Northern Ireland cowers from the swelling seascape like a child from the back of a hand. For the bosom of the horizon run wailing and screaming cities and towns and hamlets and villages and sprawling rural expanses. Soon, nowt but a handful of vapour trails remain, wavering tendrils of fast-fading light the colour of the voices in Central Station, Belfast or of the chip papers rustling about the railings outside a Londonderry hostel or of the bottles o' Tesco-brand vodka raised to yaps still framed with the rash from the first ever shave.
Fare thee well, says I, to the smattering of youngsters loiter about the gates of the park behind my house every evening. Fare thee well to those washes of foulest banter spill in through the open window to my left now and then, spreading o'er the white of the word processor screen in blocks of size 10 Times New Roman.
Fare thee well to thon towers of orange and red circle the reservoir used to be George Peaden’s Quarry. Fare the well to the wild horse gallops about the fields next the one we used to steal potatoes out of in the summer.
Fare thee well to the bus-shelter at the end of the estate, and to all the bus-shelters I was ever led towards by lasses knew far more about the texture o’ those bricks than I.
Farewell to the ghosts, says I, and from the aisle seat to my left a man nursing a glass of amber-hued liquid smiles and says ‘Farewell yourself. Fuck the hair we’re leaving back there, boyo.’
Friday 28 September 2007
Sunday 9 September 2007
A Dream Of Dublin
In a dream I’m walking down Grafton Street in Dublin with the noon-day sun hung frozen midst the night-time skyway and a breeze the colour of London Town kneading subtly with phantom fingers the nape of my neck.
From the cracks atween the kerb-stones measures of melody bleed out o’er the pavings. Vagrants sit hunched around meagre pyres in the corners of ill-lit alleyways. Old queens gabble wordlessly amongst themselves with backs against the shuttered-up storefronts. Youngsters with noses all glue-fume-scorch huddle about the flick’rin glow of the streetlamps, coughing foulest aphorisms at other, sneering ‘hind fag-burn-potted hands. ECT-fried preachers holler in tongues of screeching ‘lectric revelation.
From an upstairs window a wave of female laughter spills out onto the street. A busker strums an out-of-tune guitar and sings of Tuesday mornings spent puking Monday nights o’er sweat-slick bed-sheets. Rhymes fall from his face like dead flies. Spent verses pool in black-water puddles about his tip-tappin’ feet.
A woman in a purple cardigan flaffs a hand at me and says “Crippled and broken beasts they brought to The Lord, so they did. Lambs half mad with disease, donkeys with the hind legs shattered, calves with half the faces off from the wolves, this is the class o’ stock they offered, and expecting for that the full of His radiance then upon them?” She gives a humourless laugh. “My arse hole, says He.”
Voices flitter past me like ticker-tape - A dockyard chorus singing Abide With Me. A lass from Lucan saying “No, go to London, it’ll be good for you…”A fella with a feigned Montana accent sighing “I wish I could quit you.” A friend from school as I imagine he sounds now sighing at the static on a TV screen. Billy Bragg singing St Swithin’s Day. A priest yelling at me way back when for waking him out his sleep at half four in the mornin’ on account of Christ spoke to me from midst the clanging of a meat-slicer in a butcher’s shop. Me clearing my throat and mumbling at a too-warm coffee - “My name’s Aaron and I’m an alcoholic...”
Round about me, the airways hang pregnant with bellyfuls of summer, 2005 – eyeing the lads and lassies stood cocked o’ jaws and titled o’ heads on the Ha’penny bridge, eyes all whispering “Fancy a jag o’ thon, son?” Savage purple glow off Harry Street, glow bright enough to singe everything else black for years thereafter. Litres of possibility poured back into the Liffey, a ticket to County Antrim burning the arse out my trousers.
Red-lit barrooms to my left all a-shingle with bop and bother. Troupes of heat-warped teenagers gawking dead eyed from the interiors of parked cars. Folks in bedsits draped in reels of cassette-tape all stutt’rin beats and pitch-shifted voices and samples from TV soundtracks, the ghost of William Burroughs haunting the gaps atween their fingers.
