dirtyfilthy.net

Reading is such a rush. Performed this at beat street in front of a bunch of school kids, they seemed to like it.

*How I got my tattoos*

sit right back and I shall tell you a tale
and I will try and weave a little truth in their somewhere
although a pinch of salt does make the stew that much more flavourful

it was in lyttleton

you all know what that place is like

New Years Eve, 1999
 
and i was rolling down the street drunk as a skunk on parisian pefume
with only a couple of square wheels for legs
hands like two roman candles
just a windmill in a stiff ocean breeze
a small rowboat sailing foamy seas of 
tasteless beer and whisky
a brain that quite some time ago went out for a fresh pack of cigarettes
and quite honestly, hasn't been ever seen again since

anyhow at the time it semmed there was
a vast international communist illuminati jewish banker conspiracy
to prevent me from getting a drink 
at any bar
anywhere
in the entire goddamn world

but there was one place that would still serve me
little more than a hole in the ground really
a 6 foot by 7 foot cell
darker than a car full of arseholes
and largely inhabited by 
russian sailors
black marketeers of rare radioactive isotopes
hawkers of the illicit bone marrow trade
sickly sweet purveyors of the finest distilled dreams
pimps and rubes and circus folk

it was a pick and mix 
licorace all-sorts 
assorted 
assortment of varied and various
highly unsavory characters

I found I fit right in

one particularly ancient mariner
and I swear to god
the man so old
I suspect he actually build the log cabin
he was born in 

invited me for a drink

vodka it was
though it tasted like mineral tuperpentine
burned all the way down
felt like I had swallowed a lit match
sucked on a square of sandpaper

and then when i woke up
battered and bruised in the bright gutter of the morning

the tattoos...
they were just there

Reading back on my poems and I am deeply dissatisfied. Just yet more recyclable oh so disposable paper cup throwaway pieces of biodegradable trash, the rhythm is wrong – it’s all elbows and angles. There’s no grace in this, nothing sublime. Burn it all I say, let’s just start again from whatever charred & blackened skeletons of first principles are left. I brush my teeth with a fine tooth comb.

The walls are encroaching on the encampment, encircling, wheeling like vultures, waiting for the fire to die out, the fuss to die down, they picking their time to squeeze in like a grape-press. They will eventually crush everything. Nothing will be left, just an undifferentiated jelly or spiritual puree, a god-awful hamburger milkshake.

I polish my shoes with engine oil. I wipe my ass with a diesel rag. I am flame retardant; spin the flint, the sparks won’t catch.

To drink scotch is always to imagine you swallowed a lit match down afterwards.

In my small life there is also the small joy of inflicting my stamp (a pair of knuckledusters dripped in sealing wax) upon the face of the world. I was motherfucking here it sez, like most human endeavours a quickly forgotten kiss of spray-paint chap-stick across the mouth of a glacier. Screw you it sez. I exist it sez.

Your skin has a taste. It tastes of you. Your clothes too, they smell like you also, and if I cast my line into the sea of memory I can hook a chain of eels that are all relatives of you, a greasy recollection of you biting of your lip has the rest of your face firmly clenched in a tight bite ensconced in it’s jaw & + finding a stray hair on my jeans leads with all the chess certainty of a detective mystery to hearing you laugh then poaching lazy morning eggs together. I think that if I keep pulling on this rope I feel I could raise Atlantis. My hand on the small of your back, both our foreheads press together and the surface area is incalculable.

Consider if you will the life & works of John Fare, a performance artist who eventually had himself (after a long history of amputating other parts) beheaded on stage.

The first performance was a lobotomy on Fare in June 1964. By the time Fare performed at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto on 17 September 1968, he “was short one thumb, two fingers, eight toes, one eye, both testicles, and several random patches of skin.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fare

A job for those of job age. Now that’s what I call “Art”. If only Damien Hirst would have himself preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. Alas, we all seem to lack the courage of our convictions now-a-days.

Great art demands great risks.

I sometimes feel as if the tectonic plates of life are grinding me into flour slowly but surely over some kind of brutal uncaring geological timescale, an inevitable, irresistible & sadly irreversible decline. Let me recline in the belly of your whale for a while and recuperate, lounge around on the psychologist’s chaise suite. I really think I could use a little time out to be honest but the ever gnawing teeth of the gears of industry don’t stop for nobody, least of all the big red emergency stop button. Well, I guess this is the foreign legion: you march or you die. My feet feel like they are encased in concrete baby booties, it’s a more of a shuffle than it is a swagger.

my father, god bless his ashen soul
sat down the other day
for a serious talk
at a serious restaurant

(it all looked a bit grim to be honest)

he ordered himself a water (no ice)
and when it arrived
I could see that the glass 
was  very clearly half-empty

and then 
in the voice of a tired god
he said unto me

son
you can't keep rocking round
just spending  money like a pocket with a hole in it
you gotta have some goals boy

you gotta have 
career aspirations

yout gotta have
quarterly milestones

and where are my grandkids?
blah blah blah blah
blah


christ I thought
maybe the old bastard has point
I mean we all have to keep our little 
boats afloat don't we?
ay ay captain! 
let's not lower the liferafts just yet

fortunately I have this entire bottom draw full
of scrunched up paper napkin plans

you know, the kind of things you're always going to do
some day
but never seem to get around to 


and 
sailing my way to china 
over the ocean
on a bottlecap
has long been a lifelong dream of mine
but possibly also
a little impractical...

