The man currently speaking is one who often appears at these meetings, in Manchester at least. He is somewhat older than the students who make up most of the circle, and wears a greying Mohawk and an old studded leather jacket patched with emblems for Crass, Napalm Death, Penetration, Rudimentary Peni, Flux of Pink Indians, Amebix, the Exploited, Dead Kennedys, Extreme Noise Terror and Head of David. George thinks he heard the man had some kind of autism or something on the one previous occasion when he met him, when the man, whose name is Steve he thinks, turned up at one of George’s Warhammer 40,000 sessions. Steve was a friend of Dan, another older man who owned George’s nearest Games Workshop and tended to preside over play. Steve was sleeping on Dan’s floor and Dan insisted that he be allowed to head a legion of Nurgle Chaos Warriors despite the fact that the teenagers making up the rest of the group felt uneasy about his intense mannerisms and reckless battle strategy. The soundtrack that afternoon was Uriah Heep’s 1972 album Demons and Wizards, a work which despite the archaic associations of its title nonetheless assisted George in the conjuration of the mental image of riding on a giant mutant rat through post-apocalyptic landscapes brandishing a stack of his enemies’ heads on a spike. Though this was not an existing feature of the standard Warhammer model landscape, George found his imagination frequently returning to it, often summoning it in the minutes before he went to sleep as an escape from the responsibilities and contradictions that pestered his waking life, as a vision of a world which if it existed would contain no responsibility and because it did not exist contained no responsibility. George was planning to make his own customised model based on this image as soon as he had a spare moment; Steve, however, reacted strongly against the sound of Uriah Heep, abruptly rising to his feet still holding the dice he had been about to throw and marching over to roughly eject the tape. ‘What’s wrong, Steve?’ asked Dan in a voice flattened by having asked this question many times before. Steve remained silent as he slammed the removed tape on the counter and rummaged in the plastic crate on top of the hi-fi system for something else to play.
I was at a bar in Goa, and it was the end of the world. The building was a kind of open hut, with bamboo canes plastered over a metal structure to create the appearance that the hut was made of bamboo, and through the side of the hut that was open to the beach I could see hot storm clouds massing over the sea. There was a song playing, which was ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ by Shakira, and a man and a woman were dancing to it between me, sitting at the bar with a rum and coca cola, and the beach. They were the only people dancing. The woman looked in her early forties, with bleach blonde hair, wearing a strapless top. She was grinding her tanned abdomen against that of a man of similar age with his hair in braids, wearing a mostly unbuttoned white shirt. Though my interest in this spectacle was largely prurient I gradually realised that the expressions on their faces were almost completely innocent and blissful, and it then struck me that Shakira’s ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ might be the most beautiful song ever written and the most fitting music to be played now, at the end of the world. The combination of its exuberant carnival rhythm and the yearning purity of the synthesized horn sounds, purer precisely for existing solely in the digital realm, seemed to gather up every moment of perfect communion ever experienced between human beings in the history of the world and re-broadcast it as the soundtrack to this bar in Goa where only a few people remained sitting, at 3.40 a.m. as the splashes of rum and coca cola on the floor became sticky and it began lightly to rain outside.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
poem
Ah the day you passed out in my bath,
mainlining on cavorite as fields of CGI deer gently lapped up your dayglo blood.
I understand, and by understand I mean love. Beached and watching jackal films on fried rice, you think you hear her walk past your window when 5 billion things that you disagree with come suddenly marching out of the hideous clarity while at every shore skull faced mermaids try to sell you real estate.
You sign up to write essays for plagiarists but find both that someone else has plagiarised your essay and that your essay was in the first place plagiarised from a paper originally published in 1924 by Squid Lizard, the nation’s favourite only Squid Lizard to come with a freelance alienation dinner, or similar.
Where are you going, twenty-seven year old man? You accumulate books like a hotel room yet still twitch and are incapable of love. Now behold as I save this document in three places simultaneously.
We don’t dance, we shoot people yeah? They found you, in a coat of nails listening to guitars with yr hair tied back. That time you thought you heard crying yes it was me. Go to bed without brushing your teeth, later when they drop out it will be a gift from yr past self. Spend not these nights cursing your earthly works.