Comes stumbling from the sidelines raging, screeching Lazarus. “I was lain with angels!” he roars. “Angels stitched from strands of fractured white light all a-shimmer, angels who kissed me like the first rays of sun kissed the fresh-moulded Earth!” The howl of infinity from somewheres ‘thin his chest. “On the shoulders of the ocean I was raised!” Weeping into blistered, blue-grey hands he falls to his knees. “Angels…”
A film projected onto the door of a red-brick townhouse details an orgy of hysterical creation erupting in St Stephen’s Green - Men and women paw at the leaves of trees, rubbing wet hands back and forth along the branches, the bark all throbbing and shuddering. Great arcing ropes of rhyme spray from the uppermost heights of a climaxing poplar. A couple dive naked into a lake, emerging with slick fistfuls of tangerine-tinted prose. A hedgerow spurts sonnets over a man in a red shawl, Calliope weaving in and around his legs in bursts of half-glimpsed faces and half-heard song.
Overhead, a brooding cloudscape smoulders, sundry curious forms oscillating erratically therein; wolf heads snapping, monks ravaged with leprosy, archers with bows held aloft…
A woman in a thinning leopard-print coat approaches passers-by with head lowered and hands all fidgeting and eyes fixed on the scuffed-blunt toes of her shoes. A man holds in his arms a lame, whimpering collie, whispering into its ear – “S’alright, dote, s’alright. Nearly home so we are, nearly home.”
Towards Nassau Street I wander, encountering thereon a group of bald-headed women with mouths all a-mutter and palms pressed in prayer and the reek of the psychiatric hospital rising up off their clothes in carmine streaks.
Chards of memory glistening in the air like morning dew on a hedgerow – Fingers digging into walls. Slapping hands off of the pill dispensary shutters - “I need somethin’ to put me to sleep you bastards!” Duelling Christs bare-foot on wet gravel, scowling at other, daring – “Go on, heal the lame, fucker. Prove yourself.” Shaving my head with a BIC razor, blood pissin’ down the cheeks. Woman crying on account of her son stole all her money. She has no son.
Folks sauntering past from over Trinity College direction, faces obscured by the murmur of the traffic. In the fumes I see a house in London with no ghosts nor memories nor regrets. Stairs I never fell down, mirrors I never scowled into, a reflection I’ve never cursed for all the dirty drunken filthy tramp bastards of the day and night. Bed-sheets I never wept under, toilets I’ve tossed not an inch of sin towards…
London Town writhing back my eyes like a thousand rat-tails entwined, and Dublin pulsing neath my feet like a bag of knotted arteries.
From the cracks atween the kerb-stones measures of melody bleed out o’er the pavings. Vagrants sit hunched around meagre pyres in the corners of ill-lit alleyways. Old queens gabble wordlessly amongst themselves with backs against the shuttered-up storefronts. Youngsters with noses all glue-fume-scorch huddle about the flick’rin glow of the streetlamps, coughing foulest aphorisms at other, sneering ‘hind fag-burn-potted hands. ECT-fried preachers holler in tongues of screeching ‘lectric revelation.
From an upstairs window a wave of female laughter spills out onto the street. A busker strums an out-of-tune guitar and sings of Tuesday mornings spent puking Monday nights o’er sweat-slick bed-sheets. Rhymes fall from his face like dead flies. Spent verses pool in black-water puddles about his tip-tappin’ feet.
A woman in a purple cardigan flaffs a hand at me and says “Crippled and broken beasts they brought to The Lord, so they did. Lambs half mad with disease, donkeys with the hind legs shattered, calves with half the faces off from the wolves, this is the class o’ stock they offered, and expecting for that the full of His radiance then upon them?” She gives a humourless laugh. “My arse hole, says He.”
