London In Broken C

Shards Of A Novel In Progress # 2 - "Done and Done..."

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:07:00 +0000

From "Hush, Polyhymnia!", a novel in the scribblin'.

“They’ll kill you for this” he says, gazing out upon the blaze, the flames all knotting and gyrating ‘gainst the indigo sprawl of the pre-dawn skyway. “It ends for you here. This night. Ends.” The pift-put-put of the windows giving out on the far side of the building, chards of stained glass Christs and Virgins shot hither and thither o’er the grass and the gravel. “They’ll take you and they’ll tie you down and they’ll wire the divil to your skull and they’ll plant the rubber ‘tween your teeth and they’ll lash whatever’s left o’ you t’fuck.”

“Let them lash” says she, kneading the heel of a punctured palm with fingertips reeking of clotted blood and paraffin. “S’done now, so. Done for them. Done for me. Done.”

The screeching of approaching sirens. Ropes of white and blue whipping at the black billowing westwards towards Main Street. Folks woken by the blast staggering down from the flats next the showgrounds, pointing and gasping and pulling at mouths all warped with fear and wonder.

“If the whites o’ your eyes remain you’ll be the lucky girl. If you’ve still got the space tween your teeth and your tongue...”

Moss-matted roof slates crumbling, spilling through the rafters, clattering and clanging off buckled timber. Fellas inching across the graveyard with backs arched and coats pulled up across their faces, gesturing to this or that grotesquery strewn in bits about the earth - headless cats and wingless pigeons; rats de-tailed and slit from throats to bellies; something’s lower jaw… For the grotto, headed, Our Lady clad in robes of ash and cinder, flanked by stone all heat-split and wheezing. One at each end they grab her, carting her back along the pathway then, propping her up next the gate-post, genuflecting and lamenting.

“Done for me…” she says again, pacing about the floor next the bed where your man lies sleeping, murmuring intermittently ‘gainst the sweat-yellowed pillow. “Done”, and brushing with the back of a finger the hair all matted across his brow.

Done and done, for them and for her. Done, and to the glory of our Lord and Saviour whose name is Emmanuel and whose name is Infinity and whose name is Christ Jesus. Done…

Shards Of A Novel In Progress #1 - "The Last Story"

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 09:04:00 +0000

From "Hush, Polyhymnia!", a novel in the scribblin'.

“Did you not hear?”, said Ezekiel Dunne, “Did you not hear, at all, about how it’s all finished? All of this? Did you not hear about how the last Story needin’ tellin’ has already been told? Did you not hear about it shootin’ up out the stone of Trieste thonner, with the Liffey water spilling from the cracks atween its teeth and with the blasphemies of Cardona chompin’ at its ankles and the blood o’ the Isonzo lippin’ lappin’ at its heels, and did you not hear, did you not, of it arcin’ towards Zurich and from there to the skies over Paris, erupting about the whole of the Heavens then, rupturing the spheres and sundering the stars? Did you not hear how it slew Orion, and hung in his stead the last constellations what are themselves Bloom and Dedalus and Bloom?

“The last Story - and all stories since conceived kicked through it like light through a prism. The last Story - and it is from the caverns of its nuances that our footfalls peal back at us. The truth that we know and yet cannot bear to know we know - the truth that Christ Jesus told us we would find if ever we looked, the same truth he assured us all would wreck us, ruin us -that truth is that we’re no more than the famished hounds runnin’ rings round the ghost of a deer long devoured.

“The man asks - how can we write poetry after Auschwitz, but says poetry - I was spent long afore then, sir. With the first stately step o’ plump Buck Mulligan upon thon balcony, bedamn - with that I was felled, and crushed to the last wi’ the s of blessed Molly’s final Yes.”

“Did you not hear? No. You heard nothing. For had you heard you’d have cut the fingers from your hands and tore the very tongue from out your head.” Ezekiel Dunne with two blackened, gnarled nubs held a match to the drum of his pipe. “You’d have known it, had you heard. Known the truth. That the only thing now worse than havin’ no story to tell is havin’ a story to tell.”

Things The Revelator Did #3567

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:17:00 +0000

The moments tween waking and sleeping the Revelator pulls about his waist as he nears, and with all the static of the pre-dawn skyway hissin’ tween the cracks in his teeth.

Strange scenes sparkin’ in his pores, shootin’ up and off his body in arcs o’ black-light blazing - debris strewn about a hospital corridor, split strip-lights and discarded pills and the pages of old bibles and hymn-books… Job kneading the boils beneath his eyes with fingers all blackened and bent and broken… the message a friend o’ mine left for me at the bottom o’ thon stairway, the words all threaded mongst the pool o’ blood an' bile formed a halo ‘bout his head o’er pish-damp floorboards…

Settlin’ next me on the mattress, and the words droppin’ off his tongue like poisoned wasps, the Revelator says ‘There is somethin’ wrong with you’, and I’m noddin’, pattin’ at the cheek with the back of a hand. ‘There is somethin’ wrong with you.’

