THE END OF THE WORLD AGAIN:

When rain sticks to you like suet & friends spend seven hours stationary in
traffic jams & the day sucks light out of the ground daring you to smile,
you know it’s time to go fishing for poetry & rhythm.

(K)

FOG FLOATING:

The old Bata Shoe Factory slips out of a luminous fog like a rusting & abandoned ship free-floating mid Atlantic, threatening to topple on tiny vessels. The eye can’t see further than fingertips, the wheel is cold between the palms. Black top hisses fast & threatening out’ve sight.
Too many car crash mornings.

(K)

WHO STOLE THE STEPS?:

A curious curve-ball day of phone call queues & changing plans that conspire
to blow a fuse or inspire complaints. This isn’t the day I ordered, but it’s the
one grinning up at me from the mat. Time to practice acceptance, change,
learn to roll with it, embrace the unexpected, find something new in the
unwanted.
A warehouse becomes a cupboard, a dark room grows windows. Learning how
to laugh when the lemmings leap into your path – there’s the trick!
Reward in the sound of your laughter when things don’t go our way & who
says my plans are the cat’s cream anyway? – who stole the steps at Aislies?

(K)

DAMP, DARK, COLD & STARLESS:

Perfect day for a train ride.
Last Friday we drove from Barking Creek in Dagenham, to Coalhouse Fortress
& the Old radar tower at East Tilbury, had a puncture in the rain on the A13.
saw a giant painted banner of Jagger’s head circa 1970 hung from the walls
of an abandoned warehouse, ate a bacon sarny in a back yard cafe, 80’s
videos on a tv bolted to the wall, bars on the windows, Tyres wedged in the
cracks between spray shops. Manicured graveyards, marshlands, marsh
gasses, bird sanctuaries, silver bearded twitchers from Dusseldorf dressed
in black, abandoned shoe factories, purpose built housing estates for
workforces, empty hairdressers waiting for customers, the convergence of
traffic held high above the marshes on concrete legs, J.G. Ballard country,
frontier towns, a dead end road leading to an old Fortress across the river
from an oil refinery, the smell of chemicals, the smell of sewage, ditches
between lowland fields, flood plane, home made shrines, plastic flowers,
children’s teddies, tiny wellies left out in the rain, park benches with beloved names inscribed on them, the smell of the river, the sound of the river, crazy wind blown hawthorn sculptures, succulent red rose hips & the old radar tower, shuttered concrete & rusting steel watching the far shore, lest we forget.

(K)

YOU GOTT MOVE:

A strong desire to pull on the walking boots & hit the road. The light is low
& twisting. fields succulent, scattered puddles, the marks of animals.
Hawthorn, my favourite scribble & vibrant rose hips dangling between
delicately vicious thorns. Green lanes are the alleys of the land outside of
the city & I’ve got the urge to walk them, breath damp clean air & see the
world from behind it’s facades.

(K)

CHILDREN:

Vulnerable, hope, Potential, future. Faith, joy. Trusting. Innocent.

(K)

DARK & COLD ETEC:

Waiting for a cold damp train to a steaming cafe.
Walk the streets, film, write, take photographs & hope somebody
knows where good coffee’s at.

(K)

KEYS IN THE SONG OF LIFE:

He owned a beautiful piano that made you calm to play. It sounded best
at sundown, just as the light was beginning to fade, if you hit ‘record’
that time of day something great would happen. It stood at the back of the
building in a tiny room with sky-lights, so you could get inspired by
the rhythm of dancing branches. The wind had been bitter for days,
long coats climbed down from hooks on the backs of toilet doors & everyone
remarked how fine they looked, –
“What, this old thing?!”
The piano had all it’s coats off, stripped for action, direct injection,
exposed like a medical school cadaver. I slid onto it’s velvet stool,
depressed the soft pedal & began to play,
“I think we should record”, he grinned.

(K)

OUTSIDER ART:

A ride in a dirty train from a sun soaked city where stark shadows dance
naked above the heads of impassive shoppers.
A ride in a dirty train whose carriages stink of cold violence, strewn
with free papers, mangled sculptures of frustration.
Riding on a dirty train, vignettes of a trackside world, crafts & cold drafts
round the legs of skimpy jeans & summer trainers.
Dirty trains, imagined only in other countries, somewhere else,
never here, but somehow always.
Through the windows of a dirty train – hope, fast random images
of tenacious lives, outsiders, Art Brut,
encampments along the rim of the world.

(K)

THIS BROKEN BENDY MAN:

His texts came in at 1:00am, saying, ‘thank you’ & ‘goodbye’.They found him
lying in a field, close to death, more from hypothermia than the overdose
he’d taken. The incident number was ‘1’, it wasn’t a busy night, but the
ambulance took longer to arrive as he’d picked his spot right on the border
where it couldn’t be agreed whose jurisdiction he fell under.
No one would move him until the ambulance arrived, so they laid a blanket
over him & he continued to die, freezing like a supermarket chicken
on the frozen grass. But though his injuries were deep, they were merely
emotional & the upside of the vast quantity of cider he’d imbibed was that
he had become endowed him with the properties of India Rubber, making it
much easier to lift him into the relative warmth in the back of his mate’s
estate car, but only after it was pointed out that he’d be dead before the
ambulance arrived if they didn’t get him off the ground. Then, when he saw,
through blurred eye’s, the bright & flashing lights all around him & the
brightly coloured clothes of his companions he began to smile,
building boxes with his numb & bloodied hands, thinking for a second
he was back-in-the-day.

(K)