this needed
RE WRITING
"crumpled chill"
this needed re-writing, overwrought: "the inaudible
whistle of silence" (dub: great black smear down all
walls)
ripple it up
and over the frame OVERWROUGHT
"furry with erasures " (fury)
I'm still ready for cramming
the cannibalised remixes
down and down
"stark bleeding animal skin"
into the crumbs of erasures
red oxide dust
TAKE 1
began the first primal scrawl (squiggle/squawk) on the
matted floor of old William's flat
a calligraphy of my sly hopes
(growing/growling inaudibly)
those long lines
diagrams of flow
breaking their boxes
already ready for cramming engrams
TAKE 2
began first scribble
this quivering ventriloqual feedback:
"It's been the ruin of many a young man"
TAKE 3
began scratching text three five seven years ago
(back brain up to its old tricks:"Why Satan is a tit
man"
pretend not to look
when you're peeping in the shop front)
biro looping into lewd fuddles
TAKE 4
began "going pink" brain turning
green darkness returning
around the candlelight
walls turning in
into lairs of graffiti
in the dark
I trundled out my droppings: "crumpled chill of a
purple quilt the inaudible whistle of silence great
black smears down the walls all I've left behind black
smears"
against a black ground of basement white
TAKE 5
began with grunts
the Pentel skedaddled
across bumps of a page
candles trembled in slim bony holders
the flea died in a sofa
to the thud of speaking magnetic cones
yet ladies and gentlemen in all dark corners of the
universe
my speech was yet incomplete
speech
TAKE 6
began flattening a curling A4
letters looming their projections
of my old tack tack tat
(lugubrious game)
"the wanker is very cramped"
in this basement game where I am being kept
dark as mushrooms in the damp-room
the bog needed dyno-rodding
TAKE 7
began basement tapes: cue the sax
and old words old words
"upstairs a smashed sitar"
tape loops, pools old noises
hoots of potty yowlings
"how can I hear you hearing me
howling that immense long-distance call..."
TAKE 8
began here/any number would do/one can stop dead/here do
dreams hold the answer - they smell intimate enough or
is that random automated trivia retreival? or the old
wet spurt in the desert?
UNSCRAMBLE THIS: This is a snake...quite small. Small
whitish scaly head - which diverges. Into two (2)
bodies. Twin little tails. Thrashing through low brick
archways. In and out of darkness. It is a protected
species, nothing to do with this business of trying to
live in two places. here and there. His and hers.
TAKE 9
began coming closer, the old words: "Here are a few
words I've picked out of my pocket at random for the
millions of local visiting universes/why can't I turn my
brain down to hear one under-developed child's crooked
syllable?"
but curvatures of bronze, ligatures cramp bites of wood
to cry chaos beyond any old phonemes
through cosmic white trash hiss
old brain
TAKE 10
the knowledge: what my brain's folded/can it/ my highest
itness/ "overblown by leathery farts and the crackle of
damned men's breakfasts" thunder through the astral
webs, and who can hear that drone slow, slyly back thru
cosmic white mush fizz, and William of the Woollen Hat
rumbled that curry full of old age mysteries, the World
God's electroencelegraphy?
and does moonlight entrance cold waters
and have I gutted my queasy mysteries?
please sir/madam - what animal do we live in?
TAKE 11
outside the speckled window
church gongs time tremors
througha whole pearly sky
that won't need me to milk it
and pink wet hydrangeas
carrying on
TAKE 12
"Upstairs Captain Bee Fart drools ferociously on vocals,
harmonica and soprano sax. He has true grits. The
Captain has a mouthful of gristly, bitter food that he
is trying heroically to eliminate."
There was sunlight on the redbrick wall and its breed of
nettles. The first clouds of autumn.
TAKE 13
stones raining
on the plateau
but they fall to eye level
before the fall
and in the forest of nettles
and disused bedding
a typewriter steadily rusts
naturally some of these birds were insects
and how my psychedelic shack
rises on twisted stilts
but if the spheres flutter
into configuration
attract/repulse/attract
and she who will be you
will be shouting
storm time
TAKE 14
Hearing a child's thinning cry. And the marbles of
logos,ontology, epistomology, all that's crashlanded us.
I should have stood up, rolled up all those bad poems
with their instamatic gawp, down the hole of the whole.
And then washed my mouth out. Because I was still stuck,
the old words wormholing out from the past, struck down
by blots of light. So I walked around myself.
Program wouldn't cancel.
TAKE 15
But the scrawl of every night was unique, like the
patterns of dirt on the carpet, the alignment of tatters
of dirty paper. "This blind pressure, slower, slower,
there's a rush on. Midges. Or mad sperm, rushing
upstream upside their floating metaphysical side
show..."
I am who is at the delta bottle-neck, bending,
straining, grabbing for the true note
want bright lights
wanna rock in the same old boat
TAKE 16
"There is no writing"
The writing on the wall:
"bared her breasts slowly, nipples brush palms lightly.
The hardening..."
I am keeping my tomb shut
TAKE 17
We sleep in order to protect ourselves
domestic difficulties, beyond any word-play
or self-help porno: "Pulled down her pants...
bounce them around," but no solution
while taboos drop away like tarnished sequins
"I'd savage any ice box
for a drop of young golden blood!"
