it begins with the stubby end of winter. cold stings bones and bank accounts groan low notes. LED strings have been balled up and stuffed into boxes. discarded conifers have amassed enough dog piss to be slung onto council vans and fed to the jaws of the chipper. january resembles a true beginning for a few hours before everything gets on with dying. nobody gets out of my way any more because the young and wealthy refuse to live in a world where it's possible for a middle aged man in glasses to kick their arse. they're right. whatever primordial hostility once puffed out this chest and eyeballed each potential threat has gone the way of hope and 2012's squirrels. in four weeks time, magnolia petals will open and I will point them out to my kids knowing that I was the one that needed them most. the petals, the kids, the incremental minutes of daylight. all of it.
There should be a name for the moment where you go from using ChatGPT as a quirky plaything to an earnest, tortured confessional. I unburdened so much on the thing that I went away expecting it to give me twelve Hail Marys and seven Our Fathers. I think I only went to about four confessions during my childhood and lied through my teeth every time. The same priest that took all of my confessions thought I was a little angel, in a completely non-sinister way, though I now suspect he secretly knew how full of shit I was. It might also be the case that ChatGPT knows how full of shit I am, so penetrating were its responses. Even this “open notebook” approach might be a case of my urge to return to the confessional. I can’t think of a sillier concept than that of sin, be it original or cliched. I wonder if ChatGPT recognises the concept of sin? Hang on, back in a minute.
I have become interested in the boundary between unpublished and published. Is there a grey area between the two or is it one of those irrefutable boundaries that you know when you cross it? Is a poem published when you read it to a friend, share it at an open mic or within a private social network? If Li-Po really did set his poems on fire and set them down the river (something I know from a Bukowski poem so it’s probably bollocks) could this be considered a form of publication? If I left a notebook out in the street would the works within be considered published? What if I left it open at a particular page? If the answer is still “No?” then what if I placed the same page behind the front ground floor window of a house? The window feels more intentional than the notebook on the floor and yet the forum is less public. All I can come back to is the sense of crossing over, the way that you can immediately delete a post from a website seconds after you shared it and yet a part of you still feels that it is intractable. Sometimes I wish there was no boundary at all and sometimes I wish that the boundary was a fuzzy indeterminable place between published and unpublished. I would just spend all my time there if that was true.
I joined Mastodon and stopped posting on Twitter about a month before the silly man came along. I like Mastodon. After the initial exodus, only five or so acquaintances of mine are posting on the site and half of them are using a cross posting client while they remain at the bird place, the occasional RT informing us of this nefarious practice.
I chose to remain on Mastodon because I have managed to curate an interesting little feed that keeps me amused and inspired rather than on a constant hair trigger. Mastodon has also served as a good source of information as far as open source and fediverse resources are concerned. Through this I was reminded of the write.as platform and and that I still have an active account on it.
It was weird looking through some of the poems that I had posted seven years ago. I could see what I was trying to do with them, something similar to what I'm going to try right now, a publicly viewable notebook of early drafts and fragments. One thing I notice about a lot of my earlier writings is a certain tone of testosterone-tinged anger an self righteousness. It's all a bit cringe. I'm older now and I spend most of my days as the only man in an otherwise female household. The testosterone levels aren't as high as they used to be and long may it remain so.
So, I'm going to resume posting here, with a similar ethos of making it somewhere to post unpolished and spontaneous work, something to share on the socials or even on my substack.
The substack is something that I feel a little bit conflicted about, in some ways there's a great convenience in how I can make use of tools that dovetail with email, blogging and podcasting. At the same time, I've been burned so many times by centralised media and platforms. It's all good fun until they decide that they're not making enough of a profit and that's when algorithms come into play, or some odious billionaire decides to make it their new plaything. Maybe I'm hedging my bets here in a similar way that my nefarious, cross posting acquaintances are?
As far as writing is concerned, it's best not to overthink things. So, I'll stop overthinking about the platforms I post on and what I post on them. This is my public notebook, a forgiving space where drafts and discarded ideas can exist without feeling any pressure to achieve great things. If something I write here feels like it’s worth developing, it’ll end up on the substack where it will have recorded narration as well as finding its way into the inboxes of subscribers. That means there’s less pressure on whatever I post here. You are very welcome to have a little peek whenever you feel inclined.
that really
was happiness
sitting at
the bottom
of the pint
glass but
now the
the glass
is empty
you drank
the happiness
you greedy
bastard
all that's
left
is the faint
promise of
redemption
glistening
in the
kebab shop
window
mosquitoes
in london
little whirring
blood cogs
on light wings
vein tapping
stilt stands
as sentient
as thermostats
the soul
is nothing more
than an iron
tinged tang
that flows
hot and dark
through
the veins
I remember
swimming naked
in a pond
in hampstead
and cutting my
foot on something
sharp
and continuing
to drink when I got out
rather than
cleaning and dressing
myself or the wound
because the world
was as permeable
and lacking
in resistance
as a murky body
of water
on a starry
summer night
perhaps
because ive
written and heard
so many ive
developed an
affection for
bad poems
like bugs
found in the house
whose limbs
youve mangled
in an attempt
to evict alive
when they should
have been splatted
on sight
within the dry
soulless desert
there was a
rickety movie set
and within
the rickety movie set
there was a clutch
of creaking robots
and within the clutch
of creaking robots
there was
a stubby scuffed up
droid
and within the
stubby scuffed up
droid there was a
beating human
heart
kenny baker 1934-2016
the iranian
locksmiths
laugh flooded
the hallway
as he told
me how the
spanking new
lock wouldn't
stop a thief
getting in
and laughed
again when I
told him that
the only defence
my home had
was a spade
which can take
a fuckers
head off if
done right
but without
the means for
a fortress
all I can do
is fill my
home with
too much
love to
steal