I used to see the old man, as I thought of him, though maybe he wasn't so old, often on the aimless wanders around town that were one of my principle occupations at that time. His most distinguishing feature was his mouth, which was shaped like the letter u, but I don’t mean by that that he was constantly smiling. In fact, his face wore a pensive, worried expression, as if (I thought) he had just come down from the mountain and was wondering whether he should cast his stone into the tide of general indifference.
He wore always a sand-coloured suit, which was either pressed, or, more likely, was of the kind of material that does not show creases. I would consider engaging him in conversation, whilst regarding him at distance. I felt he had something of interest or even of importance to reveal, but I would think about the practical difficulties or awkwardness (for me) of beginning the necessary preliminary conversation, and would abandon the idea, or defer it until a more suitable time presented itself.
One day, during the festival, I arrived at the square, which was crowded with a noisy multitude, presumably come to hear a band that was playing a fast-paced waltz from a makeshift stage, in time to see him being lifted by two paramedics into a waiting ambulance. There was no siren but its lights were flashing, in a way that seemed oddly congruous with the music that was still being played, and which continued even afterward.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
space limited
I was so highly agitated that I actually felt nauseous, and could barely concentrate on the change from tube to cramped bus I had to make at S_, and when I eventually (with some surprise) found myself outside the familiar door on the bright, bare concrete stairwell (I felt that the florescent tube was making my skin prickle and perspire), I really felt I might faint, and remember wondering who would find me slumped there, and when, and whether my sleep in that interval would be peaceful. It was immediately apparent, however, on his wordlessly opening the door, that A was in a state incomparably worse than my own.
As he seemed barely capable of standing, let alone articulating any kind of greeting suitable to his role as host, I let myself in, having to squeeze slightly though the doorframe past his gently swaying and uncomprehending form, and surveyed the small, chaotic lounge, smaller and more chaotic than I remembered it. It was hard to find anywhere to sit, so indescribably full of assorted junk was the room, covering with its lurid patina (there was nothing specific that attracted my focus, in fact I somehow felt it might be disastrous should any one item of the detritus of A’s life succeed in capturing my attention, and so I deliberately kept looking generally about) not just the scant furniture but the floor as well, but, fearing collapse might be imminent, I cleared some plates and papers from a low table and sat on that.
For a longish time nothing happened at all. It occurred to me I had not heard the front door being closed. A was nowhere in sight; he had gone into some anterior room, or possibly had disappeared off the face of the earth, though there were some curious, indistinct noises coming from somewhere else in the flat which I assumed must be made by him. I picked up one of the items I had swept onto the floor. It was a black notebook. Opening it, I discerned two things: that it was a diary, and that the handwriting was certainly not that of A – in fact I thought it must have been a female hand, because the characters were rounded. The page I had opened the diary on began like this:
was in the bathroom I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror; it was as if my face had altered and in fact was perpetually altering then shifting back. After a time I realised that this was happening in time with my breathing, then my skin seemed to take on the texture of a kind of dry parchment, and I had to look away. I felt that the others downstairs might be beginning to notice my continued absence, and wondered if they were talking about me. All I could hear was the snake-hiss of water moving somewhere through (I imagined) a pipe. I felt that there had never been
I broke off reading suddenly, becoming conscious of someone watching me. It was A, framed in the doorway which I think led to his kitchen. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession, and was watching me with an odd, inscrutable expression on his face.
As he seemed barely capable of standing, let alone articulating any kind of greeting suitable to his role as host, I let myself in, having to squeeze slightly though the doorframe past his gently swaying and uncomprehending form, and surveyed the small, chaotic lounge, smaller and more chaotic than I remembered it. It was hard to find anywhere to sit, so indescribably full of assorted junk was the room, covering with its lurid patina (there was nothing specific that attracted my focus, in fact I somehow felt it might be disastrous should any one item of the detritus of A’s life succeed in capturing my attention, and so I deliberately kept looking generally about) not just the scant furniture but the floor as well, but, fearing collapse might be imminent, I cleared some plates and papers from a low table and sat on that.
For a longish time nothing happened at all. It occurred to me I had not heard the front door being closed. A was nowhere in sight; he had gone into some anterior room, or possibly had disappeared off the face of the earth, though there were some curious, indistinct noises coming from somewhere else in the flat which I assumed must be made by him. I picked up one of the items I had swept onto the floor. It was a black notebook. Opening it, I discerned two things: that it was a diary, and that the handwriting was certainly not that of A – in fact I thought it must have been a female hand, because the characters were rounded. The page I had opened the diary on began like this:
was in the bathroom I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror; it was as if my face had altered and in fact was perpetually altering then shifting back. After a time I realised that this was happening in time with my breathing, then my skin seemed to take on the texture of a kind of dry parchment, and I had to look away. I felt that the others downstairs might be beginning to notice my continued absence, and wondered if they were talking about me. All I could hear was the snake-hiss of water moving somewhere through (I imagined) a pipe. I felt that there had never been
I broke off reading suddenly, becoming conscious of someone watching me. It was A, framed in the doorway which I think led to his kitchen. He seemed to have recovered his self-possession, and was watching me with an odd, inscrutable expression on his face.
Budva; Montenegro
The beach at Budva, outside of the pristine maze of the Stari Grad (a miniature Dubrovnik of similarly scaled-down touristy boutiques and restaurants) is an unbroken, five mile stretch of tackiness. Early that morning, dusty and bleak Podgorica had emptied itself into a packed train, already stuffed with Montenegrins and Serbs from the Balkan interior, which had crawled to the coast, stopping in anonymous fields to squeeze in yet more beach-goers and their beach towels and inflatable dolphins. We had crossed the reedy fish-tail of Lake Skadar, and looked south-east through mist at the distant Albanian border. Then the bus from Bar, north along a mountain coastline packed with tourists and punctuated by ugly developments: Montenegro, its coastline its main economic asset, clearly could not afford Croatian restraint in planning permission. Also unlike its northern neighbour, taken over in summer by Italians, Germans, and Brits, the package tourists here were Serb, Russian, and pasty (or painfully lobster-coloured) Ukrainians. Past quaint Sveti Stefan island, where the uber-rich can be gawped at by the masses from their own concrete resort rooms, planted there in a mirror of obstinate voyeurism.
On the promenade there are stalls selling all kinds of greasy fast-food, restaurants with unfathomable Cyrillic menus, and several container ship-loads of souvenirs. It is forty degrees; there is no space on the shingle beach. The Russian women are coifed and dressed-up for their passagietta, tightly white with gold-plastic accessories. A small boat goes by every half hour, containing two men who use a megaphone to contend with the blaring beach-music to herald in Russian ‘the best Russian disco on the coast’. When I make it there it is blasting out a turbofolk mash-up of a Neil Diamond song at unholy volume. Its sound system is indeed powerful; I climb to an empty orthodox churchyard on the adjacent hillside, where the headstones are resounding to Neil. My notes for that night contain this short šljivovica-induced poem:
Call from a boat loudspeaker
A disco you might like to attend
This shore has it all:
Air hockey, crazy golf and henna tattoos
One restaurant has drawn a crowd, cameras clicking, as they did moments ago for a shiny red Ferrari in a hotel car-park. A shark has been caught in the bay – over two metres, big enough to bring automatically into mind the sea-kayaking I have planned for the next day. It seems perfectly undamaged, except that its mouth is bloodied. Its eye (it is the timeless eye of an old god) stares through the noisy throng that surround what they imagine is its final indignity. I pass it on my walk to Sveti Stefan. When I come back, it, and the crowd are still there (though probably the crowd is comprised of different individuals), but now the shark is on its side. It has been slit open, and one of the waiters holds, laughing, the great white sack of its stomach. He has a knife, and is about to cut the stomach open.
The beach at Budva, outside of the pristine maze of the Stari Grad (a miniature Dubrovnik of similarly scaled-down touristy boutiques and restaurants) is an unbroken, five mile stretch of tackiness. Early that morning, dusty and bleak Podgorica had emptied itself into a packed train, already stuffed with Montenegrins and Serbs from the Balkan interior, which had crawled to the coast, stopping in anonymous fields to squeeze in yet more beach-goers and their beach towels and inflatable dolphins. We had crossed the reedy fish-tail of Lake Skadar, and looked south-east through mist at the distant Albanian border. Then the bus from Bar, north along a mountain coastline packed with tourists and punctuated by ugly developments: Montenegro, its coastline its main economic asset, clearly could not afford Croatian restraint in planning permission. Also unlike its northern neighbour, taken over in summer by Italians, Germans, and Brits, the package tourists here were Serb, Russian, and pasty (or painfully lobster-coloured) Ukrainians. Past quaint Sveti Stefan island, where the uber-rich can be gawped at by the masses from their own concrete resort rooms, planted there in a mirror of obstinate voyeurism.
On the promenade there are stalls selling all kinds of greasy fast-food, restaurants with unfathomable Cyrillic menus, and several container ship-loads of souvenirs. It is forty degrees; there is no space on the shingle beach. The Russian women are coifed and dressed-up for their passagietta, tightly white with gold-plastic accessories. A small boat goes by every half hour, containing two men who use a megaphone to contend with the blaring beach-music to herald in Russian ‘the best Russian disco on the coast’. When I make it there it is blasting out a turbofolk mash-up of a Neil Diamond song at unholy volume. Its sound system is indeed powerful; I climb to an empty orthodox churchyard on the adjacent hillside, where the headstones are resounding to Neil. My notes for that night contain this short šljivovica-induced poem:
Call from a boat loudspeaker
A disco you might like to attend
This shore has it all:
Air hockey, crazy golf and henna tattoos
One restaurant has drawn a crowd, cameras clicking, as they did moments ago for a shiny red Ferrari in a hotel car-park. A shark has been caught in the bay – over two metres, big enough to bring automatically into mind the sea-kayaking I have planned for the next day. It seems perfectly undamaged, except that its mouth is bloodied. Its eye (it is the timeless eye of an old god) stares through the noisy throng that surround what they imagine is its final indignity. I pass it on my walk to Sveti Stefan. When I come back, it, and the crowd are still there (though probably the crowd is comprised of different individuals), but now the shark is on its side. It has been slit open, and one of the waiters holds, laughing, the great white sack of its stomach. He has a knife, and is about to cut the stomach open.
nuts poems by Egg
RD Laing’s nuts
mad professor, hitherto lysergic
needs, grudges, a shot
every sane day
O
keep him from turning
(green, pitch, rises)
into that stone savage
smash and mend wall
it’s only polystyrene
as perception
that can’t cleave Noah’s quark
oft-times would
tune in hued to the air
dance tinged the free verse spike
shame
spreads, mops
with the Mail
steady dose
airports remind him not to use prose / insignia at the check-in zones
...remember memories
the no-tautology
ego renewal...
voluptidue, o ball-deep flood
...civic pride
entails -
- execration...
joins the congregation
praying
(must wait
for hands
to stop shaking)
if one day
his medicine runs empty
he will turn
daub
mud obliquely between
mouth corner and ear
make himself
a mask
- or tear away his visagecase -
liberated, prowl (after Dogstoy, Fido)
the rooftops
freedom’s slave
Jeremy Paxman's nuts
Jeremy Paxman
- not the Newsnight saxman –
turns his ire
on the widening gyre
cannot hear
Lord Falconer
mad professor, hitherto lysergic
needs, grudges, a shot
every sane day
O
keep him from turning
(green, pitch, rises)
into that stone savage
smash and mend wall
it’s only polystyrene
as perception
that can’t cleave Noah’s quark
oft-times would
tune in hued to the air
dance tinged the free verse spike
shame
spreads, mops
with the Mail
steady dose
airports remind him not to use prose / insignia at the check-in zones
...remember memories
the no-tautology
ego renewal...
voluptidue, o ball-deep flood
...civic pride
entails -
- execration...
joins the congregation
praying
(must wait
for hands
to stop shaking)
if one day
his medicine runs empty
he will turn
daub
mud obliquely between
mouth corner and ear
make himself
a mask
- or tear away his visagecase -
liberated, prowl (after Dogstoy, Fido)
the rooftops
freedom’s slave
Jeremy Paxman's nuts
Jeremy Paxman
- not the Newsnight saxman –
turns his ire
on the widening gyre
cannot hear
Lord Falconer
poems restored by Fugaz Egg
Dubliners
Half way instead in his magnum opus,
past calm, and future cuddled, yet tense urge to snatch and cry:
Stephanie (a plaintive song),
A minor epiphany
appearing from the door, rejoice –
Like a notice of dismissal, misconduct
Barely legible -
The way home is long and there are a manner of creatures
to waylay; in areas the blare of blank sirens screened, and
the swine-risk,
odd flesh must pass its test.
clinch
do not alight here came too late
you are
an invitation to a chess problem
my grubby white pieces are shattered teeth
I was pleased the tequila went down like water
as if this was my advantage over the vital boys
you floated over in green
I was with Kenny, my level brother, my sorry future, my ex-priest defrocked, my image of spit,
he “was pleased”, like fuck, because we’re the same
would have kicked your ankles in the clumsy third person dance
now I hindsee warnings and remember people can tell,
there’s precedent and scandal and it’s been quantified (in the guardian, no less)
and I am only undifferentiated,
but still,
a guy can think of facebook, and hold the taps,
and imagine you between me and the mirror.
arsehole sonnet
(Rimbaud in Mostar)
Plato’s cave and conglomerate nightclub;
the lady, a contribu-nudist
writes her name around your prow, and
imagines again the diphallic light side skewer-promise.
when mirrored adolesced fear of pendulous testicle
led to shattering asymmetrophobia of low garden walls.
A hijab-wearing trainee doctor
was bedevilled by your porcupine quills.
An occasional spider fluffed at slope,
morphed Arachne, they made an example of her,
but couldn’t entirely quell her quiet hubris.
She is home-spun in soft undulation.
Whatever orbit, once or twice daily you divulge secrets -
another rim-lacuna into hidden workings, society’s upturned ear.
disaster / inaction
It impends, by a river, cold
summer's day, disrupting syntax,
uneven chill makes itself noticeable,
Disaster, in the angles of a swan
appearing in narrowed perspective
of high grasses either side, looms,
heightens in banked old couple, not
far downstream, the man's sideways
glance is hard to read
(I can hope).
To wade in and reclaim what was freely
given to the river - wet-
through jeans and anklesinking deep
(though nothing really disturbs the surface but the two swans
seen individually, and a pine cone I threw)
to leave you drowning on the bank.
Dull disaster, tributary to somewhere of more epic sweep,
threatens nonetheless to tear another fibre.
Half way instead in his magnum opus,
past calm, and future cuddled, yet tense urge to snatch and cry:
Stephanie (a plaintive song),
A minor epiphany
appearing from the door, rejoice –
Like a notice of dismissal, misconduct
Barely legible -
The way home is long and there are a manner of creatures
to waylay; in areas the blare of blank sirens screened, and
the swine-risk,
odd flesh must pass its test.
clinch
do not alight here came too late
you are
an invitation to a chess problem
my grubby white pieces are shattered teeth
I was pleased the tequila went down like water
as if this was my advantage over the vital boys
you floated over in green
I was with Kenny, my level brother, my sorry future, my ex-priest defrocked, my image of spit,
he “was pleased”, like fuck, because we’re the same
would have kicked your ankles in the clumsy third person dance
now I hindsee warnings and remember people can tell,
there’s precedent and scandal and it’s been quantified (in the guardian, no less)
and I am only undifferentiated,
but still,
a guy can think of facebook, and hold the taps,
and imagine you between me and the mirror.
arsehole sonnet
(Rimbaud in Mostar)
Plato’s cave and conglomerate nightclub;
the lady, a contribu-nudist
writes her name around your prow, and
imagines again the diphallic light side skewer-promise.
when mirrored adolesced fear of pendulous testicle
led to shattering asymmetrophobia of low garden walls.
A hijab-wearing trainee doctor
was bedevilled by your porcupine quills.
An occasional spider fluffed at slope,
morphed Arachne, they made an example of her,
but couldn’t entirely quell her quiet hubris.
She is home-spun in soft undulation.
Whatever orbit, once or twice daily you divulge secrets -
another rim-lacuna into hidden workings, society’s upturned ear.
disaster / inaction
It impends, by a river, cold
summer's day, disrupting syntax,
uneven chill makes itself noticeable,
Disaster, in the angles of a swan
appearing in narrowed perspective
of high grasses either side, looms,
heightens in banked old couple, not
far downstream, the man's sideways
glance is hard to read
(I can hope).
To wade in and reclaim what was freely
given to the river - wet-
through jeans and anklesinking deep
(though nothing really disturbs the surface but the two swans
seen individually, and a pine cone I threw)
to leave you drowning on the bank.
Dull disaster, tributary to somewhere of more epic sweep,
threatens nonetheless to tear another fibre.
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Poems by Fugaz Egg
Travel Writing
Horizon was never further
There is a word for travelling
The length of a continent.
Behind the old curtain, a mirror
Plugged in with a few lines.
Mouths blister with sensation.
Horizon was never further
There is a word for travelling
The length of a continent.
Behind the old curtain, a mirror
Plugged in with a few lines.
Mouths blister with sensation.
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