Thursday, 9 March 2023

Spin Rhetorica; or Grin: or If I Were Called In

 

If I were called in to construct a belief system, I should make use of birds


A codified catalogue of values and full-grown whole known lurches by invisible churches at intuitive angling in the rivers of life hath no need for shepherds wrangling sheep


So, all references to flocks you can keep


Construction is rife


Animal husbandry needs no wife



Gerrymandering the boundaries of my and all other fairweather constructor’s endeavours will be key


But not to the door of anything you’ll ever unlock, push open and pass over yond threshold to see



For instance, a detailed and constricted double-side printed instruction manual for re-defining the act of praying from being down on your knees to climbing up there with the choirs in the trees


Copse junkies


Mansed in the higher branches 


Swinging around like monkeys


Brother, please! 


Make a wish


Just don’t get me started on the fish



And while the thought-train remains unbroken and by the same token;



If I were called in to construct a new multi-dimensional transport system for love, that we might better project compassion and peace and devotional service across the velodrome of all communities, I would make use of maps


Good old-fashioned Ordnance surveys, bear-baited, torn and heavily annotated by oily Grammar school pupils from seventeenth-century market towns or whenever Gutenburg first got them out en masse to the hallowed gowns of Merrye Olde


You’d have to think like Chaucer to be that bold


And my international love highway would engulf most of the Euro-Asian land mass plus the sexier portions of the Florida Keys, slim seedy haunted hubs of Tokyo, chunks of Rio for the carnival slam, the North Pole for impunity, nay forgetting North Korea for Single-Hearted Unity 


Take a minute, this here I am building is an inter-planetary road so resist the urge to goad


You rogue! 


Hey hushen up because now it occurs


And not too soon


If I were called in to construct a miracle 


I should make use of the lonely moon


That she might instruct me on how better to be present 


High in the eye of my mind, slung low in the sky 


Virginal, soothed 


Unmoved


Pure as the driven


Resting, ready to shine at any given


Every night she sits above the city in my window


And lets go of the past


Moving into the now 


But how?



I'm not one for doting on poets


Wac nerds


And yet


If I were called in to construct a time machine I should make use of words

Love is for the highway and belief systems are for the birds


No need to up sticks from the ‘hood and move way out in the boonies


To be present


The moon is good an’ all


But she has a dark side long and tall and lacks drive, and just reflects everyone else’s light


Dressing up like day, all night



Begin


Where to?


Where to begin?


Loss is the hardest thing


I'd make a case for weaving sounds


Worsted warp and shoddy weft in leaps and bounds I sit bereft


Unwoven words: the yarn is left


See Silas Marner's grin


Spin


Make rhetoric


I'd make rhetoric


I’d make rhetoric spin


I'd have you see each word as is


Sent to Raveloe


Naked thin


Alas thin words grow high and wide


With Flying Shuttles, they collide


And fall back down to earth as fabric


Worn like an echo on skin


If


If I


If I were called


Ta dah!



If I were called in


..


gK 09:03:23


Sunday, 26 September 2021

Mr Night Sky, or Appetite


The whole city is exhaling 


Hissing like swans in earnest


Amp’d to the acoustic echo of cloistered coastal caves 


My ears as if muffled in seashells new upon the beach


Cold from the abandoning tide, glowing warm with the energy of longshore drift



The biggest collective sigh of relief: ahhh...


…..and relax


That hollow-bend noise we make in home crowds at the match when the awav team suffers a near miss 


Getting away with it  



And wrapped in a clarity that informs the piercing silence with her shrill metallic urgency


Ringing out campanile vibes (the thing about anglophile scribes...)


Or, coming up from underwater: the instant your ears clear


Or, when they un-pop as the landing strip jumps up and the plane wheels unfold themselves beneath your actual seat


Present and expanding


Out of the bag 


Let loose


Bounding in to fill the inevitable void of natural pressure deficits 



Live music events: that sound in your ears the morning after the night before


That follows you around like a host of ghosts gone haunting 


Can you conjure it up?


Yond comely jail-break swoosh?


