They're Not My Words: Part I

This Project is Stagnant (Get it Out of My Face!) - Latterman
We know things lose their shine over time. So the things that you love and you say wont feel the same way. So move out. Move on. Fall deep in love with your meaning, and if we haven't found it, I hope we can all start looking. So look out. Look up. Even though the skies are cloudy gray. Spend every new day looking deep and fall in love again. Because things can't stay new forever. We have to work to keep it together. Old melodies are renewed and recreated. We have to keep on singing.

Let's Contemplate the Consequence of Being

I saw a million cars cross this desert plain of billboards and bright city lights, and sad commercial gain. Where were they heading? Maybe west towards the sunset or futher to the edge of reason or perhaps to the end of the earth where they could contemplate what lay behind them. What I mean is they could think about the consequence of being, and I don't mean doing, and I don't mean thinking, I mean actually being. They could contemplate the consequence of being. I used to try and dream about what this place once looked like before the roads, and before the streetlights, gunfights, and midnight opening times. Yeah, I bet it was a flat place with birds circling skywards and the only roads paved out led to California or some other place of future promise unimaginable. So let's scuff our feet Ace, and take a walk outdoors, suck in that summer air and shake the dust off. Let's push start this motorbike and ride out to the ocean, dash across the sand and dive right into the waves. Or we could slip into the flow of traffic and keep riding the long train east, across the desert plain of city lights until we're out of that place. It's up to you to decide. Do you want the ocean waves and a subtle breeze that's blowing change or a cliff of an infinate peril drop and a deckchair facing oblivion where you can sit and take down the past, scene by scene with an hourglass counting down with each grain of sand the cost of dwelling on past failures. By the way, you can never turn back.

Out on the Streets with a Stagger and a Grin

I want to tell you what I've seen in a drunken haze on the city streets and it's just waves of resolution on the faces of night strangers. Shall we down another pint? What next though, bitter, black or blonde? I guess they're all good choices, great ideas, another one of yours tonight. I think it's great how we just open up and talk about truth and what it means to be here, in this bar, at this table, in this city, with these words. I could talk a million times and keep ploughing over the same familiar ground, it's a conversation much more adeqaute for friends and beer and slurring sentences. The pavement pounds outside with passing feet and friends embrace and laugh and talk and I'm buzzing, literally buzzing with a smile on my lips and my coat still on and I actually feel part of something here, I feel woken inside and accepted and I realise that I'm looked upon, I'm actually looked upon as a leader in there. Yes, I have positive attributes and I'm unique and something different. Did I lift the atmosphere at a time unimaginable, did I create new things? I don't think so. The people you are now were already there before me, but I was part of the hatching and coming together and I was proud to be centered so dearly and I was the peak of the pyramid but the next day I was sick and my head split open in two aching pieces. I was never a martyr, just a drunk, but it's all the same to us.

My Heart: The Jumble Sale

There was a table that stretched from the kerb to the door and it was heavy and aching with the past twenty years, and from some carefully folded napkins and a heap of dug-up bones that we found one sticky summer under hedges. There was a stack of magazines and some dog-eared novels steeped in laughter, tears and a read to rags aura that was radiating out into the street and the crowd. I saw a photo of us both and remembered swigging from the bottle and smoking until we swayed and couldn't stand. There were flashes of trainers, bass guitars and cd shops and thinking we were one on one with the world. A microscope lost in some damp dark cupboard and a draw full of cd's and video tapes. There were sheets of pulled off wallpaper and posters, pogs and midnight snow and aftershave and stars and broken office chairs. Today I saw my life for sale on trestle tables long and wide and the people gathered round with sticky hands and pound coin smiles. I wrapped my arms around these things and screamed for resolution but it's gone, I saw them slip away between my fingers like liquid through my hands and I couldn't catch them. New memories push the old away, so I archive them in objects and people's faces because it's just easier that way.

The Painstake

I've been wondering when I will catch your eye, probably never so it's time to force issue on you and make the first move, but wait, am I really going to do this and step over this line knowing that it will raise behind me from the ground like gates to seal me in, there's no going back from this. So I eased into cautiousness and proposed Christmas meetings because maybe our paths could just cross over other commitments. You liked it because it was plausible and so did I, it was an unspoken fact that we noted between us. The place was dark and red and blue and I stuck to the floor by the bar in spilt beer and liquor and the scent was sour and static but you were there and I barely noticed. Memories of four years ago washed away the awkwardness and we toasted to how everything changes but nothing has changed. I really liked your glasses and your ripped jeans and your converse and your badges and the way you painted your nails black like you always did. You were an enigma and I couldn't unravel you or figure you out but we sank all the beer that we could and went out into the night and we were rain smattered and laughing and we smoked the last fags we had under streetlights. I had visions of holding your waist in my hands and it was real and forever and we were magnets. Next there was a "Don't forget to keep in touch" conversation and you were waving at me from behind dusty glass and I was smoking alone on the bleak city street with half a dream lived out and no questions answered, like, what if I was stronger and maybe more sure? Could I have done more to keep you close? Was I a fool just dreaming about these things while all the time you were begging for me to reach out and grab us? The questions are infinate, and was that my chance just gone?

