Some People Go Out To LA And Never Come Back

rolling over Manhattan Beach in to Los A in to L A X

touching down in the desert city among the palms and sidewalks and lore buried deep in myths of quotidian riches to rags yarns

some people get out to the metropolis of engels and never get back

some people are moviestars in the walk to the muesli bar

some people get out to LA, get out to the next village, frequent parishes that never see their type

they

trapeze and vault the universes of their mind

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At Sedbergh School 38 Years After The Last Time

38 years later on a sunbreezed afternoon in June

i come again to Sedbergh School in the Western Dales

38 years after the last time

when playing cricket for LRGS

and packing my bag along with the pads and bat and gloves and box a 4pack i drank

as i waited to bat or maybe after getting out after opening as from year 1-5;

16 years old about to leave LRGS

school as school over

and i walk around Sedbergh School this June day

see the pavilion precise how i recall it

as if 38 years - count them - is 38 or 3.8 seconds;

and ruminate this::: all the stuff lived since being spilled from home spilled from schooling out into our maniacal existence:::

what are the chances of the life lived these past 38 years being lived the exact same way - same experiences, same people met and missed and etcetera etcetera - if i was back in the pavilion, 38 years ago, 16, drinking the beer, and about to live the 38 years again???

i pass the youth of this Sedbergh School of this day of 12 June of this year of 20 and 26 and ponder when they are 54 or 62 or 43 or any age if they will get haunted within by a deep mourning for all the days vanished all the laughs vanished forever - the days of this strange thing which is characterised one way as

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All I See Is A Vision Of All The Days I Will Never See

horizon of falling castanets

pharoah sanders soul,

a 3 day stroll from north eivissa to south along the old tracks

lemon salted thoughts of saxophone dreams of courtyard blues

and i all i ever see is a vision of the days i will never see

as the blue oceans swim with the cerisecoloured fishes

and small black cups of coffee brim with the intent of yestercentury and

a sadness wails silent

you are alone in the crowd in the multitudes in this circus and the hours are yours and the hours are unwanted and the hours get written down in pages for others and the hours are a ball pagès dance for water on a rock in the Med

and you gotta run towards the volcanoes of your life

flee for the pain that kills you each moment:

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And When You Are Old

and when you are old

recall how i loved you

How Many Killings You Forget

how many times you been lit up?

how many times you lit up a person

how many killings you had you forgot?

how many kills you administered like a haymaker to the temple that sends the lights flashing through the patsy’s brain before the darkness of all engulfs?

take a gun to the head of all you’ve BANG!BANGED! and take out the bullet you placed inside when the bone shattered, ichor centrifuged;

remove the nickel and lead like a surgeon sent from the heavens to cut away your pain

scalpel your soul

remake your heart outta pinkflowers of the longgrass of the meadows rumoured to be over the hills, somewhere that-a-way yonder

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I Found The True Taste Of A Chilli And It Was Like Sinatra Came Round For A Cup Of Tea To Tell Me The State Of The Weather

eggs in a morning done scrambledwise and coffee as black as the endless goodbye and

sun scrawled and scribbled from a yung un’s crayons as true as faerytales in the hot months and i lived for a time in an old cheese storage house in Lucerne, Switzerland, and the rooms were walls and the rooms were woodfloored and the rooms each took a woodstove at centre and i sat in my chair by the fire in the long weeks of that winter of two thousand scribing poesy and publishing short stories in anthologies and sending poesy to tiny publications in the U S of A and pondering how i kept meeting myself

each

time

i rose

each time i dreamed of dreams i would never dream

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Summer Rains Be There Pour Moi

summer rains don’t forget me

i am running for you right now

The sun as the world reflected. Pic: Paradisio Publishing

Watch The Sun Head For Noon/Watch The Sun Head For 00.00

he rose when the clock showed 3 or 3.30 in the A.M. and stood in the dark of the kitchen while he brewed a pot and waited 3 minutes and took a cup and the pot and went and drank the java on the terrace in the cobultorange gloaming of the coming dawn and the sky at midrange showed the first wools of clouds that faded as the light came on as if these too were welded to the firmament alongside the stars and a moon that receded and with the day a burnished sheen he set out.

