| La Violencia |
Jun 28, 2007 4:29 am
1884 Views | The day they pulled down the whorehouse
The whole village wept.
The men for the loss
Of their doe-eyed loves,
The wives with the knowledge
Of what was to come. | |
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30 Comments | |
| Three lines. |
Jun 26, 2007 11:11 am
1899 Views | I’ve been going out too much. No, that’s not right. The truth is, I haven’t been going home enough. Seeing as I live alone, this is no big deal. Or shouldn’t be. The problem is, I can’t write when I’m drunk, at least, I can’t write as I’d like to when I’m drunk. That’s what I thought anyway.
The Spanish love “la fiesta”. It’s like breathing. It’s about singing and dancing and laughing and being with your friends and family and eating and drinking and talking and talking and talking. It’s not about staying up late and getting drunk, that’s just a side effect. It has nothing to do with any phrase in English containing the words ‘party’, ‘let’s’ or ‘dude’. Since when did ‘party’ become a verb anyway? And while we’re talking about it, when did ‘momentarily’ stop meaning ‘for a moment’ and start meaning ‘in a moment’? When some breathlessly hyperactive radio host announces that they’re going to be talking to some fame-seeking non-celebrity ‘momentarily’, I really wish they meant it in the original sense of the word. But let’s not get sidetracked here, I’m not perfect, I just started that sentence with a conjunction. So sue me.
Meanwhile, back in the streets, Las Hogueras de Alicante are in full swing. These are the local festivals here, celebrating San Juan. Some might say that the fact that the Feast of Saint John coincides exactly with Midsummer is just that, a coincidence. Others might say that the Catholic Church deliberately hijacked pre-Christian festivals in order to displace and suppress the previous local beliefs and customs. The Spanish don’t really care, as long as they get the chance to celebrate and live “la fiesta”. Me, I was raised a Catholic but I’m not Spanish and I don’t talk much. I stay up late and get drunk.
Las Hogueras are bonfires. It’s a fire festival. Huge sculpted effigies are erected in the streets a week before the night of San Juan. Whole neighbourhoods are off limits to cars. Trestles and tables and bars and stoves take up entire blocks. Who wants to eat at home when you can eat in the street? Temperatures are into the nineties now anyway, you couldn’t sleep if you tried, so the fact that music is blaring until five or six in the morning doesn’t make a lot of difference either. In Spain, you can’t ignore fiestas, you either join in or get out of town.
Every afternoon at two there is a firework display. A daytime firework display might seem a little pointless. That’s only if you’re thinking in terms of pretty lights and sparkles. In the Levante fireworks mean explosions. Gunpowder. Big bags of gunpowder that explode. Deafeningly. The first piece of advice the locals give you is not to close your mouth and block your ears as the noise reaches its peak. Your eardrums will crack under the pressure differential. You scream. You scream and shout and jump up and down with the rest of the mob that surrounds you on every side. When it’s over you feel as if you have been bathed in noise. It’s a strange sensation. Try it.
Did I mention the brass bands that march through the streets from eight in the morning? This is done to ensure that you don’t miss a second of the festivities. I live in Alicante, but I work in Elche, a nearby town. Elche doesn’t celebrate Hogueras, so there’s no holiday. I have to work. After the third day the stress begins to tell. Actually, after the third day you don’t generally make it to work. I’m an English teacher, classes have finished, nobody misses me.
By the fifth day my body hates me. I can’t blame it. I hate me. The world tastes of heartburn and there is a constant fizzing in my ears. I don’t feel tired. Tired is when you haven’t had enough sleep. This is beyond that. This is what it feels like when your brain needs to switch off. Without enough time to unload and recharge, your brain begins to spontaneously emit images. Mini hallucinations. Shadowy, gibbering shapes at the edges of your vision. The things that most people get rid of through dreams. I say most people. I don’t dream, at least, I don’t have dreams that I remember. I unload through writing. Most of it’s a mess, but sometimes the slurry yields something worth polishing, could be a poem, could be a shopping list, I’m never sure. The point is, if I don’t write anything for a few days, I start to get edgy, and I can’t write when I’m drunk, it just doesn’t happen. It’s a vicious circle, I get drunk, I can’t write, I get edgy, I don’t sleep, I can’t write, I get drunk, I get edgy. That’s not a circle, but it’s vicious enough anyway.
So when I emptied my pockets the other day and found a crumpled piece of paper with a few lines scribbled on it, I thought it was an old shopping list. It wasn’t. It was a few lines, written in my hand. I read them over and over again, but had absolutely no recollection of having written them. I still don’t. The words themselves are not that important. What is important is that some small section of my mind produced something that another section decided might be worth keeping and persuaded other, decidedly more unsteady sections to cooperate in the whole project of getting it down on paper. It freaked me out. I thought I was in charge of things in this head. Obviously not.
Thank you for bearing with me in my moment of self indulgence. These are the lines:
Tonight I heard a human sound
A tree creaked against a wall
And I was saved
They've burnt the Hogueras now. The city is back to normal. I'm back too. I wasn't missed. | |
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28 Comments | |
| this table sleeps two |
Jun 20, 2007 7:24 am
2067 Views | this table sleeps two
on Fridays
lashed to the weekend
legs scrabble for
purchase
on the popcorn floor
Monday's coming
____________________________ | |
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26 Comments | |
| blue butterflies |
Jun 19, 2007 5:40 am
2041 Views | blue butterflies trace wingflame in my gut
twisted into knots of nausea
shit bile and vomit speak
with the same voice
a purple clutched throat snarl
etched with acid vision
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32 Comments | |
| The edge of things. |
Jun 14, 2007 4:48 am
2266 Views | Boy was born on the edge,
The place between
Unbreathable liquid depths
And earth and air.
A bounded place, surrounded
By the mirrored sky.
Cast away on the shores
Of his own imagination,
Listening only to
The sea’s incessant storytelling,
His island mind romped
In rock pools and
Flung itself from clifftops,
Played tag with the tide.
There was space there
Then
On the edge of things
Between worlds.
There’s no space any more. | |
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31 Comments | |
| Muse's Most Fiendish Challenge Yet. |
Jun 11, 2007 8:40 am
2294 Views | This is really unfair.
In Muse's Terrible Two's Challenge there are five pairs of words to be used (if possible) in the order given. I'll highlight the words just to show you how wicked Muse is feeling these days.
I tickled the pot
I tickled the pot.
A tentacle writhed
And something went ‘splot’.
Cooking for carnivorous crooks is no fun
When you’re chained to the cauldron
And they are all drunk.
I stirred hard again
And the broth made a ‘gloop’
Some dentures appeared
Then sank back in the soup.
My stomach lurched
My head started pulsating
That pilgrim who’d passed
Had the same dental plating.
And what of his daughter?
That fair feisty filly.
I thought for a moment,
Then remembered the chilli. | |
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40 Comments | |
| The Linen Suit. |
Jun 7, 2007 5:55 am
3237 Views | I’d been thinking about buying a linen suit. This was Spain, it was hot, I’d got a new job, I had money and I wanted to look the part. Images of imperial gin and tonics on non-existent verandahs had crept with the heat into my head. Okay, I knew I wasn’t in India, but if someone had offered me a pith helmet, I’d’ve been tempted to take it. This was the kind of state my thinking was in. I wanted to be cool, crisp, suave and elegant. A deranged cross between David Niven and Humphrey Bogart (in Casablanca, not The African Queen), moody and broody and swatting flies with an unread copy of Le Monde (I know it’s French, I was confused).
We’d moved to Spain from the wind-wracked Devon coast. I’d left behind an unpromising university career and a bookshop job of which I still have fond memories. She’d needed the sun again. Desperately. You could see her filling up from the inside out, the English pallor fading from her face and being replaced by a Mediterranean warmth. We were half engaged, she wanted to get married, I didn’t. It was a new start. We just didn’t know it was the new beginning of an age-old end.
We didn’t really know Julian and Monique that well. We’d shared a rented house with Monique back in England for a few months and Julian had visited her once. Now here they were, touring Europe in his new car. The monthly payments on the car were twice my salary. I mumbled appreciative comments and sympathised with the cripplingly high fuel consumption. He didn’t let me drive it. Julian wasn’t an unkind person, he was an alien. His father owned land. This alone is enough to generate raised hackles and snarling within certain sections of British society. A section to which I admit I belong. We hate the fact we love to hate the upper classes. Despite my linen suit aspirations, I wouldn’t and couldn’t ever join the ranks of the Julians. They exist on another plane, another sphere of being. They do not have to strive for anything, as everything comes to them. Their inheritance is bound up with money, tradition, land, history and breeding. They view themselves as the essence of England, and in a small, dull way they are.
