olimpic flame

Between 1912 and 1945, poetry was an olympic event, and right from the start things were going to be weird, with the raging eugenics of the early 20th century permeating through institutions thought to be progressive, if only by their own memberships.

What rules were in play in this poetic performance? Did the sonnet, haiku and limerick each get their own event? Were poets expected to compose in situ or were entries prepared? Could poets be disqualified for doping? How do you even qualify for an Olympic poetry tournament?

"O Sport, you are Fecundity! You strive directly and nobly towards perfection of the race, destroying unhealthy seed and correcting the flaws which threaten its essential purity"

...From the winning 1912 entry, later found to have been written and planted by one of the organisers, Baron Pierre de Coubertin. What a fucking clown. I wonder what he would have thought of the paralympics...

*   *   *   *   *

it hurts to watch: clenched fibres, bright knuckles, the rippling and desperate grips. the grind of femur and tibia. all those guts, chugging away.

four years of going through the masochistic mangle to be spit out onto the track, mat and field. one step out of line and risk spilling out into an injured mess. grazes and gashes breaching our humble boundary and exposing its internal disorganisation.

bodily fluids have always carried thousands of words in them, so much more than the meat they animate: spit, sweat, spunk, blood, tears, phlegm, bile. they are sincere and hard to camouflage.

yet despite their honesty and innocence, i often fail to see spectator sports as anything other than a waste of time and effort. such exertion for such little material gain. then again, almost everything that's worth doing in this world is a struggle.

amber

i dont even like repetition
but it has to be
amber-amber-amber-amber

amber is the colour of static
 the colour of limbo
 the colour of are-we-aren't-we
 the colour of urban decay
of pompei

it is a gormless light
dull like a mallet
stuffy like the back of a never ending childhood car journey
made to live with rubber and polystyrene
 a midnight street
 a lost highway


amber indicates that everything must slow down
 it is petrified resin
 stale liquor and varnish
 it is deep brass horns, rings and the growing middle age

even when it flashes
 in an electric vein
  between red and green
  between yellow and brown
it doesn't glint or sparkle
but throbs muggily, like the dull hypnotism of windscreen wipes

heave n scent

this morning
the cream cheese smelled like the bad breath of adults
who used to bend down to wave their faces in mine
when they wanted to pass on some private smelly kindness,
causing me to squeam.
you know,
that musk that permeates the adult world.

then my coffee had the hint of a well kept public bathroom.
well kept in that the hint wasn't that of intrepid piss
but of the residual chemicals
that cling and radiate from 400 walls.

then the cucumber slices
(they went on top of the cream cheese)
tasted something funny.
something false and sagging.
the taste of burst vacuoles and stagnant water.

all this in the movement of tiny hairs.
a moment of bristling molecules in the darkness
of double barrel vestibules.

there is something wrong with my nose,
or else the world stinks.

across the face

should i have burned down her house instead?
would it have stopped her coming back?
or would it have been too strong?
even when it wasn't enough?
the luve that burns and bursts.

in a moment of naive emotional alchemy,
i thought i could turn this vapour
into something solid;
something manageable;
something that could have its shape broken;
be thrown away and forgotten about.

it could have been so easy.
it should have been her hitting me.
a punch between the eyes for every time i got near,
my nose gradually getting shorter,
like pinocchio's twin,
every time i told the truth.

but instead i hit her
and god i saw the fear in her eyes,
in the eyes of my beautiful girl,
for whom i arrange so many words,
and i knew that nothing would ever be the same,
that everything was lost.

i hit her coz i couldn't run away
i hit her coz i didn't have the words
i hit her coz i was weak
i hit her coz i couldn't freeze in fear any more
i hit her coz i could see it all happening again.

RIP Mr Egg (hurst street lament)

what came first; the chicken or the egg?

 it's 2012 and Mr Egg has been gutted: all the organs removed, all the surfaces sterilised. Mr Egg has been sanitised, modernised, gentrified, renovated. oh, the irony of sanitise as dirty word. no more will the sign outside hang: eat like a KING for £1.50! eat like a QUEEN for £2.50! they probably wanted to call it "perfectchickenhutdotcom!". to fill you in, Mr Egg is a long-standing chip shop in birmingham, famed for its garish décor, its mediocre cuisine, and known to everyone who has ever been shitfaced at 2am at the top of hurst Street, where birmingham's gay quarter, irish quarter and china town meet in a charming culturally confused trifecta.