Voices flitter past me like ticker-tape - A dockyard chorus singing Abide With Me. A lass from Lucan saying “No, go to London, it’ll be good for you…”A fella with a feigned Montana accent sighing “I wish I could quit you.” A friend from school as I imagine he sounds now sighing at the static on a TV screen. Billy Bragg singing St Swithin’s Day. A priest yelling at me way back when for waking him out his sleep at half four in the mornin’ on account of Christ spoke to me from midst the clanging of a meat-slicer in a butcher’s shop. Me clearing my throat and mumbling at a too-warm coffee - “My name’s Aaron and I’m an alcoholic...”
Round about me, the airways hang pregnant with bellyfuls of summer, 2005 – eyeing the lads and lassies stood cocked o’ jaws and titled o’ heads on the Ha’penny bridge, eyes all whispering “Fancy a jag o’ thon, son?” Savage purple glow off Harry Street, glow bright enough to singe everything else black for years thereafter. Litres of possibility poured back into the Liffey, a ticket to County Antrim burning the arse out my trousers.
Red-lit barrooms to my left all a-shingle with bop and bother. Troupes of heat-warped teenagers gawking dead eyed from the interiors of parked cars. Folks in bedsits draped in reels of cassette-tape all stutt’rin beats and pitch-shifted voices and samples from TV soundtracks, the ghost of William Burroughs haunting the gaps atween their fingers.
Comes stumbling from the sidelines raging, screeching Lazarus. “I was lain with angels!” he roars. “Angels stitched from strands of fractured white light all a-shimmer, angels who kissed me like the first rays of sun kissed the fresh-moulded Earth!” The howl of infinity from somewheres ‘thin his chest. “On the shoulders of the ocean I was raised!” Weeping into blistered, blue-grey hands he falls to his knees. “Angels…”
A film projected onto the door of a red-brick townhouse details an orgy of hysterical creation erupting in St Stephen’s Green - Men and women paw at the leaves of trees, rubbing wet hands back and forth along the branches, the bark all throbbing and shuddering. Great arcing ropes of rhyme spray from the uppermost heights of a climaxing poplar. A couple dive naked into a lake, emerging with slick fistfuls of tangerine-tinted prose. A hedgerow spurts sonnets over a man in a red shawl, Calliope weaving in and around his legs in bursts of half-glimpsed faces and half-heard song.
Overhead, a brooding cloudscape smoulders, sundry curious forms oscillating erratically therein; wolf heads snapping, monks ravaged with leprosy, archers with bows held aloft…
A woman in a thinning leopard-print coat approaches passers-by with head lowered and hands all fidgeting and eyes fixed on the scuffed-blunt toes of her shoes. A man holds in his arms a lame, whimpering collie, whispering into its ear – “S’alright, dote, s’alright. Nearly home so we are, nearly home.”
Towards Nassau Street I wander, encountering thereon a group of bald-headed women with mouths all a-mutter and palms pressed in prayer and the reek of the psychiatric hospital rising up off their clothes in carmine streaks.
Chards of memory glistening in the air like morning dew on a hedgerow – Fingers digging into walls. Slapping hands off of the pill dispensary shutters - “I need somethin’ to put me to sleep you bastards!” Duelling Christs bare-foot on wet gravel, scowling at other, daring – “Go on, heal the lame, fucker. Prove yourself.” Shaving my head with a BIC razor, blood pissin’ down the cheeks. Woman crying on account of her son stole all her money. She has no son.
Folks sauntering past from over Trinity College direction, faces obscured by the murmur of the traffic. In the fumes I see a house in London with no ghosts nor memories nor regrets. Stairs I never fell down, mirrors I never scowled into, a reflection I’ve never cursed for all the dirty drunken filthy tramp bastards of the day and night. Bed-sheets I never wept under, toilets I’ve tossed not an inch of sin towards…
London Town writhing back my eyes like a thousand rat-tails entwined, and Dublin pulsing neath my feet like a bag of knotted arteries.
Friday 7 September 2007
Morrissey, Shane MacGowan, An Email
Somewheres on the other side of 5 a.m. I’m sat afore the monitor, the new day seeping out the thighs of the nighttime, the swelling morning creeping o’er the sleepers lain expectant on the windowsill beside me. The brains screech demented twixt my drum-holes. Morrissey flaffing arms about from out the computer speakers, couple lines about “London, giddy London” to greet the rising sun.
