TRAINS & RAIN:

North London meetings along unfamiliar rail links, unusual clothes combinations & the kind’ve hairdo’s that gets you into trouble round here. Sifting out the words from the noise & the habitual desire to turn everything into ‘nice-ness’. It’s like a tic, an itch that has to be scratched to stop the day from going bad. These beautiful words are turned to junk through an obsession to write in rhythms. I got to see a doctor…or

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LIGHT CAKE & CANVAS DANCE:

On Friday, following cake & light in Soho, I got inspired for the first time
in years to paint on canvas after seeing some fabulous paintings from 1964
by the artist Mark Vaux. Every time I visit that gallery something new
happens. Cork Street looked vibrant & fabulous like a street of toy shops
at Christmas, my favourite street of galleries anywhere in the world,
it would be a tragedy to loose it.

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SUN BATHING:

Alone

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THE MAN IN THE FLOWERPOT HAT:

The girl sat next to me last night got hot when the singer took off his jacket. His arms went all the way to his shoulders, he’d looked after himself. “Woo! Woo!” she went & squirmed in her seat, a grand daughter in age yet in her twenties. How she knew this old guy’s music & come to love it so deep I couldn’t imagine. The songs made no connection with me, but there was something endearing about his stage craft, like that character Peter Sellers played when he was a gardener. “Wow, he’s so fit!” she grinned to all her girlfriends lined along the aisle, gyrating & glowing in time with the gentle beat of his pick-up band.

(K)

COMIC BOOK SUPER HERO FANTASY FIGURES:

Kidderminster crumbles but in my dreams is filled with bustling chippy’s cooking with lard, news agents selling 60′s American comics & washing machine showrooms selling rock guitars to languid boys with hair to their arses. That’s where we dressed in brown paper costumes, imagined we were super heros, wire coat hangers for weapons. We adventured up the back stairs of decaying launderettes to rooms that smelled of rot & mould. Men showed up at the door every day smelling of spice & countries to the East. Lonely men who smiled but looked distant as they talked who left their washing, collarless shirts & dusty suit jackets in whose pockets we discovered exotic coins we saved for them, but some never never came back. Their clothes lay neat, smelling sweet & English on shelves, in back rooms, wrapped in brown paper where we glanced at them weekly, wondering if they’d forgotten or found some other fate in the alleys of a crumbling town.

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WATER COLOUR:

Driving home in the glow of FM, we saw the final rays of the sun,
gasped at their beauty & pulled over. Standing in the headlights,
engine running on a dirt track, we photographed the rhythm of
corn stubble & the blue grey of the water colour trees delineating
the ends of the Earth.

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LAST NIGHT WITH L.A. CHRIS:

Angel to Hackney whilst Kidderminster crumbles we walk a dog in the dark which suddenly stops & stands it’s ground like a Donkey – did you call it Snowy?

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PAINTING BY NUMBERS:

Pinks & Blues thin as bone china hang luminous on the horizon.
Trees blush, browns turn pink, yellows vibrate & Autumn
oscillates for a fleeting moment. You’re too busy to notice,
always rushing around, jobs to do – busy, busy. You rack up
lists of hard facts, tick them off, pile them up between us.
If I didn’t know better I’d say you were repulsed by romance.

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YEAH – NICE:

Whose voice is this I found in my mouth today?
Can I swap it for the other one?

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DANCING IN THE LIGHT:

A bright sun burns the frost off the cars & you could see for miles
if you were here. Long shadows raise shallow furrows in the fields
& Autumn clings to dancing sticks. I know it’s not new but I was listening
to John Grant last night. Never knew his story or his work but when he
stepped out onto the Barbican stage the night we went to see Efterklang
all that changed.

(K)