Searchers for Francis Lucille look no further!

Dear Fans of Francis Lucille,

Please stop by a little longer than you do.

Take a look around at where Google in its wisdom has brought you in your search for your effervescent Guru.

There are good words here. Wisdom too - if you've got the eyes.

And patience.

Hunt out a gem and if you find it, let me know and be on your merry way to your incomparable French man.

And for those who don't know, you'll find some beautiful Francis here.

And for something that will completely blow your mind, if you let it: Babaji

And finally something from my own dear Guru, posted a couple of days before I met her

Searchers for Francis Lucille look no further!

Dear Fans of Francis Lucille,

Please stop by a little longer than you do.

Take a look around at where Google in its wisdom has brought you in your search for your effervescent Guru.

There are good words here. Wisdom too - if you've got the eyes.

And patience.

Hunt out a gem and if you find it, let me know and be on your merry way to your incomparable French man.

And for those who don't know, you'll find some beautiful Francis here.

And for something that will completely blow your mind, if you let it: Babaji

And finally something from my own dear Guru, posted a couple of days before I met her

Diary of an unborn writer #9

Dubai is falling down.

Not in a slow way. Quite abrupt. We’ve been having a jolly Christmas in the desert – the expats – that’s my family and I and over-bronzed Brits and South Africans they’ve befriended. Dear people. Good people. Making their way in the desert.

The desert defines Dubai. Defines and fulfils it. It’s taken me five years of coming here but finally I see it. The space. Gaps between buildings filled with sand. Sand either side of motorways lined with date palms and floodlights. Space between people. Looseness of connection. A relaxedness. More space for the self. More time for each other.

And the expat kids take it up grandly. They’re crazy. Whiling away hard hours in tax free jobs, earnings flowing into torrents of alcohol, 4x4 desert trips, then holidays skiing in Iran. They take everything this empty town has and give it back hugely to the world.

So the desert fulfils Dubai. There are many who have seen this plot and curse its rapid development. The rate at which towers scrape the ever blue sky. Forests of skyscrapers in all crazy designs mirroring ambition, largesse and most of all greed - the large eyes of prospectors knowing that as long as the development continues folk will be persaded to keep coming, keep building. Onrush and onslaught of celebrity purses and the common cattle following to where the footballers tread. There’s an ugly side here and for a while that’s all I could see until the space seeped through and I began to realise the emptiness – desolateness – of the desert town was its message not a form of abuse (though plenty still do).

The desert fulfils Dubai. Somehow expected it. Wanted it to grow as if to say: have all this, grow all this, desire all of it again, I’ll still be a space with broad enough arms to take your India, Pakistan, Britain, America, China, IBM, CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, Financial Times and warring tribes place them in towers 1 km high and somehow you’ll forget in the cracks and widespaces between concrete dreams that the space holds you, embraces you, allows you to debauch and respect each other. This noise you create confirms how loud my silence rings.

Yes.

The desert fulfils Dubai.

***

I came out here via Istanbul. A hair’s breadth of a missed transfer meant I spent an unexpected night in the ancient city. Although I was put up in a hotel 2 hours outside the city so visiting it and making the connecting flight was not an option. That and I was broke.

The stop was not entirely dry. The food was good and I had been a little adrift of the world news until I viewed six continuous cycles of BBC World and CNN – clicking between channels for variation. It’s a strange pair of goggles with which to view the world.

And there was a lady. Stunning. Short black hair with flecks of grey like she’d undergone some trauma. A turk, she’d spent the last year in Rotterdam studying architecture. Had a visa fuck up and was thrown in a tower block of asylum seekers whores and families of 16 in 2 bedroom apartments.

She had those devastating Turkish eyes that glow as if from beneath a veil.

Yasmin the Turk.

She also had scratches on both hands and a bandage covering her left wrist. I was worried about her. She explained the bandage covered a new tattoo, pulling it back to reveal a picture of a snake that had swallowed a baby elephant in the fashion of The Little Prince – a child’s story of fitting loneliness and longing for a lady lost from home and it seems in a little adrift from the little planet. Retreating to dreamland was the safest place to be.

The scratches, incidentally, were from her cat that kept biting her. Somehow didn’t fit.

As a young man and a young woman would do when left alone in a hotel room, we fucked.

At times it felt like she was an insect as she clawed at my face and sides, though she was a peaceful little bug.

It felt good. Serene. Two people who have nothing to give each other but a sudden emotional bond with a safety valve of never seeing the other again. I'm not being cynical, the immediacy was beautiful.

***

And then on to Dubai where the building had stopped. A hectic thrust and pace of development has astonished me every time I’ve been. Swarms of workers in blue overalls – like an orchestra conducted by vast yellow metal cranes. The little black dots of their heads no doubt beaded by sweat as they worked round the clock in up to forty degree heat to fulfil the speculators dreams and most of all not stop before people could draw breath.

But now the breath has come. A deep inhale and the building has stopped. Dead. The workers have gone – back to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Phillipines. Money’s dried up – overborrowed and hysterically spent.

A city built to house generations of sun seekers can barely fill one tenth of its rooms.

And for a second there we really thought it could escape. Do what Florida, Wall St, today’s credit market could not do and outpace the resources that underpinned it.
A relief to know that gravity still holds sway. We’re not quite ready for intergalactic speculation, though I’m sure there are a few around with the dollar to push worlds around if they choose.

Which they do.

Imagine if one of them is Buddha. I think we’re going to be OK.

Diary of an unborn writer #9

Dubai is falling down.

Not in a slow way. Quite abrupt. We’ve been having a jolly Christmas in the desert – the expats – that’s my family and I and over-bronzed Brits and South Africans they’ve befriended. Dear people. Good people. Making their way in the desert.

The desert defines Dubai. Defines and fulfils it. It’s taken me five years of coming here but finally I see it. The space. Gaps between buildings filled with sand. Sand either side of motorways lined with date palms and floodlights. Space between people. Looseness of connection. A relaxedness. More space for the self. More time for each other.

And the expat kids take it up grandly. They’re crazy. Whiling away hard hours in tax free jobs, earnings flowing into torrents of alcohol, 4x4 desert trips, then holidays skiing in Iran. They take everything this empty town has and give it back hugely to the world.

So the desert fulfils Dubai. There are many who have seen this plot and curse its rapid development. The rate at which towers scrape the ever blue sky. Forests of skyscrapers in all crazy designs mirroring ambition, largesse and most of all greed - the large eyes of prospectors knowing that as long as the development continues folk will be persaded to keep coming, keep building. Onrush and onslaught of celebrity purses and the common cattle following to where the footballers tread. There’s an ugly side here and for a while that’s all I could see until the space seeped through and I began to realise the emptiness – desolateness – of the desert town was its message not a form of abuse (though plenty still do).

The desert fulfils Dubai. Somehow expected it. Wanted it to grow as if to say: have all this, grow all this, desire all of it again, I’ll still be a space with broad enough arms to take your India, Pakistan, Britain, America, China, IBM, CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC, Financial Times and warring tribes place them in towers 1 km high and somehow you’ll forget in the cracks and widespaces between concrete dreams that the space holds you, embraces you, allows you to debauch and respect each other. This noise you create confirms how loud my silence rings.

Yes.

The desert fulfils Dubai.