“London, giddy London.”
“Is it home of the free” he asks, “Or what?”
The digit hovering, trembling ‘bove the ol’ left-click, the cursor running rings around the “Send”.
Catching a glimpse of a rogue reflection in the ashtray. “Look at you”, I’m sayin, “What a pitiful bucket o’ bastard.”
Still. Not at all unattractive in the right light and with the right level o’ squint in the left-hand peeper.
Two o’ yon sleepers on the tongue and kicked on down the gullet by way of a mouthful of Diet Coke, Morrissey all a sudden out his mind with concern regarding a coastal town that they forgot to bomb and the wet sand clinging to his sandals, and the screen… The screen still dashed with the gravel o’ mine mind-wax.
What it says up there in half-mad digital shorthand, what it announces for the eyes all set to gaze, is that I love you. What I’m saying is I love you, and you should know this.
When she wakes up, y’unnerstann, when she wanders towards the PC stack all gruntin’ and coughin’ from the corner of the room, when she gets to browsing through the email, the cigarette smoke hung in sheets round about, purple symphonies and ash-grey asides - when she’s sippin from the first coffee of the day and clicking through the playlists in pursuit o’ a riff might shatter the traces o’ dream-fugg still shimmering back the eyes, when she comes across this lust-crazed declaration all hidden away midst forty-nine lines of gabbled neurotic effrontery, what she’ll smile and say is “He loves me.”
What she’ll think and grin regarding is “So what the fuck else is new?”
Morrissey, he’s busy accosting his love for flicking through private journals in pursuit of a line or two red-raw with intimate lovelorn scribbling.
Nowadays the fucker would just go snooping through the myspace.
I love you, it says. I add a bit more.
Now what it says is I love you and also, I’m set for to move to London.
I got a burning in the belly reeks o’ a craving for to be heard and read, I say. I point out that the longer I sit here in this back room with the fag in the maw and the fags in the brains, with the fringe getting blacker and the eyes getting redder, with the stacks o’ Chapter One Paragraph One getting closer to the roof-slates with each tick o’ the time-tock, the longer this goes on, I say, the closer the factory gets.
Fore a fella knows what’s happened he’s stood in yonder production line checking pharmaceutical paraphernalia for anything out of the ordinary, yacking all about how he’s gonna get a novel out one day, soon as my agent gets back to me. Soon as the publisher’s ready. Soon as this leg gets fixed. Soon as the doctors let me go. Soon as I get this black from out my lung.
What I say is don’t get me wrong, not for a second. The factory, it’s a place humming with strong and beautiful and soulful and special and dedicated human beings. But I’d be lying, I say, if I pretended yon grinding and sparking and thumping didn’t scare the yellow out my pish.
So aye. I’m going to London. I’m taking a couple bags fulla personality, a guitar tuned to Blue and a case filled wi’ y-fronts on account of I wore boxers once in 1999 and my knackers ended up moored off Arran for a fortnight.
Giddy London all Dickensian rascality and Arcadian splendour.
A couple stealthy clicks and Morrissey sulks silent in the airways, the beautiful, furnace-tattered creak of Shane MacGowan’s throat all thrust up ‘gainst the grey o’ yonder speakers.
“When I first came to London, I was only 16
With a fiver in my pocket and my ol’ dancing bag
And I went down to the Dilly to check out the scene
But I soon ended up upon the Old Main Drag”
This last lament for a childhood snatched by those sidestreets and alleys and stairways all blood-flecked and wanked-o’er and choking with revelation.
What I tell her is how sometimes, when the dawn’s all knotted ‘gainst the glass and the flags are all fluttering front the streelights out the window and the lust-crazed lights o’ Soho are clawin at my guts, what I see is that Old Main Drag, what I see is a fella with the mop all matted and blackened up with boot polish, what I see is days and nights and weeks and months spent bent o’er the bonnet of a stolen Corsa, working for to make that second record, y’unnerstann, for to mint that disc, working for the price o’ a melody in this cancer-limbed thoroughfare a world and nine removed from those pathways trodden by Morrissey’s charming, razor-yapped dandies.
