MARCH 13 ‘HAIKU _______________MAY SOMETIME

Morning light is silver grey -----------------Is your song good enough
At table by window I watch ---------------A reason to disturb silence?
Bird take bath in tin. -----------------------Do you honour your own law?

When mandala turned flower --------------You are missing
Change remained till -----------------------A cobalt dragonfly
Flower became atoms. --------------------She weaves ‘round the market
--------------------------------------------The evening rainbow ends in park.



SEDUCING LUCIE

Did you like the songs? ‘They all sounded the same’.
Did you read the letter? ‘It was too long’
Did you understand?
‘You’ve just made some mess in in your head, haven’t you?’.
GIVE ME WHAT I WANT BECAUSE I WANT IT.




NOVEMBER MORNINGS


Sitting at the table before a semi - circular window.
Breakfast with pencil and rough paper...I watched a flock of pigeons fly
from the monastery opposite to the school on the left and requested them to give me a sign.
Before landing on the roof, they formed the symbol of infinity.
I asked the air what I should do today-then noticed my cereal is called Just Right.
The next Leonard morning, I sang Hallelujah half heartedly and a brown dove
flew past my window left to right. Then the overnight tramps left the monastery
which fumed smoke West to East.
No conclusions to be scribbled at this time.
I remained still and felt a deep calmness descend.
Then thought again, the more I do what I love, the uglier I get.
A Quasimodo stoop develops.
Hunched over a woman, a guitar, keyboard or a book.


I watch the crippled leave the church
As lame as they went in
And wonder at the strength of faith.
In storms of doubt
See them limp to the Tree
And pray it’ll keep them almost safe.

JAN 2001 THUR 25


Find what you want when you stop looking?
I wasn’t, she stopped me, then I lost it. ( 19 November 2000)
Afraid I still want to end this in the classic way
I know what you think, you know what I feel
The reverse is the problem.


When she comes to the door, I manifest between a pretended sense of gravity
and a schoolboy hop. Lines on a face refusing them, don’t let her see how many
empty wine bottles there are in the recycling bag and hide the evening primrose oil.
Just trying to stay young and amiable darling, just trying not to struggle...

ABSTINENCE


What will I do when I give up meat
Negativity and caffeine
I already gave up fats, cigarettes
Chocolates and drugs
(Before you ask, I have no current lover
And it shows )
I will be left with salad, water and alcohol
One of these will have to go
Chances are, the salad.

RESCUE REMEDY BLUES

It’s the only thing that works

And I’m afraid to use it

In case it doesn’t.

OUT OF THE WINDOW

I watched you lean out of the window
And talk to a friend on the street
With a desire to come up behind you
And draw this picture complete
Certain that you were not truly aware
How it could be seen as a flirt
But I couldn’t help but caress with a stare
Where your spine curved into your skirt

Fairly sure of reaction
Had I approached the frame of your hips
So instead I drew on my cigarette
Put a wine glass upto my lips
With narrowing eyesight re-focused
A passionate storm in my head
I laid the guitar down over my lap
And willed you into your bed

That was five years ago in the Summertime
And as we both know now, I failed
The writer writes this so he can confess
And the reader wants it detailed.?


JOURNAL OF AN IDIOT

I love being wrong because it always teaches me something new. But this year, being wrong about
everything should have left me wise well beyond my time. Something must be mistaken with my idea.
Whatever I try to become, I become the opposite, so I shouldn’t try anything, just allow myself to be.
I love love, I hate hate. An artist on a bridge told me yesterday to be stronger, and so I was until this year.
In ten months I have become an old paranoid coward, every physical problem heralding cancer, blindness,
heart attack, another hernia, lung problems, ulcers, stones and panic attacks. The latter last felt for real
13 years ago. I know well the results of too much fear and anger and am watching warily for the signs.
The mind has become a true enemy and we are at war.

I met a flawed hero of mine this year, a true creative visionary human with too many emotions
and ideas to be successful in trying to seem normal. A traveller of the world and the worlds inbetween.
A rare man who follows his dreams every day of his life, working to make them true in colour and fire.
We could be writing together on his biography but due to recurring pain and doubts about my ability,
I have not called him since May. For the sake of this book, and to go against my growing self disgust I will
telephone him soon, daring to hope for the best like a fool.

