This is a single simple moment that brought me much happiness

I have been needing happiness lately. It's been impossible to shake the weight of the shadow on my back, a constant reminder that I am, too, a shadow- without worth, without use- but also there is the frustration that is carried alongside that melancholy. The words that are mine, not that of my malicious bedfellows. You don't know me. You do not know me. In the company of those who do know me, there is no shadow. I am someone worth something. There is something worthwhile here.

Leonard Cohen Tribute

I didn't listen to a vast quantity of Leonard Cohen songs while he was alive, nor have I listened to that nany more since I heard the news of his passing, but I have for a few years owned a book of his written word- poems and songs written as poems- that was a gift from my stepbrother one Christmas (accompanied by two other books of poetry- I remember being incredibly happy with such an amazing and well-suited present). But the other night, with James and his younger brother Tristan, both of whom are quite devoted fans of Leonard Cohen, I recorded his 'Hallelujah' and here it is.

Lyrics

Meditations in the Longest Morning

If I could only stay unseen as if I were a ceiling. My shell is broken now, like gutters eroded by acid rainwater. Burning a moon on a bed-sheet, heaven is sharp with flickering stars.
It is the same patterns keeping a momentum, pumped in afraid and snow-thirsty. We have been doing this mirage or magpie store or measures upon measures or medicine for a while now, it has become blunt-toothed, spurious, darker. I hear bells, and attacks and frays. I have tried make-believe, telling arguably horrible lies. I can spare static and its landmine explosions, though they provide amputation of the most trouble. There, the closed window. Here, the wind. Transparent, haphazardly tenuous.
I am not right. No. I am a pile of bridges, dislocated a few inches too far away to touch. I do not think I want to feel connected, not to this world if it makes me shudder like this without any warning. When it won’t even show me it’s face, that monster. I don’t want to be stitched into the armour and chain-mail and bones. I have the only one I need here, his eyes fold around my unfounded sunbeams.
The engines get enough nowhere as it is and even they continue to poison. Do they know what they're flitting ? I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shoulder and my unformed radios. I'll be back, I'll lose, gap-toothed, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any strawberries. I distance on the screen and the stairwell turns.

T.S. Eliot Mirrored initially

A poem intentionally written to mirror T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock', but it didn't precisely achieve what I'd hoped, yet something else appeared:

We'll stay at home, together but alone
but for the mornings that crumple on the floor,
like waste paper printing headlines on the ceiling.
We'll stay behind the door, afraid to wander
in uncertainty, parallel to busy roads,
the voiceless excursions,
the plans for long soporific days in expensive homes
and fresh-aired kitchens filled with frying pans.
Without direction, the answers all lie behind.
Ask me the question; I'll try and make up my mind.

Elsewhere the city men all crowd together,
either not talking or talking about the weather.

The clarity in eyes that bless the walls,
The understanding in a dull gaze on the walls,
sprawling time packed up into a box or a fist,
hurrying on tiptoes everywhere the sunlight falls,
tripped up in the garden, an inevitable descent,
and oblivious to the clock-face, the crimson crepuscule,
disappeared again into the rushes. No one knows where it went.

But it doesn't matter what's been done.
The eyes, still and still clear, don't recognise time passed,
don't realise what they may have missed.
It will end in the same place that it had begun,
nerves tight around the second try as tight as the last,
no space for thoughts of new starts or possible debris,
not one thought for broken hearts, for the people we cannot be.
We'll share this absent-mindedness, between
the clutter of conviction and certainty,
and practicality and potentiality,
and other matters on which we can agree

Elsewhere the city men, all crowded together,
are not talking, or talking about the weather.

And if we are going to fall apart, then we will do.
Our facades will fracture, our fallen faces,
our lost grip on graces, our black and our blue, our lost places
in the queue. We create words for the fears we cannot name.
And although our landscape erodes with the years,
the cage is the same. The scenery is new,
but what we call history will happen again,
so how can there be anyone but ourselves to blame?
Break and build, create and burn,
the pride follows the fall when pride has taken its turn.

What's in a gaze?

But when they spoke, their eyes couldn’t come together.
You never know who is looking at you in the dark.