I see Leicester Square and the shadows on the pavings, those pavings Shane’s narrator likely sat upon for a time, flinging broken matchsticks to the rain, just afore he was “picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls.”
By the end of the song he’s sat huddled round a fag-end, maybe pulling a stinking blanket that bit tighter round his frame.
“Now I am lying here, I’ve had too much booze
I been spat on and shat on and raped and abused
I know that I am dying but wish I could beg
For some money to take me from the Old Main Drag”
Aye, if anyone knows about London, it’s Shane. A mental map scrawled along the psyche, every byway and skyway and parkway rendered in glorious, intoxicating poetry.
A fella can wander along those “Dark Streets Of London” with their memories of summers past, summers spent in psychiatric wards all “Drugged-up psychos with death in their eyes”. He can catch sight of that “golden heart” pulsing twixt the city’s “scarred-up thighs” in London You’re A Lady.
A fella can curse “Dear dirty London in the driving rain” like the drunken rogue in “Sea Shanty”.
He can career along the “Dear old streets of Kings Cross” with yon scallywag hero of “Transmetropolitan”, screech across Hammersmith in time to “scare the Camden palace poofs”, “worry all the whores” and “storm the BBC” before the first hints o’ twilight kiss the stone.
“We’ll drink the rat’s piss, kick the shite
And I’m not goin home tonight”
(Wonderin for a moment if a fella can easily acquire non-alcoholic extra-caffeine diet-Rat’s Piss without too much of a hubbub?)
Aye, I tell her. These gloriously wretched tableau’s and episodes, I been catching glimpses of them e’er since that momentous afternoon when first I hit play on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash.
But the other London Shane talks about, the London of “long-gone songs from day’s gone by” carried along the swell o’ the Thames, the London of “Rainy Night In Soho”, I been pining for that, y’unnerstann.
“Rainy Night In Soho”, I remind her, is maybe the most beautiful song ever written, certainly the most beautiful ever written about Soho.
Was goin to be the first song at the wedding I almost stumbled into, by the by. We used to dance drunkenly round the kitchen in time to the sway o’ yon strings.
“I took shelter from a shower
And I stepped into your arms
On a rainy night in Soho
The wind was whistling all its charms”
London.
What I tell her is that’s where I’m headed, and I’m excited and terrified and tired and fryin.
London, where’s it’s “Time For Heroes” and singsong revelry and grot-mawed entrepreneurs sayin aye, maybe so, maybe we could afford to help youse with that record.
London. What I tell her is sometimes I get homesick and I’m still lain in my bed, what I tell her is sometimes I just get a craving to go wander round the disused quarry feeding chunks o’ hedgerow to the horses, what I tell her is I dunno how well I’ll do, being away and all that.
It’s well past 7, the sleepers long-since rendered useless, the day all set for shining, the branches o’ trees all lazily weaving shadows o’er busted bottles and crushed tin-cans.
I tell her that I been thinking.
What I say is all about how the last time I was in her presence, midst the transcendent phantasmagoric swirl o’ Dublin City, what I say is that she took hold a chunk o’ my soul I been finding it awful difficult to function without.
London, there it is, up ahead. Be it the London Conrad caught snaking through fog in those opening pages o’ Heart Of Darkness, be it the London Strummer watched burn and rise anew, be it the County Hell, the home o’ yon Landlord, the “Bitch’s bastard’s whore” done rid Shane o’ his pennies back in the day, or be it all of those things and any amount less, whatever it is, it’s there, it has a hand on my knee and it’s telling me it likes my way with a G and the way I say “fuck” in conjunction with words not necessarily “fuck”.
What I say is I have a thirst for those lights all burning my breath.
What I say is it’s a thirst I set about acquiring by way of masking that other craving, being the one connected solely to the blue all dancin’ in her eyes.
It’s 7:45 I tell her, announcing the following; “All it would take for to lead me back from off of Hampstead Heath and, indeed, to have me packing those cases all the sooner, this evening even, would be a line or two from you along the lines of ‘O.k, come on then.’”
