Shalmaneser Picklescott

Kennereski Dikkabins / Domestic Observations Romani / English

2011-11-02T15:03:00.003Z

So shunnava me te divves
'Dray o Bory Gav?
Shunnava gavver-mushes, ticknes:
Jinnen len mi nav?

Beshava anda beshengrul
Te ker mi lav-o-lil,
Ajor shunnava mouse-mengrul
A-vel te chor mi kil.

O Bory Gav parela kak
Adral i bersha bory.
Dordi, si foshena 'dray mi nak
Ta tatcho 'pray mi kory.

Dikhess, parela rakli bittinès
Opray o puv,
Ta jel o shoon posh-rahti shookarnès
Ta raklis ruv.

-

What do I hear upon this day
In London town profane?
I hear policemen, little one,
But do they know my name?

I sit upon a sitting-thing
To write my page of words,
And so I hear a mouse a-creeping,
Come to steal my curds.

Old London town's not changed, I think
Through many an old September
(That may be false in terms of stink,
But true, upon my member).

You see, a maiden's nature scarcely alters
On our sphere.
While onwards walks the moon, a maiden falters
With a tear.

Sastavarda Dikkabins / Observations by Train (Romani / English)

2011-10-17T14:15:00.006+01:00

So dikkava mandi,
Dikkava drayda puv?
Jovv'anda sasta-varda,
Ta nastiss me te tuv.

Asar dikkava rukka
Ta, borydair, o vesh,
Akana grai, akana rai
Komenna tan te besh.

Gruvnys ta lenghi hobben,
Hord' anda bori mui,
Ta len asar kerenna les:
O kam, o char, e dui.

Ta chairusa ta wavver
Dikkava wavvernès:
Dikkava dray mi zi, mo pal
Pennava tatchanès.

Ta-anda zi jivenna
Mi jinnapens, avali;
Ta lensa jivela mi shei
Ta mullo-chals, chavaale.

Maw av atrasht o' Bakro Beng
Ta waffedi folkendis
Pe-so ti dandya si tut's
Ta jivvapen si mendi's.

In English (loosely, one might even say irresponsibly, translated):

What is it that I can see,

Can see in fields all ploughed?

(I'm journeying upon a train

And smoking's not allowed).

Now into view there comes a copse

And, greater now, a wood:

And here a horse, and there a lord

Would rest there, if they could.

Cattle I see there, and their food

In big old mouths they chew.

And them that operate this good:

The sun, the grass, the two.

And sometimes, and then others,

I see quite differently:

I stare into my heart, my brothers

(I say truthfully).

And in my heart are living

My knowledges, right so;

Alongside them my lady lives

And dead men's souls, boy-o.

Fear not Old Nick the Nannygoat

Nor wicked people's powers:

Because your teeth are yours alone

And life is all of ours.

Witchfinder

2011-07-18T17:26:00.004+01:00

A film by Damian James Le Bas and Phillip Osborne
Witchfinder - Mike Rogers
Design and styling - Delaine Le Bas
Soundtrack by ERH, Klankbeeld, Section 13 (Rinkfern/Grimes)

Commissioned by Latitude Contemporary Art for Latitude Festival, 2011
as part of installation 'The World Turned Upside Down in the Cathedral of Erotic Misery (after Kurt Schwitters) by Delaine Le Bas

Rabbiting

2011-07-10T11:09:00.003+01:00

“There's ever some young rabbits up that field

Where Lady and them two foals is”,
Grit-voiced, laden-eyed Omri my uncle says,
Aims, intentions smartly inward-folded.

His checked felt fisherman's hat dips down to the front
Like a cloche for the torque of his ranging mind
As it courses its tamped old tracks through counties
Counting for part-worlds, possibly counting for worlds
As it runnels its bracken-edged, massively finite footways.

Pipe-voiced, rivulet-iris eyed young Mushi
Is ten. His downy eyebrows flick as he checks his noiseless breath:

A twelvemonth's been and gone since the field and the rills,
The tracks, the Black Widow branded caddypults cocked for tracking
Them flitsome shushis. Mushi already knows kind of maybe how
He would twang the smoothest stones in ten yard, tail-off sickles of shallowest air

In a now
In again, in a now; how the best ones are hard, unyielding, heavy and certain and small,
Masquerading as quail eggs, yet could kill.

“We'll go up there on Friday, how about that?” said Omri,
Narrowing both eyes, pinching the prow of his hat.

Come this Friday, school will be longer; longer, collapsed and inane:
The words on the books might change and stretch
But the paper will look the same.

But come that twenty past three, and the rubberised creak
Of a hundred children's chairs on lino, marking the crash of the week
I'll belt up the side of the playing field furlongs, swinging
A hooked curve clean through the Y of the stile; and there

Will my uncle Omri be, and we
Will have more than a dying to aim at.

Selma: A Quiet Heart In The Night Time

2011-06-30T09:39:00.003+01:00

A film by Tara Darby

Edited by Phillip Osborne and Damian Le Bas

Sound recording by JM Lapham : Colour by Touch Digital

Them Tribes

2011-06-29T08:06:00.008+01:00

You ever thought about them tribes?

You know, them tribes?

Them rare tribes that's still out there in the jungle that shoots bows and arrows at the planes when they goes over? I think about them lot. I think about them lot a lot.

They can survive them fellas! Some of em can any way. You'd have to ask them how many survives cos I expect a fair few gets killed by the snakes and the different poisonous insects they got in the rainforest and that, and maybe they even still mors each other with little blow darts coated in poison they get off the back of they dear little poisonous frogs.

Sometimes I think about what will happen when they gets found. Well, they been found already ain't they. But when they gets disturbed out of the bit of peace and quiet what they've got, away from all the divvyness of the world.

They reckon most likely it'll be the mushes what sells the white powder that find em first, cos they're forever going deeper into the jungle to build these little tans where they make the drugs and that, and they even makes private runways for dear little planes they use to smuggle the drugs. It's true you know, just like any other businessmen really, or so they reckon.

Anyway, when they gets found, what'll happen to em? They'll see how everyone else lives won't they. Or they'll see bits and pieces of how everyone else lives through the different ways the drug dealers use to do what they're doing out there. I wonder what they'll think when they dik the motors and planes they steps out of, and when they gets out they'll see their different chokkers and that, the flash sunglasses and the flash clothes. I shouldn't think they'll smile when they see that. Maybe they'll just look.

Or maybe if the drug dealers has got poor chavvies working for em they'll see what they got first instead. The fear in their eyes. The desperation. Maybe they'll see a yogger if these fellas has got one. Which I aspect they would have. And the tribal mushes will see it. Will they smile? Will they jin what it is?

Whatever they diks though mush I should think after that when they goes back into the woods they'll dik back at their own bits a chokkers after that, if they even has any, tell you the truth I shouldn't think they have, but they'll look at their dear little bits a kenners what they kers in the woods and they'll see the raklis boiling a dear little monkey up for dinner and they shall have to think won't they, they shall have to think, “Is any of this old go gonna last my mate?” And when the stars come out that night and twinkle through the trees, will they be too ladged to roll over and whisper to their mollishas in the darkness, “Is the old job finished now my baby?” Maybe they shan't be able to sleep. And if they can't sleep I should think the stars will look different to em then.

And what's my grand chavvys gonna do when these mushes starts a fight with us and makes us jel back to their old country at some future date? Even if we plasties, what if we catches some bad old disease of these fellers and we has to go cap in hand to em to beg for the magic they got to sort it out? Even if that don't happen, they've got out here to us ain't they, a thousand miles of trees in your way whatever way you wants to come into us where we're stoppin at, and still they've got here and kerred into us, so won't they bring their wives and chavvys out to follow em, and take this place away from us? And being as we ain't like them, won't they get sick and tired of us and our old ways when they been here a while and we ain't changed to be like em? I'll be dead and gone. But me boys and girls won't, and after they're dead and gone, me grandboys and grandgirls won't. And what do they get then? What do they get if they can't blend in? What if they're too proud, and they won't?

Do they get told to jel on?

Do they get a cage?

Do they get beat?

Do they get

An hole in the ground?

(LAUGHS)

Dordi, you thought I was being serious didn't ya.

You did didn't ya.

But dik: te mandi kom te av tatcha serious-sa mi lavs, mandi'd pukker English chavvy, woon't I.

Kakka.

I couldn't be serious if you paid me.

See, I was brought up to take the piss mate,
Been taking it daily since I was a baby
(When they called me the Mush, “mushy 2”, and Daney and names like that.
And I never had no say in it, that was their way, see).

But, maybe, then, when the days was like years and I craved me bitta mashed up food like I now craves the beers and the cash that I has to unlock from the bottom of the tank that's topped with the stocks and the shares from the dares and the shocks of the markets, that I feed on like a Traveller and a bit like a catfish (I has to, it's cash that you block pave the drive to your death with),

Anyway,

And I fed on the fears of me family, the malt of the hops of the past while it lasted, the joys that September deployed from the hops that employed us before lager come and it blasted the trade of the hop and the old made beers: but {mimics Frank Sinatra} that's life, that's what aaaaaaaall the peopllllllle saaaaaay;

And I also remember the salt of the breeze from the sea and occasional tears

Well

Sometimes mostly just tears:

Anyway, maybe back then, I must've learnt something.

I learnt-

A fair few songs from the music of Marty Robbins, Jimmie Rodgers and the Highwaymen which tell you the truth was me favourites, more cos of Waylon and Kris Kristofferson and cos of the sand in they voices, cos they sung about the wide open space and the race for the West and the testing, embracing, betraying and breaking of races or ethnicities that “infest” it, except now a lot of em don't, cos the dead ones has left it (sorry about the tense present).

I learnt-

About me Uncle [name]'s phonebook. Or it might have been Uncle [name]'s. I wish I could still ask em.

They could read the phone numbers, but they couldn't read or write. They was all sharp men in the mind, razor sharp, they had to be, but they couldn't read or write. Except the phone numbers, which they could. You know what I mean. So they used to draw little pictures to show whose number it was. Uncle [name]'s [name] had a rake drawed next to his name for the tarmac. Me great granny had a bunch of flowers cos we sold flowers on all the markets, so her picture in the phone book was a bunch of flowers. And that meant all of us in that bit of the family, because she was the eldest out of us lot. She still is.

I learnt-

To have a laugh.

And we did have a laugh on the flowers.

But sometimes bridges was burnt with the laughs that we had: peddling the rose and meddling with posies and pinks and stargazer lilies, it do make you hungry to paddle the prose just a bit, in the maze of the air, lacking ink and the leaf of a page: it was bad when you think: we never did sink too low and we'd never had drink (it was early wannit) but me mum's brother [name]'s got powers like magical powers when it comes to a laugh and a joke and a wink and the half of it is (I'm stopping soon cos I must have a smoke) like this time on the market you'll find I'm about to unwind, that when he's really having a laugh, he don't laugh.

He enjoys not laughing.

He was on the flower pitch once looking after it for me great grandad, he was bad see, bodily ill. An an old woman come up to him and said “Hello young man, is your grandad not here today then?” And me uncle says “No, I'm afraid not madam”, the old woman says “Why not?” He said “Well if you must know madam he's been ill, really bad”. She said “REALLY, my my what's wrong with him?” He said “Well I'm very sorry to tell you this madam but he's got all coreys up his back”.

Sure it was quiet for a minute, he thought the old woman knew see.

But she went, “Well I never, do you know I've been suffering with exactly the same thing myself!”

That was it then wannit. He said “Well I can see that madam, I bet you've had more coreys up your back than I've had hot dinners”.

She must have gone at some point the dear old woman. But my uncle never did laugh, or so I was told.

But he never meant any harm, see.

And when I think about why people don't like our lot, I think, maybe it's cos we can have a laugh, and not laugh.

It ain't normal, it ain't what people expect from their fellow human beings. Like the faces them tribes in the jungle might pull when the 4x4s and aeroplanes roll in from the city, they split trees, grit up the mud and choke up the jungle with smoke till it wakes up the snakes so another snake's waked by the coke that gets him out of his head when it's hectic in London and under the skin he's a skeptic about what the point is. There's a glint of all that in how capitalism works, and it ain't funny. The men cutting open the jungle ain't funny. And them tribes don't laugh either in front of people, them tribes.

Maybe it's the things they've seen.

Romani glossary for this piece

mors - endanger

divvyness - ideology

mushes - international drug dealers

tans - privately owned narcotics factories

dik - discover

chokkers - Prada loafers

chavvies - trafficked workers

yogger - military autogun

jin - be able to figure out

kenners - liana shelters

kers - assemble

raklis - unmarried young tribal women

ladged - suffering from pre-hubristic tension

mollishas - wives-of-20-years-or-more

dordi - In the name of Shiva, Hanuman, Black Sarah, Holy Mary and the Princes of the Geats!

kakker - Come gentlemen, let's forget about that and move on

mandi - any agentive consciousness analogous to the self

kom - intended to

te av - self-actuate

tatcha - perceptibly

mi lavs - ethereal vibrations

pukker - elect to communicate (in)

chavvy - Dear Reader!

coreys - reproductive aids

Angsty Gardener

2011-05-21T23:29:00.002+01:00

Article 1.

2011-05-05T09:59:00.005+01:00

Shoon akai: sar mushes, mollishas ta chavyaw's beenda yekinès avri stirapen, adray freeyimos; beenda yekinès kushti adray raiyipen. Ta lengi si a bori tastipen: te ker sar kushti kuvvas. Lengi's si a but kushti jinnimos ta jinnen tatchikanès anda zi sossi kushti te ker ta sossi bengla te ker, chavvi. Dordi! Sar jinnen asa lissi o tatcha drom: te ker mendi ta wavva foki kushti, pensa-dray a tatcha praliben.

A Royal Wedding

2011-05-02T13:11:00.004+01:00

For the New Forest Gypsies

Between his face and his hand was swept
At the edge of the glade a mizzen-sail of mayflies, silver pollen,
Chance and vanishing vapour
Slowed to a dream-speed, very lazy waltz
In sunlight weave:

Finger and thumb holding the ring he bought for a second hand
At a bit of a distance,
Spying through the nothing heart of its empty centre

A green-walled shed, and green-roofed,

White wood shuttered and skirted;

Big enough, just, for the three
Of the one kind priest and pair;
In need
Of a proper cross above the narrow door; of a touch
Of paint; of haughtiness; perhaps
Some thin, unknowable inscription.

Standing about are mended caps and tweeds, and petticoats
All fixed in gratitude.
The clearing's tamped dirt floor will bear their eighty
Or ninety feet, some shod, some soft and trusting
Still to a summer's grace:

Ahead of his love, and in the light of her face
Shall be the lilac tint of the Hampshire dust

And in her work-lined hands his love will clutch,
String-bound, a tight and small bouquet

Of stocks, sweet peas and heather
Frilled with soap-wort's fragile stars
That the folk of houses call
Gypsophila.

The Business

2011-03-23T13:08:00.005Z

With acknowledgements to Mr JPW Day for his kind assistance in production.

For those interested, on the 7th May 2011 I shall be performing a selection of my work, in bright company, at this event:

Engé Helmstetter, Manouche Guitarist

2011-03-11T10:33:00.002Z

Engé Helmstetter - Roma Route of Culture from Damian Le Bas on Vimeo.

Please forgive the lack of sound at the end as Engé plays 'Nuages' by Django Reinhardt. There was a problem with the video export that I'm currently trying to fix.

Her Triumph

2011-01-23T18:34:00.003Z

W. B. Yeats

1933

E Gili a' Sad Hilkiah, redux

2011-01-14T13:33:00.007Z

In the filth and the wet of December, cursed
By the lash of the coasts, and the squalls dank summers-wake nursed
I trod in the ways old August sang of the end of:
Feet, the bottoms all fizzing and blistered
Slapping all wetly shod up the tarmac black promenade
Stillborn to the cold, the English mold hacked off
This hard underneath of an isle where night
Comes ravening through you.

At intervals of a furlong, maybe less
Are the benches, black-roofed,
Smashed (back when the brown-armed, summer-fed boys cared less;
When alcoholics, brush-faced, smelling of salt and cheese
Would sleep there). On,
Past shelters dead in the steel-plate gale,
Brash as it whips a mist off the slick black prom
That waits in a kind of wetly-belted coma, dead
To invading pushes gouging the seafront wider.

A dozen shelters, cracked in the shrieking wind
I bypassed, battening slaps
Of collar and coat to the flash-white quivering neck,
Rain-slick, cold-pinned, ardourless.

A lull came then in the squall: a long-enough breath
For a jackdaw out of sight to cackle and, fearing the death of the windrush,
Cackle no more. I stooped and sniffed: the gale was back to the sea,
Abandoning my coat-wrapped neck, my salt-fogged eyes and lungs
To its bitterest ledge; a lookout-hand
Alone like a planted scythe in the hush of the landfall, then
Sapped as a damp wick, chilled by the bird-cry gone
And back on the slick wet tarmac, wet neck, boots
And myself now thinner and shivered, I looked:

In the nearby hut, bench-skirted, lightning-flashed
A spindle of man sat bent and cloaked
I swear-
His figure like wire, thin as a fish-hook devil.

He spoke through the wind with a voice like chalk-crack and cockerel,
Grazing the lashed black shock of the frenzied sky:
"Come akai, come akai", like a crake in the gale, his pin-taut gaze
A lash for my mind, my whole damp form afraid
And jacketed stiff by his night-wight, flintlocked eyes.

Now, in place of a place, as the sea sucked hard at the wind, came whisperings:
Sand in a silence suddenly turned to a rural plain that pulled me to it,
Decades spinning away like carven shafts,
A dry field propping my boots on short, halt stubble,
Black stumps left by a burning:
A here where the rain and early nightfalls buried themselves for shade, a place
Of reddening flint-dust burnt to a tan by August. Chalk-scraps cracked,
A canny old cockerel's laughter echoing through them:
Wagon-shaft country,
Money in hessian sacks in felt-lined caravan chests,
A thousand bone-white hearts of hazel
Waiting for sacred knives, a somewhere
Dazed in a hop-time fastness.

I stepped.
A flint shard, thin as a gallett, made underboot
Crack: My collar was soaked in night-salt,
Flaps that slapped at the flayed young neck, like roof-felt battening back
My shrinking life: the summer’s vastness deadened, blackened, fatuously absent;
The sinuous, wire-thin hook of a crying old man
A simple lash of a rain-whip cackling,

Vanishing.

Words I Like, Further

2011-01-12T14:26:00.002Z

Dordi dordi, dik akai:

(Attention, crikey! Lend your eye)

Dik at so murri bok's te divvus latched!

(Look at what, today, my luck has hatched):
Chindela Romnichal, dray bersha puri
Lavior, Rummani lavior, shookar, tatche,
Lavior asa chinnen m'i zi'sa churi

(In elder years a Gypsy man has graven
Words, and Romany words, smartly and truly
Words with which, as by a knife, my craven heart is cloven),

But where is old Sylvester Boswell
Now and how do I trust my spiteful soul that makes him deathless
In the rounding, mouthing, conjuring of old Sylvester's lavs?
For a word is breathless.

All that which is woven must at first
Be spun, from one or more of many
Qualities of dust: we cannot spurn the woven, though it burns
And aggravates the thirst, for dusty thread (as implemented
By those bleak sororities of Gorji girls eschewing lust)
Is dry, unloving, breathless as a printed word,

Is unbecoming.

Dikomusti Chirikla - Bird of Vision

2011-01-10T10:41:00.000Z

Dordi Dordi, Lavya Chordi

2010-12-04T16:13:00.003Z

Yek'rus, dray the summer, dordi!

