Land of Diskgrinder

is the barrier, the trial and the trail

Which is good enough. When I was twelve, I read two books: one was Think like a Grandmaster (a chess book); the other was The Elements of Prosody (not a chess book). The second was the most effective: I know what an iamb is, and how five of them make a pentameter, and I'm crap at chess. I know scansion, and internal rhyme, where the tension is metered out in rhyme (see what I did there? Very clever, me). Now I'll try a random string of words, and see if it's blank verse, or the reverse, a self-referential reflection (is there any other kind) of the thing I have in mind, I have started (and, to be honest, there's some tricks going on, right there) and I'll continue, new, without the fix, with a word that has to be there. Stopped short, where I lost the rhythm, broke on that full stop. Because, I've just realised, I'm a bit crap at this. According to Poetry Mechanics Weekly , I should end on something obscure, but apparently meaningful. Whether it is ...

all of you, you fucked up Stockholm syndrome sycophants, you bitching tramps, you mendicants, you terrible twats, have some fun, you frowning trolls, you spittle-flecked fuckers, stop making my world tiny and parametered by your little-brained and little-thought, nasty jibing, mean-spirited carping, stop your headache, stop your breathing (because it's my air you're wasting), and have some joy. And only then can you have a part in my shining landscape, and until then, live in the hell of your own making, and stop your shit-smelling invasion.

So, anyway, I'm here with the read-faced flush of rum, thinking on many and disparate things: all of them shining in my head; none of them quite dead. But, like a rotten apple, smeared at the bottom of the barrel, there are some dragging flecks. Listen to the ear. It's got curlicues of flesh that capture sound and keep it, swirling, so that one day after, you will hear something said, and think it's thought. But it's not, it's just an echo.

This is how I feel right now - it's a combination of stress (panel of idiots, nod to imagine right there) and pharmaceuticals.

cheese stick

When you get into someone's head, you put a little homunculus of yourself in there - a puppet you no longer control. When that voodoo-doll of you starts to separate from the immediate you, that you, yourself, know and love, then that's where the picture breaks. Like you have this self-image that grows with you, but the snapshot in that someone's head doesn't keep up. You're not the person they have in mind; you've gone on, and not in the direction they thought you should. So, now you realise your petty invasion is outdated, but you can't claim any sovereignty over that part of their thinking life - that would be wrong and bad. That's it, they have a starring role in the movie of themselves, and you're a bit-part player. metaphor mix: clay doll; photograph; movie. There's some development of motion there.

When I worked on the railway , with my orange boiler-suit, fly-bedevilled in the middle of rape-seed fields (we called the little millions of beetles dynamite bugs, because they swarmed round us, attracted to the orange livery, and got in our mouths, and went off like crunchy bangs of poison), I was a red. In fact I was very much at that end of the spectrum in all things - red in politics, orange in uniform, yellow in craven-A smoking, and kind of pink in complexion. I went to a Revolutionary Communist Party whinge-fest in central London in the embers of the eighties, and got disillusioned (as everything faded like corduroy slacks) because the main thrust of discourse seemed to be how these asses could excuse driving sporty VW Golfs, whilst still espousing the bloodless coup. The retinue of pseudo-communists there was mainly well-groomed cultural studies graduates, feminist men (never trust these smelly goateed twats) and pre-goth pachouli-drenched twenty somethings, slacking around...

See, that's the thing, you've got this big free-market laissez-faire thing going on, with the globalisation cheap-skate slavery dynamic, and the red chinese beat you at your own game. One word: deficit. And now you complain, and speak of protectionism. Where's your Adam Smithery now?

Now, I'm a big bloke: 6' 2" and built like a shit brick house, but I'm also (notwithstanding the bluff exterior and mainline chapness going on here) fairly sensitive to the breezes and cold fronts of the day-to-day emotional weather. And, I have to say, I can't fathom this recent development.

Now, I've got to say, I'm a big Dr. Who fan (since the Patrick Troughton era, that's how old I am) but this night's episode (9 in this series) is the BEST I have ever seen, not just Dr. Who, but also primetime BBC. I was completely and utterly blown away. I was watching it with my oldest boy (cassius, 9) and I was in floods of tears halfway through - it was absolutely fucking fantastic.