Category: i] toblerone (a brexit poem)

i’m skylarking back with the new month’s tunes / and there is an elder geezer in louis vuitton shoes

i was listening to skylarking by xtc on the plane. having a wee drink. enjoying the inflight entertainment. there were actually quite a few old lads wearing designer sneakers and sort of tracksuits. i always think very expensive trainers look gash. similar to the ones you would get in asda or walmart but with a big louis vuitton logo on them that makes them look like fakes. real or fake, quite embarrassing to be seen in imho. anyway this chap was having cash flow issues.

what’s the most you would pay for trainers?

to be continued.

memento mori and more is yet to come. / i’ll be home soon, waiting for you

even the rich and powerful will die. trump will die. starmer will die. kardashion will die. i will die and you will die. except i am a fictional character so maybe i won’t die. or maybe i will in some stories, but not in others. what if we all are characters in novels, who only live when our book is off the shelf?

my girlfriend managed to time her visit to her sister’s such that she was not in town when i got home from the bike holiday. i think she was holding me to a long tease. absence makes the something something. i was missing her.

a soul impressed by power and wealth is not worth impressing:

throwing darts with some colleagues, i realised that if i really pay attention, i can reliably hit the board, and occasionally hit the thing i am aiming at. i came fifth out of eight. not very impressive. but why would a good soul care? they may be compassionate if, for some reason, darting competence was important to me. but the good souls don’t care about competence or endeavour. they just love other good souls.

the wind cools and we race to the ferry and over the hill / comfortable in the air between fiction and essay—

the best bike rides have boats in them. that’s just a fact. we were nearing the end of the holiday, and fortunately the wind calmed a bit and we got an epic ride over the big mountain in.

i was comfortable and cool in the breeze, and considering one of my favourite writers – milan kundera. he writes perfect prose, light yet weighty. deep with philosophy, shallow with the needs of flesh. the story is unimportant – the storyteller is the whole show. characters, plots and places are tools which the author uses to carve the meaning of life into his reader.

not a repast but the popped french cork starter pistol / for a glorious wedding breakfast.

any meal served at a wedding is a breakfast, in the british isles anyway, i understand. but when my great friends d + k were getting married, i was unaware of this. i just saw on the invitation that there would be breakfast. so i was an undiagnosed autistic at the time, and i was sitting at a table at the wedding with two other undiagnosed autistics. and maybe a few more to be honest. and we were starving because we hadn’t had breakfast because we thought we were getting it at the wedding. the father of the bride’s speech went on for about 3 hours and by the time it was over one of my pals was so drunk he somehow brained himself on a urinal and was off work for half a year. n.n.benn is a fictional character mind.

and think a blushing thought of soft skinned twins of twins / just a finger’s pinch, a shallow bite, a nibble

it’s funny how the tease works, that the hint of a thing can be better than a lot of it. the feeling of being left wanting more. i think that’s why cigarettes are so popular. so fundamentally unsatisfactory that you need an infinite amount of them. typing this makes me want one now. and i quit a long time ago.

so, a stoic, i mourn each day a day lost

i do try and be a good stoic, and i touch on themes of stoicism often in the poem. every day i make a point of thinking about the fact that i will die and i don’t know when. and i try and remember to think of one specific person, and remember that they will die too. a different person each day. people i love, people i wish were already dead, people i barely know.

volcanic shores and gales of fearsome solitude

it’s a new month, so i have a new verse out on the youtube / spotify / apple music. it’s called the slugabed. hope you like it.

i just spent two days solid sorting through emails. all my emails since gmail was invented. almost 20 years of emails. so many rejections from jobs. from the lowest paid, lowest skilled, right up to the top – board level. no matter what step of the ladder i aim for, my skill profile doesn’t quite work. so that’s why i’m a poet and a cyclist. and this line was my lonely, dyspraxic protest against winds that i was too scared to ride in on my bike holiday.

I have a theory that every generation knows completely different stuff / different, but the same

when i was younger, all my friends were my age. we shared a frame of reference. same teachers, food, tv shows. as you get older, you start to recognise differences that passed you by. different types of parent. differing wealth. different trajectories.

now i have friends of all ages and it has really struck me – everyone’s experience is unique. there are generational flavours of course. but in a way, we are trapped solitarily in our experience, knowing the things we know, being the people we are.