Julian and Monique were on the first part of their honeymoon. They’d got married in the family church (the family estate included a church), bought the car and were doing Europe before the next leg, which I seem to remember involved a private island. So we took them in, made up a bed in the living room and, after a rather charming monologue from Monique on her history of back problems, gave them our bedroom. The days passed pleasantly enough, we went to small cafes and explored the coast and tried the local cuisine. A certain rapport developed over jugs of sangria and I confessed to Julian my desire for the linen suit. He laughed and slapped me on the back in a gentlemanly fashion and no more was said.
Finally came the day that Julian and Monique were to continue their travels. We’d checked the car every day in its secure subterranean lot, kicked the tyres experimentally and exchanged absurdities about oil and lubricants. As they put their cases in the boot and pulled back the roof ready to hit the Mediterranean highway, we kissed and shook hands and wished each other well. Julian revved the engine and cocked his ear for any tell-tale coughs, then beckoned me over in a well-oiled way. Over the throb of expensive machinery he boomed,
“It takes a certain type to carry off a linen suit, you know. It takes bearing. Take care!”.
And in that crumpled moment, I knew why I’d left England behind. I watched the exhaust fumes’ lazy coils and lit a cigarette. It tasted of tobacco and gasoline. I still wanted that linen suit, I wanted it like never before, but this time I was Charles Laughton sweating and cursing in a tropical fever, I was Peter Lorre leering and cackling maniacally, I was Humphrey Bogart on the African Queen and I was stripping leeches from my body with every grin. | |
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60 Comments | |
| dB's Homework Assignment *grumble moan* |
Jun 4, 2007 12:10 pm
2306 Views | A Homework Assignment...for YOU
Your TOPIC: Imagine you are in Spain and you go to the market to purchase a rabbit.
It’s a Saturday morning. The sun is hitting your head just slightly too hard as you walk down the street. Friday night only ended a few hours ago, but you promised you’d make your friends a paella this afternoon, so you’d better get down the market and buy the ingredients. You stop for a coffee and a cigarette. Bad idea. Now your heart’s pounding and your lungs feel as if they’re going to collapse, but you do feel a little more awake. You enter the market and are assaulted by the sights and sounds and smells of real life. This is no supermarket, this is food in the raw. A riot of fruit and vegetables clamours for your attention. You pick out some ripe tomatoes, wide green beans, lima beans and a large red pepper for the paella. Next you negotiate the fish stalls, whole tuna gape and crabs and lobsters wave at your passing. Nothing to buy here, this is going to be a traditional paella, no fish or prawns involved. A quick stop for saffron, ground paprika and rice at the general grocer’s, fresh bread at the baker’s and then on to the butcher’s. Shouts, handshakes and friendly insults to begin, then an argument over who’s going to pay for the beer. They’ve been working since six this morning, they’re thirsty, and no matter how bad your hangover you have to join in. Customers mill about, somebody produces some slices of chorizo and cheese, the cold beer sparks a little more life into you, a policeman passes by choosing to ignore the half-heartedly hidden cigarettes and then you remember what you came here to do. The rabbits stare with bulbous eyes, strange silent skinless creatures worlds away from the frisky, lop-eared furballs they once were. You choose one and a chicken to go with it. The butcher chops, cleans and wraps the animals holding two conversations all the while. The guts are wrapped too to be used in the broth. Someone brings over more beer. Lunchtime suddenly looks a long way away. | |
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32 Comments | |
| Muse's Challenge #10 |
Jun 4, 2007 11:54 am
1830 Views | I can no more quell the tide's lament
Than bail the ocean dry,
Nor tear the sea from this land's edge
Than the clouds from the heavens pry.
But for you, my love, I'd be a slave
On the remotest foreign shore,
Barter my freedom for one last kiss
And wrap it to my core.
__________________________________________
She provides the words
You provide the verse
Yes, it's Poetic Challenge # 10 | |
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6 Comments | |
| Dead time. |
May 31, 2007 9:27 am
2143 Views | This is dead time. A time to be dead.
A time to stop.
Do nothing.
Then run scream laugh cry and stop.
Hide.
Be dead.
This is dead time.
Everyone is dead.
See their faces? See their eyes?
See their slit throat smiles
And their grins like lies?
This is dead time.
It's time to be dead.
Let go of the flow
And the pulse of the quick
Be bound to the ground
Feel the soil's clammy grip.
This is dead time.
Bring out your dead.
Then run laugh cry scream and stop.
Hide.
Be alive. | |
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41 Comments | |
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