Self inflicted cancer for housing purposes.

A true story. Not written looking for sympathy but as anyone who knows what I write finding humour in the darkest of places.

Two months ago I found myself about to be homeless. I phoned RBKC (my local authority) asking for emergency housing help.

They asked for details and I explained my medical condition (chronic but manageable) and was told that unless I had dementia or cancer I did not merit housing support. As far as they were concerned I was not their responsibility.

Fast forward 6 weeks: As a result of a consultation with my GP I was referred to St Marys Hospital for tests on a lump (one of four) that might be cancerous. I will know on the 11th of January.

Should it be cancerous will |I be accused of contracting a cancer in order to obtain housing and benefits? Should it be cancer will they then provide me with housing in order that I might 'die peacefully' at home.

Is there a greater power at work here within my framework that has created this potential cancer in order to meet the body's needs.

I am determined that I shall not bow to either RBKC's nor cancers demands and carry on living my way.

It is all a little ironic though. Or is it paradox.

Don't blame 2016.

It really isn't 2016's fault. Blame 1967 and the summer of love. Blame drug fuelled 'rock n roll' lifestyles. blame anything but don't blame something as abstract as a period of time in a modern calendar. Oh, and 200 years ago all those who died in 2016, had they lived then would have been dead long before anyway (except Bowie who was from another planet). Thank modern medicine for keeping the rest of us alive beyond our natural expectancy.

Drugs either kill you or keep you alive.

ON DEATH.

Death is a punctuation mark.
A full stop.
Death states the obvious.
A full stop.
The full stop defines nothing, 
it is merely a printers device.
Let us not dwell on punctuation, 
on the full stop
but let us celebrate that which precedes it...
 
Celebrate the life.

Memory has no punctuation.
No full stop.

CHRISTMAS GREASINGS.

Pig fat on the turkey
goose fat on the spuds
suet in the mince pies
brandy butter on the puds
lard on the sausages
bacon on the lard
butter in the stuffing
butter on the chard
cream on the yule log
cream on the lot
and grandma's full of baileys
octogenarian drunken sot

Brandy in pater
port and lemon in my mum
and kinky cousin Tarquin
injecting vodka up his bum
Dinner now partaken
napkins mashed and soiled
things going very smoothly thanks
now that every-ones well oiled.

polishing silver with a barrister's sock.

A poem to commemorate 'National Cod Latin Day'.



Sitting in the kitchen
underneath the clock
polishing silver with
a barristers sock

Citing habeas corpus
weeping into legal hose
Shouting: "This is cruelty,
as everybody knows.
 .
Her lordship muttered sternly
"Sedebat in lecto cat.
Just polish the bloody fishknives
Sic biscuittus disintegrat".

A divorcees prayer

You will hate me when this is over
But not as much as I will hate you
Yet I will hate you with affection
While you will hate me with spite
Because you really hate yourself
For once loving me

Any chance of a shag?

Regarding the Killer clown craze, I first posted this on my poetry blog in 2009:: The secrets of magic

The secrets of magic

Things started getting out of hand when the dog got run down in the street out side our window. She had watched it happen and when I got in from work she was standing there in tears. I held her for a while then took her to bed.

I’d first seen her in Stanley Park one afternoon when a bunch of us were sitting around with guitars, playing whatever came into our heads and generally fooling about. A number of kids had congregated to catch the mood and catch the sun, she sat away from the others under the shade of a tree; long thick hair the color of new pennies burning against almost white skin. She wore a green summer dress and red Converse.

I knew she was there but not really there until Gus came along in a daze, stood among us and announced Kurt Cobain was dead. For real! Shot himself in the head and was dead! I looked at her then, alone under that tree; tears running black from her eyeliner. I told myself she needed comfort only really it was me who needed her. So I went to her and held her. She sobbed into my white t-shirt.

We practically stayed like that for the rest of the day, talking about Kurt and singing his songs. Then somebody played ‘In Memory of a Free Festival’ on his boom box and after that the only thing to do was go home or someplace else.

She came back to my place.

We ate pizza and listened to Nirvana CD’s while she cried some more. She laughed when I told her she looked like a clown with her make-up running. We kissed before she left me knowing I would see her again.

Soon we were living together and making plans. Sex wasn’t that great but I put that down to anything I could think of except the truth. I wasn’t going anywhere near the truth back then.

After the dog I started to find more ways to make her cry so I could comfort her. During the day I would make up sad stories to tell her at night. And I would buy her eyeliner and mascara, the cheap stuff that ran, and encourage her to use it.
But I should never have told her about the clown.
.
They found her on the sidewalk, crumpled and broken, except for her face, which, undamaged by the 30 foot fall from the window, she’d made up like a clown’s. Bright red mouth – I’d never known her to wear lipstick - and thick black weep lines running from her eyes. She had cropped her hair. Gelled it so it stood up like a fright wig.

Just like Bepo the clown who at my 8th birthday party led me into the cellar to show me the secrets of magic.

The Notting Hill Promise

They primp and preen like birds of paradise
mimic the sounds of endeavour and success
only to lead me to a bower
lined with tinfoil, bindles
coloured straws
and bottle tops.
they talk of synopses and story boards
and wish upon a shooting script

sniff and blow into a napkin from E and O or the Electric

they talk of dialogue in monologue
they talk of accents gravely and acutely
and the real star is always 'ME'.

