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.

the universal now

we live in the spur of the moment
and we can protest or conform, it
is a choice we make from minute
to minute within a limit and maybe within it
there’s a justice extinct clink.
am-me-sia, a daily battle with with my lived reality
and it’s not reckless to travel vulnerably
not if it’s premeditated….

the experience of living in the universal now is common to folk with audhd – that is, both autism and adhd. a combination that was, until fairly recently, thought impossible. a diagnosis of one meant you couldn’t have the other. i have only been diagnosed with autism, but i relate quite strongly to audhd people. my favourite podcast at the moment is ‘audhd flourishing’, presented very ably by mattia mauree. the other day she mentioned that for her there are only two times, now and not-now. i have a fundamental sort of inability to imagine the future. i have no visual imagination at all, a neurodivergence known as aphantasia.

in another life i was an award winning criminal law student. so the last lines are a reference to the two mens reas of murder in scots law, intention (to kill) or wicked recklessness – a sort of wilful recklessness, a behaviour so thoughtless and dangerous that death is an inevitable outcome.

britain used to be famous for its liberalism. but there has always been an authoritarian streak, and in recent years the government has clamped down hard on peaceful but ‘nuisance causing’ protests. so we live in a world were poor wee crusty hippies spend serious time in jail for trying to make the world a better place. whether we agree with protestors or not, a healthy society should be able to argue its case without resorting to violence.

naked to the invisible eye

naked to the invisible eye is my conscience
so jaded, they almost shot the president; i didn’t buy the paper
the elbowed class are occupied, betting the house on forex
honest labourers: poets, cleaners, cooks, balance on the breadline
not even the climate crisis promises to kill with equality
that’s ermine hegemony, they’ll colonise the moon
before one less race, people or nation leaves immiseration
so on every day’s agenda keep an item just for you
say no, instead of yes, and swear allegiance to yourself
and see yourself in every other soul

an old friend, don john, who i have not seen or heard of in probably 20 years, once accidentally said ‘naked to the invisible eye’ rather than ‘invisible to the naked eye’ during one of his tutorials at oxford. a creepy mistake which cuts to the meat of the disconcerting level of surveillance which seems to be a feature not a bug of late capitalist society.

i remember around the turn of the millennium seeing a movie about the stazi in east germany. the level of surveillance by the state against its citizens was rightly seen as shocking. it was one of the most effective arguments the western allies had against actually-existing state-socialism. do you want to live in a cliping society where thugs go through your garbage?

but then the snowden leaks happened and it turned out the us and european governments had been illegally spying on their citizens for years. we can probably be sure they still are. but on top of that, we now have unelected tech megapolies monitoring us and we are freely giving them our data, and that of those we communicate with. we tell their ai chatbots our darkest secrets. maybe we just aren’t very smart. maybe these technologies are generating issues and possibilities that we aren’t yet capable of understanding.

cohen again

i listen to cohen again and wonder if i’m obsessive
in the wet, warm drink i sip the spirit water, and ponder
i react first with emotion, the weight takes a while to settle
i’m let down and i let down
there is no reasoning with the passions.
sometimes i feel like i’m not a real person—a lack i’ve sought in others
credit for debit, the difference solo temporal
evolve the revolving door, better round than in
any task, i’ll find a way to do it
my first instinct may be wrong but given infinite time…

i mentioned earlier this week my trouble with receiving unconditional love. my confused adolescence. well last month i had romy on my playlist. her album, mid air, has been on repeat in my ears for a while. highly recommend.

‘my mother says to me, enjoy your life’

i’d seen my mum for my birthday dinner the day before. i was tired. at the gym. listening to my angsty feminist icons playlist. and i felt overwhelmed by emotion when this came on. the instruction is both comforting and implausible. why is it such a struggle to be happy?

i grew up in a loving family and still managed to be traumatised by it. i felt so unworthy of my parents’ love. if you too have been troubled by this issue, then i suggest the way to deal with it is to pass it on. to try to love universally and unconditionally. i don’t want to make excuses for everyone. but it’s not easy living in the complicated world, and we all have different perspectives and abilities. there is no right level of selfishness, anxiety or generosity. similar actions and intentions lead to dissimilar results. we don’t always know the consequences before we cause them.

a man in high viz

brain foggy social pariah, a covid redux
the pistoled bard of excise rejects my claim for input
useless plugged nose, gunged the viral info into the schnoz exhibit
assaulted. i’m looking for a man in high viz.
with a trust deficit
and a driving ban
and a financed tinted window sports utility van
or an elegant young woman-but will she let me ride her to
ingliston horse shop, mount blow, nasal and wet
soaked in sweat, shivering, bottom lip quivering…
i have the taste in music of a precocious teenage girl
if your gonna whack the boss, it better not be botched
[sniffs] you smell that, son? that’s football, and it’s coming home
ah no, they lost
we all rely on the good souls who forgive us.

i managed to catch covid for i think the third time. it wasn’t too bad, but i did have gush issues, nasally. i didn’t let it stop me riding my bike though, nor longing to get my girlfriend out riding with me. and that did eventually happen. i’m looking forward to a long life of riding bikes with my love.

that ‘man in finance’ thing had gone viral and a friend, l.r., was looking for a more manly sort of man. she is very funny and such a generous person.

then in other news, expresident trump survived an attempt on his life, unlike his would-be assassin. which reminded me of omar, in the wire. then england got into the final of the european soccer championship. i think they lost on penalties and then sacked their manager. it’s well paid but i think stressful and insecure work, hence why i have pursued poetry as a career rather than international elite sports coaching.