Through the gap in the curtains the first whispers of sunlight come wheezin’ in o’er the sill, glistenin’ some on the black o’ the rosary beads lain on the dresser there next the ashtray. ‘Fix me…’ I’m sayin’, and the winds atween my faces ragin’ and roarin’ and batt’rin incessant. ‘Please, mean. If you can…’

His eyes fallin’ on the curve o’ my neck like cinders, fixin’ on the bank of colour all sparkin’ about the bone - the memory o’ the kiss she gave me couple mornin’s past… a kiss, aye, and her fingers all threaded ‘tween mine an’ her smile all swellin’ in my chest…

‘I love her’ I’m tellin’ him. ‘Jesus knows I love her wi’ all that I am an’ all that I was an’ all that I might be in time, an’ all that’s mine, all of it, I want her to have. But what’s wrong wi’ me, sir, is part o’ me, and I don’t want her to have that for a second. Or, I mean… s’just…’ The words catchin’ in my throat, the ‘lectric lashin’ at the base o’ my spine, and the Revelator suckin’ on the bottom lip, thumb and forefinger pullin’ at the left earlobe. ‘Not for a second, sir…’

With a hand on my forehead he bids me lay back gainst the pillow. The edge o’ his blade all glistenin’ in the swiftly-swellin’ light, he says ‘We’ll cut it out you’.

His fingers all pawin’ at my thigh, thon article all prickin’ at my rib, and the Revelator sayin’ ‘We’ll cut it out so we will, that Wrong that’s in you there.’

‘Thank you…’ sayin’, and her hand in mine, and her voice sayin’ ‘S’alright, s’alright…’

Newcastle An' That

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:28:00 +0000

Driftin’ in and out a fitful kip on the bus from Newcastle to London, having spent the weekend chewing on the wild, Bohemian pule of the former, bounding from this radical cinema to that indiepop disco, from one winding, gothic enclave to the next, from this gig to the other, and all a sudden snared twixt the pegs of a vision rising up off the shoulders of the fella sleeping to my left:

A portly gent clad in bloodied night-gown waddles a descent ‘long a flight of stairs all garnished with glass and sand and peppers. Swigging now and then from a bottle of Pulmo Bailly cough suppressant, grimacing and sucking at the air and patting at the sweat-embossed brow with the back of a dusk-hued hand, he staggers against the banisters, curses the saints, laments lost love, and all the while with the rectum hung out his arse like a length of frayed tow-rope.

On his face he wears one of my faces, and says he to me “Take heed! Little shy of drowning will blunt the knives like this concoction, but amongst the luxuries a man must renege for the grace of a codeine slump is the ability to pass more than a farten whistle ‘thout havin’ to push hard enough to force the ribs to the curves o’ the shins, bejeesus, and the throat to the soles o’ the feet. Like a man attemptin’ to coax pennies out his elbow - such is the man attemptin’ to shit under influence of this article here. Many’s the arse has collapsed under weight of the strain.”

In-between visitations from this raggle-holed phantom, I peruse the litany of scrawled asides and notes birthed throughout the course of the weekend:

“Gormley's blessed and Holy angel hauntin’ the landscape. Gormely - the patron saint of Singer-Songwriters, a man whose work stems from a fear that somewhere in the world exists a fella or a lass to whom the intricacies of his nudity are still a mystery…”

“Richard Dawson wringing from out his tongue all the devils and the demons and the hobgoblins in creation, the hoof-handed hoors scuttlin’ about atween his legs, skiting this way and that o’er the stage of the Star And Shadow…”

“Performing at the Head Of Steam. Taking a stagger backwards three songs in, near to fainting. Andrew Gardiner and Andy Warmington beating tambourines and tootlin’ trumpets respectively, Ryan H. Fleming blowing into a melodica - the three of them beside me, and the world dimmin’ for a time, the sharpness brought about by an attempted discontinuation of a particular mooder-upper nulled momentarily, and thinking aye, this’ll do… Two more copies of Yonder! Calliope? sold by night’s end. Fifteen quid shy of even, says Luke Page of Ex Libris Records. Relief…”

“A four-hour improvised folk ballad concocted in Andrew Gardiner’s kitchen, myself and Ryan H. tossing reels of filthiest, blasphemous rhyme from one end of the room to the other till well after 7 A.M, and These United States, Dischord recording artists and purveyors of the most sublime Americana / folk / electro a man might e’er stumble upon all sleeping far side of the door to my left. Thinking - pray God they heard none that verse about Oh perty Joan Of Arc c’mon on down from off that stake and make the sweetest love to me upside the face…”

“Two hours dissecting that Jeffrey Lewis song about maybe he met Will Oldham, maybe not, but whoever it was, he ended up shaftin’ him up the hole in a underground station… Playing Nuances by Madisson to Ryan H, saying what about that, sayin’ she’s gon’ play bass for me that lass, down South, speaks to me and everythin’, what about that?”

“Note regarding future performances - Myself, Ms M on bass, Sir Fleming (no relation to Ryan H) slatherin’ the stage in the thickest, murkiest of face-shreddin’ grinds, and someone, anyone, hitting kettles, Coke bottles and a snare drum alongside. Adverts on Gumtree - Person needed for to hit things roughly in time with what the rest of us are doing. Influences - Walter Benjamin, Whiskeytown, Jimmy Rodgers, Morbid Angel, Aphex Twin…”

“Beautiful souls - A punk with the head painted silver sat with eyes closed through a set by Chronicity… A man in direst need of the name of a musical instrument beginning with N - ‘Can’t think of any fucker of the kind for love nor money’… A woman at a filling-station singing Billie Piper songs to the A.M breeze…”

Flinging the notebook aside then, Sheffield nearing, and Townes Van Zandt perched upon the porch atween my ears singin’ of poor bedevilled Caroline, the daughter of a miner…

Further Thoughts RE: The Shaking Of Billy Bragg's Hand

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:42:00 +0000

Stood at the traffic lights halfways-down Kingsway of an afternoon, marvelling some at the lass to my right with the tendrils of sunlight all lolling about the frames of her glasses, noting also the headline on the Evening Standard held under the arm of a fella to my left (“London shook by quake!”, and me wondering how come I never felt anything? How good was that fucking flick, anyhow, that not even the ripplin’ of the very earth beneath me could slacken the grip those images held?), when all a damn sudden a thought regarding my recent encounter with Billy Bragg comes shootin’ up my spine, blustering along my neck, exploding at the base of my skull in a cacophonous squall of recollection and revelation.