What I tell her is London is London, but it’s not you, and therefore it can’t ever occupy any more than maybe 16% of my heart and soul and wrist.
What I say is no pressure, but if you give the go-ahead, I will leave here, today, and book myself into a bus-shelter somewheres ‘longside the fetid plunk o’ the shuffling Liffey waters.
I hit “Send” and spark up a smoke.
Around 5 p.m I woke up to the hiss of a gentleman reading In Cold Blood from out the earphones wound round my neck. Before I opened the blinds I spent a moment soaking up this sensation in the chest, this hunch about how what was waiting other side of that windowpane was nothing less than the most beautiful day of the year thus far. Kinda day a man might sit in the back garden drinking Diet Coke, smoking Mayfair Kingsize and reading poetry written by women lost to delirious fancies regarding Saint Augustine.
It was raining. But oh, what beautiful rain.
I saw the inbox flashing, y’unnerstann, and “RE: At Great Risk, A Declaration” couple lines down, just after a spam affair offering 98% more willy and a fella from Wolverhampton promising all the drugs a belly could handle for no more than the price of a stamp.
I saw it, and I shivered a tad. I’ll open it later, I figured, after I shred a couple inches off the lawn.
T’was whilst I was cutting the grass that I got to thinking about how London might not want to kill me. Maybe all I’d find would be a collection of scenes much like what I’m used to, just played out afore a different set o’ bastards and poets and folks make me smile and chuckle and weep.
Maybe there’s no reason to be scared.
And aye, maybe I’ll never need worry. Maybe she’s demanded, in CAPS LOCK swears all Courier New and size 99 that I better get down there immediately, come kiss her and hold her hand and sing her that song I wrote about how I was sorry I had a wank regarding a dirty joke she made one time.
That she didn’t say that, that she maybe said no, stay where you are, all very likely, and all very unpleasant, no thought to be thinking whilst a fellas trimming hedges with a blade size o’ Russia.
I stared at the email a long time before I opened it.
Eventually, I did.
I leave for London on Monday.
Thanks folks.
“London, giddy London.”
“Is it home of the free” he asks, “Or what?”
The digit hovering, trembling ‘bove the ol’ left-click, the cursor running rings around the “Send”.
Catching a glimpse of a rogue reflection in the ashtray. “Look at you”, I’m sayin, “What a pitiful bucket o’ bastard.”
Still. Not at all unattractive in the right light and with the right level o’ squint in the left-hand peeper.
Two o’ yon sleepers on the tongue and kicked on down the gullet by way of a mouthful of Diet Coke, Morrissey all a sudden out his mind with concern regarding a coastal town that they forgot to bomb and the wet sand clinging to his sandals, and the screen… The screen still dashed with the gravel o’ mine mind-wax.
What it says up there in half-mad digital shorthand, what it announces for the eyes all set to gaze, is that I love you. What I’m saying is I love you, and you should know this.
When she wakes up, y’unnerstann, when she wanders towards the PC stack all gruntin’ and coughin’ from the corner of the room, when she gets to browsing through the email, the cigarette smoke hung in sheets round about, purple symphonies and ash-grey asides - when she’s sippin from the first coffee of the day and clicking through the playlists in pursuit o’ a riff might shatter the traces o’ dream-fugg still shimmering back the eyes, when she comes across this lust-crazed declaration all hidden away midst forty-nine lines of gabbled neurotic effrontery, what she’ll smile and say is “He loves me.”
What she’ll think and grin regarding is “So what the fuck else is new?”
Morrissey, he’s busy accosting his love for flicking through private journals in pursuit of a line or two red-raw with intimate lovelorn scribbling.
Nowadays the fucker would just go snooping through the myspace.
I love you, it says. I add a bit more.
Now what it says is I love you and also, I’m set for to move to London.
I got a burning in the belly reeks o’ a craving for to be heard and read, I say. I point out that the longer I sit here in this back room with the fag in the maw and the fags in the brains, with the fringe getting blacker and the eyes getting redder, with the stacks o’ Chapter One Paragraph One getting closer to the roof-slates with each tick o’ the time-tock, the longer this goes on, I say, the closer the factory gets.
