september

Summer is ending
Like the departure of a dozen Polish girlfriends
Leaving behind subtle normalities,
essay deadlines,
afternoon classes.

There is no great tragedy
Just as in the first breaths of June air there is no different possibility
Except that cliché old summer belief that
everything
is about to happen.

So we are taking refuge in small excitements
Alligator dreams dragged from Richard Brautigan novels
to paste upon the afternoon,
Dostoyevsky novels varnished to bathroom walls.

Oh, and we are planning dreams of buses.

These are not thoughts that go anywhere.
These are cheap 3am abstractions
which we muddle through in portish hazes,
Barely recollected plans the morning brushes away
with the thick tongued breakfast fuzz,
trying to get over the festival come downs
which splice the autumn air.

Perhaps we should put on hold our Septembers
Rest early nights and study harder and dwell in the realm of recuperation
For some other madness
Some new year
Some party where strobe lights will save our soul
and we can press our ecstatic faces against pa systems
(always: louder)
make out in darkrooms
and scuff our shiny blue satin high heeled shoes.

Until then, there is this:
a typewriter, a synthesizer, some Hegelian theory
and a king sized bed
for the afternoons.

further odes to The Man

we start questioning
the words
which last night held every secret to the universe
which we pounded and sweated into keyboards
pressing on resolute, through fields of infinite pioneer thoughts
and genius inspirations
through endless exponential tumblings of words and thoughts far faster
than our humble fingers could record
(can you feel it catching in your throat? The thought that maybe
what you’re saying is True
you are on to something
there is genius approaching in the next sentence)

well, today.
these words are naked and exposed in their size 12 fontology
blotchy and embarrassing
like daylight on the clubbers skin
no longer uv glowing in the metro morning.

so - we are deleting our life’s work
with flushed cheeks at the delusions
of literacy
we are crumpling pages for binmen and resolutely
eradicating files
we are batting the small pangs of regret
that keep flicking at our eyes

I confess:
I am not a genius
I am not a writer
Perhaps, after all, I am average
(and trite)

these are not words that can be said aloud
fixed up in the sunshine,
broken down car engine thoughts that were fucked in the rain.

these are dirty, bitter cabbage soup thoughts
which burn the tongue
and no amount of grated fresh ginger
can make palatable.

but: it is ok
we have tonight, a bottle, a laptop
some hours to dribble and burn and prosper
- until tomorrow
when the delete key returns

to the poles!

I am dedicating these words to your Polish girlfriends. To your three day gin binge hangover and the mathematician you watch on buses. I am dedicating them to secret mental allusions among friends and the great rushes of morning inadequacy we are all trembling under. A toast, sweet friends, to empty inboxes and fuzz on your tongue, to the heartfelt words slurred out at 3am which now reverberate throughout your head. Let us raise our glasses and drink once more to incoherency, illiteracy, bags under the eyes and not getting laid for three months. For this is our reality, and dear god, we are geniuses. Regardless of all the times we forget it and weep.

We must write and drink and play to the great wealth of inadequacies, the bread and butter of inspiration, the doubt which makes us shout so vehemently and so often. There is no passion and beauty in proclaiming a million times over that indeed, the sun will rise tomorrow, or YES! the earth (this earth!) is round. We live for the doubts and the uncertainties, and it is these we will scream our greatest assurances for. You cannot have passion to believe the a priori, and goddammit, what are we seeking if not this very passion? Let us take our most terrible and clichéd phrase and revel in its uncertainty of its own genius, then rip it down with confusion and begin again. Let us drink, my friends, to failure. And writing terribly, but better. Always: better.

do you still dream of buses?

Do you care anymore? Do you still dream of buses? Do you smell possibility among the salsa fumes and still believe that we are changing the world? Or do your concerns lie with sticky recycling up to your wrists and that fucker who keeps changing the garden to the way You Don’t Like It.

Are you drowning in great commonwealth pools of minutia? A confession - I feel like I am. The endless post to sort through sinks to scrub signs to make and junkjunkjunk to tidy. It may not be your junk, but the novel must wait until the desk is tidy. Creativity cannot prosper in these conditions, goddamit! But if not here…well, where?

We are busy people. We run out of time to question our purposes. But just maybe, we are skirting round the edges of something gigantic. Something we have forgotten. Something that is not misplaced till receipts and stroppy customers and bagel orders and backfired toilets and police visits.

