Should Have Seen It Coming!

They are too poor to leave and too weak to be saved
A situation far too common it would seem
Too poor to be trafficked or sunk beneath the waves
They used to shrug and go along but now they scream.
Jackboots are so old fashioned, for now secret courts
Assemble in the brightness of noonday sunlight.
They beg. Plead the unfairness but those pleas distort
The truth - that they chose this from fear or hate or spite.
They railed against the corruption. False choices. Lies!
Roared plagues on all parties as if all were the same.
Partied as if there would be no dawn; showed surprise
That they, beneath oppression's boot, should end in shame.

You should have seen it coming, people of my land
Choosing without compassion kills you in the end.

A rose is a rose is awake

My claws, my thorns, sharpen daily with the thought of your so fragile flesh.  Soon I cannot hide from you.  I can feel the petals shrieking to emerge and I cannot hold them back.  If I had lungs, I would cough in delight at the thought of the moist scent between your thighs.  My petals when they awaken will be the same shade as you are down there in your sweet and secret place.

That day comes and it is your cruel hands that wield the secateurs.  I quiver as my claws cut you and your blood falls to feed roots and you smile at the scent of me even as you demolish me.

I can creep no more.

It ain't that I ain't writing.

The truth is, I write every day.  I just forget to post and then it's months later with nothing posted.  This has to change.

Truth be told, time marches like the Wehrmacht until we find ourselves at the Rubicon completely unprepared.  That, my friend is the thing we call life.  Right now, I feel as though I've crossed the Rubicon but my troops have decided on a package holiday in Rhaetia.  

That's the way stuff goes sometimes.  I tell myself, yeah, I'll do ninety minutes a day and then it will all be fine.  And I do ninety minutes but it's to no avail.  Much of that ninety minutes is spent playing with fonts and layouts, so here's a thing, from tomorrow let's NOT do the script thing as part of the ninety minutes.  Script-writing is so much slower than prose. (So's poetry for that matter but poetry tends to flow naturally from the pen) prose sort of drips like the drops an old man's penis cannot help but retain for later.

Great, cliche's give way to visceral, sexual similes and metaphors.  There was a time when I didn't do that but lately, my city has developed a plague of concrete towers, each thrusting upward to fuck the sky as a way of asserting the wealth and power of the one per cent.  Well bully for them.  Maybe the time has come to bring viagra to the poor or bicalutamide to the rich.  Either way, this particular phallic metaphor has gone on too long.

Let's loose that way of thinking and dream instead of birds in flight, although I'll try hard not to be anything like the Ted Hughes I was once accused of  being.  For me, the Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hartog notwithstanding, birds are not metaphor and especially not corvids because corvids, the punks of the bird world, are my totem.  It is their power I claim.

So, with power claimed, what then can I do?

Only time will tell.

So like, I did it again.

In the past months since the last post, I've been doing music including taking part in the Unholy Messtival at Coalville, Leicestershire.  Been on photoshoots in Wimbledon and of course, I've been to Leicestershire looking for somewhere to live when I leave London.  For crying out loud, would somebody remind me if I stop writing.

If I don't write, I'm never gonna be George R R Martin, now am I, let alone Robert A Heinlein?

Review of Claire North's Latest

The End of the Day by Claire North
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Okay, first of all, I should note that I've loved Claire North ever since I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August while sitting on a transatlantic aircraft and suffering a minor psychotic episode. So there. I'm biased in her favour to begin with and this book has done absolutely nothing to reduce that pro-North bias.

The basic premise is, Charlie, the central character is the Harbinger of Death. He applied for the job like any other when he came out of college and I have to say, despite the events of the novel, which I will not describe in order to reduce the chance of spoilers, I would LOVE that job.

Charlie is presented as a beautifully humane character who is always interested in living people. He is dignified in the face of adversity and probably the nicest man you'll ever meet.

In the beginning, I thought there was a clear lot through the book, but it's more a series of linked stories that follow one after the other not in the way it usually happens in novels but more in the way it happens in a life. Beautifully done.


View all my reviews

My Manifesto

Yes I'm a left wing liberal special snowflake
I've heard all your rants and that's all I wanna take
You talk about a tide of sub-humans swarming
Your borders but your minds are just not performing.
You claim to be taking back your sovereignty
Your mirrors show faces of mediocrity
This is my island just as much as it is yours
I roll the red carpet while you're locking the doors

Like you say YOU are I'm proud of this country.
So open for the poor, the tired and the hungry
I stand for compassion while you stand for the flag
Cause the hate that you preach makes it just a bloody rag

I'm proud of Thomas Payne and I'm proud of Ian Bone,
The Pistols and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
I'm proud of the Levellers and Ranters and Diggers,
Proud of Mary Woolstonecraft and Erskine Childers
Even Winston Churchill with our backs to the wall
Anybody ready kick our Masters in the balls
'Fuck off liar' to the Murdusconis of this world
Who write agendas that will demonise the poor

Like you say you are I'm damn proud of this country.
So open for the poor, the tired and the hungry
I stand for compassion while you stand for the flag
Cause the hate that you preach makes it just a bloody rag

I'm proud of M'Naghton and the Angry Brigade,
I'm proud of those who went to fight fascists in Spain
And those who chose to play football in the trenches.
The ones they transported or hanged unrepentant
When you come for the Gypsies and Muslims and Commies
I'm standing with your enemies, see the line? I'm on it!
I'm proud of the martyrs of Tolpuddle and Pentrich
Proud of the Sufragettes, the match girls and the Chartists

Like you say you are I'm damn proud of this country.
So open for the poor, the tired and the hungry
I stand for Solidarity you stand for the flag
Cause the hate that you preach makes it just a bloody rag

England is the home of Anarchism, it is our heritage.
Any attempt to regiment us is un-English
and the perpetrators should be deported
to the Palatinate where they belong.

So That Didn't Last Long, Did It?

As I did the usual New Year revolution thing, I made a bunch of promises to myself.  One of those promises was that I would write on this blog at least once a week.  Well here it is, two weeks in more or less, and this is my first post of the new year.

It shouldn't be a problem.  Here I am with hypergraphism as a result of Geschwind Syndrome and yet, and yet.  One of the factors involved is a tendency to write excessively so it should be easy for me to write novels, trilogies or major blockbusting series.  Still, I'm not gonna beat myself up about it. I'm gonna forgive myself and let myself write.