khetto

So stalk the gutters barefoot, counting the drains,

until your feet turn black and your

eyes turn to diamonds;

and the colours of your iris

change with the swells of your pulse,

and blood chants in your ears

with past words spoken

and the stillness of vision

frames the brickwork like a picture.

but the stars

the stars

the stars through the clouds crowd around

in awe at the constellations on the ground!

and the lights speak in code

until the enigma is cracked

and you suppose that it’s souls,

transparent in the light.

So, like black petals that fall from a bush of red roses,

ash from the sky falls.

the heavens are burning

and I can but watch.

ELASTIC

The world she inhabits is cold to the bone

because the brickwork broke loose from her childhood home,

and with the violence condoned in unanswered phones

the demons they come in their drones.

So leave her alone and don’t ask any questions

because the best that you’ll get from your see-through intentions

is a thousand yard stare with lips slightly parted

and a hand, forceful, between her thighs.

please leave me be

Today was the first day of the new season, when the sun stops being warm. It was the first day I could smell the change in the air. New oxygen stops being plumed from plants. Excited shrubbery stops dancing in kissing winds. The shoals of leaves blacken as they begin to rot and die. The trees become crooked skeletons, brittle and hanging; their eyes closing for the imminent winter. They don’t want to see what becomes of this city once the wind starts screaming.

I want to become a skeleton. To rot and die and come back with fresh eyes in the spring. But when I rot and die I’ll be fixed in one long black spring. There isn’t much light there. Trees are lucky. They only ever live in the summer time. I guess trees never get suicidal tendencies.

The dead overcoats rest upon the cracked slabs of concrete which encase their mothers. They file into every gap, refusing to remain swept against the walls. Their last stand as the soon to-be-gone. They populate the rain-veins that frame the bubbly tarmac runs of metal rats. Gutters, punctuated by iron drains with words like ‘Bermondsey Metal Inc.’ bumped across them, become intimately packed with crisp leaves, turning to sludge with rain and rain and sleet and rain. They rest amongst the dust, cyclically becoming the dust. The leaves, brown and polka dotted with black illness, curl up to wither and die; curl up to shelter from the hurried steps of empty commuters and scared alcoholics.

The leaves, humble in their death and ability to rot, are infiltrated by tie-died plastics – spastic bent bottles baring no natural form, cigarette packs scream yellows and blues and cheapness, jagged foil cuts erratic lines and shapes thorough the dead crop. Rain-washed pale reds and blue-ish whites shard out through the melancholy brown, scratching for attention.

These will not die. They have no place in the morgue of the organic. They will live on for hundreds of years. Eventually collected and buried in some dead womb of disregarded earth. They cheapen the deaths of the little brown leaves. They cheapen their lives and worth. Please leave the leaves be.

Walter Salles and Sam Riley for Kerouac 'On The Road' film adaptation

This is the most sensational news I've heard in a very long while indeed.

Whilst looking up a Facebook group about the highly influential Beat poet's, I discovered a thread entitled 'Sal and Dean. Who should play the duo in the new Salles adaptation?'.

I couldn't believe what my hagged eyes had stumbled across. Could this be true? Many have whispered of the potential such a screen-play may have, but can it really be done?

Clicking the thread linked me to a couple of websites further confirming that this is, in fact, true. Walter Salles, director of the breath-taking 'Motorcycle Diaries' had been confirmed to direct the film. This, in itself, is a great decision. The transition of the lyrical-chaos embodied in On The Road to a finely shot feature-length film has always been a very itchy prospect for many a film-maker, but for the transition to be done not only accurately, but also well, a good and highly talented director (with ample integrity) is a must.

Likewise, it has always been a very sensitive issue with beatniks and literary fanatics alike. For a novel as sacred as 'On The Road', an adaptation may end in blaspheme.