What is it? Can you sense it in the midst of the madness? I think, sometime, we may have started with purposes in mind. I dream lucid dreams that we were working towards some common good. Some common genius. I’m not sure anymore. The bus is out of fuel. The bonnet won’t open. We are searching through our toolkits for hacksaws and crowbars, but we can’t get in. Something is missing.

There are some things I would like to learn. There is a ukulele that wants played and a midi track that needs recorded. The novel beckons from the corner, always. We are now on the fourteenth edit. It is interrupting my tennis matches and Sunday afternoon gin binges with its endless pleas for attention. But we’re running out of time. The funding application is due in at 5pm and that lady in the nylon sweater has been waiting 15 minutes already for her toasted pitta bread. These are things that need urgent attention. The synthesizer makes quiet pleading puppy dog eyes in the corner. I tell it, later.

Always: later.

It looks so damn sad.

the inadequate

I am having arguments with the man. He comes round in the mornings to read what I have written the day after I had convinced myself it was genius. He is the same man who detunes your casiotone between the recording and the replaying of it. He sneaks in illiteracy to your words and pulls out commas, he takes the sentiments of genius and spills gin stains and spliff ash on the sides. He is the sobriety and the headache at 9am, who informs you exactly how base you demeaned yourself as your fingers jabbered out nonsense, the literary equivalent of the fourteenth Bacardi breezer that induced the sticky pole dance or the dribbled and inhaled mushroom theory of life. In the recollection, it is trite. It does not posses the unquestionable beauty that a photograph could. It lacks the backbeat that makes the ‘I love you’ lyric seem pentrating. It is naked and exposed in its size 12 times new roman fontology, the too large print glaring and exposing like daylight on the clubbers skin; what glows so pretty under uv lights pulses dark circles in the metro morning.

Camille says we must press on. I like the sound of that sentiment. For we must, for shame, we must!

An endless battle is being waged with the man. We are coming back in the morning and carpet shampooing the red wine stains. We are emptying the ashtrays and polishing the edges. The crusty hardened noodles are being swept resolutely into the bin, half chewed corncobs cleared from the kitchen tables. We are looking for What Is Left. And we will gather it up and duct tape together the best bits. No doubt the man will come back the next day and prod at that too, pick away at the corners and point out the flaws. The tape will rise off and leave black stickiness underneath. But that’s ok. We have plenty of tape, rolls of it hidden down the back of sofas and in secret cupboards. We have secret weapons the man has no idea about. We will bring them out tonight, in the genius hour, and fix things up when the man is not looking. We will remind each other of the truth:

Camille Lorigo is a fucking genius.
Jane Flett is a fucking genius.

We will make t shirts that proclaim our infinite wisdom. We will varnish poetry to toilet seats and invite our friends round to record some ukulele solos. We will donate out some spasms of genius for the evening and watch it multiply twentyfold. We will find out that everyone is afraid of The Man.

We will find artists who cannot play music in public, except for the triangle.
We will find photographers who cannot put stories into words.
We will find crocheters who don’t want to play music.

They are all afaid.

FINE! We shall cry. We shall record the clackering of the crochet needles. We shall take microphones to the scratching pencils. We shall hand out scissors and boxes of wine to whack out the beats we keep hidden deep inside.

It is difficult to feel inferior when you are snipping the scissors. You do not compare yourself to Dostoyevsky. You do not long to be a better scissor snipper. In fact, you begin to believe the scissor snipping might just be the key to your soul.

So we will take the scissors, the boxes, the zippers and the geniuses in our midst. We shall bake bread and eat chocolate and custard for desert. We will let the ripples begin in the midst of the eating, and we shall watch them fluctuate. We will move off to a corner and begin discussing the origins of port, the alcohol will kick in and we will be moved to fantastical tales of sailors and concubines and STDs. We will demand to our friends that they lie to us solidly for 5 minutes and record the result faithfully, like Gods, in the corner on the computer. In the morning the lies will take form into stories, we will edit the falsities of our friends’ lives and make them flesh. We will publish them in our basement office, taking refuge in great sheathes of paper and the ever spewing printer. One of us will feed in the blank sheets, one will fold, one will staple. We will sneak copies into the toilets of libraries and the dark corners of bookshops, under the placemats in posh French restaurants. We will hire the Indian take-away man to post them through letterboxes alongside his special chicken tikka deals. We will build projectors and spam the ceilings with our words, the walls, the floors. We will be shameless in our self promotion and our belief. We will be religious converts, forcing the words from our mouths to the page, to your ears, to the world.