Mandi dikked a Romni-chal

So "Me shom posh-a tuke" penned

Ta mandi, posh-a-dinlo, sikkered, lending

Lesky so man, sore-sor kokkero, 'penned'

In ink and kakker mi chib, djaness?

Djaness?

Ta-divvus, iv ta ven, ta kak reward:

Ta-divvus I jins mi jinnapen's been chored.

Ribs of phantom tents may bend

But maw the zees of Needi men,

Ta divvus rokkerava dray the ven

Chore of a needi chal, ta lel the Beng.

Romani Poetry: A Supplement to our Literary Times

2010-12-02T11:40:00.004Z

The verse beginning 'Eastern lavs and Northern lives' is quoted from a poem I wrote last year. You can read it in its entirety here.

DLB

Baby in Boots: Chapter II

2010-11-15T12:10:00.004Z

Mushi stepped, feeling the warming pull of the trailer door. He stopped. Three huge hog weed plants, green and stringy and strong, stood suddenly in front of him. There were black- and yellow- striped caterpillars furling and unfurling themselves around the little fronds of their leaves.

Mushi moved closer towards them until he could see the velveteen dullness of their concertinaing bodies. He thought about what made the caterpillars writhe and furl around like that. Reaching out an index finger, he gently prodded one of them. It recoiled, smoothly but quickly curling up, and fell to the dusty ground. His eyes followed it, then his fingers. A tiny sheen of peppery dust now coated it where it had fallen. It was still now, an incomplete hoop, its yellow and black stripes less distinct under the film of light, dry dirt. For a moment he thought it looked like a prawn of some kind, just a different colour to the ones his Nan served him in a shallow bowl of vinegar on school day afternoons. “That's dinlo”, he said, correcting himself of the thought.

Fixated by the caterpillar's stillness, Mushi touched it again. This time it writhed more quickly, bucking and lashing at nothing as though in terrible pain. Disgust came over Mushi, cloaking him completely like a thick sheet of hot water, blanketing him. He reached out for the last time, quicker now, picked up the caterpillar between his forefinger and thumb, and squashed it into a creamy paste, rubbing until the skin and the squat head were nothing. The warm blanket of disgust abated, and he stood up, rubbed the creamy mess of the caterpillar onto his jeans, stepped gingerly around the plants, and walked on again.

He had never thought anything like it before, but now it seemed that there might be caterpillars everywhere, everywhere that there was green. Mushi kept walking towards the old trailer. The shapeless fear he'd felt before meeting the hog weed plants was bucking now, furling, unfurling itself like caterpillars, given shape and colour and motion. There might be caterpillars inside the trailer, he thought.

The old horse neighed rheumatically behind him and Mushi forgot his new fear. He got to the plastic step of the trailer, grabbed the frame of the door with a small, warm hand; felt the parallel edges of dulled aluminium framing the door. He huffed with the tiniest noise and stepped inside.

The Battle Continues

2010-10-27T13:05:00.003+01:00

This film explores what the real reasons are for the intensity of public protests against developments by Gypsies. Watch it and come to your own conclusions as to whether it's simply a matter of "planning" or "environmental concern".

Johnny Howorth, Max Sobol and Elliot Smith

Originally published at guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 26 October 2010

Tender Explanations

2010-10-11T10:19:00.003+01:00

The original article can be read here.

And now for something completely different:

"That is a most kindly and beautiful saying", said Wittgenstein concerning the phrase "It takes all sorts to make a world".

Atching Tan - A Place where Fires are Lit

2010-09-22T14:36:00.005+01:00

EXT - A SMALL PLOT ON A COUNCIL-RUN GYPSY SITE

DAY

NEILOUS, 20, has arrived back on his plot and is unloading a small amount of scrap metal

His father THADDEUS comes walking by

THADDEUS: Been calling for scrap?

NEILOUS: Plenty of calling, not much gear.

THADDEUS: All your gonna do is wreck your seats anyway, trying to load scrap in that little motor.

NEILOUS: He never had as much as I thought he would.

THADDEUS: This come off a farm, did it? It wants a day's work to knock the rust off that lot.

NEILOUS: All he had. Apparently.

THADDEUS: People won't part with the steel stuff like they used to. Precious metals is
worth more lovul. Tungsten, nickel.

NEILOUS, agitated, throws down a piece of corrugated iron

NEILOUS: It's only a few extra bar. I'm back to lopping trees.

THADDEUS: No fortunes in that game, ya know. Too many Travelling boys into it.

NEILOUS: It'll have to make do for now.

THADDEUS: That's all it will do and all.

NEILOUS: Me and Lovvie are getting by.

THADDEUS: Ah, that's nice for Lovvie. Dear one to jel with, is she?

NEILOUS: (SILENT)

THADDEUS: Time I was your age I'd bought me second lorry. And two acres of ground over by Bottenham.

NEILOUS: I know you did.

THADDEUS: Sold it to the Irish lot over there. Made nice vonga too.

NEILOUS: Times was different then.

THADDEUS: There's always been money about. For anyone with the sense to go out and get it.

NEILOUS: Maybe I should lay my money on a chicken fight. That'd be the right thing,
wouldn't it?

THADDEUS: (COLDLY) Keep your voice down or I'll give you the right thing I'm sure.

NEILOUS drops another piece of metal

NEILOUS: Well if there's money about I'd better stop gabbing and find it, ay?

THADDEUS: Watch who you're talking to.

NEILOUS: I ain't never asked you for nothing. Have I?

THADDEUS: If that makes you proud then I'm happy for ya.

NEILOUS: (QUIETLY) Cheers.

THADDEUS: I know Travellers all over the place, and I'm telling ya
if a man ain't managed to get his own trailer and lorry by the time he's 21,
you can see he ain't got it in him to make any
proper money.

NEILOUS: Some people get on later.

THADDEUS: Not amongst our people they don't.

NEILOUS: Well I'll have what I need soon enough, don't you worry.

THADDEUS: Will you now. (BEAT) Good luck with your tree lopping. And careful with
that chainsaw, ay?
I'd hate to see you get hurt.

THADDEUS walks off

NEILOUS: (UNDER HIS BREATH) I'm sure you would. Not a proper man, am I?

NEILOUS gets in his car, slams the door and drives off

--

The above is a scene that was cut from the third series of Atching Tan, the BBC's radio drama about Romany Gypsies. Conniving entrepreneur Thaddeus Arkley is a central character, and his son Neilous struggles to escape from his shadow. The series will air from October-December on iPlayer and BBC stations across the East of England. A 45 minute play based on the series will air on Radio 4 on 23rd November 2010 at 14:00

2010-09-06T12:51:00.007+01:00

'No Special Rights for Travellers' MEP in expenses inquiry

MEP Nikki Sinclaire speaks out against Travellers' 'special rights' in the European Parliament

AN INDEPENDENT MEP who has spoken out against the 'special rights' of Travellers and the money they cost taxpayers is facing an investigation into her fraudulent expenses claims, the Sunday Times has reported.

Nikki Sinclaire, 42, who stood for the leadership of UKIP, regularly claimed up to £840 in travel expenses for the round trip by car from her Birmingham home to the seat of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

But a whistleblower has revealed that she actually travelled by plane instead, paying as little as £260, and pocketing the difference.

Sinclaire has stood up in the European Parliament and stated that "Thanks to the Convention on Human Rights, [the] travellers have special protected rights. They have priority in health care and education, all at the expense of local taxpayers! (Source: your-mep.org)

On her blog, Ms Sinclaire has spoken at length about the problems caused by politicians fleecing the taxpaying electorate.

Her blog, Nikki's Campaign, states that "Ms Sinclaire has highlighted the lack of transparency amongst elected members of all the parties."

It quotes her as saying that "Despite all the media coverage, and the fact that criminal charges have been brought against the worst offenders, politicians still have not got the message".

"We are still seeing vague and incomplete declarations, politicians are still employing their wives and families, and despite the economic crisis they still go off on luxurious taxpayer-funded junkets", says Ms Sinclaire at http://nikkiscampaign.blogspot.com.

Damian Le Bas, Education Editor, Travellers' Times Online

2010-08-31T15:28:00.003+01:00

I had a dream that someone said
(Unfortunately, in my head),

'The wrong'uns of the Middle Class will go
To see something remarkable, and try not to remark:

Within, they're bloody barking
Sirs.

The wrong'uns of the Middle Class will go
To see the Raft of the Medusa there
In oils, or actually, in a salt distress our gone God doth allow
And, under voluntary duress of One's Own Will
To strut and pout all pissily, will say not 'Wow' or 'Oow', but
(Lately)
'Oh.'

The wrong'uns of the Middle Class will go
To hear a joke, a good joke:
Then shall not
Guffaw, but sneer,
Exhale too brief, too little-y to do compliment
But to the dying straits of tedious lips, What
Service!
No balls.

Please.'

I had (unfortunately, in my head) this dream:
In any case, part of a farrago.

Yet will the wrong'uns cease to come and go,
Talking flippantly of whatsisname?

The Eighteenth Hole

2010-08-18T10:25:00.006+01:00

The grass is silken, cheered, a little straightening with water
That it waited for and waited for like old men waiting
Earnestly for never-turning daughters.

Last month our English wetnesses were wedded to the sea,
All moored offshore,
Visible at the lowest porthole: even that was dryness-fogged,
Crystally round the edge,
Bobbing like the dunes on tautening eyes of stranded fathers.

Now is the eighteenth. Now for a week the wicked globules,
White and blobs and thick inside, beckoned by insect-tended sex and static
Fizz that tremulates in skips across
The wildering hedge, a must of skittish spectra, fall
And pot themselves outrageously.
The grasses straighten, silken, happy with water,

While at the left, woozy over its chair
And baring, veined, its generousness in blushing throbs
The fig tree wafts, smooches thistle-crook and muddy notch.

It can't know what it is to love a daughter.

Words I Like

2010-08-16T12:28:00.002+01:00

We all got words we likes, my mate.
Now just a minute: let me tell you, mine
Is words I likes for special reasons going back
A thousand years I think, so long ago
I'm losing track.

Mandi'a pukker tuti- Sorry, I mean
I'll tell you. Well, at least
I'll have a crack.

Here's a kushti word I like: it's 'cushion'
Seeing as 'cushion' hushes in my ears like 'kushti'
Which means 'very fine', like frilly cushions
Bought by our manushis-
(That's our women).

What's different about me ears, you ask
O mandi's (more, correctly, mirra) chavvy?
(Sorry, chavvy's a boy. And mandi's mine,
Or me, which is what I see in mirra mirror,
And 'mandi' ain't a girl, it's just an ancient word
Like one of 'thine').
There's stor or pansh examples (four or five, I mean): You want some more?
Then hark.

When I was twelve year old I wrote
A poem about the sea, and never mentioned boats
But I did mention 'Gypsum': It's a stone, a frost-white crystal.
What was Gypsum like? I didn't know back then, I guessed.
But I thought it was crystalline, and, like the sea,
Possessed of a frosty, foamy zest (good guess, I says
To meself, ta-divvus- Now, today).
So that's what mandi wrote:
'The shore receives its cleansing Gypsum glaze'.

'This works, perhaps, a little obscurely',
Scrawled the jinnapen-mush upon the page
In jinnapen-mush's (oops, 'a teacher's') lolli (ah: 'red' ink), so you would think
He meant it very surely.

I never told him 'Gypsum' was a special word for me
(Though it comes from Gypsos (chalk, in Greek, you see)
Especially
Because it sounded like the English word 'Egyptian'
(And our special, shorter version, 'Gypsy')
That refers
In ethnic terms
To me
And to my family,

Though you'll concur historians may err-
Like when they hollered 'Look, Egyptians!'
To my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-
Granny and Granddad, stopping in a bender
(Tent, not as in 'bend o' river')
By the lake,
They'd made a big mistake; they spake
In error when to Egypt they referred, and Gypsy's therefore not so dignified
As our own terminologi-
Kalo term (Whoops, 'kalo' meaning 'black'):
And that is 'Romany', and that is usually
Preferred.

But I won't take 'Gypsy' back,
Though many Gorji (Other; Stationary)
People use it, and they piggyback
Ridiculous ideas onto our name-
It's really parni- Water- off our back: all those
Rubbish ideas, you know, a load of kak-
Ah! Here's another yekh- another 'one'-
For explanation:

Kak or kakka means 'don't', or just
'Be quiet, you'.
So call me, by all means, 'cack-handed': There's another phrase I love.
In Romani, 'cack-hand' must mean one of two
Things: either
'Disciplined; even handed', or even
'Stealthy-fingered; quiet blighter'.
So tuti'a kakker jin that mandi's chored tu 'yogger'-
Sorry, that means 'Lighter'.

Oh- 'Jin', I said. Now, jin's a drink
I cannot get enough of:
But look out- Dik' akai:
When I say 'jin' I don't mean London Dry,
I mean the water of 'good old cogitation', fuel of intellect
Or Kushty puri jinnin' in our anglo-Asian dialect.
'Cos 'Jin' means 'know', 'believe', or 'think' to us
And jinnapen's the drinking-stuff, the piyaben we peeve
With which I feed my needi- Traveller- brain, to its relief.

So tuti's now ohr'd tickni, bitti lavs that mandi koms, Mush, ay-
I mean, you've had a taste
Of a few of my favourite words, mate, anyway.
But I'd kakker sim- I wouldn't be- a proper man, a tatcha needi geery
Unless I ended this in haste
Before your kans ta yokkers- ears and eyes-
Gets weary, deary.

Baby in Boots

2010-08-03T21:38:00.002+01:00

Smashed up tiles and terracotta ground a dust, starting the breeze. Low with the dust, the breeze fell whirling off the bypass through the gate, whirling along the stumpy wall, grazing itself. Gathering sandy weight from the sour old lichens grafted on the flints, it slowed. It sneered. It whisked the settled dust of old red lichened tiles that sat at the cracked base, baking. The wall broke, cracked once at the club-hammered end, smoothed for a second by the hush of the breeze still going. Nine straw bails, grown dense in a lump, caulked and stank of wheat like piss, stuck to the dry-wine coloured tarmac after the wall. Sweating and big, their fat rolls sat in the way. The wind left no dust there, but swept off more, frisking it from odd stalks sticking crazily from the sides. It fetched up the bitter whitened trace of the chalk crust, rabbit fur-dust, acrid grit of Phone Mast Hill, and breathed it all to the next yard. Its long dry concrete flashed like a signal, then was shushed and seeded by the breeze.

The stable door on the left was warping, chewed on the bottom edge by mice, clawed on the lock side by the cat. The floppy looking iron bit had fallen off. Knocked and bulbed by cob and Clydesdale feet, it stood at the side of the door, undercut by the breeze now tangy with straw dust. The breeze sniffed, tempted, at the foot of the door where mouse cuts splintered into teeth. Behind them, a cold muscle of night air sat and heaved. The dust breeze hissed and ran on feckless, clasping the dusts and grits it carried off.

Channelling into two around the thick steel bin, it slunk up the sides to the lidded mouth and found the flaking rubber lid was slung ajar. A slither of gap was there, shaping a chilly beam of sickly breath that came out and nuzzled the sun. Sugar beet, cereal bits, molasses and chaff smells whipped through the dust and went on gathering heat, peppered in dust, making it sweet, bringing the two streams back to a single breeze, tasting itself.

The breeze was quick but small and sweet by now. Wending up the plastered wall by the bin, it smelled the sudden damp and gasped, and the little boy ate its wholeness. His spongey cheeks went ever so slightly out, then tightened into dimples. Mushi frowned and swallowed. He pushed his cheek to the wall and waited. The summer was the same as last time, but the coldness of the wall on his warm brown face was a new thing. He put his palms to the wall next to his head. The cranky old rooster over the hill went “Carkle-cartle-oww” as Mushi's ear met the wall. It felt like water.

There was a swish and Mushi's face pulled back: he turned his head. Another swish, and this time he caught the flash of the musty tail looping about by the fence. Jimmy the cob was munching nettles, getting their layer of settled redness on his palate. “Humph” went the horse's throat, then “Brrrrr-khaw” went his lips and tongue.

Mushi ran over, bobbing his head. His tan boot-toes knocked the ridges in the concrete as he bounded.

“Jim-Jim!” he chimed, singing through the powder on the breeze. Down at the little boy's ankles, grasshoppers skipped and hissed. The horse's tail went “whish” again. One back leg started, knocked a foraging pigeon. It fitted and shook itself through the air, got its wings out level, saw the flat felt roof on the far side of the field, saw it come near, and drew its wings in, landing. Mushi squinted. The pigeon dipped its head and turned around, switching stance for the heat on the chalet roof.

The heavy plastic door glinted for a second, swinging outwards. Mushi's eyes went wide, and the wind felt sandy against their wetness. He stared at the door. For a second the darkness behind felt like it was going to leak out into the sun, and then it swung back, click. The sound of it shuttered over the field. Mushi thought he saw a haze of redness round the door frame, blinked and shook his head, then ducked away.

An Interview

2010-08-02T15:42:00.004+01:00

Interview for ROMALE festival publication,

or,

'With Apologies to J.D, who despises Windbags, for this Indecently Unpoetic Liquid Crystal Spool.'

What do you love, what do you hate?

I love freedom and nature, and looking at the world around us. I love reflection and pondering life’s mysteries. I love learning because it enriches life, not because it leads to money. The thing I most hate is refusal to imagine that you might have been born in someone else’s shoes. Our circumstances are defined by fortune, which is what right wing politics fails to acknowledge. This failure is responsible for a lot of suffering.

Most Roma artists are at the same time activists – why is this so?

Romani history has been moulded by the irresponsible actions of the powerful, and the refusal of nation states to accept different value systems and aspirations. This is still true today and in some places is getting worse. To learn about Romani history and the impact of political decisions on Roma and Travellers is to become politically conscious, to become angry; this angry consciousness has given birth to a new political language.

If Romani artists want to address important issues they will have to speak about politics, and foremost that means making yourself visible, rather than necessarily being an ‘activist’. It saddens me that global Romani celebrities will not stand up and say who they are. Until they take that risk then not much is going to change.

Individual identities are complex and sometimes contradictory. What was most important for you?

-I cherish the Romani language, especially in a country where it has come close to being lost. Yes, identity is complex: I am glad to speak an Indian language, handed down to me for a thousand years, through a dozen countries, even though people would look at me and say ‘But he’s white’. Sometimes this cultural interface confuses people. Good: maybe that will teach them the world isn’t that simple.

Freedom is more important to me than anything else, but to cherish freedom is to be hunted. If you cherish freedom above stasis and money, you will not develop the arsenal required to defend yourself against tyranny.

This is why free cultures usually lose militarily to cultures that love money more than freedom. I find it deeply ironic that nation states like to refer to themselves as ‘land(s) of the free’ when they have usually built their fortunes upon genocide. The Black Hills were stolen from the Dakota Sioux as soon as gold was found there. Romanies and Travellers have been beaten and punished for their way of life because they cherish freedom and the present rather than pension schemes and a future that may never arrive.

What does integration mean to you?

To me, integration means having looked behind the curtain of elitism, so people can’t lie to you any more. It means being able to see government rhetoric for the rubbish it often is.

The powerful have had centuries of practice at convincing the weak that they themselves are the only people fit to govern, and in many cases the weak still believe it. However, because I am integrated, I went to a good school, to a world-class university, and I know legal, financial and political professionals, I know that this rhetoric is totally inaccurate. Bankers, politicians and lawyers are no more likely to have intelligent or sound values than anyone else. Usually, they have just enjoyed enough stability to succeed in those professions.

