Rosevear – marriage veil
Gould – boulder earrings
Sheridan – horse mat
Blackler – cobbler
Hawker – impersonator
Gouldthorpe – fashionable trouser
Green – coroner’s ladle
Davis – shaggy dog
Ireson – green valley
Chong – ornate house boat
Hughes – lethal cough
Ford – expensive butler
Oneill – horse and cart
Godfrey – undercooked chicken
Gledhill – epaulets
Friday is a farce.
I travel in at the usual time, on the lumbering bus, but the morning’s mostly spent making tea or blowing my nose, and then it’s an early lunch. I put my umbrella over my shoulder and march down like a matchstick man to the nearest boozer. It’s all brown panels and busty barmaids inside, and a strange air flows in the rooms, an air of relief and happiness because it’s Friday, and yet below, lurking like a creature from the deep, I sense a foreboding feeling of inevitability that the weekend won’t last forever.
Next week we’ll be doing this sad little dance again, again and again in fact, until we die. Still, the looming white breasts of the barmaids (always in the same tired dresses) pour forth the frothy golden beer and it’s easy to forget about anything past today.
Back at my desk, I arrange the leaves on my plate carefully, and adorn here and there with cherry tomatoes, those little marvels of bursting red flavour.
The rest of the afternoon is a write-off and then we’re back down into the stinking dungeon that transports us to-and-fro off into our warm little living rooms, or like me, back into another den with the swirling brown panels and huge white breasts.
Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’ll bury my face into my soft white pillows.
Balasubramanian – Russian nobility
Cron – carnivorous bird
Ashcroft – fireplace
Smith – ear warmer
Cooper – policeman
Swift – any cream cheese
Harrold – wings
Steel – (musical) organ
Tonner – ship paint
James – lookout
Sleator – teddy bear
Dargue – military hospital
Kear – position of proposal
Ward – velvet flannel
Hostler – jailer
-(from my lecture on “How a Modern Poet Dresses”)…
A poet often wears a hat on his head. He calls this his “Lamb Chop”. Poet’s hats come in all shapes and sizes, though the most common style seen adorning the heads of young poets today is a small, dark blue, velvet number, oval-shaped – quite minimal in design and rather fetching [see Fig.1].
Professor Gallstone of the Institute of Poetic Physics found that the style of this most popular hat actually helps keep poems inside the head of the poet for longer, keeping the ideas and words more resistant to the corrosive elements of time and place which can be so detrimental to the lyrical verses that come like magic to the mind of the poet, and sometimes have a tendency to leak from the basin of the brain where they wash about like water in a tilting rock pool.
So we see, even in the most apparently insipid items of clothing, the poet is protecting himself not just from the elements but also from what Gallstone has termed “Poetic Conduction”, a polite term for what is essentially a destructive process for the poet attempting to commit his words to paper in these increasingly chaotic times.
Fig 1: A sketch of the hat in question.
Beswick – bald patch
Potter – woven purse or wallet
Alderman – statuesque administrator
Pepper – bespoke container
Hodgkinson – auditorium
Sherrington – fine liquors
Fahy – hay bale
Humphreys – chin strap
McGarvey – bespeckled teacher of French
I was dripping in cheap cologne
The camel I had ridden home
Was armed to the teeth with bagels
And we were able to weather the storms
And make it home in time for the harvesting
Of the corn and bath time, too.
We’d had quite a laugh
We’d travelled across deserts and
Under blue moons and steep grass
And if I ever see another camel
Or eat another bagel
It’ll be too soon,
Too bloody soon.
I like a bit of chaos, drama. I think we should all strive to have a lot of drama in our lives. Out of drama and chaos great creativity is born, plus it helps to make you feel alive.
You should always be listening to music, preferably on headphones with very loud volume, while doing two or three other tasks at the same time, to increase levels of pressure, tension and disorientation.
There is a kind of calm that comes with the chaos, somehow. When I’m on the tube, packed to the brim in the morning rush hour, I’m alone with my thoughts even though lyric-heavy or very fast music is blasting in my ears and I’m surrounded by the million faces of fellow commuters.