We will gain confidence as our ranks grow.

In the night we shall write manifestos. We shall fill them with grandiose language and ideas. Our laptops will grow warm on our laps, toasting our thighs with endless quivers of thought process. We will imagine ourselves to be taking over the world. We will hit our chairs with great arm spasms of agreement, shouting “YES! And…..” and there will be a thousand “and”s which leave our mouths. Ideas will germinate and be recorded faithfully in scribbled notebooks to be acted upon on later dates. In the morning we will read them and smile, and wonder when the later dates will be.



The great tragedy of our lives will be if there are no later dates.

The great tragedy will be the ideas that die in the morning. The ideas that the man takes away as his own. He will carry them to the furthest point from humanity like a Suskind antihero and leave them there to rot in caves. Years from now we will stumble across their bony corpses and wonder why we didn’t nourish them when there was still life and excitement in their souls, but by then it will be too late.



Still, we persevere.
Persevere.

Remember:

WE MUST PRESS ON!

ode to a mexican parasite

I have no dinner inside me. Just babies and bugs. An empty stomach all filled with disease and crippled offspring, rubbing their little fetal red eye as they inhale the fumes from my blood stream. I have not been eating well. I have been subsisting on uncooked chickpeas and cold custard. I haven’t left my bed in three days. Sometimes a tray appears on the bedside table with a small desert glass, ice cream sundae style, filled up with cold custard. I dip my sticky paws inside and munch it down. The drawers beneath my bed are filled with tinned chickpeas which I struggle to open using my teeth and fingernails. Sometimes I give up and munch on dried chickpeas instead, but this makes the babies angry. They beat little cripple fetus hands against my womb walls, and I go back to cutting my fingers on the cans.

There are kittens on the walls of my room. They streak big poop paw prints up the walls when I’m not looking. When I am looking, I tie them to the ground with bits of old string and wool unraveled from my jumpers. It doesn’t hold them for long though. They chew through the string and ping upwards like bubbles to the ceiling. Then they sit there, crosslegged on the roof giving me dirty looks. I don’t take shit from my roof kittens though. I throw the empty chickpea cans at their heads and scream expletives in rhyme. They’re quicker than I am though. The cans fall back down on my head more often than not. Once I knew a rat who chewed through a tennis ball in a drainpipe. If rats can do that, it’s no surprise my tethered kittens can break through the string. Sometimes I think about making a babushka cat trap. I would take the babushka doll that’s inside all the other babushka dolls, and cut it open. I would put the tiny kitten in the tiniest babushka doll, then put the tiniest babushka doll inside the next smallest babushka doll. Then I would take that doll, and fit it inside the next, and so on, until all the dolls were inside the big fat mamma of babushka dolls. Then I would see how long it took the kitten to chew its way out. I would do another babushka set with a rat, just for comparisons sake. I don’t know how good an idea it is though. I worry about the air inlets to babushka dolls. Perhaps it would be unsafe. Maybe the kitten would suffocate inside its babushka womb.

Like my babushka babies
Growing inside me

If there are babies inside me, at least they shall never be lonely. They will sit all day making polite conversation with the Mexican parasites that lived there before. And who will continue to live there forevermore. My doctor locks his door on my arrival and turns down the lights. My Chinese herbalist just cups me.

That’s no cure for parasites.

So I am rotten on the inside. Like a chestnut. Like a mouldy passionfruit. Like a bag of broken glass and dead spiders and the tops pulled from tomatoes. That is my stomach, with its yattering parasites, chattering away about global warming and hurricane warnings and house prices on the Carribbean coast. Why parasites would be concerned about house prices confuses me. They are happy and content with fecal matter and stomach linings as a place to hang their hat. But on they chatter, keeping me awake at night with their endless complaints.

I told my Chinese herbalist that I hadn’t slept in a week because my parasites were keeping me awake by discussing the nationalisation of the railways. I told her I was now too exhausted to leave my bed. I told her about the chickpeas and the kittens and my problems. She said
“Roll over. I need to cup your back.”

Lessons for life

Don’t forget to stir the soup. Don’t ignore the burbling of the percolator – listen to what your household appliances are telling you. It is saying; your coffee is ready. Listen.