 who was mr egg? where did he come from? where was he going? why was he topless and dancing around with a hat and cane? now we will ever know. and they got rid of the giant decorative fried egg that used to droop from the ceiling, threatening to fall, like an infant-school parachute, over every shit-in-a-tray recipient in the room. it's the end of an eggy era. what the actual fuck. 

 i remember being hypnotized by that giant decorative fried egg on the ceiling once when i was 14, waiting for my friend to roll a spliff in his lap. i remember thinking how discrete we were being, even though we weren't, and i remember thinking about how grotty the air must have been to turn the white and yolk of this giant droopy egg the same homogeneous shade. the rest of the place was decorated a dim but bold yellow, coordinated with a classic greasy spoon dining table set-up. The egg-ufo that stuck to the ceiling - with its ripe, comical colour from years of absorbing airborne grease - was a vivid childhood memory. it had been my favourite part of the shop, but all that's gone now. that whole side of the room, where the customers would sit down to eat their chips and saveloys and pies under the sagging egg parachute, has been bricked up to halve the shop. you can't sit down any more. you can't zone out at the giant egg stuck to the ceiling. now it looks the same as any other chicken shop, with the glaring LEDs of new management.

 i noticed all this one night after a shift at the comedy club, pouring people their saturday night pints. Mr Egg is reputable enough that an in-joke has developed between some of the comedians, urging them to crack one about it in their set. it always gets a big laugh from the locals. by the time i finished it was 3am and the only thing i'd eaten that day was a few after-work drinks, so in search of elusive midnight munch, i followed the bright lights of the junk-in-a-bucket vendors.

 i cross over at the hippodrome to the new Mr Egg, but it's just closing. the man behind the counter is trying to get rid of stock and offers me some dead battery chicken with fries for £4 and i tell him wtf and what happened to me eating like a king for £1.50? what happened to the all you can eat egg buffet? upon seeing the gaunt, sleep-deprived face looking back at me, i sympathise briefly with this man, contemplating that this is probably all he's been hearing ever since he started work here, and equally, that he probably doesn't give two shits about the drunken opinions of chip-shop devotees. he waves his plastic chip-scoop around in the air like he's trying to turn me into an egg with his fatty plastic wand, motioning towards the window that dixi chicken across the road is cheaper. i was so disappointed. that was going to be the last time i ever went in there.

 so i head over to dixi chicken and get a face-full of restaurant ventilation stink rising through the rest of the pollution as i weave between horny taxis. you can always smell when there's a fried chicken shop in the area, can't you? it's in the air - the clouds of grease. that's why it's mostly a nocturnal affair - so no light can illuminate the yellow fog that drifts through our midnight midst, filming our faces in unctuous mist. i look up at dixi chicken: an establishment that ranks pretty low in a highly competitive list of fast-food lows. i look up, eyes meeting with the cartoon hen of its logo, its red baseball cap tipped back, winking at me. adding insult to injury, it's smiling too, giving me the thumbs up, reassuringly. you gotta love that. it used to be all about kebabs, but they never showed happy sheep, i don't know why. people love the happy chickens though. it was in london i first saw this wave of fried-chicken fried-chicken fried-chicken approaching. that trendy wave burst the banks of the M25 and soon moved north to hit our brummie lack-of-shores. i consider a veggie burger so as to avoid the fowl genocide.

 as i step up the curb to get inside, a large slap-head of a security guard emerges out of the dark to hold the door for me, flexing a fluorescent bicep bangle with his I-D held within it. this thinly-veiled fascist irks me before i've even clocked the bulldog tat. as i move to the counter i know he's checking me out; weighing up what sort of threat i might potentially pose; gauging how easily he could take me. that's what security do all day. they check everything out. they watch everyone entering the space to be secured and consider who is going to cause them problems. they're usually right. that's their job. they keep an eye on things. that's what this guy was doing. he was keeping an eye on me. i could feel it.

 you fuckin' fuck, i react to his silent judgement, already feeling violated by his eyes in the back of my head. i bet he doubles up as a self-righteous bailiff in other hours, i go on, judging him back. a lot of security thugs will work a couple of different jobs. bouncer and bailiff is common combo. one of the bouncers at the comedy club moonlights as a bailiff. says he loves his job. cunt. he gets off on the intimidation. knocking on people's doors in the night. destroying people's lives as a matter of occupation. god, now it's flipped: i've half-turned to get a better look and can't stop staring at him. i'm trying to read his criminal record in the folds of his face, wondering if ever he got carried away dealing with a situation - got too excited and did someone in - having to carve them into small pieces, coat them in delicious southern style seasoning and give them a go in the deep fat fryer. maybe they're all complicit. very good, my friend. good price. lovely-lovely.