***

I came out here via Istanbul. A hair’s breadth of a missed transfer meant I spent an unexpected night in the ancient city. Although I was put up in a hotel 2 hours outside the city so visiting it and making the connecting flight was not an option. That and I was broke.

The stop was not entirely dry. The food was good and I had been a little adrift of the world news until I viewed six continuous cycles of BBC World and CNN – clicking between channels for variation. It’s a strange pair of goggles with which to view the world.

And there was a lady. Stunning. Short black hair with flecks of grey like she’d undergone some trauma. A turk, she’d spent the last year in Rotterdam studying architecture. Had a visa fuck up and was thrown in a tower block of asylum seekers whores and families of 16 in 2 bedroom apartments.

She had those devastating Turkish eyes that glow as if from beneath a veil.

Yasmin the Turk.

She also had scratches on both hands and a bandage covering her left wrist. I was worried about her. She explained the bandage covered a new tattoo, pulling it back to reveal a picture of a snake that had swallowed a baby elephant in the fashion of The Little Prince – a child’s story of fitting loneliness and longing for a lady lost from home and it seems in a little adrift from the little planet. Retreating to dreamland was the safest place to be.

The scratches, incidentally, were from her cat that kept biting her. Somehow didn’t fit.

As a young man and a young woman would do when left alone in a hotel room, we fucked.

At times it felt like she was an insect as she clawed at my face and sides, though she was a peaceful little bug.

It felt good. Serene. Two people who have nothing to give each other but a sudden emotional bond with a safety valve of never seeing the other again. I'm not being cynical, the immediacy was beautiful.

***

And then on to Dubai where the building had stopped. A hectic thrust and pace of development has astonished me every time I’ve been. Swarms of workers in blue overalls – like an orchestra conducted by vast yellow metal cranes. The little black dots of their heads no doubt beaded by sweat as they worked round the clock in up to forty degree heat to fulfil the speculators dreams and most of all not stop before people could draw breath.

But now the breath has come. A deep inhale and the building has stopped. Dead. The workers have gone – back to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Phillipines. Money’s dried up – overborrowed and hysterically spent.

A city built to house generations of sun seekers can barely fill one tenth of its rooms.

And for a second there we really thought it could escape. Do what Florida, Wall St, today’s credit market could not do and outpace the resources that underpinned it.
A relief to know that gravity still holds sway. We’re not quite ready for intergalactic speculation, though I’m sure there are a few around with the dollar to push worlds around if they choose.

Which they do.

Imagine if one of them is Buddha. I think we’re going to be OK.

Gangs are getting younger and more violent, Met chief warns

Are we listening?

Gangs are getting younger and more violent, Met chief warns

Are we listening?

Kali

The Goddess Kali came to London

Daggered teeth and acid tongue

Mourned the streets for their depravity

Innocence dazed, tore out its lungs

Fire spewed along Embankment

Rain of hell across the Strand

So to show the poison

That lives in every man

Her blade chopped and mashed to pulp

Heads that tried but could not speak

Surprised that Lady Fate should damn

Their commuter shift next week

Kali

The Goddess Kali came to London

Daggered teeth and acid tongue

Mourned the streets for their depravity

Innocence dazed, tore out its lungs

Fire spewed along Embankment

Rain of hell across the Strand

So to show the poison

That lives in every man

Her blade chopped and mashed to pulp

Heads that tried but could not speak

Surprised that Lady Fate should damn

Their commuter shift next week

Diary of an unborn writer #8

Green seats on yellow trains and rain runs down the window pane...

On the way home from Rotterdam where I've been to see Xavier Rudd - a bearded Australian hippy man who doubles as an international shaman.

Playing guitar (mostly slide) drums and didgereedoo, he kicks off with techno and a bass blast on the didge that shakes the chest of each of us there.

United in a single note - the crowd is primed.

As he blows and bangs and slides his way around fretwork he's making shapes with his hands. Animal shapes like snakes and buffalo horns - the way the old shamans would to call an animal spirit to guide, lead, empower and flow through them.

He doesn't need to play music anymore, just express that sprit as it flows through manifesting as hymns for the Earth and love of good people.

An exceptional beautiful man.

And you can feel it too. That night I dreamed of snakes and buffalo, flowing through expressing through my days.

He ends the night alone holding a stick high above his head. On one end is a dream catcher, the other two eagle feathers.

He speaks aloud a poem "while polar bears still give birth to their arctic young" (I'm paraphrasing). And none if the assembled moves an inch.

I've been watching with Evelyne beside me. She's found the crowd a little much. We leave, collect our coats and out into cold December rain. Heading for the station I'm thinking I could get used to this one.

We kiss goodbye.

Diary of an unborn writer #8

Green seats on yellow trains and rain runs down the window pane...

On the way home from Rotterdam where I've been to see Xavier Rudd - a bearded Australian hippy man who doubles as an international shaman.

Playing guitar (mostly slide) drums and didgereedoo, he kicks off with techno and a bass blast on the didge that shakes the chest of each of us there.

United in a single note - the crowd is primed.

As he blows and bangs and slides his way around fretwork he's making shapes with his hands. Animal shapes like snakes and buffalo horns - the way the old shamans would to call an animal spirit to guide, lead, empower and flow through them.

He doesn't need to play music anymore, just express that sprit as it flows through manifesting as hymns for the Earth and love of good people.

An exceptional beautiful man.

And you can feel it too. That night I dreamed of snakes and buffalo, flowing through expressing through my days.

He ends the night alone holding a stick high above his head. On one end is a dream catcher, the other two eagle feathers.

He speaks aloud a poem "while polar bears still give birth to their arctic young" (I'm paraphrasing). And none if the assembled moves an inch.

I've been watching with Evelyne beside me. She's found the crowd a little much. We leave, collect our coats and out into cold December rain. Heading for the station I'm thinking I could get used to this one.

We kiss goodbye.

Diary of an unborn writer #7

All my stories just now are relating to perfection and death

Diary of an unborn writer #7

All my stories just now are relating to perfection and death

Diary of an unborn writer #6

Then it became OK between us.

Settled down.

Mute loneliness became our accepted barrier, knowing we could not breach it anywhere so we became easy, patient.

And for the first time I didn't move.

Enjoyed her company. Stopped trying to be the perfect couple, or love like the perfect man and gradually the boundaries softened.

Sex was the first to ripen. Halting fits, nowhere near the realms of climax yielded to soft, mellow orgasms - the kind of thunder quake you catch at the end of melting summer breeze if you're sly enough to witness it.

And this woman - never lacking aesthetically - began to glow in my eyes. A quiet companion, indefatiguable. The depths had not been plumbed and excitement was easily found elsewhere but perhaps our ideas of love had been misplaced anyway.

The easy times gave way to a deeply devoted peace. Acceptance of her became like a realisation of the gift she was.

Some angels speak in secrets, hers was a speech plain less refined.

She'd tell it like it was and the music of it grated, then moulded, made me the man I have become.

Not better, but different. Moulded by gratitude of her.

She died a year ago, next Tuesday.

Car crash - could have happened to anybody.

Diary of an unborn writer #6

Then it became OK between us.

Settled down.

Mute loneliness became our accepted barrier, knowing we could not breach it anywhere so we became easy, patient.

