Catwalk

Symphony in Green ~ Jeremy Geddes

You wore your heart upon your sleeve; a style long out of fashion
You drove yourself to the water’s edge, the sea intent on crashing
You grit your teeth and split your lip and spoke with forked tongue twisting
Of all the woes and wanderlust and interstitial bitching
You raised your arm to hail the chief but found his wonder wanting
Laid your palm on fur-decked hide whose thirst had gone to panting
Who sized you up for an overcoat with lining laced in entrails
Took your measure and just for luck wrote down your banking details
The coat it fit you like a glove to warm away the wasting
And stood you up against the change of seasons for the tasting
Of distant shores and swinging doors and thoughts that scatter wildly
When washed against the rising tide you come to lie beside me
And there to whisper wounded wild excuses for the blues
And scatter stars upon the rims of my weary walking shoes
Allowing thoughts to wander miles, millennia and moments
Metricated warning signs, posts, portents and omens
And at the door marked 'death denied' in donut sugar sweet
Removed those shoes and on the mat marked 'wisdom' wiped your feet
And passing through the door you found you’re back where you belong
A room bedecked with heartless sleeves and drowned in silent song

Not For Me Thanks

Thank you America for all you have given us
Cowboys and injuns and Buffalo Bill

Thanks for the music your slavery created
And for the dead eyed women on your porno screen

Thanks for your alternative to the railway system
Thanks for the wars and the weapons to resist them

Thank you for god-fearing and the pursuit of money
Thanks for the land of milk and honey

Thanks for mcdonalds and pepsi
Thanks for obesity and perfect teeth

Thanks for have a nice day and happy holidays
Thanks for Halloween and Thanksgiving (just what we need)

Thanks for gung-ho you ho
Thanks for hummers

Thanks for nothing


UPDATE: If we find thanksgiving hard to swallow, what about the real victims?

Smiles in the Void

QU ~ Artur Golacki

There are smiles on the faces of children in places
Where you’d think no smiling survives
There is blood on the papers signed by the rapists
who decree that your charity saves lives

and your water-well tears for pity poor people
wont change their fate or the basic principle
that it’s the system employed that cultivates this void
and you can’t change it with anything so simple

as a charitable heart or an animal rights march
or a tutting-tongue aimed at the TV
nor will your voice be heard by the prophets
that promise perpetual democracy

through Christmas sales soaring and credit-crunch whoring
by the payment of taxes to torturers
by the fear-factor insurers sent to divorce us
from access to the life they’re insuring

by fire and by fury by the judge and the jury
by the bastards that monitor your safety
by the covenant, the sword, and the arm of the lord
by the roadmaps to peace and prosperity

So drop your coins into cups into hands
And try not to feel like a martyr
Since those smiles will exist despite your demands
on a world that doesn’t depend on your charter

The Funeral of Innocence

Zdzislaw Beksinski

“Citizen Iskandor” the Initiates stood on either side of her, periodically notching up the level of pain, “you have been heard subverting the mind of your son.
“Concerned neighbours have reported numerous occasions of conversations with the boy that questioned the authority of the Core; and yet you find no voice to guilt; you see no reason for shame."
There was a short silence while the speaker drew and indignant breath
“It is time therefore for you to make your peace with The Oracle”
Her head has forced off her chest by a hand in her hair causing her, involuntarily, to unclench her eyes.
She sucked a ragged breath, before her the blood-blurred figure so integral to her life; hers and every one she had ever known.
She blinked to focus on a room filled with arcane objects: shiny tubes and glass devices; their purposes obscure but presumably integral in the workings of the Oracle.
Ensconced in a large and well padded chair sat the hallowed figure itself, dressed in one piece suit of pale blue fabric; faded and, in parts, worn beyond repair.
Iskandor’s gaze settled on what, at first, she assumed were shoes but slowly came to realise were the Oracle’s feet, rose up the blue clad legs on whose knees rested a pair of blackened and deeply creased hands, mutilated five fingered hands with fingernails brown-yellow, long and thick with age; past letters stitched on the left breast of the suit, letters that read, absurdly:

R.AKAL

Above the letters a shiny metal emblem pinned, a disk with a silhouette depiction of a man cut from its centre, higher the buttoned collar from which a wizened neck protruded.
The face...
She sucked another rib aching breath at the sight of those empty eye sockets, deep and black below a skeletal forehead across which a feather wisp of hair seemed to apologise for its existence.
Iskandor’s horror at the proximity of this monstrous creature was further compounded by a sudden shudder that passed through the blue clad chest beneath the shiny metal emblem.
In the instant of seeing the Oracle for the first time a myriad of interconnecting thought-shapes were formed and instantly shattered:
Her childhood perception of the Oracle as a calm figure of benign and honourable power was lightning-struck by the reality of this so obviously dead creature – and this reality in turn obliterated by the Oracle’s belaboured intake of breath – she could almost taste its despair in the back of her throat; despair thick with antiquity; unwilling, or unable, for reasons known only to the Source, to die.
A realisation as bleak as those empty sockets chiselled its way to the centre of her world:
the realisation that had hung in the back of her mind since as far back as she could remember, silent but nagging; the realisation that everything she knew was a lie; a grand and pre-meditated deceit; a deceit now shattered; a deceit that she found herself unable to reassemble into anything that would allow her life to resume its once preordained path.
To question The Core’s authority was one thing, but The Oracle? Her mind shied as she realised that beyond the next rise lay questions about The Source itself.
The enormity of this brutal awakening caused an involuntary reaction from Iskandor’s own chest; a breath held longer than she could remember blew across her voice like some discordant and mutilated instrument fit only to be played at the funeral of innocence.