Fore a fella knows what’s happened he’s stood in yonder production line checking pharmaceutical paraphernalia for anything out of the ordinary, yacking all about how he’s gonna get a novel out one day, soon as my agent gets back to me. Soon as the publisher’s ready. Soon as this leg gets fixed. Soon as the doctors let me go. Soon as I get this black from out my lung.
What I say is don’t get me wrong, not for a second. The factory, it’s a place humming with strong and beautiful and soulful and special and dedicated human beings. But I’d be lying, I say, if I pretended yon grinding and sparking and thumping didn’t scare the yellow out my pish.
So aye. I’m going to London. I’m taking a couple bags fulla personality, a guitar tuned to Blue and a case filled wi’ y-fronts on account of I wore boxers once in 1999 and my knackers ended up moored off Arran for a fortnight.
Giddy London all Dickensian rascality and Arcadian splendour.
A couple stealthy clicks and Morrissey sulks silent in the airways, the beautiful, furnace-tattered creak of Shane MacGowan’s throat all thrust up ‘gainst the grey o’ yonder speakers.
“When I first came to London, I was only 16
With a fiver in my pocket and my ol’ dancing bag
And I went down to the Dilly to check out the scene
But I soon ended up upon the Old Main Drag”
This last lament for a childhood snatched by those sidestreets and alleys and stairways all blood-flecked and wanked-o’er and choking with revelation.
What I tell her is how sometimes, when the dawn’s all knotted ‘gainst the glass and the flags are all fluttering front the streelights out the window and the lust-crazed lights o’ Soho are clawin at my guts, what I see is that Old Main Drag, what I see is a fella with the mop all matted and blackened up with boot polish, what I see is days and nights and weeks and months spent bent o’er the bonnet of a stolen Corsa, working for to make that second record, y’unnerstann, for to mint that disc, working for the price o’ a melody in this cancer-limbed thoroughfare a world and nine removed from those pathways trodden by Morrissey’s charming, razor-yapped dandies.
I see Leicester Square and the shadows on the pavings, those pavings Shane’s narrator likely sat upon for a time, flinging broken matchsticks to the rain, just afore he was “picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls.”
By the end of the song he’s sat huddled round a fag-end, maybe pulling a stinking blanket that bit tighter round his frame.
“Now I am lying here, I’ve had too much booze
I been spat on and shat on and raped and abused
I know that I am dying but wish I could beg
For some money to take me from the Old Main Drag”
Aye, if anyone knows about London, it’s Shane. A mental map scrawled along the psyche, every byway and skyway and parkway rendered in glorious, intoxicating poetry.
A fella can wander along those “Dark Streets Of London” with their memories of summers past, summers spent in psychiatric wards all “Drugged-up psychos with death in their eyes”. He can catch sight of that “golden heart” pulsing twixt the city’s “scarred-up thighs” in London You’re A Lady.
A fella can curse “Dear dirty London in the driving rain” like the drunken rogue in “Sea Shanty”.
He can career along the “Dear old streets of Kings Cross” with yon scallywag hero of “Transmetropolitan”, screech across Hammersmith in time to “scare the Camden palace poofs”, “worry all the whores” and “storm the BBC” before the first hints o’ twilight kiss the stone.
“We’ll drink the rat’s piss, kick the shite
And I’m not goin home tonight”
(Wonderin for a moment if a fella can easily acquire non-alcoholic extra-caffeine diet-Rat’s Piss without too much of a hubbub?)
Aye, I tell her. These gloriously wretched tableau’s and episodes, I been catching glimpses of them e’er since that momentous afternoon when first I hit play on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash.
But the other London Shane talks about, the London of “long-gone songs from day’s gone by” carried along the swell o’ the Thames, the London of “Rainy Night In Soho”, I been pining for that, y’unnerstann.
“Rainy Night In Soho”, I remind her, is maybe the most beautiful song ever written, certainly the most beautiful ever written about Soho.
