There's things you can do and things you just don't because if you did you'd have to hide and once you hid you'd never have lied more than that day you found you'd hid at her door
And whilst I'm still unsure and the door in question remains half ajar I'd not tarry I don't think in the blink of an eye which caresses what it espies when looking forward to you
And so now my insecurity belies my other erstwhile uncertainty: I've lived my life without a wife as well as I could ever have done
That's all it's been and all I saw and then today I'm really happy and all up for a SAPPY review of you and me and me and you
And equally time to rhyme the end and equally lines we read between and equally things we just don't either except, that is, when yes we do
And then it's clearly me and you and then it's obvious: never true and then it's never less than us because it's time we began to trust ...
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life as eldest of my family being the glue that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be for every sibling and cousin i had the very best sounding-board they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects accepting all their holes of dark seeing as absolutely and utterly fair the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens of the dragons and monsters some of them have been to me and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen and what i have actually witnessed and suffered to the extent they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time i found it hard to do more than rhyme in order to survive the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me and imposed on me and painted on me as if into a corner around my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits and find in time the core i needed and just be me for me at all and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son and father and brother and lover and done nailed brutally and abusively to the cross of quite another
and so after all that it came to 2015 and all i could do was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought again he's going mad or maybe he's just bad and maybe that was it
when really what it was this thing i began to do was realise that their VACUOUS holes like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core of apple-like pleas ever forming contentedly so that all i knew how to do
all this time for 53 years of foolishness too was to impale myself like stake to a soul in such a way
that their very real madnesses appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day most would still find it easy to say that what they did to me in 2003 as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate as incarcerated foully by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty and how it did so
and how it was so neither good for them nor good for me as no one ever let me be neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004 then took me to her web of evil spidery claw and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly and without remission and did all those things to me with zero permissions
i am reminded also of the techie folk who in 2002 in virtual sense and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true as they played their games with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish who can't find it in themselves to ever care more than a minimum expression for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today and christmas 2023 does approach in its way and so now my son is adhd and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true and my younger relations both clearly that and good and even two others who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish for all their multiple decades and years ... and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for and one of utterly beastly yore as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis when if all the above had come fairly to light first of all then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family both sibling and parental and so wider and much more wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet drugged to the eyeballs by a country caring only to treat a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside like evil mischief far and wide because dear cousins
and siblings and children and wife and my life that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all as i tried desperately to be that thing you all needed me to be when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU who needed far more support than i ever would being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024 i realise with joy in no way a trickle that i need care for none of you any more at all because what was broken
and splintered and hurt was not my job you see to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time than you and yours and those you claimed were mine and i was far LESS incomplete and far less unseated
and far less nailed to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss and the cost of not talking to each other as we might've done and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed and never embracing what actually you all were in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity to treasure and measure against all other benchmarks where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now found myself at last with no right at all to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining to ever help out anyone insane enough to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe incapable of realising any of you in time that the very reasons you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why you should've protected me and precisely why no longer there's any point in my trying
to work with and for absolutely any of you in health and sickness or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame where being together could've been a worthy test of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun of chests of mysterious pieces of infinity where once upon a time
