wet salty hotdog

i believe in a barista, coffee and jog

to cut through the morning fog

primary cafeteria, inchoate aroma

of wet salty hotdog

you get the key to a new place of great significance

brompton over, you invite; but take your moment first

i get there and the floors are up

circular saw sounds erupting

drag a trail through the dust

alone, together, us two and all of us

my girlfriend had just bought a flat and started doing the place up. she is very handy. i was getting in the way. on a run, i had a sudden recollection of waiting to get into the cafeteria at lunch in primary school. i usually had a packed lunch so it was novel. the food was terrible. it was notably briney.

excoriated content

i just realised i am probably autistic

my natural selection is intensive introspection

medley relay, amazed, amazed

that butterfly is a cromulent procedure

sour jam and feta pancakes, likewise sensational

the funny thing was that people had said to me in the past that i was autistic and i just thought they didn’t get me. after i finished sorting through all my emails last year, i thought, i wonder if i should read all my text messages. i curiously looked at my earliest messages and found ‘you are autistic’ from an unknown number. 3 july 2010. i remember a guy i found weird telling i had aspergers at a temp job in like 2003 or 2004. clearly i didn’t look further into it.

the 13th month

the bell chimed, it’s time

to introduce the thirteenth month

rationalise the calendar with months of 28 days

plus an extra day, a global holiday

for all workers

during which the bourgeois financiers

shall man the (beer) pumps

and another one the same each leap year

and the extra month should be a holiday too

slide it in between july and august

call it hedonia, for a long free summer.

we all work too much. why can’t we rest more. i’m sure that if we just cut out all the pointless jobs that are just done to make money, and just did the stuff people need and love like cooking and nursing and entertaining and building good places to live in and growing stuff etc, then we could probably all have a pretty nice life where nobody wants for nothing. but some rich guys want to own everything, so we have what we have.

socrates in shit

i read about his suicide on teletext in the 90s
a poet tortured, bill teller of the apple orchard
never socrates unsatisfied nor pig in shit:
we are socrates in pig shit, always and 4 real.

i was at the climbing gym the other day, i like to run over there, i put my climbing shoes in a wee run bag, it takes about 20 minutes if i go slow, sometimes i race back, anyway, this is all besides the point, so, i arrive at the gym, decide to go pee, in the disabled loo as it was closest, i’m there, nearly flowing, but the pan is full of unused female sanitary products, like a couple of pads and three inserts, all still in the plastic, so i’m like well i can’t pee on that, but i’m also like, if i leave now the next person is going to think i’m a mentalist who fills the toilet with sanitary products.

so i fished them out with my hands as a public service and put them in the bin and i hated it but i suppose this is just what its like to be an adult. and that reminded me a bit of the poetry above i suppose.

a common question asked by philosophers is, ‘how does one live a good life.’ which leads to the question: is it better to, like socrates, live an ‘examined life’ – and probably be constantly unsatisfied as a result. is it perhaps better to be a pig rolling in shit, just living?

but i find that often life forces us to be socrates in the toilet, actively disliking what you are doing, and thinking a lot about it.

and while i’m here, the first two lines were references to elliott smith and william burroughs, the death of the first by a somewhat suspicious suicide, and the killing of burroughs’s wife, joan vollmer, by burroughs, in a drunken ‘game of william tell’.

ill or kind

did you eat my toblerone, cheeky kiddo?
i shall now claim that if you’d asked,
i’d have shared it.
i have a theory that
when it really matters,
we should all be treated as equals,
without bias ill or kind
different but the same

i’m not sure when or how different but the same became the mantra of the poem, but it is a bit of a guiding philosophy for me. life is so unfair. we have different abilities and different needs. but we nearly all have some of the same abilities – most of us can communicate, follow instruction, hopefully we can all appreciate at least some of other fellow humans. perhaps we can’t all love. and we all have some common needs – shelter, nourishment, entertainment. and we need each other. whether we like it or not. we rely on the labour of anonymous millions across the globe, hidden from us by the complexity of multinational supply lines.

i often think of the pandemic – the key workers who were not furloughed and could not work from home. the front line of those who actually make life possible. turns out the world does ok without lawyers and accountants. but we do need nurses, refuse workers, carers and supermarket staff. maybe we should pay them more.

stressa, italia

the train stretches and yawns to a peripatetic merry go round
down a wonky corridor
arguing inarticulately; things we can’t control
an azure mountain panorama and delicate fish
blue moments punctuating the trattorian cycle
even the trees are blue
bodily warmth, the wind sliced small by my forearms
above the alps i contemplate my mirror world souls
i wonder how they’d feel, those me’s i could have been
torrents of nostalgia may bombard us
pain may tattoo our love
despite tourettic itches and compulsions
it would be good to be good for the sake of being good
but i recall us mortals are careless and forgetful
good souls will forgive one and all

from napoli we headed north by train to stressa, by lake maggiore. i like writing poetry on holiday. i try to document the novel experiences. i liked the calm and peace of the lakes. one day we walked up a steep hill for lunch at a restaurant with a view over the lake. we had no reservation, and they sat us in the sun on the edge of the courtyard. but then a manager asked if we would like to move to a table with a better view. we drank the house red wine – i think it was 12 euro for a carafe, and it was very nice.

i was reading doppelgänger by naomi klein at the time. a fascinating book. in it, klein immersed herself in the world of the alt-right ‘mirror world’ – trump, bannon, and their fellow travellers. it was this book that sort of pushed me into getting a formal autism diagnosis, after reading her reflections on the difficulties presented by her son’s autism.

