“It’s useless to live” — meditations on the occassion of a significant birthday.

Last night I sat at the breakfast bar in my house listening to the radio whilst smoking ordinary everyday magic rollies with CBD charis rolled and crumbled in. Some country song caught my emotional vibe and I was moved to write two things: a poem which sounds a bit like a journal entry, and a journal entry which sounds a bit like a poem. First, retyped for your inevitable pleasure and violent curiosity — the poem:

VIGIL (poem for 40)

An old country song tumbles out from

the radio like autumn leaves filling

up this empty kitchen where I sit and

hear her name in the voice which

bewitches, seduces me, stirring heart strings

with fiddle and lap steel chiming.

We look back to look forwards, to

some future or something. I could open

the window. I need to put the bins out.

II need to sleep, but here I sit in vigil

for my lost youth, for friends I see rarely

and never. For love lost, changed, or forgotten.

[fin]

and the journal entry with (I feel) poetic qualities:

“This night as I refuse to gently go to bed, with a four-colour biro dancing in my sweaty hand on this square gridded page, unruly words tumble from my own inner Alladin’s Cave, skull bound and forever dreaming…

…is this a beginning? Is it an ending? Or just another day?

I feel my heart stirring alive, while reminded too of Last Days, the Gus Van Saint movie where a generic Kurt-a-like wanders uselessly around his large abode, I wonder then now am I old?”

As I write today I am shedding skins and rippling with light laser energy but calm with it, acceptant of this new cycle, ready perhaps for a new start. Synchronously perhaps, the real Kurt Cobain sings from the speakers “all we know is all we are” himself having climbed that metaphorical spectral ladder back in 94 wasn’t it? aged 27 inevitably.

I remember being 27 just about. I think I liked it. I was wild and mad and brimming with ideas. I think I’d better check my phone… my friend might be getting here soon but I want to press down these words. But the battery has run out on the doorbell and it’s up at my parents waiting for my eminently practical dad to fit a new battery.

The family narrative is (and it’s based in truth, or just “based” generally as I think they say now) — is that I’m impractical, a dreamer. I have always been resistant to tidying and unconfident about fixing things and DIY. I don’t look after myself very well physically. The mind is what matters, and I don’t look after that perfectly either. In fact, mind and body are one it seems, contrary to the cartesian split which may well be a malady of some sort; identifying with our thoughts overly. But I’ll spare you my psychospiritual speculation this morning, of which six minutes remain.

The last two songs to play as I write were “I’m Not Okay (trust me)” by My Chemical Romance, which I was too mature for at the time I thought, in denial about my inner emo (which is strong in this one) and thinking it was for angsty teenagers, but being ‘younger than that now’ as Dylan Put it, twisting rather the phrase towards immaturity rather then Zen simplicity, and remembering how at the Zen retreat I listened to the song on a loop, often while crying, smitten as I was with an imaginary friend, (some mysterious woman online I didn’t really know and heavily anima projected onto) and still stinging from the breakdown of my family unit, our little trio, however for the best it was and is, even if we get on better separately (my ex-wife popping round in a half hour to say hi and happy birthday with our daughter). It’s still painful. But it gets better. The other song was by ‘Therapy?’ the question mark part of their name, “lonely, crying, only” a melodic punk anthem calling for company.

I’m learning to look after the house better. I collect books, but rarely read, like in that Maximo Park tune (another one I liked on the radio like that other MCR song — ‘the Black Parade’ but didn’t listen to the album til later). I collect records, but the shelves are nearly full and usually I’m on Apple Music anyway. I’m reassured by “stuff” and have an obsession with notepads. There are paintings on every available wallspace and elsewhere. Cassettes and CDs pile up. I even keep DVDs to watch instead of Netflix. I’m a hoarder of sorts. My parents keep useful things, Dad’s garage is full of bits of furniture, old screws in washed out jam jars. We save wrapping paper. Reduce, reuse, recycle. We all compost. I forgot the bins yesterday but got them out just this morning in a photo finish meeting the binman as he walked past.

Anyway, I was going to ponder, what makes a poem? I see poetry through it’s relationship to visual art and music. In the revolutionary fervour of the Sixties, (and for the Avant gard back as far as 1900) we’ve had Cy Twombly’s painted scribbles, then years prior, Malevich’s Iconoclastic “black square”, plain white canvases by various artists, slashed canvases, not to mention Duchamp’s famous bit of plumbing. We’ve had Dan Flavin’s neon strip lights. In theatre we had Beckett’s sparse work in the Literature of Exhastion (most famously Waiting for Godot, but most relevantly perhaps in his novels and the whole oeuvre is grimly humourous and fascinating). Gone are the days of realism, country scenes, and courtly renderings of Lords and Royalty. Instagram is now saturated with abstract art of questionable virtue, and anti-art is getting tired. But we get this cyclical argument regarding art — what is it? Art is what an artist makes. Artists are people who make art. Joseph Beouys democratically said everyone is an artist. Picasso said all children were artists. Your uncle Bob said “my three year old could’ve done that” — the gallery retorts habitually “yes, but he didn’t”. William Egglestone set the precedent in photography for the elevation of the mundane into visual poetry. My poetry follows that logic, that my thoughts are poems if I say they are and want them to be. You may think they’re bad, or incomprehensible, or boring, but you don’t get to say whether they’re poems or not. On instagram today, I shared a limerick, as a gift and as an insult to popular taste. Maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe the pendulum will swing back through postmodernism and into a new Modernism as David Foster Wallace wanted. Maybe a cultural apocalypse is upon us. Anyhow, here’s the limerick, as a goofy little full stop on this article.

There once was a person from France,

Who kept several tadpoles in his pants,

he went ot the airport,

foolishly lost his passport,

and now he’s in a psychotic trance!

(bye)-