it was me that was seen to be the really crazed guy when it truth it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change because family for me now irreversibly wanes as we all become
as diverse as each other thus meaning right on i am finally released from ever being again your necessary brother
you know that when you're the bad guy and what this feels like when one day you realise you're really not and all your life has been a lie like a woman's body never was and never sighed and never signed up for contractually either
that lie of the treasured like a valley of souls rolled into one and made entirely one as reaching the winning-post like a dinner roasted at thanksgiving or a christmas feast to be followed by sandwiched leftover because this is what my life has been
just leftovers you might say and then again you may not because as i draw the picture and shape the narrative of what it's been like to be alive i refuse to revise what i saw and felt and did in terms that otherwise fail my truth because for me there is nothing i love more than this
nothing more than the truths i sometimes stumble across like those stations of the same and those paths of the insane where we find ourselves socially constructed and criminally instructed to remain in the severest of pains for the rest of our existences able no longer to resist the abuses of such powers
where our nation-states should've protected us profoundly of these layers of horrific inspecting introspection from which our capacity for free thoughts and thus our ability to sense joyous oughts becomes merely the obligation of familial relationship instead of the real pursuit of that which might once have rightly suited us
and so that's it it is it really is and that's why we lose our intimate instincts i mean those we were born with and out of and into for doing good things by the others we meet and rather much rather prefer to that bullying of the opposing
into opposing much more than should've been necessary and so this is how it became radically and so easily cessation-free as all histrionics and hostilities became us madly too like we were grinding our humanity with the pestle and mortar of cannonballs galore
and so i do just wonder why it has to all be like this and why we can't build generation by generation on the achievements of the previous and why it's only INDIVIDUALS who grow from beginning to end in a trajectory that ennobles them always whereas the MASSES just muck us totally up
like the messages of hatred that intimidated our mothers and led our fathers to fields of blood where blood meant no brotherhoods were ever capable of yielding good any more and where life has become the survival of the very least fit being those who chose finally to run the world into the deepest of pits
when you teach and reach out and don't preach but do advocate these certain ways that are different from all the differences everyone else sees and accepts and may reject or not then i am not you and you are not me
because what i am looking to do is change the "you and me" we have been so far in humanity's historical charter of what is good and what is not: i'm not prepared to settle any more for a relativism of core that destroys our capacity to construct good and bad in the measure they had once upon a crime and in rhyming couplets that mean something deeper than a ditty of shitty superficial resonances
i aspire to much more you see because i believe we humans are built out of cruelty and good depending on where we are stood and the challenge for me now (and how it is this challenge i see how it is for sure) is to make it possible for not just an individual to progress mighty and fine across the timeline of their person but for the generations too that they make up and inhabit true ... ... well ... that finally they may not need to reset and just about almost always reboot what we know from one to the next
because if the driver of humanity's improvement really is only ever the nonconformism of intelligent individual where corporate-style teamworks serve simply to only implement and make real the dreams of those who dream the unreal we need far more dreamers of the unreal than we currently have if we are to survive and thrive quite outwith ourselves one day when FEARful prayer would no longer be needed to deities sometimes just and in equal measure as cruel as gruel at least in the "sometimes" that history has loosened upon us
and so all i want for christmas is just the sense that together you and me me and cee (out of a love of the most real even where not expressed ever for whatever the circumstances which present themselves as a present that is current as well as wrapped up like no gift ever given) we might just soon enough be tough enough to bring enough truth and compassion and firm resilience to the science of building the FEARless CITIZEN
because me and you that's what we are and what we've been all these years they knocked us back like into a sack where good guys are tumbled by the really really bad and dumped into waterless wells (like we were rocks that don't ever get to) and some these guys and sometimes gals do no good but only stuff the neighbourhoods with more and more legitimated mafias of nearby cities and then again way beyond
so it's now time we put a stop to it all my love: time we said enough is enough and then did in consequential act what was needed and always has been and that the rough guys who were never tough but just cowards and only apparently hard when possessed of the full knowledge no one could properly stop them ever nor stop their awful cruelty born of power's abuse and total misuse as they winged our beautiful civilisations over and over again like icaruses of a sun which should only have embraced and instead was laced with poisons galore by the criminals of yore but also the mafias of RIGHT NOW
time i say to make love where we can and as women and men and genders-all we make these calls to love as practised where humans communicate with fabulous exes that become the kisses which seal the real human deal ...