Their body of work buried under a drift of new blown snow.

A raddled would be rock chick
on hands and knees
in the ladies loo
hoovering up cocaine
from
a piss stained floor remarks:

'I despise you losers who have to work for a living'
as she mentally remortgages 
daddies inheritance
to reinvest in her habit
and somewhere nearby
an imaginary cameraman smears
a pound of Vaseline
on an already forgiving lens.

In the bars they tell me
'it will never happen
you are one of us
and we never succeed.'

And that woman
somewhere between the Priory and oblivion
quotes Raymond Carver and the things we talk about 
when we talk about love
and I misinterpret self interest
for interest
in a real world that for her
no longer exists.

And i gently humiliate myself
through the floorboards of embarrassment
and then despair
and get drunk
and do a line
and join in, start the rotting process

'Material all' I tell myself
in that padded place called denial.

And life has become nothing more than material
for my obituary.

Urinal song.

I love the sound of piss on zinc

Donna's sleepy tales

of rain on Trinidad tin roofs

that she told me as we lay

in a Gloucester park how

she reeked of passion

and coconut oil

The downpour

on the corrugated school bike shed

where Mandy and I

traded tobacco smoke laden kisses

and held our own geography lessons
discovering America

The rusty dutch barn

in which we made hay

and then hasty crop circles

in that hay

and planned al fresco escapades

in the ripening wheat

Come the sun

Of the beach girl

dancing naked

save a transparent plastic mac

the deluge

drumming on the upturned boats

as I drowned in her exclusive proximity

Before realisation that

it was the breaking of our 'summer'

30 years have leached out all but

the salty memory of those monsoon kisses

that creeps up my spine

At the sound of piss on zinc.

Dreaming of tigers. Daddy what's it like to die?

Daddy what's it like to grow old and die?

It is like going to see the tigers.

Imagine it is a lovely sunny day and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

We get into the car and drive to the zoo and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

We get our tickets, you are half price and you say Daddy I want to see the tigers.

Daddy I want to see the tigers.

I tell you that the tigers are at the other side of the zoo but we will get to them eventually.

But on the way we see giraffes and eland
springboks and hippos
chimpanzees and wallabys
sad bears.

And you forget about the tigers.

We see seals and penguins
aardvarks and zebras
macaws and owls.

And you forget about the tigers.

In the insect house a butterfly lands on your arm momentarily and you forget about the tigers.

We see wolves and rabbits
dogfish and catfish
gorillas
ants.

And then we see the tigers and the tigers see us, they have been waiting.
You smile and yawn.

It is a lovely day so we go to sit in the park nearby
lie on our backs looking up at the sky
searching for animal shapes in the clouds.

We close our eyes and drift off to sleep

dreaming of tigers.

Trump is not mad. He is just scared.

Jan Nieupjur writes:

As an amateur alternative psychiatrist I am often asked: 'Is Trump mad?"

The answer is of course no. Trump is not mad, he is a narcissist with an ego the size of Texas. Initially the idea of running for presidential office was planted in his brain by his ego. I doubt very much that even Trump would have thought he would be taken seriously as a contender... He probably saw the whole thing as a short lived attention grabbing stunt.

Donald Trump is a three year old child jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool, pretending to be swimming, screaming inwardly, while hoping someone will fish him out.

Trump is not mad. America is for allowing Trump to get so far out of his depth.

Alphabet rain.

Today I burned my poems
a bonfire of my own vanities
words sent skywards
on vortices of their own hot air's making

Some caught in nearby trees
others falling upon the Westway
the majority fly skyward taunting
a million empyrean chimps shakespearing

at their keyboards.

I imagine abstract condensing
amid cumulus then
falling Burroughs like
as alphabet rain forming
nonsense puddles in foreign fields

Or circling vulture like
over a carcass

A stabbing on Portobello road.

We have had a killing on Portobello Road. A 17 year old was mercilessly stabbed to death by another teenager in broad daylight. The killer killed his victim, killed his own future in the process and killed all hope for the victims family for whom my heart bleeds. The killer killed all hope for his family...How can you live with that. The killer killed any justification for allowing children to discipline themselves.
The killer should be handed a copy of 'Lord of the flies' to read in his cell as should his parents as well as the rest of us.

The reason for the killing, from what I can surmise from talking to kids and locals, is that the poor boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time while the undisciplined children of the neighbourhood went out looking for someone to blame for their miserable lives armed with knives. They picked on him rather than picking on their parents.

I am a step parent of sorts to a 13 year old boy. He hates me because he sees my desire to protect him as a desire to control. If he listened to me he would realise that all I want to do is help him survive this mad world. Survive this mad world in order to do all of the shit he wants to do without getting stabbed.

Stabbed by the kid sitting at the desk next to him.

I do not know the victim or his family to whom I can only offer tears, tears I openly shed on Portobello Road this afternoon surrounded by schoolchildren standing at a loss at the makeshift shrine.

Do not blame the children. This is bad parenting.