However, after researching persisently for a full 10 minutes (mostly entailing google searches of 'Salle On The Road' or 'On the Road film with that guy from that Film4 motorbike one'), I also discovered that Sam Riley, former '10,000' things front man and born-again acting prodigy through his portryal of the fatalistic No-Wave song writer Ian Curtis, is to be cast. Whether or not it is for the character of Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty is irrelevant, due to the fact that THIS GUY IS NOTHING SHORT OF FUCKING GENIUS.

Now, both these men have incredibly credible talents, without any hint of LA's 'Heroin and Healthfood' Hollywood nastiness. 

However, with the film now being in production, the obvious objections and excruiating fears cannot be ingnored.

1.) With the film being made by such a cult director, and the actor's cast very likely to be 'up and coming', Kerouac, Ginsberg, and all the other beat poets, and the beat philosophy, may become tiresomely chic and (desperately trying to avoid seeming arrogant in my own indier-than-thou tone) perhaps just too much of a dip into the 'mainstream'?

'Topshop' will begin modelling all of it's clothes on the simple cotton polka-dot dresses worn by the late '40s Denver gals, whilst 'Topman' will be doing the same, but styling their hideous winter ranges on Kerouac and Co. themselves. 

Perhaps 'Beat Jazz' will rear it's now-hollow head with a new 'It's so pretentious it's not even pretentious anymore' pretense. People will start called weed 'Tea' again, and instead of people liking things, they'll simply'dig' them. 

'Hey man, I really dig that new film about that Willie Nelson song...'

Then you'll get the guys who try and pull birds by saying 'I was into Kerouac way before the film' and 'I'm so 'Beat' that my shits make me cry.'

The energy and the concepts and the desperate loneliness detailed in the book will all become part of an image, where it will increasingly become a contradiction of itself.

Or it could flop.

2.) The book possesses a felling that is impossibly energetic, a constant love and wonder for the world they lived in. They found a joy in Sadness, a curiosity of sexual and narcotic experimentation, and a adopted a fatalistic acceptance of their world. All these highly complicated and profoundly touching themes are expressed through the beautifully written word, and the fear that many folks have is that a feature-length film may not be able to capture the solemn and often heartbreaking feeling of love and loss created by Kerouac all those years ago. 

The adaptation may, possibly, butcher beat-poetry and all it's credibilty, with one swift money grabbing swoop.

Or it could flop.

3.) Why does everything have to be a film? Can it not be left? I wonder if Kerouac would have condemned or condoned this move? Salinger wouldn't allow 'Catcher' to be made into a film, because he realised that it would be a contradiction of the very meaning of the book, and he said that 'Holden wouldn't have wanted it that way'. 

If still alive, would Kerouac protest the same way? Is it disgusting that these people commissioning the project have no respect whatsoever for the written word? Or are they merely artists themselves, wanting to cast a new dynasty over the Beat generation?

4.) It really could flop.

What Kerouac would have wanted is obselete due to his no-longer existing on this planet. 

The thing that matters most now  is, when can I start saying 'Woop! Yes sir, yes, yes, yes, can you feel it? Yes m'boy...' and people will think it's cool, rather than me making incessant, constant sexual inuendos?

Let's just hope everyone remembers Kerouac in 'Visions of Cody'...

'...I'm carrying a copy of 'Pierre' under my arm, all beat with crinkled pages and coffee rings - except I'm actually reading it, unlike these prep-school boys...'

A. Nights

"...The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. " - Hunter S. Thompson

Been standing still for much too long and I realise there's something wrong

I'm feeling strange, I need a change

and I realise that

there's something wrong

there's something wrong

there's something wrong

From Tom Wolfe's biographic publication The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test to Springsteen's bleak record Nebraska, anything that has soul, anything that has an inquisitive and independent spirit, anything that explores the darkest, saddest caverns of human existence and anything that celebrates 'the ragged ecstasy of pure being' will circulate this blog.

It's just a phase, that comes with age, to earn a wage, and not to gage, the closing cage, the burning rage, the dimming stage, The Modern Age.