All entries for Sunday 24 September 2006

Epicurean thought–bud

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not;
remember that what you now have was once among the things
you only hoped for.

-Epicurus

: 24 Sep 2006 17:53 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Reality Principle Essay –Draft

‘Today… sexual freedom has unquestionably increased… [At the same time,] sexual liberty is harmonized with profitable conformity’ (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization). Comment, expanding on Marcuse’s assertion regarding the alignment of freedom with conformity.

When Herbert Marcuse writes of the profitable conformity with which our current sexual freedom is harmonized, he doesn’t specify the ideological frameworks that constitute this conformity. Instead, at the end of chapter 5 of his essays on Eros and Civilization that analyse Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle he writes that “the history of the transformation of Eros in Agape” has “still to be written” (107). It is the purpose of this essay to draw a correlation between these statements, and claim that the relationship between Eros, and a higher, monogamous (though not necessarily religious) form of love lays waste to the declaration that our generation is more truly free than previous ones; rather, the “profitable conformity” taking the form of a “true-love” myth compromises our freedom whilst we are distracted by token allowances of sexual “perversion”. The process works rather like an act of sleight of hand, with man focusing on the card tricks of polygamy through consecutive monogamy or casual promiscuity, whilst unbeknown to him, a magician nicks his actual liberty.

To argue that man is freer sexually than before, one would have to posit that he has ceased to give up “momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but ‘assured’ pleasure” (30), but this is not the case. For whilst engaging in the sort of “momentary” and “destructive” pleasure that appear to constitute sexual freedom, he is never free from the ideology that posits a monogamous love as the goal of sexual activity, and ultimate insurer of happiness. He is still acting under the logic of conformity since his libido remains diverted “from [his] own body toward an alien body of the opposite sex”(48), and even if his pleasure is truly self-centered, he is likely to be aware of the limits of such a state of pleasure, and its inability to fulfill his “emotional needs”.

How did such a state develop, and how has it slipped under the ideological radar? Through the creation of a cultural concept of “true-love”, sex has become aim-inhibited in a whole new way. Is their anymore telling proof of this transition than the renovation of the old phrase “making love” in the 1960s to represent not simply “courting” but actually the sex act itself? Progresses in contraception and the legalization of abortion at this time meant that people were no longer expected to have sex for procreative reasons. Something had to be done to ensure that “energies [were] directed way from… sexual activities on to… work.”(33) The confabulation of the idea of “true-love” with intercourse is powerful enough as an idea to bring the logic of capitalism, of conformity and of a utilitarian work ethic back into the bedroom.

“True-love” is defined for the purpose of this essay as a monogamous attachment to another, which may involve sex but is considered morally superior to an attachment based on sex alone. As an ideological vehicle of repression it is transmitted in the old and obvious ways, first by “parental influence”(42), in this sense an inherited belief like any moral code, and then by the “societal and cultural influences”(42) that concern themselves with “what people call the “higher” things in human life.”(42) This explains why people continue to experience sexual guilt despite the virtual disproving of a God, or absolute Good, as the “true-love” belief is still “introjected” into the ego, as the ultimate “aim” of sexual practice and experience; in this way sexual freedom is still limited by the yoke of guilt.

The “true love” myth is also strengthened by the “fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot)”(44) which originally necessitates the reality principle. Such a fact sustains the love myth in two ways: firstly, it is because of Ananke that a civilized people is inclined to accept a form of pleasure that is delayed and secure over an instant, shimmering form because they believe “existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay.” Such an unspoken agreement underpins all classic wedding vows, in promises to “forsake all others” and care for the other “in sickness or in health.” Marcuse’s words would not seem out of place in the office of a marriage counsellor, when he explains that “whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work, more or less painful arrangements and undertakings for the procurement of the means for satisfying needs… for the duration of the work… pleasure is ‘suspended’ and pain prevails.”(44-5) Beliefs like this sustain, daily, marriages built on a faith in love.