What occurs to me is that, by shaking Billy Bragg’s hand, I was in some way wrenching him from out the firmament, shearing him - albeit only for a fraction of a second - of those wings that over the years I’ve been drawing out the skin of his back, an inch further with every fresh encounter with that flugelhorn in The Saturday Boy or that line in St Swithin’s Day about “With my own hand / when I make love to your memory”, or those harmonies in You Woke Up My Neighbourhood or that stunning bluegrass rendition of There Is Power In A Union on the second disc of the re-mastered Internationale or those thunder and lightening clangs and crashes in the middle of The World Turned Upside Down or the Hammond organ tremors in A Lover Sings or the line in that self same song about “Sittin’ in the park / kissing on the carpet / and your tights around your ankles…”… Those wings, yes, festooned with sapphire and ruby and emerald - in the shaking of Billy Bragg’s hand I was momentarily plucking those wings from off of him anew, and so he stood there as a man, and I also, at least officially, stood as a man alongside.

What it amounts to, I get to thinking, is an attempt to bring the Ideal onto my turf in the hopes of being someway carried onto his turf in return.

Maybe more - Maybe in bringing Billy Bragg down from the heavens for a moment what a fella is doing is hoping that, in some way, at some level, an allegiance has been formed. The Songwriter takes hold the extended hand of the writer of songs and thereby forges a connection - yes, a bind, by Christ, a union, and there is power in a union, remember.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand is reminding a fella that Billy Bragg is as the fella himself when it comes down to it. If an ant or a sparrow or a tiger were to gaze upon the scene, what they would see would be two humans, one of whom has great hair and is impeccably dressed whilst the other looks like he’s been shafted in the gums by an antelope and obviously fell asleep whilst trying to bleach his head, but two humans, nonetheless. One is as the other, so far as they’re concerned.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand a fella is vicariously charged with a sense of Braggness. Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand becomes as the act of reading Proust in public, the idea being that folks will obviously equate reader with text, and from a distance might not even be able to tell the difference.

Shaking Billy Bragg’s hand, the writer of The Myth Of Trust and A New England shaking the paw of the fella who wrote some songs you never heard of about a lass you never knew - what it represents is the attempt of the latter to assimilate the former, to bring Billy Bragg into his realm at the same time as he slides the heel of a boot into Billy Bragg’s.

These things thus thought, I waited for the green man to appear and footered for a time with the hood of my coat, caught as it was round the strap of my bag, thinking also of a song I heard a lass sing a few 9 P.M’s ago, song about a fella with ale on his breath that she didn’t much feel like kissing.

Thank You Billy Bragg

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 22:05:00 +0000

In the alleyway round back the HMV on Oxford Street I’m stood, fingers trembling and ears blazing with the cold, the glare of the fella to my right carving trenches up my jaw, the banter of the half-dozen security guards across the way bopping and jostling in the air afore me.

Gaze fixed on the doors of the Visitors & Staff Entrance, and the mind untethered for a time, free for to traipse and bound through the reams of recollection swaddling the brain, for to inspect the images and the sounds jutting up out the wrinkles in the pink like bust springs…

...16 years old and perched on the edge of the mattress, hands folded in the lap, head tilted towards the speakers, and Billy Bragg singing about sometimes it takes a grown man a long time to learn just what it would take a child a night to learn…

...Hobbling up and down the corridors of Ballymoney technical college a couple days hitherto, the gash on the shin weeping through the fabric of the jeans, and a holy and blessed man by the name of Paul McKeegan saying “The blazes happened to you?”

“Aw for fucks sakes” says I, wincing. “I was wanderin’ about Megaw Park of an afternoon in the company of a fella from the psychiatric ward across the road, blethering some about a pornographic magazine he’d picked up in Costcutters and how he felt like goin’ back and throwin’ it at them, for when he got it out the plastic hadn’t it turned out to be one of your Mature Women carry-ons and much as he respects the right of a fifty-five-year-old hoo-hah to be spread and to be photographed as much as the next man, still and for all it’d be a better one than him, he says, could work themselves into much of a fluster over the head of it. Five quid and forty-nine pence it stung him, and in the end he had to stick the forefinger up the arse anyway to get anythin’ approachin’ a rooter, so he says.”

“Wanderin’ about as I say with this class of conversation twined about us, when by Jais’ there comes careering out the speakers of a nearby portable cassette-player a song the likes of which I never heard in all my puff, hurtlin’ across the gravel right for me, and here it’s shootin’ at my leg there, near splinters the bloody bone in the ankle.”

“What song was it?” he asks.

“Damned if I know, but I’ll tell you this - I’ve thought about nothing else since. It was a fella and an electric guitar - all razor-blade chords chiming and clashing with the reverb clinging to them like randy badgers to the moss on the oak, and the voice - fuck me… This astounding punk-rock holler all terrace-chant inflection, singin’ about Our fathers were all soldiers and something to do with Fightin’ and fallin’ or….”

