blog

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i wonder if wine 
hastens one's demise 
when no one has eyes for you
and demise is the goal you yearn 

i wonder if life
hastens one's death 
when no one is any the wiser
to what you're really intending to do 

i wonder if love 
is actually what kills you
when everyone says foolishly 
it's everything you'd ever desire 

and i wonder if pills and tablets 
but not like the ones the heroes took in films 
when battling with the evil ones 
all those years ago 

are all we can look forward to
in a century where reflection 
is no longer measured thinking 
but has become a narcissistic fact 

of selfies galore 
and personal branding 
and instagrammed realities 
editing foolishly out all of the truths 

because when all is done and said 
and the winners take the bread 
and leave the crumbs behind 
for the stupid and the blind 

society wasn't made to do any good
and businesses weren't aimed 
at what we ought or should 
but just instead to speed the passing 

of what some of us thought 
was right for a while
and whilst we still had the guts all right we did
to think with a kind of style that night 

---

i discovered a place this year 
like cs lewis 
once built in narnia 
where bad still existed 
but good was predominant

it wasn't a place i felt lonely at all
but a country 
and society where 
whatever befell me
i knew what call to make 

back in my own homeland now 
i am cowed and frightened -- 
sad as can be --
of what next i must do 
because of this #loneliness i feel 

it assails my every hue 
and steals away my joy
and toys with my emotions 
as if i were a mouse 
in someone else's cattery 

and whilst it's all my fault
as the mental health nurse once told me
awakening from a drug-induced coma
he had surely 
administered by injection  

even so i sense it a waste of a life 
that could've been something ever-so- different 
where a wife had meant a joyful thing 
and society had managed 
to be more gladly expressed 

and where even my deep love of country
had finally been reciprocated 
so that steep hills of green 
and shallow graves in valleys between 
had led us all to value the other 

instead of this reality i now do face 
where no one cares to embrace my body
and everyone prefers to batter my mind
as if it were a childhood arse 
used by savage parent instead of kiss 

and so that's it:
another life gone down the tube 
which once was cathode ray and all
and now is always you you you 
never me me me ... at all 

---

another sad #poem for tonight, inspired by the recent publication in Strand Magazine of a rare and previously unknown one of #raymondchandler’s #poems.

i read a reviewer today, covering off as she was this literary discovery, and who in so doing called the writer one of the most empirical there had ever been. she either didn’t know how to spell lyrical or simply didn’t ever get #chandler’s amazing capacity for real #poetic #prose.

for me, that is, and for what it’s worth, #chandler was the #fitzgerald of #crimefiction.

when #chandler’s wife died, he fell into a deep depression and never recovered. he himself died five years later. what’s been recently published (though to my chagrin i have yet to read it in its totality) is called “Requiem”: being a #requiem for his awfully missed wife.

my poem, meantime, written this evening around the idea not the content of #chandler’s work, befits the #narcissism of our own century: in my case, my #poem is a #requiem for myself.

i’m sure #chandler’s is much grander. but either way, here is mine:

i'd rather be sleeping with a knife 
than a wife
i'd rather be lying on a slab 
than through my mouth
i'd rather be face down in mad muddy gutters
than face up to pain and utter single words again 

i'd rather be a body in a zip-up bag black
than be bagging a future no one recalled 
i'd rather now hurt people who hurt me all this time 
than be hurt any further in my dowdy stupid life
i'd rather choose last of all to take what's mine and only this
than have people around me taking the piss 
as they argue till red in their idiotic faces 
how instead i'm actually committing a crime 

and so i'd much rather say in this way i always had 
that i loved you to the end (with no intention at all of bad)
than be the man who then failed to beat 
this human i'm just as clearly become 

---

Background

The poem below is about one of the most disagreeable families and groupings one could ever encounter.

It involves a brother, my younger; a cousin, older than me; plus a mass of their friends and acquaintances all too eager and willing to do ill … and all in the interests of delivering what now we call #cognitivewarfare.

How it started

It all started in the first place because my younger brother had had an affair with my aforementioned cousin before and after I also, to my shame, did myself. The previous year, 2003, I had been judged by the British state to be a paranoid schizophrenic, when in hindsight this was utter balderdash. Nevertheless, the following year, 2004, my cousin encouraged me to embrace my diagnosis, whilst I spent four days in her family home, absent of all other members, saying to me over and over that the diagnosis as it stood (still stands because of people like her) was sexy and fun.

Although our affair in the physical sense lasted four days, the relationship hung around like a miasma of the most foul for more than a decade after. She was simply a toxic woman of the worst, capable of getting a doctor friend onside to cover up her historical behaviours with an equally ludicrous mental health diagnosis to mine.