For how long can I continue to watch the tips of my shoes,
and the floor beneath them, and worry wordlessly about home?

It’s all peachy, really, it’s Video Killed the Radio Star.
Then again, it’s an unlit candle, an unmarked calendar,
or Ginsberg burning dollar bills in a bin, grinning behind
a grisly beard, or a man you only know vaguely from some talk
of a reality TV show becoming America’s next President.

People are incapable of concealing their latent resentments
When they are looking at something else, but at you?
What’s in a gaze anyway? What are you looking at, for whom?

If there was somebody, they have left already. Prior appointments
available only to high flyers, PowerPoint presenters, success stories.
Not available to you. You who are so aware that in a single minute
everything could be different. You who says goodbye but
never knowing how to leave. These moments are split, a smile
Splitting open a face that once scared you. See? See how different it is?

It’s different to be seen by different people, but are you ever seen?
If you are, you really shouldn’t be. Not on any road, in any doorway,
at any bus stop. But you have to get there somehow.

There are good people everywhere, doing terrible things,
and if I’m not going to be one of the good people, I don’t mind so much
being a terrible thing. If it means I’ll be looked for, used,
needed for whatever, even if I know that needs are fulfilled
and the things you think you need are usually what you want, actually,
or what you want to need. But probably the last thing you really need.

You really need to get that appointment. It isn’t enough
to put out the fires. Damage control- how sad, if it’s what you do best.
What you really do best is what other people tell you that you do best.

It doesn’t alter the experience, even one moment’s fragment of it,
if you know from the start how it’s going to end.

The thing that never happened

They never spoke about it but it happened, and thoughts
of what happened pushed into the soil only grew heavier and dirtier
when they pretended to strip the past of its indelible importance
and pretended that their early nights were the product
of productive days and not prescriptions, but they never had dreams
and they never took flight and they never felt the rush of wind
on their faces and their faces did not even feel theirs.
They stilled in their silence until silence sounded like a soundtrack.
If they had thought about it, they might have seen the faintest promise
of closure, enough to try for, enough to cry for. Cold and concrete
and the cure perhaps as painful as the poison itself but to come to a close
nonetheless. Instead they chose to tell themselves no closure was needed
for no wounds had been left open for nothing had wounded them,
and saw this as stoicism, as strength but it was strength mistaken,
in actuality it was slavery, and the bad guys got away,
and the robbers got rich, and what went around never would come back around
with some comeuppance. Their paths redirected, their plans and aspirations
and passions scribbled beneath a blanket of white noise they thought
was safety. They never again would take off their shoes to dance
or light candles in the summer or make someone's day by offering a smile
or offer anything much at all. Why would they, when they got nothing back?
A tombstone in every doorway, a bitterness in every bite,
a listlessness in every kiss and in that listless life, one big lie-
I am whole, I can be what I want to be because this never happened to me.
They throw their heads back and then they laugh. They watch Forrest Gump
with dry faces. They sometimes have nightmares like those of children,
of crocodiles and claws under the bed. When they wake, that means it's a new day
and that means nothing now. Tell me you know I exist, says the smallest voice,
a whisper, an echo, from somewhere buried so immeasurably deep under stones,
a voice that had been stoned to death. Tell me you'll save me, that
you'll pull me out of here, that you will give me a chance to survive,
I'm all bloodied up and broken but because of that I'm stronger now.
I know the meaning of strong, and I know that it all means something.
If they ever catch a breath of that small voice, they turn up the radio,
take another pill and swallow, change the channel to a game show,
check their phones and when the curtains are drawn, throw more stones.

In a dream.

In a dream that I had, or maybe another life,
I'd never been bad, and you were proud.
I can't say it aloud- but every day I wish I wasn't myself.
and when you left the room, I'm sure I heard you say
'I wish she could be someone else.'
And I don't know anymore if it is you or me,
and I don't know why and I don't know how.
Look at me now. I can see all the reasons for your shame.
I'm stone in your shoe, a restless breeze in the hall
and I take the blame, I take it all,
All I can tell you I'm not what I seem,
and in my dream, we shared a phone call. I had the answers.
I could take some of the weight from you.
You told me you were leaving but you said, 'I'll wait for you.'
I don't know what it could mean.
I don't know what it could mean.
There must be some way I heal the wounds that I've made,
there must be a way I can turn it around.
Didn't make a sound, but I caused an earthquake.
I brought down your walls, wasn't around
to see them shake, coming to the floor.
And in the dream, I was caught in the rain, it started to pour.
but I had some keys and you were waiting when I opened the door.
We've done this before, but I wish I could do it over again.
I'd change everything.
I'd change everything for you.