“That’s Billy Bragg” Paul McKeegan says with a shrug. “That’s what that is, is Like Soldiers Do by Billy Bragg.”

Billy Bragg… I’d heard the name a thousand times. I’d heard Rancid singing about him, I’d seen him pictured in this or that article in Vox or Q…

“Billy Bragg! Well by God, where can a man get hold of these records?”

“I’ve got a couple you can borrow if you want. I don’t have that particular tune, but there’s plenty more tunes of equal or maybe even greater standard to be gettin’ on with.”

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry and The Internationale handed me the following day, both on cassette, both with Pay No More Than 3.99 written on the inlay…

Things I Would Say To Billy Bragg #365 - “Talking With The Taxman About Poetry changed my life, Billy Bragg…”

Things I Would Say To Billy Bragg #387 - “…and Workers Playtime fucking well destroyed it.”

The former is probably my favourite Billy Bragg album, the one that had me leavin’ the band I was playin’ bass in at the time, the one that convinced me how it didn’t matter a fuck whether a fella could hit this note or the other or none note at all, for singin’ songs is about riddin’ oneself of those torments and those hopes and those dreams and those frustrations lie like white-hot coals on the tongue, and if not one of those coals fall anywhere near what might be considered The Tune, fuck the matter it makes.

The latter, mind you, is the one that I listen to most, probably because, when it comes down to it, and much as I might pretend otherwise, I’m the sort of cunt spends far more time fretting over the lassies than fretting over Thatcher.

Workers Playtime is one of the all-time great break-up records, up there with Blood On The Tracks, with The Libertines, with World Without Tears, with Heartbreaker… It’s a record has a fella racing out to sabotage every damn thing he can find, everything most precious and pure and special, just so as he might for ten minutes feel the kind of thing Billy Bragg felt when he wrote The Short Answer or The Price I Pay or Must I Paint You A Picture, just so as he might stand a chance of writing something might be fit to lick the sweat out the arse-crack of Life With The Lions or The Only One or She’s Got A New Spell or Little Time Bomb…

Aye, Workers Playtime. Ruined my fuckin’ life that record, swear to God.

A copy of it, ensconced in the front-pocket of a laptop-bag sans-laptop, hangs at my side here and now, and a copy of Talking With The Taxman… alongside, both of them the cardboard-sleeve special editions included in those two gorgeous box sets put out last year, owing to how - “They’re easier to write on.”

“Ah aye… aye, yeah, that’s the, mean, beautiful. So.”

Billy Bragg stood beside me with my copy of Workers Playtime in his hand, Taxman… still in the bag, me chickening out at the last minute, figuring one signature was as much as a man could ask of Billy Bragg, figuring I was pushing it as it was…

“I have a biro or… a pen or… here. In here. Somewhere.”

From his own pocket, Billy Bragg produces a black marker, gives me a wink, says “Even better.”

All the things I said to Billy Bragg in my head over the years, all the conversations about Thomas Payne and Gerrard Winstanley, about Red Wedge, about what I thought of The Progressive Patriot, all the stuff about he introduced me to Woody Guthrie and for that I am forever grateful, all the blathering about how I think I might steal his idea of pretending to be a band next time I approach the promoters and what not, for they’re very reluctant to fling a fella with a geeeetar onto the same stage as folks with drums and bass and drum n’ bass laptop accompaniment and what not and also-

But no. Stood at the back of the HMV with Billy Bragg beside me, I end up stammerin’ and stutterin’ and feelin’ that same mesh o’ terror and euphoria I felt when I walked out front Amanda Forrest in first year and asked if maybe she’d go out with me?

“I went with her for a fortnight, Billy Bragg, and I didn’t speak a fuckin’ word to her the whole time. It was a great relief when it was over and I was fit for to joke and to jest with her again without the flesh of the cheeks and philtrum scalding the very bone from out my skull with embarrassment.”

Couple hours ago K.T Tunstall, with whom Lord Bragg had been performing a half-hour set at the retail establishment in question, came wandering out those self-same doors, and the fella who’d been gawking at me racing with limbs flailing and shoulders bopping, yelping “K.T!” and realising then, that’s why he was sneering so, he thought I was intending for to cut into his K.T time.

I encroach none. K.T Tunstall is this man’s Billy Bragg. I’ll stand back here and content myself with thinking about the many marriages myself and Ms Tunstall will enjoy in my head, about how lovely she is altogether, about how the version of The Drugs Don’t Work she and Billy performed in there was truly fucking astounding, about how I very much hope they’ll record that one day.

For the next two hours I stand there, scared for to light a cigarette even for it’d mean I’d have to look away for a second and might miss him…

Sometime around 4 Billy Bragg steps out those very doors, flanked by a couple fellas carrying guitars and cases of some sort, and me near to collapsing.

“Ah… Mr… Mr Bragg!” says I. “Could I… could I maybe please, mean…”

Billy Bragg shakes my hand and says “Thanks for being patient.”

Ganshing and blootering. “Could… um… please, could you… maybe could you please sign my Workers Playtime please?”

“Sure, mate” says he. “Course.”

Thinking… I can’t do it. What I had intended to do in the foolhardy throes of the pre-dawn, no.

I do it. I say “Um, could maybe I give you a…”

“Of course you can.”

He knows. Happens all the time to Billy Bragg. Crag-tooth backroom troubadours with terrible complexions and stupid half-bleached hair and the hood of the coat shoved halfways up the side of the face owing to the weight of the bag on one shoulder, and all of them with this or that record or minidisc or cassette tape thrust towards him, all of them saying “Billy Bragg, you are the very reason these tracks on here exist and maybe you could give them a listen one day?”

