May 3, 2008
Of course I’d like to be rich enough
To live here in idle consumption. I’d
Take coffee mornings on the promenade,
Watching the hoi polloi walking
Self-consciously the latest electronic gadgets,
Joggers jogging, intercontinentals
Lost in the clouds, seawater lapdancing
The concrete piles: old man with rotten teeth.
May 2, 2008
Wind. The horns of the late afternoon buses blare past.
The plastic carousel of underwear dances
provocatively. Dark thunder skies.
They need not kohl their eyes, their soft voices,
they prepare themselves, gentle see-you-laters.
He wakes from his sleep, brushes leaves from his jacket,
comically adjusts his attire, watches
the girls at their unselfconscious work
from his secret nest under an innocuous bush,
relaxing flatuence, digesting chicken.
May 2, 2008
Tao Yuan Ming wrote after thirty years
in the dusty city of returning
to the country. He planted his few fields
and then relaxed, reading his book, happy.
Winter and he stagger’d to the willage,
begging for food. Thoreau silently left.
And then there was wankin’ Willy
and Innisfree, paid for by Lady G.
May 2, 2008
There are too many whores in Kowloon; one,
drugged and dazed, being transfered, 10am,
from taxi to ambulance; heavy whities
plod about, from bargain to bargain, pastries
and coffee: I’m sure Henry would have liked it
here. I wander over to the park,
my tired eyes gazing at girls, for a nap.
The turtle dove with speckled collar,
the shy wren, or warbler, in a corner
under a bush; songbirds in trees with with aerial roots
and, circling in the sky, a pair of kites,
black and large and rewarding.
One of three bottom bunks, sixty dollar
for the night; building site; evening bustle.
May 1, 2008
The thing to realise about Buddhism is
that it’s just another hierarchical religion:
disaffected with our own, we look east,
through the rose-tinted dawn, for something
different. Of the beggars in Guangzhou,
the upper-middle class Buddhists, well-fed,
robed and groomed, are the worst: they hold one’s wrist
in an attempt to disquiet one’s heart;
statistically it must improve their take, but
it’s really a not so gentle black magic:
money, power, wealth. And tai qi quan,
shadow boxing: my first Chinese teacher
told me “here imagine that you hold
somebody’s ears. Then pull their head down onto
your rising knee.” Poetic, balletic, violent.
My first and last Chinese tai qi teacher.
As Dolly sang, she of the wondrous breasts,
“Shaolin, shaolin, shaolin, shaolin … did you
have to go and break my heart?” What’s spiritual
about committing one’s life to kicking
someone’s lights out? “For we have hirelings …
who would if they could … ever prolong corporeal war.”
And the message from the mountain is:
religion is a sophisticated ego-trip.
And the rest is … “let me tell you son,
there’s fucking nothing there” … silence.
April 27, 2008
They would bomb because their syntax confuses them,
Not understanding the holy body’s need.
(Deeply we embrace: zero, one and then somehow
To infinity, but all along the road …)
They would bomb because they are afeard ‘n trapped
In their monstrous towers of false logic,
Tragic egos jerking their bloated beef-fed,
drug-dazed, porn-dulled, neon-hypnotized flesh.
They would bomb because they are stupid.
The cockroach has more sense and humanity.
They would bomb because we here are concerned
More with rhyme and meter and royalties.
I would that words had power in peace
to turn all the planes to dust, and all the guns
and other nasties to fertile piles of loam.
February 8, 2008
footnotes, spotlights, prompts and broken props
facepaint, old lines, codpieces, tutus
stagemarks and an empty spittoon
*****
I spilt my seed in Bethan Efans,
We waited, nervous, for three weeks;
But then last Sunday she had her monthlies,
We were so happy that we could hardly speak.
*****
By duck, we mean to sing, sweet Nell,
Down by the pump, by the pond on the green.
There is not too much litter there.
*****
it’s smell is overpowering.
your music, her lisp, my ego.
*****
Lazy tea I will not drink (my tired heart,
no care for beauty, yr old milk carton
discarded on the floor, the unswept floor).
*****
small nut-brown nipple. self-knowledge
parting.
January 20, 2008
I know you
I know how you feel inside
I know the smile in your eyes
and your sighs
January 18, 2008
a north-east wind blows waves onto the fragile coast
the developers’ blue tin fence rattles
screech and scrap of the highcranes and earthmovers
January 16, 2008
Yesterday afternoon I felt awful, at least under the weather. My legs
are tired. In the autumn I was doing about 30K a week and since the
beginning of December its been 38K. I was thinking perhaps I need
another rest day … but then I read through the running posts that came
up with the tag-surfer. And out I went, running carefully and
attentively, but running.
Thank you fellow running bloggers!
It was peaceful out - there’s a little bit of rain in the air, as there
always seems to be in this moon, the last before the new year, and so
the locals were safe in the dry. I noticed that it’s so easy for me to
get into running along looking into an empty space about 2 metres in
front of my chest. Must try to stop that ….