 i'm getting ahead of myself. more important than the origins of steak burgers and popcorn chicken is the question: when did fast food franchises start getting security guards? is this the world we live in? is this the direction the future is headed? to streets on lock down in case someone starts shooting up the neighbourhood in a flurry of rage sparked by a missing portion of bbq beans? or else gangs of lads start jacking family buckets at knife point in moments of desperate drunken heroism? are our binges really so lairy as to need armies of paramilitary dinner-ladies to supervise our eating habits?

 it might just be me blowing things out of proportion - underestimating the inevitable societal backlashes and projecting small-time escalations into apocalyptic cataclysms - i don't know. maybe it's just my paranoid imagination getting carried away. then again, the metropolises in which civilisation has suppurated already bear every weeping sign of farce. sometimes i think the only reason we don't already consider absolute meltdown to have occurred is because we've grown up with it. because we only live for 70 odd years - just enough time to glimpse the abyss and then pop our alienated little clogs. if that's too grim for you, another vision is that our chicken trough establishments grow tamer as our generations grows older, our kids frowning on the sleaze of our dietary choices. Perhaps in future, fried chicken shops will inherit the social function that greasy spoons once held, replacing the purple-rinse nattering venues of instant coffee and brown sauce, with cans of nondescript energy drink and tiny plastic pots of chilli-mayo.

God bless you, Mr Egg!

heat death (for Robert Frost)

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Fire and Ice by Robert Frost

Second Law of Thermodynamics

Heat Death (ultimate fate of the universe)

we are living in the most unlikely of universes,
where silver and gold are forged in supernovae,
and DNA has evolved to fight over this glittery mess.

the laws of thermodynamics are heartbreakingly sad.
the universe cannot sustain itself.
we are in the throes of a giant drift,

inexorably falling away from the light,
and into the abyss,
in a high entropy fade out.

combination lock

we used to talk of sharing a house without doors.
but now we lock them behind us.
because we have become scared of each other.
scared that we might hurt each other.
scared of what we might find behind the curtains.
dust.
a million little decomposed microscopic spiders.

it will be christmas soon.
we will wrap ourselves up thickly.
we will wear pads and grow our locks.
to protect our fragile bodies.
i am thinking of buying you a pick set.
you say you want to liberate the tampon vending machines.
a good set is about 20 quid off ebay.
and you say you want to learn.

but we don't live in the same house anyway.
or even the same city.
or even the same country.

slide it in a granny's twat

who calls up a number that precedes the words...

SLIDE IT IN A GRANNY'S TWAT

...i mean, who and where are these people?

this is not the internet
this is a piece of card with a gloss finish
and a picture
this is the inside of a phone box
where it all began
the tele-tails
the exchange of information
(inside a granny's twat)

snake bite

another drunken phone call
from my little girl blue

i listen to her stagger
and remember the mess i have made of myself
flinging shit around the walls
in those obnoxious midnight whirlwinds

she slurs her misanthropic words
looking for love in all the wrong places
all the guys she wastes herself on
not knowing what she wants
getting used and crying on my shoulder

and i try to suck out the negativity
suck it out of her like a poison
a mouth full of another guy's sperm
spit it out into a tissue
or sometimes i spit it back in her face
coz i get mad at what she does to herself
and it comes off as jealousy
or parenting
or whatever
and we argue
then we stop
and get over it.

my mother's tit and tat

from corner to corner
an assault course of crock and bauble.
trinket and trifle,
gimcrack, knickknack,
widgets, whatsits, debris, doodads, bunk and junk.

towers that collapse and crumble under the weight of their own neglect.
tiny polly-pocket worlds of wrinkling reams inside inside inside of folders.
boxes inside boxes, like matryoshka dolls.
through latin and russian - my matron and mother.
stacked into columns so tall 
they threaten to meet at the top to form arches
and forever block the sun in underground tunnels, 
fit for squinting rodents. so defensive of her mounds,
the vole house.
the house i grew up in.

when i visit the little crooked house
deep in the guts of birmingham
i feel as if i am wading through runny flab
drowning in the excess
crouching through aching arches of forgotten paper
snippets, clippings, printouts. incomplete tangents.
my mother's ideas trailing off into obscurity
to remain undiscovered until too late to enjoy.
when they will be the tatters of the dresses to which i used to cling with little fingers.
when they will absorb my eyes with her forgotten spells.
when i will have to send my mother's silent cackle into the crackle of an industrial furnace.