You are making a terrible mistake. The only modern ism is everythingism. The only modern CGI is Squid Lizard.
mainlining on cavorite as fields of CGI deer gently lapped up your dayglo blood.
I understand, and by understand I mean love. Beached and watching jackal films on fried rice, you think you hear her walk past your window when 5 billion things that you disagree with come suddenly marching out of the hideous clarity while at every shore skull faced mermaids try to sell you real estate.
You sign up to write essays for plagiarists but find both that someone else has plagiarised your essay and that your essay was in the first place plagiarised from a paper originally published in 1924 by Squid Lizard, the nation’s favourite only Squid Lizard to come with a freelance alienation dinner, or similar.
Where are you going, twenty-seven year old man? You accumulate books like a hotel room yet still twitch and are incapable of love. Now behold as I save this document in three places simultaneously.
We don’t dance, we shoot people yeah? They found you, in a coat of nails listening to guitars with yr hair tied back. That time you thought you heard crying yes it was me. Go to bed without brushing your teeth, later when they drop out it will be a gift from yr past self. Spend not these nights cursing your earthly works.
You are making a terrible mistake. The only modern ism is everythingism. The only modern CGI is Squid Lizard.
Two Skins
This is an assemblage of things, not all original to me. Credits at the end.
One
There was a man once who lived with his brother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms.
Ten years after seven perhaps also brothers had cut his mother’s throat when the wind blew to stop your lungs sharp the man walked out into the cold and ate raw things till he reached a forest. He helped an old woman cut trees for a fire, and she told him how to find a wife. As she told him to he hid in icy branches till fourteen black feet touched the snow.
By the lake the last swan tore her breast’s flesh with her mouth till hands burst out into woman, slim and placenta black. She washed the blood with her sisters in the hot lake, and he took her dead feather cloak from where it smeared the ground grey-red. Returning to find her power gone and hung on some unseen tree she bared her gums to bite out his heart. Come out, man, I am a sow or pack of hounds to tear you up, she said.
The other birds flew off in ignorance. The man held up his bloody hands. We’ll marry then, she said, and when you see me pulling out down for pillows I’ll fly away. But the man pointed her to where seven men who wore the skins of hunters hung their hearts that burn from what their lives are on their tent pegs to cool in the night wind. Somewhere on the frozen plain too big for me to search there is red meat steaming to the black sky, he said. Take your skin to fly and my purse to carry the organs, and I’ll take your heart to draw you back, he said.
With a nail she scraped down her tight ribs, pulled the heart out beating and sealed the tear with spit. He put the heart in his other purse, she slipped her head beneath the white and was gone. He made a shelter from branches. Next morning the swan wife stood over him, red mess twitching in the bag. You can’t hide on the plain like in the forest, she says. With my wings and bird eyes I saw the tangled arteries. As I left they must have felt the tug because they are near, she said.
When the men were close he spattered their hearts on the ground and they fell. The last one told him where to find the rest of his mother, skin gone but her ghost collected in a purse. The man took the purse and wrapped his legs round the woman’s swan hips and she flew him to his mother’s grave. He shook a drop of blood from the purse and it steeped the frosty earth till her grey hand came through.
The mother joins the man and woman’s hands together and blood runs between them. I love you and cannot return your heart, he says. The woman runs her finger down his chest and pulls his heart to herself. See how easy it is, she says, softly. Choking at my red ripped chest I take her heart and hock it to the air, above the clouds where things no longer fall. Fly for it. She, gasping hollowed, throws my heart up the same way. We are bound, and our knees fall to the cold.
As they lay panting in the snow his mother trudged through deep drifts to the boiling lake. Onshore the last swan tore breast’s flesh with mouth till hands burst to woman, slim placenta black, blood washed, and she took the feathers and held up bloody hands. Come out say the bared gums and
the other birds fly away and
Give me your heart, she says, I’ll give you skin and you must retrieve two hearts that orbit somewhere above and you return them in this purse and I give you it back. Swan rolls black eyes, opens chest, gives heart to mother flies to where the hearts bob in clouds spewing steam to the stars till they frost over, takes them in her beak and swoops back white to mother is but mother will not give her it back and she
takes my mothers heart and she
and we bleed immobile on the snow breathing white in each other’s eyes and
my mother pale and choking comes and gives us hearts back but her heart is still in the air and my swan wife puts on skin and flies to my mother’s heart and the other swan heart and brings them all back in the purse and see now, all our hearts in the air and flies free in soft white and hard black and blood drips steams through stars and runs together spiral to tongues, lick freezing sweat from black ribs and eat her heart and wear her skin and
scatter feathers to the dark.