Hope these pages are dispassionate enough to avoid criticising their nakedness. The former quality is
the only guard I have against exposure but this irony is lost on me. A woman who loves me told me last
Friday night, ‘Don’t ask, do it’, so I tied her hands above her head and did. And in the morning too, but
without the silk scarf - is this more information than the reader needs? Felt good to get that close and true.
Today is the last day of my 39 day fast from alcohol, thought it would help my immune system recover.
As with reasons in the first paragraph above, this achieved the opposite effect, although it has been
good to wake with less of a fuzzy head and more words have started to get free.
The glands in my throat continue to swell at random and so I will return to the spirits to help cleanse
the poisons of abstinence.


I call the Black Jester on Halloween and get invited over in a celebratory voice. Stoned/drunk at three in
the afternoon while writing an opera for the British Queen, surely not. Must be the beauty of the work.
Feeling weird due to the seasonal change, the three am collapse a day before, blood pressure far too low
and the numbskull nextdoor banging the doors until 3.30, I approach the next two days with great tiredness.
I call ‘The Only Woman I Have Ever Wanted to Marry, live with and have a family’ she admonishes me
that I am going to be ‘One of those old men who take pills’. This has a clear ring of bitter truth. I love her
far beyond what I can express in writing, but I try to keep this secret. Another paragraph has been
censored here, bless the lovelorn poets eh? She might read this page with an exasperated sigh, but it was
probably obvious. She is married with a beautiful baby daughter. One of these things should suggest that I am
still living in a dream world as regards attaining my love, but love is love. (As some great philospher would
assert, after a drink or two) Another quote from her, ‘Life goes on’ actually feels like a threat when you feel
vulnerable rather than venerable. Last year it was a joyful mantra.
Getting left behind by all that you believed in. Death to the suicidal writers!


The beautiful Lucie arrives on a Saturday morning. She speaks about mountain climbing in Bulgaria
and the beaches of Greece, a passionate infidelity, her university and family. We talk about the loss of
innocence. I don’t think this happens until bitterness sets in, together with guilt and too much permanent
darkness. She asks me if I have ever had a relationship with a girl that I really wanted, in terms of my ‘ideals’
of evolving and learning. Christ, but the ones I care for are good with questions! They know how to cut
to the core, perhaps because I allow them, but more because they are spiritually sharp. Still desiring of an affair
with her. She will read this one day in happily embarrassed disgust, well it is truth my love, it is a truth.


Some slight worry about this book, although I am mostly proud of it, it tells a true story, and quite well.
The last eight pages are unfinished, Wound does not quite visit the destinations I needed. Terrorists reads
like a teenage diatribe. ( When the countries who are consistently pious about their special freedom and
power, maintain policies which cause/allow thousands to die in a year or years, then the effect is
proportionally the same on life as hijacked planes crashing into skyscrapers of innocent people.)
Homegrown anthrax merchants in the USA, serving the ones they wish to overthrow by increasing fear
and the need for security. IRA decommisioning the oldest weapons, a major stride towards peace. News.


Alice appears on a Wednesday to take 36 black and white photos of the authour by a light bulb for this book.
She speaks about her boyfriend becoming more fantatical over his Christian religion - he lost his family then
became hooked on an amphetamine, and his seeing the Light saved him. Now he has started to rage at Buddhist
friends. I understand the need to hold onto a strong truth to survive, but putting God in any box other than the
one labelled ‘Infinite’, seems like a madness to me. The Czech word for religion (In Latin,‘To Bind’)
is ‘Viru’, sounds too much like virus to me in this mood. November weather is becoming fouler and I long
to hibernate myself back to full health. Two days later we go to Maly Buddha for hot crab meat in springrolls.
Another failure of an evening. Sulking as if I had been interrupted from my lofty ivory tower in my Great
Work. As if something here were more important than learning to express or receive love.