A Short Word on Writing and Hearing

Sometimes my fingertips are hard and they smart when i push them into frets but it's ok. I keep playing out the same pattern and it's one that is perfect from start to finish in my head but when I try to convey it out loud it consists of minor melodies and the rest is just missing pieces, but it's ok. There is always the picture but never the right frame, I keep saying it over and over, but it's ok. Hearing my voice on the scratchy, low-fi recording feels sad and incomplete, but it's ok. There is always the picture but never the right frame.

Polo Shirt Girl on a Train

I saw her first in a reflection of mirrored glass. Her stare vacant and thoughtless and perfect across rolling fields and farmland and it was a waiting purity and she was pure. She didn't have a place to go and there was nowhere she'd left and her story was a empty page to me so i could just get out the pen and start writing this rant in my head. I saw her bag and her badges and her vans and her hair and it was easy to imagine her smile and her laugh and her arms and her legs and the beating of her heart moving across crowded rooms, and her bumping into me as she passes me by and the feel of her skin at the push of the bar, and the look of her friends as they push her towards the dancefloor and the drink in her hand as it starts to spill and the way when I lose sight of her I try to look across the faces as I pretend-listen to a conversation about being alone that I am barely involved in. It's really just a lightening flash story that evolves around her as she sit's there unchanged but to me it seems real. I wish I could put a name to the face but I guess if I could it would mean conversation and I've already invented her so why ruin it. I've kind of based my life on these situations.

Let's Scratch the Surface Tonight

I laced these shoes tight for a night on the town and my feet felt like blocks skating on a pavement of ice. I stretched down my shirt to get rid of the creases and sat back and wrote names in the steam on the glass. I wish for one night I could empty my head and erase myself from this novel and start a fresh. In hindsight I would've chosen to make the mistake and spill my guts onto your vans in hope that maybe you would feel the same. I could go in the other direction with you and have people talking behind our backs and if the truth had to be known then that's what I wanted. I wanted office chairs spinning and stealing shy glances and pretending for pencils and pens just to see you. I wanted scribbles on post-it's and pinstripe compliments and 'how did it go?, you looked great up there' conversation openers. I wanted cigarette breaks where we stalled over drags just so I could memorise your perfection and take you home whole at night. I wanted whispered phone calls and broken heart confessions and movie script endings where we finally 'were', but I was weakened by being a boy. If it was now, then...

The Great Jigsaw in the Sky

I remember this one time when I was standing at the mouth of an ocean watching the sun dissolve behind soft, flat water and I felt something burst in my chest and in my hands and in the deepest pit of my stomach. It was a sudden understanding of life and love and the wind and rain and it was almost as if everything just clicked for those four or five seconds and there was nothing too dfficult to understand because everything was connected by atoms and chemistry and human compassion for the things they created. And that was all over in a few seconds and I went back to sandy feet and high stools beside granite bars. I've not spent time since trying to search out that understanding, only trying to remember the things that I knew. One day I'll take a son or a daughter back to that spot and we'll wait for the sun to drip out of the sky and when night approaches I'll tell them about the world and how it is just a neatly tiered structure of science and prayer and passion and angst that is all built on a foundation of human connections and understanding. I'll try to explain that everything is as simple as rows of houses, saturday night telelvision, raised glasses, kicked off shoes and shopping bags, and there'll never be a reason to say another word.

The Importance of Being In Situ

Ear splitting, nails down a chalkboard
Living smokeless with no expectation
Screaming into black holes
In palpable misery

Lying face down in room spinning ache
Pick up, check, place down gently
The same routine, the same agony
I am the principal of this sickness, the pioneer

Attempting to Connect through Speech and Actions

It was a million years ago today that we met. Your smile sickly sweet with a hint of regret and your words unpalatable. I was a master of penmanship and my normally steady hand was awake with a vibrating shaking that came from deep inside my nervous system.