Secondly, the ideology of love itself depends on the fact scarcity, the idea that an individual is lacking by himself. Never is this made clearer than in the relationship between the concept of “true love” and advertising, or as Marcuse might call it, the “hierarchical distribution of scarcity.”(47) The ideology of love and the advertising industry are conspirators, existing in a symbiotic relationship: with advertising reminding the public of their lack and love offering itself up as the solution. It is in this way that sexually “free” acts, those enacted outside of monogamous relationships or which are not inhibited by the aim of procreation still seem empty, because they are not helpful in combating scarcity. Scientific studies continue to show that people find themselves attracted to those who have qualities they would like for themselves. Through attraction to another person, and then affiliation to them through the love bond, one is seeking to diminish the sense of lacking.

Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth talks of beauty in similar terms, positing that a myth claiming an objective standard of female attractiveness is perpetuated by our patriarchal society to make women feel constantly inadequate, so men can retain power, and also links this myth to capitalism, since it upholds billion dollar beauty industries. While her argument is sound, Wolf’s analysis is only skin deep. The “beauty myth” is only one manifestation of the larger myth of “true love” that Wolf, and others, too firmly entrenched in this ideology, do not interrogate. The “true love” myth not only encapsulates these industries, “the $33 billion a year diet industry, the $20 billion a year cosmetics industry, the $300 million cosmetic surgery industry, and the $7 billion pornography industry”(Wolf, 1991), (since most women do not use them for “beauty’s sake” but, as Wolf admits, to reach a “true-love” goal, and “get a man”,) but also all dating industries, much of the self-help book market, much of the greeting card industry and, arguably, all of the pop music industry. Rather than just being the result of a patriarchal hierarchy however, the “true-love” myth, which exists in most cultures, derives from the universal experience of the reality principle as Freud describes it, the acknowledgement that full satisfaction of desires is neither possible nor advisable.

Beauty, sex and love become conflated in the act of repression. This process occurs because, as Marcuse notes, “the pleasure of smell and taste is ‘much more of a bodily, physical one, hence also more akin to sexual pleasure’”(47). Through the medium of repression these senses become associated with the baser elements of “perverted” sex, whilst love, the “transcendent” version, becomes focused on “the more sublime pleasures”(47) experienced from appearances (“The sight of something beautiful”(47)).

The “true-love” ideology is a formation of conformity that rivals claims we are any freer sexually than previous generations; at the same time it is profitable in the sense that it tends to the aims of the reality principle. But it is also profitable in the more general, economic sense, underpinning capitalism by transferring the worth ethic to the bedroom, by stimulating advertising, and spreading scarcity, and also in this second sense profitable to the reality principle, since capitalism itself represents for the average man, a deferral of pleasure in favour of security. There are several obvious parallels between capitalism and love: both operate on a series of exchanges, depends on needs, on scarcity. And, to use Marx’ terms, perhaps love represents the ultimate fetishism, the abstraction of social relations from physical ones, derived as it is to be an aesthetic alternative to sex.

This perhaps explains the rise of the “true-love” myth in the later 19th and 20th centuries, and how in the reality principle relay it was appropriately timed to take over the rod of sexual repression from the field of religion. In fact, in many ways the “true-love” myth has much in common with that other core myth of modern society: Christianity, and on closer analysis one can see exactly how the concept of “true-love” gathered ground as belief in religion trailed off.

The “true-love” form, one that combines attachment, sex and monogamy in a 3-way ideological marriage, first appeared in the 16th Century, just prior to the Reformation, when the church was undergoing a crisis as Henry VIII adopted Protestantism to advance his own love connection to Anne Boleyn. It was quickly accepted by the literary establishment as a convenient way to deliver security to a fractured generation.

Perhaps the best example of how easily this new, trendy love could be bolstered, like a crutch, onto the wounded religion, is found in the 17th Century poetry of father of metaphysics John Donne. Beginning his life as a dedicated catholic, most of Donne’s earlier poems are devoted to sex and seduction, but also the transcendent, religious love of a man for a woman, found in poems such as “The Canonization”, which uses doctrinal terminology to elevate the speaker’s romantic relations above the level of mortal, bodily pleasure. Later, on conversion to Protestantism, Donne inverts this tactic, now using the language of “true-love” to represent his devotion to God.
The love between Adam and Eve presented by Milton in Paradise Lost has all the components of “true-love”: monogamy (somewhat compulsory), attachment, and sex; furthermore Milton shows this love as the only thing that can compromise Adam’s love for God, thus subliminally advancing love as an appropriate substitute for religion.
In Romeo and Juliet, practically the set-text for “true-love”, Shakespeare, born 17 years after Henry VIII’s death, has Romeo stressing the transcendence of love by using the imagery of pilgrimage to seduce his desired:

ROMEO
[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Even from the beginning then, the “true-love” concept was linked to religion, in order to provide it with its mythical status, and inject it with a transcendence, an otherworldly power, which would come to prove vital when the time came for it to inherit, on God’s death, the throne of religion.

