You Are The Nation

You are the nation

Sons and daughters

You are the nation

Stuck at borders

You are the nation

Pushed into a vacuum

You are the nation

And that vacuum leads to accumulation but

You are the nation

You are the nation.

Now then now then Lucifer

Now then now then Lucifer.

Now then now then Lucifer

Written after reading this:

http://theneedleblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/madlands-savile-article/

I have always stayed around the fringes of the party of life. You can hear there. Hear yourself think and you can hang out and share those thoughts with other similar people, less inclined to throw themselves onto the dance floor of the party. Conspiracy theorists are such people; party watchers. I have heard all kinds of mutterings for years. All about the puppet masters and the honey traps and veiled, ruthless agendas to preserve power of the elite. The theories become paranoia fuelled dot-to-dots that use connective logic to lead us from David Cameron, for example to the parallel edge of an imagined universe controlled by lizzards…if we wanted to go there that is, and most people don’t really…I have tuned in but clung carefully to my own personal fence of cynicism. If there is one endorsement for conspiracy theorising though, it is the coverage of the sordid life of Jimmy Savile as he had been the subject of a fair bit of research, prior to his death, that would have one time seemed totally incapable of existing in the main stream. But now the eccentric is centric and the music of the dance floor is infused again by those distanced from it.
Like a good percentage of humanity the world over, I have been tuning in to conspiracy theories for a while via the internet. Amongst the quest for divinity and doom it is often said that child abuse and child sacrifice occurs within the clandestine power circles of our world. Is said that this is part of a tradition and various eminent family blood lines are involved and they basically control the world as we know it etc. I haven’t studied it too closely but I get the gist! Whether we believe or choose not to believe this is entirely down to us as individuals. But, post Savile, when there is such weirdness glaring at us when we read about what he was up to, surely we can’t just carry on in blissful ignorance.
There has been over a year and a half now of escalating, disturbing revelation into the seemingly insatiable appetite of this former sex fiend. From general hospitals to Buckingham Palace, Jimmy Savile was given accommodation. He was close to royalty and politicians the world over. Those that have truly looked into his exploits have I think, done away with the perception, through the media, that Jimmy Savile was a ‘lone wolf’. If you look into it, be prepared because it is very dark indeed.
If any of it is true and as I feel my own fence beginning to wobble, we have to look at the rounding up of living, elderly celebrity men as being a bit of a sham I think. I wait to be proven wrong and am truly sad for any sex offending that the likes of DLT and Rolf Harris have committed in their time but what about the men of power and influence that are implicated, mainly now through associations with Jimmy Savile? Aren’t these arrests of celebritiy contemporaries of Savile, that are relished by the media, just a distraction?
We will ‘hang the DJ (s)’ for their errant perverted, abusive ways but what about the nightclub owners? Should we close this party down for while and demand to see the management? I watch, learn and sway.

Parkrun Dream

I saw you at the start,
It was a feeling, your shape
Filled my eyes and my heart .
But your face was hidden as
You looked ahead to the race;
The fixed future, a time zone of
Nothing else but effort
Until we’re done.
We hold our place in a mass now moving
Hopes and hearts and all legs running
And I started to unwind;
All that shapes my own mind
I throw aside and leave behind.
The park paths lead us past trees
Ever green, deep rooted memories
There are people I used to know
Sitting on benches laughing as I go
They reach out for me
Round and round, I run them out
I leave them there.
And you are fast but I am catching you up
And I am shouting
But you won’t turn round.
I know I know you.
I know you know me.
Once when life was simple
And true as feelings.
I am running I am running out
My life, its twists its turns
I am unpicking and gathering the slack
And running and as I run I am losing
Everything, even my clothes
And shouting,
I know I know you
I know you know me!
I watch you go.
The police denied me the chance
To see you or the finish line.

Madam

Madam est douce, gentile..
Madam is not a native to these hills.
She is Saxon pale and plump as a pear,
Jane Asher looks, strawberry blonde hair.
A rare flower; an exotic bird forced North.
In harsh, alien Yorkshire she taxi’s back and forth
To high school, run like a chaotic fort,
Where education incubates, is distilled,
Given, stamped, handed out like passports.
In an African convent, as a girl
She learned French and saw the natural world
And now her life is cats and wildlife campaigns.
And she yearns for Southern, benign terrains;
Her familiar links, her pulse; the garden,
Agriculture, cycling, villages, ancient settlements.
When the kids arrive to take their leave of learning
They invade the classroom, take up French;
Stubborn, resistant blocks in her refined air, space.
She offers up dialogue and dispatches
Crumbs from the curriculum, ever casting,
Her calls absorbed by the apathy, the din
Of the deaf and dumb. In the distance
A double-decker bus is grinding the high ground
Of the moors edge, pushing its bulk up a hill again.
In this lesson there are hijackers up for any stunt
And hostages blunted by banality, the dynamic
Of the traveling band of their cohort that don’t
See the point so don’t do anything. All gifts
To be given in to; Madam has a hard time.
She makes it simple, sets puzzles to pass time
To pass posts to get passport points; pointless.
Nobody listens so it is hard tell, these days
The world is easy to buy but hard to sell.

reconciled

Reconciled

For better, I did my worst.
What is better? The sermon of self
Summons me; better is a feeling
That the sap in me is not capped
By fear, weakness, lostness,
Loss through unwanted gain,
Going against a tide or a grain
Of truth of love, of truth of love and
Going, against my heart, insane.
And that a hundred buds can one day burst.
You offer some water yet
I feel a further thirst.