... and then when we meet people who care not at all for all this it's time we became as firm as hell and gave them bottles of their own medications as we salvage the reputations of every civilisation of good good hood into a future-present of neighbour "should" and "want" and "wish" being the most at this time of year anyone has the right to see delivered and given and handed over and no longer feared no longer feared no longer feared ... at all
a world where it suddenly becomes possible and practical to rebuild once more the FEARless CITIZEN
because when you love unconditionally is when you arrive not at bill gates but at real pearly gates where your place isn't a state of vatican embezzlement but of true affection and amusement and of honest kindnesses expressed like the best espresso you ever sipped being your lips that day on dublin river and so this christmas i hope to find you on stockholm isle and maybe we spend a while together where everyone can see us holding our palms out not in surrender or white flag but in the glorious colours of blue and yellow one a sanctuary from all that is bad and one fighting on behalf of us daily by the minute and to the second never seconded from anything that wasn't a deep belief in the fact that putin is not mad but just entirely and completely bad without redemption and without ascension and only awaiting if some day a justice of a natural kind may be delivered duly: the descent to the darkest embers of unending fires
and so all that's being left for me to say is how much i love you and always shall and if you cannot show yourself now or cannot yet or may not any more then there will always be a time i will find time for you when you can finally hold my hand again and make me the happiest man who ever walked this rock proud and tall and amongst it all because that's what this is all about dearest soulmate of forever where our shared and intrinsic souls our fabulously intertwined souls become arts of the heart and our work then finds itself never-ending
and our life is always of utility now even as distances make the kiss on the lips quite impractical for the moment still one day we may one day say it's time to hug each other in beautiful lacy embrace NOT of the poison-laced juliet or romeo but being just the moments when utterly chilled together on common sofa we end our days in an uncommonly handsome conversation of a meeting of minds and body night after day and in all our joyous beams not of foundation or construction but actually just of sun where your eyes glisten and shine with happiness and mine weep and sob as finally i am accepted exactly for what i am by the only woman who knew what made me right again
just that state out there (if you're ever so lucky and if fortune blesses you and if your life is one of fortunate outcomes and not of war nor conflicts horrific) but that state that one which makes you unconditionally beloved without further recourse to the cruel and without further imposition of those gruels of incarceration i suffered once upon a crime but just a hand again a hand outstretched never clasping or grasping but compassionate and warm and slender-fingered and SO elegantly yours after all
and so i do await that moment one day in the near future when maybe soon and if not then well ... then maybe later you may grace my presence and give me the notion and opportunity to remind you of all that you have meant to me and mean verily still not out of illness or infirmity but simply the veracity of knowing the soul IS where it all lies in truth: a very human redemption ... for us all
it's hard when you're younger than they think it sinks you to see when they wink amongst each other as bold as ass when racing to the bottom of the pile that's exactly when it's harder than you'll ever know
they see a body not a mind because that's the world they've had themselves constructed out of code and software constitutions designed to infect with viral obfuscations the truth of the matter in question where lies are absolute rejection
and it's harder still to be growing young instead of growing old as most because younger people like to think they're younger than almost all other folk when in fact it's not your age that makes you old but something else which involves not being bold
because when you lose your bravura is when you lose your cordura as the spanish would say wouldn't they yes they most certainly would and when you lose all that you might just as well be old hat for all i'd guess tbh myself
and so this matter of growing young instead of more conventionally growing old has me sorely vexed i hate to say it does because if it were their choice they'd have me as the henchman when all i ever wished was to be superman
and so whilst my brain gets that much better the people around me refuse to get it and all that's left for me to do is to attempt to grow young gracefully at that for old is NOT my thing and growing old NEVER my ring of dire necessity
let this be the lesson then of all that i say this morn: remember that some of us do grow old i know it has to be but equally others not so different from me actually do find the lessons of life utterly enthusing and not rehusing at all
all then that's left for me to say is that i'm just a small man who's growing smaller by the day and in this fact i find absolute joy because not for smaller do we become the universe's toy
linking off is something to scoff bound to raise a hackle or more linking out once made a space home and graciously so linking now into words galore allows us all to set store quite rightly and so we do this thing quite fine and so no longer do we rue the things we left unsaid because speaking often and speaking face-to-face is the only thing that will save this human race
and so i'd like to try again to mend what's broke as said out loud and as they did so proud and strong and quite without end like a world we all quoted never sure if at a price or just unkindly and wildly wounding or simply to treasure like some easy pleasure the realisation we could all be friends again
because if we can't achieve this goal at home what chances do we have when we decide to roam and much much more further afield in meadows now blood where neighbourhoods aflaming as they surely should not lead us all to shallow blaming of others for lacking love because life is barely anything more than realising in time what's really in store and then remedying the hatred we did once feel so that other rhymes replace our spiel and bravura of rather cinematic cloth is when the embrace finally calms our wrath
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
mil's page 