Tuesday, May 29, 2012


Museums for our Maladies

After I die, my MAV given over to the National Trust, tourists will be able to file past the head pressure that stopped me writing; enter my room to see the non-prolificacy that came in clusters, all laid out on my desk as it was when I used to sit at it, watering from the corners of my mouth, hunched over, cowed by a morbid sensation that I was about to fall backwards.

Arranged around the place will be the things I was migrainous wearing: my Dunhill glasses, my bucket hat and an Iraqi soldier’s uniform from the 1990-91 Gulf War.

One day, will you not come to Crondall and Ewshot, Whitenails Country? After visiting my migraine's museum, have a drink in the pub where Cromwell stayed – his valde melancholicus is still on display, just as he left it in the stables – then walk to Swanthorpe House. In the copses there are bluebells and yellow hornpoppies, and by the fields you may find musket balls from the English Civil War. 

Rogan Whitenails: the poet this nation has ever produced, by far from it (sic); just a pinch of pyrotechnical doggerel, an affront to the corpus; but unless someone moves in who can write better they’ll give me Crondall and Ewshot. They'll give me Crondall and Ewshot, even though we both know I could never hope to preserve the local countryside, people or traditions in my self-pitying aspic. 



Held in factotumtude, my retrieving pal,
Bewilting the hardiest palm with her mal-
fertilising manure, is my salvation.
She rolls in the strongest concentration
Of tooty vilas extant – fox pooh.



Sunday, May 13, 2012

Open Strings to Put Down


Open strings, bereft of frottage and fret,
To show my contempt for discernment;
Extrapolating from egalitarian Eckhart
To venerable animism,
Where all the wisdom
Of angels and sages
And a punnet of pick-your-own greengages
Is folly before God;
And the closing shot of Haneke's "Hidden"
Is vaporware for Google Photons,
A technology shaped by forbidden
Research and unethical eidolons...