i was thinking a lot about change. i’d been through a lot in the year or so leading up to that holiday. and so much more change was to come. a year on, life still feels a bit unsettled. but i walk on steadier ground, trying hard not to take anything for granted. trying to live a life of love, and generous understanding. but still a bit grumpy and normally complaining. life is hard.

benn’s law

from snowy summits are mountained limbs of venomous frogspawn
here is to the life pudendal
blessedly unaffected by format rigidity.
going home, i see the most expensive chocolate bar
i’ve ever seen, heard of or read about
and in a fog of lousy vibes await an operative positive.

i was in the pub with my friend i.h. the other day and conversation turned to inflation and high prices. mars bars in particular. i remembered distinctly (meaning, probably, inaccurately) that a mars bar was 27p when i was in my youth. a particular memory – i was at the swimming baths while my brother was taking a lesson. and reading the adrian mole diaries. and i’m sure i read him spending his pocket money on a mars bar in 1982. and it was 15p. so i reckon i read that book in 1995.

1982 15p
1995 27p

that’s an increase of 80%

so 13 years later, in 2008, you would expect it to be another 80% higher? rounding up that’s 50p. and i’m pretty sure that’s what it did cost in 2008.

so in 2021, how much was a mars bar? the model says 90p. I would bet you 90p you could find a mars bar for sale for 90p in 2021.

a mars bar today costs… £1.05.

so based on no underlying data other than my own memory of the price of mars bars, i was able to determine that the price of confectionary will increase by 80% every 13 years.

or, more snappily, we can extrapolate from our data that the price of confectionary doubles every 15 years. and i call this benn’s law.

(and we can take the calming news that the inflation we have suffered recently is relatively normal)

and yes, i know this ignore the fact that mars bars have also shrunk. the real rate of inflation is higher.

soy flat white

she goes by hot chocolate, that makes me soy flat white
karmic on the balcony, sharing a thunderstorm,
writing this poem, i hear my queen through the wool
and feel the love epochal
in napoli, where love is king, the pizza is immortal
and a thousand wonky steps climb to a hot pink moon.

in the queue at the starbucks in edinburgh airport, a young black woman was in the line ahead of me. she ordered a hot chocolate. the (white, timid, young, male) barista asked her name, and she said ‘hot chocolate’. obviously, this made the barista quite uncomfortable, but the woman who ordered the drink clearly found it hilarious.

then i ordered my soy flat white. but i just said my name was benn. poor boy.

then i went to napoli and waited for my girlfriend to join me from sorrento. when she arrived, she took me running in quite intense heat and the route she plotted just seemed to go directly up in the air. afterwords we napped and listened to nick drake.

and from this little verse came the title of this body of work, the love epochal. which to me anyway embodies the search for meaning in an amoral universe in which love, joy and happiness coexist with alienation, despair, poverty and war.

men only

“men only” in the gents loo
none of your wokery pokery for sure
in our punishment society, though i advocate for justice
each disaster brings a wonder that our
species carries on with
this system that penalizes age, health, gender and bad luck
the strong are loud and like atlas they shrugged
so by the seat of my pants and a matchbook of gyp
i watch the green place dip from the cauldron’s lip

I’d been at l.b.’s 40th birthday at a tennis club. i’ve known l.b. since high school. i remember her vegitarian mother cooking bacon for me one evening after a boozy night out. and i’ve been vegetarian myself for a more than 20 years, aside from a lost weekend in the late 2010s.

it was nice to see so many old friends on a humid summer day. in the club however, there was a sign that said ‘men only’, in addition to the usual stick figure. i took this to be anti-trans sentiment. i thought it was a bit embarassing. but it turns out the supreme court agrees with joan rowling. which i suppose reinforces the idea that ‘progress’ can’t be assumed. there are no universal human rights – we have them because our ancestors fought for them. they are granted to humans, by humans, through the exercise of political power.

then i went to meet my girlfriend in napoli. i took the bus to edinburgh and enjoyed a nice vantage point from the east – glasgow sits within a sort of cauldron surrounded by gentle slopes. slopes i know well from my cycling addition.

toblerone [remix]

hamstrung by the ancestors of landlords
beneath the distant barren peaks of a toblerone—
the traumatic trough entrenches resilience.
a slight slide and crunch underfoot on icy steps,
the organism (the leviathan) slips into disequilibrium.
revolted by bolts of thunderous chunder, and a cold sweat
a risky coffee poured into the evacuated gut.
in a feverish daze, i found the courage to ask for help
and was restored—with my problems undiminished

there is a nut on my bath plug. it can run up or down a screw length. no clue why, at first.

one day, after one of my many long baths (like the one i’m in right now) i turned the knob that ejects the plug. and it had no effect. so i was reduced to spending my evening emptying the bath into the loo with a saucepan. then i went to drill a hole in the plug, but before it made an incision the jolt of the drill burped out the seal and the plug came out.

i inspected the nut on the plug and inferred that clearly i must turn the screw all the way down to the bottom, for maximum ejaculatory force. i did this, and then for ten years or so, generally when i tugged the knob at the end of the bath, the plug always came and the water drained.

but then the knob ceased to have effect again. it impotently refused to drain. twice again in the space of a few weeks. it even made it into the poem (perhaps not yet published, i can’t remember, and, as i said, i’m in the bath.)

i don’t understand, i thought, the second time. the nut is screwed maximally to the bottom?!

a few weeks later it occurred to me. maybe i should try screwing the bolt leftwards, up to the top of the shaft. sure enough, with that setting, the ejected plug sat a good half centimetre further out of the water.

thank fuck i never spent that £2.49 on one of those rubber plugs that you just pull out and never ever have to try and extract with your toilet plunger ten years ago when i first had this problem.