be you drunken ceaselessly

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.
On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.
And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:
"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

-- Charles Baudelaire

cameo cafe observations. part 1.

Affected hand gestures. lattes. Stripes and too short fringes and always, always, the half pint. Full pints are masculine and don’t allow for explicitness in the arms and fingers while drinking. Full pints are heavy and wont to spill on stripy trousers.

These are the mannerisms of French girls in bars. Or the Spanish? They left before I had the chance to discern the accent, but suffice to say they were of the attention affected vowel sounds style as opposed to the hardlined digital electronic consonant of the eastern European. It was going to begin as a tale of people who had been sitting in the café for three days straight now, a story of all the things they had seen and done in this time and of the infinite stream of words and judgements which had been formed, pressed out, mollified, nullified, reiterated, trembled and decided on, once and for all. It was going to be a metaphor for life. But they left five minutes into us watching them, before the first paragraph of the rest of their lives could be completed. Wandered straight out of this narrative without a care in the world for its favoured directions and stomped off into someone else’s tale. But we shall press on regardless. The grand story must be told, and if its characters are fleeting, well, so much the better. In some ways that's a metaphor for life too…

So: they could have been sitting here for three days solid. Gesticulating at the barman (square glasses, fringe, art house cinema barman) for endless beer refills. Half pints do not last long. They storm in and out to the toilets, captivated by their own gestures, the flare of jackets walking through the crowd, always too much black curly hair and lipstick.

They don’t stay sitting at the table for long. The movies are waiting, wet streets to tramp on, a dozen cozy windowed cafes to dash inside, filling the cheap cigarette air with the first warm flushings of cheeks, then a trainlong rattle of inane and fundamentally important narrative, words of epiphanies, yes! important so long as the hands keep moving. Chin up. Nico poses to the ceiling. A particularly interesting light pattern spilling across the roof perhaps, a sterling excuse for coy.

So where are they headed now? The eternal question. They swept surefootedly from this mental image picture, hands smashed deep in woolen coat pockets, still glowing and glimmering faintly from bright lights and warmth. The feeling they have upon expelling themselves from the front door is everything, an early evening wet pavement foreign city tramline feeling, this night could well be the rest of your lives. There may be jazz or salsa, thick plumes of cigarette, café spun revolutions, your soul saved by the PA system, and definitely, definitely sticky floors.

The Day in Bed

I wake up late, convinced that today I will spend the day in bed

The bed is filled with an infinite supply of pillows in varying sizes
a feather duvet
a torn-covered book documenting the rise of punk culture
in the US
in the early 70s
and beyond.

there is the spilled remnants of egg fried rice with too much soy sauce
ground into the duvet cover like dried blood

there are classic alcoholic stains
and sticky patches

the pillowcases are colouring a sour autumn yellow
in corners which have seen
faces buried
mouths open
gasping drooling snoring dreaming


In this bed I have drank endless cups of tea
read the collected dog-eared works of Dostoyevsky
and taught myself to fly around the thirteen moons of Jupiter.

I have died a thousand fiery closed-door broken-stair black-eyed deaths
I have swigged supermarket wine at dawn,
at dusk
at 5am.
whispering the secrets of the universe.


Today I will stay in bed until the light stops seeping in.

I will spread the windows wide and listen to the cluttering
of recycle bins
the inane afternoon swearwords of neds
car doors which open and close

I will peer towards the neighbours empty windows and wonder how they are spending their days
treading the moist October pavements
and I will think about roundabouts in children’s playgrounds
queues in brightly lit supermarkets
traffic attendants whose pages smudge in the rain
trouser hems which soak up puddles and spend the rest of the day
expelling them around ankles.

Things which do not concern you when you are in bed
with the infinite pillows


Perhaps by the time night arrives, pounding on the windows
like a motel room whore,
I will be tired of the bed.
Perhaps I will pull myself out of the liferaft and take a walk outside,
with the rain and the noises and the nighttime and the magic
or perhaps I will turn over,
tug covers
fall asleep
and take a trip to the eleventh Jupiter moon.

metaphors

“it’s a metaphor for life”
she said, gesticulating at the
///////
I was tired.
sleepy with the eternal dimension shifts from the
- literal to figurative to metaphorical to actual -
dance
we were undertaking.

I could not comprehend why the scissors with the broken handles meant more
than being unable to cut the sellotape
or why cutting sellotape would be symbolic of
___
in all its stickiness

sometimes i still think about the mathematician

The mathematician was on the train formulating differentiated equations. His mind was twirling through realms of integrals and display register number, popping up like one armed bandit cherries and fizzling past. He was not paying attention to the screech-stop brakes and the stale faced commuters, the frayed advertisements for dietary supplements, travel insurance and open university learning courses. The mathematician was bored with the mundanities of people and life. He was abstracting his existence into a number based paradise, where his only interactions were with logical form. He felt the thrills of the infinite quivering through his cord clad thighs, as he scribbled lines of eternal proofs in the dissolving pocketnotebook. Elsewhere, crusty businessmen evaluated buttocks in pencil skirts, gum popped, the Sisters of Mercy screeched loudly through headphones and the elderly conductor crushed his way through the centre aisle, clawing out his wizened fingers for tickets.

I wish he wouldn't come around here and try playing my guitar

He picks up the guitar, twiddles pegs
Strums a few half-hazard chords with an expression like a
congealing tv dinner,
smile dissolving in glutinous concentration.


I don’t like him looking at my guitar like that.

jumbo kalamata olives

She is sitting at the bar, eating jumbo Kalamata olives
They are slick with herb infused
extra virgin
olive oil.

She sucks each one like a religion, a tantric workshop, a yoga class. Her mouth is slow and wet and open, lips like a Salvador Dali wet dream. A surrealist platitude to moistness. If I was more confident, I would approach her with damp paper napkins and offer to sponge off the dribbles which make her chin glisten in the candlelight. But instead, I sit at my table, sip whiskey, clink ice cubes round the glass.
Adjust my bag discretely across my lap.
She takes another olive to that mouth.

I start to create fantasies around the olive. They are unrepeatable, and involve frequent references to ******. I imagine feeding her olives slowly on her oil stained mattress, pushing their greasy flesh into her loose tongued mouth. Spitting the firm stones into an empty gin glass on the bedside table.


The manager is looking at me like I just spat on his wife.

tonic water hipbones

We sit on too-low barstools.
Concocting dream speeches and ideal moments to toss out, chewed
and scrappy on the sticky bar
pooling in clumps among the beer rings
and scampi fries.

She is waiting for some epiphany of thought
her eyes scurrying round the room,
seeking twitching idiosyncrasies to steal and weave
into her monologue
the wonderous tale of our lives.

She is trying, desperately, to appear interesting
her hands noisy in their head-high gestures,
vital,
body juddering with certainty and the third vodka lemonade of the evening.
thoughts sparkle briefly, fissure and die, lost in looped jukebox noises
and thick cigarettes
they leap frantically from her lips, then
- moths at Christmas time -
batter confused at a million shiny lights

I would like to make her stop
smudge fingers on her lips and explain
the true pleasures of her company:
the tinfoil shiny smiles
tonic water hipbones, glowing in uv
and those cheap cracker toy eyes

But I swallow my lips, knowing she would not appreciate
ruminations on her ass
and grinning body.
So she continues to speak, wave fingers, concentrate
spilling puddles of inanity
in the smoke plume air.