Rare as my land-locked lovely when I was a pirate sailor


The caprice of infinity: her lemniscate lullaby grooves


The pulp-scudded mist that rises in summer off hot city streets in the steely aftermath of a hard-hammer rain shower: how the flagstones sweat to catch a breath; tongues hanging low like workhorses ring-fenced in a shrouded mesh of coal-hot steam from the workhouses


Take a beat: we need a moment to regather lest we never shake free of this jungle lather



Ahhh 


Listen up now!



My night sky is a blue darker than black and offers up to me a neon majestic trembling jelly of city lights


Green, yellow, white, red: the photon codes of altitude 


Low to high as I take her in


Dimmer, populous, converging and twinkling at base like gaping acres of oilseed rape


Peppered with rows of uncanny green-for-go’s in the small hours of urban freeway emptiness; the lush hour


Clinician whiter for brighter as we move skyward: bigger-piece-of-the-pie-ward


Powerful red beacons at the top; non-negotiable bastions of impression



A kingdom of light I am being served; and up to me too, for I am above the entire giddy feast, or seemingly


How can that be?



My night sky, taller than cliffs and wider than sunsets, is my waiter and each evening I sit at my desk in my concrete serious lounge and turn hard to my right 


Up he steps from below, silly as clowns and palpably nervous


Shaking like that 


The incompetence of novelty? 


He’s hardly new to the job; I should know


No, it’s not the fear of the L Plate driver 


It’s the pure simple raw giddy-ness of so much life so tightly compacted 


Who’d dare to contrive her?



Wound


All year round, down the second hand and back up the minute hand of all the clock faces in every faceplate tower of every town hall from here to Nepal


The all-at-onceness 


The very now of it


The forested nuclear impact of modern cities that only residents and hoteliers know - day in, day out 


Not your here-for-the-seasons and business pitchers and dirty weekenders: revellers sans maisons


We who constitute the bulbs of essence



The rampant stow-away stash of being; when stars collide and chemicals stream


Vertical columns: the upper floors: the wide windows and great fireplaces; the marble ante-rooms and gold leaf chambers in teal satin with views of other countries


Oh, the curvature of the earth; we didn’t let that stop us


More comprehensively earthward - the neat buzzing ‘hoods


Stacked decks container-like, primmed and trimmed full of Chinese goods


Why not just sail them up through Suez and Panama, pile them high on street corners, cut out doors and windows and move right in: what's with all the quaint unnecessary transit?


Scandi-style elevated roof barns and post-modern what-the-hecks in Dutch boatwood and galvanised steel


Somewhere between trick-turning underskirt lechery and the grateful atheists revenge: architects being creatures of god so all this but some slick smoking gun proof of His divine treachery


Mazy parks and densely jumbled districts that arc and stretch and bend and loop back and overlap to create an intersecting dialect of light


Such brilliance, relegating the broad acres of the dark fields


Pushing even the regent realms and the old squares of swagger with their halls of high dudgeon into the silhouette pastures of moot


Lonesome lamp-lit lordship lanes


Dull witches


By day, the calm and green heart


By night, dull itches daubed and mottled by beanstalk freaks 


Their bevelled-off levelled-off lines the upshot of CAD software glitches


Blazoned images in gilt and glass



Ahhh


Do you receive her siren greeting?


An illusion fluid and filtering - if not for the time-being fleeting


She was a song that imploded and this is what you get now: the non-sound of us, grinning wide and wiley and loaded with the ifs and tomorrows of mass potential


Ensemble modernia


I intuit the colour, shape and cry of her twisted upper-echelon privilege only because I am implicated in her projects


At the wrong side of her tracks


I am a piece of her 


I am her witnessing joy from within and as such, I get to read the energy



So, just as the entire city is exhaling, I inhale, lips pursed and deep through the nostrils with both force and longevity until my diaphragm is a dome fit for bursting


I ingest and analyse any number of exalted glimmering, simmering cubes


Each piece clawing like cats with the centripetal fervour of in-crowds 


The riches of avarice


A dangerous, sugar-spun shot


Riven, if you could pull her apart, only in the very singular insecurities that we conjoin to make waste of


Brimful and almost too much to contain, like blackbirds in a pie, disappearing upward into the dusty quizzing rafters so quick after the cut


Were they ever really right here at table with me just now?


