Separated by a cigarette paper 4,000 miles thick.

I got a woman said Rusty. An American woman. The only problem is that she is 4,000 miles away.

Thats about the right distance for a woman said tristan

Collaborating in El Camino

In my new found bachelor-hood I have been eating at El Camino in Portobello road, under the Westway, opposite the tented market.

It is the place you hope to expect when feeling low and humming Dwight Yoakam songs and thinking of crossing the border with all the pretty horses.

They have a shelf of Mexican toys to play with if you need to play with a Mexican toy. It is run by nice kids who treat an old man with kindness and tolerance and it;s the right side of inexpensive. you might hear the fuck word but you don't have to pay gordon Ramsay prices to hear it.

Makes me think of Rusty Mcglint and Fluente Maiale: how are those boys, maybe I should give them a call, invite them down for a Taco and a beer and perhaps even invite Tristan too; we are all walking the same road right now.

It is time to collaborate.

Electric Portobello,, Joy, Hope, Grace and Charity.

Lunch at the electric, Portobello Road with Joy and her sisters Hope and grace. My change contained an American cent coin which I have been unable to spend.

I shall give it to Rusty Mcglint the next time we meet.

The girls greeted Charity warmly.

Confiture/comfort

I have just tasted apricot jam again.

Absorbent lint,masking tape and joy.

Joy, a new presence in my life, and although an amateur, an expert at putting comma's in the wrong place, is an excellent nurse with hypnotism skills par excellence and a fine turn of ankle, has agreed to tend to my immediate needs.

boy are my needs immediate.

I met her at the opening party of the International times Archive in east london, she was working the crowd as a strippergram nurse handing out packs of absorbent lint, something new to me as the only kind of lint I knew was the stuff that Babs picked from Rusty's coat as she leant in, whispered endearments and then talked of love.

I told her i was a poet, she asked what stream of conciousness was and i told her i don;t know and don;t want to know and couldn't care less then the ghost of Bukowski walked metaphorically into the room, pissed in the sink, drank all the beer... told us to fuck off.

I woke up with something resembling a hangover and a pack of absorbent lint stuck to my chest with masking tape.

as our american cousins would say: Go figure.

Change/evolution and burlesque at cafe Ravenous

My old sparring partner Rusty Mcglint has changed.

I put this to him the other night at a burlesque show at cafe Ravenous in Portobello road.
Heck no! he said. I aint changed I've evolved.
'I aint the man I was six months or a year ago; not because I changed myself but because shit happens and it affects you. I will be a different Rusty in six months time; I ain't got no control over that, it just happens.'
He went on to tell me:'I met a woman once, Babs was the name, I loved her good and she loved me. I told her straight though; I told her I aint gonna change and she said that was fine and dandy, let's proceed. Then she tried to change me; that got to me and I couldn't cope.'

Babs. Photo: Sasi Langford

'I let her down bad and I deserve the fires of damnation for that.'

'But women do that, they fall in love with potential then try to mould the man into their ideal. If only she had let me evolve I woulda turned into something else pretty fast through osmosis and capilliary love action, through just being close to her spiritually.'

'I ain't proud of my actions but I'm proud of what I have learnt and what I have become... Long may I evolve.'

You know I respect Rusty for that... He is evolving!

I hope Babs can forgive him too.

nurse Caz, Saki and silence

To misquote my old friend Saki; nurse Caz was a good nurse as nurses go and as good nurses go, she went.

I shall not speak of her again.

The Tree

There is a painting, a painting that has always hung in our dining room since my earliest memory.
It is a small painting of a tree, a painting of a small tree. Nothing more than that… A sapling growing in a hedge in an anonymous landscape. It measures twelve inches by eight and is set in a good guilt frame.

I have always imagined that the tree was painted by my father, painted by my father before my birth (my birth that killed him) not far from the house where I was born.
When I imagine that picture now I see it as part of a much larger canvas and in that larger canvas to the left hand side stands a young boy, a twelve year old boy, watching the artist as he captures his subjects; both the tree and the young boy.
The artist is oblivious to the child.
I lost sight of the painting when I became alienated from my mother many years ago, I feared that it was lost to me, that it rested in some bric-a-brac shop in Antwerp or on some strangers wall. Misunderstood.
I have missed that painting dearly for most of my adult life; it was ‘home’. It was the father I killed, painting a tree.
And in my imagination he painted me into a corner.
Last week I saw my sister for the first time in many years, as we were about to part she informed me that she had something of mine in her attic. Mother had given it into her safe keeping for me many years ago.
It was the painting of course.
Thank you Honey.
　

Beat

We often mistake enthusiasm for passion.

In 1963 I went to a party in Chelsea with a good friend who threw shapes in a beat combo when he wasn't throwing off the shapes of his nightmares or shaping up a hangover.

I thought I was a beat poet at the time so could write shit shaped poetry like that

I had bought a new pair of sneakers that day and my bullet wounds were playing up; yeah I hung with Michael X or was it Malcolm?

















I met a girl; an artist, her name was quickly forgotten but I remembered it that night... I was enthusiastic.

She could not take her eyes off my sneakers and I witnessed an idea growing.

I wonder what became of her?

I found the photograph in an old copy of IT.

There was a photograph of a naked girl in that 1960's magazine who was the spitting image of nurse Caz. I confronted her with the image and she soon confessed that it was her mother.

I now know why nurse Caz has a passion for starched white cotton and sensible shoes.













Nurse Caz being hit on by a lipstick lesbian.

Chivalry and Cod Latin.

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

(Even when crying; normally a distasteful sight), as she sat sobbing under a hankerchief tree.

Of course I approached her and offered assistance, a shoulder, and anything else for that matter.

I asked why she cried so publicly. She replied that she wept because she could not reach the hankerchiefs that festooned the tree above her.

I smiled then and reaching up, plucked a starched white flower from above and offered it to her.

She snatched it from my hand, still sobbing. then turned and waved the handkerchief at a man standing in a window of the house opposite. 'I surrender, I surrender.' she screamed.

Moments later the door of the house opened and the most beautiful woman in the world flew into the bastards arms, He then wiped away her tears with a tissue of lies.

Sic biscuittus disintergrat!

Beautiful but smelly

Betjeman, Haidoku and Carol vorderman

Ever since the rather drunken picnic with john Betjeman on hampstead heath I have been a great fan of poetry and have a crack at it myself from time to time.

I am also an avid viewer of countdown repeats (the programme ended for me with the departure of Carol Vorderman) as well as an occasional sudoku do-er. I have tried to combine all three interests with a new verse form.

the Haidoku combines the rigid structure of the Haiku with the numerical content of the Sudoku; there must be three lines containing nine words, the words must be the numbers one to nine with no number repeated. The following is (I think) my best effort to date:

Carol Vorderman

One seven three
four... Six nine two
five. EIGHT!

Tap dancers, surgeons, soap and Frida Kahlo.

I have the hands, said Caz, of a tap dancer, combined with the feet of a surgeon. she made these observations as she watched me turn off the hot tap in my bath with a deft flick of my ankle.

I told her the story of the tap dancers hands.

The soap bubbles were full of her laughter; they burst with joy.

Nurse Caz says that I am as bad as Frida Kahlo; taking photographs of my foot all day long.