Except from Decaying Orbits - a work in [slow] progress.

Commuterism

The House of Ill Fame ~ Hieronymus Bosch

As this Technicolor dream disperses in thought-pixel clouds
to greet the morning muttering in towers and viaducts red-brick
where they manufacture the white heat grinding deconstruction engines of daylight.
The passing window lights the trees of morning passing green
while heads nod in anaesthetic thoughtlessness blue to the coming day denied
you purse your lips in yellow anticipation
of another day wasted in cardboard empires of purple prose

Autumn

Deciduous Man ~ Frank Picini

In the underpass Bob Dylan’s Spray-paint shadow mutters “Defy”
Beyond the autumn trees that press schizoid branches to the sky
Pregnant with the calling moon that lights the verdant grass to whisper
“come with us to fields that cry the winding blades to blister”

In the undercurrent Dylan Thomas’ stenciled silhouette whispers “Deny “
And the autumn trees use scaffold branches to support the sky
The give way signs with corroded edges give it all away
To scalene cars whose passing causes the hedges to decay

In the underground Thomas Pynchon’s portrait warns Oedipa to fly
the autumn trees whose branches hide the secrets of the sky
The agents cock their causes close and cross the dotted line
Cause wounded worlds to edify and clouds to concubine

And underlings in fabled frames do raise their eyes to borders
Send the autumn trees to catch this season’s personality disorders
The climbing thighs of wastrels walk the path to minds unstable
And contrails curse the crochet trim of afternoon sky table

Those loiterers at the rumored rim of cities in the sky
Inhale the smoke from cigarettes as they carefully deny
The spray-paint shadows and silhouettes that clock the rooms to rent
And send you home with ink to pen those letters never sent

So suck your cheeks and roll eyes there’s bigger fish to fry
And don’t allow your skittered thoughts to smear the autumn sky
With lurking clouds and stenciled birds heading for the sun
And don’t believe or self-deceive that you’re the chosen one

• A stream of thoughts triggered by graffiti spotted on the wall of the underpass near Turnham Green: a stenciled Bob Dylan (black and white days) above the word ‘Defy’.
• Oedipa Maas is the single-minded heroine of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Nexus Fish

-- Nexus Fish --
-- Second-hand copy in a Petri dish --
-- Bones unclothed --
-- Divining signs for the side if the road --
-- Skin back peeled --
-- Chalk outline for the truth revealed --
-- Saw-tooth spine --
-- Hook and claw versus sacrificial tine --
-- Aquatic druid --
-- Ancient history laced in eyeball fluid --
-- Tidal turned --
-- The hook ignored is a lesson learned --
-- Legacy sown --
-- Wisdom is the barb that you cannot own --
-- Tooth and gill --
-- Angle the face by force of will --
-- Scale and fin --
-- Knife dissects the mess we’re in --
-- Cat-gut line --
-- Cold water sliced hum a wake-up sign --
-- A liquid moon --
-- Hope like hell I wake up soon –-
-- Constellation wish --
-- Astral roads to the nexus fish --

I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish
~ Steven Wright

Semiotic Colonial Rhetoric

Myrna Burner ~ Kyle Baker

Did I dream I dreamt this life, up in a tree with the ape-man’s wife?
Swinging that arm in an arc to the future
Slice with kitchen knife a memory to suture
This two dimensional platform soul, this piranha-infested goldfish bowl
Watching the world with enclave eyes
Warped with wonder and self-told lies

And in dreaming did I the ceiling rent, needle eyes the firmament
The folds of time and taste and smell
Return my heart in chest to swell
And rise again on wings of words, illiterate, delicate, double-cursed
To see the world through eagle eyes
And break with glee these ancient ties

This semiotic colony is in dreaming realised, sends out ancient rhetorical spies
To mine the strata of this highway’s lost souls
Leaving the surface littered with pornographic holes
That weaken the mind with futile lust, the reaper, the empty husk
To see the day through glacial eyes
The body’s rise, the spirit’s demise

I may have dreamt it, may have constructed a psychic fire-pit
For wayward hearts and wildered wishes
Drained the drowning pool of Piscean fishes
Blown the leaves to kingdom gone and burst the air with offbeat song
But to dream is not to see through cataract eyes
The world and all whose hope on truth relies

Word on a Wing

Don't wake me up without a master plan ~ Delgados (The Light Before We Land)