Those birds?


I squint up through clouds of descending pastry and cobweb


Are some things really possible?



Anyway, I always accept the wobbly offer


Always 


For what am I but life itself, not so much pulled by the magnet of species toward this massive winking icon thing, as a part of the thing that pulls?  


Dancing forever to the piper’s tune and hungry to devour any course, of course


Any time 


No starter 


Skip the sides or bring them all


Let’s get straight to dinner, Mr Night Sky 


Wheel in the fun


Elbows out, head down, use of hands permitted, no talking, there’s a job here to be done



I’ll pretend to scan the menu in haste before plumping for, once again, once more, the implausible honesty of Everything Is Illuminated 


Dish of the night


The gourmet a la carte 


No need to ask 


I’m predictable as dripping taps


Same seat, same time, same small-town ceremonies 


Up she comes


My jet sorcery eyes dilated


Gooey and wondrous as newborn babies 


And tonight Matthew, I’m gonna be …… Ta dah!


Blinded by the grinding glare


Out of genius rhymes


All fur coat


Good times!



I am an animal designed to track physical movements and so my eyes stare forever, adjusting and refocusing through the very noise pollution they address


Feeding on the endless friction, like hunting hounds pulling living meat from the bone with glee


Animal as me



On and on I go 


Further and further and faster and with an eerie largesse into the ocean of lights


Into the deep I’m on dizzier heights


A moth to the flame most nights


Murdering it 


Wolfing it down 


My tapestry of proof-of-life reflections polished off with the relish of northern industrial appetite


You see, we are appetite: you and I 


Plumes in the velvet night


You know that, right? 



At some point mid-feast my waiter doubles back to plant the quality enquiry


Yes, Mr Night Sky


Don’t you worry at all, now 


And thanks for asking


Believe me: it’s more than satisfactory


If, I might add, scarcely deserved


Oh boy, am I being served?  



Hey appetite, you’re mine!


Alas, I retain a perpetual rain check until the effluxion of personal time




gK


Friday, 30 July 2021

I Recapture The Castle


Something didn’t drop down out of the gaily heavens 

All cotton-bud creasy and perfumed with angels and wrapped up swell: just for me

It was more heavy-laden and started like a guilty thing 

Peppering my soles with old heat from the dark hearths of Hell that bequeath the city street 

Consuming the ground beneath my feet

It was eerily aligned and personally designed 

With a bin chute of malice intention

From this height things look half alright 

At cloud level even the dodgy parts of Broughton are a cute jumble of orange triangle roofs with eaves 

Can I hear horses hooves?

Those leaves

And garden fences snuck into a dense green belt of tall English trees 

Swaying in an evergreen breeze 

Elevated elegant seas

You can’t see the street level state 

It’s all tree tops and slate 

And the upshot is a tidy sideline in the reverse calumny of a calm that doesn’t exist 

Yet I’m looking at it 

From here, open-handed 

Down there, a clenched fist 

It only makes sense when the colours all run: it’s sewn into the storm-blown sun 

You’re drilled like a tool

A copycat fool 

We all are 

We hardly ever write hard onto the pad or type deep into the screen devoid of the sheen of fear and the hum-drumming relentless concern to do well

What is that? 

What if it were to just go straight to the tyre swings in the forthcoming dell or the Hell that came up at the start?

What happens when we ditch the cart and ride on? 