TAKE 18
Backhand smell
watch ticks
to the rhythm of red lozenges
lumps of me hang everywhere
the therapy gun is a scattering machine
I am a lump
in the hot seat
in the red sky
SURVIVE SURVIVE SURVIVE
TAKE 19
one has to be one has to be
one has to be one has to be
to survive the splitting seconds of last night's
cathodes
the glassy walls of what is unreturnable
mutating in the body alone
brain-powered meat ready for the licking
one has to be one has to be
one has to be one has to be
but the house was tidy at my final departure
I had to make a coherent exit
TAKE 20
I had left my wife. I was living in that basement.
The words had taken themselves into care. There were
voices. Upstairs Captain Bee Fart heroically eliminates
harmonica gristle. The writer/landlord upstairs did a
thump dance all over his Olivetti. I was trying to
overdub an endless recursion of white rooms. Sock
smell. Sheet crinkle: "Crumbling chill."
It broke up in comix, jags of dialogue. All I've left.
Tharg rules, we are all aliens, all plural presences.
Huge black smears down the walls. Phlegmatic sax
bleatings.
In hibernation, in my teddy bear sweater, tentacles
stung. "That was the aria of the underground policeman,
proceeding through swing doors on the weather-house of
Venus." Collectively conspiratorial automata walk at
the pace of precariously carried mirrors, as deadly as
the virgins of Delvaux, sent out to move in chilly
processions through the green velvety night.
"Extrusion of my sticky lust-numbed bodyspace!"
The ghostly spiral of sex noises overdubs more subtle
brain events.
TAKE 21
Imagine: a sheep. A robot sheep, lost in the fog.
Imagine: the smell of cooking. Imagine giving up
smoking. The pie catches fire and burns out the cooker.
TAKE 22
Clouds shine through my back door
beyond a dirty grimace
imaged through streaky glass:
time tremors
younger hydrangeas
damned mysterious flowers
aircraft dopplers away
again and again the old tale
fading out
TAKE 23
WORD SALADS YOU CAN PAY TO IMPROVE
Frost-fried Hannibal naturally titivates those
elephantine nights. But there aren't enough rocket men
to go round for my kind of night-porterage. Norse
virgins with the order of the silver cross shape some
unusual molecules, when placed subcutaneously in the
drugged body. Astrally, it's best to be sky-high to a
dandelion. Keep the glottal stops. Summer afternoon
rays only decode through stained glass. I have seen it
in the eyes of old aunts who focus the secret spectra
into a tiny image of the Hindenburg:
"Thousands burned in the air..."
TAKE 24
whisky and a sore throat
drizzle in Marylebone
this grouping; a bare rhythm
vexing as light burning
underneath the carpet
where trashmen find sleeping insects
as sun balls through the milk round
humanoids in rout
remember witch doctors
escaping burning krals
TAKE 25
this detention for thousands of lines
time to bend over the keyboard
I kept my mouth cleaned wide open
to swallow November stars
yes mate the need for soft junctions
and a pipeline of burning honey
this checkpoint overnight
when the cells turn round
to start walking home
TAKE 26
I'd had a small furtive underground breakdown in the
summer of 77, that was all. This was my data base,
before I began playing with it.
Beyond my micro-squalor, malnutrition killed off
millions anonymously. Soveit cosmonauts were an
endangered species, and somewhere in Birmingham an old
man was burned alive, an old woman starved to death.
That was all old words. Just a false tooth, in high
vacuum.
TAKE 27
Cue the blue, the long donging horn.
Mix into separations of half-light, overlays.
TAKE 28
groping through all the silences
waiting for one that's all clear
here I can see/hear
through hiss and dribble
the gobbing mob
I've sold on
yet as soon as silence is touched
I'm filling it
with reel-to-reel private soul radio
sax ectoplasm baby
stream of blue-green orgone tracers
go flying with the flow
cruise missiles nosing though night
loop the old script in hi-fi
the time's shrinking while you hunt your head
TAKE 29
Those sparkly flashbacks, griping me in raw stomaching,
were the side effects of the upstairs rescue mission.
"Things are quite out of control below stairs, he has
not hit bottom yet, nor contracted a reliable
psychosis!"
I was pacing in tiny circles in the smallish tatty white
room. The tape machines sang, "Go, Johnny, go!" and
I
sang it for drinks on Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays. My
homegrowing hypnotherapy was a memoire of smudged
dreaming, mostly in locked mirror cabinet settings,
which I had just invented as an escapologist's metaphor
for sex/money anxieties, self-inflicted knowbot
malfunctionings.
Muscular tremors worried me at first but faded out after
reading Nietzsche.
Got the taste for saxophone heresies. I was as grubby
as warm plasticine in the grey sheets, but teetered out
every night craving impossible relationships.
"The hysterectomy of laughter reveals the red slugs of
pain doing their roadwork..."
TAKE 30
In the basement
in the half-light dancing to my shadows
in the furry yuck Pooh bear sweater
I and (I) and ((I))
toasted through this version of the noises about things
beyond the rings of Saturn
Perfect revision? I'd need a brain dump
I became totalled
a write-up
that's all there was
let's go let go
©Paul A.Green