not to worry
I do have a plan b though
I was thinking I'd take a flight up to wellington
pack a crowbar
steal a few of those gold bricks they use to pave the streets with

I'm not greedy
just enough to retire on

now I don't know if any of you people has ever shot any bison but

those gold bricks will soon grow back

anyhow
the thing is right I met this guy on the internet
and He's quite into lunar real estate
says if I buy ten acres he'll throw in the entire brooklyn bridge
which sounds like a pretty sweet deal
I mean it's cheap land but you know it's

good soil

though exactly how I'm supposed to get my bridge up there
is still a little unclear around the edges

I'm sure that:
all will soon be revealed!

as the priest once said to the chambermaid


I figure I'll just start a ranch
maybe plant me some moon chickens
herd forests of magic bean stalks across the lunar wastes

finally go and make something of myself

dad
you're going to be 
so 
so
proud

On the other hand

Pita breads stuffed with humus, soft avocado, cheddar cheese, the merest slightest brush of crushed garlic: fresh produce, so good.

Cigarette holders still have this kind of dirty sleezy lounge lizard cool. Burning gulps of whiskey in the alleyway behind Frank’s Bar & Bistro, another one night hat stand followed by another guilty visit to the vetenarian. Pocketful of napkin plans, no forwarding adddress mr postman, I’m sailing straight across to china on a bottlecap. Shake down the Irish fish mongers for five dollar scores, hustling for nothing but it’s like this prehensile swimming motion now, instinctual. Let’s keep leaky boat afloat ok. Ay ay captain! we will lower the liferafts immediately, set the controls for the heart of the iceberg, first deckchair on the right and no chickening out afterwards. Just an empty piece of sky blue jigsaw, the maudlin melancholic mad-man’s hum from the loneliest little cigarette butt in the ashtray. A bit of trouble – well hell Beatrice better cash me up while I’m ahead I can hear storm warning sirens, they wail like baby they weep like a widow. Shutter the windows, barricade youself inside, feed the cats, horde your ammunition. TO-DO: Write letters to the editor in green ink. Dear Sir/Madam I deeply apologise for my behavior on the night of ________, it was completely out of character for me. I know we have never met before but that does not excuse my heartfelt desire to offer a general expression of most sincere & humble remorse your’s etc P.S. that new lounge suite really suits you.

xoxoxo - this is the new morse code. An alien language, a context free gramma is soaked to the bone in spirits and then: set alight. A flickering cinema will-o-wisp or Uncle Arnold’s six hour holiday slideshow projection extravagance. Just like Orwell says right: a pair of balls, slapping against an ass, forever. In some way I guess everybody is getting fucked, St. Ron Jeremy surrounded by a orthodox christian gold-leaf halo sillohuting his beautiful big bald head, like a setting sun steaming like a hissing snake into the ocean, but uh, let us be perfectly honest I’ve always found his videos to be, as they say, oncers.

Masturbating nuns at the confession booth, let us at least be truthful.

Ah man, I dunno. I feel pretty bad, and now having somewhat exorcised my demons, figuring it’s not good to take out your own personal kinks and crevices out on other people. She really didn’t deserve it. I love you m.

These twelve hour days are killing me.

The working week just rolls on and on, seems like no sooner has friday finished whispering in your ear than monday comes in with an early morning bullhorn, passive aggressively clattering the dirty dishes and slamming shut each bedroom door. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM NOTHING IS WRONG LEAVE ME ALONE I AM FINE.

oh man, i’m actually really nervous haha.

“They found despite New Zealand being ranked first in a global peace index which looked at issues such as corruption, violence and crime rates, only 57 per cent of New Zealanders felt safe, a rate comparable with Iran and Bulgaria.” (italics mine)
– http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/6632902/Politicians-cuffed-for-filling-jails

Yeah. About that. Lolwut. Buy me a river and cry out the fishes. One of the safest countries in the world, but also amongst the most paranoid.

I have a leg of lamb marinating in cumin, ground coriander seed, tomato, ginger, garlic. Tomorrow I will slow cook it over a period of six or seven hours. This is an experiment, hopefully it turns out ok. What am I doing – I have no idea – I am an idiot wrapped in an enema. Everything is fearful, looms microscope large and casts vast shadows. I am some kind of semi-average pervert wrapped in tinfoil and many layers of gladwrap. Like Jem, I am also a hologram; truly outrageous, truly truly truly outrageous. I really wish a could turn my pre-verted neuroticism into some kind of charming woody-allen like schitck. Let’s make beautiful! – I’ll take two, wrap them up in newsprint, stick a band-aid of sellotape across the flap then just shovel it under my arm and I’ll stalk the streets like I have a purpose and here is a dream. There: we abseil off the edge of the world, past turtle after tortoise and on to the back of the giant snail that carries the entire universe on it’s shell.

You

take your faltering lantern and stride cautiously into the dark.

hello this isn’t going well at all i am an idiot and what was i thinking, well something. Though i couldn’t describe it too you except in the ways already listed previously. Honestly sometimes I feel a bit dwarfed by you. Like ok I’ll just bust out this totally amazing shit I happened to have stashed in my pocket OKAY HERE IT IS. What a strange thing, that your skill should make me feel small. You ring the bell, I can only ever touch it with a pickle fork.