In an essay by Terry Eagleton on “The Rise of English Studies”, the author details how Literature seized the “hearts and minds of the masses” (Eagleton, 22) as the grip of Christianity weakened. He writes that “If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English Studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: “the failure of religion”.”(22) The same case can be made for the “true-love” myth, since much of the evidence Eagleton uses can be applied as convincingly to this ideological formation.
Eagleton states that the decline in religious conviction was “particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological control. Like all successful ideologies, it works much less by explicit concepts or formulated doctrines than by image, symbol, habit, ritual and mythology.”(23) As far as symbols go, it would not be an overstatement to say that the heart is the new cross. On love merchandise everywhere, it is joined by cupids, and doves, noticeably images not marked by particular secularity themselves. Habit and ritual must be two of the most obvious symptoms of a “true-love” relationship, although these probably take the form less of weekly attendance to mass, than regular phone calls, repetitive sex acts and mutual past-times. As for the mythology of love, this is candidly perpetuated by the media, and by literature, that present “true-love” as though it has existed forever- T.V. dramatisations set during Ancient Greek or Roman Times or in the Dark Ages continue to show characters embroiled in the same sort of relationships that didn’t exist until hundreds or even thousands of years later. Furthermore, this love is unfailingly glamorised, and represented as the aim of life, source of happiness, and only hope of salvation in a fallen world.

Like Eagleton’s conception of literature, “true-love” is “experiential, entwining itself with the deepest unconscious roots of the human subjects.”(23) Its power is universal, no-one is immune from the strength of this ideology, and in this “it provides an excellent social ‘cement’, encompassing pious peasant, enlightened middle-class liberal and theological intellectual in a single organization.”(23) In this way it can be seen, like literature, as a prime subconscious deterrent of revolution, since as Eagleton notes, if you “deny to the working-class children any common share in the immaterial, and presently they will grow into men who demand with menaces a communism of the material.”(25) True, romantic love is a perfect way of rationing out harmless immateriality, and, like literature, can “serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people… and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.”(25)

Eagleton states that literature is the perfect solution to preventing political action because “reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative activity [that will curb in the working classes] any disruptive tendency to collective political action”(25) but whilst this is true, solitary time is thinking time, and as Marcuse points out, one of the maxims of the media in its role as status quo defender, is that “the individual is not to be left alone.”(Marcuse, 52) In terms of maintaining the status quo, even better than being alone with a book that could provoke stimulus for independent thought, is to be left alone with an individual as firmly entrenched in ideology as you, and for your time to be spent in aim-inhibited activity, that kills energy and exists under the guise of an act of purchase on your share of immateriality, an activity that promises to “convey timeless truths, thus distracting the masses from their immediate commitments.”(26) Through love, the sex-act is transformed into most fervent activist for the causes of the reality principle, inhibited by the aim of emotion production and augmentation, supporting capitalism and oppression. Its acceptance was also alleviated by the “deep trauma of the war”(30) of 1914-18 which left the public with a “spiritual hungering”(30), and every war in the 20th Century since then has only strengthened the value of love in a “love-less” world.

None of this is to say the feelings of love do not exist, just as the feelings of faith genuinely exist, but these feeling can, with the progresses in science, be explained away at a chemical level. We are a point in history where belief in a transcendent, un-provable God actually makes more sense than belief in the “true-love” myth, since an omnipotent God could exist in a reality outside of rationality, but a concept of transcendent “true-love” would depend on a Godly authority or at least absolute good to validate its power.
These speculations have strong philosophical foundations. Marcuse mentions how “Nietzsche exposes the gigantic fallacy on which Western philosophy and morality were built- namely, the transformation of facts into essences, of historical into metaphysical conditions”(103), a fallacy responsible for the deification of love from a chemical fact, into a transcendent and eternal essence. In Phenomenology of the Spirit Hegel writes of how “When mere consciousness reaches the stage of self-consciousness, it finds itself an ego, and the ego is first desire: it can become conscious of itself only through satisfying itself in and by an ‘other’” (99) and it is easy to see how this yearning becomes channelled into monogamy, in order that this satisfaction is secured. As for the circle that “comprises the whole: all alienation is justified and at the same time cancelled in the universal ring of reason which is the world”(98) it is no large stretch to see in this the wedding ring used to cement “true-love” bonds and envelop them in completeness and satisfaction.

So what is the problem with the conformity found in a myth of “true-love” that seems both profitable and necessary? The problem is the same as with all current forms of repression arising from the reality principle; they depend on an excuse of a state of scarcity that no longer exists. Just as how with the progress in medicine and the economy, third-world starvation is no longer a given but the result of political choice, so too, is long-term monogamy no longer required. It seems viable that the idea of monogamy arose out of the female’s need to be protected and fed by the male whilst pregnant and therefore unable to find food or defend herself. Now, however, with the invention of reliable contraception, pregnancy is no longer a necessary consequence of sex. Additionally, the arrangement of the current economic system and modes of human behaviour mean women don’t need men to protect or feed them as in cave times and this independence will only increase with further technological and political advances.

As Marcuse puts it, “a theory of civilization which derives the need for repression from [the fact of scarcity] has become irrational.”(84) When stating that “the morbid romanticism” of the “Tristan myth” is “in a strict sense ‘realistic’” (86) Marcuse means that it conforms to the reality principle, but since the reality principle is no longer rational, the idea of “unhappy love” which permeates “the great literature of Western Civilization” is no longer rational or necessary either. Marcuse notes the relationship between monogamy and sexual conformity but does not go as far as to see love itself as part of the problem. It is not just “unhappy love” that relies on the faltering reality principle, but all “true-love”, since all depends on the fact of scarcity.

Why does the myth of “true-love” prevail despite the growing irrationality of the reality principle? One could argue that a desire for scarcity itself, for lack, for something to want, is included in the destruction drive “Thanatos”, whilst the Eros drive is preoccupied with the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction. The reality principle therefore will always be required, designed not to apologise for the unavoidable fact of scarcity, but to reconcile the conflicting drives: one that desires freedom from “want”, the other wanting “want” itself. As Richard Schoch, author of The Secrets of Happiness puts it, “one secret of happiness is to moderate pleasure.”(The Independent, Apr. 06) This is not a new idea but its continued perpetuation provides good reason for the continued perpetuation of the reality principle, and by extension, the true-love myth.

In Freud’s anthropological speculation he writes of a situation in which “the king is slain by the people, not in order that they may be free, but that they may take upon themselves a heavier yoke, one that will protect them more surely from the mother.”(Marcuse, 67) The “unquestionabl[e]” increase of sexual freedom in the 20th Century mirrors this symbolic history. Sexual repression, in the form of the King, is lessened, but only so the sons of this repression can take on the heavier burden of “true-love” – a covert and less easily defeatable form of protection from pleasure and satisfaction, represented by the mother. This is the harmony of profitable conformity with freedom, a balancing act where liberty is mediated through love.
The last word must go to Marcuse for noting that just because something previously presented as truth can now be recognised as ideology, does not mean it has ceased to be useful, profitable even, to our civilized society, since an “ideological character does not change the fact that [the] benefits are real.”(89)

Works Cited.

Eagleton, Terry. The Rise of English. Literary Theory. Oxford: Bail Blackwood, 1983. p. 17-53.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1950.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1955. p.29-107.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Oxford: Heinemann Publishing, 1993.