Integration is not the same as assimilation. Assimilation means losing your values for the sake of convenience; wanting to have a car instead of wanting to be free. It’s a parliamentary democracy’s job to make sure its citizens have as identical values as possible. Those who show evidence of different values will be swiftly crushed. The evidence is all around us, particularly when it comes to Romanies and Travellers.

What do Roma, Gypsies, Sinti, Manouches … have in common? Which experiences do they share? Is there something like a Gypsy spirit?

Roma, Sinti, Manouche, Romnichel, Kale, Gitano- all these people are part of global Romani culture and they all acknowledge it in one way or another, even if they prefer to have an individual name and separate identity. Romani identity, like any ‘group’ identity, springs from a matrix of characteristics which any Romani group will have some of, but no group anywhere has all of. So there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ Gypsy, though Gypsiologists have always claimed otherwise. It is astonishing that people still feel comfortable pontificating about the stereotypes that they feel must define Romani identity.

Imagine a non-Jew telling a Jewish person, in total seriousness, that they can’t be a Jew because their nose isn’t big enough, or because they are not greedy enough with money to be Jewish, or because they do not drink the blood of Christian children at the feast of Passover. Yet every day, people who know nothing of Romani culture will tell Romanies they cannot be Romani because they are literate, or because they have a job, or because they are not sexually promiscuous, or because they aren’t dark skinned enough for the interlocutor’s liking.

Of course, to be Romani means no more or less than to be Egyptian, or Argentine, or Dutch, or Jewish, or Sioux. It is a culture one happens to be born into, not a qualification. But if there is such a thing as ‘Gypsy spirit’ then I hope it means resisting cultures that are built on other people’s suffering, and this is an aspiration that any human is free to share in. It is not conveyed through DNA, but through empathy.

Romanies and Travellers are not immune from making others suffer, it would be ludicrous to claim so. But I do believe that any sufferings caused by Romani culture are utterly, utterly, utterly trivial when compared to those caused by mainstream political thinking. Are the Romanies, or anyone else, seriously supposed to think that living on one’s own land without ‘official’ permission is as serious a crime as the mass dismemberment of children in Iraq and Afghanistan? Our spirit must say no.

Puppeteer in the Palais

2010-07-30T09:55:00.003+01:00

And every now I pose at the newsstand, stroke the curve of my nose
And quiz the breeze with 'What the fuck is going on today?' ,
Wonder if my unease might be distilled into a cure,
Or whether it's the source of the disease,
The thing that makes us 'do things differently',
And this week fired the Gypsies off their knees
In the old Loire Valley; the thing
That Europe's Berlusconis, Sarkozys
And other blue-hue shirted, greatly spotted,
Fisty-tuff mosquitoes hoover and forge
Into their Spear of Nation-Static Destiny, the better still
To drive us into the gorge

GYPSIES IN DISGUISE

2010-07-21T18:09:00.006+01:00

Lack of poems also blamed

On things like this dramatic work,

Of which I'm somehow not ashamed

Even though I looked a burk

Because unlike my better half here named

I cannot act

That well.

Why For A While No Poems

2010-07-21T11:11:00.015+01:00

Little no fire, no cracklings in the dark
No more,

Little no more uncertain bend of the sapling

Thickened

Is his for the stripling grown

Beyond the compass of constricting saturnalia

Their one unsolid ring's diameter,

Even a coupling minute's, theirs

Is serious dearth of variousness in view:

In place, the little vastness of a woman

Pulling in sighs the long and salty drift

Spark-mockingly, hushing and crackle-dousingly

Along the fire-knapped edge,

Making certain of me

Smoothing-

The Pedestrian Traipsed Around in a Glue of

2010-07-21T11:01:00.004+01:00

The pedestrian traipsed around in a glue of

Somnambulent sloth. Women, bidet-excoriated,

And shirking duties flippantly, flock to

My side to lick my druel of cinnamon chat.

Draping wrong things along bad neurons, caping

My cape, taping my nape, and creping my pancake

Escaping the nonsense into a world of sense, non?

It was as if your coddled stepmom actually cared.

But no, a thousand times no, she doesn't

Care, she doesn't wash, nor hinder her farts at all.

lets them go during dinner and all the rest of it,

Fool.

Keep me in your thoughts, I say, do, do, do.

Meet me in the courts beside the perspex, judge and screw.

Greet me in the hearse next Wednesday, do.

Do it for the magnolias, for the otters, the rampant diatom, the whale.

Do it for the bees and the trees and the art that starts where it ends

And the guys and the flies and the sword that, blunted, fends.

JOHN ASHBERY

Maine, 1972

Four Perspectives on Bullshit

2010-05-19T18:05:00.005+01:00

'Pull your socks up' say the Tories

'You've got a fucking cheek' say Labour

'You've both got a fucking cheek' say the Liberals

'You've all got a fucking cheek' say the papers

And I wonder what the poor, smooth, innocent

Cheek

Has done to deserve this slander.

I have lots of pairs of socks. I had a theory

That the reason rich old men don't weary

Quite as fast as poor ones

Is because the little, unseen things in their rich life are

Littles and unseens fit for a movie star.

So I invested for a while in the bestest socks,

Immorally comfortable pants,

The same shaving brush as Prince Phillip

So that when I take the hair off my top lip

Or confine my feet or balls

I'll be like a rich man, only without the halls and corridors:

Yet always reserving the right to

Deny his right to

Be a rich man

When I'm shouting my mouth off.

The IMF has said it's time to call it a day.

You've had your chances.

Britain, you once-imperious seat of old austerities,

Take your medicine. pay for your insincerities.

'But you bailed out Greece', we cried, 'and so did we!'

'That is then, and this was now', they said,

'Now get thee to a poverty.'

The blood runs palm-deep now in Troynovant

And all of it is red, and there's only one of it

That coursed through many a so-called different head.

And just after four, a dusk, in mid-November

A single flag is left, raised on a tussocky hillock outside Basildon:

A single feather of the final falconer's kestrel left, with all of us

Departed.

Noah's Ark

2010-05-18T11:29:00.001+01:00

Noah's Ark from Travellers Times on Vimeo.

Interviews by Damian Le Bas and Bill Laws for Travellers' Times.

Casualty

2010-04-24T15:38:00.006+01:00

When Carney died at the mudded hedgeside

He was alone, and sixty feet into no man's land
Across the brook of the gloop and gorse of wire
Cutting off wept-out Tommies who made it back
To sunk-in pits of sandbags. Rat-belly smoothed bivouacs
Pulpitted them sadly.

The next was Christmas, and a ceasefire.
Lieutenant Colton, Higgins and Hitchings went
Across the mire, the blenchless pools
And million gray spent cartridges
That housed the ripping ends
Of boys who went where they were sent.

Carney was there, his tangled arm and crooked, shot-through hand
Giving the hedge his finger 'V' of dissent,
His coat already the tent of rats and attendant lice.

'He was always shaven clean' said Hitchings,
Trying to paint him nice
Instead of mudcake carapaced, blood-smothered.
'True, I never knew his stubble came through ginger', Colton said,
Fiddling finger with finger.
'It's the Irishman in him', said Hitchings: 'Well,
I hope he was in his mother'.

And a laugh escaped as they stood.

Ein Brief aus Treblinke; or, Blue Sky Thinking

2010-04-24T09:48:00.004+01:00

i. Prolegomena

All our thinking must begin from the ultimate otherness of God. Man does not exist in a relation of analogy to his creator. The fact that characteristics of the almighty are said to be predicable of us is the result not of our actual identity with God, but of a language permissible solely by grace. As such, even to speak of the "characteristics" of God is in a sense to mock his divinity, which is such only in its otherness.

How does God relate to us, and do we not require a capacity for analogy to the almighty in order to relate to him? God relates to us because his perfection allows him to do so; allows him, in a manner incomprehensible to the human mind, to exist in relation to that which bears no identity to himself. Only a being existing in a perfection wholly and utterly other to our own finite materiality can be capable of interaction with that which is of wholly different substance, if we are permitted to use the word.

ii. God's Substance

The issue of God's substance is an important one. In what way is the word "substance" justifiably applied to God? The truth is that it means little more than his "-ness", or that which makes him God. "God's substance" really ends up meaning no more and no less than "God's being God": given that the word God can already be said to be infinitely burdened (in its utter difference from our own nature) then we would do as well to say that "God" as we would to state that "God's substance is ...". Like the very word God, the notion of God's substance might at least have some use if it can remind us of the ultimate incomparability of God and our substance. The phrase "God's substance" has been thoroughly used, however, in Christian theology, in spite of this central difficulty. It was especially enjoyed, or endured, during the patristic period.

It is a shame that this was the case, as those who plunged into debates about the nature of God's substance were attempting to solve difficulties of sacred doctrine by making them cases amenable to clarification by human terms. The human terminology, philosophy and logic thereby takes precedence over God as he states himself to be. Herein lies the specific terror of this problem: God states himself to be Trinity; whatever God is, he is not such in a manner comprehensible to us other than by grace; we are unable to accept this, and we eagerly set about explaining in material terms the God-ness of God immaterial and incomprehensible! We would do better in all ages to stick to the word God and offer such reverence to this subject as it itself permits us to know is appropriate, i.e total reverence.

iii. God's call

Must we be convinced philosophically/empirically of the validity of God's claim on us, God's call, before we proceed? This cannot be the case. For the claim to be truly existential rather than merely worldly, to make true claim rather than contingent claim, it must spring from an acknowledgement of the utter otherness of He who makes the command.

How can we expect a claim to be made which is from a source external to and prior to the world, that is, its creator, which is amenable to the reasonings that we develop by looking at this world? This world is a product of his creative act, it is not even that act, and yet the act would give us greater knowledge of the actor. But the truth is that God's act is as inaccessible as he himself is. There is, in the sensible realm, merely the clay that he has created and then formed.

It is thence that our need for grace comes. Such grace must be total, and it is: in Jesus' call by the lakeside we have the pure encounter, and the divine vocation itself: "You cannot know where I go, so you must come". It is the only call the mechanics of which we cannot comprehend, which is what verifies it as divine. To look for its endorsement in the midst of that to which it says "No", the clay of this world, is true folly.

Self-Portrait

2010-04-23T13:33:00.002+01:00

The bleeps and ticks of tangled thoughts
Capable of moments, loves / tartness in the teeth,
That dental kinda reason, reining soft life back.
Teeth are dormant in the kiss, physical in speech.

The old face Sundays bronzed, somehow liked
Is simple smoothness, petty three dimensions
As simple in the fact of surface as the willow, or the careless mouse.
In these angles, pent between their cloister, are the thoughts, the ticks and tangles.

An eye is lit like blue. Simple, or a fractal hue unlit
And carving further rifts in gulfs consuming clarity.

Reporting to Yeats

2010-04-09T13:20:00.005+01:00

War is privatised, old man:
Become a realm of plastic definition, badged and registered,
As constant as the East.

Truthless ghasts, politicians, fools
Are lionised.
Thieving is fine for them refined, meet for the finery draped
And the clean like children, sheen cheeked,
Nowadays nil to the mire of declining oil
Which is our blood, the overspill spoils,
Grease of the granite-fist masters of a future
One past only prayed for- theirs,
Bought by grinning and press-gang raped and ruptured souls:

It will spill the old blood mightily, a rum new red Euphrates
As the new blood withers and dies in a piss
Of dusty, disappointing gasoline,
A sunburnt dry-worm trickle
On hissing sands.

The sands shall not be new
Until some bright new Third Blood comes to drown the imperial clash,
To smash the deserts' dunes and shepherds' hill paths wet
And hush the heat of everything. Then, as blind and mindless as a flint,
Arcing its Vulcan mass to the sky, springing impossibly,
Cull-bent it soars
On a day when eagles' tungsten talons crinkle
In merciless storms of water-freight,
Mindless Poseidon's re-raised gush of Panzers.
Then, when anvils of salty water sweep
And swing over great circumferences of Earth
And hammer, Leviathan-knuckled, the wings away
From Romish drones that swooped as the toddlers' play:
Gaia the fist and wave, the future, free
In killing our sands and salts with a bold
And water-engorged machine of blood and sea.

Then, in their once great phosphorous-sword girt shards shall fall
The pitiful trunks of the Air Force gnats, yesterday proud, all Yankee shimmering,
Smatter in thuds the dunes in cemeteries of panned and overproud hegemonies
Wrought in arrogance, and the smut of silver gelatin, yet
We all shall remain in the time before it, decades, five or more
Each of our conned, condemned united host
Pissing ourselves
In butt-clenched teetering.

Purging the old worlds clean, these deep, unprayed-for tides
Will mar our blenching faces into mud
At the birth of that rough beast, born and slouching through
The grease of a post-oil, unmanned New World's blood
That stirs, as now we come and go
In its hell of stony certainty laid out beside us,
And will rise.

Grime and Punishment

2010-04-06T11:23:00.005+01:00

A tale of two now-Londons, told with a beat:
The whirring heart of Grime, the cuffs of architectural design
Up Vyner Street.

Follow, for these four minutes, our upwardly mobile hero
Who stumbles, maddens and burns in the bleep-shank firey
Lit by the Rudekids fiddling the strings like Nero,
Merkin' effeteness.

Director - Ian Pons Jewell
Cinematography - Job Reineke
Gaffer - Sebastian Lamb
Editor - Gaia Borretti
VFX - Tommy Nagel
Rudekid product graphics - Richard Wilson

*Can't get this to fit on my blog properly so best to just watch it on YouTube...

Jack

2010-03-31T18:25:00.002+01:00

Jack can't be put in a box, because
He'd spring out before you'd planned, but right on time
Like it was a happy young someone's birthday shindig
And the evening was rubberstamp destined to turn out wicked.
You'd be able to tell by the grin on his grinning face
As he sprang in a high-noon draw stance out of the box (like
Cocking a shotgun full of the best pakoras, the zestiest pancakes
With his face that's somehow exactly like the Wild old West
[Where he ain't from, yet knows a lot about its {and elsewhere's} bestest sides
And dishy hot dishes
Like the hickory, the gambling and the whiskey and the gals)]:
A damn fine sandy beard built for barbecue laughs,
Two 'Aaah, so you think you're a tough guy, do ya?' eyes
And the spectacle-frames his eyes make mischief in,
Eyes like a couple of Jacks in neat checkered shirts
Sparring elastically, chucking one liners like frisbees and body-pop curveballs
Round a J.D-sponsored boxing ring in the park,
Surrounded by cowgirls in tight jeans doing the hoopla
Marvelling at his mastery of the balancing bit of the brain)
That, if one-guy-jumping-out-of-a-box's face can conjure up
Such nang pictures,
He's basically going to serve up a reality just as fine, and just as
Free from strictures.

E Gili A Sad Hilkiah / The Song of Sad Hilkiah

2010-03-28T14:20:00.005+01:00

Part I

In the filth and the wet of December, cursed
By the lash of the coasts
And the squalls dank summers-wake nursed
I trod in the ways old August sang of the end of:
Feet, the bottoms fizzing and blistered
Slapping all wetly shod up the tarmac black promenade
Stillborn to the cold, the English mold hacked off
This hard underneath of an isle where night comes first.

At intervals of a furlong, maybe less
Are the benches, black-roofed,
Smashed (back when the brown-armed, summer-fed boys cared less;
When alcoholics, brush faced, smelling of salt and cheese
Would sleep there). On I went, past shelters dead in the steel-plate gale,
Brash as it whips a mist off the slick black prom
That waits in a kind of coma, dead
To invading pushes gouging the seafront wider.

A dozen shelters, cracked in the shrieking wind
I bypassed, battening slaps
Of collar and coat to the flash-white quivering neck,
Rain-slick, cold-pinned.

A lull came then in the squall: a long-enough breath
For a jackdaw out of sight to cackle and, fearing the death of the windrush,
Cackle no more. I stooped and sniffed: the gale was back to sea,
Abandoning my coat-wrapped neck, my salt-fogged eyes and lungs
To its bitterest ledge, a lookout-hand
Alone like a planted scythe in the hush of the landfall, then
Sapped as a damp wick, chilled by the bird-cry gone.

Now, in its place, as the sea sucked hard at the wind, came whisperings of sand
In a silence suddenly turned to a rural plain that pulled me to it,
Decades spinning away like shafts,
Til a dry field propped my boots on short and sudden stubble,
Black stumps left by a burning.
Here the rain and early nightfalls buried themselves for shade, a place
Of reddening flint dust burnt to a tan by August. Chalk-scraps cracked,
A canny old cockerel's laughter echoing through them: I stepped.
A flint shard, thin as a gallett, made underboot crack

And back on the slick wet tarmac, wet neck, boots
And myself now thinner and shivered, I looked:
In the nearby bench hut a spindle of man sat bent and cloaked,
His figure like wire, thin as a fish-hook.

He spoke through the wind with a voice like chalk-crack and cockerel
"Come akai, come akai", like a crake in the gale, his pin-taut gaze
A lash for my mind, my whole damp form afraid
And jacketed stiff by his flintlock eyes.

Hangovered

2010-03-24T10:23:00.004Z

-Urgh-m
Every right-left jerk to jerk
Buck-weave unto bump
And swing of the ten a.m train
Wiggles the bugling ethanol blend
In my worming belly,
A pish-mix stupidly, stupidly doused with coffee
And milk, by the fool in the head,
Making me feel like a weary old welly
Gone shapeless, filled with mud,
And stomach acid, and gloop-de-gloop insistent booze gas
Rising in terrible, fat and orderly gulps:
Big, mooing, chlorine gut pool farts
Folding me up,
Flopped and cringeing in the neon hum
Like a dying old slug in a double-cuff shirt.

A sprawlerman, fat with sick.
A lag-brained dough pat, fishtongue sod of a man
With strange unwanted bones inside me,
Poking about, forcing punishing angles into the blob,
Ruining the odd four second puddles
Of vacant, soft tranquility,
The pauses where I paw at my sagged white face, the alright bits
Where I just about don't
Want to blow my brains out.

Just Walking Around by John Ashbery

2010-03-15T13:51:00.002Z

I liked this poem so much I copied it out on a piece of gold card straight away.

Middleofmarch

2010-03-15T10:46:00.004Z

Spring done come to South London.
Perkier seeming birds, tight up-thrusted waxy daffodils
And sagged pasty faces that have had enough
Suddenly squeak together in parks like
"When did all this shit happen?
I must have missed the transition."

We were all indoors in the snow and rain
Pawing at the purple 5 p.m for three years
Spitefully disguised as five months, the cunts:
But now it's warmed up
And the snow-bane's out of my cup.
Thank fuck.

Five Minute Poem

2010-03-08T09:27:00.004Z

Why do we build and bulwark, craft and strut?

Great glass scarps are magnetized and framed

In the head of an architect. Patented, funded, named,

Cast into splinters splitting the mindless sky.

Those who are not architects build up their contacts,

Cudgel and tease their loves like wire, each an unselfconscious sculptor,

Craftily refining every curve

Into a classier source of smut.

[Addendum: outside the first minutes "Yet

Let there be no more of these bits

Of moaning verse, because they're shit

And I'm scared to get stuck in a rut."]

With thanks to William Kraemer

Witch Hunt

2010-03-07T13:24:00.006Z

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MINISTER - A British Minister of State

GHOST - A Faceless, Wandering Guide to the Countryside

MINISTER and GHOST approach a strange camp in a wasteland vale.

The camp stands behind a chipboard palisade.

They approach it slowly, from a distance.

MINISTER: This must be a dream.

I do not know this place,

And though there are signs of life I hear no voice

And see no face. What is this encampment, scout?

GHOST: Welcome to England,

And the Shires' premiere doll-shack poverty park,

The vale of spite-crimes' legacies:

An orphaning landscape's Scrubland World of Adventures.

