Office bitch

Office bitch

“Karma Police, arrest this girl
Her Hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party”

~

… bunch of sugar binge vs diet bitches … swollen ego screeches… vomit gossip. spewspewhisspitshit, so much they do, they lurve it.

… their nasties make out with their monthlies, join hands and do dirty lil’ dances…  then it goes viral, really does some violence:

Nerves ping petrified under the skin, hearts start palpitating, and all around the sound of knife tongues and fork teeth cutting with a cliquey clatter lean bits of lady flesh left on show.

… ears-wiggy whispers, cunt cackles, their meanie mouths motor on… until they pop some Valium, wipe their cry-baby bawly eyes and*!!@*! off home.

~

“For a minute there, I lost myself
I lost myself”

Karma Police – Radiohead

Thoughts on Thatcher

Loved her, loathed her, at least she provoked REACTION. Left-wing riots, right-wing worship. You can hardly say the same about today’s lot: bunch of “wets” (love that!). Now they all just try and appeal to the ‘centre ground’, it’s gone all mushmushmeh, and so no wonder people can’t be arsed to vote, ‘cause there’s not much to vote for/against.

Oh, why can’t we throw impromptu street protests calling for the death of THIS government and get a song into the charts with a nasty lyric directed towards David? No? Just polite picketing over pensions instead then. (I didn’t like those student-activist-y protests with ‘The Bitch is Dead’ banner waving (misogyny ok here, yeah?), dancing on her grave. Were you even born when she left Downing Street? Protest NOW, people, protest NOW; or getajob, and hope no one dances on the grave of your Mum/Nan when SHE DIES, HE HE!).

I wouldn’t have voted for her, either. Thatcher the politician was a nightmare. But I salute Thatcher the woman… comes closest, probably. As a woman… yeah, there’s something there: shopkeeper’s daughter; working middle-class; worked hard went her own way (punk rock! irony!); couldn’t be doing with feminine frippery. Qualified as a barrister the same year she became a mum to twins = badass. No, she didn’t give a shit for feminism, chose to surround herself with men, but that’s ok, I kind of get that too.

S’pose what I respect most is she was a woman who had the courage of her convictions. The ‘lady was not for turning’… I u-turn so often… I admire her single-minded fortitude (though too much = turn to fascist?). The first female British Prime Minister was one with ideals she followed through on, put into action. !It took a woman to get this country back on its feet, it took a woman! She was a ballsy lady, the Iron Lady. Cameron & co. in contrast = sooo emasculated.

“Politics at its purest is philosophy in action”. A sentiment alien/inapplicable to the noughties political age. Where did the philosophy go? The big ideas? Diluted down to suit centre ground.

Passionate philosophy politics, some principles, please. That’s what all this talk of Maggie makes me want. Loved her, loathed her, at least she made people think/say/do something; something HAPPENED.

It’s time something happened again.

Two Sisters

Two Sisters

Here we have two sisters. In the company of their own friends, colleagues, acquaintances, they are each often called out for being ‘too quiet’. But when they get together, say in some kooky tea parlour (which is where we find them now), and it’s just the two of them, their mouths metamorphose

Grow sea-monstrous. Torrents of thoughts they then suddenly start spouting; here they come now, sprayed out loud: spit-splashy fountains.

At times the intensity of their talk appears to overwhelm them, and we should perhaps begin to worry for these two sisters who seem to heart & mind & soul so much. How can this – out here – ever be enough?

But we need not fear: the frothy tones of their throats; nor the swirls of other worlds steaming afloat from the tips of their tentacle tongues.

For though the too-fullness of their thoughts is what casts them out, keeps them schtum, and could even be one day what kills them; it is also the very thing that saves them, keeps them more Alive than most.

The Second Day of the New Year

The Second Day of the New Year

With all the strength still left in his stiff 80-year old body, he heaved the Christmas tree out of the house, and laid it down in the boot of the car. As he lifted his hand to shut the door, the gold ring on his wedding finger got caught in the winter sun’s soft glow, and glistened. Sixty years together. This the first Christmas without her. “To My Darling Wife…” the card that had sat on the mantelpiece, above the fire. He pulled down the door. Thud. Shut. Then he drove off; round the corner, and into the sun.

Moonlit Metallica

Moonlit Metallica

Combustible balls
of chugging riffs & epic energy.
Madness explodes loudly.

Then sadness seeps out
to strains of melancholy guitar

Moonlit Metallica.

Metallica, Knebworth, July ’11

Reading… Ulysses, by James Joyce

Commemorating Bloomsday

“What do they think when they hear music? […] Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless, gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin’s name.”

I read Ulysses at the beginning of the year. I liked it. I didn’t ‘get’ all of it, but I still liked it. Once I stopped worrying about making Sense of it, and just let myself get caught up in the Sound of it:

in the rhythms, lyricism, and cadences, of all those wonderfully unwieldy stream-of-consciousness sentences, rolling brilliantly delightedly off the tongue of the mouth in the mind.

“Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.

Bloom loped, unloped, noded, disnoded.

Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Press to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.”

These words don’t just DESCRIBE the experience of listening to music; the sexual urges, sensuality, that experience induces / is driven by – but ARE the music.

Words AS music, sexual urges, sensuality.

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness……”

Reading… Stevie Smith

It’s easy to see how Sylvia Plath became a “desperate Smith addict”: her poems skip to the beat of light-verse, propelled along by slightly off-beat rhythms and traditional rhyming patterns – but with dark hearts.

This makes her poems instantly likeable, whilst also, deeply affective [I Am; The Forlorn Sea]. Some are a bit absurd, or take sinister twists and awkward turns – they jar [Mrs Simpkins; The River God; Thoughts about the Person from Porlock]. Many of them are direct, speak frankly about ugly things, shadowy feelings; death-things [Death Came to Me; I Hate This Girl]; whilst others are much quieter, strike a more elegiac note [Come On, Come Back; I Rode with My Darling; Out of Time]. And they have edge; a social and political conscience that pipes up, bites down [Deathbed of a Financier; The English; The Leader].

In his preface to her Selected Poems, James MacGibbon described Smith as a sociable personality, a woman with “multitudes of friends” who could “converse unflaggingly”. And yet, a lot of her poems bear the pulse of the outsider’s heartbeat [Deeply Morbid; Every Lovely Limb’s A Desolation; Look!; The Hostage]. They speak of the essential solitude the individual heartmindsoul resides in; tell of how behind the eyes, each of us is, inherently, inevitably, alone. But despite this, there are also Smith poems that throb with hope, compassion, a lust for life [Away, Melancholy; In the Park; Do Not!].

I have a soft spot for artists who vacillate between, negotiate, these sorts of quintessential life tensions, who say: don’t be afraid to smash up against the black rocks – but then pull yourself back out to sea, look up, embrace the moonshine.  

Stevie Smith was one of those artists.

The Actress

by Stevie Smith

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but the pay was good.

Oh how I weep and toil in this world of wood!

Longing in the city for the pursuit of beautiful scenery,

I earn my bread upon the stage, amid painted greenery.

I have a poet’s mind, but a poor exterior,

What goes on inside me is superior.