on the fridge in the kitchen -
that aladdin's cave of culinary alchemy -
a magnet says,
"please do not write your name in the dust"
and i laugh as i read it,
laugh with my beautiful mother,
at the bags and boxes, 
wherein one can find relics relics relics
of recipes that were never to be tasted;
like squirrels forgetting where they left their feast.
the growing bags under her eyes.

my mother is a hoarder
so i must wait for her senility,
thereby robbing me of the catharsis
of burning books
of refining volumes
of the breaking of paper chains.
till senility,
as these days most of us must
with such an excellent national health service
that lets our smiles rot before we are finished being young
and keeps us alive long enough for our minds to do the same.

on this cusp of dementia
on this line for which my mother would kill me
or possibly herself
with those pills she told me about
on my 14th birthday

and she tells me to be careful with that axe, you gene of mine
careful of this hoardom, forcing me to perform covert burials.
midnight fly tipping jobs.
back and forth from one tip to the other.
tip tip tip toeing to the windy landfills to which me must all return,
one day in a box,
to be eaten by worms and worse,
to be lost in a gust,
and blow away
blow away
remember
remember

corn fucker fucking dog

from my 3-month trip to America, titled "American Crumble and the Gluttony Honeymoon" 

More at https://gluttonyhoneymoon.blogspot.com/

after Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach had said similar things, albeit more figuratively, it was first printed, as such, in the Bridgeport Telegraph in 1923; a quote from the opinionated nutritionist Victor Lindlahr that would become a dinner table staple of which the greater part has been forgotten, namely; "ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. you are what you eat."

and so it comes to tinned pigs brains in milk gravy and deep fried butter. these things are real. i have seen them with my own eyes. can't cookies and i scream crumbling and dribbling down mall swelling "i heart attack" t-shirts. it's never been the same since it came out the wrapper. meat product. cheese product. powdered cheese. squeeze cheese. spray-on cheese, in the land of circumcised sausages and castrated dog dicks. ground up re-constitutional quote unquote meat held together in messed up gut paste tubes. intestines into intestines. this is modern alchemy. this shit has to be stirred as part of its manufacture. i cannot stress this enough. corn dogs, corn syrup, corn flakes, corned beef, corn muffins, popcorn, corn-hole. me so corny. so chokingly cheese-steak-tastic. corny and cheesy are words chosen to mean bad taste. this is not a coincidence. neither are the domesticated mongrels staring cross-eyed vacant into the twinky-winkling salt crystal stars and stripes of streaky bacon, rippling and spitting on the hot-plate. have you not noticed before? that the spangled banner is a giant piece of bacon, crisping and curling at the edges? (the stars came later in 1777). we used to eat pigs in blankets, and look where the revolution has led us - to shrink wrapped irradiated dreams. to oink and snorting slaughter house debris galvanised in glittery candy bread, sloppily resuscitated by dielectric magnetic waves. that's adultery right there. but who am i to judge - amen and awomen - when you lick your slithery slave fingers. who am i to judge when the world's richest country gobbles dog food?

as a border patrol cop told me coming over the border from canada, "boy don't even think of coming here if you aint got enough dough" ...yes officer lard ass. i can see that (wibble. wobble).

1, 2, buckle my insurance claim

a lustre for the archaic gibble gabble goose gobble babble of tish and pish rummaging. muddling through criss cross crises of capitalised condolences. whipped up windscreen verbiage and spotty adolescent rashes clash with wipers on waving drizzle days. auto immune system reflexes. wipe it up you wet lettuce. gag it up or put a sock in it. tick tock spanner flinging fantasies of shattered gears and broken disco sticks. corrugated zero-sum insurance waves for fly-wheel hip hazard operational replacement procedures. damaged systems of reclaimable cog and socket surges. hot sparks and then anaesthetising umbrella airbags, curdling on the surface with drip and drop cut cuddles. heavy retinal photon bombardment of "who-ate-all-the-pies?". too slow to latch on to propped up pudding lies. no cutlery for production line propaganda. spiraling domino singularity responsibilities. tick-tack-static-toe worm drones gnawing telegraphic downgrade options on tin foil backseats. brewing up futures of lost foundation. failing principals of fierce top n tail punch-ups reiterating the churning maybe-logic of dog-shit cement mixers. logistics, logistics, logistics. hash-tag, hash-tag, hash-tag.

cntrl+alt+del (version 2.0)

re-hash of an older text and a new article in a kind of 0-attention span mashup...