MINISTER: England?

GHOST: This time, yes;

But in truth, these places litter the now-time world,

Prisons in open air, where souls grow bent and curled.

MINISTER: Is anyone really trapped here?

These tents couldn't keep out the rain,

Let alone locked within themselves

An inmate under chain.

What sort of prison uses silks and rags for shackles?

Ridiculous. You have got me perplexed.

The compound walls are chipboard: cheap and short.

Smothered in cesspool speech. My guess?

This is a victim complex.

GHOST: Might could free itself from here, but maybe innocence can't.

MINISTER: Innocence? They've wrecked the place.

And why's there a cut-out plane above that door?

What could an allied plane be a symbol for?

Is it a Harrier? Perhaps an F-15?

GHOST: Who knows? They each drop death and fire,

Both accurate and keen.

These days, even out here in the woods,

The crucifix of the Western Orthodox has swelled,

Grown fat, its angles broadened out

On a Harrier jump-jet's wings.

So what do you see in this shack, from way up here?

Does that door lead to nothing more than a broken outhouse,

Or is it a cracked confessional?

A penitent box for de-mobbed men to weep into children's blankets,

Confessing to pink and conscienceless cartoons?

MINISTER: I can't see any evidence of penitence from here.

Graffiti, look. They're vandals. Pikeys.

It's not even words, its gibberish!

Destructive dolts. Ungrateful 'do-as-you-likey's.

GHOST: Is what you don't know 'gibberish'?

Those slogans are in their languages.

MINISTER: Look, there!

Looks like they've strung up a virgin bride.

It's too late now for bandages.

The scum. What this place needs is a hose.

GHOST: Sir, don't choke on your sandwiches.

It's only an effigy, a hanging dress, reminding those

Whose great grandmothers, long ago,

Your clergy drowned and choked

Under the good old English crown's duress

That some things ought to be remembered.

MINISTER: Oh come on, it's three hundred years and more

Since witches or Gypsy whores have been dismembered.

And the Welsh? Well that was longer still ago.

So why should I feel bad, today?

Me?

No.

WITCH HUNT is an exhibition by Delaine Le Bas on show at Chapter, Cardiff

London Is Lucky To Know Me

2010-02-23T13:01:00.003Z

A thief of avocados said 'A city must be small
Enough to walk out of
Within a morning'.

Perhaps a city should be merciful,
Dry and good for the suede of Lawyer-list shoes.

But London is a sheet, green-edged with time,
Never lifted: wettened, stretchable,
Heavy on the clays its long millennial lie-in shits beneath.

Skittish flea-troupes nattering flit
About the creases, spikes, new mildews whittled
To glassy squares on top of it.
Lanes, some taped, some cut on hairs and skin
Mask dry over sebum-liquefaction smut,
Crusting the good old innards:
The black, molassed, rich gizzard.

Now, we could sink a borehole into London's sugary guts.

Fleas, their mouth parts sharp, insouciant,
Would fatten up more quickly, clot up nicely
On a diet of the lipids of the belly of the city.

London whispered all these things to me
One night in Docklands, when I crouched down, cold
And put my ear to the dark, denuded mud.

'Is that the sound of the sea?' I said.

'No sea, but one beloved of he,'
Said London's murmuring heart to me,
Wetly and gently.

I listened more. 'One blessed,
One seas must kiss, lapping at night-times, privately
To quicken their vast old deadness.
Can you smell the lust now, fleet-lived flea? Or,
Small as you are, scent how my musks
Drew oils and spice-soaked ships on gold silk threads
Across the wash of harmless centuries,
The cyclic sheddings of imperial dusts?'

Then London told me a secret: how to feed
On the sugars of his/her pasts, should I have need.

I thought, 'I'll keep that last bit secret.
I wouldn't want to see the city bleed.'

London is lucky to know me.

Of course I'm lucky London told me, too,
How I can find, beneath the thinning crust of a flea-like life
The blood of the past, so thick, molasses-like
Where sugars are formed from dead, past loves, like

Who?

Shalmaneser Picklescott

2010-02-22T11:11:00.003Z

People keep asking about the title of my blog. So, bref:

'Picklescott' is a small village in Shropshire where I was refused entry to a pub. I do not know why. Perhaps it was genuinely closed, but it wasn't closed because there were a bunch of locals standing outside enjoying a pint. I don't think it had anything to do with Gypsies (I'm made aware that I apparently don't look like one), but the experience stuck with me. I thought, 'Alright, you awkward c***s, I'm going to take the ridiculous cutesy name of your xenophobic (maybe?) village and use it as an outlet for my poncy, Gypsophiliac poetry. I bet you'd love that!' So there you are. Stupid explanation.

'Shalmaneser' was the name of several Kings of ancient Assyria, once the most powerful empire in the world, ruled by chariot-thrashing, braid-haired-and-bearded Kings who fought lions in the dusty arena armed with nothing but a sword, and led their armies from the front on bloodsoaked campaigns up and down the boomerang of the greenish Fertile Crescent. So there's me in a nutshell: ever aspiring to the epic, the ancient, the crypto-Jewish, the sandswept deserts, the big old palace, the crazy eyed nomad:

but then the surname kicks in, little old Picklescott in the rain, in the shadow of an unknown English hill, where stands a white boy Traveller with no way out of the mire, not even his own beat-up truck doling out a smidgen of touchable authenticity. Never mind: we live in such contradictions.

Mythic

2010-02-12T14:11:00.004Z

Slow bed rising, cell before torture

Gaze slight, light-thirsty

Broken back Theresa.

Grünewald's feet claw after a crucifixion:

Your ribcage heaves, imprisoned hearts pound out a diction.

Crows are stung with hunger.

They stir.

Auxin-charged, gibbeted,

Pained like a minded plant

You burn for the light, the water in you

Pitted against the clockwork.

Slow and easy amputations surface.

Silver nails, feet that eat,

Wishing to know the mind that moves them-

Mind they cannot meet.

Higgledy rib-caulks stalked a page

Before rage purified them into rock, and

Sculpted granite age.

Your Rameses tenure being great but brief,

The flesh returns and has you prone.

The kingliness is thieved.

Arcing bridge legs, disconnected,

Wean themselves away from cords and spine.

Shattered legs cannot be trusted:

They are restless and unsleeping, they defy you,

Guided and diseased with sunlight.

Your backbone-tugging spasm lurches

And one high palm can't fend it off.

Futile as your ceilinged gaze

Hands untrustworthy as spiders,

Drugged, fickly supporting you

Doing the bidding of some other.

The leper faces downward, shunning any gaze,

Plays the parasitic twin as

Nuzzling draws the wet

From fizzing, head-strung spinarettes.

Where do you put

The ghastly, quickened sinew that you took?

A thing your sinews made, younger and more slinking

Than the old mistrusting spine that bore them,

Wronged, out-quaked, unthinking.

Why does the sawdust mind give out no breath?

No sand-unravaged sleeping time for me.

No breath from the dunes.

Pray instead to the feet that tug

In mindless mammal pullings.

Help them, pulling, sleeping,

Friends.

Here I might be, here

In the back-fed feedback.

Let the birds all pullulate again.

Let the Pharaohs gasp.

Osiris feels the quickening quiver

Of my taut nails

Searching the blood for his liver.

Wet, against a gasp from the sands

That disbelieve the stalking, threading of hands.

The faithful aquifer of love

Sends no wet thread up through the ageless dune

To dampen a curse, to make your lover

Breathe again in mud.

Cast it this way, for you cannot think

In cogs.

Orreries and orbs may help the -hah!- enlightened,

Yet Gyroscopes shall one day sag

Like flesh.

Send the disbelievers soaring,

Flighted up, like spectres from the cat.

I'll be fire, light my blood

Vultures quake

Old Horus breaks his mind

Drugged with his own old cult.

You spin and wield the entrails:

Bloody in earth, not hell.

Drugless, unlike any of the gods

Who died in the mire of your fleshly spells.

Flap no deathwing.

Need no balance.

Shroud the life outside these sands

With death no heavy life can outdance,

Life made shy and fleeing from imbalance.

I am alone, and only I

Need trust my Djinnish sand-dance,

Until the grain of fifteen thousand years is vanished,

Wind has lulled to trance all broken loves,

Consciousness has run:

Then we may go as one into our Sun.

III

Now break down.

Out in the rain, down in the mud

A stone, Victorian Jack-in-a-box of undead Kells

Reveals old Grandma, coddled by swaddling earth,

Rocking back to warmth from a dampened hell.

Be there, black as your dress

When the bad ghosts come to take you.

Smile, address them,

Fool those scavenging gods of the outworn sands

To eat your mud, choke on the London clay,

And with your silken spirit

Drive them away.

Come, young spider-shade one.

Feel the creaking power of human clay,

Crack the wells and make them new.

Build a soul from the hissing liceland

Churning a stew from darker estuary sand.

It courses through you. Let it be your life.

Sit back up to the feedback,

Give the devil the eye, and mark his strife.

Then curse the dark man with

A grandma's taught, beguiling cheek, and

Make him fly.

They told me I would not live again

My little star, my twilit darling:

Now the frail old wrist is shaking,

Fingering, expertly, this new day's key,

Shattering the listlessness of

Dying death again.

Here, stonewalled on the mountain,

I can breathe.

Lit by the flour-white floor and a cleaner sun

All old bloods are cooled

And stillness won.

Which wars may rage outside

In sunwashed snows

While here in the court I gaze and step

Calm, unblinkered

Down to the misted clothing?

Breathe the cloud.

Breathe it to the knees that slacken

Not through weakness

But in millennial, lightened, filtered love;

Bringing me finally to cast

Fleet petals of your heartstrings on the stone

Which here, amidst the wide, unlooked for skies

I have forgot my wish to resurrect.

This poem was inspired by Mythic, a performance by

acclaimed Butoh practitioner Marie-Gabrielle Rotie

at Laban, Docklands, London SE5, 11th February 2010.

http://www.rotieproductions.com/

http://www.laban.org/index.phtml

Format: Homily

2010-02-11T10:02:00.005Z

Wend ye North a couple of miles

From Stockwell's flats

And the patter: happyish dread,

Past Whitehall's powdered, twangable, hamstrung smiles

Bracketing a smattering of honour, the Cenotaph and friends

Left out on a blown-off limb.

Club '18 to '45,

Destination: London,

Status: shelled.

Home, at the news- and rain-dulled end of the war

The gramophone's tone is weak without a blade:

Expecting fun, we cannot hear the gun.

Expectorating 'Fun', gird up your loins:

Snap your venal cord in a Right direction

And get thee to the funnery,

All merely a mile up North!

Leave the boring moaners in the tents,

Stinking away their time in hoar un-whoring.

Jilin Deda factory's up the road.

It's only up the road from Dehui City.

It's only up the road from Pret (Long Acre)

Actually

In Thomas Friedman's flattened earth

Gawky-grinning, grin-shot, shot and flung about by greasy business.

Everything is fun-E, tech-E, hap-E

Up at the news-dulled end

End of a warmish world that still makes ice.

(Turning it down is a flighty kick

In the hospitality bollocks.)

Look, there's still some left for the Caiparinha!

God: it tastes so good, it tastes so good.

Pret is only up the road from everywhere,

And at the end of the working days on road

Some Prets arrange their staff to mix their yoghurts with the sandwiches

To make them too disgusting for the foragers to eat.

Here endeth no lesson.

My Home London

2010-02-09T15:22:00.003Z

Smells good, is good:

Smells bad, is bad.

Garlic gets coffee-licked round here,

Swirling round and round the tongue as I get not to care today

Being briefly alone in the kitchen

With no-one to kiss for a while.

Kicks from the fire, documentaries, book-buys.

Cordoba guitar.

No kicks from the stiff-leaved lank head tulips

Mewling yellow over the table. Look,

Like the dumb little cat used to before she died

To precious little crying.

We wrote poems about her on the fridge-

The sex poem magnets featured 'pussy' words, multiplied.

It's a good week. I've got a hundred quid.

I can buy food, get the tube,

Let not the right hand know what the chimp hand do

With the small change gracing the plastic pot by the till.

Faith stops the bother of bothering mind beyond

The acronymable title, Such-And-Such-An-Ill.

Sounds good, is good:

Sounds bad, is bad.

What's my girlfriend doing?

Why am I not working?

I didn't buy the coat that keeps me warm,

But is not this my jerkin?

I wonder what mates I'll get round later.

'Turkey Creek' Jack Johnson: 'I've got lots of friends'.

John 'Doc' Holliday: 'I don't'.

Sweet potater!

I could make pasta, just like usual.

Plenty.

Watch A friend wince while B says "dente", "denty".

Eats good, is good:

Eats bad, is bad.

We're doing alright, we are.

Let's not be churlish.

We've played at paste.

We're qualified for pearl

-ish.

Some do books and some do art,

And C is known to balk,

And D balks not to fart.

We balwark round our arty litter

With the litterati patter-pitter

That we train eachother in, are smitten by.

We cultivate it neatly, then grimace at the gutter,

Wish the smut would wash away,

Wish the tramps were happy, resolute and solvent

Hippy-clap revolts resolved in glitter.

Chintz good, is good:

Squints mad, is bad.

Don't look at me.

I'm not omnipotent.

What can good time Charlies do but look away?

Relent.

I Am A Jealous God

2010-02-04T12:38:00.002Z

---------------BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN---------------

"For I am a Jealous God"
Yahweh, God King of Israel

The problem of interpreting this world is one of SCALE.
We watch disaster movies and emerged shocked at their sudden application of the long scale of time to our regular experience of the short scale, the scale of school years and muffin toasting and sex.
The death of the miniature creature is no source of pity: even Vegans cannot be bothered to worry themselves about the tiny weeny holocausts of bacteria carried out each second in their gullet.
Sentience comes into it, but scale is the bigger deal.
Is that the truth of it?

Well, it is a very human perspective.
Scales of things, of time and space, are a by-product of our minds, themselves fine-tuned to this particular zone of lightscapes, sonic frequencies and merciful distances from the nearest happy star.

Hence... Is our week to day to smokey second, back to day and week and then a year, and then for fuck's sake man it's like seven years, and are these scales worth a single ounce of stardust when we stare on the cosmic whole?

Even a jealous God would maybe think us really, really little:

But what about nothing?
The absence of things?

For next to nothingness we are as GODS
and perhaps
next to true infinity,
Our own finitude doth make us more than infinite.

In such a world,
Press your space face close to mine, love:
Humans are the infinite:
Infinity outlasts time:
Freak out
Eternal-
Lie:
Freak out in a Moonage daydream, ohhhhh yeah....

And let this be the preface to a poem about my friends
A very long one, one that'll take me ages
Singing the praise of thems
Who rescue me from the godlessness of a big old
Big
Old
World.

2010-02-03T12:44:00.003Z

Narrated by Pender Buckley, Tom Buckley, Rebecca Frostick, Joe Lamb, Ruby Lamb and Stan Lamb

Edited by Damian Le Bas for Rural Media Company

All Change!

2010-01-13T14:53:00.002Z

Years it's literally took,
The motion
From blog
To book.

I have my fears
That there'll be jeers
For facin'.

But should you want a closer look
A bookseller provides the hook
And you can swim, O catfish, up their Amazownyan basin.

To curb
Confusing you,
The blurb I'm including,
Too.

- -

Product Description

The welcome emergence of a Gypsy/Roma/Traveller academic and intellectual community has stimulated new reflections on and reassessments of many of the established ideas surrounding Romani history and culture. New questions are being asked and, in turn, new critical challenges have arisen, in part because, for these individuals, Gypsy identity has never been something exotic and Other, but their own. This volume offers new perspectives on the Romani experience from voices that speak with authority and authenticity. Eminent scholar Professor Ian Hancock (University of Texas at Austin) explores how the study of linguistics has shed light on the origins of the Roma. Dr Adrian Marsh considers the discrimination and prejudice faced by the Gypsies of Turkey whilst Valdemar Kalinin considers the construction of the history of the Roma in Russia. Dr Brian Belton and Damian Le Bas offer their views on the seemingly elusive idea of Gypsy identity, while Janet Keet-Black argues strongly for the value of exploring personal and family histories. With its broad survey of international Gypsy politics and culture, this collection brings together the leading Romani scholars of the day in wide-ranging and engaging scholarship.

About the Authors (Editor/contributors, actually)

Damian Le Bas graduated from Oxford University in 2006 with a First Class degree in Theology. He is a native speaker of English and Angloromani, and has written and acted in drama for BBC Radio. He also exhibits his art, most recently (i.e ages ago) at the 2007 Prague Biennale.

Thomas Acton is Professor of Romani Studies at Greenwich University. He has written or contributed to many publications and is committed to supporting the rights of Gypsies.

The Apophatic Way

2009-12-23T12:22:00.004Z

Jesus failed.

Let's be honest.

He kept failing to stand outside funerals and spit at the ash-faced mourners.

Did Jesus really fail to mention gays?
It looks that way, for want of a better phrase.

He failed to stone adulterers, failed to punish,
Failed even to condemn them.

What the fuck? Am I having a laugh?

He failed to walk by those in need.

Christ, nine lines and I'm bored
Of having to be reminded how
You failed in every step
To act the Lord.

He failed to keep his bread to himself,
Jesus.

He failed to be a hypocrite
(In Greek, that last word there means 'actor', honest.)

Jesus failed to be fearless at the coming of his death.

Crying into the mud of Gethsemane, a little park where prostitutes and desperate muggers go; from which, on a clear and quiet night, you might discern the sirens calling help to the babies of Gaza, he seems to have failed to stop his tears and shut up, as he might have.

Living among such suffering it is hardly surprising that
Jesus also failed to give up the drink.

Jesus seems to have failed to be born in Bethlehem,
The only town where any good saviour should.
For what good can come out of Nazareth?

Though people say Christ was good.

Of course they do. Let's keep that sheen.
Though Jesus says he failed at that as well, in Mark 10, verse 18.

Jesus failed to be rich, and was not a Third Way Socialist,
Or Tory speculator, Communist, or Green, or hack, or rake.
He fails and fails to look the part of Jewish-rebel-Catholic
Meets-Methodist-cum-Orthodox-slash-suited-TV priest;
Fits none (nor every) self-affirming photofit we make.

Jesus failed, some might lament, to be That Great Anomaly:
The first great old-world atheist,
Which sucks if one felt smug at this til now.

Go out, and tell the cities of the plain
That if young Christ had had a modern brain
He might have rejected God.

Or else, just wonder how.

Don't worry if, like me, the truth of that bit made you make a fist,
For Jesus failed (this time, why, famously) to check his rage
When commerce in the Temple got him seriously pissed.

But table-flipping's not the same as donning righteous sword and mail
To kill oppressors, even those to blame
For murder, torture, rape and death
By any Empire's name.

Jesus failed to wear the sword and mail.
And if you think or hope or wish that single wealthless Rabbi did
Then prove it.
Do it.

You will fail.

Like Jesus, in these ways and others, did.

Spiders

2009-12-19T22:42:00.005Z

Someone had carved a spider's web onto my desk. They'd done a good job. Then they'd crossed it out viciously, or maybe someone else had. I was sick of hearing about the fucking spiders. I traced the splintery lines of the web with my fingers, and a little splinter went into my forefinger. Shit.

I was knackered. The meeting went right over my head. Shit coffee, no breakfast, and Laura had been thrashing around all night, occasionally elbowing me in the face and muttering about being hot. She wasn't on her period and it wasn't that hot. And as soon as the meeting was over some of the guys started giving me shit about the whole thing with her. 'One day you'll see why we think it's stoopid'. 'Mick, them old ways of doing things, you stick to them and it's a definite symbol of compliance with the status quo in other areas, we of all people can't be nonchalant about that Mick'.

