The Wayward Stage Recording

Daily Pain (Pain Quotidien)

I’ve lost the magic touch,

and so I’m falling, crawling through mediocrity,

saying this is I or that is I, but endless.

Defined by moving lines of you,

defined by turning, swerving,

I don’t know where I’m going and

you laugh.

Don’t pack me in this box you say,

I’m not a shining bright white letter,

capital and known, I’m another,

and another,

and sun on your terrace.

I’m the rays,

grazing on your knees as you hit tarmac,

saturating in grovel, gravelling,

ending in shams,

shambles of needy calls,

into the sunken wise man’s ears I go.

“Get up!” you say and so I do.

So you look at me in one of

two ways, either dead or ray-like,

on sunny sunny terraces.

“But isn’t love endless?” – Oh, you silly silly child, no wonder you’re always tripping up.

Forwarding

Men with moustaches masquerade

The reminisce of bustle still lingers, otiose and dreamlike.

He, the other, one of many,

Stumbles along, across a square,

Armed with slippers and insanity

Through attics of comprehending boxes

Boxing in, boxing out, up

Bursting into the endless maps of now.

Time drives a man to the edge like that:

His mouth hung low, parted, disenchanted,

Listlessly, ingesting all the trivialities

One step at a time

In all its odd importance.

This square used to feel different

The sounds, the debates he used to have

His lips curled up in the glory of infancy

They are all consigned to oblivion, those hours,

Those silent films, watched on mind-screens;

A headache with pictures.

Frail hands grasp onto each other,

Their arthritis mutual, merging into one

Mess, but glad to find refuge in

Each other’s sadness, mating.

Trembling, they lie

Behind his back;

It’s all they’ve got,

And eyes flicker fanatically

In frantic endeavours to

Scrawl all these pantomimes into

His eroding mind.

The feeling is almost faded

In his legs

With their protruding violet veins

And messily pleated skin

This drain of feeling dances like

An idea, rotting around this body.

And there are herds of you

Walking down myriad alleys

In this delirious city, all with

That very same posture.

All of you reduced by age

Into chains of ants on the tarmac desert

Side by side dogs with mixed up heads,

Mixed up to be growing old

And cruising towards endlessness,

Bursting into blue.

That Mole

That mole. It bled

That night

In the room with the

Curtains you adore

“Look at the curtains!” you

Said “Look at the curtains!”

But I was looking at

That mole

With its erupting black antennae,

Fossils from its

Previous diseasing.

I asked you to come back

To bed, but

Your eyes were wide and

You stood, owling on the floorboards.

Lips taped, stricken before that

Mole – that mole that could

Eat you up, swallow you whole,

Drown you, all the while

Dribbling by your side;

Vomiting life onto

Those hips of yours.

And Google had

All the answers,

Of course.

All the wrong ones

From babbling strangers

Kept up one night by

Their own diseases in

Hospital beds,

Recovery beds or  

Death beds.

But not yours:

Yours is the bed where

We fumble.

Yours is the bed where

We’ll lie, unspoken,

Ideas strangling –

Worrying.

Sunny South Kensington

And still you wander, past Sunny South Kensington, on battered soulful tracks, I plead and plead relentlessly but cannot articulate struck by croaking distance. Limbo, I’m back. Limbo, I’m cracked, I’m creviced. Limbo, cup me, pack me into boxes, into mugs, into you. Limbo, you dreamstate, let me sleep on you, with you ,again. Eat and sleep in my lungs, bulge through arteries, spit cholesterol, cut me off, eyetight, with all that might, under luminous alleys, a mad man going through mad doors. More facepaint, cloaking clownlike eyes, sad. Cracked tooth bash against mine, I beg, bulging beauty splash dance with my fingertips again, skintight. I promised to make you a blanket of these pages, but you’d still shiver to the bone. You creep and creak, gazing from pavement’s tip, where you’re yellow. Come join me in Limbo, where the knees are sharper and the barks more acute. There’s no thump around here, no bumps of folly, but featherless webs, fishnets even, to hold us, wavering, hovering, ever-dreaming.

But, I’m blue now. I’m lagoons of it. You threw me here – why? I’m blue now. I wanted yellow, and vague forceful promises, reassuring frantic nods of you. That’s what I wanted. To eat you up and throw you up and take you up with me on rooftops to scream and scream and scream and tell them all they knew nothing.