A copy of Yonder! Calliope? by Aaron McMullan handed to Billy Bragg.

“I’ll give it a listen, thank you very much.”

It was a while before I realised he left, stood there as I was with the yap hung agape and the hand still outstretched and thinking “Billy Bragg has a copy of Yonder! Calliope? in his possession…” Thinking about how it didn’t matter if he binned it half-ways up the street, thinking about how what mattered was that he took it, thinking about how those folks who say “You should never meet your heroes” probably are the sorts of folks who just happen to have a shower of cunts for heroes, thinking about the times I’ll listen to those songs now, wondering all the while - “Will Billy Bragg like that bit? Will he notice what I did there? Will he skip that one - aw balls, it has the best line, that one. He’ll never know. I imagine Billy Bragg will find all that right there a bit excessive. I imagine he’ll say ‘I don’t deserve to speak her name’ is a terrible, terrible lyric and she deserved far, far better, that muse of yours.”

I know Billy Bragg, I know.

I’ll tell him I know one time. And also about how Talking With The Taxman About Poetry changed my life and Workers Playtime destroyed it and here’s what I thought after reading The Progressive Patriot and by the way, thank you for introducing me to Woody Guthrie, dunno how I’ll ever repay you for that, and also…

Travels In Scientology - Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:47:00 +0000

And the conclusion, again penned by myself and the marvelous Sir Fleming. Click the link for to read it and what not on Blogcritics.org

Travels In Scientology Part Two

Travels In Scientology - Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:18:00 +0000

Of Wednesday past, myself and Sir Fleming took a dander to the Church of Scientology on Tottenham Court Road for to see and to hear and to wonder. An account of such, co-written with the brilliant Sir Fleming himself, has since appeared on blogcritics.org. Part two, the concluding part, will appear this Wednesday.

Click For To Read Travels In Scientology - Part One

Of Your Woman In The Hawley Arms

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 20:52:00 +0000

A stroll about Camden Town of a winter’s night is erotic in much the same way as certain chards of film have proven erotic for the most Blessed and Holy Laura Marks - it is a wrassle twixt domination and submission, twixt tension and ease.

Wandering those pitch-black thoroughfares, a fella is both fucker and fucked.

The senses oscillate erratically, bounding from fear to calm, from recognition to confusion. A fella has his vision and sense of symmetry torn from him one minute and brought blasting about the skull anew the next.

His name slinks away from him, scuttling for the shadows, captured then and returned by way of a man in a parka selling the sniff n’ jig by the tube station. ‘Oi ginger!’ says he, and there it is, my identity - wrenched back out the clutches of the concrete with teeth bared and eyes tingling.

Dominated and dominating. Fucking and being fucked.

(Say the words of a song swelling somewhere back my eyes - “I was rid but once in London / By the cock of Camden Town…”)

Wandering towards the Hawley Arms with Sir Fleming, and a burst of laughter. “Ginger! Did you hear? Fuckin’ Ginger, no less.”

I run a hand about the shapeless, toneless plume atop my head. Bleached white here and there with belches of orange and brown flit’rin about. “If ever again I get the notion to mess with the mop” says I, “Be sure and force me to sleep for at least 9 hours afore proceeding.”

Awake for two days and with a bastard of a flu rampaging about the head-holes, even the most obviously absurd notions seem all the reasonable in the world.

Considering this still whilst stood awaiting service at the bar in question, one arm thrust across the counter, scrabbling for the barmaid’s attention, the other flailing in the air, grasping at the melodies that self-same barmaid is spitting left and right with every flick of the hair off her shoulder.

The spoors of a Jenny Lewis dream haunting the eyes of a waking Kate Nash - such is the measure of the barmaid’s appearance.

Thinking - fuck me, of all the nights to encounter such a wonder… Of all the heads with which to greet her… Oh for a Wurzel Gummidge-esque collection of spares that I might rummage through afore leaving the flat. Two dozen potential fizzogs arranged according to plumposity of jowls or texture of eyelids. For the barmaid in the Hawley Arms… None but this cheeky bugger here, with the Nick Cave handlebar and the Christopher Lee widow’s peak will suffice.

Round about me - mocking and taunting - a carousel of grotesquely beautiful faces trundling incessantly. Statuesque jaws, impeccably disheveled fringes, eyes blue as the balls o’ St Francis and smiles so perfect and yet so cold a fella’s pupils stick to them in passing. On the wall, a sprawl of Polaroid photos stretching from floor to ceiling details a thousand more yaps - sometimes forlorn, sometimes cheering, sometimes with eyebrows arched halfways across the scalp, sometimes pretending not to see the camera, always stunning - the yaps of various revelers and scenesters and celebrities who’ve been sat at these tables at some point afore now.

To the image of Richard Hawley - for whom the bar wasn’t named, but should’ve been - I give a nod and say all about I fucking loved Lady’s Bridge and also, if it’s at all possible, maybe I could borrow your quiff for ten minutes, for I’m very much considering telling this barmaid that I’m in love with her and I don’t think she’ll be all that receptive, to be honest. But if I reminded her of the fella sings Love Of My Life… I dare say I’d be walkin’ with the assistance of fourteen strong men and women for the next month, so ferociously would her lust lay waste my limbs.