While they said this stuff I nodded. I thought about Laura while I nodded. I thought about replying, then remembered what would happen if I spoke. The slight tomatoey warmth I was aware of on my tongue meant that my breath would smell like hot pasta mixed with shit and turps to other people, so I just kept my mouth shut and took some notes.

On the way home I knocked this guy's briefcase and he said 'Cunt'. Thought he was going to hit me. I hadn't even knocked it out of his hand, just literally knocked it. He stood there for a few seconds, brown frowning eyes trying to make me do something. He still didn't move and I thought, again, He's going to hit me. I thought 'Your name's Mick for fuck's sake, you should be hard enough to at least attempt to do something'. Then this girl walked past me in trainers, sweating. She didn't give me any eye contact. She'd been jogging or something. She knocked his briefcase too. It looked like it might have been on purpose. She tutted as she kept walking and didn't turn round. Brown eye guy lost his bottle then and walked off looking like a child.

I felt bad for him and wondered what our pressure group was ever going to achieve. Or maybe they might get some legislation through and then the resentment will all start to build up in cycles: first, a few girls might have a go at being jubilant about our prissy equality bills. Laura would be alright about it. Then even the nice ones will get pissed off. Definitely. We're all inured to this shit, really. Every custom magnetizes to what has been before. Blah blah de fuck, more cycles, even more useless as they're jammed in my own stoopid head. It wouldn't help anyone else if I got hit by a bus right now but it wouldn't harm them, either.

I went into the supermarket to get some stuff for dinner. I wanted to cheer Laura up after our shit night's sleep. Working in Male Equalitism made me notice all kinds of shit I'd never thought about, and that most people couldn't give a toss about. I didn't blame them, or judge them. I saw all the guys with their little trolleys, and all the girls with their big trolleys. I'd just get the piss taken out of me for pointing anything out to them, so what were me and the guys actually doing at these meetings? I'm still here shopping on a Tuesday night for the same old shit, I thought.

I got the big tins of sweetcorn that Laura likes. I got the big bottle of gin, thought about how little I was going to drink compared to her. I imagined the relative proportions with some accuracy, like a good Equalitist. If I was going to match her average consumption I'd have to become an alcoholic. The glass of the bottle was green and made me happy like Laura's green eyes. The gin glugged, donked around inside when I put the bottle in the trolley. I thought about the trolley again. Guy trolley or girl trolley? Did I really give a toss? All size is relative, really.

I got to Kings Cross tube. It was raining but for some reason I thought about the Kings Cross fire. Dad and Mum only just avoided it because Dad had one of his irrational freakouts like we men are prone to do and decided to get the bus. It saved their lives I guess, and it definitely gave Dad a surge of pride to think about it. Mum indulged it. She used to cuddle him up and say 'Masculine intuition' whenever he mentioned it, and I don't think he noticed she was blatantly taking the piss. All this passed through my mind and I decided not to get the tube. I walked in the rain.

When I got home I was fucking soaked. I told myself it's good to get soaked every now and again. I betrayed my allegiance to the circle-jerking Equalitist guys by thinking it was a feminine virtue to be able to hack being cold and wet. Jesus, this internal self-punishment for mere thoughts was getting me nowhere. I just wanted to get into the flat. I put the key in the guylock. Turned it. Pushed. Door didn't move. Fuck's sake! Pushed it harder. Hurt my wrist. Laura. She'd locked the fucking toplock again. Thanks for the fucking pledge to try and accommodate me in your progressive fucking female life. Fuck's sake. Great, back to prick Jennifer the neighbour. Fun times when water's pissing out of your pockets, shoes and ears.

I knocked on the door next to ours. Out she comes.

'Ah, Mickey doll, you're saaaturated!' Wanna come in?' She crossed her legs and put one elbow into the nook of the doorframe. Rub my nose in it you cunt. Cheers.

'No thanks Jen, I was just, God, um basically I think Laura's locked the toplock and you know-'

'Don't worry hun, giss your keys, I'm on it doll.'

I reached up and gave her my keys. She did look good. I tutted to myself for thinking it.

'What's that doll?'

'Nothing, cheers, Jen.'

She strode over and undid the toplock, threw my keys back down to me.

'Cheers, Jen'.

'Any time, babe.'

She went back into her flat. I spat on the floor. Then I rubbed the spit into the carpet with my shoe. I thought about the spider web carved into the desk at the meeting. Spiders.

I went into our flat and slammed the door, threw my pissing wet coat on the couch and tried to forget about Jen. Laura wasn't back from work. She'd be back soon, and there was no way I was going to avoid mentioning the shit about the toplock. I waited for ten minutes. She still wasn't back. Fuck.

I went into the bedroom and lay down in the middle of the bed. I gritted my teeth and hissed. I got back off the bed and went over to the laundry basket. I threw a towel and a pair of my jeans out of the way and grabbed a pair of Laura's dirty knickers. My heart started beating faster, my whole chest seemed to twitch, even the skin.

I tried to drop the knickers but I couldn't. I could hear the guys in my head, the mantras of anti-dependency, the whole pointless logic and anti-sense crap. Fuck it. I ripped the gusset out of her knickers and tied it around my face. It covered my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I started to breathe faster.

I could smell her. I was going mad, trying to hate it all. I dropped my trousers, stopped trying not to go mad, heard nothing but my breathing and the strain of the gauze of the gusset against my hair. I almost tripped as I made for the bed, shuffled into the middle, could feel the massive space of her bed all around me. Lay on your back, Mick. I breathed in through my nose again, reached down.

'Mick?'

Fuck. Rumbled.

'What the fuck, Mick?'

Allowing for mental distortions, there was definitely a five second silence. I reached up and grabbed the gusset, pulled it slowly off my head. The crap knot I'd tied fell open as my eyes came back to the light.

And there she was. Laura, nearly as tall as the doorway that dwarfed me. She shifted her weight, and I was afraid.

'What the fuck are you doing?'

'Don't pretend to understand, and thanks for locking the toplock you fucking lovely woman. You wanted this anyway, you cunt. I got you your sweetcorn Mrs. My Natural Superior, you big fucking pig'.

I was still pulling my trousers up as I tried to barge past her through the bedroom doorway. It was tricky and I stumbled. My head knocked into Laura's big left knee.

'Cunt', I said, just about staying on my feet. She gasped.

I grabbed my coat, the water on it colder than before. I slung it on, turned one last time and felt the chill of my doubts.

Laura stared, her arms moved up to cover her breasts, and two long tears fell at once from her big green eyes.

I made a fist and the splinter in my forefinger itched. I turned and left, slammed the door, bit my finger, ran jumpingly down the big steps, thought of big girls and bigger fucking spiders.

Jon

2009-11-27T11:26:00.003Z

My friend Jon is a thane in trainers.

Skimming a thin keen glance to the sheen of a Mere,
Good gait a little cautious, knowing the stalk and stile
And how to marlin-dart right (fleckless
London mile over London mile)
Minded like the bindless hawk,
Finds each time in the rained-out dale or turnpike
Hides less damp, the better moss for kneeling
Then: pursuits.

The fingers whittle and fix the net
To siren-beckon the gannett, mackerel, working the Northish wet.
Difficult crakes to catch and food to get.

Jon will.
Lay a bet.

In shortening, more prayerful strides
Cresting the hill as the Welsh sun burns,
His fist is bier to claw-wires, dwindling lank,
The bird's spring-hinds unstruggling, hanged and gone.

Nearer, the glance, no gaze,
A glint?

Nearing now, great cheers then muffle through deeps of clods and difficult thought:

That great grin breaks for dust, for the end
And a tear in the archer's eye.

2009-09-30T19:43:00.006+01:00

Who'd be a man?

I did not ask for expertise in splitting brands of speech.

Our yard. Be there. Nineteen eighty nine.

Before the teachers thronged to me from divers pools of accent,
Before the accent-peddlers and the "right way" tutters strutted round the classroom
I was a young boy, peach-cheeked, scenting hay and grasses
Where grasshoppers scratched at the air uncritically,
Passing through the world swiftly, fitting its unspeaking fleetingness
Singing to me happily.

Gypsy men laughed and stood
With their weight on the back boot foot.
"He's a comical chavi, ain't he mush" said each,
Goodly thick-thumbed pinches paunching the cheek,
Coddling a small peach-face, all nuanceless.

The men with the soot-coil hair stood boxer-wise
And dimple-fat-cheeked Mushi smiled.
Foiled corrupted sheen-black Gypsy eyes.

Be in London. Two thousand and nine.

Am I the peach-face littl'un now?
Stretched and long-faced, drawn thin, stubble-speckled?

"Gissa minute:
I'll deceive ya.
Want some romance?
Buy reprieve.
Blue-eyed Travler sells ya trueness,
Myths ya can believe.
Leg-slap
Knock-spoon
Trader's hand-clap.
Old New Forest Gypsies? Us.
Cure ya blueness, bust a truss?
Kakker rokker dinloness
But ker mi dui, trin a divvus:
I'm ya prince o' fortune weavers."

There's the rub.

For all the Romani I fleetly speak, and
Well
I can,

I still deceive myself much more than you.
I don't know who I am.

Just ask mi rakliya-ya-ya-
They must know who they are, or na?

By ones they'll flush a cheek,
Rush for platitudes.

In circles?
Bloody saviour
Mush
They're far, and far, and far, and far from one-ness when they speak
As speckled, stubbled, fractious, thinning man
From Mushi-baby's cheek.

And I should speak?

Clem

2009-09-22T15:48:00.004+01:00

This morning was a sprightly one in London's bright September.
I woke excited, thinking "What's the cause? I don't remember."
I threw the old sash window up to shed some light and air on things
And both seemed to be whispering, "Today a traveller eastward springs".

Then happy details I selected
From a 'phone call recollected:
Up the highways there would come
This afternoon, a man with rum
Equipped, and with a fine guitar
Inside a car, to here, from far.
He speaketh Welsh, and English too,
And spiketh chaps against the 'flu.
He squirms at neither warts nor phlegm:
This gallant's name is Doctor Clem.

Now: doctors are a queerish sort
(Consort with some: you'll think this thought)
Yet Clem refuses to conform
To medic mould, or nurse's norm.
For instance, he does not denounce
The stoner's slouch, or bean-head's bounce.
He's seen a thing or two, you see,
From Teepee's dell to Cornish sea
Enough to give Clem sympathy
For silly folk, like he and me.

In terms of interestingness, Clem clearly is the first and best
Of all the Hippocratic crew
Who, when an ague turns you blue
Press questions in a foul duress,
And stethoscopes upon your chest.

In evidence I'd offer up
The times with rum he's stocked my cup;
The times that Ben and Jon and he
Played poker with me, whimsically.
And Clem can jam upon guitars
To any tune between the bars.
He even lends a pleasing sheen
To "Theme for Highlander" by Queen:
Should you indulge his impish fire
With finer discs, like Bob's "Desire"
You'll leap and preen like elf or sprite
Enraptured in the Cornish night.

Yet keep the conversation light
And neither mention scuff nor fight:
For should Clem lose his mirth, you see,
He'll punch you most unmercifully.

Forsooth, there is much more to prate
Of attributes of Clem my mate,
Like when we did my uncle's lawn
Then searched the beach for clam and prawn
Yet when the sundown search had ceased
We'd mainly limpets for our feast.
It pains me that I must desist,
But hopefully you've got the gist.
Of good young Clem I'll say no more,
For now he knocks upon my door.

Kaye

2009-09-14T15:35:00.001+01:00

I first met Kaye
At the dusk of the day
At a magazine launch in Waterloo.
Above her head (in the eye of my mind
As the London sun drew down its blinds)
Was a halo, framing spokes entwined:
For here was a saint of the one-wheel crew,
A disciple who could
Unicycle real good
Like the Monogyre muse had taught her to.

Soon came a selection of excellent knacks
Outshining the whizzing of Kaye-upon-loop.
To the graveyard we went (a suggestion of Jack's)
In the coldness of Lent (with the rain on our backs)
When a Thermos event sent the kids cock-a-hoop:
Kaye nourished us all with her fine home-made soup.

(It actually wasn't home-made:
But that's minor, so don't be dismayed.)

Kaye takes wicked photographs
Sometimes on film, in the old school mode.
They document what comes to pass
On weekends spent on road and grass
(In the farce of the chucklesome Camberwell team)
When whimsical peeps
Make poses and leaps.
It's jokes to be part
Of the bleachingstream.

Kaye says she tries to get faces right
But in fact her drawings are constantly nang,
And combinationed with the blessing
Of the cut-out window dressing
There's no stopping them impressing
All the gang.

(Not like it's actually a gang, though, yeah.

Safe though.)

Peace, after Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

2009-09-11T11:06:00.000+01:00

A young man named GOLIAS is sitting alone in a large white tent. It is a cold afternoon in April. The tent shines inside with the brightness of the Spring sunshine outside.

GOLIAS begins to read from an old, leather-bound book.

GOLIAS: I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

GOLIAS pauses.

He remembers a poem he learned by rote as a child at school.

GOLIAS: My Soul, there is a Countrie

Far beyond the stars,

Where stands a wingèd Centrie,

All skilful in the wars.

GOLIAS pauses again, and furrows his brow

GOLIAS: How come we ain't got none'a this writ down? Nothing.

GOLIAS pauses

GOLIAS: What if we could remake what was there? Startin' with the real old stuff.

GOLIAS concentrates. He begins to recite a poem, remaking it as he goes

GOLIAS: My Son, there is a Valley

Beyond the rampart-stars

Where stands a dark-eyed Centrie

All skilful in the wars,

There above laws, and tethers

The tents are ringed with lace

And one born in the heathers

Commands the Cob-trot Race,

Of every Rai befriended,

And (O my Jivapen!)

From hoppers' love descended,

To break the Stirapen.

If thou canst get but thither,

There growes the grass of bliss,

Their hop-vine cannot wither,

The law-tongue doth not hiss;

Leave then thy storeyed manger;

Leave dinlo talk of sin,

Our Valley brooks no danger,

She beckons chavvies in.

GOLIAS pauses

GOLIAS: Well. She's a start.

Rai – gentleman

Jivapen – life

Stirapen – prison

dinlo – foolish

chavvies – Gypsy children

William

2009-08-29T09:49:00.003+01:00

William Kraemer's (thank the moon) my neighbour in South London,

Where, if you spot things sprayed a pretty purple, he done done them.

He wends a meticulous path on road, chats etymological counterpoints

And leaps a ridiculous farce at home, with entomological bounce and poise.

He doesn't do sneers, or fears, or tears, or jeers at the rollerblade can't-do-wells

But follows the cheers (for sheering veneers) with cavalier beers in

Brixton.

William taught me to unicycle. I'm trying to be

As bouncy as he, but in comparison Damian's beggarly bad

And for poise of freight

Down the Walworth straight

None ever out-elegants Kaye Blegvad.

William works for the Bumblebee Peeps, the drillers of billions of barrels of crude.

They can't be aware that the mumbles he seeps, the folkloric musings of data-type dude,

Are worth more than riches from tectonic hitches

Or they'd get their drill-bitches to flee the grease-ditches

And bore holes in William's head

Instead.

He's wicked at anagrams, too:

A shamanic dog-otter, askew.

In this digital medium I therefore pronounce

That there's no cure for tedium like William's bounce.

Just Shut The F**k Up

2009-05-25T17:07:00.003+01:00

This is ink.

Drawers:

This a sketchy lady.

Leather legged, and mouth is all of ethanolled tomato O

And s**t, she's 48.

She wants, and says, and wants and brooks no empathy

To travel beaches back to time,

Tell her face she drew and knew too well

That “Every fin i-schooner be oar-wyte”:

Miraculously, not to do with beaches,

But her: the only reason she was there.

Apparently.

Headline: Laud little God who missed the good and cod for Frieze!

Luvvies.

Our worlds are not each-

Others.

'We are lovers' scream we-

Not we, individuals.

Own agendas: me-concentric vigils.

I do not buttress here the European abscess of discreteness,

For everything, as gobshite novelisers know, is k'k'k-connected,

Rattling every printer each to each:
“Taste the secret! I am young! I'll be a God eternally, today!”

And God hears what?

“Fount of being, Why, you're not! Big we of Kilburn done it.”

Through goblin-journalista-muffled ears they scent the groan.

Creak and moan of hack, though, twanging back,

Illustrate it.

God the mirror in the dark, and of it,

Boomeranging comically the killer antic blade

Dead-heading Stinker Lily,

Critic of the Prophet.

For whom the burning question waits to canter

Devil-prancing out of little pots on flippant bench-backburner

The clever ones spout clever-ness, the best, “Ner-ner-nee-ner-ner”.

Cold-silent un-there face of God replies?

“Have thy reflection”. Fair.

That, without a murmur.

Much less, ink.

Everyone's Intentions

2009-05-18T22:21:00.009+01:00

Sometimes (I mean, this once)
I get (I got: still having it)
This fifties feeling, when the leaves of Haywards Heath are blurring painted past me on the train
And I'm listening to Phillip's lasting jazz (Mongo Santamaria)
A feeling all these leaves could be on Chinese trees,
And I could switch the music on to blasting dubstep, für Elise, one of them rondettos,
Or Saw Palmetto by the rapper, Noah23.

And it would still be me, that is, a minor human,
In a kind of place where humans ought to sit and listen, see.

I think I know what every music maker wants to do.
No: what is ridiculous. I think I know the that
And that's “they have desires to cheer”,
Busting like a caffeine sentence from their earnest dubby music hearts.
And each desire is understandable, I mean, “I see what he's getting at”,
And we're all trying to get. Even forgetfulness is for 'getting into newness',
The clean white starch of optimism-raiment that the poor just cannot, period, afford
Cleanliness away from grey regretfulness.

“I do not care to share the seas
With jellyfishes such as these,
Particularly
Portuguese”.

See, a bigot! Yes, I would prefer him diglot, foreigner-embracing smilingly
Loving men of war the same (presumably), and leaving scathing scalping on the side.
But not all chaps are born to run, or structured in the cheeks to chirp and smile all day
Like happy little pigs.
Even pigs in shit are happy: don't we all get mucky celebrating that in cliché, un-appalled?
It's a scenario. The monk and the lothario, the both are built on stimulus
And that determinism helps us all to take a big collective breath
And chill a little hate.

A Game of CARDS

2009-05-17T10:57:00.007+01:00

Poker strutters stretched and keen from Old Street to Nevada
Take scabrous scheme-palaver, leech a grin-lash (rummed: limed),
Tack an unfetching sense of "etiquette", bootlace bad un-craft
Ta-tick-mouth greeting.
Carve a totem-churl, a skittish thing
Strung tight, light flensed on chum-pretence
And before you know it
Rum eye jack-o-tension
Paldom pallid, spade-blade fence in the muck
Wincing in its little shade
The lads, wondering how your friendship pootled off like that.

Fuck

Bildungsromany IV

2009-05-14T10:02:00.003+01:00

It was over Messenger's Meadow, where they was when war was declared, but this was a few year earlier. Little Naffy (name was Naphtali, see, but I don't expect he could tell you that) come running over with the hop grease on his hands where he'd been rubbing them, wasting time on the piece-work. He said there'd been an accident up the road by Feudal Craven, and see, as soon as we heard this we thought it was Jehu, where he was always into the kerrabins and fighting with the gavvers, and the monkeys' capers and that.