Wolf, Naomi. “The Beauty Myth” (extract). 3 Apr. 2006.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:50 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Manual

Don’t like the form much, think it’s a bit of a gimmick. still the point stands – something about alienation, and what distance from ourselves techonogy designed to bridge literal distance brings

Manual

B4 thy invntd txtn
I wndr wot ppl did
Wit thr fngrs
2mke thr lovrs
Hot n wet n cnfsd?
The 1st tme u touchd me
On the nsde, my
Fone vibratd.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:37 |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sea Bass – a sestina

Sea Bass

On the way home, you thought it would be nice for us
to stop at Sainsbury’s. We could – you had the idea
– make sea bass, “like we used to”, although we only did it twice.
We went around the garden maze of aisles
all brightly lit as though they were the line spaces
on a sheet being Xeroxed, picking out things

to buy with glee as though with things
we could put substance back into the lucid hypothetic of “us”.
Pushing that surrogate pram through the spaces
in conversation, newly formed during our break (your idea)
and round cans of tinned fruit stacked in isles
we found ourselves visiting the same spots twice

twice
as we gradually remembered the required things
ticking them off as we picked them from the aisles.
We needed parsley so we got parsley (this ease of this wish-granting mocked us),
a light bulb of garlic containing the idea
of a gleeful lemon, a puckered up exemplar of Space’s

first child that full smiling lights all spaces.
And then the fish itself, I made you wink twice
at the assistant to catch her eye (after all, this idea
was yours) and looked at all the icy things
in their dry aquarium – how like us
the bass inert on chilly beds, with frozen smiles

like the cast of a forced marriage grinning in the aisles.
We checked out, and hopscotch-ed through the parking spaces.
Back home, I stood over the counter and you made a fuss
as I grated garlic into butter and lemon rind, twice
asking me to be careful. With the fish it was different, you knew how dead things
have to be prodded, and slashed deeply on both sides. The idea

being the butter can seep in and infuse, like the idea
that through the slits of Jesus faith can permeate the aisles.
In bed you asked me if I felt things
between us at the supermarket, then we went about filling the spaces
that could not be filled with shopping, by fucking, twice-
for a week after my fingers smelt of lemon and garlic and us.

Twice together, now twice apart, I knew then, when you asked
I could never choose the idea of us over crafting a self out of the spaces
choosing things daily from the aisles of the heart.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:33 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The first time my boyfriend slept with someone else

The first time my boyfriend slept with someone else

he said I came to mind
in odd ways. how I would
have laughed to see him a

jester, a nine AM
fool, stumbling home, motley
dressed in half yesterday’s

tux and half tomorrow’s
skate-wear, a girl’s backwards
cap, shirt tail poking out

over his waist band, tie
a make-shift belt after
the button lost in a

battle-field of passion.
how I would have been proud
to see his confidence

talking to said girl and
others, how his thought of
me smiling shepherded

him back to her hotel.
he said I didn’t come
to mind when she was on

top, and he didn’t tell
me how they slept, whether
they held each others bodies

like sobbing refugees
or if he lay like a
pencil, drafting that night

through graphite impotence
into a love-letter
of apology for me

or like the bent Crosier
of a bishop, his hands
folded respectfully

in prayer to beg amends
from our final false god:
Love.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Our love is nothing like Leamington in spring

This is an older poem about the natural versus the constructed (artificial)

Our love is nothing like Leamington in spring

so I shall not go for a walk in the park with you today

what do you want us to do?

stand there like imposters
clipped onto each other like
lifers, like the accused
when we are accused
of nothing?

or the dogs, threaded to
their owners, that pull on the choke chain
until their snouts tint slightly
with forget-me-not?

a dark ink blot on
their watercolor landscape
we would be holding hands
and not feel

the life-force wind flapping
wildly round us, tearing at our hair
the skirt of your coat jacket

would not see

the squirrel who alone
can pick and choose
which kernels are worth keeping

the solipsism of the water in the lake
that draws from itself into pleated fountains
gives back to itself
and needs no other

so lets not go for a walk
lets closet ourselves in my bedroom room
and shut each other’s sense
of bluebells and daffodils
with kisses to the eyelids

we’ll busy ourselves
in the cloistered dark and pray to god
without light, the seeds of love
we planted
can still bloom

: 24 Sep 2006 17:28 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Jenny

Jenny’s body was blown from glass

Into a black candlestick, ornate and bent backwards.