It was a million years ago today that we met and I still remember the uncertainty flairing up between us as we talked about Sundays and where we would spend them. I asked for a notepad and pen so i could empty my head onto pages of margined and lined paper. All in order for the purposes of cataloguing my self destruction.

It was a million years ago today that we met and I loved you, and the same amount of time since I melted and sank into my electric chair, with a view of the city reaching out to grey sky. There were glances from nearby, and strange messages, and creaking of footsteps approaching the situation with cautious ease. It was clear that we were crumbling.

It was a million years ago today that we met, and I was awkwardness personified.

In the Fire and Flames of Fifth Avenue

Memo:
I drove through the wind and the rain just to be there, over borders and through cities unrecognised by my eyes but familiar in feel to my home town. I imagined the streets and buildings in the naked glow of yellow streetlight, stripped back to nothing but plaster and road signs and I never felt lonely, not even for a minute because I know that life is nothing but concrete blocks, moving cars and people jaywalking over the asphalt streets at night to get to some awful bar where the drinks are cheap and the music is beating their heads in with a ridiculous rhythm of vanity. This is an everwhere place where everybody looks the fucking same, and feels the fucking same and nobody can even imagine a life without this topshop idiosyncrasy and one-mind obsession with looking 'right'. I was never like this, but I did try and I couldn't be the same as those that are different. I am happy to live in this naked town stripped down to bare bone but I don't want to pretend like that ain't the truth. Give me a second to write a list of ten things I don't like about your freedom and I'll allow you the freedom to enjoy having your life judged, and your fucking ego's massaged. I hope you enjoy your night on the town.

Forever, and Counting

Plane of thought:
If I could have saved that night I'd revisit it with new eyes. Wipe the steam away with a closed fist and make brand new assumptions about the conclusions we made. I had a vision of a smokeless future and a skyline so clear that the birds were circling at three a.m. and we were buzzing inside with assured complexity. We were happy. All of this started when we were saddened by the pull of gravity and the lack of freedom for the better half of society. "People should just be good to each other" you said, as we tried to establish how to pull the problems back from the edge. Through the windscreen we saw the streetlights flicker and the sky brightened. The city was definately brighter at night. It fucked the sky and took it away from desperate eyes, but the light on your face from the dashboard was something that I will never forget, it made my bones shake.

Lights, Camera, Reaction

Dear Denial:
The ageing night signalled the end of summer and the life spilled out of the city and into the gutters. The camera clicked and split the atoms of our fake eyed smile so we were digitally lasting and embraced in a lifeless grasp of hands. The tables we sat at were wet with condensation, it was a cold bottle met hot air scenario and we were watching the chemistry in action. How do you say to a person you know that it's safer to bet on being lonely, but not alone? Well, I brushed the side of her face with a pale clammy hand and i saw my reflection in her eyes that answered: you don't. In the end it was just a moment which served as the final memory and our words were false again under blazing spotlights. Behind the scenes and away from the crowd of familiar faces there was a single moment of validity in the form of a parting glance which said "I never, ever seem to get what I want". The hardest part always seems to be finding the words to say.

Leaving, Summer, 1998

Let's Start with How it Felt:
I remember it as a parade of men leaving the city limits for better climes. A smile on their faces and a lit cigarette for each of the loved ones they are leaving behind. It's like a black cloud carnival of aching limbs and crooked teeth, the feeling of parting is rocking in their heads and creaking like old door hinges. On the horizon there is a vibrating sun, casting mile long shadows that encroach the powder of soil. In the city of ghosts the people look on, chastising hollow figures with careful eyes that stare a hole. In the end, from the city, the parade is an ever shrinking blip on the eternal curve of the widests of plains. If this place in my head was a desert then the scorch of the sun would have burned through the rememberance of how it was to feel departed. But the rays are a radio, and I am the wavelength that they are always tuned to.

In a City of Vacant Spaces

A Pensive:
Do you know how the skyline falls and folds between pages of prose you wrote? Well that's how the pressure is contained within manuscripts and notepads of scribble my thoughts spilled out onto. I couldn't ever be ashamed of saying nothing, when nothing was all there was to say. How could anything be so right and hit you so hard? I was walking through a time warped year smoking cigarettes in open spaces. I was an accurate arrow bursting through walls and tearing through nameless places. There was a time when we would question constitution and never cave in to resiliant arms pointing accusing fingers. There was a time when we would tip the bottle and tear the labels and talk about fighting the fires inside us. There was a time when we were standing and stable and the wires of sound were beating out music. There was a time when we were over the worst but the better years were casting shadows and moving to it.