Control. Alter. Delete. in the egalitarianism of the blogroll, in the twinkling night of flashy appin' pappin' camera phones and post-hangover photoshop face-lifts, we try our hands at things we’re not very good at. contrast. the greatest resource humanity has ever know. backspace. a network of interconnection, drowning in debates of sticky flummery spewed back and forth between ignoramus and obnox with the intellectualism of a food-fight. hillbillies with computers! hillbillies with computers! that's what we’re up against! unending pages of vacuous comments, talentless pixels and the unedited duplicates of selectiveless snap-happy shoot-me-in-the-facebook profiles; worse than gran’s slideshows. a result of the undiscerning abundance of megabits. whatever happened to Bill Gates’ prediction of an efficient and economical 640kb one-size-fits-all allowance? shift. stuttering vitriol. can't hack it. capitalised sentences. google whack. the spaces in the clouds get exponentially bigger. more and Moore. tubes, tunnels, pipes and wires. cathode rays. electron guns - it all seems so retro sci-fi. internet cafe time-out. circumventing illicit words in emails the same way i look over my shoulder to see who might be listening. the walls have ears, and your screen has eyes because “don’t be evil”-sloganned google is shifty. do you remember when CCTV cameras started to appear on every street in the country? no, neither do i. our keyboards bear the symbols of a paradigm (shift) in semantics and sneaky syntax. worlds of new alpha-beta-gamma-deltas babbling codes and subliminal secret languages that i don’t understand (f#@k it). trapped in the web. try to escape, space. or maybe, enter, home. hyper text mark-up tangents. shift. 10,000 years of warfare on land, 1,000 at sea, 100 in the air and 50 in space have led us to cyberspace. "the fifth domain of military operations", that's what the US defence secretary called it. anonymous wars in a terrain that defies topography. the aethernet. i’m scared. omgwtfbbq. post-modern goldfish attention-span globalisation cults for cut and paste generation-X-Y-Z. De1337 yourself. internet protocols like impossible etiquette. shaking hands. makes me nervous. slash. back(s)lash. drowning in i-scream. promises of the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged penis possible. adverts all over my user inter-face. web 2.0 is a skynet of interactive coercive logic gates. we live in boxes. Josh Harris was right. Warhol was right. everyone can have their 15 minutes of fame and anonymity will become a commodity that only the rich can afford. fakebook, me-me-mespace, googly all-seeing eyes. they all go to Bilderberg meetings and sit next to the the chairman of the federal reserve. David Rockefeller. Henry Kissinger. ACTA, SOPA, PIPA. shift. 1,000 friends makes you a loser. so well connected. extended, nuclear and now cellular families. there's no place like home, insert, end. Control. Alter. Delete. the war is on (line).

Burchard of Worms

'Have you had sex with your wife on a Sunday?' You shall do penance for four days on bread and water.'

'Have you had sex with your wife or with another woman from behind doggy style? If you have done this, you shall do penance for ten days on bread and water.'

'Have you tasted your husband's semen in the hope that because of your diabolical deed he might burn the more with love for you? If you have done this, you should do penance for seven years on the legitimate holy days.'


...Excerpts from History Laid Bare by Richard Zacks, in turn extracted from the early 11thC penitential of Burchard of Worms.

dawn two thousand and eight

typing tip-toes round colour-blind lasagne party debris
ambiguous non-vegan limbs in the 6 o'clock lack of sunlight
silhouettes of sons and daughters
draped sheets of skin and glowing bones
ketchup splattered haribo bondage paraphernalia
plastic wristbands and rubber jewellery
cheap slinks that don’t go clink
just a sound that can't be written
non-biodegradable hydrocarbons
neon and un-natural ring
finger you because you are you are
extinct unicorns with dildos on their foreheads
like in a porn movie i once lost and found
boys and girls
what a muddle

prattle

someone i don’t know is amazing.
        a little sip of coffee.
i move my head with it,
nodding and bobbing,
mmm, yeh, yeh, amazing.
my buoyant eyes,
gazing at his shoes
        the guy in front of me.
grazing a familiar field.
        we've been here before.
with a mouthful of cud.
she talks some more about this dude,
totally oblivious to my disdain,
so i purposefully burn my lip on the coffee.
wait,
what the fuck did i do that for?
now my lip hurts.
        light a fag and chew on it.