On all these squares you dare, you dare – we’ll never go back to that café again. Or all the pavement blocks you broke my heart on, all those ones that gave us bad luck, three in a row, I warned you, didn’t I? Past the station, again, again, and up the road where I sinned once more. We went back to that place, again, again, again, we’ll conquer them all with Lego bricks remastered, to melt them leaving plastic smells of colour , to build you a universe, build us a bed, build us sheets and sheets of muffled laughter, mortal heavens for non-believers, all these things cannot – must not – exist. If they did, you broke them indefinitely like chocolate bars in Tesco’s which you thumped with your thumbs. It’s not Cordoba, it’s in my mind; there’s no such thing as time, no such place as London. CCTV caught us that time, at the back of the bus, they’re everywhere, Cyclopes eyes, once blue, once green, ever-changing, the other buried beneath beige pillowcases.  And Peter’s Street where the alarm went off, on and on and on, and back again. You punched fanatically, punch into button love, modern music box, just punching ad hoc codes. Mad, raving, delirious city, come back. Come back and gulp us down, chewing all the while, limbs entwined with herd and flocks of homeless wailers, feet bent by bluish bikes. You led me to all the places in the world, but always the same, routinely and relentless, only once did we hop on and shut our eyes tight, it seems a wretched shame – to never be so reckless again, just, here, hover hover, full of maybes, of caves, so full of monosyllables and words that make you afraid when stared at for too long, whole worlds of these words, staircases of them, tube maps pointing the way to them or to all kinds of Angels. So this is it, maybe we’ll wipe the slate clean together, on our knees, or become elbows in an old woman’s dream, in some grimy home in Pimlico, with all the other mad ones, sad ones, through mad doors. The dread shakes us alive on rotten carriages, grey, to home, where you once took me, avoiding glaring traffic angles, and we shivered moving together in frozen drama, slower and more acheful than we had once been. Batter me, bruise me, plug me into walls, tear my narcissism apart and crouch in its dent, smiling urgently.

Slabs of Picasso

They look on at you through the

Looking Glass

Illegal clicks and flashes stealing away your charcoal delirium

For they could not walk away without the grim certitude of a tangible souvenir.

Smudged cashmere lovers in nameless alleys

You Pig! You dared to forget this embrace

And we succumbed although animalistic treachery

Seeped through each pore in this pallid skin of yours

Sketchy barriers

Maniac Scribbles

Epileptic oil paint love

Meddled and mashed with

Grimy slabs of fingertip eagerness.

You must have stared and glared at them for hours

All the porous dents in achromatic skin

Subcutaneous calamity of brushstrokes

A pulchritudinous replica with divine precision

Or

Wavering

Disintergrating

Collapse

Into the sweetness of melancholy,

Pencil distress, grey or blue,

Blue as can be

And clawing through our carelessness.

And upon this very wall,

Buckets and buckets of lust at theatres

Blurred disjointed ligaments of puerile dream

We gazed and blazed, fickle as always.

You and your dainty observation

Your emaciated guests in frames, clinging on to

Scrawny hopes and constructed situations

Building blocks of yearning

He trapped you, alas.

Abashed you concede,

Prisoners in prison bliss,

We adore you

And forget you

Or can barely hear you articulate,

With your entwined outlines

Myriad pains

And Bitter longing.

You made our hairs stand tall

In their pulpy stools

Demoniac cats, bristling hairs in blacks and pinks and greys,

Clownlike,

Rapid glances of fleeting distraction, attraction

In drooling yellows.

You bore little emotion

In your asymmetry

And he

Bodiless as she combed and pulled at blackened eye sockets

In which rotten birds could or would feast once more

Electric plummeting pools of light

Carcasses of bobs and curls

Fickle fleshy brush strokes,

Blushing in their nakedness.

Worth the wait

And the envy in kaleidoscopic eyes

As poison and lazy arsonists

You sang to us in canvas caverns,

Unfaltering.

Cults of heartache and disgust,

Almost choking on these chunks of pigment

Pools and pools of watery ideas and

Foolish thuds of paint in your

Voracious talent.

Crowds of people to pick apart

Limb by limb

Pantomimes of pedants

We must comprehend at once

Each crack Each crevice Each snarl

Of these seas and the wretched Loathing.

You adored it all in all your disdain and repulsion

These beautiful slithering flaws

Upon which you feast,

Canvas caresses

Of Eerie Warmth

Valleys of White

And incoherent figures of melancholy

Nonsense as it should or shouldn’t be

We could never tell.

Ad hoc absurdities shovelled into

Sterile rooms

Lay us all on the tarmac

Skulking around like silly crustaceans 

In these alleys of insanity

Poltergeists of shame

Manifest of the strangers,

Frustrated glances in instance of creamy anguish

You saw it all through creeping squints of

Pure Bliss.

You presented us with this bizarre company

Pointed counts

Who despised us all

I care not who he is but how he stares with such angular anger

I adore him already in his selfish cynicism and disdain

Fascinating, enthralling intellect

For he for one knows just what he sees in all its bitterness

And sepulchral tones,

Obscure shades of discontent

Opaque freak shows in hazy frocks

Frantically scrawls onto cards, walls, etched into mind sets

And frozen from cagey café seats.

Smokey pedestrians

Clamorous citizens

You succumbed to this lustful documentations

Snippets of breath

And Torment.

Inky foetus,

No thoughts

No association

Just you or I

In further fascination

For you all feel different against the

Ridges of his page,

All aching through this host

In your wretched mortality,

Erotic as all poetic though

You shivered at these unhinged loves

And sketched to your heart’s content.

Symmetrical scenes of wisdom.

Insignia of art,

Number 26 or 27, I haven’t the heart to know

You just are

In your agony and fantasy and lascivious freedoms

Stupors of honesty and adoration

Dalliances between features

Marriage of beats of sense of

Face after Face after Face

Who knows anything these days after it has all been and gone

In all their humanity and

Blueish similarity,

Any medium you could find.

Glorious jungles in which we basked

Apart of course but nevertheless

Amongst the shores of madness

The futile and flimsy lines of senseless  darkness

Amidst the folly of

The peck peck pecks.

To hell with all these delicious victims of inspiration

They are immortal now.

The Man Above.

In media res,

We halted,

Sermons trodding on our

Sodden toes.

We became futilitarians of some sort

And barely could pronounce it , we

Joined sects, bemused

Consuming vegetables in their masses

And chanted before stricken statues

Fully clothes marble megalomaniacs

With jejune eyes lit with

Lust and fascination,

Rocking to the celestial dirge of

Madness.

Slots for your wealth,

Pour in your hearts.

We

Paved the roads with parasites

And processions of gun fire

We felt tall on our stools

In self-indulgent solipsism

That ruptured all reason

And knelt before martyrs and cheats

In which we wholly believed.

She bowed before you

And we followed

The villagers watching;

Widows in black,

Ragged teeth glaring

Urging us on

To the sound of the bells

And unrhyming mantras

To which we devoted our nakedness.

Poltroons,

Recoiling from all that bore sense

Heads held low,

We marched stodgily in stupors of phantasmagoria

And devoured watches, clocks and myriad crabs

Which skulked along the tarmac

Otiose and dreamlike

Spitting fiercely at Darwin’s fantasies.

You always lied to me.

You said I’d come to my senses

Faith, but in stringless puppets

Bleak and ignorant

Ingesting tales of supposed wisdom

Secure beneath rooftops

Of shrieking institutions

Ridden with lies and fantasy;

You said somehow it would make sense.

Floods of formaldehyde

In third world countries

Disgust and despair

And rotting consumers

With protruding ribs

Gasping and tubeless

All dreading the daylight

Stealing oxygen

And masking motives

What about those tsunamis

Of Moroccan lust

Which surged

And broke your bones

In alleyways of truth?

Creeking floorboards of shame

Manifesto of the poltergeists,

Wailing in plastered bathrooms

And a child’s scaffolding with multi-coloured seas

Dancing with idioms

In grubby bathtubs over sheens of limescale and disgust

Where you pumped me with rhetorics;

A natural born cynic.

They entertained dalliances

With the forgotten

And spoke softly of erotica,

Lit up with childish bed lamps

Swirling and illuminated

Telling stories of tiny princes

And senseless miracles

Conquering the world of

Dreams and the barren land

Where we told truths

And slept through wars.

You always lied to me

You said he was watching.

I was sick to the bone

With vegetables.

Class Clown

Big man, you’ve broken my back,

I’ve lost the joints and cartilage.

As Lego bricks  sprawled

Beneath jonquil wallpaper

And puppet furies

Unhinged as pegs and coat hangers

From which reptile suits drooped in

Solutions of pollutions

And school bus traffic on bathroom tiles

Where she pranced in juvenile half-nakedness

Making giggly marriage proposals

To giants in buckle shoes and bowler hats.

Monosyllabic toddler riddles

And rhyming games with the man above

A new book with a letter a page

Easy as that.

How I feasted on your glorifying laughter

A clown out of elements,

Annoyance propped on shaking shoulders,

All because you seemed so serious.

Hair-dye.

Every time you dye your hair

Everything changes.

Polaroid flashes steal away

Baths of crimson red,

Sluggishly exploring your

Pulchritudinous membranes

On incandescent pictures.

Carcasses of bobs and curls,

Battling for voices,

Lay scattered and

Consigned to oblivion,

Slaughtered by

Paranoid screeching engines

And  schadenfreude.

Mother whines at

Tarnished towels,

In a marriage of

Bleach and beats

And warmth,

Finally.

I woke to find

Luscious spirals

Wrapping themselves

Adoringly around me,

Senselessly,

A thwarted panacea.

You recoiled

From maggot feasts

In your mind or

On the pavement.

And she glared at me

Through cruising blinks

On frightened eyes,

And cut it all off.

Wife Beater.

A wife beater sits, wearing a wife beater, downing a wife beater.

