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.
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.
volcanic shores and gales of fearsome solitude mapped out like a navigable carthaginian, i was not so, a stoic, i mourn each day a day lost and think a blushing thought of soft skinned twins of twins just a finger’s pinch, a shallow bite, a nibble not a repast but the popped french cork starter pistol for a glorious wedding breakfast.
the wind cools and we race to the ferry and over the hill comfortable in the air between fiction and essay— a soul impressed by power and wealth is not worth impressing: momento mori and more is yet to come. i’ll be home soon, waiting for you i’m skylarking back with the new month’s tunes and there is an elder geezer in louis vuitton shoes his amex was in a stolen purse has 1000 euro cash money and wants a chicken wrap pours his heiney to a flexy tumbler, up to the brim thanks the kindly lass across the aisle for a short term loan and 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…
our reunion was a salty affair, trolling agents and sellers ebitdata scientists don’t budget for trauma: cutting teeth. immersed in the pain pearlescent I wonder if being kidnapped by my mum‘s best friend as a child had a lasting effect? unrelated: the knot in my chest will spring from my mouth and rip out my guts 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
all stoned poets think they are funny—well i am funny or unusual anyway shilling for a limited europe, my identity fading, delaminated not drunk, just exuberant. and well nourished cycling down a road like the dream where i find another room in my house moist stroll, jelly tower shuffle, cheesing postbox, very cruel 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 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 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 a hotbed of fervour, preachers on manic street indigent, indignant and surplus to requirements 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)
chorus 3 – march
have you tried the toblerone, stupid child? i have a theory my anti car philosophy is not strictly environmental but because i was in two major car crashes before i was 10 different, but the same
shrinkflation, skimpflation, it’s hard not to feel like we are living in troubled times. despite technological advances, we seem to be continually told we need to work harder, and for longer, and that we should expect less.
i was just having a beer and feeling nice and relaxed on the balcony. sunbathing behind a wind blocker. feeling chilled out and at one with the world, listening to leonard cohen.
we went to a resaurant on top of a hill and nearly blew away. i could feel my sliders blowing off my feet as i trudged up and down the sand dune. i think the food was alright though.
#gastronomy
santa lucia, bocadillo con queso, cortardo y cerveza it’s great to be back
pretty self explanatory. a cheap and good cafe. half way up or down a hill. roll and cheese and a milky coffee on the way up. ice cream and a shandy on the way down.
we walked to the next town across for lunch one day. went to a pretty average/crap cafe. it was a longish walk back. an hour or so. i needed to pee so snuck behind a screen at an abandoned construction site. accidentally stood on a plastic jug of dark oil. who knows what it was but it got all over me. ruined my brand new shoes. the only pair i brought with me! traumatic.
and when we got back home, it turned out the restaurant we went to was a chain. and there was another one right next to our apartment. the only half decent restaurant in town as well.
i arrived on the desert island for the much needed cycling holiday but was disappointed to be greeted by absurd gusts and breezes that made cycling feel bizarre. through treacle in one direction, like a missile in another, and a sort of bucking bronco phenomenon otherwise. we made the most of it.
i was feeling frustrated by bureaucracy. check-box office politics. i made a mild protest against the meaninglessness of it all. and was soundly ignored. fortunately, i had a holiday booked.
i had never heard the phrase ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ before. had to google it. reminded me of a competition i heard about on radio 4 many years ago for pointless aphorisms. the two i recall are ‘no leg’s too short to reach the ground’ and ‘you don’t need niagra falls to wet a stamp’. it’s weird what sticks with you.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 