Vespers

We spun out our nights lighting fires on the beach.
He smelled just like honey, the palm-reader’s son.
I fell in mad love when he went mad on the piano.
The sea has its limit but my desire had none.

Shakespeare and songs about sunsets past
sailed some hope upon my heart as it tossed in fear.
Too afraid to make friends, make amends, though I tried
to put the world to right, but was too quiet for it to hear.

A carnival ride

Our blueprinted fears, disconnected appliances,
sparking careless and unpredicted,
a narrow infrared beam for the moon rising.

It’s evening half-light, glistening on a collection
of machinery and whispers, the quiet moments,
the fish humming in coin fountains, gold,
red as fire hydrants against the indigo October.

Careless bookshelf bright with cries, at the window
the world is watching this funeral motorcade
crossing the soft, blank country, no solace.

Static crackling in the cat’s ear, thorny wool.
Evening grass rustles the silent delirium.
 Galaxies wheeling through a suburban bedroom.
This is the alchemy of guilt, falling into clean halves.

One heard horrors that she had misremembered,
the other did not wake so close to the edge of disaster.
My secret kingdom, she thought, and it lay buried.

And like a lazy connotation, grey morning came,
awestruck, and bells follow you and me
in an unbending line. It's a carnival ride,
our documentary world, an absurd illusion.

Memory is

Memory is a schoolyard, a racetrack, a Kandinsky, a UFO sighting, a scarcely-contained thrill, snake eyes and stone eyes and an infinity of eyes, the audience in red, the humming news at six o’clock, what is behind door number three, headlights, night-lights, mirrors and smoke, a forest of exquisite sentences, a prank, skylines I haven’t seen, a hundred thousand songs, a flat circle, films with gunfights, films with dogs, mountains and monuments, boxcars boxcars boxcars, of bars, of beaches, of brain, in fact already gone, a tripwire, a tantrum, an escape plan, a complex equation, this strangeness, frozen in radio, all the trains, a haunted factory, ferries I should ride, a terrible headache, a most beautiful alien, a gimmick, playing cards facedown, wilful confusion, our big reveal, a mountain they died climbing, the inevitable, sometimes no reason, the harbinger of burnout, the bringer of ageing, something we invented, facts not questions, a curse, light that comes from nowhere, retrospect, an ethos, blood-stained, the hinterlands, the moment gone forever.

Jamnesty- a concert for Amnesty International UK- Southend-On-Sea

I've comprised the first of two videos I am making for Amnesty International UK. This is the Amnesty theme song, 'I Shall Be Released', featuring performing musicians at the concert in Southend-On-Sea, organised to raise funds and awareness for the cause.

Rain gutter godliness

Evening lights hum with the sound of our voices
in this vacuum where,
from the place that is always moving,
the seasons blend into an unrecognizable landscape
of new faces and old buildings
and they all pull together, held by the warmth
of lamps on the street, gold in the dark,
the particles of hope that are born from all sorts of evil imaginable,
out of the rabbit hole, out through the looking glass.
And in the droplets of psychoactive reciprocity
the wasteland reflected betrays
the only claim
that the moment holds on
being holy.

This paper tiger's gonna break your heart

The Resistance Cont.

PREPARATION.
There are bruises and scars making an atlas of his arms and legs. They are badges from his days in training. He is a master swordfighter. He has severed the heads of seven men. He tells this to the younger generation who are now training under him. When he was in their position, no one had quite warned him that at night, he would dream a bloodbath. That he would come to feel alienated from everything he’d once derived pleasure from.
Now he was a mentor, he knew he had to prepare them. There was no margin for failure, for mistakes, for errors in judgement, for being a fraction of a second too late, for thinking that trying hard is enough, for leisure or affection or matters of the heart, for hope beyond the kill.
It’s for their own good, he told himself as he hardened against the eleven pairs of wide, frightened eyes looking up to him in the gymnasium. Prepare them now for what they are going to see and what they are going to do, and I have a better chance of saving them. Saving the galaxy? That was different. He had built his life around this fight, but he had never thought about the possibility of winning it.

APATHY.
Do it for your people, his mother would say. She had the idealism that he lacked, even though he was younger and ought to have been more naive. All he could see was it getting uglier and uglier. No victory, no mercy, just endless sacrifice, and for nothing.
But he went anyway. He did it because he had nothing and no one else, and because he couldn’t have tolerated himself if he ever saw her look at him with the same eyes she used on other people. Those who didn’t cooperate for the greater good were, in her eyes, just as bad as the enemy. He didn’t think he’d survive if he was ever on the receiving end of a look like that from her.
Without friends, having had a menial job at a telecommunications company that he had lost when the business was shut down, his existence was devoid of personal or professional pleasures, no reason to feel good about himself. All he could do was keep from disappointing her, keep her proud of him. If not proud, then at least not ashamed. So whenever she told him to go out into the desert, he went.
Go and get it back, she would say. Bring it back, what is rightfully ours. She told him how he needed to look for that which had been stolen out of the hands of those who had never held their own belongings for more than seconds at a time.
Be a good dog, she says. Her fingers rest on his shoulder, providing some tactile evidence of her connection to him, her dependence on him. Every time, just as he was leaving, saying goodbye, taking the pistol she made him carry- though he would never have used it, even in the direst, most threatening of situations, for he was not a fighter, despite what she wanted to believe about her son-
Every time, she said, Bite the bullet, or bite the dust.

BETRAYAL.
He named all his sons after Jupiter’s moons. As though this, beyond their blood connection to him in the dearth of any kind of connectivity that existed on their planet, would keep them true to their shared orbit. He never did find out which of them gave him up.
He never saw any of them again after the soldiers hauled him away one cold morning the sky was tinted green. But they saw him. His face rippled before them whenever they looked away or closed their eyes.


[I compiled the tales of some of the brave individuals who fought for freedom of speech and to reclaim their human rights in the wake of the universal governing bodies being usurped and taken over by an unnamed extremist group, hell-bent on absolute domination, abolishing democracy and enforcing a totalitarian regime. You can read it here: click]]

If Freud and Jung were to have a rap battle...

FREUD:
This is something you've probably read.
If you're messed up in the head,
Man, I feel you. I can heal you.
Consider your dreams interpreted.

I've got so many fans, like little Hans.
My influence only expands.
Every neuroscientist should know
This psychoanalyst put the super in super-ego.

JUNG:
No one doubts my authenticity
My metaphors of electricity
I’m not tainted by bad publicity
And that’s synchron-fucking-icity.

You can try to diss me,
but my patients want to kiss me.
Everyone in society
wants a piece of me,
consciously,
unconsciously
and collectively.

FREUD:
I can explain psychic pain, and all its effects.
The cause of every complex.
It all comes back to sex, yo.
(Just ask Anna O, yo).

If you've got a problem, try me.
I hold the key to your psyche.
Nobody can falsify me.
Not even mystics mystify me.

JUNG:
I don't know much about the brain,
but I maintain that if you're insane
and your wants and wishes
are obscene, feel unclean.
I can tell you what they mean.

Hey Freud, don't be annoyed.
You're just a weirdo with a beard, yo.
A little man with a very big cigar.
Trying to compensate for how small-minded you are?