And for the first time I didn't move.

Enjoyed her company. Stopped trying to be the perfect couple, or love like the perfect man and gradually the boundaries softened.

Sex was the first to ripen. Halting fits, nowhere near the realms of climax yielded to soft, mellow orgasms - the kind of thunder quake you catch at the end of melting summer breeze if you're sly enough to witness it.

And this woman - never lacking aesthetically - began to glow in my eyes. A quiet companion, indefatiguable. The depths had not been plumbed and excitement was easily found elsewhere but perhaps our ideas of love had been misplaced anyway.

The easy times gave way to a deeply devoted peace. Acceptance of her became like a realisation of the gift she was.

Some angels speak in secrets, hers was a speech plain less refined.

She'd tell it like it was and the music of it grated, then moulded, made me the man I have become.

Not better, but different. Moulded by gratitude of her.

She died a year ago, next Tuesday.

Car crash - could have happened to anybody.

Mukti

Muktananda walked the Earth

And cried and prayed

The Red man's song on his lips

And California drawl like a desert

Pouring into your lap

He arrived

Prayed

Poured

And went

We were left dazed and horrified

Could California speak so sweet?

Or a feather so coarse?

He was gone

So we didn't know

Mukti

Muktananda walked the Earth

And cried and prayed

The Red man's song on his lips

And California drawl like a desert

Pouring into your lap

He arrived

Prayed

Poured

And went

We were left dazed and horrified

Could California speak so sweet?

Or a feather so coarse?

He was gone

So we didn't know

Love #2

Love kept it slyly for a time

Rendered me complete

Flaying acids pierce this tongue

The better to lick you sweet

Love #2

Love kept it slyly for a time

Rendered me complete

Flaying acids pierce this tongue

The better to lick you sweet

Love you shaded greatly

But I never saw you looking

You had me with a stench

That hid my better knowing

You gave me to the thieves

They did not want best from me

You met me with a laugh

And blessed me with your knee

Love you shaded greatly

But I never saw you looking

You had me with a stench

That hid my better knowing

You gave me to the thieves

They did not want best from me

You met me with a laugh

And blessed me with your knee

Larch

Sing a song of Christmas

Stick your penny in with mine

We'll sing for all we haven't done

For which we did not die

Rainbow on ruins yet to fall

Gold raindrops from the sky

Mother's blessing as a curse

Before we wonder why

You've gone again

Not to return

At least in this soft shape

See you in another time

Another startled scape

I'll know you with a haunted look

Your laughter dry and thin

Your eyes like worlds that found themselves

At the dusk day could not bring


(Red in them somehow reflected in the black)

Larch

Sing a song of Christmas

Stick your penny in with mine

We'll sing for all we haven't done

For which we did not die

Rainbow on ruins yet to fall

Gold raindrops from the sky

Mother's blessing as a curse

Before we wonder why

You've gone again

Not to return

At least in this soft shape

See you in another time

Another startled scape

I'll know you with a haunted look

Your laughter dry and thin

Your eyes like worlds that found themselves

At the dusk day could not bring


(Red in them somehow reflected in the black)

Krishna

His was a song that knew no words

Lifting and fulfilling itself with each note

Flute on lips and eyes twinkling like sapphires

Blue skin rapt with the passing breeze

Cheeks raised to the irridescent melody

Each time his tongue touched the reed

Another universe was born.

Krishna

His was a song that knew no words

Lifting and fulfilling itself with each note

Flute on lips and eyes twinkling like sapphires

Blue skin rapt with the passing breeze

Cheeks raised to the irridescent melody

Each time his tongue touched the reed

Another universe was born.

Dusk grew a tender purple

A note was played by the wind chime on the veranda

Warm wind releasing the day’s heat swept up from the land

Away to our left the just set sun glowed above mountain tops

There’s Hesq, settled in the wicker rocking chair

Glass of vin rouge lovingly held between his two middle fingers

Its bowl moving gently with the chair

Three yards away I leaning against the veranda fence, one foot up against it,

Looking down at the floor, watching light-faded beetles bump into my shoe

Turn around find another away in the floor board cracks.

We’ve been finding other ways ourselves but finally made it here

Two roamers contemplating the path bewilderedly followed

Glad that it should reach this sunset lay-by

There’s really not much to say

Dusk grew a tender purple

A note was played by the wind chime on the veranda

Warm wind releasing the day’s heat swept up from the land

Away to our left the just set sun glowed above mountain tops

There’s Hesq, settled in the wicker rocking chair

Glass of vin rouge lovingly held between his two middle fingers

Its bowl moving gently with the chair

Three yards away I leaning against the veranda fence, one foot up against it,

Looking down at the floor, watching light-faded beetles bump into my shoe

Turn around find another away in the floor board cracks.

We’ve been finding other ways ourselves but finally made it here

Two roamers contemplating the path bewilderedly followed

Glad that it should reach this sunset lay-by

There’s really not much to say

Diary of an unborn writer #5

A scratchy lo-fi punk number (probably without a bass guitar):

So what if I ate

Your precious last potato

So what if I ate

Your last can of sardines

So what if we had

Awkward sex that night when we were drunk

That what lovers do

When they’re called flatmates

I've been quite lucky with flastmates. I’m living now with a dear two who are set to be engaged. Luckily there’s been no sex between us though I am privy to their nightly gyrations through the oh-too-thin wall of our flat.

I thought I’d have my revenge when Zuza came over from Prague for a long weekend – a noisier hen you will not find – but somehow the bastards were sleeping. Damn them, but well done Zuza for stopping by, hope I’ll see her again some time.

Suzanne and Jens – the soon-to-be-weds – are like gems from Zeus’s harvest. Living in Amsterdam would have been a grimy hell had it not been for their warm and total assistance with anything I need. Job searches, paper work, food and money.

Suzanne even bought me a speaker set for Sinta Klaas – an early Dutch Christmas - because she knew how much I was upset by having to listen to Sufjan Stephens through a tinny laptop. Perhaps she overestimated my grief, but with twin 30W speakers and a kickingsub woofer, I can see how my old life grated.

Suzanne's only vice is the oppresiveness of her charity and sometimes, after a breakfast and smoothie delivered to me in bed, followed by tea, I feel a little like Lenny's mouse from Of Mice and Men. Such is the curse of living with a woman of spotless nature. Dependable and devoted, I love her like a closest sister and judge her just the same.

Jens is her fiancée. A German of considerable stature, we have completely nothing in common though I’ve never known such mute warmth. We engage each other with stories of drinking episodes or conversations about hot women. His luxuries are James Bond and video games and he makes an elegant simplicity out of loving them. I have never known anyone to laugh so hard at the Simpsons or to be so captivated by explosions.

A chef at a local hotel, I’ll occasionally come home to find pork chop and a dozen vegetables thrust in front of me and firm insistence that I eat.

These are good people with which I live, not least because they’ve taught me Northern European standards of house keeping. I now wash up with clockwork integrity and hang up my laundry the day it’s finished in the washing machine.

It is certain my habits have changed.

Two and a little bit years ago, I received a phone call from Thomas – a less elegantly clean German – calling all flatmates home to take on the kitchen.

There – in a scene that made Withnail & I look like Good Housekeeping - we found pie gravy on the walls, pasta-coagulated mould in the sink and green fur lining the bowls of several broken red wine glasses. Thomas had been right to call for the infantry and in keeping with the times, we decided to smoke a joint to prepare ourselves for the cleaning ordeal. Don’t recall how it got clean either.

It was a time when life was a separation between endless outdoor parties, I think I entertained three simultaneous lady friends, ecstasy charged our veins and red wine was our morning tea. We were also experimenting with seeds that contained an organic equivalent of LSA, that could be bought from the Head House across the street and amongst the pasta and pie gravy grime was apparatus of extract DMT – the chemical the body releases when you die.

I began to weep and welt through the mistress heavy month

Veins span chemically diffuse becoming rusty

Brain expanded to a pop

Heart wrecked for no one else

Drugs made this one a shell

Irrecognisable

Diary of an unborn writer #5

A scratchy lo-fi punk number (probably without a bass guitar):

So what if I ate

Your precious last potato

So what if I ate

Your last can of sardines

So what if we had

Awkward sex that night when we were drunk

That what lovers do

When they’re called flatmates

I've been quite lucky with flastmates. I’m living now with a dear two who are set to be engaged. Luckily there’s been no sex between us though I am privy to their nightly gyrations through the oh-too-thin wall of our flat.

I thought I’d have my revenge when Zuza came over from Prague for a long weekend – a noisier hen you will not find – but somehow the bastards were sleeping. Damn them, but well done Zuza for stopping by, hope I’ll see her again some time.

Suzanne and Jens – the soon-to-be-weds – are like gems from Zeus’s harvest. Living in Amsterdam would have been a grimy hell had it not been for their warm and total assistance with anything I need. Job searches, paper work, food and money.

Suzanne even bought me a speaker set for Sinta Klaas – an early Dutch Christmas - because she knew how much I was upset by having to listen to Sufjan Stephens through a tinny laptop. Perhaps she overestimated my grief, but with twin 30W speakers and a kickingsub woofer, I can see how my old life grated.

Suzanne's only vice is the oppresiveness of her charity and sometimes, after a breakfast and smoothie delivered to me in bed, followed by tea, I feel a little like Lenny's mouse from Of Mice and Men. Such is the curse of living with a woman of spotless nature. Dependable and devoted, I love her like a closest sister and judge her just the same.

Jens is her fiancée. A German of considerable stature, we have completely nothing in common though I’ve never known such mute warmth. We engage each other with stories of drinking episodes or conversations about hot women. His luxuries are James Bond and video games and he makes an elegant simplicity out of loving them. I have never known anyone to laugh so hard at the Simpsons or to be so captivated by explosions.

A chef at a local hotel, I’ll occasionally come home to find pork chop and a dozen vegetables thrust in front of me and firm insistence that I eat.

These are good people with which I live, not least because they’ve taught me Northern European standards of house keeping. I now wash up with clockwork integrity and hang up my laundry the day it’s finished in the washing machine.

It is certain my habits have changed.

Two and a little bit years ago, I received a phone call from Thomas – a less elegantly clean German – calling all flatmates home to take on the kitchen.

There – in a scene that made Withnail & I look like Good Housekeeping - we found pie gravy on the walls, pasta-coagulated mould in the sink and green fur lining the bowls of several broken red wine glasses. Thomas had been right to call for the infantry and in keeping with the times, we decided to smoke a joint to prepare ourselves for the cleaning ordeal. Don’t recall how it got clean either.

It was a time when life was a separation between endless outdoor parties, I think I entertained three simultaneous lady friends, ecstasy charged our veins and red wine was our morning tea. We were also experimenting with seeds that contained an organic equivalent of LSA, that could be bought from the Head House across the street and amongst the pasta and pie gravy grime was apparatus of extract DMT – the chemical the body releases when you die.

I began to weep and welt through the mistress heavy month

Veins span chemically diffuse becoming rusty

Brain expanded to a pop

Heart wrecked for no one else

Drugs made this one a shell

Irrecognisable

Diary of an unborn writer #4

This young man

He played wise

Went to market

To make a life

Fashioned himself

With suit and tie

Now he's dead

By 35

(and he didn’t even need a coffin, stopped living long before the undertaker came)

A little epitaph for the gentleman in the last entry and perhaps for me. Forays into the world of work have so far been unencouraging, which is inconvenient because I like to eat.

The brief history goes:

In my final year of study there grew a tenacious civic nihilism, that recognised that life consisted in many fine things but couldn't see many of these about me. I'd spent years railing the capitalist order and this was coupled with the observation that almost all of my peers were debasing themselves in the rush to get an honest career.

Seriously, I know I'm a dreamer but this was appalling. You've got beautiful shiny ones perverted and contorted to making grey-faced excuses for a world they don’t understand.

At the time I was in the company of some gentlemen and considered ourselves enlightened. Actually, we believed the bohemian counter-revolution had begun in our brown-carpeted flat on Clerk St, Edinburgh. The communist manifesto sat in the toilet, art of the flat's inhabitants was on the walls. We would entertain weekly with outrageous drunken parties and never received a return invitation.

But there was something we were driving at, a shock to show the rest what they had missed. In the event they found us mostly offensive and retreated to their career paths. We're talking drama students turning credit analysts. Diamond beauties turning into dense clay sods - the better to be moulded.

We were spinning the kind of philosophy that drives poets to madness and greatness and for the majority it was decided we should be stopped. We became social outcasts, appearance at events almost considered a rebuke. And rightly, we were offensive. How do you contain an enlightened being when he's so keen to show how lowly you are. The social retribution was evidence in our eyes that the mustard seed of truth sprouted more willingly in our hearts and gave us cause to sprinkle it more.

Consolation of dire consequences you could call it.

So, political aspirations were put on hold. No, wait. I gave them a go, spending six months with the Scottish Green Party where I dribbled out an article on social enterprise. I would sit in a redundant gloomy alcove of Holyrood - a twisted concrete labrynth like the Sim City Arcologies that were considered victories - feigning an economic stupor while I researched apocalyptic predictions of 2012 and the best uses of Amethyst crystal.

My passion for alternative healing was born. I loved it because it was peaceful, presented an alternative to a world that I'd seen into too deeply for comfort and didn't involve drugs and alcohol which by that time had had quite their wicked way with me. Winding hands through an aura's psychic debris and soothing bruised emotions, it seemed that this was to be my Great Work. That 99% of the world thought it was barmy was more tantalising than I was prepared to admit at the time.

This ensued my first brush with Mr Market and His Method. Conclusion: He doesn't like Reiki.

Six months later and in a pit of despair about how this wounded soul could rub two coppers together without feeling like tw’penny whore, I was approached by a six foot tall, just as wide, Icelandic man with a short-cropped beard that went the name of Inky.

Mr Market had decided to take me by a firmer hand.

The ploy was to supply Reiki and massages for people in their hotel rooms - a wheeze no one had tried on a wide scale in Edinburgh at the time. Inky was the money and I was the gopher, securing deals and networking with therapists to make sure we had a steady supply. In the way of green-jacketed battalions in 1914, we thought we would be millionaires by Christmas.
Somehow the monetary onslaught didn’t sit too well with me. After a month I was slumped in a hotel lobby, knees held tight against an aching body, minutes after closing a deal and wondering why it didn’t feel too good.

It seemed that Mr Market had decided to teach me in six months what it usually takes a 25 year career culminating in divorce, suicide or unsavoury relations with your children’s au pair. Gratitude, however, has been a little slow in coming.

Inky, by the way, was a master of his sullied field. A ‘bottle a day man’ into his forties, he was a bulldozer of a businessman. He had a way of getting people to do precisely as he wanted and made them feel like he was doing them a favour. Every deal simply went his way. It was enough for him to wish it. It was as though those years spent on the bottle had submerged a quiet power, which now unleashed, was as devastating as he willed it to be. Luckily he was a beautiful man, making an art form of monetary prowess, and the world was spared the effects of what might have been a terrible rage.

His trophy wife was Freyja, who had survived the depths of alcoholism with him, herself putting it away like a tank. Now an artist, she'd have the oven on and kettle boiling the second I stepped through the door. Even after the collapse they remained dear friends. I made it a point to see them for a fortnightly breakfast.

To fill in the chronology, I got by as a care worker for a 21 year old named Stephan who suffered from cerebral palsy. A gem of a boy, I thought I was pretty good at the work, although my boss hated me. Couldn't understand why I didn’t make endless conversation with the guy while he was watching TV or playing his Playstation3 and filing suggestions to do otherwise in the garbage can.

OK - I didn't really make the suggestions too forcefully. I suggested walks when it was a rainy day and the cinema when I knew he didn’t have any money; and spent the hours he spent electronically entertained reading, writing, meditating and sleeping and getting paid £7.50 an hour for the privilege. It really was a fantastic job.

And there were a couple of moments each day, driving back from school or hosing him in the shower when we'd be singing along to Queen or Newton Falconer and I'd put my cultural cynic aside and enjoy the bliss these songs were giving him, start shouting the lyrics and make my voice go funny in the electonic segments, which caused him to roar with laughter.

In fact, some of the funniest moments of my life were when I was hauling shit from his arse with a rubber begloved hand as he sat suspended in a sling above the toilet.

So the boss got in the way. Got upset and started poisoning Stephan's mind against me. It was really quite sick. The guy's attitude completely hardened and my last months were spent trying to serve a man who didn't want to be served. Finally understood something of the pains of my mother, and a number of despairing lady friends.

So trust broke down and with it any capacity to do the job. I feel sorry for the boss though. She genuinely didn't understand. The frustration of ignorance taken out on the educated Englishman where, in this wild and rugged North, it was customary for him not to be understood.

I play this role as an innocent victim, but I knew I was driving her crazy and knew just as well that I was powerless to do anything about it. My facial angelicism has long been seen as a mocking wall of silence. I didn't say a thing and irritated her beyond redemption.

Just like this ball hanging in the blackness upon which we take step. Our favoured prayer is to scream into the void and confuse its silent reply that we're not shouting loud enough.

I think Mr Market is a shouting man, soon to be submerged by Mother Gaia.

And, man, won't He then know the meaning of roar.

Diary of an unborn writer #4

This young man

He played wise

Went to market

To make a life

Fashioned himself

With suit and tie

Now he's dead

By 35

(and he didn’t even need a coffin, stopped living long before the undertaker came)

A little epitaph for the gentleman in the last entry and perhaps for me. Forays into the world of work have so far been unencouraging, which is inconvenient because I like to eat.

The brief history goes:

In my final year of study there grew a tenacious civic nihilism, that recognised that life consisted in many fine things but couldn't see many of these about me. I'd spent years railing the capitalist order and this was coupled with the observation that almost all of my peers were debasing themselves in the rush to get an honest career.

Seriously, I know I'm a dreamer but this was appalling. You've got beautiful shiny ones perverted and contorted to making grey-faced excuses for a world they don’t understand.

At the time I was in the company of some gentlemen and considered ourselves enlightened. Actually, we believed the bohemian counter-revolution had begun in our brown-carpeted flat on Clerk St, Edinburgh. The communist manifesto sat in the toilet, art of the flat's inhabitants was on the walls. We would entertain weekly with outrageous drunken parties and never received a return invitation.

But there was something we were driving at, a shock to show the rest what they had missed. In the event they found us mostly offensive and retreated to their career paths. We're talking drama students turning credit analysts. Diamond beauties turning into dense clay sods - the better to be moulded.

We were spinning the kind of philosophy that drives poets to madness and greatness and for the majority it was decided we should be stopped. We became social outcasts, appearance at events almost considered a rebuke. And rightly, we were offensive. How do you contain an enlightened being when he's so keen to show how lowly you are. The social retribution was evidence in our eyes that the mustard seed of truth sprouted more willingly in our hearts and gave us cause to sprinkle it more.

Consolation of dire consequences you could call it.

So, political aspirations were put on hold. No, wait. I gave them a go, spending six months with the Scottish Green Party where I dribbled out an article on social enterprise. I would sit in a redundant gloomy alcove of Holyrood - a twisted concrete labrynth like the Sim City Arcologies that were considered victories - feigning an economic stupor while I researched apocalyptic predictions of 2012 and the best uses of Amethyst crystal.

My passion for alternative healing was born. I loved it because it was peaceful, presented an alternative to a world that I'd seen into too deeply for comfort and didn't involve drugs and alcohol which by that time had had quite their wicked way with me. Winding hands through an aura's psychic debris and soothing bruised emotions, it seemed that this was to be my Great Work. That 99% of the world thought it was barmy was more tantalising than I was prepared to admit at the time.

This ensued my first brush with Mr Market and His Method. Conclusion: He doesn't like Reiki.

Six months later and in a pit of despair about how this wounded soul could rub two coppers together without feeling like tw’penny whore, I was approached by a six foot tall, just as wide, Icelandic man with a short-cropped beard that went the name of Inky.

Mr Market had decided to take me by a firmer hand.

The ploy was to supply Reiki and massages for people in their hotel rooms - a wheeze no one had tried on a wide scale in Edinburgh at the time. Inky was the money and I was the gopher, securing deals and networking with therapists to make sure we had a steady supply. In the way of green-jacketed battalions in 1914, we thought we would be millionaires by Christmas.
Somehow the monetary onslaught didn’t sit too well with me. After a month I was slumped in a hotel lobby, knees held tight against an aching body, minutes after closing a deal and wondering why it didn’t feel too good.

It seemed that Mr Market had decided to teach me in six months what it usually takes a 25 year career culminating in divorce, suicide or unsavoury relations with your children’s au pair. Gratitude, however, has been a little slow in coming.

Inky, by the way, was a master of his sullied field. A ‘bottle a day man’ into his forties, he was a bulldozer of a businessman. He had a way of getting people to do precisely as he wanted and made them feel like he was doing them a favour. Every deal simply went his way. It was enough for him to wish it. It was as though those years spent on the bottle had submerged a quiet power, which now unleashed, was as devastating as he willed it to be. Luckily he was a beautiful man, making an art form of monetary prowess, and the world was spared the effects of what might have been a terrible rage.

His trophy wife was Freyja, who had survived the depths of alcoholism with him, herself putting it away like a tank. Now an artist, she'd have the oven on and kettle boiling the second I stepped through the door. Even after the collapse they remained dear friends. I made it a point to see them for a fortnightly breakfast.