*

We bought a tree, you and me
And called it reconciliation.
We found a pot, dug ourselves in
And committed to our location.

And here I lived divided, always drawn
From the place for which I provided;
A life outside, a wife inside
And the days they passed divided.

And I brought home food and fuel
To that place of no renewal;
Because we did not share the whole
I starved my own true self and soul.

And my soul is the sap
That will not back down.
Although I’ve tried to keep it contained,
I know the truth
Of what must be lost and what must be regained.

Animal

An animal has left me in its dung.
My eyes have been opened by the sun.
I will levitate in a room.
I will stalk until I bloom.
Until again,
I crawl into the trap of my bed
And wait for night to take my head.

 

The Holy Ghost

Not a phone in sight. We sat there conversing, my dads mates and me. Memories shared and politics and then..Michael brought up, just as a ‘have you ever thought about this?’ type thing: the Holy Ghost. What the f**$€king hell is the Holy Ghost? God? er maybe. Jesus? er mmm, go on then, the Holy Ghost?…nah. just what does it do? What is it? Why is it even necessary? Kept us chatting for a while…

Morty and Me

Last night I went to Morty’s again. This was the third time I’d been. The other 2 times had both resulted in me making disastrous deals with him that manifested in nervous breakdowns. In the last few weeks I’ve been analysing phrases such as ‘nervous breakdown’ and ‘crisis point’ and thinking, when is a breakdown a breakdown? and what is the ‘crisis point’?..is there a recognized tick list you can refer to, or is it when you stop being able to function and people around you have to pick up the pieces? Truth is he didn’t do anything wrong; it was all my fault.
I met him through eBay. I saw a badly photographed joblot of vinyl records and saw Piper At The Gates Of Dawn there shimmering like a pixelated nugget of gold amongst less precious, other heavy metal stuff. This is Pink Floyd’s first album from 1967 and a first press, mono, can sell for hundreds. I went through the familiar process of determined anxiety and self-questioning and aspirational thinking that precedes bidding in auctions and bid and won it.
I met Morty on my birthday. I was already in a bad place that day and the fact it was my birthday just made it worse. My life has been like a sleepless night for over 20 years; tossing and turning and a mess of paths that just lead back to the start of new paths. And there he was this 26 stone Scottish man-mountain with laughing, intelligent eyes telling me he had thousands and thousands of records in lockups in Glasgow that he had no interest in and he was happy to do some deals with me. Punk, folk, rock..you name it, he had it in abundance. He didn’t just have one copy of Led Zeppelin 1 (the one with turquoise writing that’s worth a couple of grand) he had seven of them. In records, the label Vertigo has much appeal with it distinctive black and white swirly optically illusory pattern on the labels of the records. He had more vertigo swirls than a Christmas scene of vertigo snow flakes; drifts of them all stored in lockups that he was very eager to stress I would never know the location of.

-you seem like a nice lad but I don’t know you from Adam
-I understand Morty but if we can work something out..
-work something out, work something out..not being offensive or anything but your offers are a bit shite

This was a different league of speculation to anything I’d ever speculated in. My offers were usually 3 times less than what he could possibly sell his unprized treasure for and he began to use my interest and ‘shite’ offers and measure its worth like this. So when I offered him 5K (that I didn’t even have) for a vast amount of top quality vinyl records, he offered it to the world on eBay and eventually accepted and offer of 18k. 18k!!! I began to realize I was out of my depth.
All that glitters is not Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn. When I took the initial batch of records that I bought home I realized a) I am not savvy enough yet to take expensive chances on records b) Morty didn’t even check what he was selling. Pipers was stereo and so the less desired issue and the other records that it came with were almost unsellable with covers that didn’t match records most of which was worn and scratched. He also convinced me to buy 350 late 90’s dance records at the same time which, although I was reluctant to do, I did because it seemed like it might help to open up a future of lucrative, vinyl powered business with him. ‘Fortune favours the brave Danny, chill out!’ He cussed my caution and hesitation and told me to chill out and not worry about what he regarded as paltry sums of money.
After this squandering of this money, hard earned and much needed, I decided to do another deal with him to try effectively to recoup my losses. Again I came away hundreds of (borrowed) pounds lighter with records that turned out to have problems. Here is a quote from Daniel Defoe from Robinson Crusoe, pre shipwreck:

My ill fate pushed me on now with an obstinacy that nothing could resist; and though I had several times loud calls from my reason and my more composed judgment to go home, yet I had no power to do it. I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret overruling decree, that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open.

Yet Morty was always there when I came back ‘crying’, as he put it. So last night I went to see him again.

Oxygen Song

The Sun It Rises
Again And Again
We’re Going To Make That Oxygen
But The Thing That Separates Us
Is Our Breathing Apparatus