which was to walk the village out the village up into surrounding country until he reached the meadow where he lay the backpack in the longgrass and took from this accoutrements for fire and breakfast and from a stand of trees at the far end of the meadow got branches for firewood and built and flamed and fanned a fire and fashioned from three of the branches a spit of a rustic aesthetic and fashioned two hooks and positioned the ends of the spit either side of the flames and from the divers supplies for his repast took a sizeable chicken purchased from the butcher’s in the village and speared this so it was centralwise on the spit to which either end he placed the hooks and he took two small cages from the backpack and in one cage was placed sausages and the other bacon and black pudding and these got dangled from the hooks and he set about cooking.

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Attack The Sentence, Attack The Yellow Roses In The Garden

wheel out the chariots

buff and sheen your angelwings

take a 3 day week

fuck it - take the whole 8 days

stride out along the high street like a 7ft Napoleon

chomp ham hewn at the butcher’s on wholemeal granary English mustard slavered

pickle your days

for

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Pep Guardiola Blew Kid Paradise A Kiss

it was after his last game as Manchester City manager,

in the press conference i asked, ‘everything the last week has happened in a flash, might it hit you later, Pep, say in the Maldives, drinking a pina colada, that you’ve left Manchester City?’

‘you will not be invited.’

‘thanks.’

laughter. a pause.

he may have felt bad, he didn’t need to, he said, ‘you don’t like the Maldives, you like…’

and El Cap pistolpunched hands to mime energy, push-push-push, this his take on The Kid during a past decade (Juy 2016-May ‘26) of verbal sparring, jousting, fencing, a certain kind of fondness that is a written down in a particular annal of the world which can be particular to all.

i told him what i like.

said, ‘i like house music.’

the briefing moved on.

then: those hacks who clubbed together to buy him a favoured bottle of rouge - Sassicaia, ‘23, £299 a pop - went out into the mixed zone,

hangers-on following,

and,

as we gathered and presented the plonk to Pep, he thanked all and he saw Kid Paradise standing at the back. humbly. respectfully. deferential. as always.

and when Pep Guardiola saw The Kid crowded out by the crowd he smiled and blew a kiss through the crowd and i smiled back

and i

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Crow Caught On Barbed Wire

it was one day in the fields

where the sheep and cows are

and the trees stand forever

i saw the bird stuck on barbed wire

flapping its wings unable to move

hung across the third strip of the twisted metal

alone in front of the skies

the barbed wire seeming to garrote

this creature of the universe

this crow

across the back of the neck and i walked up slow

and the bird eyed me and stopped flapping

went calm

and in that quiet eerie silence of the fields

of the world watching

i

worked to remove the ligature

that man made gallows that was killing the crow

the barbed wire as needless as nation states, bad advice offered in good faith, 5-day working weeks, taxes and other people’s opinions.

the bird stilled and i un-caught it from the barbs, the feathers on the shoulders showing blood and, finally, free, the crow flapped wings and

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Does Anyone Talk About Making It And If They Did Would Anyone Listen???

you can read the life of Julie Andrews in 5 seconds flat

or know it across 2 years, 5 biogs, the third hand gossip parlours of the world and the various myriad divers talkies she features in

and you can vision the East Hamptons and a 15-seater theater showing the unabridged works of Dashiell Hammett for the stage in a loop, across the seasons, in the earth’s land where the Atlantic foams across from Ireland. incessant. like the funereal march of funerals. and you might then lay down on parchment the colours of a day fashioned in chalks/pastels/oils/pencils, jackson pollock-ed

as the complete D Hamnett scribed for the stage shows in the 15-seater theatre at Sag Harbor and wonder who are the people going to take this in.

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There Will Be Dawns

there will be dawns when the light wobbles with murmurs of all known despair

and there will be eves aureate as the timelessness of joy

and there are some moments right now contained in afternoons a-whirl occurring in places never visited, never known;

and there will be you and moi and all the stuff we should have spoke of.

except:

there will always be stuff you and moi should have spoke of even if we speak of all.

songs as songs of other songs of their own songs.

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Who Has Retained The Original Joy Of Living???

run and run to outrun the storms of May

protect each other not your ‘country’

cos there ain’t none

pluck a grape from the vine ancien

peruse the social notes of folk to peruse their imagination or peruse something else common get exposed

tis always prudent to not think about not thinking

and the girl at the Corley Services Starbucks takes a look at the sled and says::: ‘nice car’

and the dude 14 hrs later in Rickmansworth at 10.31 in the A.M. has blower stuck to an ear, smoke stuck to the lower lip, other paw stuck to a jar of 1664,

his youth flown and worn by some other dude now

and i wonder when the last time he wept - a weeping wept - and hope he will do again soon

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Come In Fancy Dress As Yourself

at the security gate at Manchester United’s training base i go to tell the guard who i am and the dude’s hand comes up and he smiles and he says: ‘Don’t worry i know who you are.’

i drive through the gate and up the walled and narrow singletrack lane to parking, to the media conference of Michael Carrick, interim manager of Manchester United, the conference scheduled for 1.30 in the P.M. on this Saturday of the eleventh day of the month of April, the year of two thousand and twenty six

and i think of what i hear echoing down all the mirrors of yesterday:::

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Dreams Of The Med

i wake in the late afternoon and the Med is a longgone place, this

mirage of sun and gold light

filled with

ephemeral days of something other than life

and i look around and i am lost -

lost forever in the late afternoon

tormented by an absence of love.

no. far worse. by anti-love.

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A Square Of Ugandan Chocolate

a wave to the local farmer

under a skie of trout-herring

and a square of chocolate from Uganda - dark, bitter, 94% cocoa

leaf

and longgrass a palegreen

like a narcissus in a pond of lillies

and all logic is anti- logic by the same logic’s

logic

making this aphorism itself anti- and pro- logic

as clouds fecund with thunder and epistles from the norse gods

send down a song akin to

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Exclusive Club

you forget your best times, feelings, moments and

remember only the sadness, the grief, the defeats and the humblings

you are no shaman or pied piper you think despite reaching this far with the world another place from you

loneliness you understand and accept

like the notes of music in a melody that are novels in B flat, poems as a string of quavers playing through the blue blue night -

the best you can offer yourself is to look away from the mirror which remains a never known tragedy because

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Do All That Makes The Morning Fold And Rise And Rocket The Soul

do you want in on it?

the secret?

okay then:

take the local bus out into the country or the next town or hamlet and look at the lanes and the trees and the streets and the buildings and get off the bus someplace and walk about and see a shopfront painted this a-way and see two dudes sat on brokeback chairs on the pavement chatting and go then and take a train to someplace else and dream a dream of clouds brushed pink over other skies somewhere else, say where the monsoon sweeps south-to-north across the wondrous land of India or picture a sunset flooding a Thai island beach with cathedrals of light and when the train hits the station watch it all and breathe the air of the same air of the avatars of yesterdecade and make up a new world your way not mine and go get off the train

and

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The Hope

it’s the hope

of old photographs and film of all living high in the Goa of yesterdecade

the light in their eyes

smiles

the sun overhead a wondrous thing

the palm trees

Arabian Sea

the time gone before it is grasped

the goats and the sands and the birds and

what they are heading for

what we are all headed for

never asking to be born

what else is there than this

the gasp of it all

the sundering

the days passed and no getting them back

the way i was and the way i will be

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