FREUD:
If you don’t think that I’m the best,
it’s just repressed,
and you are secretly obsessed,
but you know it and you will show it
when your latent desires are made manifest.

a playlist

Not Going Home- The Elected
Cynical Beings- Anitek
Kettering- The Antlers
Tomorrow Never Knows- The Beatles
Hide From The Sun- Goat
Psycho Killer- Talking Heads
Artifact #1- Conor Oberst
For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti- Sujfan Stevens
Ode To Billie Joe- Bobbie Gentry
Ghost of Stephen Foster- Squirrel Nut Zippers

Members of The Resistance

WARRIOR.
She meets her father at the end of the world.
He's there among the stars, his face glowing from out of the dark dripping space, as if he had always been the moon. There are security cameras everywhere. This moment will be broadcast to each corner of the galaxy, so she makes sure to look him in the eye and smile. She squares her shoulders, trying to not to look like cared little girl on a desert planet. Trying not to look like she's a million light years from home. Trying to forget she was ever the girl who cowered underneath the bed while soldiers stamped through the safe-houses and tore bedrooms apart, pilfered safety boxes, broke windows, as the planes came overhead- you could never hear them coming. They shone bright lights into all the hiding places.
Does he recognise her now? She is a thief, a master con artist, a warrior. She had wanted to go to sea, long ago, and study the behaviour of whales. Now, she stands at the end of it all with a big gun and a bigger smile. The threats worsen as time passes, but her outer shell grows harder, hands steadier.
Time can work wonders, if you want it to.

JUSTICE.
Her starship gets stolen and she doesn't realise it until it's too late. She's running where strange plants grow, through grass that scratches her legs, waving her pistol, shouting in every language she knows: how could you do this? how could you take this away from me? how could you break open my chest, take out my heart, and then crush my skull with the weight of my own birthright?
Eventually, as the hulk of metal recedes into the disappearing distance, she stops and gives up, breathless. Red light bleeds into the sky. She has nothing to hold onto anymore, and nothing that stirs her to chase after something else.

QUIET.
They huddle together as they sleep. They had taken the pots and pans off the wall, put away the plates and cleared she shelves, for the walls would be shaken with the thrum of war, and everything in the house would clatter too loudly. We might as well paint a red mark on our door, his brother had said. When he is asleep, it's the only time he is able to pretend that he isn't going from place to place with no home. He isn't running for his life. They aren't being hunted. That there is a place somewhere in the galaxy where he can go and the predators won't find him. When he wakes up, the reality solidifies around him, colder every day, but for a few seconds before he opens his eyes he is still somewhere else.
This morning, as he comes out of sleep, he is for a moment in a different sort of huddle. He can hear his mother's voice- the sweetest voice- calling for him from the other side of the lake. How long will he be able to preserve that memory of the way she laughed- like the tinkling of polished glass? How long before they invaded his sleep and found him there?

RUTHLESS.
Her mentor had shaped her into a weapon- sharp mind, sharp blade, sharp vision, sharp instincts. This combination could be what brings the empire to its knees. To its bloody end. As she spit up blood, he would tell her that she was a device, that she had one purpose. Her teeth were like little daggers. She couldn't feel things that that used to be part of everyday, but she couldn't remember those things, and didn't miss them. Her purpose had become everything.
What do I do when I reach my target? She asked him.
You do what you do best, he said. Activate.

ESCAPE.
The last place he had been before going on the road again, he had met some of the locals who had stories about the Other World. No one knew how to get there, and the gates were barred and guarded, and you'd die trying to get anywhere near the walls at the edge. His knuckles whiten around his steering wheel, the morning fog billowing in. He drives into it, wondering if he will be the same when he comes out the other side. He presses down on the accelerator. Faster, faster. If he had hope, h would throw it to the wind. He doesn't know where he's going, but he will find that gate to the Other World, and when they kill him, at least he will die knowing that he tried.

RAGE.
The very moment their trap was sprung, he knew that they were all going to die. Arrows shot from crossbows, piercing flesh. Heads separated from bodies. Fire and noise and twisted metal and brutality- that was the world in its entirety.
Sword slipping from his grip, he ran into the thick of it. Battle was the only place for anger like his.
He was determined to fight with the might of his hatred, even if it would only speed up his end.

RESILIENCE.
People used to say that humans were destroying the earth. This was an arrogant belief. They didn’t need to worry. The earth was going to destroy them before they could harm it.
They could burn down forests, reduce civilisations to dust, but the earth never stopped regrowing, repairing the damage, and try as they may, they could not bring down the mountains, and they could not drain the sea.

TRADE.
He had forbidden his children from fighting. They saw him cleaning the barrels of his guns, go down to his underground bunker where they knew he was building explosives. Strangers came to him, gave him food or books or the parts he needed to build a radio in exchange for the weapons and armour that he made. He could give them gifts on their shared birthdays because of the demand for weapons. Even if fighting was the right thing to do, he told the twins that they weren’t to fight, they weren’t to go near the weapons. If he lost them, what would he have that was worth fighting for?
He slept with a revolver under his pillow. He cried in his sleep, and dreamt in black and white.

SACRIFICE.
They had decided to disobey their father. He would come nightly from his underground room to kiss them goodnight. When he was gone, one of them would climb into the other's bed. Only when in this close proximity could they sleep, feeling safe in the knowledge that they still had one another. They slept face to face. When they woke up, they wore one another’s faces.
One morning, their father would wake to find armour and guns missing. He raged at their stupidity, at their disobedience, and waited, He could do nothing else. He had to believe in them. And he did, until his son brought back a helmet, spattered with blood. He stopped speaking, after that. I couldn’t find her body, were his only and last words. I’m sorry.

ILLUMINATION.
He meets his daughter at the end of the world. She is smiling against a backdrop of stars. The dark, dripping space. He's come to know the darkness, but seeing her in it, she is light.
He is a revolutionary, a member of the resistance, a rebellion that stretches across the galaxy.
He has been the killer, in a kill or be killed world. He is a father. He had forgotten that.
Her smile has a wicked edge, and she stands differently, looks at him differently. She doesn't look up to him anymore, but straight at him. They are equals. But her eyes still look just like they did when she was born, when she needed him. He wants to tell her that he changed to protect her. That he broke something to be certain that she would never be broken again.
In her, he can see himself. A deadly mirror, an eternally complex puzzle, part of a whole but somehow a whole, and it scares him.
The more time passes, the easier it becomes to neglect the things that were once most important to you. You can’t imagine the things that, someday, you will have forgotten. In the reframing of your promises, you detach, the ache disappears. It stops hurting to remember the way it used to be.
Time can work wonders, even when you don’t want it to.

Life Has Always Been a Mystery to Me- the musings of an autistic man

I've tried counting stars but I'd need a tape measure.
If I had a friend, we would count them together
but people cross their words, always disagree.
People have always been a mystery to me.

Summer comes by later with each passing year.
Some yesterdays are distant, and others too near.
They say that time flies, and yet nothing is free.
Time has always been a mystery to me.

Put explanations together, pull them apart.
I'd like to know why but wouldn't know where to start.
With cause and effect, two plus two equals three.
Reasons have always been a mystery to me.

At Catholic school, I talked to him but he wouldn't speak.
Finding strength in blind believing just makes you weak.
I could never have faith in that which I can't see.
God has always been a mystery to me.

The moment you cross your heart, all hope has died.
If you can't deliver, does it not matter that you tried?
I learnt when I was very young to trust nobody.
Promises have always been a mystery to me.

There are secrets that hide behind other people's eyes.
Their voices sound truthful, even when they tell lies.
From what I've seen of love, it's nowhere I'd want to be.
Love has always been a mystery to me.

A Ballade

Left sun-poisoned by a summer, and all its hot spills,
that passed as if in blinks, in stills, not a blur.
They shared spaghetti, sun lotion, pillows and pills.
Outside, trees dropped eaves on their secrets,, leaves purr.
Outside, a clatter of noises, the engines that whirr
living in the belly of some huge city car.
Windows once rushed her to where others were.
She to him: Why would I leave now I’m where you are?

He to her: You are victory won by pillow or by a balloon.
She to him: You are the warm rush of blood to the cheeks.
He to her: You are the first ever step, out there on the moon.
She to him: You are the first touch, after three parted weeks.  
He told her that someday they’d visit the mountain’s top peaks
and they’d write their names in the light of a star.
She dreamt flecks of stardust, leaving galaxies on her cheeks.
He to her: Anything’s possible when I’m here, where you are.

She knew that she had talked too much of the past
but it was not because there was something to miss.
She to him: You give me more than I could ever have asked.
You took my ignorance, and left me with bliss. 
My imagination at first glance, my breath at first kiss.
She asked: forever? He said: Forever isn’t as far
as where we are headed. / What for? /  For this.
I’m here. You’re there. There, here you are