God and demons and desperate souls – the theory’s littered with circuit holes, ungrounded thought through which the world may be diligently sucked, pummelled pissed and pounded leaving little less that hope and hapless luck.
What follows is not the result of a long-running scientific investigation; nor carried hence on bended knees the words of some great divination.
But you may come to see that we are neither inherently good nor inherently evil (an impossible dream devised by the simple minded lens of the silver screen) – nor are we a monochrome gradation of black to white (those shades of grey will drain your light away in desperate attempt to colour).
This complex organism whose reflexes are dictated not by rules and regulatory bodies, but by a body of evidentiary responses gathered through millennia of evasive action:
-DNA switches and synaptic triggers; dopamine dancers and serotonin trances; childhood beatings and elementary teachings; alcohol lasers and ripped school blazers at the hands of the smokers and engine room stokers - Myriad fluctuations in the moons gravitation, water distilling in my imagination; teeth baring grimace at the world’s baptism; cerebral fracture at the terrible schism that lies at your feet, at your toe tip division between promises made and actions taken, between wishes coined and wells dug, between hope and hype, hell and high water.
Stranded here on the outskirts of town; where they still do things in a joined-up way; where the old men of method tried-and true still bedevilled hold sway; where the tombstones are inscribed with lessons learned and the flowers grow between the blades of municipal mowers; where traffic jams at pedestrian crossing and children glaze at pancake tossing.
Between the rows of hedges hewn that demarcate the limits of suburban imagination and the engines that steam from crucifix scorn to genuflect stations
When they say “Jump!” I say “Why?”

Meteors

Orion now you join the dots on your studded stellar belt
Smile the smile with teeth bared grim for those injuries never felt
Wade across the nebulous pond of velvet ripples not
Seeking yet the answers that Darwin forced forgot

Lenses pointed at the gaping inscrutable firmament
Searching deeper desperate for love letters never sent
For broken hearts caked in slumber do once more return
To questions crumbed upon the chest fast asleep to yearn

The future’s tense the cold war cancer diligent deploys
Penis pointing schoolyard full of idiotic boys
Semites align with the bully boy the better equipped to beat
Those bogeymen waiting there to batter their brethren back to meat

This macho machine a ferrous arc does happily rotate
Lubricating inebriating the tributaries of your fate
Lightning crackles veins across the blue bright brittle sky
A teardrop crystal crackling clear in the corner of your eye

A tear a tear in fabric smeared with the blood of innocence
Bullets fired from vaults of greed that raise your moral rents
In a world made square by all that seeks the circle yet to rule
And teaches ignorance in childlike chunks of fish to school

Hex Enduction Hour

The Fall ~ Hackney Empire 31.10.08

Watching (and hearing) The Fall isn’t necessarily a comfortable experience - its not as if they are a collective of equal sharing democrats; neither do they subscribe to any capitalist ethos where profits dictate success ~ It's not by accident that the event was billed as Mark E. Smith presents The Fall.
Mark E. Smith wandered onto the stage to join the latest, already grooving, incarnation of his band at The Hackney Empire last night to a boozy crowd, good-naturedly rowdy after being subjected to some experimental video torture which constituted the last of three support acts which included Bobbie Peru and John Cooper Clark.
Smith, all elbows and gurning, incongruously old amongst a relatively young band gave us a smouldering hour of The Fall: brilliance teetering on the lip of disaster.

The first thing that becomes evident is that Smith (although appearing three sheets to the wind) is in absolute control of the proceedings – or rather, he is the random element that is threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down into chaos. He scatters his lyric sheets untidily next to the drum kit, twiddles knobs on the Bass and Lead guitarists’ amps; drags his two (who needs two?) microphones around the stage in a tangle of wires, leaving one of them nestled inside the bass drum thereby subjecting the audience to screeching feedback; takes a random 5 second turn at the keyboard, wanders off stage on more than one occasion for purposes only to be guessed at, and on order to bring about the end of one particular song, signals to the drummer with a thumb-slit-across-the-throat.

The band themselves are superb: stolid, solid and focussed as if their lives depended on it – which in fact is probably the case, since that the only constant member of the Fall is the little dictator himself, Smith, notorious for treating his band like a football team, changes of personnel being a constant feature of The Fall’s 32 year journey along the edge.

I don’t claim to be a big-time Fall fan, the three albums spanning 1984 to 1986* where as long as I stuck with them, but it was at the request of my 14 year old son that I went last night, and I am very happy that I did.
I found myself watching in awe at the dynamic created between, on one hand, Smith’s carte blanch treatment of the band and the subsequent tension created, and on the other hand, the audience’s absolute sense of euphoria at being in the presence of a musical experience which, even after 32 years and (perhaps because of) numerous personnel changes, remains sharp, fresh and on edge – no dialogue between songs, no “you’ve been a wonderful audience”, just pure buzz.
Watching (and hearing) The Fall isn’t always a comfortable experience, but it’s an experience worth having.



*The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall; This Nation’s Saving Grace & Bend Sinister

Photographs by DanMud