When life gets stagnant, when we’re finally sat at our desks after all the fanfare of the rush, and the monotony of our work sets in, this is when we’re most unhappy. As we know, we weren’t meant to leave sedentary lives. I get around this by walking the four miles home every night of the week, come rain or shine.
I used to shy away from confrontation but now I’m more inclined to actively seek it, as a way of squeezing out some drama from an otherwise dull and dreary day.
Bob Dylan has just been given the highest award in France, the Légion d’honneur, in recognition of his “chaotic life and lyrics of an exceptional artist who is recognised in his own country and throughout the world as a major singer and a great poet”.
I say it’s right we should celebrate Dylan’s chaotic life and recognise that without it his creativity wouldn’t have been either as abundant or as profound, stemming as it has done from great drama and chaotic experience, which reflects a life well lived in to the essence of existence in the world.
Our lives are preordained by controlling forces a lot of us don’t even question.
We go from one institution to another: school, university, work, old people’s homes.
The only differences I can tell so far between the educational institutions I’ve gone through and my workplace is that I get paid now whereas someone had to pay for me to go to schools.
Apart from that there’s not much difference.
I don’t particularly want to be at work as I didn’t particularly want to be at school. I don’t make much effort at work and I never did at school either.
The difference is that I am questioning the need to be here, at work. Obviously the need is money, and only money.
It still feels like school. Even the professional, mature and composed woman who sits near my desk reminds me of the prim and proper type of schoolgirl, a try hard with all her pens and paper laid out perfectly, aiming for top marks.
There are also the geeks, bullies and idiots. I don’t see myself as part of these groups and I didn’t at school either.
The only thing I’m glad about in respect to work is that at least I’m not really ‘anything’. I’m not a solicitor or a trainee, I’m not an engineer, I’m not a doctor, I’m not anything. I’m free and defying the institutionalisation that sets upon us as soon as we’re old enough to work.
But how long can I hold out? One day the money I earn will not be enough, and maybe I’ll need to become ‘something’.
It all depends on one’s willingness to compromise on one’s values and ideals.
One thing I can safely say about all my heroes is that they definitely did not compromise. I think it’s the choice between doing something great or just becoming part of the institution. It’s the choice between the freedom of Life or being a cog in the grinding wheel of Death.
To compromise is cowardice.
The whip beat down again and the sun beat down just as hard, just as cruel, drawing blood, more and more blood, and it came pouring out onto the dusty broken earth. The blood coagulated and dried on the cracked ground, and sweat rhythmically lashed in spots across the dark pools. We were all in loincloths and bound by rusted chains around the neck, pelvis and ankles. The brutes had us – we worked for them day and night, until we could work no more, and fell slowly to the ground like dead trees, and rose no more, not for fear of whip or fear of death – those dead trees were dead for good, and lay silent on the barren ground, to be trampled over in disregard – there were no burials, trampled and run over the trees became part of that vapid earth and dust drawn in by more dusting lungs.
Our masters were cruel monsters, green of skin and tall, and we in our weakened state could offer no rebellion, we suffered unduly and with no hope of anything except for a speedy death and exit from that hellish life of labour. The work was meaningless, and for a man of education, a student of the arts, I was as unfilled as I was beaten and mistreated and malnourished by our overlords, cruel aliens who came to Earth as prospective employers and dished out work for which no union would stand.
Somehow I stayed optimistic through those tough times, like a little ship buoyantly bobbing through huge crashing waves in a dark night.
It was because I always saw myself still coming out on top. I could visualise myself by a window in a tall house on a hill, overlooking a peaceful seaside town, a pleasant little harbour with moored boats. I could see myself writing fine things and having profound thoughts. I thought of the girls that loved me, at least three, all different flowers in their own rights, all beautiful beings, too much together, enough for ten men.
There was always the nagging feeling, when I was being whipped once more to the ground, and my mouth and face filling with that dead man’s dust, that perhaps I wouldn’t amount to anything, and that it really was my lot – to be a slave, and sometimes it was a struggle to pit my optimism against that darkness, that unfaceable fate, the unclimbable mountain, to become just another bit of dust. But I came out on top usually, by just telling myself to calm down, and not accept the fate of others.
thewordgun 