This is the journal of an idiot, of this I am convinced. All I could have done was apologise and hold her close
and explain but I didn’t do either. Hating the phrase most men have used in truthful desperation,‘I can change’
I have never used it it. Although it has been felt, I know I won’t. How often have I refused to lie, when for the
sake of Peace, perhaps I should have. It will take a Zen prison to make me conform to the state I wish.
Typing my heart onto computer, praying the Reader understands about weather moods.
To Hell with you if you don’t, I am this. Capable of great love and evil. Also able to do Nothing,
but without the serenity. I need a partner. Although any woman who could view me as her man,
would have to be viewed with great suspicion.

I meet Alice once again in happy circumstances, she brings the copies of all the black and white photos she
took last week, we hold and kiss and all is good. The next day she brings me something which looks like a lily
but isn’t. This is the first time anyone has bought me a flower and its significance is the end of our broken
relationship. Today she went for x rays of her brain to look for a problem caused by lack of bloodflow there,
and at some point, the man who is supposed to love her gave her an ultimatum, marry him or leave their home.
She loves me but as she said, she herself is thin ice. Takes one to know one and you get what you are.
I knew from January she would marry him, she sees this as partly love and partly fate. As many men do,
he needs an entire family in one woman, her strength is gone, leaked out to all the friends she cannot open her
heart to about us. This paragraph is being written by one far less unemotional than it sounds. At the tram and
bus stops, tears freeze on my face which I cannot let her see. An entire year of new memories with her, swirl
into vortex. I press a small paper into her hand which says the same as she told me in January.
(see You are Loved) In two languages and mis - spelt in both by my nerves before we leave the house.

If I said the magic words, she would go with me but I return to a Cohen song again and again,
‘...and there is no man or woman can be touched, but you who come between them, will be judged.’
The artist on the bridge told me if I felt like this at all, then it could not be Love.
My love has far too many angles, when I feel it. An hour before she appeared unnanounced I had instructed the
genius student Sonya, (see Zen Garden, Octoberweek) to teach me something- she was stunned, recovered
composure and asked what. I told her to teach me how to stay happy and she replied instantly, ‘Don’t give up
so easily’. I haven’t yet but I am getting closer to it, and forgetting to breathe enough.
Want a shaved head, symbolic purity, return unto the Ubermensch I was. (ha ha) My health is ruined.

Five days ago I saw a little girl on the bus with her mother, five thirty pm,darkness, she was falling alseep
opposite me, with her head pressed to the window. Her mother told her to rest her head on her lap, this she
did, with a beautifully happy smile and went to sleep. I try to keep these type of images in my head in
order to stay in love with living. Writing a new song, based on a Czech saying ‘You can’t cross your shadow.’
Some words for other pieces coming through which are very surreal and I wonder at my state of mind.
To be this desperate inside and yet stubbon not to surrender is a strange yin yang mandala of feelings, I want
this book to be finished and printed within the next four weeks. Delaying the inevitable.

Alice’s father has a heart attack while out of the city and she spends the night here before taking an early bus.
No idea what she told her boyfriend as an alibi. He told her last week to look him in the eye and tell him she did
not have another man. She did one but not the other. All my fragmented Czech to reassure and keep the humour
going. This doesn’t work for me, but because she wants it to, does for her. I need to get stronger for all the
ones I care about. Any support coming from a weakened foundation cannot sustain another for long, I have
trapped myself with the perception of my private laws.

How the hell does this read to the ones who know me, let alone those who don’t?
I refuse to change these pages too much, in the name of the ‘truth of the time’.
When you read this, this is how I was. Refusing to sterilise panic and so make it anodyne, I pray, but
probably not pure enough, Return me to my Health. Also known as
Reflexes react in defence mechanisms in attractions we have to our cataclysms...
Is every ‘poet’ as self obsessed as this?
Only when feeling infinite or mortal.

THIS WORLD’S A MULTI-CINEMA SCHOOL
EVOLVING STAGES WHERE
WE MASQUERADE IN DRAMA

I PRACTICE AN ACTOR’S YOGA
FOR A LIFETIME PLAYING HERE
BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE ME ANY KARMA.


Finish the journal with a bad pun and cliches? Yeah, why not?
Happy Christmas and new year everyone
With 2001
Your idiot is done.