atlas tugged

earth is comprised of water, mud and metal

so is the human body.

and as we pump pollutants into the air

we literally incorporate them,

a singular ticket to where?

i’m in my prime and,

unlike miss jean brodie,

atlas tugged

people expand in space to take it all

when i just want to be so small

hitlerism is coming back

and i’m as depressed as i am scared

and i’m suddenly not sure,

is everyone humouring me or not?

i’d just read primo levy’s masterpiece ‘the periodic table’ and was touched greatly by it. the vile inevitability of war, hatred and suffering, coexisting, always, with the fantastic beauty of the cultural world. as the bombs dropped, the poets worked on in the dark.

the culture war will exist forever. because there will always be the poetic and the curious on one side, and the bullies on the other side, who think that poetry is an affront to them, because they dare not try and understand it. and even now, when the bullies are fundamentally in control of america and the internet, they strike against poetry, and call us elitist, when all we are is a disparate mass trying to make sense of the hatred in the world, and imagine something nicer.

typist, poet, athlete, hi

get jacked up,

no imposter testostero-monster

typist poet athlete spy,

i wonder why i have this tie

to the human condition

a horny cowboy,

clit eatswood on a mission

it took me forever to realise

what consequences were

and remain

i’m still not sure i really get it

as we stand on the verge of

nuclear armageddon

let’s discuss commodity fetishism

from an original position

rejargonise my vocabulary,

please, textbook on notation

i was trying to find a balanced way of living. making money, while also being creative. it was creeping up to the new year, when i would start publishing my poetry, and i had a lot of nerves and apprehension regarding this. i still do.

i also remain anxious about nuclear war. and i was starting to try and learn about music theory. a year on, i can just about bash a tune out of a piano. i’m better at melodica. haven’t got long enough fingers for the piano really. really crap at guitar.

oh and some of these lines were originally ‘funny’ ideas for my online dating profile.

self-care weekend

search term “gumtree”

eight hundred items

cried three times

in a basic way,

people are just

what they do and say…

cold dry, hot dry,

hot wet, wet wet

transcendental massage

happy tears ending,

middle,

and a bit near the start

when she took my feet

like yeshua of nazareth

then clasped my palm

like the virgin mother

i was really worn out, i’d been busy in work, i’d had a big disappointment after missing out on a job i really wanted. i spent a weekend sorting emails and then went for a sauna and massage and it was just what i needed. i am a tense person and i have a lot of neck and shoulder pain as a result. and when i’m sore and burned out and incommunicative, i want a deep sports massage delivered with firm certainty.

but there’s also something very intimate about contact with the palms and soles of the feet. a lot of nerves there i suppose.

bad election

i’m freewheeling with neil in a sodden cloud

commiserating on the unproud

behold the convict’s re-ennoblement

i live with my pain, i own it

and i don’t care who knows it

chain-whip for a strain

against the pain

with every novel

life-stage crisis

i achieve a new, anal

level of organisation

i remember tidying my room after a particularly bad bout of depression aged about 18. i think it helped. i remember even at that time being always stressed out about the files on my computer. and my email inbox. i had no systems. files had stupid names. data was saved all over the place on various hard disks. at some point i actually managed to lose gigabytes of original music recordings i’d made over many years. i’m getting stressed typing this.

when i had a bit of an identity crisis after being diagnosed with autism, amongst other things, i assembled all my school reports cards and exam certificates. and i sorted though all my emails since i got a gmail account in 2007. i try and maintain a system of sorts now. i like to keep my flat tidy.

ms. diagnosis

i only realised i had dimples

when i was 39

its fair to say i have a disconnected

state of mind

my health so misdiagnosed

i associate doctors with hurting mine

so let’s let this limerent love sing fine

aside regular meltdowns,

it’s still the honeymoon time

we bond beyond the boundaries of skin

and trust that good souls forgive everything.

when i was in my early twenties i had a girlfriend with facial dimples. how, how did it not occur to me that i also have dimples. even as i was researching the idea on google images i was doubtful. but ultimately accepting. diagnosed with dimples at thirty nine years old. with autism at 40. what next?

the pb

race day nerves, alert,

waiting for the call to stool

and then a heady wait for armistice

two centuries less a decade,

my heart rate for eighty-six minutes

wobbly, aching legs, perplexing personality test

pleasant materteral assessors suggest i am for def. autistic

i ran a pb in the half marathon this time last year. this time this year i ran a pb in the 10k. 38 mins. it was a windy day. my legs are still aching from it now. as they were from the half last year.

then i went for my autism assessment, which was actually very stressful. like custom designed to really stress an autistic person out. which is the sort of person i am.

save for what?

my good friend steev had a job when teenaged

saved up, quit, bought a guitar with his wages

said to me once: what are you saving up for?

lately i think about that a more and more

and the other recurring dream

loading the trolley with all the treats

and waking up before i eat them

i have mentioned my friend steev before. i went climbing with him early in the morning before work for a year or so, until he moved away last winter. we were both going through transitions of one sort or another.

we were in a band together when we were much younger, and it must have been around that time that we had the conversation about saving up.

when does one find contentedness? i was thinking about that a lot. and the autism diagnosis was forcing me to look at my life in a different way.

i decided to work less. spend more time on art. poetry, music, this blog. and i am working on redrafting some long form prose for publication. i wish i could work more on this stuff and less on employment still though.

degenerate cosmopolitan

i’m not jewish but i am a degenerate cosmopolitan

tagging my archive, overwhelmed by the burden of time,

the library extends my being

to a new dimension, my mind fleeing

to the shelf. and when i see a single magpie i blurt, i say

there was a second one but i scared it away

down glens and valleys, down spirits and sedatives

my love is unambiguous

but the good souls may as well forgive us

i often reflect that if i lived in nazi germany, i would have been a victim, not a perpetrator. i’m left wing. i believe in individual freedom. i’m an artist. i’m disabled.

i am very scared about the turns being taken in many so called western liberal democracies.

plug stuck

am overwhelming day, a meltdown throws my phone away

the bath is full of soapy water, the plug stuck in its circlet

it’s thursday the 12th, what the fuck will tomorrow bring?

i start the drill and it’s enough

to scare the plug from its crown

when you find out you are probably autistic, there is a tendency to temporarily get more autistic. i have actually only had a few meltdowns. i am a quite person. i am prone to shutdowns. i don’t like to draw attention to myself.

the few meltdowns i have had have tended to get me in serious trouble. like, arrested, or hospitalised.

on this occasion, i merely smashed a phone that was already quite scratched up and to be honest i probably wanted an excuse to buy a new one.

oh and the plug got stuck in the bath. i have written about this before! it was annoying! check the archives!

diarrhoea and dandruff

put primo down, nobody cared, not even humoured

zapped and solitary, unarchiving and decrypting

violent gut, cash drop,

shy black sheep dribble down a gravel path…

as a poet it frustrates me no end that I am able to articulate my identity crisis

only through the bodily language of diarrhoea and dandruff.

i’d just recorded the first song of my album, toblerone, but nobody was very interested. that remains the case – it is available on spotify and all other good record streams though if you are interested. seach for ‘the love epochal’. at the time i was planning on releasing a new song and video every month.

one of the things about autism is that it can be hard to work out how time consuming a plan is going to be. it turns out that schedule was incompatible with having a job. but i managed it for six months and that’s quite good i reckon.

and when i wrote these lines, i was having an identity crisis and was suffering some physical symptoms. itchy scalp. bad gut. good thing i had my poetry to keep me going.