There was a man once who lived with his brother and his mother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms, and sometimes when the hearth smoked to the black air he thought of the swan woman.
Every animal suggests some crushing misfortune that took place in primeval times. The fairy tale betrays man’s misgivings. But its prince preserves his reason, so that he can explain his predicament when the time comes and be set free by the fairy. An animal, however, is doomed by its lack of reason to inhabit its form for ever – that is, unless man, who is one with it through the past, discovers the redeeming formula and succeeds in softening the stony heart of eternity at the end of time.
Two
A sudden blow: the great ghost wings beat still;
his guts are stuffed with polaroids,
and they're all humiliating.
Above the staggering drunk, her thighs caressed,
sitting alone in the 4am darkness of a pitch-black theatre,
he holds her helpless breast upon his breast, his breasts are
hollow apartments with the finest quality furnishings
he explodes like fireworks on the stage
Sing,
your voice just won’t stop blooming.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
He wrote a play and you're the protagonist.
All the girls you wish you'd fucked make a guest appearance.
His eyes are twin mushroom clouds,
His feathers are unsuspecting cities.
You just won't believe the ending.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Fly me home, Giant Swan.
Your heart's a diamond, buddy, what's the price?
How can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Your skin
is cheap
and your hair
is shoddy.
A shudder in the loins. Skin draped over luxury chairs where you can watch the ballerinas kick and spin until you die. Being so caught up,
So mastered by this brute blood of the air you
strip
down to your vulgar skeleton.
It will sting like a raw sunrise when the black swan is gone.
Back at the resort, the curtains closed, you haven't left the room for two solid weeks. With a pound of cocaine under the bed where the call girls perform their services, you left CNN on so you wouldn’t have to think about her newborn son.
Who's at the door, Leda?
Your heart is sweating and your hand's turning black.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the pixellated beak could let her drop? "Give me all your money! Give me all your dope!" No second Troy.
And the sun is like a painting of your whole life; you scratch
at the canvas, but you can't get inside.
Dark webs, her nape caught in his bill; take me to the river.
one adapted from a story found in sabine baring gould myths of the middle ages ed john matthews blandford 1996 pages 115-6 two comprises lines from jordan blilie johnny whitney william butler yeats quote in between from adorno and horkheimer dialectic of enlightenment trans john cumming verso 1997 page 247
One
There was a man once who lived with his brother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms.
Ten years after seven perhaps also brothers had cut his mother’s throat when the wind blew to stop your lungs sharp the man walked out into the cold and ate raw things till he reached a forest. He helped an old woman cut trees for a fire, and she told him how to find a wife. As she told him to he hid in icy branches till fourteen black feet touched the snow.
By the lake the last swan tore her breast’s flesh with her mouth till hands burst out into woman, slim and placenta black. She washed the blood with her sisters in the hot lake, and he took her dead feather cloak from where it smeared the ground grey-red. Returning to find her power gone and hung on some unseen tree she bared her gums to bite out his heart. Come out, man, I am a sow or pack of hounds to tear you up, she said.
The other birds flew off in ignorance. The man held up his bloody hands. We’ll marry then, she said, and when you see me pulling out down for pillows I’ll fly away. But the man pointed her to where seven men who wore the skins of hunters hung their hearts that burn from what their lives are on their tent pegs to cool in the night wind. Somewhere on the frozen plain too big for me to search there is red meat steaming to the black sky, he said. Take your skin to fly and my purse to carry the organs, and I’ll take your heart to draw you back, he said.
With a nail she scraped down her tight ribs, pulled the heart out beating and sealed the tear with spit. He put the heart in his other purse, she slipped her head beneath the white and was gone. He made a shelter from branches. Next morning the swan wife stood over him, red mess twitching in the bag. You can’t hide on the plain like in the forest, she says. With my wings and bird eyes I saw the tangled arteries. As I left they must have felt the tug because they are near, she said.
