Icarus skywriting # 1

Wooosh...

Not Yet May

The rain has gone
and sunshine has appeared 
in a pale,
blue sky daubed with white
puffs of clouds and skywriting.
Contrails and vapour trails,
spinning tales 
of journeys to and from 
the end of the earth;
and I attached a poem
to an aeroplane tail,
for peace and love and life...


April may not have been the cruellest month but it was driech and I am anticipating the changes of May, where I can begin a new cycle of writing and general good health. It has felt like a long year so far. May it slow into summer, come May! 'Amelia it was just a false alarm...' Ah, Joni, 'like Icarus ascending...'

Icarus seeking culture # 1

(I only have...) First World Troubles

My cultural week has been pretty exciting in a quiet way. Having finished my article, Certificate 12A I took some time out to do other things - and with Brighton Festival heading my way soon I am already planning my way through the huge choices. I can't wait and I will post every time I attend something. But I thought I would begin to post my cultural life. In no particular order, this week I:

• re-read Jeri Kroll's The Mother Workshop I adore Jeri and must write to her to see how she is (PM). And something she wrote gave me a smile: 'Warning Gale Force Winds - The summer poem has just blown away...' and I can see it now, all the words looping around in the air, refusing to join together in coherence
• wrote a song (well most of one) called (I only have...) First World Troubles (so I only sing first world blues), with lines floating around because I don't have the complete shape yet. Like

I live beneath the skyline

between the finelines of philosophy
I don't know if there is an answer

but I know what its like to be free
I only have, first world troubles
so I only have, first world blues...

• read a wonderful chapter called, 'Benjamin, Kracauer, and Redemptive History' by Vincent P. Pecora (don't you just love it how American academics have to include their middle initial. My middle name is Methuselah and I like to forget it.
• started reading The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes which is a little too smug for my liking
• wrote a tune which I am calling east/west blues because of the way it combines two different sounds
• bought new music by the fantastic Alabama Shakes, yay, can they shake:

Eyes

Eyes

I see!

I am colour blind and not always the best reader but I see!

But if I am honest, which I am not, only now, in my middle age do I see myself as others might. I was always happy to shut my eyes away behind glasses and shades and darkness because it looked cool. But in youth I could never quite focus my eyes. I did wonder if this had followed me from childhood into adulthood (because kids tell you but adults never do) but digital photography, moving image, laptop computers and pictures like this of me just leaning and seeing my own self, confirm that if someone was to say, blink and you missed it, then I would. Then I realised that if you internalise this, you internalise everything, you keep yourself close to your own chest and I always have. I am not going to self-analyse but its taken me 50 years to face this of myself and it begs the question: how many more ghosts lurk? And then I realise I am tired of fighting it and them, the imperfection, the songs I don't write, the novels I can't finish, the poems I am so bad at, the memories I carry and then I ask myself, who wears a hat and sunglasses in his own kitchen? Maybe I should just go for a long walk into the ellipses... ellipses I like, the unsaid and unsayable and the pondering of thoughts that struggle to be said out loud... sigh... this is an ellipses track: life is a thief, it knows how to steal your precious things and moments only for itself! But all of us are searching for some kind of peace...

Empty Rocking Chairs

To sit quietly, hands on knees, fiddling with holes in blue jeans, growing a beard, waiting for the dusk to settle, with fading light and night beckoning strangers who may happen by, wondering and pondering and thinking without asking out loud, until it becomes obvious why the scene is so silent; no creaking bones or crooning moans, rocking chairs are great for waiting and contemplating but no good for players because the arms get in the way of arms and hands on guitars; so he left...

Blue Jumper # 2

Its another blue jumper for a very blue day. Bank holiday weather reminds me of one of the first songs I ever wrote, which I can still play (though can't remember all the words) But it goes like...

We talked a lot about a lot about nothing
and drank a lot of wine
sitting a broken down bus station
just passing time... broken weather is pulling me down...

But its been 40 years so its a wee bit hazy. But the song writing has been going a wee bit this weekend, trying to get some things finished and that's a good, at least I am writing again. Writing the Bogeyman and Monsters books took so much out of me, I almost feel as though I am worded out. But its coming back methinks. So I will give April a go and see what happens but I seem to be saving up tunes without words to accompany them - and how hard can it be to rectify that for a wordsmith - sigh? Its a hard life wherever you go... Belfast got over this: