the viscosity project

SOCIETY

We poured from the pub that abyssal night,
A full pint of rain dripping from our noses.
Flowed down waving streets of aching hands
And were gratefully absorbed by our houses.

Waking from millimetres of sleep,
To board crumbling trains in the deep-sea rust,
We still believed in some perfect room
Left over from the night, where we trust

That the women, still, come and go
And they, Still, talk of Michelangelo.

But to teach that the night-struggle is glorious
And to preach that we must always strive
Is merely to leave a choice between
Holy repentance and free, pagan pride

And if my next move, now, is a choice between
Rook to knight four, or knight to rook four,
How can I choose the latter
If the former is, still, the board?

My father, once, said I should start smoking
in the same pernicious, smiling breath
that he advised me to work in the city
for the few years of my youth I had left.

Where the endless March tides would carry me,
With the slow wavelength of nicotine
That sea of camphor would embrace me,
and gently stroke my memory clean.

But remember just one thing, my son
In the whiplash of your final December,
When your swollen arteries are clogged,
When your spite is almost dead, remember;

That our eyes, my brother,
and our minds are merely other
Weapons of imperfection
with which to punish one another.

For 12 months the trees grew warped,

were extruded from the ground already leaning.

For that year I feared to lose my hold,

and that first night i woke with a screaming

cry, then a quiet sigh,

and now just silent, slight

surprise.

It started innocent enough, was just an isolated phenomenon at first.  Occasional small villages, here or there, in places you’d never heard of.  Isolated places, and isolated repors of some scourge.

It started in the West Country.  It was started by a woman.  Her children were supposed to be up on the moors.  She looked innocent enough though, in The Mirror.

Then riots, killings, torture.  Children were read, books were burnt.

Your personal effects.  They happened slow.  They happened imperceptibly.  But, one day, you passed a sign.  It said You Have Been Warned, and you actually, carefully took note on your scorecard.

You Have Been Warned.

He was found, staggering, on Charing Cross road, speaking in tongues.  The officer who gently arrested him, who silently guided him into a cell for the night, was not surprised.  It was a Friday, it was 3.00am, and this kind of thing was not unusual.  What was, if anything, was the complete lack of sense the drunk made.  Even in the worst cases, occasional ribbons of sense would pour out.  Not here, it seemed; he spoke a language entirely without nouns, but full of compounded adjectives.

Later, when at the university, he would occasionally return to this talk, in the midst of lectures.  The students, the first time, were awestruck.  This tweeded man, grey streaks of hair pulled forward over his bony forehead, talking in tongues.  The assembled mass, their noses red from the winter morning, stared.  That was the first few times.

Later still, even once the language had been well studied, it still stood as a pseudo-joke.  Something to be hinted at in the corners of pubs, where those used to talking in the upright, pub, drink, money nouns would, in their drunkeness, descend into the strange moonly-rising tongue.

Rosharch butterflies came in through the window, stars straying briefly from their wingtips.  The curtains twitch in their sleep as the moon blows softly in through the window.

A flowered face, tendrils crawling over it’s eyebrows, stares down.  It watches the lilies skating over the carpet.  Foot-long butterflies skim thier voilet flowers, sending circular ripples beyond where the walls were.

Where the boards were stand roots, iron-brown trunks drip azure tears into the sheltering sky, and the moon blows softly in.

The impoverished, the meek, the gaunt and hollow

houses huddle here.

Under the tree thrown sideways,

under the streetlamp violence.

They started as cracks in the pavement,

before pebbles, then tiles, pour out.

Solidifying as it billows upward,

it has a face of coral,

and a purpose made of glue and pins.

Windy, Low Pressure, Fluctuation.

on one side their is the choice to choose

between a flint spear-head of desireless will

and the opiate-infused day sweats.

but then, if the choice is only available

through a sublimation of myself

can the choice ever be met?

if my choice of move, now, is between

knight to queen four and queen to knight four

how can i choose the latter

if the former is the board?

So.

I’m not sure how many people regularly commute to London from their very own suburb, but it must be a sizeable proportion of the population of good old London town.

I count myself in a somewhat priveledged position here, if you can call it that, because I commute the other way. From my flat on threadneedle street (yeh, right) I go to Bromley to waste far more time than is necessary working. I ride a bike.

This, in itself, is nothing special. What is, though, is the wind. In the morning, the friction caused by all those lattes being lifted, from all the skinny jeans being drawn over newly shaven legs, creates hot air. As any of you who have been to school will know, this means that the air above central London rises. Thus, the cold, refreshing air of the suburbs (provided mainly by the notoriously thrifty “poor”, God Bless Them) instantly wants a part of the gentrified action. It breezes in, as it were.

Eight hours pass, and the sun goes down(ish). Suddenly, all that rustic air, having sunned itself in the *ahem* sun all day, decides to rise. There’s probably cider up there or something, or perhaps just a massive joint, I don’t know, anyway; the point is, the city air blows the other way, out of London.

I wouldn’t have noticed this, of course, if i hadn’t of been riding the other way ALL THE BLOODY TIME. It’s a bit annoying. But, and this is important, it means that all you people commuting into London probably aren’t aware of this. It’s pretty hard to notice wind that blows in exactly the same direction, at almost the same pace, as you. About as hard, I would say, as noticing someone on the train. This is exactly the point, although there are two ways of looking at it.

The first is that the wind has decided to go to work. All you guys have made it so embarassed that it’s decided to stop arsing about blowing flags and lifting skirts and got itself a suit. To put it bluntly, we made it do this, mainly by making the city itself.

The second is that it’s making us do it. This is the scary one. As though it was meant to happen, that there has always been this tide in London, and we are being swept along against our will. As if, when waking in the morning, you have no choice but to get the train. That the train cannot divert it’s course. That, whilst eddies may take you into Starbucks, that whilst a powerful car may allow you a week in the country, you are caught. You are the wave, breaking every morning against bulwarks of concrete.

Of course, the perceptive among you will have realised the obvious.

The two are not incompatible.  We created this, and we are trapped in it.

so. poems do not have meanings anymore, or so i’m reliably informed by those people who go to more college than me. i’m too busy being cool, you see. me, i’m not too worried about this lack of semantics, nor that we have now decided, in what must be the longest running debate in history, that context both matters and doesn’t. similarly, i’m not bothered that we now have considerably more ways of interpretation than people alive. you see, i’ve realised something quite important. even i if i do say so myself, and i do. texts, you see, while they may not have meanings or contexts, and whether or not they mean nothing or everything or both or neither, posses something much more important. i shall choose to call it…socio-psycho-ability. i could have named it conversational value, or the even more vulgar thought mileage. in fact, perhaps that’s better. so; thought mileage, then, is a certain quality of something that an object may posses in varying quantities. all objects have it, but in most it is at such an impossibly low level that our in-built censoring equipment quickly, efficiently and very gently guides our conscious mind from it. most things we do not think about, talk about, even look at in any meaningful way. whether we should or not is a discussion for a different day. but what i’m trying to get at, in an incredibly long-winded way, is that poems have thought mileage, you see? most have it in some degree, and a very few have it in supertankerfulls. it is the quality in things that some part of us goes ah! to. but not just ah!, and certainly not just aw…, but hmmm… and grrr… and right! and wrong! and right? and wrong? and yes! and no! and yes and no. it is the thing that makes things we see into things we think about, things that we hear into things we talk about and things we do into things we do again. cue; problems for the statements i began with. for you see, all the above discussions about context, about interpretation, about meaning most importantly, are all ways of measuring poems. they won’t tell you this, of course, and i certainly wouldn’t, but they are, really, aren’t they? i don’t mean in the cold hard operating room sense, although there is certainly an element of this that occurs, but merely in the fact that everyone, be it layman or laywoman, has an opinion on these matters, and texts that do not conform to these are excluded from discussion by the great social hive mind. but wait, and cue; the statements above becoming right again. for if every text has a quantity of thought mileage within it, then the ones that get discussed must be the ones with the most, right? and this, this unifying quality, is what i’m getting at. that we must celebrate the fact that someone, somewhere, has extracted enough thought mileage from shakespeare to prove (prove, i ask ya!) that shakespeare created the modern individual. now, in my view, this makes shakespeare good. not because i agree with the quite frankly preposterous idea, but because any assemblage of 30 repeated inky symbols on pulped dried vegetable matter that can create that delusion has a certain wizardry about it. but, and at once and the same time, we should realise that we can discuss a particular book to within an inch of the end of the world and not change the fact that it is boring. the only objective value that a text possesses is, in fact, the amount it will be thought about, discussed, and copied after it is read.
discuss.