Your Guide To Seasonal Affective Disorder

Just how much longer is this going to carry on?
It’s gotten so far beyond a joke, I’ve started to
overtake myself coming back the other way.
That woman haunts my bones,
like Confederate bugles still haunt
the fields of Gettysburg Pennsylvania.
Like the great whale haunted the quaking dreams of Captain Ahab.
This year has felt like a penance at times.
My sadness firmly entrenched and deep-rooted.
Things could have turned out so differently.
Things would probably have turned out exactly the same.
Take me down to the waters of the river Jordan,
pinch my nose, hold me under
and leave me there
til my feet cease
their kicking.

Single White Soulmate (Maximum Length 500 words)

I got off the train one stop early
and followed her down the busy platform.
She was wearing a patterned dress over thick tights
and a pair of loose-fitting flat-soled shoes that made her
shuffle a little as she walked towards the escalators.
Her shoulder length hazel-coloured hair
looked like it had been spun in a poppy-field
and then left to dry in the wild wind for a week.
Her cardigan had small holes in the elbows.
Her cheeks were lightly flushed.
And she was carrying just the right amount of
excess weight around the bustle and the corselette.
I followed her towards the fluorescent Way Out signs,
through the barriers and out into the glare of the streetlights.
And then she was gone. Consumed by a shoal of oily fish.
I never asked her name. We didn’t even make eye-contact.
It’s certainly possible to pick faces out of a crowd.
Godfrey Reggio’s film output is proof enough of that.
And so I continue to live in hope. And so I continue to let my gaze wander.
I’m looking for someone wearing Grandma’s hand-me-downs.
I’m looking for innovative use of multiple
hair-clips and designer spectacle frames.
I’m looking for a piercing too many about the ear
or the nose and maybe even the bottom lip.
I’m looking for lips recently stained by spaghetti gravy.
I’m looking for freckles in hard to reach places.
I’m looking for someone who scribbles
reminder notes on the back of their hand.
Someone studying the yellowing pages of a dog-eared
Picador or something published by Blacksparrow Press.
A girl you can imagine telling your darkest secrets to.
A girl you can imagine finishing all your sentences.
The kind of girl you’d dream about naming a distant star after.
The kind of girl you’d look forward to sharing a sleeping-bag with.
The kind of girl who could play the kazoomaphone
or knit herself a woolen beard. Preferably both.
But oftentimes, what we’re looking for turns out
to have there all along. Sat right beneath our noses.
Which is another way of saying, girls are a lot like philtrums.
Which is probably why the Ancient Greeks considered
the infra-nasal depression to be one of the most
erogenous spots on the human body.

I Think I Might Be Falling In Love With You

Queen Mab would always call me
if she’d been drinking in the afternoon.
And not just once. Twice at the very least.
Sometimes 3 or 4 or 5 times in quick succession.
And each time, her attempts at conversation
would prove less and less coherent.
And would rely more and more on talk of
baby dragons and faerie folk, and questions
about what colour my wings were that day.
Or about what kind of tail I’d been born with.
Questions, I always found it impossible to answer.
She liked my smell and she liked my socks.
She liked my smile and my ears. And she particularly
liked that bit of skin just behind my ears. So she said.
I think she probably liked me a little too much.
Which was part of the problem.
Some people are destined to stick like glue and slowly
worm their way into your heart’s ventricles like a blood clot.
Whereas others, it seems, simply spin into your orbit,
oscillate for a while and then spin away again;
back into the cold dark void of space.
To punctuate the human skin and penetrate
all the way through to the heart, a blade of
at least three inches in length is required.
For this reason, I’ve set up a metal-detector at my front door.
For this reason, I’ve instigated my very own knife amnesty.

Every Red-Blooded Man's Dream Date

I’m hardwired a little differently
from your typical red-blooded slavering
heterosexual male of the species. I must be.
Otherwise this would all feel like a much bigger deal.
Hard to believe, I know, but she wasn’t the first choice for the role.
Kate Moss was unavailable, and Peaches Honeyblossom
Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof was far too busy.
Or somesuch. My inside information only stretches so far.
Behind the tinted windows of the silver MPV,
there’s complimentary sugarless chewing-gum
and the bottled water is strictly carbonated.
I’ve been instructed to program the number of
today’s Close Protection Officer into my Nokia.
Just in case. Though it’s not really me that
Johnny Paparazzi is going to be interested in.
Afterall, tomorrow’s celebrity gossip pages are hardly
likely to lead with the headline; “How did a sweet girl
from Ladysmith in British Columbia, end up stepping-out
with the 1994 UK National Student Playwright of the year?”
Although, wouldn’t it be refreshingly
less jejune of them if they did?

My "date" with Pamela Denise Anderson

I Lie Here In A Strange Girl’s Apartment (After Brautigan)

I lie here in a strange girl’s apartment, reading
a poem called ‘I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment’,
written by an American man called Richard Gary Brautigan
who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the year 1984.
And you have to realise that I didn’t plan it this way. Not at all.
I mean, you have to realise that this is a case of purest serendipity at play.
I simply opened the book (first published in New York City 41 years ago),
turned over the page, and there it was; 14 lines long
and printed on paper now slightly mottled with age.
Lying here in a strange girl’s apartment while she takes a shower,
I find myself listening to the sound of the running water, and imagining that
it’s the sound of the Pacific ocean that I can hear coming from the other room.
I imagine the black-green kelp. I imagine the seagulls shrieking overhead.
Richard Gary Brautigan’s ‘I Lie Here in a Strange Girl’s Apartment’
is dedicated to a woman called “Marcia”. But what I don’t know,
and probably never will, is whether or not this Marcia
is the same Marcia as the Marcia who Brautigan
dated for a time, and who turned out to be the last person
he ever spoke to (on the telephone), before pointing
a loaded .44 Magnum at his troubled and quixotic head.
That Marcia, so the story goes, tried calling back later,
but repeatedly got Brautigan’s answer-machine instead.
“Hello, as you can probably tell, I’m not here right now,
but you can leave a message for when I am here,
after the beep” are the words which Marcia heard.
Over, and over, and over again.

Richard Brautigan page at 'Old Poetry Dotcom'

What’s Wrong With This Archetypal Diluvian Scene?

An Old Testament rain falls hard
on a newly resurfaced cul-de-sac road.
Mount Ararat, for its part, lies far off to the East.
I pray for the deluge to continue for another 149 days.
For another 5 months solid. Until such time
as the sweet chestnuts begin to leaf again.
Mayhap the good Lord will send me a pretty girl for company.
A pretty girl with hair the colour of goldfish,
and lips that smell of rose syrup and almond oil.
We could fall asleep next to each other
upon an unmade bed, with all our clothes still on,
and dream like Pharoahs as the water-levels
inch higher and higher and The Thames bursts open
its dirty banks and submerges London
like Atlantis before it
in a flurry of escaping oxygen bubbles.
Noah drank a lot of wine and lived to be 905 years old.
I don’t envy him that longevity at all. Not one bit.

Land Of The Midnight (Or Black) Sun

One day, not so very long ago,
She invited me to spend Midsummer with her,
across the waters, on top of sunshine mountain.
Amongst the juniper and the toadstools and the green birch.
I looked into flights. I booked the time off work.
I read Tove Jansson and watched Tartovsky’s 'The Sacrifice'.
And then she stopped returning my calls. Even when she was drunk.
And that was the end of that particular chapter.
And so when, in years to come, people ask me
where I was when I heard that The King Of Pop
had died, I’ll be able to tell them only this much;
I was out in my wooden garden, in just my underwear,
drinking a cup of redbush tea in the moonlight,
and thinking about how much closer
to the Arctic circle I should’ve been.
How I should've been counting cat’s hairballs
and collecting rain water in coffee jars.
Watching a country house slowly become a bonfire.
Watching a dry Japanese tree transform into a maypole.
Maybe next year instead? Before I turn 40.
Before the frogs start growing their ears back.

Banned 'Midsummer' Ikea Commercial

Don’t Shoot The Messager (Ne Tirez Pas Le Messager)

I see children with their eyes scratched out.
I see angel’s wings and shrunken heads and BDSM.
Discarded yarn and woolen viscera. Please do not touch.
I see a flock of dead sparrows, arranged in lines
and embalmed in crocheted doll’s clothing.
I see Caribbean sunsets, chimeras, and stigmata.
I see roadkill in a baby’s nursery.
I see a Disney Store abattoir shop-window.
Fermentation. Emancipation. Genocide. Chiromancy.
Little Annie Messager is a Trickster. A Phoney. An Art Brut.
A Collector of oblique artifacts. A curator of curious Peep-shows.
I see me some sugar. I see me some spice.
I see me an unshaven Mound of Venus
and this cold hard rain against the windows.

Annette Messager: The Messengers Exhibition

With A Bit Of Heart

She’s never eaten dim sum before.
This is her very first time. Her debut.
The char siu buns are stacked
ontop of the scallop-and-shitake,
which sit ontop of the vegetable puffs,
with the sticky rice wrapped in
lotus leaf right at the bottom.
We watch together, as the jasmine tea
slowly unfurls itself in the clear hot water
like a flowering foetus from the Song Dynasty.
Over dessert, She tells me that her ex-boyfriend proposed
to her earlier this week. Somewhat out of the blue.
But she doesn’t tell me whether she said yes or not.

Bishop Allen Drive In Cambridge, Massachusetts

These days, the first thing I like to do
when I get an ink stamp on the back of my fist
and walk into darkened venue, is to look around the room and
identify at least one person there who’s older than me.
Or at least one person there who looks as if they’re older than me.
Then I can relax. Then I can start to enjoy myself.
Then I can kickback and begin stomping my feet a little.
I don’t know how old Christian and Justin from Bishop Allen
are, but I do know that they’ve both appeared in low-budget
16-millimetre mumblecore movies made by Andrew Bujalski;
an old friend of theirs and former Harvard University roommate.
Now based in cooler-than-though Brooklyn, these 2 charismatic
afro-beat calypso-cowboy rock-a-hipsters have brought a touch
of the boho vogue with them to Dalston Kingsland this eve.
The joint is jumping. The boudoir is bopping. The kids are all singing along.
At the back, near the booths, someone turns to me
and asks me how I first heard about Bishop Allen.
I don’t lie. I tell them I was introduced to their music by a girl.
The same girl, I tell them, who also re-introduced me to Bukowski.
The same girl, coincidentally, who I found myself
standing behind on the escalator only yesterday.
I didn’t say hello to her, or make my presence known.
I didn’t feel it was appropriate. I kept my head down
while she played absent-mindedly with her hair.

Bishop Allen play ‘Click, Click, Click, Click’ on the streets of NYC

Official website for the movie ‘Funny Ha Ha’

Official website for the movie ‘Mutual Appreciation’

Sugar On The Mound

I don’t know much about baseball,
but I do know that it’s far-and-away the most
popular sport amongst the people of the Dominican República.
Nothing else even comes close. God, Fatherland, Liberty, Baseball.
Makeshift diamonds on every empty parking lot. Jumpers for bases.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is 19 years old, and a rookie pitcher
for the Quad City Swing in Davenport, Iowa. He’s a young man,
a long way from home, with an uncommon ability on the mound.
Smokeball. Curveball. Knuckleball. Okie-Dokie. Backdoor slider.
His all-time favourite ballplayer is Roberto Clemente;
a Puerto Rican who won 12 (twelve) Gold Glove Awards,
made 3,000 career base hits, and became the first Latin American
to be elected into the prestigious MLB Hall of Fame. Posthumously.
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is played by Algenis Perez Soto. He’s been
playing baseball since he was 9 years old. ‘Sugar’ is his film debut.
Writer/Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck took a chance on the kid.
And the kid doesn’t let them down. He keeps his eye on the game.
The infectious sound of the bachata music follows him wherever he goes.
It’s only as the end credits complete their upwards roll
and the lights come back on, that I’m reminded
of the fact I’m sat here all alone in the cinema stalls.
But hey, it's not like this is a new experience for me or anything.
She’s stood me up before, and she’ll no doubt stand me up again.
9th inning. 2 strikes against. Oh say it ain’t so, Joe.
Go on, Joe, say it ain't over till it's over.

Official Website for the movie 'Sugar'

Tinnitus Comes From The Latin Word For Ringing

In the narrow kitchen, between sips
of tea, is where our lips meet and linger.
There’s a solid 12-year age gap, but
that’s not the reason why my ear is bleeding.
For the ear is a complicated piece of apparatus,
and we all know that you should never put
anything smaller than your elbow into
your external acoustic meatus.
It's just that some of us choose to learn these things the hard way.
I need to avoid any high or low pressures for the next 6-8 weeks.
That means no planes. And no bathyspheres neither.
I probably shouldn’t even be drinking.
Not with the antibiotics.

I Can't Believe You're 38 And Single

You have to believe me when I tell you that I’m not used to this.
I’m not used to women throwing themselves at me.
And I’m certainly not used to more than 1 woman
throwing themselves at me at the exact same time.
I’m currently attracting them from as far away as 10 kilometres.
If you could see the queen butterfly
in her black cocktail dress, with the
red rose in her ice-blonde peroxide hair
smiling her champagne smile, you’d think me a fool.
And you wouldn’t be alone in that. For I’m looking at her,
and I’m thinking me a fool too. A fool in sheep’s clothing.
“I can’t believe you’re 38 and single” are the words she says
as she sits down beside me and rests her head upon my shoulder.
And I think she means it in a nice way.
Look, I’m still broken, is what I say to her.
I'm sorry, but I’m still hurting is my excuse.
But the truth is that I’m too scared.
The truth is that I’ll only disappoint.
The truth is I need to floss more regularly.
The truth is I need to trim my nasal hairs
freeze that verruca on my right big toe
and get my Templeton skin-tag removed.
It’s better this way, I tell myself. And that’s the truth of the matter.
But since when did the truth have anything to do with these things?

The Curious Case Of Sunday February Eighth

It’s just this side of midnight
when I climb into bed, alone,
and reach across to extinguish the side-light.
I can still smell her cigarette smoke in my hair.
I can still taste the cinnamon chewing stick on my gums.
On the cinema screen, I can still see the film unwinding.
Bradley Pitt is ageing in reverse; thanks to the prosthetics and the VFX.
We’re buying popcorn. We’re walking past the Royal Opera House.
We’re standing outside the Mexican restaurant in the rain.
Across the table in the coffeehouse, I can’t be sure,
but there’s a moment of stillness, when it feels like
she wants to lean across, cup my face in her hands,
and kiss me, slowly, whilst keeping her eyes closed.
Just like I want to lean across and slowly kiss her too.
I'm walking across Regent’s Park counting surviving snowmen.
I'm making breakfast still wearing last night’s nail-varnish.
I'm waking up, alone, 68 years after Francis Scott Fitzgerald
died from a heart attack, in the living-room
of his mistress's first floor apartment,
whilst waiting for the doctor to arrive.
Head still hazy from the blended Scotch whiskey.
The jazz age no more than a fading tubercolic memory.

'The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Filmed In Mexico In Panavision

So there’s me, Chuck Heston,
Richard Harris, Jimmy Coburn Junior,
Warren Oates, Rodeo Slim Pickens,
L. Q. Jones, Cannonball Taylor
and Robert Golden Armstrong.
Out on the High Road, pursuing renegade Apaches.
Out on the High Road, pursued by French Irregulars.
Bloody Sam's trademark catsup red
staining the arroyo and the whinstone
and the waters of the Rio Grande.
Claymore and Colt and mini-howitzer.
Mules and buzzards and howling prairie wolves.
Mariachi guitar, south-of-the-border harmonica
and some of that old-time bareknuckled sucker-punching.
I know they don’t make them like this anymore,
just as surely as I know that
my heart is broke right now.
It needs time alone in the hot white sun.
Time to wallow in the charcoal of old cookfires.
For she is my scar tissue. And beyond doubt my Achilles Heel.
Leaning forward, I spit into the dirt,
wipe my mouth with the back of my hand
and, taking up the trailing reins,
ride up through the low juniper
to rejoin the column
as they turn and ride on towards
the crumbling walls of Durango.

Trailer for Sam Peckinpah's 'Major Dundee'

My Own Private Guernica

Snow falls upon the Sierra de Guadarrama.
Shadows lengthen in the afternoon sun.
I could have gone to see Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ today,
but I just can’t face that capacious canvas right now.
I’m not really in the mood for abstracted strategic bombing.
I feel shot-thru with enough symbolic shrapnel as it is.
Instead I’m stood here, watching the street-walkers on the corner.
Counting the number of imported cigarettes smoked.
Counting the number of tricks turned.
The bull is just a bull. The dying horse is just a dying horse.
The inverted hidden harlequins are just inverted hidden harlequins.
I could have gone to see ‘The Garden Of Earthly Delights’ triptych.
Or ‘The Black Goyas’ (painted at home by a half-mad old deaf man),
but best I stay right here, partly hidden by the heavy curtains.
Collecting dust on my eyeballs. Slowly bleeding out.
A lemming on a clifftop.
A kitten in a gunny-sack.
I open the sallyport and close
the first door firmly behind me.
My white flag is unfurling.
I can feel my toes beginning to curl under.

Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica'

Pass Me The Melatonin Please

It was early when I first awoke that morning.
A cold north wind was whistling around the high-rise.
Whispers of the Munsee Indians
who once laid claim to these lands.
We’d flown in Air India just the night before.
Lost 5 perfectly good hours in the process.
I remember she had her back to me;
wearing Sony walkman headphones
a sports bra and nothing else.
Running on-the-spot. Silhouetted against the glass.
Her bare feet pounding the parquet flooring.
Her Circadian Cycle all shot to hell.
It was early when I awoke, alone on the inflatable mattress.
Way too early. Far too early. Beaucoup much too early.
Outside, the snow was piled-up on the sidewalk hip-deep in places.
I sat there in shallow silence a while, propped up
by a pillow, eyes still wet with milky morning dew,
hypnotized by the veduta di fantasia illuminated behind her.
Dawn light burnishing the brownstones and skyscrapers with gold leaf.
Eldorado rebuilt on bedrock. Atlantis risen anew from the ocean floor.
A tangled mess of inlets and islands
on the very edge
of The New World;
conquered and colonized
and bent to the will of mankind.
This city of cities. This metropolis that Mammon built.
Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome made steel and concrete.
Putting a pot of cinnamon coffee on to boil,
I managed to persuade her to rejoin
me back beneath the crumpled sheets.
We made love like ancient Minoans;
cracking open our outer shells
and letting loose our astral forms
to roam amongst the space dust
- whilst 20 floors below, the background
vacuum-cleaner hum of Manna-hata
built gently towards its Gershwin crescendo.

The Sport Of Tomorrow

In the future there will be no war.
In the future there will be only Roller Derby.
Faster than frisbee disc golf.
Sexier than competitive eating.
More violent than dwarf-tossing.
Not as Flemish as vinkenzetting.
A kind of British Bulldog on wheels,
Roller Derby is a game of Blood-and-Thunder.
A game of Pluck-and-Fidelity.
A game of Style-over-Substance.
A game of Razz-and-Matazz.
6 Blockers 2 Pivots and a couple of Jammers in the rear.
Three periods of between eight and ten minutes in length.
Each period divided into a smörgåsbord of two-minute jams.
And inbetween? Plenty of good clean unsportsladylike conduct.
Ministry of Neo-Burlesque meets Queercore riot-grrrl.
Rockabilly meets NWOBHM meets Beastie-Girls meets Cybergoth.
Kiss-curls and Monroe piercings.
Polka dots and desert camouflage.
Coloured gumshields, fishnet burn and Betty Page tattoos.
Welcome to The Thunderdrome true believers.
Welcome to Do-It-Yourself Third Wave
Skate-Punk Feminism in all its glory.
Caution: Do not interfere with Rollergirls who skate out-of-bounds.
Remember: Getting a Rollergirl in your lap
is not a right
but a privilege.

London Rollergirls official website

Official list of Rollergirl names

The Buddha’s Noble 12-Bar Path

Strap it on and turn it up to 11.
Pluck it, slapp it, popp it and tapp it.
Like a snake charmer with an electric boa-contrictor.
Like a matador with a 4-string medium gauge wild bull.
Like Siegfried and Roy with a woodgrain-finished white tiger.
She tames the beast. Oh boy, she tames it but good.
Wrestles it into submission. Shows it just who’s boss.
Rest in peace Torakusu Yamaha. Your child is in safe hands.


The Chandeliers at MySpace

One Of Those Patrick Duffy Moments

I must have fallen asleep,
for when I awoke I found her gone.
Her side of the bed absolute cold beside me.
A cool minus 273.15 degrees Celsius.
But then I noticed her bespoken spectacles resting
on the bedside table next to the alarm-clock,
and I realised that the background hum
I could hear was the sound of the pump
sustaining hot water to the bathroom shower.
Like some kind of dream.
Like some kind of imaginary story.
Like Bobby Ewing at the end of ‘Dallas’ season 9.
Believe me. She came back. From Outer Space.
Like Fallon Colby at the start of ‘Dynasty’ season 8.
Which was a different show, I know, but let's be honest
it was all very much of a muchness really.

'Dallas': Title Sequence / 'Dynasty': Title Sequence