There was one mingra still stood there, in the blue like the attenuated sides of Jehu's Austin half-ton pick-up, its arse sticking out of the hedge. The paint of the old motor's wings was dusted on the tarmac, flecks and bits in a broadening line, though the tire-marks were narrow and true to the end of the crash. The whole thing was a mess of out-foxed eggshell, metal and concealing something precious; hence, the man in blue stared solely through the little oval window at the passenger seat. The seat had neither space nor rights to still be in the motor. The gavver's face said Jee was somehow in there, in the tangled spite of iron, wheels and inertia. And he was flinty faced.

And then Jehu came over Buckford Down on the little grey star-nosed mare he'd chored for Lysha. But he wan't going to give it to Lysha, see, where they'd been fighting and killing one another over the last ten Waites fags. Jehu could see his pick-up, and the steam. He never slowed down though, come right up close, and got off the mare. In one short axe hack-noise he got the phlegm out of his throat.

"I see Teddy and Bo-Boy ferreting". Boaz, the dear child's name was. "They hollered out". Jehu's eyes drilled the wheelarches from under the thick black gorse of his brows. But his mind was for the moustache and jaw of the blue man, woman-puncher, them that kicks the fire in the faces of the children. The matt of the town-made tit helmet strapped to the German chin was constable's antlers. Jehu couldn't look at him, but he reared in the chest.

"Kun rokkered to the baulos ta jel up akai?"

Naffy wan't rubbing his hands no more. "They was just here my Jee". His face showed no nerves.

"As tuti penned ta the gorjie-bred bastard?" Jehu's voice mossened; Naffy's right foot shook to the road. "I never said nixes".

Constable Slab-face moved in the end, the head leering first, evolved like a shark. Hark, the women had come up the road: Leena and Lou had the quiet babies with 'em. They stopped by the little lime tree over there as the Slab-head officer moved. Smooth and heavy and gun-like, he neared, instead, willow.

"Mister Jehu Gryres".

Willow tree fleck, dead in sound of the engine prior to cut-out, crush, ending: Willow, Lysha's tree for fag and buck rabbit skin: seat under stream-side, smooth dirt from teenage pant-seat; lard-down hair: youngest brother: salty eye-sheen, dull in dry-month of his smile in the soft cheeks; seventeen year/step-dance birthday/Lou-girl pregnant, Lysha's chavvy, baby in her short of willow, and the wind, Achilles brother-God bacon-knuckle-fisted Jehu's face, and his mince-crushed brother's balled-up-boots tormentor's Slab of face:

"That horse is Nolan Quincey's".

Vortices of Jehu's printless anger span the statement into wicker; then, arrow-shaft; then, fist.

"My brother's in that car, boy. Talk and I do murder".

Willow, wicker word stuff, waiting. Second death of the afternoon, unarrived: future berating present circumstances. Talk is what they trained the strapped and bucklered helmet-face to do; talk and Jehu murders by the willow.

Verblessness, after Michel Thaler

2009-05-05T13:27:00.003+01:00

'A dull and precious afternoon in Abney Park cemetery. Christ, the perpetual overcastness of north-end Stoke Newington. Beyond that, and the glimmer of lustre off the top of Kaye's special home recipe soup, the wank-hovels and spunk ducts of the night-time hedgemen and sexually 'other' types. In the greasy shades of hungover eyes, uncomfortable sudden reflections of grave and smut and just-about consent and the mustiness of a pitch-black lurk.

Redemption at hand, though, in the form of better things, earlier in genesis, and long in manufacture. The head of little Agnes, robust in grey, somehow almost pink about the cheeks and eyelids, bold and alive against the dour green-grey dampness of the earth. A single marble sustenance in each mind of the smiling young collective, there and good for restraint in the later friction of brief tat-argument, offspring of a strangely benevolent external force... Understanding of belief in force beyond ourselves: stark, unequivocal, yet outside of the regular power of grasping. 'Till the charm of two short hours of ours in dank, in fusty Abney Park. A veritable charm, that.

Bathos For Unsung Vanquished

2009-04-30T12:33:00.012+01:00

The recipe houses of this Northern mind
Pulse in falling-forward urgency.
Encased in cold, the green and great-hipped wraiths encircle fire,
Wreathing the life from it come Christmas.
It's too cold for intentions to gestate:
So small, they're whipped too quickly into being,
Not incubator-cuddled, unallowed to fulminate.
Embarrassed thoughts experiencing first
The tripping wires of overbred intent
That clip the harmless cuffs of chicks:
Phasmid-like, encircling new young thoughts they breed and cry:
"Make nothing of their bayonets with cutlasses of void, batailles!"
They curtly make a soup of clean-cut heads,
Of skill/tack/moan/kiss/cry and love, and rationality,
A mockery-curd too runny to enjoy,
Cloying in its throw of last intent
The softly moaning walls of young dark pitchers, conical hop-pole eaters.

The cramming of it all, that big life into sebum liquefaction and unhearing
Puts pride to rest, bally-calms the smiler,
Gifts mantid suck to suckle craven mandibles, finnickily sluicing through her stinking recipe.

Discreteness, character and stress of those dissolved is pasteurised
And every promise in that kitchen syncopated.

King Cycle; Bathos Reversed

2009-04-06T15:27:00.004+01:00

Leather bracered, shinguarded mottled bronze
Sat Jehu of Israel, casting dice to blue night sand
And the campfire threw from side to side
The shade of bruises on the bones below his eyes,
And flecked with dissembling lustre the grease of Jehu's beard
And, in it, grinded dusts of flint and farmer's hand-down axe
Had from the fight across the winded wash, where Jehu with their blood
Made mud of sand.

On this particular night
I twitched, and my mind sketched the fretful lusts a little:
Not particularly- slightly, allowing bright specific thoughts, a flickering
Of taught and pungent parts once slick and beckoning
To dance their stilted jig across the hatchings of each dream.
I thought "For once the active tongue and passive plate
Will not diverge." For once
The night will reckon fading things its project,
Articles worth gilding, worth a layer of gilt.
Something tarnishable, therefore meet to laminate.
A sheen, a varnish glancing time.

Across some centuries, old Barbarossa ruled in flesh.
The nostrils wished a sustenance to sinews. Hingeing laps
Of pulsing mats of cord that slapped within the strapping
Of the skin around his elbow, itself the twisting swinger
Of the whistling mace that stilts the air before it,
And sends the thinner conscript to unbeing,
Harsh old decree
Of the wrist.

So Papal thoughts and, consequently, brittle Papal writs
Got flecked acknowledgingly with the oily trace of conscripts,
And in each letter formed from plasmic uselessness,
Priorly gunk of conduits of coursing conscript life,
Sat the thin, victorious splinters of his mace.

Bathos Reversed

2009-04-06T11:16:00.002+01:00

On this particular night
I twitched, and my mind sketched the fretful lusts a little:
Not particularly- slightly, allowing bright specific thoughts
Of your taught and pungent parts once slick and beckoning
To dance their stilted jig across the hatchings of each dream.
I thought "For once the active tongue and passive plate
Will not diverge." For once
The night will reckon fading things its project,
Articles worth gilding, worth a layer of gilt.
Something tarnishable, therefore meet to laminate.
A sheen, a varnish glancing time.

Across some centuries, old Barbarossa ruled in flesh.
The nostrils wished a sustenance to sinews. Hingeing laps
Of pulsing mats of cord that slapped within the strapping
Of the skin around his elbow, itself the twisting swinger
Of the whistling mace that stilts the air before it,
And sends the thinner conscript to unbeing,
Harsh old decree
Of the wrist.

So Papal thoughts and, consequently, brittle Papal writs
Got flecked acknowledgingly with the oily trace of conscripts,
And in each letter formed from plasmic uselessness,
Priorly gunk of conduits of coursing conscript life,
Sat the thin, victorious splinters of his mace.

Nidi's Puvs

2009-03-31T15:48:00.005+01:00

We are the Needi foki. Young we jinned
Ta jelled in yesterdays.
Once England wondered ‘kai we velled from
Pardel puvs ta vesh's ways.
Had we kestered graia sorkon chairus, asar adral panya?
Ta penned amara jib in whispers, tallani shooka bavala, palya?

But kak: a bori rai-mush shooned
As chavvies rokkered Romanès
And in their muis jindel jib
Avr'India, like ours, they guessed.
Tardenna bori panya borya, chalavin puvs so far and broad
Ta dur an’doorvori bersha's meea’vri Needi's peerdos, Gypsies' yawks.

Some kommed in love to jin the puv
Desh’shela bersha morred from mind.
Their kala skins and unloved yawks
Dikked love through brishind-shillni tears,
Booyna that doorè puvs bitchered simensa they could kom adui,
Te pogger mingri's okkabins choongrenna adral baulas' muis.

But English kams and English panis,
English bavals shrouding heaths
Still warmed and soaked and whispered round
The ticknas beenda ‘neath its clouds,
In divvuses our dads ta dais have jinned, and theirs in vennas past
And Rumni chib t'kelel-adray our chavvies' lips while England lasts.

So Eastern lavs and Northern lives may meet
Within the Gypsy's chest.
We're what we are and what we'll be
Through un-jinned droms to future's rest
For like the Gorji foki jallas talla kams 'att kakker besh
Ta Needis, English foki, sor folk jin the rati, shookrinès.

2009-03-23T17:19:00.002Z

In a recent article on the evolution of the concept of consciousness published in the New Scientist, the Birkbeck Philosopher A.C. Grayling wrote the following:

"Locke argued that a person's identity over time resides in their consciousness (he coined this term, and here introduced it to the English language) of being the same self at a later time as at an earlier, and that the mechanism that makes this possible is memory. Whereas a stone is the same stone over time because it is the very same lump of matter - or almost, allowing for erosion - and an oak tree is identical with its originating acorn because it is the same continuous organisation of matter, a person is only the same through time if he or she is self-aware of being so. Memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore loss of the self."

Whether or not Grayling agrees with the argument expressed here is ambiguous, but I shall treat it as though he has in order to question it in the least possible number of words, while craving his indulgence if he does not. The assumption here seems to be that the key constitutive feature of a person is their memory. This is why "memory loss interrupts identity, and complete loss of memory is therefore a loss of the self". Consequently, the oak tree finds it far easier to claim to be the same organism throughout its lifespan, than a human, and the key is in the word "organism": it has an identifiable structure, or organisation, which, though evolving through its lifespan from acorn to adult tree, is nonetheless continuous. Grayling seems to agree that this subverts entirely the problem of stating that 'this oak tree is in fact exactly the same organism that began to sprout from an acorn, say, 40 years previously'.

Given Grayling's lack of sympathy with the pre-Lockian religious notion of a soul, it is intriguing that he unquestioningly gives priority to the consistency of memory over organisation in constituting the identity of a person over time. Why should this be the case? If an oak tree remains the same tree by virtue of its participation in a "continuous organisation of matter", then why do I not remain the same person throughout my life on exactly the same grounds? This was the conclusion reached by Aristotle. However, we cannot agree with Aristotle if (as I assume Grayling does) we choose to believe that the most important consitutive feature of a person is their memory, rather than some other structural constitution. Surely the only grounds for this assumption is the belief that reflection or, more precisely, self-reflection, is of greater importance than material organisation of matter in defining a person's continuous existence. Whether or not this may be justifiable, it is a foundational assumption of asceticism, among other religious philosophies.

Grayling treats the debate as a dead horse, and we might be able to agree with him were we not still daily exposed to such patent exemplars of the continuing controversy: witness the fraught debates that take place between doctors and the relatives of those who have suffered brain stem death. There is clearly room for disagreement here as to whether the brain-dead individual continues to merit recognition as the person they were prior to the loss of memory and its pre-requisite, consciousness. The beating heart and continued participation in physical structure of the sick person may cause some observers to note that they continue to be, howbeit in an adjusted sense, the 'person' they were all along. In any event, it is a challenge to deny that such a person has ceased to retain membership of the breathing human species. Attempts to deny this datum usually seem to have the smack of the subjective value-judgement about them.

Further light may be shed on the issue with the tentative suggestion that the Western understanding of memory, and its relationship to personhood, tends to be exceptionally individualistic, with an atomising effect on our notion of what memory means, which dismisses a priori (as though no justification were needed) the possibility that memory might be shared. If this is a possibility, then elements even of a dead person's consciousness might be said in some way to survive them through the participation of others in those same memories. There are, of course, several potentially serious problems with this view. The first is vexing for those who think literature (or any other attempt at transferring experience or the effects of experience to another individual) has merit. The problem is the possibility that qualia, the irreducible units of experience, may not be transferred between one person and another. If they cannot, then not only is it pointless to read a book as though the writer were actually making known to the reader any of his own experiences: it is impossible that persons share in any experience more generally, since they cannot have the identity of space and time required for two individuals to experience the same experiential 'quale'. This, if true, would sound the death knell for my suggested possibility of collective memory (and the attendant possibility that our consciousness is in some sense shared with others), and preclude even more fatally the possibility of finding any merit in Jung's discussions of collective consciousness, or unconscious. I grimly await a riposte from those more versed in the repercussions of belief in qualia in general. Yet I hope that the possibility of human participation in data of experience is possible, even if this cannot in the strictest sense mean the sharing of a specific datum of such experience. For if this possibility remains, then an understanding of personhood as essentially dispersed among humans (rather than located in completely isolated individual cases, with no chance of communication between them) will remain. This means we are closer to our friends than we think, and even has ramifications for our understanding of death, since the death of a person may not be viewed as a discrete and final event if their memory can truly be said to be shared. Should death be proud, or not?

Jehu of Israel

2009-02-14T14:10:00.005Z

Leather bracer, and shinguards of mottled bronze
Sat Jehu, casting dice into the blue night sand
And the campfire threw from side to side
The shade of bruises on the bones below his eyes,
And flecked with dissembling lustre the grease of his beard
And, in it, the grinded dusts of flint and farmer's hand-down axe
Had from the fight across the winded wash, where Jehu with their blood
Made mud of sand.

2009-02-05T12:49:00.001Z

"The mental age of the average adult Gypsy is thought to be about that of a child of ten. Gypsies have never accomplished anything of great significance in writing, painting, musical composition, science or social organisation. Quarrelsome, quick to anger or laughter, they are unthinkingly but not deliberately cruel. Loving bright colours, they are ostentatious and boastful, but lack bravery."

Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1954

Bildungsromany, Chapter 2

2009-01-19T12:24:00.003Z

Ten years later, another uncle died, and another uncle told me I was the image of his son Jimmy. I knew what it meant. But Mum said it was their way of saying I was one of them. It was a moment hard to come by for a blue eyed boy. I was very happy; I'd thought he'd meant what Mum said he meant. That was Uncle Leslie, and he wasn't into the Hellenisation of Gypsies. Never lived in bricks. Never had a toilet in his house. “Mooter in your own house, them's gorjie ways”. When you think about it, shitting in your own house is a bit of a price to pay for having a warmish journey to the bathroom. He used to run out all hours in the rain to the outhouse in his seventies, until the emphysemia got really bad. That was Uncle Leslie.

I jumped up the back of Jobie's old Escort van when he'd just passed his test. He had buckets of water and gone off paint. The water had red food colouring in to make it pass for sealant. There were big white solid bogies in the paint. The old woman who needed her outside wall painting saw the bogies. He said loudly “Thass the special weather seal madam, it's textured”. Jobie had split second lies on tap. She believed it, and he made a few hundred quid that day. He gave me a score and drove home fast along the top road which used to be all woods, maybe it had old bender tents in, Travlers woods. He flew straight onto a roundabout and braked hard then hollered “Mewt! Dinlo bastard!”. I was nine.

And soon in the Gun Inn:

“Dinlo shero-cuts these boys got in here”, said Golias hissedly in the pub.

“My hair's long and all”, I said.

“Kakker”, sided Golias.

“This is me nephew Danes. He're down a pint quicker than Sam Frankham”, he bowled.

When we walked round the side bar the jockeys brooded over stout. So this is the inheritance of a reputation, and the need to drink the bitter dry, I thought. Jobie skidded up outside in the van, sending a few pea gravel spits into the Estate Agent's old window.

“Shark's mouth, your brother”, said the Landlord, legs white, socks and sandles, trying to imitate the nicknames and the timbre. He made a good job of it, spilling my pint.

“So what does your nephew do then?” But Jobie and the biggest Uncle, Jesse, broke the phrase.
“My mate, whatever's that smell?” Jobie boomed. They all laughed at the insult, adjusted by his massive laugh that followed.

“Drain's broke”, smiled the landlord Dave Millyard.

“Your breath, you mean”, suggested Jesse.

What did their nephew do? Watched, at close quarters, from many miles across fields, thinking the others there did not see the words on mental tickertape in front of them like he did, but communicated more like beasts through suggestions borne on sound and simple emphasis. And there were the physiques and clothes he couldn't imitate. It makes the personality defensive, and the social manner useless. In that moment Danes would have given all mind and experience for black eyes and hair and a squat chest and laugh, and comfort and a niche at the side bar of that one village.

Bildungsromany, Chapter 1

2009-01-16T13:10:00.002Z

Born, they took me back from the hospital to a twin unit chalet, possibly Dutch-made. Yes, it was in a field, and yes, there were horses nearby, and chickens that could have been made to fight. But my family were squeezed into this “shally”, not because they really wanted the thin tin walls and the nearby horses, but because they were building a grand old house five hundred yards away, on their own land. Once you own it, the wanderlust is shown for what it is. It is movement by necessity. Now my granddad moved back and forth, the same few hundred yards, and between his wheeled place and the foundations of the new place, he carried new bricks and mortar.

They had two geese that used to peck my brazen child uncle as he tried, on weekends, to chore their eggs. One set of piglets had been bought from a dirty farm, so Granddad said, and that was why you'd never keep them clean, no matter how furiously my black-haired Uncle Bill scrubbed them with a wire broom. He had hands like knuckles of bacon, and the pigs squealed when he came near, until the lorries and the horse boxes rolling in took care of the squeals. In a year or less I was running up to the horseboxes, wrongly more interested in the white painted livery than the gearbox or the axles. In braces and boots and hands behind his back, the Gypsy boy is almost ready to earn, and never toddles or coos or cries. They bypass that.

Reading all the TV pages of the paper in a bookless house, the little boy was blonde, sadly. This is a slight failure: it doesn't affirm the provenance of the race. I was torn from the paper quickly one afternoon. My uncles had a motorbike and they put me on it in the field. The accelerator was sensitive: I flew off at maybe 20, the fastest I had ever been in the open. Panicking, the accelerator went down even harder, and I swished a little channel through the big stinging nettle bed. They laughed in the field, laughed as I cried about the stings. Granddad smirked, mum gathered me up and put me in a cold bath, and my uncles ran in again and laughed. “Am I hard?” I thought, maybe for the first time, as the raised white mumples on my legs took a long time to shrink.

Then one day it was Uncle Bill's funeral. I didn't go, went to school instead. Jobie and Golias went, in their boots and braces, custom-made crombies and widow's peaks. When Mum and Dad got back I asked them if they had a good funeral. “You can't really have a good funeral”, said Dad. Mum was crying. “Uncle Bill taught me how to whistle”, I said, pushing out my chest a little bit. “There must have been five hundred Travlers there”, said Dad. “I'm going to the next one”, I said. I think Mum nodded. It is necessary, or the family forget who you are, especially if you don't really look like the old ones, the giants and the matriarchs, women who ruled impossibility through grit. I hoped one day they'd find someone I looked like, that the old ones could tell me I looked like.

Mouse

2009-01-16T11:34:00.002Z

I'm moving house today so things must be packed. I need packages to put them in. These tend to be kept from view in the brief interim between significant movements, so seeking them out exposes the seeker to rarely seen parts of the jilted lodging. While looking for a certain plastic box of robust and transparent character I was confronted instead by a dead mouse, wincing like it was killed by a bad joke, top teeth denting the bottom lip like the last word was the breathy beginning of “Fuck”.