To fill in the chronology, I got by as a care worker for a 21 year old named Stephan who suffered from cerebral palsy. A gem of a boy, I thought I was pretty good at the work, although my boss hated me. Couldn't understand why I didn’t make endless conversation with the guy while he was watching TV or playing his Playstation3 and filing suggestions to do otherwise in the garbage can.

OK - I didn't really make the suggestions too forcefully. I suggested walks when it was a rainy day and the cinema when I knew he didn’t have any money; and spent the hours he spent electronically entertained reading, writing, meditating and sleeping and getting paid £7.50 an hour for the privilege. It really was a fantastic job.

And there were a couple of moments each day, driving back from school or hosing him in the shower when we'd be singing along to Queen or Newton Falconer and I'd put my cultural cynic aside and enjoy the bliss these songs were giving him, start shouting the lyrics and make my voice go funny in the electonic segments, which caused him to roar with laughter.

In fact, some of the funniest moments of my life were when I was hauling shit from his arse with a rubber begloved hand as he sat suspended in a sling above the toilet.

So the boss got in the way. Got upset and started poisoning Stephan's mind against me. It was really quite sick. The guy's attitude completely hardened and my last months were spent trying to serve a man who didn't want to be served. Finally understood something of the pains of my mother, and a number of despairing lady friends.

So trust broke down and with it any capacity to do the job. I feel sorry for the boss though. She genuinely didn't understand. The frustration of ignorance taken out on the educated Englishman where, in this wild and rugged North, it was customary for him not to be understood.

I play this role as an innocent victim, but I knew I was driving her crazy and knew just as well that I was powerless to do anything about it. My facial angelicism has long been seen as a mocking wall of silence. I didn't say a thing and irritated her beyond redemption.

Just like this ball hanging in the blackness upon which we take step. Our favoured prayer is to scream into the void and confuse its silent reply that we're not shouting loud enough.

I think Mr Market is a shouting man, soon to be submerged by Mother Gaia.

And, man, won't He then know the meaning of roar.

He

He’ll make you scrambled eggs

Stir fries of all expensive tastes

Take you for moonlit walks

Ask you nicely about your day

He’ll make sure you never need to worry about a thing

For every need supplied with wry smile or pleasant grin

He’ll say to you the words that are convenient to hear

Such as how you make him laugh

Or how this clip sits well within your hair

He’ll kiss you with half curled lips

Stroke your skin with plastic thumb

Lick your skin with woollen tongue

Does he thrill you once he’s done?

You’ll be supplied and satisfied

No need to wonder what’s going on

The height of satisfaction

None of the daring, gasping sun

None of the shine that burns your skin

Makes you hurt, makes you cry

None of the love that shakes your heart

That you shy from as you said goodbye

None of the winter like it felt those weeks we were apart

None of the summer when you came back again

None of the thorns we threw like darts

Your love with him is comfortable

Like an IKEA sofa bed

For you no more four poster

Or the lover’s well-spilt blood

With him the sky is out of reach

The ground you’ll firmly stay

Let cold Earth comfort you

Your wings are tucked away

If you had seen the poet dance

The hunter kill his prey

Seen mastership in the twinkling eye

You’ll know from him it’s far away

The poet hurts and bruises

Can’t take every stinging dart

Can;t say to you what you want to hear

Though it breaks his strangled heart

He can love and gush upon you

Make you dream and spark and flower

Doesn’t wish so much for wilting

Carries the pain that love endures

Be happy with your quiet man

But know him as a fake

His script is fine but unrehearsed

His bread stale and overbaked

He’ll never know that freedom

Comes from letting go

Know that true love’s blooming

Hurts like salt cuts to the face

He

He’ll make you scrambled eggs

Stir fries of all expensive tastes

Take you for moonlit walks

Ask you nicely about your day

He’ll make sure you never need to worry about a thing

For every need supplied with wry smile or pleasant grin

He’ll say to you the words that are convenient to hear

Such as how you make him laugh

Or how this clip sits well within your hair

He’ll kiss you with half curled lips

Stroke your skin with plastic thumb

Lick your skin with woollen tongue

Does he thrill you once he’s done?

You’ll be supplied and satisfied

No need to wonder what’s going on

The height of satisfaction

None of the daring, gasping sun

None of the shine that burns your skin

Makes you hurt, makes you cry

None of the love that shakes your heart

That you shy from as you said goodbye

None of the winter like it felt those weeks we were apart

None of the summer when you came back again

None of the thorns we threw like darts

Your love with him is comfortable

Like an IKEA sofa bed

For you no more four poster

Or the lover’s well-spilt blood

With him the sky is out of reach

The ground you’ll firmly stay

Let cold Earth comfort you

Your wings are tucked away

If you had seen the poet dance

The hunter kill his prey

Seen mastership in the twinkling eye

You’ll know from him it’s far away

The poet hurts and bruises

Can’t take every stinging dart

Can;t say to you what you want to hear

Though it breaks his strangled heart

He can love and gush upon you

Make you dream and spark and flower

Doesn’t wish so much for wilting

Carries the pain that love endures

Be happy with your quiet man

But know him as a fake

His script is fine but unrehearsed

His bread stale and overbaked

He’ll never know that freedom

Comes from letting go

Know that true love’s blooming

Hurts like salt cuts to the face

You fuck like a lover's hard-won revenge-styled angry biting teeth

You fuck like a lover's hard-won revenge-styled angry biting teeth

Diary of an unborn writer #3

A massage centre has opened down the road and here I sit - surrounded by gem stones, books by the sage Osho and tankas of the Green Tara - absorbing the energy of each.

The owner, Unmani, is a dreadlocked Italian with a smoke-begotten rasp from a life on the tough. She’s celebrated, sure, gone through all trials of celebration but is no shirker.

Down the road from her is a woman in her forties with multiple sclerosis up to the neck. Unmani takes care of her and a team of eight women – friends who have decided the lady’s last paralysed days should not be spent abandoned.

The lady lies on her bed, lungs heaving with their lessening ability to breathe. And by her side, along with the eight other women is her ex-lover who too refuses to walk away.

He's a KLM flight attendant with another girlfriend who won’t stop pestering him to leave the MS sufferer alone. But so far he has remained resolute, calling his ex every day if he cannot see her in person.

Unmani tells me all this from an Italian-accented mouth crevassed on either side by lines that have seen entirely too much shockery. Around her are crack addicts and alcoholics and she seems to be a bolster for them while dabbling a little in their vices.

She is no doubt a healer – to which her deeply rifted geometry doesn’t quite give lie.

Unmani - think there’s the Sanskrit for lotus in there.

“Om Mani Padme Hum” – “I am one with the jewel of the lotus” in the Tibetan way.

I spent a happy day holding the door open. Unmani couldn’t be in the shop so I sat behind the desk giving information to the (three) customers that came in the door.

And then came a fourth – man with a crooked throat, who wanted a healing then and there.

I obliged.

A burnt out career and woman that had left him had led him to my healing table. He was suffering from weak kidneys and therefore low energy. (Chinese medicine it's the kidneys that hold your jing or sacred essence).

It’s strange how the soul speaks. You could see he was suffering but he seemed overjoyed to be there. Body broken, mind numb, wondering what the hell his next steps were, though his eyes betrayed by dint of shining that the release had come, that resolution may be in sight.