When the men were close he spattered their hearts on the ground and they fell. The last one told him where to find the rest of his mother, skin gone but her ghost collected in a purse. The man took the purse and wrapped his legs round the woman’s swan hips and she flew him to his mother’s grave. He shook a drop of blood from the purse and it steeped the frosty earth till her grey hand came through.
The mother joins the man and woman’s hands together and blood runs between them. I love you and cannot return your heart, he says. The woman runs her finger down his chest and pulls his heart to herself. See how easy it is, she says, softly. Choking at my red ripped chest I take her heart and hock it to the air, above the clouds where things no longer fall. Fly for it. She, gasping hollowed, throws my heart up the same way. We are bound, and our knees fall to the cold.
As they lay panting in the snow his mother trudged through deep drifts to the boiling lake. Onshore the last swan tore breast’s flesh with mouth till hands burst to woman, slim placenta black, blood washed, and she took the feathers and held up bloody hands. Come out say the bared gums and
the other birds fly away and
Give me your heart, she says, I’ll give you skin and you must retrieve two hearts that orbit somewhere above and you return them in this purse and I give you it back. Swan rolls black eyes, opens chest, gives heart to mother flies to where the hearts bob in clouds spewing steam to the stars till they frost over, takes them in her beak and swoops back white to mother is but mother will not give her it back and she
takes my mothers heart and she
and we bleed immobile on the snow breathing white in each other’s eyes and
my mother pale and choking comes and gives us hearts back but her heart is still in the air and my swan wife puts on skin and flies to my mother’s heart and the other swan heart and brings them all back in the purse and see now, all our hearts in the air and flies free in soft white and hard black and blood drips steams through stars and runs together spiral to tongues, lick freezing sweat from black ribs and eat her heart and wear her skin and
scatter feathers to the dark.
There was a man once who lived with his brother and his mother on a cold plain where they sold animal pelts and ate the meat of the animals, and sometimes he dreamed of his mother with grey plaits and bloodied arms, and sometimes when the hearth smoked to the black air he thought of the swan woman.
Every animal suggests some crushing misfortune that took place in primeval times. The fairy tale betrays man’s misgivings. But its prince preserves his reason, so that he can explain his predicament when the time comes and be set free by the fairy. An animal, however, is doomed by its lack of reason to inhabit its form for ever – that is, unless man, who is one with it through the past, discovers the redeeming formula and succeeds in softening the stony heart of eternity at the end of time.
Two
A sudden blow: the great ghost wings beat still;
his guts are stuffed with polaroids,
and they're all humiliating.
Above the staggering drunk, her thighs caressed,
sitting alone in the 4am darkness of a pitch-black theatre,
he holds her helpless breast upon his breast, his breasts are
hollow apartments with the finest quality furnishings
he explodes like fireworks on the stage
Sing,
your voice just won’t stop blooming.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
He wrote a play and you're the protagonist.
All the girls you wish you'd fucked make a guest appearance.
His eyes are twin mushroom clouds,
His feathers are unsuspecting cities.
You just won't believe the ending.
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Fly me home, Giant Swan.
Your heart's a diamond, buddy, what's the price?
How can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
Your skin
is cheap
and your hair
is shoddy.
A shudder in the loins. Skin draped over luxury chairs where you can watch the ballerinas kick and spin until you die. Being so caught up,
So mastered by this brute blood of the air you
strip
down to your vulgar skeleton.
It will sting like a raw sunrise when the black swan is gone.
Back at the resort, the curtains closed, you haven't left the room for two solid weeks. With a pound of cocaine under the bed where the call girls perform their services, you left CNN on so you wouldn’t have to think about her newborn son.
Who's at the door, Leda?
Your heart is sweating and your hand's turning black.
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the pixellated beak could let her drop? "Give me all your money! Give me all your dope!" No second Troy.
And the sun is like a painting of your whole life; you scratch
at the canvas, but you can't get inside.
Dark webs, her nape caught in his bill; take me to the river.
one adapted from a story found in sabine baring gould myths of the middle ages ed john matthews blandford 1996 pages 115-6 two comprises lines from jordan blilie johnny whitney william butler yeats quote in between from adorno and horkheimer dialectic of enlightenment trans john cumming verso 1997 page 247
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