This reminded me of finding my hamster, Bertrand, dead in his cage six years ago. Bertrand had chewed a hole in his water bottle, which resulted in the water spilling out, leaving him with nothing to drink. The idiot then died. He looked normal from above, but when I picked him up the lower half of his face and body was squished and smoothed like a leathered tangerine, peachy but otherwise like that exhibited murdered geezer from the Danish bog. Poor Bertrand. Today's mouse might have been trying to cuss out his last word, but dead he looked healthier than dead Bertrand. This precipitated feelings of guilt, so I went to get tobacco.

I rolled a cigarette and licked it shut as I stared at the mouse. The tobacco smelled earthy, shreds, grown and brown, like dead mouse, his buck teeth and million fur hairs.

Lady Bathos

2008-10-26T13:00:00.006Z

And if the child is father of the man
Then woman's fascias bloom (are blood) of pumping, living, present pasts
And what we are is what we were. Bold, enshrined consistency
Peaked from broadening roots of what we did
Is what we are.

Fact is, the done is father to the do
And flaying-do, past just twelve months, gives zest (resented) to our now,
Sickening breathful zest,
As when your thighs moved slow and hot, then down across his chest: he gasped,
Burgeoned into a broadening: your utter, soft consent.

And as you flushed across each other's gasping
Shuttling glances, feels and cries
There could be no advance detecting (here my boldness dies)
Of coming going I, fleet whisperings.
You were before me, could not yet betray me, could not father lies
But only love her fairly, be there cheerly.
I nurse resentment nearly, but the basis of it crumbles
In your eyes.

Sluts' righteousness is cheap. Have I not got former lovers? Yes, they formed
And were, and felt, and breathed, and surely left a zest, a breath.

But I have just one one set of walls within which one mind, mine, is known
Where smiles of my old marionettes are fallen ragly,
Floored like art all shot.

Your mind, my dear, is scale enough
To house one fairy runaway, no bigger than an agate stone,
Perhaps unstrung and free. Until on one appointed day
The tickle of their hoof, their fitful quickening step
Will sentence, in the flutter of a chest, the flicker of your narrowing eye
My thoughts to danken, quiver into cravens
Feasting over quickly on his flesh, which is my flesh, I hate.

PARADISE FOUND

2008-10-03T11:06:00.004+01:00

Press Release:

PARADISE FOUND: WORKS BY DELAINE LE BAS

GALLERIA SONIA ROSSO

via Giulia di Barolo 11/h
10124 Torino
tel/fax +39 011 8172478
info@soniarosso.com
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 2.00 / 7.30 pm

“Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.”

James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 text

The God of Eden saw disaster in the Fall, the awakening of the beings he had created. For those beings it was their punishment, the expulsion from the Garden, that actualised the change. The glade of lyres and fruits and lulling sleep is lost, guarded by the cherub with its lion body, head of man and flaming sword. In place of the Garden there would be the scattered domicile, each with its four frenetic walls of childbirth, relationship, activity and death; a diaspora clogged by claustrophobia.

Within these walls Delaine Le Bas works, roofed by the long shadow of Eden, the gazes of spies seduced at the threading of new gardens, seething at them. A womb of dolls will populate the stage, a weaving of different tendrils shade them; light and sky and bird preciously stitched to the world, charms and lucky numbers cast, some hemmed in tight to seal the second world against expulsion by the “miasma of a rotting God”^¹.

The underworld colludes in the project. Skulls are embraced as helms and emblems by the fabric children, masked and dressed in frills that match their own gauze skins, machined gifts of maternal layers, guarding and pretty. The doll wields powers here. Lurking among beds and tents, its dark eyes and sunken cheeks like the toucan-nosed quack of the plague, it stalks the wicked. And the ambiguities are frightening to Hell. The masked ones might be hero, phantom, human with animal mother's mask, a knowing puppet suckling the wild in fenced confines. Even the belted tormentors of Dante and Bosch will run from them, chased out of their element by peachy faces decked in leather and skulls.

The dragon scales of darker places are rent and scattered, made sequins on the backs and wings of gaudy new species. Begetting, remembering, listening to each other's whispering antennae, they are the soldiers and the nurses of Le Bas' work, a conspiracy of parts rejected for their uselessness, irrelevance or evil, changed and quickened by living stitches loving colour, clutter, seeing paradise encrusted on the off-cast and the found.

Delaine Le Bas has exhibited in the First Roma Pavilion PARADISE LOST at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and in a solo exhibition at Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, in 2008. PARADISE FOUND is her first solo exhibition at Galleria Sonia Rosso.

1Isaac Rosenberg, God, in The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, and Some Drawings, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937). Poem first published 1916

A Split Life. Part 3: Sussex

2008-09-15T20:38:00.002+01:00

The day is bearably inclement. The walk to he's Nan's bungalow takes fifteen minutes and an uncertain length of thoughts. "There's ugly day", he thinks, relishing the accentless nature of words in the head. They still betray an origin in a specific place, as do thoughts in any head, perhaps even those of animals. But the word generated by a mind and processed by it without being vocalised or written has less road to travel, and bypasses the seasons of nomadism.

He is walking, and threaded through the steps are wishes for a motor to drive about in. It will be a while before he could take his driving test. Among these people, driving is a subject of dreams as well as roads. The dream was consistent and a cause for joy: driving around, wheelspins at seventeen years nought minutes old, right arm drumming the driver side door: youth of a happy local fashion, summarised. Fixing the mind on other exams, done in other accents, had kept him a spectator to this rite. Like the vicar's son who shirks confirmation, this missing skill was like an empty sheath and would sit jaggedly until redressed.

The vehicle does not complement the masculine: here, it completes the masculine: every car has the same forward-looking gender. A Toyota flareside pickup, big to take on work. It would be white and as old as him, the odd dent like the late teen, the forward motion and awkwardness of the reverse. A pickup, open for new stuff to be chucked in. Probably, typically.

He gets to his Nan's driveway, and before speech or encounters the past in him took one boot off, knocked on the door, thought he should have knocked once the boots were off. Of course his Nan was there at once.

"Ello mate you ent walked allway up ere asyer?"

"Godoo ennaye."

"Thass alright mate you'll soon av yerbidda van woont yer. Geddin ere look yerbeperished, I thought youas goon come ere last night, there was eeps afood, bawled bacon through there there's taters, brawn, and a bidda bacon puddin from dinner time, you could'et what you want. Sit down look I'll make you cup a tea."

"Sorry Nan I was gettin on wisumminc", he acknowledged. How did he revert to the speech of his childhood, a string of words codified by the missing consonants and flecked Romani, with such ease? Travellers are actors, the best when it comes to not being themselves. Above all else in life he wanted a single tongue, just one maskless face, one that could rest. It was exhausting.

Perhaps there were consolations in these unsettled, jangling words; these wandering tongues. Nan was untroubled in her sayings. "Bidda morer, get this yari out", and the egg hissed brightly at the word. Jutting between all peoples are switching modes of speech and kinds of embrace. The tugs and claims that different speeches make on the speaker betray a restlessness. Perhaps for some it is the only echo of the road, heath winds, dead and loved family, passed things.

In the coridoor that leads to the kitchen, and in the heavy, broad front room off to the left of it, there are family photographs. The men and boys wear jackets and their hair is greased and dark, some smile, every hand sorts hops. Anxious and searching women, sometimes obviously hungry, grab at the vines on the first few days of September, before the assuredness of work has settled in. And in every image, backed by trees and skies, the outside is the home. Outdoors in every one, a people of honed and storied skins and urgent hope. And then the stationary Eighties came, a time of pubs and short glad-rag holidays, inroads of assimilation that could not yet kill the speech and its weather-brightened memories.

English Guy

2008-09-11T22:50:00.002+01:00

I spent my last fifteen quid getting a train down to the nearest set of cliffs last night.

My girlfriend called while I was walking to the headland. She doesn't always call, that's one of the reasons I felt like going down there in the first place. Sitting in that place, without even a cat, just a bike and clothes, and the awful smell of must and chrome and egg emanating up from the kitchen sink. It's not a place where one's own company comes singing back into focus from the mirrors. Any face would stagnate in there.

I could still smell something musty, even with the staunching sea breeze battening down my hair and reddening nostrils. I'd just noticed the smell, and was wondering whether the kack of my basement home was grounded in my sinuses like a curse, when she called. It was the same bloody song that heralded the call, the same contemptible little squeal crying out for good or bad news.

She said “Hey”, then “Shit, it's windy there”, or something. So I couldn't just say I was lounging around back at mine. “Yeah, I'm on Parliament Hill”, I spun off quickly. She started asking what the fuck I was doing up there, mentioning rent boys and crack and other pleasantries. It was fine, I hadn't seen anyone about, just fancied some space. Then it must have started to seem like I was pissed off at her, and I let the waves usurp the conversation.

If I'd scripted proceedings the phone would have gone over the edge the moment I saw the first little peaks on the sea. But like everyone else I never do really stupid things, probably for fear of throwing the sparsity of really worthwhile things I do into relief. I just waited till she'd had enough of the chat and the wind, though I was still being polite for my part, cupping my hand round the mouthpiece to save her ears. She didn't seem to want to get me out of the wind and the night, and there was no invitation round to hers. Just a “see you in the morning” that forced all significance from the moment. I guess she didn't mean anything bad by the act. It was like rolling up the toothpaste tube to glean the final little turd of detergent: just frugality, really.

With the muted click of a rubber button, that was it. I might have rolled my eyes at Dawn and her disengaged chat, but as soon as I was back alone in the jet black wind I realised I was feeble again and alone, a man or a boy only ever half there without a bosom. It made my ankles give out slightly to the sides. One foot slipped on the wet chalk. Then I realised, again, the mundaneness of the truth. If you stand there unsupported, even in the wind, you don't fall into any abyss. Life isn't as interesting as that. Things just get slightly worse, and very slowly: you realise you need to piss, you get thirsty and yawn a bit, you get hungry and end up in Costcutter looking at cold pies. If you beat this lot and stood there a few days the worsening smell of your body would do the trick, and send you exhaling a sneer on the path to the train.

My thoughts continued to dead-head themselves even before they bloomed, and the speed of it kept increasing. It was Spring and Autumn running side by side. Jesus, was there a time thoughts hadn't been like this? It must have had a bad effect on the quality of my conversation. Given that it drove me up the wall, I wondered how Dawn put up with it. And Mum and Dad, and Shay, and all the other ones who occasionally had to orbit this mess. They could have done with a functioning model, a dog would even have been better. And I married the announcement of failure to the deepening blues, and I felt my weight, and I walked a little.

Then I was thinking, “Shit, it's amazing how quickly a resolution can actually develop... I mean, I'm resolved now! This is it...” And I guess I thought it was, and that I was, and for three or four seconds it was beautiful. There was the wind and me and my future and bold resolve all sat between two new heartbeats, and even in that small a space they had an endless sky to breathe. I felt I had the same sky as well, all whirling loosely round my head, a wind like all the arms and hugs I thought I'd needed. There was an ocean out there, and winds that told it all about the happenings at its fringes, ranging about and finding the news from all sorts of corners, able to focus all at once on a single place, like me.

Perhaps this little rapture marked a change, and it was then that I saw some graspable beauty and couldn't just write the discharge. But the truth is blander than the water might have tasted. I saw the resolution there, hanging on the wind, and by that point the only act was written: I would turn and mount the path, and get the train. It needed a jump to catch the wind and swing my way out of the crap. The truly mediocre have one skill that I know of, and it's conjuring doldrums, even out of good, inviting storms.

I don't reckon my example will make it into a Gospel.

Of the Universe, and its Beginning

2008-09-06T16:44:00.006+01:00

The first intentions buoyed, were sizeless and expansive,

Breathing the bright young absence of a wall-less sky.

A space that habitates through being nothing

Which in its spaciousness can let a sigh expand within itself

Growing from exhalations well re-breathed.

A cloy or pucker scars a pure intent:

Denies a self-propelled intention with a limit.

But a sky, apart from not-yet banks or trees,

Houses a will, a self-fuelled buoyant thing

Through wall-lessness, and lets it sing.

Cupping in old bone fetters each intention from the first

Is the antic, and two seated skyless palms

That caged intention from their first particular clash

That replicates, and replicates, and strives to wall and law the wall-less sky

And clashing, filling the outer, kill it.

That great old maker, clasher of brick-on-brick and lord of walls

Was cupper, cloyer, hideous womb of noise and touch,

Bringer of forms and face that wall up skies,

And final bringer of his and Adam's fingers round that space

That now, between such painted walls, can die.

A Dream of War

2008-08-30T11:27:00.003+01:00

As I sat sleepily under a tree one evening the colours of the mist changed from blues and purples to red, and the mist drew nearer to the ground. I knew from this that war had come to the South of England for the first time in four hundred years.

My granddad got his old sword from the stable. It looked like it had seen several successions of granddads, its edges somehow curled by the age, and made orange by the air and the damp. I straightened the edges out on an old hand-powered grinding wheel. Had the Gypsies been to war before? I knew that some had gone across the seas to fight, but I couldn't picture them flexing bowstrings, swinging swords in these fields. Maybe now their horses' hooves would tear scars through the grass that showed the white of the chalk like ribs as they galloped after the enemy.

The omens showed that war had come, but to feel its coming one has to wait for the enemy. As I crouched gathering firewood the next evening, a troop passed along the brow of the hill away to the south, under cover of poplar trees and fences hanging with ivy. By the huge white fronds on their helmets I actually thought they were jockeys of some description, practising a ludicrous parade. But then they shot, just three shots from rifles that must have had enormous barrels, given the range. The first and last cracked harmlessly into the ground at my sides, but the middle one got me in the head. I wouldn't say it grazed, as it took out some of the bone and there was a tremendous amount of blood. From above the left temple it bled insistently and in waves. It was like a drunk person proclaiming love to friend with an unstemmable rhythmic gush of words.

Obviously I ran indoors, and Gran patched me up. The job was done well, and my head felt a little more secure than before with all the strapping and cotton. That was quick, I thought. It was time to go and get the bastards. The clarity of the need to get the enemy had very efficiently erased any non-violent leanings I'd had. I only had this old sword so I'd have to capture a rifle. That could be difficult. But I did have a horse, and with all his brass harness he could be quite a spectacle, tearing over the downs. It was time to build a reputation, to get some kills under my belt. The aspirations all built very quickly on eachother, like gymnasts forming a pyramid: Revenge, then winning; a reputation stretching beyond the present. Finally would come that gilted legendary status garnishing one's own legend. I hoped mine would be like the highwayman who came a-riding up to the old inn door. I was up for it.

The fracas started, I know that: I fell sideways, slapping to grab my horse. It was a hard fall into ground wet, but, from the summer, still like wood just below the surface. I'd at first thought a knotted clump of mud and thistle had tripped my horse on the saddened hillside, but then the

It was the clash of other swords than mine that woke me as it was transformed into my own heavy breathing, and the whole misted dusky countryside was made quickly into the dawn-dry sheets of my bed. In a months-long night I had been carved out for war, bruised into capability. Muscleless and woken, I would now have to make my grandma tea instead.

You know dreams.

The Lido

2008-08-29T13:37:00.002+01:00

Down the lido happiness cajoles around the slitten glance
Suspicious girls curl at the boys, less glorious creatures.
As sun draws smiles, genuinely drawn, the mothers
Mitten safety round the bellies
Of babies fat and blubbering a laugh
From tiny fists that even smile, curled up.

Slitten glances widen in the water accidentally,
Weaker swimmers tantrum frantically, breathilly,
Making a pig's ear of the happy water in the sun.
Smiling-fisted babies' chubby arms
And legs stretch out in laughs, water chuckles back at kicks,
Making its mist a mirth of their nice chaos.

Slits are eyes and palms dicing the fast-lane level surf
Chests over there that love the waters pressures, feel them like carresses
Saintly parallel to taut and twanging lane-dividers
At right-angles to crazy splishing babies, and the mums.
The cutting hands fall in, the rigid toes twanging behind
Milling the water clockwise, water felt and helping movement
Softening shouts, whelping the lapping summer at the sides,
The splishing shelfs.

A Split Life. Part 3: Sussex

2008-07-13T10:37:00.003+01:00

A Split Life. Part 2: Sussex

2008-07-11T11:30:00.004+01:00

This place forms part of the young man’s dream of Sussex, and, through it, of England. He dreams of it almost every night and by the next evening is heartened by the apparition of what his flickering midnight mind had hoped for. It is of course possible that, the images from the dream having been toned down by a day’s trawl through the world, the mind grows to expect less and as such receives with gratitude the sort of sunset that in one’s dreams might precipitate a yawn. He has thought of this, but hopes it is not the case.

The young man allows himself to hang ten on the precipice of his small caravan for a few seconds, perhaps not even that long, lights the cigarette (only one of the day-much better like that) and then the gravels growl quietly under a foot wearing a running shoe that by now is striding up the drive. Knowing of no other proper way to address a grown horse, he calls out “Alright Nobby” to the only proximate neighbour. Out on the front fence are the outlines of the swastikas that creosote has done its best to disguise; you can’t paint over these things. It is strange to think that such a symbol could have been aspired to by the young man as a small child of four or five, the idiot friends of his young teenage uncles slapping them up inside stables and garages in an unknowing Anglo-Saxon ritual of pre-club Friday nights. They might have done a good deal worse; they were still those whose ways he had to lust after. A consistent crew dressed in new things each week, clean smelling out of the shower, visible steam coming off their shoulders and hair in December twirling through an updraft of cheap, dependable aftershave. Always cleanliness, everywhere. Although it would be some years before he saw the merits of his Granddad greeting a hairbrush deposited in the kitchen with a menacing, warlike cry, the more sensual exhibitions of cleanliness made him feel warm and safe. And as a child the fact that they were “Travlers” was signified by and found significance in nothing else.

Things having changed, so have the signifiers. The problem with Erasmus’ “In Praise of Folly”, thinks the young man, is that by the time one has garnered the analytical power required to understand it, he is intellectually irreparable and the advice given cannot be absorbed. He is a wreck and no lament on the sad state of the wrecked can alter this geometric progression of the mind. Progression, yes; by this is meant, however, the exponential capacity of the mind to suspect all comforting or paraenetic philosophies of ultimate rootlessness. The great tragedy of such suspicion is that, He suspects, its conclusions are usually correct.

This being true, sensuality beckons. It beckons to specific places that yield half-decent results in terms of convincing the body that it has a mind and that this mind is feeling something otherworldly. He presumes that creatures more attuned to such feeling, the nyads of the old world, strode about similar places long years past and lacked the Darwinian interior that curses every joyous feeling he has. Just to survive, to live properly, would be a very fine thing. To live as the rabbits and birds, untroubled by the degradation of successive presents decaying into pasts, flicking their legs gloriously back and forth in the red dusk that perfectly farewells the first and last cigarette of the evening.