Not seeing that this resolution is nothing but a revolution and it goes round and round and round.

Steps, though, ring a little more joyfully when they’re taken off the treadmill.

Diary of an unborn writer #3

A massage centre has opened down the road and here I sit - surrounded by gem stones, books by the sage Osho and tankas of the Green Tara - absorbing the energy of each.

The owner, Unmani, is a dreadlocked Italian with a smoke-begotten rasp from a life on the tough. She’s celebrated, sure, gone through all trials of celebration but is no shirker.

Down the road from her is a woman in her forties with multiple sclerosis up to the neck. Unmani takes care of her and a team of eight women – friends who have decided the lady’s last paralysed days should not be spent abandoned.

The lady lies on her bed, lungs heaving with their lessening ability to breathe. And by her side, along with the eight other women is her ex-lover who too refuses to walk away.

He's a KLM flight attendant with another girlfriend who won’t stop pestering him to leave the MS sufferer alone. But so far he has remained resolute, calling his ex every day if he cannot see her in person.

Unmani tells me all this from an Italian-accented mouth crevassed on either side by lines that have seen entirely too much shockery. Around her are crack addicts and alcoholics and she seems to be a bolster for them while dabbling a little in their vices.

She is no doubt a healer – to which her deeply rifted geometry doesn’t quite give lie.

Unmani - think there’s the Sanskrit for lotus in there.

“Om Mani Padme Hum” – “I am one with the jewel of the lotus” in the Tibetan way.

I spent a happy day holding the door open. Unmani couldn’t be in the shop so I sat behind the desk giving information to the (three) customers that came in the door.

And then came a fourth – man with a crooked throat, who wanted a healing then and there.

I obliged.

A burnt out career and woman that had left him had led him to my healing table. He was suffering from weak kidneys and therefore low energy. (Chinese medicine it's the kidneys that hold your jing or sacred essence).

It’s strange how the soul speaks. You could see he was suffering but he seemed overjoyed to be there. Body broken, mind numb, wondering what the hell his next steps were, though his eyes betrayed by dint of shining that the release had come, that resolution may be in sight.

Not seeing that this resolution is nothing but a revolution and it goes round and round and round.

Steps, though, ring a little more joyfully when they’re taken off the treadmill.

Diary of an unborn writer #2

I should probably get out more. Today saw a breeze of glorious sun and then a 4am dusk that found me still in bed.

Oh, I had been reading, remembering what it is to learn. The duvet piled in soft furrows, my most frequented landscape.

It shifts between bouts of snoozing and masturbation.

Today could be hard, so I’ll thwart it by being easy.

Easy in the avoiding way. Easy in the way of Nelson holding the telescope to his bad eye and seeing no ships. There’s not much that can go wrong when the day’s activity is a scout in a pocket for loose change which is duly exhausted on a packet of pasta and a tin of beans, maybe a thumb of wine in an eetcafe on the way home.

Cooking is my great luxury. Persuades from obsolescence -my instinct.

Obsolescence is the luxury, in fact. Saves from having to do. I’m jealous of these doing types with routines. Seriously. I hate them and I'm jealous. There is everything that is wrong and good in man. Structure, engagement, participation in the stink - though it saps them.

I mean, how can a person walk down a hospital hallway? Or a street for that matter? It’s not the pain but the dullness of it. We’re forced to be dulled because full acknowledgement would be a horror none of us could take.

The news spews what’s going on in our very streets. You find me over the top – an indignant huffing and hum of “Don’t want to look, there’s really no need”.

And I believe you. It’s where I am too.

I used to think that Satre’s protagonist in Nausea was a man of outstanding consciousness. Seeing a cold world passing him by.

He was not – just avoiding.

I don’t think Satre himself was avoiding. Even if he did bring his mistress with him on is hholidays with Simone de Beauvoir.

Diary of an unborn writer #2

I should probably get out more. Today saw a breeze of glorious sun and then a 4pm dusk that found me still in bed.

Oh, I had been reading, remembering what it is to learn. The duvet piled in soft furrows, my most frequented landscape.

It shifts between bouts of snoozing and masturbation.

Today could be hard, so I’ll thwart it by being easy.

Easy in the avoiding way. Easy in the way of Nelson holding the telescope to his bad eye and seeing no ships. There’s not much that can go wrong when the day’s activity is a scout in a pocket for loose change which is duly exhausted on a packet of pasta and a tin of beans, maybe a thumb of wine in an eetcafe on the way home.

Cooking is my great luxury. Persuades from obsolescence -my instinct.

Obsolescence is the luxury, in fact. Saves from having to do. I’m jealous of these doing types with routines. Seriously. I hate them and I'm jealous. There is everything that is wrong and good in man. Structure, engagement, participation in the stink - though it saps them.

I mean, how can a person walk down a hospital hallway? Or a street for that matter? It’s not the pain but the dullness of it. We’re forced to be dulled because full acknowledgement would be a horror none of us could take.

The news spews what’s going on in our very streets. You find me over the top – an indignant huffing and hum of “Don’t want to look, there’s really no need”.

And I believe you. It’s where I am too.

I used to think that Satre’s protagonist in Nausea was a man of outstanding consciousness. Seeing a cold world passing him by.

He was not – just avoiding.

I don’t think Satre himself was avoiding. Even if he did bring his mistress with him on is hholidays with Simone de Beauvoir.

Love and freedom are the songs that never end

Love and freedom shall begin

Love and freedom are the songs that never end

So kiss me and take our love and freedom in

Love and freedom are the songs that never end

Love and freedom shall begin

Love and freedom are the songs that never end

So kiss me and take our love and freedom in

Diary of an unborn writer #1

Day began with an account of Ernest Dowson, friend of Oscar Wilde, who drank himself into oblivion on absinthe and whiskey. A paragon of charm and wit until drunk when he became obscene, picking fights. A slight man, who from pictures, barely fitted into his body. He died as the the violent century took off at the age if 32.

What sensitivity does to the unready soul! The most sublime experience and readiness to understand. The potential to seize and replicate in the most varied song the humdrum of everyday. It is the acknowledgement of everyday that keeps these boys dreaming. Unreadiness to experience it to its coarse tip. And ironically know its coarsest flavour.

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormword and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things
Dregs ~ Ernest Dowson

Dowson was perpetually infatuated with young girls. A trait his friends saw as a sign of his purity of heart.

To me it's as though he couldn't stop dreaming.

Absinthe - the splendid hallucinogen - is symptomatic of those that dare to dream but are desperate not to fall. Young, beautiful men that grow not old even as they that are left grow old. In old age they yearn for simplicity and retreat into childish fancy or else abhor worldly stench while simultaneously revelling in it.

The delight of those that would reference it plum-mouthed and giddy at the romanticism of the green fairy without daring to even peek beneath the veils that these romeos tried to lift.

That they saw was perhaps too much for those - as we've said - who are unready.

The dens of Dowson, Wilde and co. were the fowlest, most sublime you'd ever meet. The troughs of Lautrec, Van Gogh, Verlaine - spilling nectar of broken hearts. They that knew how fine things could be, and saw how desperate they were.

And now are, though we cloak it in ceremonial self-reference, digitised and anaesthetised. How many of us can say we've lived even a speck of these fin-de-siecle adventurers.