Well, for one you won’t be bleaching your heart with societal acquiescence 

Cheap addicts 

Easily bought 

Loyalty persisting 

So caught up in the need to impress that we don’t catch on to the fact we are caught 

Talk about perishing the thought or, heaven forbid, the untaught unsaught adjunct thought that we should not have been bought like we ought 

Just keep your voice down and solemnly raise your cup

At this rate we’ll wake ourselves up

Quiet writers 

Crite and righteous 

Not quite riotous

Disconcertingly difficult to assemble more than eleven of us eating into any one space at one pace 

The low darting dog is chasing its neverwhere tail 

And the yellow cross box painted wide and large across the tarmac collecting rush-hour queuing cars under racks of pulsing tricolour lights is where I start and you end and my mind is a place I can point to and all curves bend 

Hackneyed on the A to Z 

Malfunction Junction

Once, I captured the castle

I’d lay flat-bellied above the main gatehouse and listen through the murder holes for portcullis gossip

I’d swim the moat after dark without drawing the bridge before counting the stars in the silky grey Milky Way ridge by slow-strolling the south-facing battlements

I’d sing love songs up the garderobe to make the closet smell of rose-petals

And I’d steal father’s loudest rock n roll amp to blast pops and jazzes and ragtimes and heavy metals

All down the motte from the base of the bailey

Hardly ever when I was writing

But when guests were present and usually in the days leading up to a full moon, daily

Since those distant lessons in love, I learnt something about purpose 

If it’s gone you can’t go get it back: you have to go get it forth

Even if until recently you lived with a focus and direction and intuitively creative connection of a qualitative depth and breadth that had hitherto set you and everything you touch alight 

Ablaze 

Huxley’s antic hays 

And Phil’s long lion days that start with white haze 

It’s OK

It’s just the laws of base alchemy

It’s Chilean pine valley nature and her monkey puzzle ways 

You cannot rekindle the fire 

You have to go back to the wire 

Sometimes with purpose, you have to go get a new one 

The old one’s not taking a time-out 

It’s gone 

It’s not coming back and it’s not for rehire 

It doesn't matter what your purpose is 

It matters that you have it 

It doesn’t matter if you achieve the targets and goals that are set out within the terms of your purpose

Failure to achieve is succeeding as long as you walk the path that, looking back from the end point and only much later, you will call failure – that you do so walking tall, clip-heeled and spring-stepping and decked out in the decadent velvet garments of authentic objective, bellows-proud values and real freewheeling feeling

Mission-fuelled 

Walking toward something 

Buildings for canvas 

Michelangelo perched under the ceiling

I didn’t paint the thing because I needed to, wanted to or had to 

I only painted it because I tried, he cried 

But to run around just going through the motions when things don’t make sense anymore

When the exact same fruit that gave your life so much contentment and fulfilment at root is not enough anymore

To put up with that and just hope that things get back on track? 

That’s not even dreaming

That’s demeaning

Times are when an old purpose shuffles surreptitiously aside 

Still breathing just needing a companion, or needing leading

Bowing from mainstage and falling into the wings

Commanding you to take charge of things

Your job now is to apply rich viscous brush-strokes of bright gloss over what formerly depicted the finished matt ceiling of the Sistine but now functions as the regulation beige undercoat in an SME reception area with an OUT OF ORDER vending machine on an industrial park brownfield site off a B road somewhere just outside Swindon

A primer 

Reinjecting purpose with colour to make it fuller by giving it cohorts 

And demoting what once was brightest to duller

What task could be finer?

I broke out of my thoughts

I locked myself away for five days and nights 

I wasn’t depressed or down 

More like a marathon meditation

A mission

Staying home to get out of the town of my looping cognition

I’d sleep from about midnight to midday and on the Tuesday I didn’t get out of bed until 4pm 

I’d been awake since mid-morning with all the windows yawning wide open enjoying the biggest pulmonary vertical tower summer barnstorming bars of rolling blue thunder and bolts of electric lightning and deep-rinse fingering sheets of rain 

Laying in bed looking up at the low sepia-print ceiling which is so sepia-thin-ply you can hear birds walking on the roof of this old sepia highrise tower that stands on a creepier hill that felt creepier still and the hill and the tower even higher in the pneumatic shrill of the acquatic drill that fell finer than millstone flour with Newton’s gravity downpour power 

Now my castle had shaken awake to more than a gentle merrily-down-the-stream row-your-boat swaying like a ship going around the Horn in a sightless forlorn type of scorn

Right at the top 

Twenty-four floors and I’m king of the castle and in the firing line of the lightning bolts that now come through my windows horizontally 