A Split Life. Part 1: Oxford

2008-07-10T12:45:00.003+01:00

It had certainly been Oxford; now the meaning of that name was beginning to change, even before the place had been left behind for the summer. The power of Study is in the cold, fuelled by the stern observation of cold stones peering sideways and downwards at desks lit by a yellow the pulse of which insects cannot stand (even these offer no warmth) quickened by occasional faltering shafts of moonlight. The cold supervises and does not overlook. Then living things grow and swell, and Study, with the warmth, shrinks. Out come the linen frocks and trousers and the deliciously fickle plans to get things done under the new magnolias- thank God those things are never done. The youngsters driven half mad by their own schemes to productivity now better understand the concept of glorious laziness, which must even now be squeezed in between pangs of unlaziness. In certain corners the sometime glorious girls and sinuous boys mope about. These ones have exams. This yellow eyed troop with their ridiculous twitching mouths and confused tongues have tried to make a company of books and have gone the way of all tunelling monasts, stylites and hermits, quivering in their efforts to look grave. Should be a joy of humour for the non-stricken to look up at from the grass. These latter, though, are under oath to find them grave, not silly or funny. That’ll be us, they’ve been told, so they gulp instead of chuckling. The cold and Study survive in the ones who haven’t been getting out and swelling in the heat like the leaves and the magnolias, ruining the fun that their stupid games should allow others to poke.

Certain of the not-yet-twitching folk are walking around in the sunshine, and one of them, regrettably, is commissioned to call in at this time of (even a sunny) day to a small an impractical adjunct church which is wrongly called a ‘chapel’, ‘chapel’ being a word which continues like a wave on shallow water at the end and, thereby, suggests length. He turns right through practical doors. The notion that he is inappropriately dressed is mocked by this funny little place. A curt little checkered floored hole, it is most certainly a church and if one walks swiftly down its aisle (wide as it is long) he/she will stop prematurely with an involuntary “Ch!” before the sudden altar, whose abruptness is all punctilio. The altar is actually not a bad representation of the squat and innaproachable {God under wraps} who finds it, in his constant cantankerous fit of age, difficult to return his grandchildren’s smiles. The particular grandson standing in front of it manages a frown mixed awkwardly with a smirk. He checks himself; this unacceptable face must grudgingly be turned into a closed-eyed pursed-lipped mockery of a smile. Ramrod bend at the waist, affected compass gesture across the head and chest (Father gets to be North. Theologico-Cartographico-Ridiculo.) “Stand back up please, this is silly, there’s nobody here.”

Pain, and now begins an utterly useless little rivulet of reasoning within reasoning to which the young man is accustomed. It might have been quite difficult to verbalise, but for the delicious gift of a liberal education.

“There is someone here: experience had told that the most irritating thing about the Godhead is His peculiar refusal (inability?) to be amenable to sense. Not existing doesn’t stop him being there. It doesn’t stop him having teeth. Oh yes, once bitten there will always be a wolf. Not existing doesn’t even stop this One from having extensive machinations of thought far beyond the power of a good sized collective of human geniuses, and once you get that far the problem is solved: issues of scale mean that a very complicated mind is bound to be considered infinitely complicated by a small mind. The small mind is overawed; once overawed, issues of existence can safely be laughed at. Safely, at least, when safety means fingers-in-ears and a child’s tongue-between-lips humming. If, on the other hand, there may be any praise of folly, then perhaps that state of being shouldn’t be thought of as all that silly after all.”

“Managed quite a diversion again”, thinks the young man about himself. “Can’t even hop up the altar steps without dull reflection”. Then he starts wading through the little rivulet again.

“In such a grandson of an absentee landlord extended diversions of thought should not be surprising. Like others he is the spawn of a glowering executioner, an intangible warrior giant riding out from endless windswept desert skies. This grandfather did a very amazing thing. He managed a splendid feat of ancient world IVF, in fact, the only one of its kind. This oversized, testosterone-fuelled cavalry archer of the skies is now, whether dead, wounded in a secret caveof wonders or never having drawn his bow in the first place, unknown to his cowering progeny. All these grandchildren know is that if the impression left on the general form of the world and its landscapes was not made by his body then it was made by something so like it as to be understood only in terms of such a body. Grandfather God lay here. If he didn’t then he jolly well ought to have done. I fact, may he, having not been here, be damned. We humans, especially we English, can conceive of no more exquisite betrayal than abandonment by he who was never there to abandon. A double betrayal, or perhaps even worse than that, would this be. The nerve! I want to have my say. The cheek! Cue orgiastic collective phone-in.”

Finally two corners are turned and the young man opens a cabinet in which is held all the unexciting “finery” of the Eucharist. A little plastic bowl in which linger the used handkerchiefs (“purificators” has such a superfluously Fascist air; later one realises it is also deeply fascist, if only a la Florence Nightingale). They sit in washing suds and cold water, turned a little purply by the scant happy remains of the grape. Not many people come to these Eucharists. There is not much to give thanks for, and less to shout about, hence the tiny congregations manage a simpering milksop sound in delicious counterpoint to the last trumpet.” Somewhere partway through his thoughts of the last few seconds he noticed that the nebulous and ungrammatical forms that usually characterise thought had given way to clear internally spoken forms; he was delivering an oration to himself. Always the fetich priest. A little self-distraction is all it is; he misses love-in-idleness. Which item, absurdly named using an ill-bound compound of atomised Latin (doubtless tortuously, theologically, necessary) have I left out of the arrangement this time? Perhaps it will transpire that it is the subtenens-caudexpontificantor, that glory of stitched linen lovingly made to represent the neckerchief of Naphtali of Bethphagathea, hastily employed by that same early beatified witness of the wounding of Christ’s holy side.

(A few more rituals, several ill-understood days: he leaves for home)

Originally Composed June-December 2006

Occupation

2008-07-06T23:43:00.002+01:00

Well,

Best of luck to big-shot George.

I might have done the same, but pasts are pasts,

Spinning, as they're remembered, these intents:

"I'll work the wending fires around the bowing fizz of steel instead.

Dead metal? It keeps me warm, sometimes gets too hot

In a very well roofed shack, totally remote, a working place

But busy George's steel is dead

Where grasses like our grasses grow, irons like our irons glow and bend.

I'm forty-eight. Winters tickle the lonely muscles.

High speech is gone, legalese is not within me yet, won't be I suppose

And my place is the forge, the good-enough grate,

A place where things still change and move

But not in the better way of town. My horseshoes weigh on the end of tongs

Weighing me down, I widen the grasp like every time before

And shift my weight to the back that dents the bench.

Even if it never cracks with age,

I hope my son will sanely burn the thing, forget old George and bitter old dad

And keep his aspect wide without the twine

That tugged my thoughts to whining and the better ways in town."

The forge's heat has spun conviction

But for someone else's seed and pride,

As, actually, I'm George-made-daft

Fiddling out of tune while out of sewers

Smart rats come, skittling over curbs

To meet his steps that play the tune worth claps.

And I admit, must admit

I'd be a steely rat and run the wheel

If such successive times were spent, not spun,

Tempering, not describing, human steel.

Working, Walking

2008-06-20T17:31:00.005+01:00

The boys were stone picking up, as bad as potato picking up. A hot autumn day had drawn the sweat out of them. Smoking Waites fags in dozens as well, in that heat. But they looked well, didn't know what it was to get up without having a shave. And the shirts was clean against the dust. Try keeping clean in a bender tent. Their trouser cuffs were turned up on the outside, shirt sleeves turned up on the outside, a bitter grease in their hair, and the fags. And the dust was like smoking: the dust out the field tasted like flints, all in the breeze. And they gave the water to the babies. The pram was alright under a tablecloth, and the babies was alright. They didn't cry all day.

Over Medstead there were four stubble fields before The Rook pub. You could have a laugh and a joke walking; stoning was finished for the day, and over by where they was stopped there was otchis to get out later. The sound of the fourteen feet on the stubble crunched but lolled like water, undulating like a wind, tired, but small and focused. There was odd bits of corn still hanging, but it was dry, and you could light all the fields with a single match. They looked readier to burn with the slouching sun, orangeing all the fields, charming the birds again, drying the clothes and still beating winter for months. Not for good though, and then you'd know about it. But icicles on the boys' morning eyebrows were months off, and the walks for wood, and calling. The trouser cuffs swung with the quick talk and the whistles. It was alright times.

The Rook has a leaning willow, and although it was out the back you could see it before the pub as you walked over the crest of the fields. It was a nice looking tree but they move a lot in the wind, making time look like it's going faster, shushing in the breeze, whispering the winter to come, hushing the summer to sleep. Proper mullerdy tree. The Ash by the tents was stronger, kept out the rain, and then was the queen of firewoods when it fell.

The pub was quiet like the sign in the window. Leslie couldn't read it, but the scrolled shapes told a story. Their tongues were like the ground though, clicking with the thirst, and they needed a drink. Drop'a piyabin. Words for common things, common needs; words as obscure as the hate in the window and the glass in front of it. Clear as water to the eye, but black in some other way.

--

Otchi (usu. Hotchi) - Hedgehog
Mullerdy (usu. Mullerdi) - Deathly, a bad omen
Piyabin - Beer

Trees. A Beginning.

2008-06-17T17:37:00.004+01:00

Her Nan might have sworn she was born under a tree.

But trees had utility then, could shelter humans as well as sheep from the rain. Could corner with hedgerows in a merciful team to keep out the westerly winds. Then, in sun, or using the tamed vestiges of that wind, the twigs needed no request to hold up shirts and petticoats, and help them hold the heat again. Merciful gestures, balancing metronomically difficult living. Comfort and proper warmth, the fuel of romance and longing, were for those in the houses. Mercy, not comfort: small and practical helps, and not romance. Every winter mercy fought against the cold and the rain. Mercy did its indifferent best, but certain skirmishes in the middle of nowhere were lost in the 1940s. Little Hilda Riah died in a little green dress, and her old dad swore he'd never buy another green dress again.

Restlessness persisted, drove the workers, subjected work to motion, and ploughs to the moving horse. Perhaps one horse stood in one small field, with a patient back unused to the plough. Wheels he pulled instead. And at night-times the Ash tree in the middle there stands between him and the fire, the slow rabbits literate in the sympathetic grass staying by the far hedge. Sanctuary for the chavvies over by the fire. The Ash marks a place but deceives, in leaf, on behalf of the winter.

The trees are different now, the old names gone, and all just trees. And if you run to, or past, they extend their own hands, strange at all times and frightening in night and cold.

Girl

2008-06-10T23:39:00.002+01:00

Your dressing:
Even your belts, smiling swimmers of practical people's waterways
Intent to finish the outfit round the moment shared
With coat and smiles.
The heels brief sterns of quick bright boats above them
Pulling for once like nature, simply.
Simply the right dress, pretty alone,
Maliceless.

Your reaching:
Your loose arms can reach just and softly
Wrists that trust, not clasping fingers
This a true ungrasping action,
Waking, the neck waiting unpresumptuous
Pleasanter once you wake.
And in this starker, fresh communion
Knowing other life outdoes and outsurvives
My stuttering wraithness.

Your promising:
Your first young widening moment of wakening,
Shackleless and willing, unpowerful but present
Is worth the deep disquieting drops that prompt the broken sleep
When, in the most regular instance (the one that laughs at love)
I wake to my old aloneness, that uncertain('s) desolation
Of a single self you remedy
In kiss.

27th May 2008

2008-05-27T13:43:00.001+01:00

English sadness wraps itself in layers too moist
Coddled round the iron, blackened, labelled dark
By youth a cackle separates from pits that struck the black,
The soot and chance the men there grasped.
Waiting on the task, the work. To live and nothing but,
Unlifted by seroxat guarantees
To ease the sexless smut out-gasped
Between the moist old moodless roots of trees.

Sadnesses that wives have tended
Leaf in shades of suits instead of green.
Recently the svelte veneer that births and stamps their sadnesses
Is felt unchanged by girls whatever age.
The loin will roar its bleak contempt the dearer trusts around it grow
And shatter cotton cuddles into glass, a broken frost unlike the snow
For starkly crystallising cotton griefs
Are frosted taut by suited passions' suns.

The working men's club's slats will moulder faster than the church:
Each week's awaited breaths and claps outdone by olden patrons
Having the knack for stone and flattering kings.
The dead kings in their stone still tartly lisp
As common fingers hiss across their higher seams of robes.
The dry stone is injurious pumice to the common English hand
Blistered now by moistness, wrapped in a short inconstant ground
Where sadness settles, genuine,
Brief.

Tabloids

2008-05-26T23:13:00.001+01:00

Consider paper fantasies

In days in wagons slyly pondering

Vindictive criminality,

The tricks that fuel inanity in foreign-neighbour papers

Between the years of days of wandering.

Consider the reality

Presented by one's thoughtful inner mind

Remembering profanities

Of kids that hissed the darkness from their parents' papers, firing

Illiteracy. Kids left reason-blind.

Consider pride and sheens that gloss

On homes and cars that live beneath the sun

Then reconsider, crouched behind the moss

That thinly creeps on cracks on rotting canker under concrete

Of shut-out corners mothers hardly won.

Consider wheels on homes and cars

The vans, certificates of pride and labour

The wheels on both the chance, at least, to pass

And spread again from one long yard along the longer hedges

That sheltered far, and far, and in the past.

Consider individuals:

The mindful, sly, profane and reason-lovers

Subsisting on one air, hedgerows apart,

Who badge contrasting paper trophies harmlessly in England

Who all profane the harmless with intent.

The Worms

2008-05-26T17:35:00.001+01:00

This scrub, broken place was on the outskirts

Of a filthy townette,

A splayed through-road lit by passing cigarettes,

The flopping dank figureheads of moaners.

Through dry spells it still stank,

And the ground held the smell of the rain.

It was a dry spell now,

And in a newer country the sun would mean

Only opportunity and newness¹.

Not in England.

Our sun warms up the rain

And the blood and the silage of oldness,

Diminished by the act.

It has to warm before it dries, sending the old vapours up,

Reminding us. Here we could smell it all.

Shrubs, bags.

Our young skins curled away from the damp.

A single crinkled iron sheet defied the drying out,

Held the morasse underneath,

Kept the old wet below it like a child.

I toed the chewed edge and thought

To flip over the sheet.

It went at personal pace,

The neighbour grasses tugging at the sides.

The slugs too slow to hide,

The lid pulled off eclipse

And then the lipless speech.

The slow-worms stared in ancient calm

Of sandy realms and not the damp.

Their little hall, old now,

And not in England.

The first one moved for short advice, no eyebrow to raise

But a tongue suggesting shade.

Our skins warmed at the life,

The different little country,

With its new unwelcome sky

Torn through by the lever.

The sun resents life that beats its warmth

And coiled away unhappy

As a jester to the kings.

The worms went then in train, their new sky darkening back

And tendons taughtened by the bright small country

Are slack under the greys.

1 That sun would lead and define the road to wend up, would be returned unblemished off new, dry surfaces. Fresh marble, fresh suits, businesses so new that not one has had time to cultivate arrears.

Laziness

2008-05-25T11:06:00.003+01:00

I am sitting, witful, feckless

Frowning at responses asked for

Spitting at the faces

Where the words I courted play

Upon the lips I courted

With humour courts commission less and less

In days where workers feverishly grow

Intolerant of excess.

In sitting not much later, text

Is reckless in its fast appearing.

Strangely, lazy boys that watched it

Tapping, self-producing, working,

Tack their name, cement intent,

Disregard the accident.

Not productive, work-shy or heroic

Instead on odd days each, perhaps on every, all.

I am sitting browner faced

Frownless, smoothed by calm industrious suns

And sundays worked from the sky,

Sighed out on earth.

Frowning only from that sun,

Winking out the accident

Where feverishly one thing grows alone:

Intolerance of lips that court

A certainty of blame and praise, and state it.

You Don't Look Like A Gypsy

2008-05-16T23:25:00.005+01:00

I met a juvel last September

She was there to meet me mother.

She took cover under darkness

Mixing ignorance with starkness:

“But you don't look like a Gypsy”

Divvi mort akai. Jel on

Was mandi's thought. My words were other

But in mind I saw the embers

Of a hundred past Septembers

Many spent asleep in Benders

In the fields me Nanny's drawn me

With her words, a proper Rawni,

Things no kennick could have taught us.

So the disbelieving juvel

Could have heard these words to shrivel

Condescension from the gorger

Could have heard a lifesong forging

Angry iron truths that wrought us.

I'm an Ayres, Mush. We're from Ampshire

Dee's me mum and Sue's me granny

My Nan Julie is the eldest.

Seven of her brothers gone now,

Uncle Georgie was the biggest

Uncle Bill and uncle Charlie

Uncle Job and uncle Leslie

Uncle Alfie and Goliath

And aunt Betsy was her sister.

Little Leonard, Hilda Riah

And two others died as chavis.

Now there's only Nan and Eddie

Out of Bill and Pachie's fourteen

But there's heaps of us around

The same in blood, entwined,

Unbound.

We're still the Ayreses, you can spot us

Blue and brown eyes don't divide us

(Gorgies think so, but they're gorgers

No time here for outside measures).

Only gates and counties hide us.

Like them Nidis there behind us

These past hundred years and others

Don't make brothers less than brothers

Don't make raklis far from mothers.

I still know me farthest cousins

There's a dozen single dozens

That's what we mean by a family

Not that life's like streets: consistent

Neat, like terraces, comported

And the boys in suits contorted.

We don't smother one another,

But our tea and food's to share and

If we're hurt we help each other

If we're dying, we will be there

Far from glimpses known to doubters

Round the trailers, yards and motors

Quiet, homes where you can't count us

Strong, so hate will not surmount us

Strong, it's pointless to denounce us

Kakker rokker nixes round us

LEARN BY NOW YOU CAN'T IMPOUND US

We'll survive if England founders.

Like that juvel in her blindness

Some won't take us as they find us

But our truth their lies eclipses:

We are real, as well as Gypsies.

Inheritance

2008-04-22T23:09:00.002+01:00

Do the nomad's grandsons know him

Or do springs of wandering matriarchs suggest

The subtleties of craft of untied forebears

Who, as was ordained by unintentioned pasts before,

Found only inconsistent rest?

The intermediaries (60 years the central pivot)

Between the tall long fathers, slit-eyed by the sun

Witness one consistency at least: the backward homely accent.

Them that were born in hedgerows

Trusting thorny ground as worthy, under sack, to bear them

Speak like their own youngsters, drawn close to older tongues

Yet trusting only cottoned warmth to bear them within walls.

And if we like them/they like Grandad

He, assumed by sons, like his long fathers

Spoke, then there are pleasant chains of truth

And some consistent things.

And did the nomad see his grandsons

In a warmer life inside

With eyes conditioned by the clasp of winter and its cackles

To look only after means of fending hunger?

Now the nomad's sons and daughters

Sense the furtive floors beneath their softer present sacking

And, beneath again, the good earth. Boarded up

Dark and useless clods battened by bricks thought better than the ground.

Soundless walls reflect in painted masks the meek and average smile

Anaesthetised to warmth and cold, unknowing of the hunger, the true senses,

The ground that grew things.

A Warning from Machiavelli

2008-04-16T16:31:00.003+01:00

“I well know that warnings to men and to nations are generally heeded too late. The strong man laughs at the counsel of his physician so long as his iron muscles grow rigid at his will- and the fate of other nations is an idle tale to a republic that is marching on with gigantic step to extended empire. The heavens are now bright over us, and the warm blood of new political life is rushing through the veins of our people- we forget, in the intoxicated fever of glory and dominion, that our dark hour will come. We have, indeed, little sympathy with those who can render no higher service to the republic, than to croak hoarsely under her battlements. We confide in man everywhere, and above all in men who are free.

But we cannot forget that even within our recollection ghostly images of disunion have stalked over our land, and they haunt our memory still. No American fears the ultimate result of a foreign invasion; and every vestige of the power that risks it may be swept from the continent, if such be the will of the people. But let us not forget that the great Republic of Brutus, which rolled her wheels of conquest to the end of the world, at last fell by her own hands. Above all, let us remember, we are powerful and free only while we maintain our civil union.”

C. Edwards Lester, New York, August 1^st, 1845

From the warnings to powerful nations offered by Machiavelli in his Florentine Republics