Well, of course it's hard, there's all those middle eights to any melody that don't happen anymore.
There's the build into it, the diminish away for one elevated second, and then the head on smash of it.
These are probably the things I miss. The little corners of 16 years remiss - in this way I can see up an avenue I wouldn't otherwise.
But, really, although I spent so many years trying to live up to your expectorations, the spit you vectored on the hot plain
You're not the cure. Fuck off,
Coming up against a utopian architect's wish to narrow my avenue through the spaces he designed in my estate
I see his wish to make me turn this particular corner and marvel at this brutalist curve of ideology written in piss-poor false to materials build in shit and gypsum
Is ignored by me and everyone other than tramps and muggers who either piss or lurk in the shadow of the overarching concept
And that's an easy shame
That this was so easy to fuck up
That you could think that your modular architecture, just by the shapes
You'd make people live in
Would make us all shiny
Well, you turned out to be stupid cunts, didn't you?
And not because central planning is broken
Just because some venal apparatchik will find a way to graft the play
Shame. It was such a nice ideal that looked good in drawings where the sun shined on sketches of trees and stick figures
And then, well then
There's still something monumental and fucking fantastic about that idea in blueprint
Gross piles of shuttered concrete spined by cheap rebar
Not as fucked as the consensual opinion would have it
Don't rush up a street on your way to a meeting
Walk up a lane under a big blue sky
Don't furrow under the concrete that smacks down your eye to exhausted fumes
Look left and see rooks fly up from a bramble, a tree, or something other than urban furniture
Don't wind your options down with bitter scraps fed through the usual incoming stew of paper inconsequence, invoicing the inner voice that daily says fuck this thing
Instead shoot up pure heroin in a forest
Which is why this isn't popular
It's not because it's crap
It's because it's a sterile debate about proper usage of apostrophe's
Is to describe the Bristol Harbour Festival
A crowd of smiling people, taking a cheap holiday from frowning at bills and tax returns.
Walking up the concrete esplanade with ugly fat children running out before. All smiles, and therefore, not ugly anymore.
Just a hard-grained blue sunshine banging up from the metal grey water
Cut in two, or four, or six, by sweaty row boat crews sculling someone else's culture up the floating chop.
Whilst red arrows arrest the sky in loops of contrail contrasting air and high disposition
With burnt smells of beef and onion coming out of wheeled sheds chaperoned to the front by shiny SUVs early in the weekend morning.
The balloons go up, and all the squared eyes watch, whilst smaller scions ignore the up
There, and a lot of boats.
How difficult it is to pull out of the curve down the last post steers me into
Like I'd like to be happy smily person, but doesn't work, because the differential is not discontinuous, so can't suddenly right angle at a tangent
Or, balls. Money it!
Are not full of discarded and disregarded ephemera
(lego bionicles, bills and bad crime novels)
Then I can focus in on the very apposite sounds and voices coming out of the big screen, the only thing not caked in dust (which is because the electric field repels, not because I take special care).
And in this various claptrappery I see something dull and musty in otherwise brandished glitter.
That, in the dead, bored corners where nothing happens and the same old becomes the same new.
That's good enough, where nothing ever, static happens.
The wheels don't go round, or fuck them, they do, but not in the direction I voted for
That's the thing that crawls up your spine and smiles over your shoulder; to which you defer.
Dog's bums and cat's arses.
Are all you see, when you're following cats and dogs.
Well done me, finished that one off
I have sublimated my enthusiasm for writing in two entirely different ways in this whole five years gone like an extended fart.
One, in precise technical writing where I functionally specify the ins and outs of diagrams referred to in the preceding pages, to a largely indifferent audience who only require the presence of text.
And I have tested this by occasionally getting poetic when defining the schema for a database, by making the field names scan in iambic meter, or in blank verse acrostic spelling philosophers' names.
On the other hand I have, since 2006, fairly spat away a whole lot of sentences on twitter, all of them finely good in heart and contemporary relevance: diskgrinder twattery.
But all the time I've had these two poles of unpleasance : I've always wanted to write something a little more substantial, something more, something less ephemeral: not a description of process and not a reaction in 140 characters to continuing anomie.
But I didn't have a plot to hang it together.
Now I do.
