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. search 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.