A Love So Strong

Have been up for 20 minutes and already have given myself away as being vain, shallow and dead of mind. I spend a lot of the time trying not to be a wanker. I mean, I make a conscious effort. But you can’t always be fully conscious of ‘what you’re about’, and at such times the ‘real you’ seeps through the cracks in your persona and ruins everything… besides which, there’s very little you can do to escape the need to evacuate your balls...

In the kitchen making a cup of tea with Flatmate Simon. He says he going to go to Goldsmiths College to hear a talk. I tell him I’d like to go – because I ‘have a thing’ about girls who’re artists. So much wrong with this statement. The undisguised lack of engagement with what Simon’s saying, the braggadocio, the automatic ‘what’s in it for me’.

I go to Pimlico to look at the Romantics’ paintings at Tate Britain. Fall in love-lust - on station platform, on tube train, in the gallery café, in the tranquil domed hall where strangers sit in dreamy reflection, and - especially - as I walk across Vauxhall Bridge Road. She is beautiful. But they all are, in that fleeting flurry, between the Turners and the Blakes, and that unmanageable urge towards love-lust, every fucking time I see an attractive girl.

Pale and black

Frantically drunk in Sainsbury's on a Friday night. I see a girl I can't help but be stupified by. She is murderously beautiful. Pale. Black. It can't be right to call her beautiful, or can it?. What does beautiful mean? Is it anything I can talk about with validity after two bottles of wine and two months without intercourse? But what chimeras the supermarket aisles can conjure.
Why not use the word, as impossibly vague as it is? Because I've never had an unsentimental conviction about anything, drunk or sober. I've also been to enough weddings to be familiar with that criminal misrepresentation of the woman as 'beauty'.  Don't tell me beauty is subjective. That doesn't get anyone anywhere. Give me instead a treatise on aesthetics. Give me Burke on the sublime and the beautiful. Give me beauty you can measure. Give me her beauty to measure.

Crimes against the English language

Crimes against the English language
And failures to play by the book
Repel the girls out of whom
I will ever fancy the fuck

Jeanette Winterson and Hilary Mantel as Keywords

I picture Jeanette Winterson, ruddy-faced, sat at her 200-year-old oak kitchen table, in front of her Aga, squinting in an expression of studied, strained optimism and saying: 'No, for me, I simply can't write if I can hear music playing. I really do need absolute silence. Music, or any sound really, would rob me of the concentration I need to coax the words out, to free the words from the dark prison of my mind, and bring them to the saving light of the page.'

I imagine Hilary Mantel sat bolt upright in her Chesterfield armchair staring at me with wild wide eyes that dim, almost imperceptibly, over a period of about a quarter of an hour, from fearful alertness to profound pity. Then she says:
'What is it you want?'
I say:
'What you have.'
She replies:
'You don't know anything about what I have or don't have. You're full of nonsense. And how did you get into my caaaastle anyway, my moooooated caaaastle in the Hiiiiighlands, whose doors and windows  are aaaaallllway firmly locked? Even the portcullis is down, and the croooocodiles are as hungry and alert as they have ever beeeeen...'

Weed and Wine

When I consider what I need        
While clamouring voices rise              
To see a bulging bag of weed    
And bottles full of wine            
Makes me feel rich                    
A fleet sensation which                  
Turns too quickly saturnine        

How do You Spell Your Name?

In the striving to remember I forget. What occurs to me now? Not her face, but her feet. This is how it was: she sat behind me on the edge of my bed, kneeling behind me, not quite square-on. She started massaging my shoulders in a fussy way that was anything but what a massage was supposed to be. She told me to take off my shirt and I did. Then she moved square behind me, wrapped her bare legs around my waist and started massaging again, not quite in the same way, a little slower - anyway I liked it. I leaned forward and tried to take off her plimsolls. She shifted slightly. No, my feet are smelly, she said. I don't care, I said.
I unlaced her plimsolls while she massaged my shoulders and my neck. In a drunken plunge, she started sucking my ear. I was drunk so smiled and laughed. I took off her plimsolls and grabbed her feet, running my thumbs over the soles. I smelled my thumbs. She did have smelly feet. I told her it didn't matter because it didn't and we kissed.
I wish I could remember more. I record this here, now, because of how good it made me feel. Sort of foreveryoung, untouchable and... ah, what crap.
I liked her unusual posh voice and the vanishing, dissolving thing that happened when she smiled. It was as if she were not quite there. She never looked at me. When she smiled she lost focus. There are things I forget about her, little idiosyncracies, and I'm really annoyed about that. Actually, what really annoys me is that she is not here with me now, smelling of jam and peaches and unfresh feet, the way I remember her.

Well, What Next?

Well, what next? I'm always asking myself this

Failing to find what the answer is

Till I’m staring at the frozen clock

In some dream-corroding office block

Then, the bird in me falls from its sky

The whale, confused, is suddenly beached

Reluctantly a truth is reached:

Without a plan you’re high and dry
A deadweight sinking through the days

But living just once it’s hard to say 
What's the best way forward, and why