supersonic 2008: saturday (a snapshot in three parts)

his head?  his head is of no fixed abode.  in mirror he’s yearning; sunlight, breath, sleep, time, anything.  he has a story to tell and a mouth fearing speech.  he gets dizzy and smokes and can’t imagine hearing anything again.  do you not know hubris, she asks?  no-one’s cured cancer.  he’s succumbing to bad syntax and ellipse.  battle wearied; let’s get lost, you and i, again.

cath and phil tyler: they’re opening gates, torii to the other.  now?  right now, this place is a curious abandoned pleasure.  you should all be here as a witness.  centuries old in their smiles and tales, playing history and present and future on faded stringed things and cracked voice and the soothing stomp of shoe on wood, as forever, as it is comforting, as it is now.  the music, it’s breathed into life, whispered through cobwebs and old faded sodium-yellow books, captured in sepia and passed on somehoworother.  hearts and bones were made to break, this is what they’re telling us.  do you understand?  it’s love and death and everything inbetween.  it’s old stories, but the same stories.  always.

• fishermans girl
• crown of rhubarb    

the courtesy group: waiting.  elsewhere.  for whatever.  twee folk and the wind to stop wheeching.  going.  the ultraviolence of black sun.  the fillings trembling in notsowhite teeth.  waiting.  good things.  and all that.  more verbs nouns and adjectives spat out, bellowed, mumbled, muttered, like fuck you’s to the standing herd, spilling out like a comedians confession or some feverish addled opium dream from some birmingham council scheme.  the grim moribund humour of provincial towns and loud shirts, jazz dirge and mangled blues, shuffling, staggering, shambling as drunks are wont to.  like walking a tightrope with only shelly winters to guide you.  like philip larkin’s senseless dancing to some bardo pond fall crossover elseworlds haze.

guapo: the first of glorious three.  one.  neither a prime nor composite number yet resplendently achromatic in reckless sequinned lycra, like some strange hypnotic sex dream i once had.  a heady brew of intense.  of mesmeric.  of dark satanik contours.  it starts with clouds rolling, roiling and birds, birds falling from the sky.  a grubby pantomime, gnarled and tar thick and black.  it’s the sound of alan moore and john carpenter and anton lavey and dario argento and the goblins.  it’s the klang of piano and the wail of warm electrics.  it’s the unsettlement of waking somewhere where, alone and damp cold before the configuring fist of realisation clubs you upside the head.  here, here is no horizon, no point of reference, only nothing and everything all at once. 

• the planks

battles: the second of glorious three.  two.  the first prime number.  the tension is palpable, sweatsoaked and strained.  i beg of you, someone begs.  there’s a rhythm, a musical prosody.  there’s a pulsing syncopation and expressive repitition.  there’s a wombbeat and heartstammer that exists within us all that makes us jerk and flail spasmodically with mad giddy glee.  beats complex and broken apart fixed, settled in locked down rainfall polyrythms making my goddam feet twitch delirious.  there is love in hearts and on faces.

• atlas

oxbow: three of three.  the first unique prime.  scribbled phonetics and compounds on too-latenight messed notebook.  ugly seedy joy etched on lips and fingertips.  this?  a lipstick flecked cigarette on exposed flesh; a shoebox filled with nails.  this?  this is how it goes.  his cock is in his hand.  the poetry’s lost in translation.  muscled, frenetic, electric.  taut, like a length of rope and an iron will.  stories, channelled and howled, of small triumphs and relentless disappointments, of nightsweats and clinging bedsheets and blood stains on something.  the light at the end of the tunnel is the brief flare of a struck match.  vague and threatening.  the truth?  i’ll find it even if everything has to come apart.  the truth, it comes in dreams and plain packaging.  the truth is two fingers inside your body, and the freedom conferred by masks.  the truth is disappearing when necessary.  the truth is letting go and learning not to breathe so easy.  this was the narcotic story.  staggering.  powerful.  graceful.  fucked.  other words, they fail me. 

“and in the end we all get exactly what we fucking deserve

down a stair backward:

i step outside to cool.  it feels good to be alone, to be not-so-sober and not-so-strong.  i’m walking like i’m drowning, determined to make the same mistakes twice. 

• (the collected supersonic 2008)