In the end, another lad serves me, and it’s only later, when I’m shudderin’ through kip owin’ to the amount of caffeine in the gut that I get to say to her “I very much adore you, barmaid woman who looks a bit like Kate Nash with a (fake) rabbit-fur coat draped about her.”

She smiles, shrugs one shoulder. “Sorry” she says. “I’m seein’ the fella out the Longpigs.”

“Oh” says I, stifling a wince. “Fair enough, so.”

“I do like your quiff, mind.”

“Cheers” says I.

I woke up to the sound a fence collapsing in the garden next door.

Notes On 27 Hours Without Sleep

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:54:00 +0000

Strange sensations, curious dichotomies, synaesthesic moments…

Bizarre phenomena of the physiological and psychological varieties…

To see the sun set then rise then set again in the one stretch - once or twice a month, it seems, is about as much as the mind / body can cope with. More than this - two such stretches per week for three months, say - and the brain rebels, the body says no more!

The sun set yesterday and I watched the dark swallow the room around me, leaving nowt but the phosphorescent glare of the laptop. Afore a man knows where he is the brittle azure wash of the dawn is busy siphoning detail anew from the shadows.

Ah, it was a guitar is what it was. A dresser. A pair o’ knickers, bejeesus.

-The mind lurches left and right with maniacal zeal now and then and the body too tired to heed thon crazed and devil-charged ravings… -

The sun sets and rises and looks set for setting anew, and the street, like these words, like the frames of that film careering past in maddening, insufferable screeches… a tapestry of nonsense is all. An unknowable web of lunacy and …

This, I can’t edit this - not because of any pretensions I might harbour about the truth of the unedited splurge, y’unnerstann, a bullshit notion if ever was one - but because I don’t understand it.

What to cut and what to leave and what difference would either o’ them articles make, pray tell?

The wind rises and the rain bratta-ba-tats from off the window.

Sometime after 2PM - The strip lights in the tube station hollows crack and flicker stroboscopically - faces smile electric, blisters of blue heat rising and popping at the corners of the eyes.

The daytime wavers eerily tween the ceiling and the floor - uncanny shapes appear. A woman with blonde hair and denim jacket - at the door of my room she stood just now but no more, gone…

That paranoia peculiar to this city far as I can tell - stemming from two seemingly incompatible fears;

1 - Everyone Is Looking At Me

2 - I Am Invisible

Everyone is looking at me and I am invisible…

Camden Town passing by and the second sun of the day strewn in streaks o’er the rain-slick pavings.

Fleet Street with thon dragon stood gallant on its pedestal - the City Of Westminster and the City Of London bleeding into other for a time and the words of ol’ Tennyson haunting the brick and the bronze round about.

A black-haired woman smiles at me and I think about inviting her to a gig I’m doing tomorrow night. And if not her then maybe the fella sat there day in, day out in the construction tunnel with the blue sleeping bag pulled up about his shiv’rin shoulders. Irish, he tells me. From Dublin. I give him a cigarette on account of I’ve only the 90p for the bus to my name.

75 MG of Effexor XL and to sleep son, for God’s sake, to sleep…

Notes Made - Will Self, Two Gallants, Babe Etc Etc

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 01:22:00 +0000

A schoolgirl drumming on the window of a bus headed up Wood Green direction of a Monday afternoon, complementing the beat with an intermittent grunting rises from someplace tween her kidneys and her throat. The murmur of the engine and the crank and the grind of the metal round about providing an approximation of the hissing and the popping and the scratching of well-worn vinyl.

‘Well’ she says, shrugging with one shoulder. ‘Fucking sing, then.’

Lass sat opposite bats the command aside with a flaff of a lever-arch file. ‘Don’t wanna sing.’

A third girl fashions a hi-hat out a polly-pocket and an A4 sheet of paper, trattle-la-dratta-ba-tattin’ two biros off the plastic.

‘Sing, I said.’

‘I don’t wanna fuckin’ sing fuckin’…. fuckin’ alright fuckin’ Hmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmm. Y’got’t goin’ ohhhn, an…’

‘Y’see? Y’see, that’s what I’m sayin. Yes.’

‘Hmm. Hmm.’

Fella across the way cocks an ear towards them, the foot jigging on the spot, a can of Carlsberg clutched in a gloved hand, a loudhailer held atween his knees.

* * *

Through the pores of the nightime the colours of County Antrim bleed o’er Rutland Gardens, pooling around my feet for a moment, then taking off like a flock of grackle aflame, dispersing in fleeting bursts of image and sound, swallowed by the amber-hued sky.

* * *

Flatmate and bandmate and creator of Generic Mugwump Sir Fleming hoists me towards a video on youtube ‘thin which Will Self yacks about his new book to a roomful of Google employees.

The crux of his concerns this time around appear to involve post-modern geographies, the simultaneous shrinking and expanding of our environments (its easier to get from A to Z but B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W and X get swallowed in the process) and the difficulty in acquiring any kind of cognitive map of anywhere anymore (for anywhere in this instance, read The City).

Thinking - Of London I know Rutland Gardens, I know this street and I know that a right turn leads me towards the bus to Wood Green and a left turn leads me to Manor House tube station. This, Sir Self asserts, is my micro-environment. My micro-environment is connected to other micro-environments scattered here and there by way of leagues upon leagues of metal and glass.

How to know somewhere, anywhere, in these circumstances?

Walk, says he. Fucking put some cunting effort in.

Become a Flaneur, by Jesus!

