Hurt

She still looms large

The large-eyed one

Olive skin and Angela Jolie lips.

Perfect

In a word

And easy with it

I have no memory that would praise her enough

Or sounds that could explain

The pain that absence beings

there are days when you're so delicate

a sentence could break

into a thousand pieces

living

They're coming up

these flakes of gold

from the belly

up the throat

through the mouth

silently

they'll make it better for you

for us

to breathe

that is

once you arrive

right now

you've been slow

Cali lady

Let it go, this thing, at the core of you,

 this pain you've suppressed for a month or three, pretending that she

did not exist

she hurt you deeper than you'd like her to

put on a brave face and turned to go

eyelash flicker like a scrape to the soul

she's gone now

you can cry

it's fine

Rebalance

This is a blog

I've neglected for a time

I find myself writing to many of news and thought instead

I would throw the blinds open to a wider crew

after all you wish to know what's going on, no?

Please comment and use rating also.

If you blog too - let me tune in.

Love and freshnes,

Arjuna

Neck lines of slender, beautiful alternative women

Should be outlawed

At work

Even if

I went to youtube

To find them

Dreams

Going to your dead Grandmother's church, perhaps for a wedding. You hang around in the grave yard before taking your bus to the local pub. A man screams at your Mother for not having a ticket "'Ere she's got NO TICKET!" he yells, embarassing her in front of everyone.

In the pub surrounded by the fine local yokel folk. One of them, Titus or Scargill or something, has a large nose and lank blode hair. The plot didn;t quite make clear but you slam his head into the floor and when he protests do it again as your parents look on. They do and say nothing. The protests from Titus rise to a squeak.

You see him later in the beer garden, sparkling eyed and grateful. Waving you a cheery farewell.

~

You wake up in the church garden surrounded by autumn flowers. There are people there you know and they circle your bed like spectators and admirers. At the head of the bed sits your world's greatest love. She looks over and smiles, pats your head and sink back into sleep.

We wear our clothes more lightly now. Before they were the stuff of dreams, of etiquette, critical to being. Now more lightly tossed around, elegantly worn. The thread’s a thinner silk and colours more reminiscent of the jungle than industrial complexes. We stand and admire the vestments of another no longer threatened that our own may pale.
We wear our clothes more lightly and it’s a relief to Man and Earth.
0
Love left it shapely for a time, plummy, too big to fit your arms around. And now so small to be thinner than a mouse’s supper.
But better. Arms would have simply tired and mouse needs to eat more than I.
You kept it well though: threads, mice, suppers – managed to thread, sew and weave in a tapestry I thought crude, while making a hash of my own.
The threads were the finest that I’ll still contend, but the loom was faulty and guidelines not parallel. Causes problems further down the line
I’m not aware how it got fixed but you kept threading all the time. Sweet angel, no show, no dance but beautifully woven.
I see it now.
But too late. Too late.
0

Psychologies Magazine, May 2008

HOW TO LIVE IN THE MOMENT

A 20 page special

(I swear, I swear, I swear this was true)

Errrr

Does the light get lonely in the dark?

Or see that its distant cousin shines just like him?

Arabrab in May

I could not look at her without a tear forming in my heart, swollen and incapable of breaking.

Her innocence shone. Empty face taking in the shelves of whiskey, traveller's photos of the cottage. We'd gotten away from the city. Seeing each other for two months of tentative longing , believing, willing that the other could provide solace for breaks we'd begun to put together. Tears unwept, smiles unbroken. We were close enough to be scared it just might be...

The ease of Fife was the perfect escape. Here was space to stand exposed or shrink back afraid. We arrived and it was clear that this served to fill a gulf. Car doors slammed in unison and bright exchange of faces at sunlight pouring lazily onto the roof of our little cottage. Not Canada or Norway but here in simple Fife - though similarly pined, clear and empty.

An evening spent easy tumbling, red wine and oven baked chicken. Full and rosy we fall into bed. Sex forgettable but friendly, sober breakfast and a morning walking mindfully amongst the trees. Lost in nature's details that urban coarseness makes it essential to override. How could you look at a face with intense love interest, note its pores, freckles and sumptuous blemishes when its likely response was a grimace and turn away?

Oak, fern and rowan provided accomodation for the exercise. Stopped wonder at cells, veins, the shining surface of a leaf.

Then she broke. Inexplicably. Silence shining on every surface and she broke. Weight too frequently falling into reverie that plants find it hard to sustain. She could not look beyond what she carried within, like a pregnant belly waiting for birth.

The was no curse, just an outpouring of stillness, streaming eyes a request to be alone and running down the path, skirt beaten into clouds by skipping ankles, an inch of damp above the hem from the morning's dew, branches closing behind her, a curtain for the play.

I made it back to the cottage alone. Concocted a dark siropy cup of sweet coffee in the steel Italian espresso maker on the wood burning stove, sank deep into a chair covered with a patchwork quilt frayed after decades of contented sitting. Odd country scenes looked down from the pictures on the walls. Of pheasant shoots, Sunday walks and witticisms from Victorian social circles now dull and obsolete but comforting, brown and safe.

I should have read it during love makng and would do subsequently - how she would drift off - feeling it all intensely climaxing in damp sweat and hoarse gasps but something had left. Physical body in its arching swoon, young summer blush unfit to house the melancholy that ushered her spirit away as if it did not deserve this clench, holding close what she desired.

She returned. White skin glowing, lit up as she passed the window. Through the door, displacing boots, crossed the room and curled into my lap, taking coffee from me and making a sour face as she tasted all the sugar. Inclined head, hair pressing softly at my neck, resting in understanding that this distance would not be overcome. Would I mind, though, accompanying her a little along the way? as she moved in love's slender reaches, at the finger tip touch, which was, for now, enough.

Along the North Shore

Beach at Burntisland

A slim fingernail before tropical gardens

Hardy from winter's lashing

@

Cracked window at the Good News Supermarket

Memorial wreath - plastic tattered,

Peeling prayer of flowers, red around black eyes

Looking onto Kinghorn

"Faithful unto Death"

It proclaims unto the dead

The names the stone speaks worthy of its standing

Nearby a man swigs Lucozade in black Ford Fiesta Zetec

Orange and sticky down his throat

After an afternoon weaving through job centres, broken bus stops

An accident of a town on Fife's Forth Firth shores

@

Looking back driving there

A flash of sun lit up the water

God's aggression on the calm sea

Fist shaped cloud splaying bright curses

Dreams against the day

My love it falls in waves

Crashes over you

Who?

You - lovely angel, standing in front of me

Reading the screen

Lucky thing

My love it falls in waves

Crashes over you

Who?

You - lovely angel, standing in front of me

Reading the screen

Lucky thing

Stone shakes

Amber breaks

Golden drips from solid

Stone shakes

Amber breaks

Golden drips from solid

Diary of an unborn writer #12

I enjoy a daily commute of three hours. Really enjoy. Time to sleep and read. I'm redeveloping a passion for erudition, worming my way through all kinds of serious books.

The commuter trail is hilarious. Train stops and there's an orderly swarm of faces tap tapping down steps so they don't miss the onward transport to the office. It's so polite and so frenetic. Elbow barges by way of refused glances. An attempt at personality sees you shunned.

In the office too I'm perfecting the steady stare of pretending you haven't noticed the other person as they pass right by you in the corridor. Sometimes you see them looking and you look but too late so they look away and by that stage neither of you is going to admit to looking at the other by looking back again.

Though I naively hope for this. I walk towards them staring across their trajectory. That way if they glance they catch my eye. But there's a problem. By prolonging the gaze, my eyes settle into an accidentally intense glare so if they look it'll seem as if I'm staring them out, they look a little freaked and look not just ahead but away. The pain of missed spontaneity is not worth confronting as this oft-repeated ritual clearly displays.

~

Martin Buber was a clever Jew from early 20th century Vienna ; one of those firecracker conflations in time and place where every thought seems to spark a revolution and proving - with 1776 Philapdelphia, several Parisian decades and 18th century Scotland - that intelligence is a collective fragrance aside from the gigantic personalities to which it is attributed.

Buber had Freud, Wittgensstein and my favourite Karl Polanyi alongside him. In 1919, radicalism flew along Red Veins, while these men, great men, sang finer tunes and ideas yet to be fully absorbed.

Buber was an existentialist but not the navel-gazing, wistful type that make his cousins so attractive to me. Like Heidegger he spoke of an authenticity but felt this was found most effectively by connecting with others. Disitinguishing between 'I-you' relations and 'I - thou' relations, the commuters painful walk is a dearth of thous amongst too many grey eyes.

I-you's are conceived as if to an object, an acknowledgement, the corridor avoidance, the shop counter lady seeing fit not to return the warm morning greeting (I even said it in Dutch...). It's the connection that populayes 99.8% of human connection.

To 'I-Thou' relations, Buber gave a designation almost holy: the tender inexplicable when all shutters blow apart and we find in the other all the meaning and serenity of human existence.

By reaching into the other, the divine in you can emerge.

Imagine the fate of civilisation, leave alone that of its discontents, if Buber had had a few more morning strolls with Freud along the Graben.

~

Looking at a photograph of Martin Buber you see the relaxed gaze of a man that cannot help but Thous all round. The Immortal in man stood nakedly before him, whether blankly gazing back or avoiding down corridors - the Buber boddhisattva enduring everyone to be free.

I take his eyes and fix them with an inward glance, the better to see my depths in the other. Two fade to one, as if it could be any different.

~

Love kept it slyly for a time but now repentent seeps it back trace by trace into gaping mouths and stifled hearts drip by drip we're coming back

~

The eyes and corridors and Buber ruminations melt to nothing in the face of the horror in Palestine. There's no fact to this I can add to make it more real just look on in disgust as politicians play parlour games with situations they well concocted long before.

Can't remove this from our own plight. Please don't place it over there but see the I-I that made this so - Ishmael and Isaac - one brother not recognising the other. And you pretend it doesn't matter to ignore the other as they pass you by again.

You play out this horror every day.

Only the Palestinians cry.

Diary of an unborn writer #12

I enjoy a daily commute of three hours. Really enjoy. Time to sleep and read. I'm redeveloping a passion for erudition, worming my way through all kinds of serious books.

The commuter trail is hilarious. Train stops and there's an orderly swarm of faces tap tapping down steps so they don't miss the onward transport to the office. It's so polite and so frenetic. Elbow barges by way of refused glances. An attempt at personality sees you shunned.

In the office too I'm perfecting the steady stare of pretending you haven't noticed the other person as they pass right by you in the corridor. Sometimes you see them looking and you look but too late so they look away and by that stage neither of you is going to admit to looking at the other by looking back again.

Though I naively hope for this. I walk towards them staring across their trajectory. That way if they glance they catch my eye. But there's a problem. By prolonging the gaze, my eyes settle into an accidentally intense glare so if they look it'll seem as if I'm staring them out, they look a little freaked and look not just ahead but away. The pain of missed spontaneity is not worth confronting as this oft-repeated ritual clearly displays.

~

Martin Buber was a clever Jew from early 20th century Vienna ; one of those firecracker conflations in time and place where every thought seems to spark a revolution and proving - with 1776 Philapdelphia, several Parisian decades and 18th century Scotland - that intelligence is a collective fragrance aside from the gigantic personalities to which it is attributed.

Buber had Freud, Wittgensstein and my favourite Karl Polanyi alongside him. In 1919, radicalism flew along Red Veins, while these men, great men, sang finer tunes and ideas yet to be fully absorbed.

Buber was an existentialist but not the navel-gazing, wistful type that make his cousins so attractive to me. Like Heidegger he spoke of an authenticity but felt this was found most effectively by connecting with others. Disitinguishing between 'I-you' relations and 'I - thou' relations, the commuters painful walk is a dearth of thous amongst too many grey eyes.

I-you's are conceived as if to an object, an acknowledgement, the corridor avoidance, the shop counter lady seeing fit not to return the warm morning greeting (I even said it in Dutch...). It's the connection that populayes 99.8% of human connection.

To 'I-Thou' relations, Buber gave a designation almost holy: the tender inexplicable when all shutters blow apart and we find in the other all the meaning and serenity of human existence.

By reaching into the other, the divine in you can emerge.

Imagine the fate of civilisation, leave alone that of its discontents, if Buber had had a few more morning strolls with Freud along the Graben.

~

Looking at a photograph of Martin Buber you see the relaxed gaze of a man that cannot help but Thous all round. The Immortal in man stood nakedly before him, whether blankly gazing back or avoiding down corridors - the Buber boddhisattva enduring everyone to be free.

I take his eyes and fix them with an inward glance, the better to see my depths in the other. Two fade to one, as if it could be any different.

~

Love kept it slyly for a time but now repentent seeps it back trace by trace into gaping mouths and stifled hearts drip by drip we're coming back

~

The eyes and corridors and Buber ruminations melt to nothing in the face of the horror in Palestine. There's no fact to this I can add to make it more real just look on in disgust as politicians play parlour games with situations they well concocted long before.

Can't remove this from our own plight. Please don't place it over there but see the I-I that made this so - Ishmael and Isaac - one brother not recognising the other. And you pretend it doesn't matter to ignore the other as they pass you by again.

You play out this horror every day.

Only the Palestinians cry.

Diary of an unborn writer #11

So I'm into the new job. Faces aren't so grey, lunchtime conversation not so bad.

Actually I'm loving it - suits and stimulation from the latest corporate development - a buzz about where we're going, what happens next, how it impacts the bottom line and wonderful serried excuses about our contribution to the human cause.

And oddly they may not be all wrong.

The many cornerhouses of civilisation require strange bricks and stranger folk to man them. Take the techie - the wizard solving the problem of the everyday and depositing it consumer-sized ready-solved and underestimated. The amount of work these guys do on brilliantly complex problems. And there we pick up a phone, send an email from an elegant graphic interface and muse on simplicity. The techie knows otherwise.

My job is to offer people advice on the fitness area of their life. I'm constrained in what I can say because it's new but I've become an uncommon cog in vast apparatus. No job has ever existed like this before. But there I am. Bathed in the suit a thousand generations have worn, spilling tales to frustrated strangers - an outlet for their concerns, in the tiniest way, offering hope.

Of course things haven't always been this good. I write a lot outside the diary - sudden spasms of frustration that don't make it to the keyboard - and too many events for a man to describe - but this I wanted to share from 12 December - happening to be on the midpoint on the numerical scale to the current entry...

~o~

Diary of an unborn writer 5.5

The disillusion muddies on – a life so empty I’m having trouble speaking in anything below abstract.

I have established the unnerving habit of flinching every time I see clock. What’s the countdown to?

Somewhere inside is the nervous knowledge that things aren’t going as planned.
I’m out of bed at 10am.

Gayatri mantra

Shower

Breakfast ~some days I’ll read and stay in bed a little longer – but days are feeling more productive. I apply for two jobs per day.

Write, communicate with friends, attend satsang, meditate between times. Variety’s increasing. Theatre last week, concert this.

I’m having trouble seeing what does what. What calls or relaxation would help make the turn. I have very little energy for anything and the effort required for the smallest thing is immense.

I eat well, sleep too much but health doesn’t improve. Dry eyes, consistent cold, nerves at touch point, even in sleep.

The miners and Sheffield steel workers had whole communities of malaise. Now we hide ourselves in scattered city apartment blocks, the edge of squats, cups of tea to punctuate the day. Industry’s an underrated thing – personal or wide scale.

I’d like to get it back.

I fear the stiff overtake of obsolescence.

~o~

I’m tired by the look of pity
Patronising negatives when I’m trying to get by

Bored of observations of my red and yellow eyes

Scruffed appearance and condemned to compassionate inferiority

I’m tired of people noticing the panic in my eyes as another door slams shut

For a guy to taking simple steps, this community has the shortest arms

~o~

Alma Mater folded her arms and gave me the heave ho – withering idealism in the boil of a continuous “NO!”

Forming a boil actually; the packet of pus that sits on my ass threatening to burst each time I sit down. Move on, weary son, despite the screams and threats to rip it off and spray its contents in the face of naysayers (praysayers).

“You’re raging in a dream cage”

they sagely say as the yellow scab forms and dries stinging ten times worse than before.

Well Fuck You if I can;t see the cage and fuck you twice for not showing me the way out

Maybe I like it here

You’re right. It sucks and depresses me more than all your achievement and smug art of mediocratic life.

“You should put down roots”

Another wise thumb sucker

“Want some savlon for your ass?”

And all this in halting English, acerbic with blame for our miscommunication. For a narrow-minded continent, the Dutch are its doyennes. Unprepared to embrace that which lies outwith their network of understanding.

The famed liberality I’ve heard summed up thus:

Drugs? Homosexuality? Suicide? Go Ahead!

Leave your bins out on the wrong day however....
~

There’s a point in the listening – a dead drop in the eye, you can almost see it click - when you’re judged to be not worth the effort.

The point at which they offer you the savlon.

And so are my frustrations living in Holland.

Diary of an unborn writer #11

So I'm into the new job. Faces aren't so grey, lunchtime conversation not so bad.

Actually I'm loving it - suits and stimulation from the latest corporate development - a buzz about where we're going, what happens next, how it impacts the bottom line and wonderful serried excuses about our contribution to the human cause.

And oddly they may not be all wrong.

The many cornerhouses of civilisation require strange bricks and stranger folk to man them. Take the techie - the wizard solving the problem of the everyday and depositing it consumer-sized ready-solved and underestimated. The amount of work these guys do on brilliantly complex problems. And there we pick up a phone, send an email from an elegant graphic interface and muse on simplicity. The techie knows otherwise.

My job is to offer people advice on the fitness area of their life. I'm constrained in what I can say because it's new but I've become an uncommon cog in vast apparatus. No job has ever existed like this before. But there I am. Bathed in the suit a thousand generations have worn, spilling tales to frustrated strangers - an outlet for their concerns, in the tiniest way, offering hope.

Of course things haven't always been this good. I write a lot outside the diary - sudden spasms of frustration that don't make it to the keyboard - and too many events for a man to describe - but this I wanted to share from 12 December - happening to be on the midpoint on the numerical scale to the current entry...

~o~

Diary of an unborn writer 5.5

The disillusion muddies on – a life so empty I’m having trouble speaking in anything below abstract.

I have established the unnerving habit of flinching every time I see clock. What’s the countdown to?

Somewhere inside is the nervous knowledge that things aren’t going as planned.
I’m out of bed at 10am.

Gayatri mantra

Shower

Breakfast ~some days I’ll read and stay in bed a little longer – but days are feeling more productive. I apply for two jobs per day.

Write, communicate with friends, attend satsang, meditate between times. Variety’s increasing. Theatre last week, concert this.

I’m having trouble seeing what does what. What calls or relaxation would help make the turn. I have very little energy for anything and the effort required for the smallest thing is immense.

I eat well, sleep too much but health doesn’t improve. Dry eyes, consistent cold, nerves at touch point, even in sleep.

The miners and Sheffield steel workers had whole communities of malaise. Now we hide ourselves in scattered city apartment blocks, the edge of squats, cups of tea to punctuate the day. Industry’s an underrated thing – personal or wide scale.

I’d like to get it back.

I fear the stiff overtake of obsolescence.

~o~

I’m tired by the look of pity
Patronising negatives when I’m trying to get by

Bored of observations of my red and yellow eyes

Scruffed appearance and condemned to compassionate inferiority

I’m tired of people noticing the panic in my eyes as another door slams shut

For a guy to taking simple steps, this community has the shortest arms

~o~

Alma Mater folded her arms and gave me the heave ho – withering idealism in the boil of a continuous “NO!”

Forming a boil actually; the packet of pus that sits on my ass threatening to burst each time I sit down. Move on, weary son, despite the screams and threats to rip it off and spray its contents in the face of naysayers (praysayers).

“You’re raging in a dream cage”

they sagely say as the yellow scab forms and dries stinging ten times worse than before.

Well Fuck You if I can;t see the cage and fuck you twice for not showing me the way out

Maybe I like it here

You’re right. It sucks and depresses me more than all your achievement and smug art of mediocratic life.

“You should put down roots”

Another wise thumb sucker

“Want some savlon for your ass?”

And all this in halting English, acerbic with blame for our miscommunication. For a narrow-minded continent, the Dutch are its doyennes. Unprepared to embrace that which lies outwith their network of understanding.

The famed liberality I’ve heard summed up thus:

Drugs? Homosexuality? Suicide? Go Ahead!

Leave your bins out on the wrong day however....
~

There’s a point in the listening – a dead drop in the eye, you can almost see it click - when you’re judged to be not worth the effort.

The point at which they offer you the savlon.

And so are my frustrations living in Holland.

Amsterdam

For you I cry bulbous aubergine tears

As if you'd take me seriously!

*

Tonight I was chatted up by a gay gentle man. The kind of come-on where he lingers his hand as you shake (hands) goodbye. For the first time it didn't feel too bad. I could feel his affection, also a little from my side but nothing more.

I've had some strange experiences with gay men seeking a deeper connection, which one day I will describe but not now. It's long and a little painful.

*

Amsterdam at New Year was a warzone. Kids (up to the age of 35) stand at the street side and throw fire crackers at your feet, light rockets from champagne bottles, explosions ripping through and not just on the outskirts - from the outskirts to the main drag of town. Everywhere you go boom crash laughter. It quite frayed the nerves until the third beer and fifth joint kicked in.

We found ourselves a bridge in the red light district. Safe, full of middle class types and not too many tourists. To our left, a Moroccan kid lit a whole crater of bangers and jumped back delighted showing his friends - as if they could miss it. Echoes and ricochets to our right - another side street packed with revellers who, in the way of revellers finding a decent spot before midnight did not look in the throes of revelry. More bridle path stroll and negotiating a barbed wire fence (for which read revellers, bangers, possible standing place).

In front of us were the great exploding flowers of the main display, framed by neon signs and houses of ill fame. The Dutch allow fireworks one day a year and the people go crazy at the opportunity, hence the makeshift displays we could see surrounding and throughout the city. Even the main display begins at 10pm and then at midnight it really takes off! Cascading an amazing - there's nothing like a firework, even when you've been cowering from their hastily planted little brothers for most of the night.

From a distant, as you can imagine they were spectacular. We could calm and sing Auld Lang Syne even as a rocket-in-a-bottle tipped and flew horizontal over the canal. It was a multiple one, exploding green and purple, showering over boats and firing directly at window panes. On the scales of beauty and public damage, we pronounced a not guilty.

We made it to a bar - "Wonder Bar" - that had lifted the smoking ban for a night. Smoking joints and playing games with rizlas on our foreheads, it could have been any one of a million previous nights. But it was in Amsterdam, New Year 2009 and walking home we found red debris from fire crackers moving round our ankles in drifts - a gunpowder autumn after the heady days of summer - and ladies of the night tapping windows four our attention.

Getting home there was an Evelyne in my bed. She hadn't made it out because the conditions like Bosnia (cold and exploding). So here she was - warm, fragile and sleepy.

Things with her going exceedingly well.

*

In five and a half hours I have to leave the house, take a one and a half hour train ride to Eindhoven and begin a new job as a life coach for a large company hoping to raise the activity of its employees.

Green bohemia I'm leaving fair behind and the hours and job description delight me not at all. Though the pay is good and after all isn't that what we're here for...

I'm being over cynical. It's part of a move to give my life legs. I enjoy free time but it's run me up a fair amount of debt and my art - the great anamolous which we prepare to line our grave - has yet to flourish in the way of a Steinbeck.

Though of course between train journeys and midnight coffee houses - I'm hoping it still will.

Sobriety is how I feel. It's not a big deal and in some moments frightens the life out of me - grey and yellow walls and the military hum of serried computers, greyer faces and deader conversation. But perhaps not.