Don’t take the retards to the zoo and let yourself be distracted in front of the monkey cage. Gorillas who pick noses and scratch crotches. This is not a suitable role model.

Don’t tolerate coffee you can see through. Never add milk. Sugar is only acceptable on 18 hour car journeys and after 3am. Tell it like it is – this is not coffee, this is weakness. Do not be fooled by the bargain of budget apple juice. Concentrate. Concentrate. There are no apples here.

Do not drink beer before 10am or after 6am. These alcoholic hours must always be tempered with spirits.

Do not leave your harmonica on buses. Even if it is still there when you finally flag down the route 37, half way to Stockbridge, there will be spittle gathering in corners from the back seat masses, chewing gum wedged in high octave c.

Do not leave your cello in the sun. Sunbeams are life’s great detuners. You will return to find your instrument melancholy, eternally spewing funeral ditties and maudlin love songs.

Do not fall in love with illiterates. There can be no tragedy in misspellt love letters. All great loves will eventually yearn for tragic love letters.

Do not leave whisky bottles in bathrooms. Do not leave roaches on the rim of the kitchen sink. Your vices are precious to you, keep them close and safe.

Do not kill kittens with your accordion. Use pillowcases and rivers.

Never read anything in bed, except the Russians. Prop yourself up on pillows with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and set aside the small hours for penguin classics. Do not cheapen your bedtime experience with Jilly Cooper or Mills and Boon. Do not tarnish the hazy middle ground between varying consciousnesses with sociological journals and periodical back issues. Under feather duvets you need great tragedy. Respect this.

Do not court notoriety in your youth by snorting sherbet fountains. Years from now you will be inhaling the croissant fumes from a Parisian baker, and still experience a burning sensation in your upper nasal passage

How to Write

Part 1.


1.
Surround yourself with peculiar items. Peculiarity is tonic to the great writer. Collect torn corners of notebooks and sellotape dispensers. Look for double ended glue sticks. Line up wine corks and bottle tops as absolutions. Sort your staedtler pencils into piles according to their gradient. Fill your desk with oversized brandy glasses, “how to” books (how to play the HARMONICA – Ian Kearey), crocheted hats and red sparkling hard candy lip gloss. Cultivate interesting stains, do not wipe away the coffee ring. Perhaps you will find the secret to the universe inside it. Perhaps it will offer you characters and situations and inspirations for Your Latest Novel. Perhaps you will find yourself licking it at 3am for caffeine energies, and burst into a new flurry of words and genius.

2.
Listen to electronica. There is no other genre. Remember – if babies were raised on electronica their brains would develop to accommodate genius faster. The electronic is the antithesis to the organic analogue thought process. Unexpected killer bird computer game noises will jolt you from apathetic clichés. When the casiotone kicks in your brain will expload new phrases. Do not allow yourself to be tugged and cajoled through prettiness and shiny words by your choice of track. If it causes a painful abrasion to your skull: so much the better. We are not here to reiterate, to spell out, to clarify. We are not here to fill in the gaps in the cacophonic symphony, shaded gradients at borders, easy listening journeys. Allow your words to be the detuned midi chorus, the agitated offbeat synth penetration. Break from your 4/4 rhythm. Utilise alarm clock noises, scissor snip back beats, bags of broken glass and electronic frogs. Do not be normal. This is not the right time.

3.
Be high. Smoke drugs and inhale music. Snort great lines of genius literature as you lie in bed at night with the Russians. (Never read anything in bed, except the Russians. Prop yourself up on pillows with Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and set aside the small hours for Penguin Classics. Do not cheapen your bedtime experience with Jilly Cooper or Mills and Boon. Do not tarnish the hazy middle ground between varying consciousnesses with sociological journals and periodical back issues). “Be you drunken ceaselessly,” said Baudelaire. Respect this. Worship your heroes endlessly and believe, always, in Greek mythology. Do not allow your plants to die, but insist they too live in interesting extremity. Do not water for weeks, allow them to see the entrance to the tunnel, gasping and choking for moisture in the air. Then flood them, watch their newly resuscitated pleasure in existence. Subsist on a diet of blue and black foods only. Become a Scientologist, a romantic, a tramp, a libertine. Pick a vice to be your good companion, and never, ever, neglect it. Nurture addictions, they are your bread and butter. Believe in the healing power of alcohol. Remember: you are not Napoleon.