How it continued

Since then, three man from her country, Mark, James and Dermott, as well as innumerable others along the way, over all this time it has to be said, have pursued my interests and life opportunities to prevent me from ever breaking away from the monster she has been, both in my life and — in the deepest sense — in the lives of so many others.

Particularly her menfolk, too.

I called it a while ago, maybe three or four years now (this thing which these people around her have being doing to me), the following: #neoterrorismontheindividual. It’s essentially a tech-driven gaslighting conducted by groups of ordinary people using easily available mobile and similar technologies:

• Text-based version of my idea around #neoterrorismontheindividual

• Slide-deck version of my idea around #neoterrorismontheindividual

It’s anti-democratic because it uses tools such as Facebook and WhatsApp and Instagram and Messenger to deliver outcomes of private choice over any intervention possible by legitimate law-enforcement agencies, or maybe even just others with a minimum right of democratic expression to apply such force in representative fashion.

Where I am today

I am happy today, despite all the above, because I realise on my 61st saint’s day — I used to have the middle name of Andrew in a language I now find generally bitter (why I no longer name myself thus) — that I quite like, after all, being kind of a fisher … not of men, but of humans.

How it affects us all

Our civilisation is dying, this is clear. And it is dying in part because we rely on the decision-making capacity of structures that don’t allow for nonconformity: Western democratic corporate and related teamwork dynamics allow for many things, but one thing they work firmly against is creative leaps of faith of the very best by individuals.

What’s been in charge as we move straight to #globalboiling is a teamwork that wipes out the hyper-individual thinking which otherwise can lead us to genius: maybe, even, a species-saving genius too.

What needs to be in charge, surely, is that which I advocate today: a democratised capacity to deliver unpredictable thinking, predictably.

Just this …

• gb2earth.com/pgtps/isolate | essay

• gb2earth.com/tools | introduction to the wider concepts involved

• gb2earth.com/pgtps/genesis | #platformgenesis

• gb2earth.com/pgtps/space | #thephilosopherspace

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i'm sitting at table 42
in storyhouse right now
and i am reminded of 
the worst year of my life 
when i met a woman 
who was someone else's wife 
as chattel it must be admitted 
so wrong as wrong could be 
even i would say this true 

a woman who didn't know how to be
in this world at all at all
even to the extent 
she preferred to see wrong 
as right
in philosophical bent 
claiming blue was black 
and as black as any top hat 
she demanded be doffed in her presence 

they called her 
those who loved her 
(and then there were some of these)
a gentlewoman of sorts
brought up by the violence of a father 
who knew only the life of bully
and as part of the scurrying  
and blustering brutality
that those northern isles did bring for so long 

to her very own native inhumanity 
callous and biting 
with the tongue of thieves 
as she dismantled 
every single manhood she met 
and that she uncovered out there
as they were 
in pursuit in reality 
of the parents of hers who'd known nothing at all 

except how to set traps
in amongst the future of this rock
where nature takes stock 
and then piles on the cruelty
of all these bullied women and men
who find themselves unable
to do anything whatsoever  
except conduct their children and society 
to funeral pall and requiem of every one of their counted kin 

and finally i see
how all this wasn't me
but just the war they chose
to baldly conduct on my person 
and so then it is now when i start 
to feel good 
and utterly upheld 
in all the things 
i sold and still do sell

because there is nothing worse
than to be a team member
when the function of such grouping 
is to DISmember a world 
and it's this 
that i have firmly resisted 
during this time and all along:
i refuse to form a part of you all
when you all are fully engaged with clearly what is wrong 

me myself i was powerless all this time
so entirely blameless too
as the only thing i had was my rhymes 
but you had all those big jobs instead 
and those cocks and cunts that wrote up societies 
and claimed to be making this real 
and something in truth for all our kids 
when in fact you didn't no you didn't 
only prefer to fuck me around 

but gladly you chose to fuck your own kids 
and their futures and ways of seeing true 
with you gas-guzzling cars and mortgages
and nicely imported wines
and the nightly dining brightly in line 
in fab island cities 
of good food so cool
where the environment was a toy 
of awful casual tool 

and all this time as i say 
i myself had zero impact at all 
but all of you ALL of you i say
with all your positions of power so fine 
neglected one thing 
and WILFULLY too 
(whereas i found my person honestly good 
whilst all this time
never stopping marking the time in that there hood)

re your very worst cards and jokers 
kept so close to family and friends
of unacceptable end
and of terrible secrets
and undercurrents 
that justify everything all these years 
which you yourselves have preferred to deliver on 
as right and absolutely so
when the only thing they really are 

is fucked-up humans like you and yours 
who'd much rather 
bloom falsely and mad on days of idle
than take a hold
of the root of the problem 
being that which involves
having all that fun you still choose to enjoy
at the expense of a future
for all our CHILDREN 

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