I came to Amsterdam in Autumn

Where leaves fell on brown canals

Drunk cafe houses dry

Of all their dim delights

Imagined myself in picture books

On stage and on the scene

When a woman with a level gaze

Sat me down and touched my knee:

"You've built yourself a prison cell

While pretending that you're free"

So I got wet in participation

Office meetings and stifling air

Water cooler conversation,

Conservatised my hair

Goodbye green blue pink bohemia

Golden sunset hues

I'll see you in another year,

Bank account with more zeroes

Amsterdam

For you I cry bulbous aubergine tears

As if you'd take me seriously!

*

Tonight I was chatted up by a gay gentle man. The kind of come-on where he lingers his hand as you shake (hands) goodbye. For the first time it didn't feel too bad. I could feel his affection, also a little from my side but nothing more.

I've had some strange experiences with gay men seeking a deeper connection, which one day I will describe but not now. It's long and a little painful.

*

Amsterdam at New Year was a warzone. Kids (up to the age of 35) stand at the street side and throw fire crackers at your feet, light rockets from champagne bottles, explosions ripping through and not just on the outskirts - from the outskirts to the main drag of town. Everywhere you go boom crash laughter. It quite frayed the nerves until the third beer and fifth joint kicked in.

We found ourselves a bridge in the red light district. Safe, full of middle class types and not too many tourists. To our left, a Moroccan kid lit a whole crater of bangers and jumped back delighted showing his friends - as if they could miss it. Echoes and ricochets to our right - another side street packed with revellers who, in the way of revellers finding a decent spot before midnight did not look in the throes of revelry. More bridle path stroll and negotiating a barbed wire fence (for which read revellers, bangers, possible standing place).

In front of us were the great exploding flowers of the main display, framed by neon signs and houses of ill fame. The Dutch allow fireworks one day a year and the people go crazy at the opportunity, hence the makeshift displays we could see surrounding and throughout the city. Even the main display begins at 10pm and then at midnight it really takes off! Cascading an amazing - there's nothing like a firework, even when you've been cowering from their hastily planted little brothers for most of the night.

From a distant, as you can imagine they were spectacular. We could calm and sing Auld Lang Syne even as a rocket-in-a-bottle tipped and flew horizontal over the canal. It was a multiple one, exploding green and purple, showering over boats and firing directly at window panes. On the scales of beauty and public damage, we pronounced a not guilty.

We made it to a bar - "Wonder Bar" - that had lifted the smoking ban for a night. Smoking joints and playing games with rizlas on our foreheads, it could have been any one of a million previous nights. But it was in Amsterdam, New Year 2009 and walking home we found red debris from fire crackers moving round our ankles in drifts - a gunpowder autumn after the heady days of summer - and ladies of the night tapping windows four our attention.

Getting home there was an Evelyne in my bed. She hadn't made it out because the conditions like Bosnia (cold and exploding). So here she was - warm, fragile and sleepy.

Things with her going exceedingly well.

*

In five and a half hours I have to leave the house, take a one and a half hour train ride to Eindhoven and begin a new job as a life coach for a large company hoping to raise the activity of its employees.

Green bohemia I'm leaving fair behind and the hours and job description delight me not at all. Though the pay is good and after all isn't that what we're here for...

I'm being over cynical. It's part of a move to give my life legs. I enjoy free time but it's run me up a fair amount of debt and my art - the great anamolous which we prepare to line our grave - has yet to flourish in the way of a Steinbeck.

Though of course between train journeys and midnight coffee houses - I'm hoping it still will.

Sobriety is how I feel. It's not a big deal and in some moments frightens the life out of me - grey and yellow walls and the military hum of serried computers, greyer faces and deader conversation. But perhaps not.

I came to Amsterdam in Autumn

Where leaves fell on brown canals

Drunk cafe houses dry

Of all their dim delights

Imagined myself in picture books

On stage and on the scene

When a woman with a level gaze

Sat me down and touched my knee:

"You've built yourself a prison cell

While pretending that you're free"

So I got wet in participation

Office meetings and stifling air

Water cooler conversation,

Conservatised my hair

Goodbye green blue pink bohemia

Golden sunset hues

I'll see you in another year,

Bank account with more zeroes