different, but the same

i have always hated cars. noisy. smelly. wasteful. ugly litter on the streets. horrible signage in hideous colours. potholes. smelly garages and petrol stations. aggressive drivers. speeding. trying to kill me on my bike. polluting the planet. and they keep getting bigger. complicated to drive as well now they don’t seem to have keys. get in the car and press buttons and levers at random until it turns on. most of the inside of the car is a computer screen. seems safe.

it’s the end of the month! so there will be a new release tomorrow – april is here, the time is now…ish

how do you feel about cars and climate change?

always leaving, never gone, tomorrow never will crystallise / the turncoat, former scapegoat, grasping for a banknote / but there is no antidote. / we hereby shall rely (on the good souls who forgive us)

i was enjoying being a firebrand revolutionary from the manics reference yesterday and carried on with some lefty hyperbole. i hope you don’t mind!

do you consider yourself to be a left-wing firebrand?

a hotbed of fervour, preachers on manic street / indigent, indignant and surplus to requirements

manic street preachers was the first band i saw live and will always low key love them. what’s not to like about welsh weird glam rock marxists. men in dresses talking about dialectical materialism. would recommend. so as a little tribute i put some manicsy sounding left-wing angst into the poem.

what are your favourite rock bands?

once again i chop chillies then piss and my dick burns / i count the first lambs of spring and dig a few hills / fitments suitable for various screws, but none of this massivity / a sombre lover, indolent turbo, fresh strain spring clean shower interrupter / a plan for mouth and fingers, mutuality of idyll desire

i don’t know how often you touch your genitalia after fingering hot chilli peppers, but really one time should be enough. so why does it keep happening to me?

do you have any self-injurious habits?

a big and empty feeling filling a sad gap / why do i act like ive found the one true way of being when it doesn’t me happy? / but then bliss is in my life and the doldrums abate / we extend the family table, aware the ides of march

2024 was a bit topsy turvy for me. firmly a year of transition. i was most of the way through a sort of period of reflection and rebirth. psychologically unmoored as i examined and reinvented myself. i found myself a bit stranded from time to time. doubting the process. and just when i needed it, i’d get a sense of that feeling of rightness in the world. that its all for a reason. that life gets better with understanding. that sometimes you have to hurt to heal.

have you been through a period of transition in adulthood?

charge another hour to diary management / you simply must believe the story you tell yourself / (excuse me for hoping to feature so prominently in it

our attachment to reality is not as strong as we believe it is. we live in the permanent now. we can’t really trust out memories. they could be fake. we make plans for a future that we assume will happen, but based on what? all there ultimately is are the sensations we feel and the stories we tell ourselves about them. but, as a practical matter, it is helpful to just believe reality is as you see it. otherwise we’d never be able to brush our teeth and drink our coffee in the morning.

do you believe in reality? do you trust the sun to rise again tomorrow?

cycling down a road like the dream where i find another room in my house / moist stroll, jelly tower shuffle, cheesing postbox, very cruel

i used to always have this dream where i found another room in my flat. ‘all my problems are solved,’ i’d think to myself. how did neither i nor the previous owner or like the builder or the estate agent notice? but i haven’t had that dream in a while. life changed i guess. i got a bit smaller. need less space.

and the road is a real road. that runs near a road i know well. i am aphantastic. on some level, i don’t believe that the world that i can’t see exists. new places frighten and amaze me.

how vivid is the imagery of your mind’s eye?

shilling for a limited europe, my identity fading, delaminated / not drunk, just exuberant. and well nourished

so I was listening to a lot of the streets. shilling for a limited europe is a reference to european bob, from weak become heroes, while also being an ironical statement about brexit. and then my identity fading, delaminated, again, a statement about brexit, but also a reference to the fake student id card i had in 200x that sometimes got me into nightclubs and sometimes quite literally delaminated in the bouncer’s hands. and then the drunk / well nourished bit is basically a cryptic reference to an in-joke i was in-on in high school.

do you still ruminate on in-jokes from your days of underage drinking?

all stoned poets think they are funny—well i am funny / or unusual anyway

i saw an episode of the jerry seinfeld car programme were he said he knew a lot of comedians who smoked weed – a lot of broke comedians. it’s a good enough line for me to steal it anyway. i was listening to a lot of the streets at the time. original pirate material. come rain or snow the buddha flows. lock down your aerial.

are you an unsuccessful comedian? have you considered sobriety?

leaving a slugabed trapped in a pole vaulter’s libido / territorial, barking at my next door neighbour on the landing, hello / stand up for yourself, for [] sake / ah, woof! we all rely on the good souls who forgive us

this is the husk, the kernel of my character. a horny chasm, which forms the foundation that my superstructure of art, personality and lifestyle attempt to conceal. profoundly, inherently lazy, but driven to outrageous (solipsistic?) achievements in the pursuit of lovemaking.

and my girlfriend’s dog thinks i own the entire apartment building i live in. she is always alerting me to intruders. and this one time she barked at my neighbour for ages in the hall. i think that was the first day that i ever picked up a dog poo. and in that act, i understood love.

do you have a special canine in your life?