Thinking - Do I have the arse for Flaneury? If I saw myself wanderin’ aimlessly about the street out thonner of an evening would I think ‘Ah, lovely fucks, here’s a Flaneur strolling and a-dand’rin’ by way of reclaiming the map - or would I more likely hunch the shoulders and lower the head and mumble about I gave my last change to the fella next Holborn station wears the black leather sailor’s hat and the beige cardigan, sorry, and also, your arse is saggin like a bastard, near to hittin’ the backs o’ your ankles them cheeks o’ yours. I bet your willy’s shite an’ all.’

* * *

Two Gallants at the Koko in Camden. “Baby, when I was young of age / I had you for my world / the oceans were your eyes / the pastures were your curls”.

County Antrim in the gaps atween the notes.

Sat afore the speakers this time last year with Two Gallants talking about they come from the old town, baby, where all the kids are crazy…

“If I remain, then I’m to blame…”

And saying now - alright, Two Gallants, I didn’t remain, I came here with eyes wide and arse wider, but tell me - what now?

Rilo Kiley at Shepherd’s Bush a week later, Jenny Lewis winking this direction, clapping along with Sir Fleming there for a moment, the white light draped about her, a girl with black-rimmed glasses pressed against me for a second and the breath on my ear sounded for all the world like What Now? This’ll Do, Pig. This’ll Do…

* * *

To Do

Finish review of The Radiators album and incisive critique of Babe - Pig In The City (Crux of the matter - I hated it back in the day and then all a sudden I come to see that not only is it better than its predecessor, but also, that it’s the one of the key films of the 1990’s, that it’s the best film George Miller ever made and that it is without doubt the bleakest, sharpest, most intelligent, most prophetic portrayal of The modern City I’ve ever seen outside of sci-fi. Thinking of the design of that cityscape - it makes it hard to breathe. Images I can’t see myself ever forgetting. Although I did first time around. I can only assume it's owing to how, back then, I was under the influence of The Hard Stuff, The Strong Stuff, The Daddy’s Tickles, The Vicar’s Friend, The Cock-Wilt Wonders, The Cold-Case Calamities, The Fanny’s Frumps, The Scrumpy Scrotums, The D.T Doozies, The …)

Finish New Tune For To Try Out At Gig Next Week

Finish First Draft Of The Novel

Ask Laurie From The Tube Station If She Maybe Wants Some Grapes Sometime

* * *

Job interview at local care-home for persons recovering from severe schizophrenia.

Woman seemed to very much like my tie even though it had a soup stain on it from three months ago that I never noticed till I sat down afore her and so spent the rest of the interview with my forearms raised front my chest as if I was scared she might use one of the recovering schizophrenics to stab me in the liver, but no, it’s just that I haven’t worn this tie since the summer and I never thought of washing it and its got a great cunt of a Campbell’s splurge up the front.

Of qualifications relating to the position I had none. “I was detained in a nut house for a while, however” I tell her.

She thanks me and says I might hear back but most likely I won’t but to hell with that says she sure isn’t it the wildest time of it we’re havin’ with the rain…

Dream #217 … “It’s Eating Me!”

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 06:40:00 +0000

Stepping out into the neon-hued drizzle all pitter-pa-tatterin’ about Piccadilly Square he was two inches shy of slipping a fresh-rolled cigarette atween his lips when he noticed that his mouth had fallen off his face.

Glaring down the steps into the belly of the tube station, thinking; Hells blazes, it’s came off away in thonner somewhere…

On the platform probably, swept away with the winds blustered about the tunnel as the train careered off towards Leicester Square. Images of men and women peering nervously at it from behind upheld paperbacks and free newspapers. Nudging one another. “What’s… is that?” … “Fuck me, a mouth with no face round about it.” … Security guards prodding it with sticks, whispering in others ears so as not to panic the commuters - “Be careful. It could be something to do with the Islamists. Could be the very mouth of Mohammad himself there on that floor if you only but knowed it.”

He descends the steps with his tongue jib-jabbing at the flesh now sprawled atween his nose and his chin. Discreetly he eyes the passers-by, looking for someone maybe brushed against him by accident and now has his mouth blathering away on the nape of their neck or the crook of their arm.

Down the escalator with one hand clenching and unclenching nervously. What if he left it on the train? What if it slid off when he was stepping on at Knightsbridge? What if somebody stole it? Some rogue now racing around Hyde Park with his mouth in their trouser pocket, hissing at folks as they pass - “Mouth, mate? Face hole for you? Beautiful fucking orifice, beautiful. Tonne, fair an square. Tonne for a tongue-hut, yes son, yes…”

Black market orifice trading…

“An arsehole for you, darlin’? Oi, mate, an arse for you this evening? An arse and also here’s a vagina, join em up you got a minge you can shit out of, save time, spend it with your children, maybe, or with a Labrador or Chaffinch you might keep as a pet, I don’t know.”

Stifling heat, the air oscillating demented atween the screeching white walls. Dabbing a handkerchief against his brow.

Dry.

Aw Holy Mother Mary and the Martyrs… My pores are gone…

By the time he’s stood on the platform itself he has noted the following items missing;

One (1) Mouth

Innumerable Pores

One (1) Earlobe

Half (½) Of One (1) Kneecap

Two (2) Retinas

One (1) Nostril

Three-Quarters (¾) Of Each Eyelid

Sixteen (16) Wrinkles From The Underside Of His Scrotum

One (1) Belly-Button (But Not The Fluff Gathered Therein)

As each second topples flailing down the grinding gullet of history, another fragment of his being disappears.