Slams his corpulent fists down angrily,

Demanding another,

Until the whole world goes blind.

Arguing over the purchase of over-priced tax-free minty breath,

Weeping and cackling fiercely as

Money slipped through his limp apathetic fingers,

Soot snug beneath his clammy nails.

He paddles through this familiar pool,

Laser green and indifferent,

Gasping, giggling.

Infancy creeps up, curling the tips of his desultory

Chapped and cracked lips.

Grey roots standing tall,

Armed with bulwarks

Battling time.

She sat

Pigtails and buckle shoes,

Watching,

Enchanted by the decadence,

Nauseatingly thrilled at her own youth.

We are immiscible.

I gulp us down with emulsifiers but, ultimately,

We split.

Films.

I want you to be miserable like me.

I’ll hide your cream and pretend he’s mine,

Steal his long words

That made us so unhappy.

I adore your tarnished lungs,

Sluggishly inhaling boredom.

Caged in wild melodies,

I ate the key and forgot.

Three in a madman’s attic,

Rummaging through overflowing beige boxes

That tasted like pancakes and old bathrobes.

Silky ectoplasmic flesh,

Electric like his father’s stanzas,

Verses of wisdom flew like doves

And his mutilated larks.

Softly outspoken and

Spent.

Caustic lichens reveal your

Amoeboid excuses,

Forgotten as the tide gulped them down

Like moribund, growler cakes, silly and tasteless.

Projections of sweet celluloid images of sweet ideals;

Sweeping proboscis lunges out from his body

Protruding, Infringing,

Selling pageless books on the side of the road,

Gasping fanatically beneath embalming helments,

Absent-mindedly kicking coffeepots on our way to seclusion,

Led to believe in joy at bus stops and romance,

Typed angrily on plastered buttons,

Clicks of misunderstanding,

Horses and carts in mixed up orders and hums

Of hazy jazz in Roman notebooks.

I'll write you off.

Three in a Studio.

Caked in face-paint,

Insignia of art,

Or merely of fear.

Clamour of yak.

Yakety yakety yak.

Aloof, a spoof,

You cackle and incriminate.

Her strokes caress,

Clumps of colour

Erode the shores of madness.

She laughs

And asks “is it alright?”

We shrug in flocks,

And gawp at charcoal brains.

And her, who sat stricken,

Conjunctivitis of perfection

Snarling from her absent eyes and

Bucolic morals,

And she always had

The thinnest paintbrush. 

Skeleton.

His lips quavered at the edges,

Cloaked in sepulchral balm

And tumescent tones.

Subcutaneous calamity seeps through dusty pores in

Achromatic skin ridden with dents

And crevices, in which I stored secrets that would have made you gasp.

Cold kaleidoscopic eyes,

Bore into me, Tuesdays and Wednesdays,

Prompt with taradiddle,

Histrionic in his soliloquies.

He despises me already,

I remember not why when I scurried and worried for years.

Voracious for what was left

Of his intellect.

Nonsense.

What remarkable coexistence we have here, in the canvas city. Hazily begging for dreams, we trudge through forgotten alcoves, nurture crevices, wallow in cracked and tarnished pavements. These ephemeral moments seem to last longer, they linger and carelessly float, adoringly wrapping themselves around us like the breezes of the Seine. Berets and butterfly cups, The Eagle screams out to be heard. We poured out cryptic messages before our elders. Naïve rackingly of wheels on the cobblestone, the air of romance long evaded, stolen by these flashes, ravenous for independence. Tourists trudge and capture, stiff in the heat. Drinking catastrophes, they squabble and lay down cards. His tortured pond-like eyes were met for the first time, in the bagagerie.

                                                                       *******

Stricken in the churchyard, ingesting nonsense jazz. Fed by this establishment, blasphemy, ridden with cruel, shrieking lies. Corrupt institution, leeching, thieving , applauding ignorance. Slots for your wealth, pour in your heart. Below us they lie, sulking, for there were no angels in the underground. Skeletons abashed, under the tubercular sky. Limbs trudge back unwittingly, rotting. Dainty pallid skin awakes, cloaked in calamity. How shackled, tedious, coexistence has become, steadily striking to the beat of defeat. Always chasing the bittersweet, daughters remind me of Sundays. Sunday morning with my mother and a pallid egg. Flies feed on the residue. 

Constance.

I always think that she is mad,

She is mad and hatefully so,

Mad to make up all these demons,

Mad to sit them on their pedestals.

I've often watched her late at night,

As she babbled hastily,

Slaving away with ragged tools,

Applauding the autocracy.

Crumpled pamphlets framed, displayed,

Beginning "unfortunately"

Unfortunately you give a damn,

Unfortunately you are mad.

Father Prozac, Mother Valium,

Fill us up with omega three,

All that's precious in the Thames,

That demoniac degree.