Angry gods with twitchy purple laser guns

I loved every second of it

And after the storm, an empty rectangular box of off-white calm, radio-tuned and long-wave frequenting a dial-in beguilance;

 

The dial-in beguiling violin silence of slighting 

Violence a heart-string 

Violet the sighting 

And soon the stinging truth doth swoon the sleuth

The vilest siren made off with the light in a sling of soothing

Stolen

Smiling

Unmoving

But then she was back in a whip-crack and all at once frightening

Lips blood-red and eyes whitening from bold cobalt blue bolts of lightning 

When the storm had gone for good, finally

Me too 

I had

It brought what was left instead of me back into the room

And the space where I had been illuminated with grace and sheen

Ever so slightly but forever

I stood on the threshold of my perception gate 

Back in the liminal space 

And I knew it at once 

There was no once 

It was askew and raw and out of time like a sing-along wartime rhyme 

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, boys, that’s the style

I was not so much somebody else as one body else entirely 

Lifted and gifted and excited with the potential of a new project 

All ready

No longer looking ruefully and sheepishly at their projects 

Your stuff

Jolted with that lick-o-paint fresh anticipation of one’s own new youth

Here now newly appointed

Name. Badge. Station 

I’d been sulking like children about not having children for about five years 

All victimised and stampy like a baby without candy 

Singularly failing to focus on the fewness of my wants in favour of the cheap extent of my possessions

Stupider still, refusing to see Cupid on the sill like a whirling dervish with her posse and their portable, potable take-away ditties of possibilities

When you receive, you are alive 

But only when you are giving: then and only then are you really living 

Five years 

Off-kilter

Refusing the possibility of love and misinterpreting have not for cannot 

A miniscule huge perspective swing 

Looking out

Neglecting in

And that’s only consciously 

Probably longer 

Maybe forever in the deeper chasms of truth that weave and embed me 

In the damp oily garage where under parking ramps they had cobbled me together 

Or the orange heat of the coals of the ovens of creation where I got baked

Not so much a problem as a slow-beat dread

It’s a first-world problem

I’m not hungry or shaking with fright or dying tonight

I solved it by recalibrating the lens 

And the best bit: the I that did it? 

I’m dead

My subtle shift of vision from the haves to the have-nots had stolen upon me some dark night and groping like a stealthy changeling had nudged my world-view out of focus, therein executing a transformational task 

The socially-distanced terrorist bomber, hands clean, safe space, no mask 

On some down-and-out mid-week slow-blues cheap booze no-news bound-along nondescript day 

My devilish muse with a ruse had etched over my blue skies with an attempt at a permanent grey

It certainly hadn’t felt like a hassle

Breezily facile 

Yet, out to the east where the yellow birds feast

And higher still, at the top of the hill, by the astle

I had lost sight of my castle

From this height things look half alright

Out north, some townships take me back

To orchard fields and cobbled streets

There, Lancashire with Yorkshire meets

Where Mossley milltown Dovestone greets

And Uppermill’s

Tame Pennine beats

I think of long-lost childhood seats

In Bagshaw dell for summer treats

Her Pollyanna browbeat bowers

We are the current of attraction

I am the emptiness

My body the vassal

And when I re-flood my soul with purpose

Which bull-horns the fuel pipe for the ignition stamp

Returning a discharged concoction of nitrogen gas to the rotating lighthouse lamp

And so projecting that dull persistent reliable stationary detectable old-fashioned flash

Of hope and a coil of long rope and a dash of dystopian brash to all the long-lost salty sailors out there on the black high seas

Who can not cope

Hitherto sinking

At them, winking

Replenishing purpose

Washing their mouths out with warm hopey water

Defying the fear they are surplus

Then even before I re-open my eyes

And with every fibre of my being unwise

Before even the very next breath I take

Or the release of the one I am holding

I am the emptiness

My body the vassal

I recapture the castle








Thanks for reading!

we are one

Spin Rhetorica; or Grin: or If I Were Called In

  If I were called in to construct a belief system, I should make use of birds A codified catalogue of values and full-grown whole known lur...

The House of Words

The House of Words
built like a novel

She Travels Through Books

She Travels Through Books
the green light girl