Too responsible. Too afraid. Too dead.

Dear boys what is the world to do with you, but celebrate your inspiration and spit on your misery. Probably spit on both.

They is no use for the grand observers, simply because they refuse to disguise or use disguises so grotesque they remind the others of their own false dreaming - the strategy to cut off inspiration for the pain of falling.

Dear men.

I've found Dowson's story as inspiration to find some stability. To experience drudgery to its very tip, and pray that inspiration finds me well on the other side. I've no wish to wash up dead, however romantically.

But to recall what might have been - that is a luxury I can ill-afford to lose.

Retrospective dreaming. Anticipative wistfulness.

Solidad - nostalgia for a time that has not yet passed.

Or couldn't, even.

Diary of an unborn writer #1

Day began with an account of Ernest Dowson, friend of Oscar Wilde, who drank himself into oblivion on absinthe and whiskey. A paragon of charm and wit until drunk when he became obscene, picking fights. A slight man, who from pictures, barely fitted into his body. He died as the the violent century took off at the age if 32.

What sensitivity does to the unready soul! The most sublime experience and readiness to understand. The potential to seize and replicate in the most varied song the humdrum of everyday. It is the acknowledgement of everyday that keeps these boys dreaming. Unreadiness to experience it to its coarse tip. And ironically know its coarsest flavour.

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormword and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things
Dregs ~ Ernest Dowson

Dowson was perpetually infatuated with young girls. A trait his friends saw as a sign of his purity of heart.

To me it's as though he couldn't stop dreaming.

Absinthe - the splendid hallucinogen - is symptomatic of those that dare to dream but are desperate not to fall. Young, beautiful men that grow not old even as they that are left grow old. In old age they yearn for simplicity and retreat into childish fancy or else abhor worldly stench while simultaneously revelling in it.

The delight of those that would reference it plum-mouthed and giddy at the romanticism of the green fairy without daring to even peek beneath the veils that these romeos tried to lift.

That they saw was perhaps too much for those - as we've said - who are unready.

The dens of Dowson, Wilde and co. were the fowlest, most sublime you'd ever meet. The troughs of Lautrec, Van Gogh, Verlaine - spilling nectar of broken hearts. They that knew how fine things could be, and saw how desperate they were.

And now are, though we cloak it in ceremonial self-reference, digitised and anaesthetised. How many of us can say we've lived even a speck of these fin-de-siecle adventurers.

Too responsible. Too afraid. Too dead.

Dear boys what is the world to do with you, but celebrate your inspiration and spit on your misery. Probably spit on both.

They is no use for the grand observers, simply because they refuse to disguise or use disguises so grotesque they remind the others of their own false dreaming - the strategy to cut off inspiration for the pain of falling.

Dear men.

I've found Dowson's story as inspiration to find some stability. To experience drudgery to its very tip, and pray that inspiration finds me well on the other side. I've no wish to wash up dead, however romantically.

But to recall what might have been - that is a luxury I can ill-afford to lose.

Retrospective dreaming. Anticipative wistfulness.

Solidad - nostalgia for a time that has not yet passed.

Or couldn't, even.

The great revelation

Untouched by circumstance

Or you

Useless fool

So love and live as if....

You've heard that before

The great revelation

Untouched by circumstance

Or you

Useless fool

So love and live as if....

You've heard that before

Me

Love,

Tell me whatyou wish for most in the world?

I wish for inspiration that could move a monster to tears

Allow a great wake up of civilisation's monstrous ways

Let it know the sweeter things, stop dabbling in mirages.

Dear tell me - how you wish to take this part yourself?

In the first part I'm a lover. Providing for my muse, subservient to her every wish.

Her breakfast is the golden dawn of rose petals, ambrosia her dinner.

Our hours are spent in silent mutual appreciation.

We sit in a wooden cottage deep in the forest, by a stream, made available for dearest friends to drop by for amiable weekends.

In the second I'm an artist, cultivating from life its richest threads woven in mysterious tapestries and hung from sky scrapers to challenge, bemuse, delight and horrify.

I'm a defender of truth, a slayer of wrong. My works challenge and absorb, sting apathetic youth into meaningful contemplation and wake the lazy old from slumber.

I'm a reminder of life sweetly, honestly lived. The dance of a thousand romeos at the service of your soul.

In the third, I'm healer, bringing all disharmony into whole. I am the culler of negativity, the alchemist trading your base metal for pure gold. I raise prostitutes to queens and renegades to silent destiny. I'm the winner of all that was never lost, champion for you in your misery to rise up and quell. Reach down and bear you to safety.

Keep the dear ones alive. Alive to their overwhelming possibility.

Show the sinner their broken heart is ripest for mending, the afraid that theirs is the least of challenges.

The blind that their eyes are already open and give the jealous a tender cheek caress, let them know it's OK.

I am the challenger of wisdom the deceiver of peace, the underminer of all that is known and forgotten.

Dear one, I am also this.

In the fourth I am a dreamer, away from the terrible hum.

Eyes pointed to the sky, missing Earth's dreaded overgrowth and serpent designs, cajoling and puking.

I am sunset skies as war rages beneath, angels out of devils reach.

A life imagined far better than any could think, it is none the less, a life barely lived.

And the fifth sweet one,

Is available entirely for you.

Right now.

Speak.

Me

Love,

Tell me whatyou wish for most in the world?

I wish for inspiration that could move a monster to tears

Allow a great wake up of civilisation's monstrous ways

Let it know the sweeter things, stop dabbling in mirages.

Dear tell me - how you wish to take this part yourself?

In the first part I'm a lover. Providing for my muse, subservient to her every wish.

Her breakfast is the golden dawn of rose petals, ambrosia her dinner.

Our hours are spent in silent mutual appreciation.

We sit in a wooden cottage deep in the forest, by a stream, made available for dearest friends to drop by for amiable weekends.

In the second I'm an artist, cultivating from life its richest threads woven in mysterious tapestries and hung from sky scrapers to challenge, bemuse, delight and horrify.

I'm a defender of truth, a slayer of wrong. My works challenge and absorb, sting apathetic youth into meaningful contemplation and wake the lazy old from slumber.

I'm a reminder of life sweetly, honestly lived. The dance of a thousand romeos at the service of your soul.

In the third, I'm healer, bringing all disharmony into whole. I am the culler of negativity, the alchemist trading your base metal for pure gold. I raise prostitutes to queens and renegades to silent destiny. I'm the winner of all that was never lost, champion for you in your misery to rise up and quell. Reach down and bear you to safety.

Keep the dear ones alive. Alive to their overwhelming possibility.

Show the sinner their broken heart is ripest for mending, the afraid that theirs is the least of challenges.

The blind that their eyes are already open and give the jealous a tender cheek caress, let them know it's OK.

I am the challenger of wisdom the deceiver of peace, the underminer of all that is known and forgotten.

Dear one, I am also this.

In the fourth I am a dreamer, away from the terrible hum.

Eyes pointed to the sky, missing Earth's dreaded overgrowth and serpent designs, cajoling and puking.

I am sunset skies as war rages beneath, angels out of devils reach.

A life imagined far better than any could think, it is none the less, a life barely lived.

And the fifth sweet one,

Is available entirely for you.

Right now.

Speak.