53. Stuckiness has no perception
54. Stuckiness is over there
55. Stuckiness is over, there
56. Stuckiness is willing to settle out of course
57. Stuckiness is hairy when it needs to be
58. Stuckiness is a smooth-faced cad
59. Stuckiness cannot believe in itself
60. Stuckiness wants to know where you left the last bit of milk
61. Stuckiness tenses up without noticing
62. Stuckiness is as slack as a simile
63. Stuckiness is a metaphor for and of itself
64. Stuckiness resists categorization
65. Stuckiness is dogmatic
66. Stuckiness is catatonic
67. Stuckiness is mousy
68. Stuckiness cannot bear itself
69. Stuckiness is hoarse
70. Stuckiness cannot fly
71. Stuckiness is as good as it gets
72. Stuckiness is no ambition for a growing boy
73. Stuckiness ate itself already
74. Stuckiness loves hunger
75. Stuckiness cannot be ready for a sandwich already
76. Stuckiness belongs in a goddamn zoo
77. Stuckiness was brought up in a barn
78. Stuckiness is on the pavement at 3am and you stepped right in it
79. Stuckiness is rotten
80. Stuckiness tastes like chicken
81. Stuckiness explored everywhere already and was unmoved by it
82. Stuckiness once told you the meaning of life but you forgot it again
83. Stuckiness cannot speak
84. Stuckiness is a world-changing lymph node treatment in late animal testing
85. Stuckiness pronounces it ‘scone’
86. Stuckiness is next to stuckiness
87. Stuckiness is all the holes from all the doughnuts and cheese and mints of all time
88. Stuckiness wraps itself around itself
89. Stuckiness saw the original Möbius stripping and knows the secret
90. Stuckiness has a thousand names, and all of them are the same
91. Stuckiness is a spellbinding array of superstar cameos
92. Stuckiness is the greatest gift nobody possesses
93. Stuckiness is not a soul, a heart, a mind, a body, an object, a metaphysical illusion or a concept
94. Stuckiness will sleep with you and never call afterwards
95. Stuckiness is in the walls of abandoned Soviet missile silos
96. Stuckiness has a half-life of itself
97. Stuckiness grabbed God on the evening of Day Six just before he was about to invent ‘sense’
98. Stuckiness is irreducible to mathematical cantankerism
99. Stuckiness is not a number.