His hair, his lower jaw, the knuckles of his right hand, the fingers of his left…

Delirious with panic, he lunges for a woman stood next an advert for Terry’s Chocolate Orange, gesturing wildly - Help me! Help me please, oh sweet Merciful Fuck, woman, help me! I’m disappearing! Something is eating me! Fucking eating me, I am disappearing!

Eyes wide and teeth bared the woman jerks the head this way and that. “What the fuck!”

He has vanished.

"What..."

A fella stood beside her offers a hand. “The wind in these tunnels is fierce” he says, helping her to her feet. “Knock you right on your tits if you’re not careful.”

She brushes herself off, thanks him. The train arrives fourteen seconds earlier than announced.

Green Socks

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:06:00 +0000

Green Socks jigs and jostles her way back and forth from Manor House tube station to Colina Road with her hands on her sides and her elbows thrusting in and out with crazed poultrific abandon. “Lonely, dahlin’, is ya?” asking as I pass. “Lonely? Loneliness I can help you with, dahlin, aw yes - thirty notes a time or twenty if you only wanna hand job, yeah? Come on then whassamattah?”

Green Socks grins and winks and twiddles her hair round her finger and taps an imaginary cane off the concrete like the ghost of some long-dead vaudevillian half-glimpsed midst the murk on a detuned telly.

The Quiet Man watches her from the window of the kebab shop across the street, smiling to himself, shaking his head, muttering incoherently. So too the fellas in the pool room next the internet café. They spill out onto the street of occasion in groups of three or four shouting and jeering and cajoling. “Go home, love! Quit embarrassing yourself! No-one wants it! No one wants t’tap that ‘tang, yeah?”

Green Socks flips the fingers and carries on her march.

In a dream I bring Green Socks round the flat for to watch some Fulci, maybe City Of The Living Dead or The Psychic since it’s Halloween time and all that. I make her a cup of coffee and she holds the mug in shivering hands, the sleeves of her cardigan pulled up to the ends of her fingers. “Thank you Travis” she says.

“Travis?” says I, jerking the head back. “No, no. No that’s not it at all.”

“What? You don’t wanna save me?”

“Save you? Christ no. I want you to save me!”

She holds my gaze for a moment, then sets the mug on the windowsill and rises, pulling her green socks back up to the knees. “Fuckin’ hell” she says. “Always I'm saving or being saved.”

Sighing, she descends the stairway and heads back out onto the street. The tangerine sprawl of the streetlight glow ripples and splits for a moment, and she thanks it with a nod of the head, clip-clopping on through the dark.

"So How Is It, Then?"

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:57:00 +0000

“So how is it, then?” she asks me. “London?”

I shrug, pulling on the tip of a clumsily-rolled cigarette, brushing stray tendrils of tobacco off the knee of my trousers. “I don’t know. I have no fucking idea. I’ve been here over a month and I could no more tell you How It Is than I could whistle Dixie backwards out my arse.”

She laughs. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious. I have no grip on it whatsoever. Neither topography nor geography nor people nor places. I don’t know it at all.”

Sat skewed to the right front the laptop, speakerphone perched next a postcard sized reproduction of Ecce Homo picked up at the Titian exhibition in the National Gallery, Dublin five or six years ago. A wind-up Mother Mary totters about also. Where’s that from? Edinburgh?

Edinburgh and Dublin. Cities I understand, right there.

Edinburgh all Caligari roofscapes, the Covenanters Prison with the muck weeping blood o’er the soles of my shoes, shoes hidden sometime afore dawn to keep me from racing up Princes Street at 3.28 in the mornin’ in search o’ a man with a crack-black beard told me earlier in the day about the wailing and the screaming down the Royal Mile at midnight…

Dublin with the Savage Purple erupting o’er Harry Street like a thousand frozen suns all thawing in unison, with light hung in ropes o’er Euston Street - “This is beautiful” sayin’, and a laugh and a “Fuck sakes, go write a song about it…” Scrabbling about Dame Street in the winter of ‘99 in pursuit of the hotel a woman told us Shane MacGowan was staying at, the details lost midst the clash of the whiskey-heads all seething…

And London…

Shadows of shadows, reflections of reflections. Intersecting tube lines. Washes of neon lettering. The breath of strangers on the back of my head. Sirens stabbing the 4 A.M. Bin-lids clattering off tarmac. Skeletal, fag-yellowed fingers poised afore formless, faceless faces.

“These things I know” I tell her, “but little else, barring what’s echoed back at me from a thousand songs and stories and films and books these thoroughfares birthed long afore I got here.”

London mediated via Shane and Pete Doherty and Will Self and…

London careering past me in nonsensical streaks. What I catch of it I catch in five minute bursts atween tube stations and bus stops.

London as notes strewn at random o’er some shapeless liquid stave.

London as Metal Machine Music, and me clawing at the static and the squall for the ghosts of melodies haunt the gunk about the guts.

“Well…” she says. “Mean, do you like it?”

A series of stutt’rin beats from the flat next door. Fella’s making a rap record, woman arrived a half-hour ago’s singing about her baby done gone fucked her somethin’ wicked in the breaks atween those blocks of machine-gun rhyme.

Nodding. “I love it” I’m saying. “I’m very much lookin’ forward to bein’ wrecked by it, tell you the truth.”

O'er Ocean Proceeding

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:41:00 +0000

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.’

A Dream Of Dublin

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:00:00 +0000

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.

Morrissey, Shane MacGowan, An Email

noreply@blogger.com (Aaron McMullan) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 18:39:00 +0000

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.