Built for holding light, but used for darker tasks

Jenny’s body was blown from glass

In heaven, to all the angel’s gasps

But she’s not going back there:

Jenny’s body was blown from glass

Into a black candlestick, ornate and bent backwards.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:24 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tessa

Sex for him was a sad sort of affair:

he’d enter from behind, and be surprised
to find them twist their heads
back over their shoulders like sheep
eyeballs white as snow
bleached with want, and bleating

hoping that possibly, maybe
he’d want to go out with them.

he’d think “why not?” and sometimes
as with Tessa, it’d pay off.
occasionally there’d be a ball, those grotesque
masquerades of sex,
she’d come up to him, dressed sleek in black,
almond eyes shining, dark hair pinned back,
he’d feel a king; he’d slip his hand
in the ring of arm she’d made for him

they’d dance by the light of the moon, the moon
and later they’d Runcible spoon
but all the drink they’d had
couldn’t blur those eyes enough to hide
the pressing want, her hope that hit
his stomach harder than any punch

she’s bent over the desk – he’s feeling like
he’s renegading on some sort of deal
got that children song stuck in his head
“why does the lamb love Mary so?”
and as he comes, the teacher struck dumb
in reply—

: 24 Sep 2006 17:24 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Claire

Claire

In a strobe-lighted Gethsemane a kiss
Changed hands and then beneath a
Thirty pieced sky of silver you betrayed yourself. But that’s not
How we remember you:
Your image reflected in
Stained glass

Is of one chained to bedposts with sex-shop
Cuffs in a make-shift crucifix
The outer sheet stretched skywards in an un-
Holy cathedral as my boyfriend –
Your, then devout, disciple – performs Tran-
Substantiation.

In a ritual prayer of
Consecration to
The God of Nothing
He’d make your measly offering of parts transcendent, breaking
Your pearly back and drinking the winy
Scent between your thighs.

Innocent, he
Claims no enduring faith
Though still retains like fetish object by
His bed the blue glass bottle that once played third hand to
Your writhing lust.
Sometimes, only when

I ask, he mentions how although your
Crown of
Thorns
Had long slipped under
Your chin, you
Still retained the knack of miracles, how

In your warm
Command of palm you held the power
To bring anyone’s lifeless cock to rise
How you could satisfy the
Yearnings of five thousand, with barely enough love for one.
So

In bed now, some lonely doubting Thomas
Claire, I reach out
To touch your silvery ribbon scars and
Have to recall how even
You, ultimately, had fallen
Short

: 24 Sep 2006 17:23 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

She doesn’t know how to waitress

She doesn’t know how to waitress.
Babushka, or Dali’s lady
balancing stacks against her dress

with plate drawers, beak-hand clipped round some
at right angles, Egyptian Thoth
she moves with a haphazard grace

using her hips, a pendulum
shifting weight to points on her bones
to garner or lose momentum.

As she swishes past or pivots
round the customer’s heads, or ducks
here for napkins, there for glasses

she smiles in her special dreamy
way, half sad, half happy, a sort
of tragi-comic figure, glazed

eyes of a fallen angel, eyes
that speak of blue hours, satin bras
and night winds, and when she places

one fingertip on your hand for
less than a moment, a spark like
static pricks up your finer hair.

She doesn’t get it. Her grace
and peculiar remoteness
provokes anger, not tips. You’re

meant to be like that girl off the
sea-side postcards: cheap and cheerful,
not Una from the Faerie Queene.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:21 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Sixteen lines

Laid out in finger rows on a piece of plain white paper

this stimulant is a terrorist, fighting jihad against

the conceit of my central nervous system’s attempts

to regulate and high jacking a neuro-vehicle, flight path

D.O.P. aimed directly at the twin towers of

my two nostrils. Why should it be up to my brain

to decide when I’ve been good enough for chemical rewards?

Screw the governing body. This is a political moment – -

this is a fuck you to responsibility! This is great!

I feel euphoric as I follow the line eastward

imagining the steam chute of a backward moving train

as it passes into the London underground. Fuck.

I don’t feel so well. You tell me I’ll be ok so I swiftly

snort some more. And see blood. The sentiment is sweet but

It’s only like that ‘coz it’s cut with glucose

anyway.

: 24 Sep 2006 17:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Back in the game

Ok its been a super long time since i updated…

muchos stuff to follow, which will be of varying degrees of interest to blog peruser, or none

x

: 24 Sep 2006 17:16 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem