While one man laughs another man sighs
While one child's born another child dies
Monday 28 December 2009
A Little Light-Heartedness in a Sea of Bones
"that's another fine mess I've gotten myself into"
Larry David - Curb Your Enthusiasm
A Child Re-Born
The blue star in the black
Woven with stars of the night
And that blue star that did attack
With fire
The blackened forests of wondrous light
It was a spirit in fire and ice
Its essence burned bright in black and white
It moved in grace in the eye of its storm
Willing himself a child re-born
Woven with stars of the night
And that blue star that did attack
With fire
The blackened forests of wondrous light
It was a spirit in fire and ice
Its essence burned bright in black and white
It moved in grace in the eye of its storm
Willing himself a child re-born
AJB Circa 2006
Underrated
Bitter and Broken
Trampled and kicked
Unappreciated and
Underrated and
Constantly slated
Laughed at 'cause her anxiety stammers
Looking away, bright scarves and expensive shoes
Not their problem
Laughed at
She's too much to feel
Her best friend a cat
Alone she was where I saw her sat
Try help from afar
A distant shooting star
Trampled and kicked
Unappreciated and
Underrated and
Constantly slated
Laughed at 'cause her anxiety stammers
Looking away, bright scarves and expensive shoes
Not their problem
Laughed at
She's too much to feel
Her best friend a cat
Alone she was where I saw her sat
Try help from afar
A distant shooting star
AJB November 2005
Tuesday 22 December 2009
Saturday 19 December 2009
Reflections of the neighbourhood of my young adulthood
In a quieter darkened room
The dominoes hammered down
The Old West Indian men
Them that you see about town
Jamaican patois yelling "fresh mango" he's selling
The basement is a boomin'
The Wailers are a wailin
The rib cages are a vibratin'
The Ganja pungent 'n' pervadin'
Heavy with smoke 'n' raasclaat danger
A long plain wooden bar stands in the dimmed light
Behind two rottweilers snarling and stand guardin'
Red Stripe and Special Brew's a flowin'
And only at dawn of day do the people start to goin'
Back then "the Square" was a fairly dangerous place to live. I remember riot squad police deployed with dogs on each corner when there was a blues raid. I remember a riot was close to breaking out one night about 3am. I once found in my own hedge not a nest of lost eggs but a tin of sticks of hash hidden there by a local dealer I knew. The dealers would pester you while you go to the shop for milk. I was mugged once by two youths with knives. The street-walkers would beckon you and ask you for a cigarette, which I didn't really mind. The pubs were pumping with strong Jamaican accents (in contrast with the Derbyshire accent here - an accent I dispossedly speak myself). There were a lot of drug dealers (predominantly selling hashish), and some unpleasant pimps. The white people were mainly down to earth and friendly, some battered and bruised, like in any poor inner-city area.
And yet curiously I felt more at home there than I do here. Maybe it's just my mind that felt more at home in it's body...than it does now. However, that was back then. A time come and gone. Now, the powers-that-be have emptied the area of overt pushers and prostitutes. Now it has gone underground, and the drug of choice for the pushers isn't a £5 piece of hash, but (in their codes which the police will obviously know) a ten bag of Brown, B's, Brandy (Heroin); or a P4 of White, Whiskey (0.4 of a gramme of crack-cocaine). It might look a safer place to live, but eyes are deceiving. I don't know for sure; I may be wrong; I don't live there anymore. But I know people that do. Today, your sons and daughters, instead of buying a small amount of marijuana to smoke, their is an easy access to the hard drugs, that rob them of their spirit and soul.
Enough rambling. I'm not writing anything I'd keep if it was on paper, but I might as well post it on to my weblog as I've typed it, just so I feel I've not wasted the past hour.... ramble ramble, scramble
The dominoes hammered down
The Old West Indian men
Them that you see about town
Jamaican patois yelling "fresh mango" he's selling
The basement is a boomin'
The Wailers are a wailin
The rib cages are a vibratin'
The Ganja pungent 'n' pervadin'
Heavy with smoke 'n' raasclaat danger
A long plain wooden bar stands in the dimmed light
Behind two rottweilers snarling and stand guardin'
Red Stripe and Special Brew's a flowin'
And only at dawn of day do the people start to goin'
Back then "the Square" was a fairly dangerous place to live. I remember riot squad police deployed with dogs on each corner when there was a blues raid. I remember a riot was close to breaking out one night about 3am. I once found in my own hedge not a nest of lost eggs but a tin of sticks of hash hidden there by a local dealer I knew. The dealers would pester you while you go to the shop for milk. I was mugged once by two youths with knives. The street-walkers would beckon you and ask you for a cigarette, which I didn't really mind. The pubs were pumping with strong Jamaican accents (in contrast with the Derbyshire accent here - an accent I dispossedly speak myself). There were a lot of drug dealers (predominantly selling hashish), and some unpleasant pimps. The white people were mainly down to earth and friendly, some battered and bruised, like in any poor inner-city area.
And yet curiously I felt more at home there than I do here. Maybe it's just my mind that felt more at home in it's body...than it does now. However, that was back then. A time come and gone. Now, the powers-that-be have emptied the area of overt pushers and prostitutes. Now it has gone underground, and the drug of choice for the pushers isn't a £5 piece of hash, but (in their codes which the police will obviously know) a ten bag of Brown, B's, Brandy (Heroin); or a P4 of White, Whiskey (0.4 of a gramme of crack-cocaine). It might look a safer place to live, but eyes are deceiving. I don't know for sure; I may be wrong; I don't live there anymore. But I know people that do. Today, your sons and daughters, instead of buying a small amount of marijuana to smoke, their is an easy access to the hard drugs, that rob them of their spirit and soul.
Enough rambling. I'm not writing anything I'd keep if it was on paper, but I might as well post it on to my weblog as I've typed it, just so I feel I've not wasted the past hour.... ramble ramble, scramble
rambling thoughts in the early hours of December 2009
Untitled Number Two
In between the midnight moonlight
And the high noon searing sun
I see the girl with piercing eyes
She's the One
She's my Hydrogen Bomb
Playing a beat up beat guitar
To dying among the dead of night stars
Visions of the woman I crave
She's the One
She's my Hydrogen Bomb
Drugs I take I crave to sleep
Poppy vapours inhale bittersweet
Her fragrance in my dream I sense
She's the one
She's the Truth and Beauty we call True Love
From miracles of a sunning butterfly
And the hard-working bees
Beneath her skin such beauty I see
She's the one
She's my Exploding Bomb
She's the one who will save me
Yes, in that do not underestimate the strength of that reality
From the madness to come
For my soul to be free
For beyond dreadful sadness dare I see?
And the high noon searing sun
I see the girl with piercing eyes
She's the One
She's my Hydrogen Bomb
Playing a beat up beat guitar
To dying among the dead of night stars
Visions of the woman I crave
She's the One
She's my Hydrogen Bomb
Drugs I take I crave to sleep
Poppy vapours inhale bittersweet
Her fragrance in my dream I sense
She's the one
She's the Truth and Beauty we call True Love
From miracles of a sunning butterfly
And the hard-working bees
Beneath her skin such beauty I see
She's the one
She's my Exploding Bomb
She's the one who will save me
Yes, in that do not underestimate the strength of that reality
From the madness to come
For my soul to be free
For beyond dreadful sadness dare I see?
circa 1997
Wednesday 9 December 2009
Monday 7 December 2009
There is a place...
There is a place
A place that I want to go
Into the valley of the woods
Onto the purple heather
Lying down with deep brown eyes
Gazing and all-seeing
The ensnaring small of an angel's back
Entwined in that spiritual purple for ever.
But the humble bumble bee
In the wild marjoram and the lilac flowers
Sweet nectar and death comes within a year
Falling, struggling to fly,
Fading, flailing, crying, more time
To lick that sweet colour nectar.
But god in his wisdom did not dispense that
He deigned to leave the pleasure with the pain
And now I know where God goes I need not go
Again.
A place that I want to go
Into the valley of the woods
Onto the purple heather
Lying down with deep brown eyes
Gazing and all-seeing
The ensnaring small of an angel's back
Entwined in that spiritual purple for ever.
But the humble bumble bee
In the wild marjoram and the lilac flowers
Sweet nectar and death comes within a year
Falling, struggling to fly,
Fading, flailing, crying, more time
To lick that sweet colour nectar.
But god in his wisdom did not dispense that
He deigned to leave the pleasure with the pain
And now I know where God goes I need not go
Again.
Can She See Me?
And into her sad young eyes,
I saw her searching vainly for her mother,
Knowing in her heart she has gone,
Deep in the mists that their time brought along.
And into her sad blue eyes,
I look around to see if she sees me,
For if she handed gave me a one and only chance,
I'd find her happiness with eyes which gave her my eternal thanks.
And into her sad ageing eyes,
I saw her searching for her red childhood bows,
That she wore in her wild long hair,
That she wore with her happiest gaze,
When she was lively as a child.
I saw her searching vainly for her mother,
Knowing in her heart she has gone,
Deep in the mists that their time brought along.
And into her sad blue eyes,
I look around to see if she sees me,
For if she handed gave me a one and only chance,
I'd find her happiness with eyes which gave her my eternal thanks.
And into her sad ageing eyes,
I saw her searching for her red childhood bows,
That she wore in her wild long hair,
That she wore with her happiest gaze,
When she was lively as a child.
Thursday 3 December 2009
He's a-raindancing
In the dusk a man could be seen from where we were huddling. He had his curtains half-open in his cage, painted a 'white sterile' colour. I was with some of my fellow 'friends-in-adversity', outside in the cooling summer courtyard, littered with plants that needed tending, adorned with cigarette ends, cigarette ends unadorned with lipstick.
"Look! He's doin' his fuckin' rain dance again! Daft cunt," one of my lot noted. She didn't mean to sound uncaring; it was her lifelong way. She was a quick-witted woman.
The man in the curtained cage was listening to something. Whether it came from an external source or from within his brainstormin' flashin' lightnin' mind I could not tell. There may have been no sound whatsoever. Instead he may have believed he was dancing in the stars under six feet of mud to vision or visions, thoughts or a thought or tens of thousands of thoughts, streaming like bits of information into a YouTube video on a computer. But instead of a clear picture, a higgledy-piggledy imagery, flashes of thought, stabbings in the black & white. He may even have been dancing to defy the hundred razor-sharp knives trying to slash at him - never mind dancing for the clouds to give forth their lives in cooling rain. Did he know? Who knows?
Indeed the Devil himself appeared to be in that poor soul as I watched him. I'm pretty sure he was unaware of this ragtag group watching from outside his cage. The Devil playin' the puppeteer, the man doin the Crazy Jane Jig for all to take in n disseminate; some to savour like their Sunday dinner, some to find hard to digest. A disturbing scene I found, watching the 'raindancer'.
Anyway and either way, the ragtag patient army I was a part of, some of them laughed hard and some cynically, resignedly laughed.
"Don't you fucking laugh!" I erupted, kicking a bin that it still hurts me four months later. "Don't you fucking laugh! What's so funny? Fucking Pricks". Equation, I had thought in my mind: man in torment equals laughter equals cruelty and ignorance.
After some curious looks my way (Chinese proverb: 'bin-kicker emanates from rain dancer'), one or two voiced it was wrong laughing AT him, but they were laughing at the whole sorry situation. I didn't and could not dissent. They just dealt with the scene in a different way, a better way than mine maybe.
What tortured souls are hidden from society? What untold tales to disturb by the probers of the mind, horror stories worse than anything the horror movie reels would roll.
The souls with me and surrounding me, trying to run from their breaking minds. "You seen someone draw a head with the top opened up? Or put more brutally but realistically, cleaved open by any means necessary". Nobody is listening now. I drive on anyway. "That's them trying to exorcise themselves. They need relief, 'n' it just can't be given...unless you try to put 'them' to sleep. You decide, you god or gods, you people who follow looking for guidance and meaning."
"Look! He's doin' his fuckin' rain dance again! Daft cunt," one of my lot noted. She didn't mean to sound uncaring; it was her lifelong way. She was a quick-witted woman.
The man in the curtained cage was listening to something. Whether it came from an external source or from within his brainstormin' flashin' lightnin' mind I could not tell. There may have been no sound whatsoever. Instead he may have believed he was dancing in the stars under six feet of mud to vision or visions, thoughts or a thought or tens of thousands of thoughts, streaming like bits of information into a YouTube video on a computer. But instead of a clear picture, a higgledy-piggledy imagery, flashes of thought, stabbings in the black & white. He may even have been dancing to defy the hundred razor-sharp knives trying to slash at him - never mind dancing for the clouds to give forth their lives in cooling rain. Did he know? Who knows?
Indeed the Devil himself appeared to be in that poor soul as I watched him. I'm pretty sure he was unaware of this ragtag group watching from outside his cage. The Devil playin' the puppeteer, the man doin the Crazy Jane Jig for all to take in n disseminate; some to savour like their Sunday dinner, some to find hard to digest. A disturbing scene I found, watching the 'raindancer'.
Anyway and either way, the ragtag patient army I was a part of, some of them laughed hard and some cynically, resignedly laughed.
"Don't you fucking laugh!" I erupted, kicking a bin that it still hurts me four months later. "Don't you fucking laugh! What's so funny? Fucking Pricks". Equation, I had thought in my mind: man in torment equals laughter equals cruelty and ignorance.
After some curious looks my way (Chinese proverb: 'bin-kicker emanates from rain dancer'), one or two voiced it was wrong laughing AT him, but they were laughing at the whole sorry situation. I didn't and could not dissent. They just dealt with the scene in a different way, a better way than mine maybe.
What tortured souls are hidden from society? What untold tales to disturb by the probers of the mind, horror stories worse than anything the horror movie reels would roll.
The souls with me and surrounding me, trying to run from their breaking minds. "You seen someone draw a head with the top opened up? Or put more brutally but realistically, cleaved open by any means necessary". Nobody is listening now. I drive on anyway. "That's them trying to exorcise themselves. They need relief, 'n' it just can't be given...unless you try to put 'them' to sleep. You decide, you god or gods, you people who follow looking for guidance and meaning."
amendments 18 December 2009
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