Was goin to be the first song at the wedding I almost stumbled into, by the by. We used to dance drunkenly round the kitchen in time to the sway o’ yon strings.
“I took shelter from a shower
And I stepped into your arms
On a rainy night in Soho
The wind was whistling all its charms”
London.
What I tell her is that’s where I’m headed, and I’m excited and terrified and tired and fryin.
London, where’s it’s “Time For Heroes” and singsong revelry and grot-mawed entrepreneurs sayin aye, maybe so, maybe we could afford to help youse with that record.
London. What I tell her is sometimes I get homesick and I’m still lain in my bed, what I tell her is sometimes I just get a craving to go wander round the disused quarry feeding chunks o’ hedgerow to the horses, what I tell her is I dunno how well I’ll do, being away and all that.
It’s well past 7, the sleepers long-since rendered useless, the day all set for shining, the branches o’ trees all lazily weaving shadows o’er busted bottles and crushed tin-cans.
I tell her that I been thinking.
What I say is all about how the last time I was in her presence, midst the transcendent phantasmagoric swirl o’ Dublin City, what I say is that she took hold a chunk o’ my soul I been finding it awful difficult to function without.
London, there it is, up ahead. Be it the London Conrad caught snaking through fog in those opening pages o’ Heart Of Darkness, be it the London Strummer watched burn and rise anew, be it the County Hell, the home o’ yon Landlord, the “Bitch’s bastard’s whore” done rid Shane o’ his pennies back in the day, or be it all of those things and any amount less, whatever it is, it’s there, it has a hand on my knee and it’s telling me it likes my way with a G and the way I say “fuck” in conjunction with words not necessarily “fuck”.
What I say is I have a thirst for those lights all burning my breath.
What I say is it’s a thirst I set about acquiring by way of masking that other craving, being the one connected solely to the blue all dancin’ in her eyes.
It’s 7:45 I tell her, announcing the following; “All it would take for to lead me back from off of Hampstead Heath and, indeed, to have me packing those cases all the sooner, this evening even, would be a line or two from you along the lines of ‘O.k, come on then.’”
What I tell her is London is London, but it’s not you, and therefore it can’t ever occupy any more than maybe 16% of my heart and soul and wrist.
What I say is no pressure, but if you give the go-ahead, I will leave here, today, and book myself into a bus-shelter somewheres ‘longside the fetid plunk o’ the shuffling Liffey waters.
I hit “Send” and spark up a smoke.
Around 5 p.m I woke up to the hiss of a gentleman reading In Cold Blood from out the earphones wound round my neck. Before I opened the blinds I spent a moment soaking up this sensation in the chest, this hunch about how what was waiting other side of that windowpane was nothing less than the most beautiful day of the year thus far. Kinda day a man might sit in the back garden drinking Diet Coke, smoking Mayfair Kingsize and reading poetry written by women lost to delirious fancies regarding Saint Augustine.
It was raining. But oh, what beautiful rain.
I saw the inbox flashing, y’unnerstann, and “RE: At Great Risk, A Declaration” couple lines down, just after a spam affair offering 98% more willy and a fella from Wolverhampton promising all the drugs a belly could handle for no more than the price of a stamp.
I saw it, and I shivered a tad. I’ll open it later, I figured, after I shred a couple inches off the lawn.
T’was whilst I was cutting the grass that I got to thinking about how London might not want to kill me. Maybe all I’d find would be a collection of scenes much like what I’m used to, just played out afore a different set o’ bastards and poets and folks make me smile and chuckle and weep.
Maybe there’s no reason to be scared.
And aye, maybe I’ll never need worry. Maybe she’s demanded, in CAPS LOCK swears all Courier New and size 99 that I better get down there immediately, come kiss her and hold her hand and sing her that song I wrote about how I was sorry I had a wank regarding a dirty joke she made one time.
That she didn’t say that, that she maybe said no, stay where you are, all very likely, and all very unpleasant, no thought to be thinking whilst a fellas trimming hedges with a blade size o’ Russia.
I stared at the email a long time before I opened it.
Eventually, I did.
I leave for London on Monday.
Thanks folks.
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