Tag: blog

An early walk to the weir

An early walk to the weir
young gulls, learning
loving, cold, water
rushing, falling
casual crows, black, white-necked, doves
pecking, grass
ducks, basking, blissfully, bathing,
warm, bright, gold, late summer, sun
river, tumbling
endless, rushing, song
Annie’s bench
sitting, silently, thinking
days, ahead, days,
long gone.

Again
swans, duck, dive
tails, aloft
beaks, beneath, sparkling surface
young gulls, splashing
ugly dogs rushing
stationary ducks, wet mud, camouflaging
fallen, fruit
overfed crows
loping lazily, grass grazing
walking, home, day, beginning

A lazy writer?

What it is see, is that I’m a lazy writer. No, it’s true, I know that I could work much harder and craft every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter, every verse, every simile or metaphor into something that is entirely professional and rock solid. No, I could, I really could do it – every time.

Thing is, I don’t.

Why is that?

More importantly, does it matter?

And, in any case, lazy people deserve to have their voices heard too. After all, there are a lot of them about. Yeah, I know, there are a lot more people who don’t have the skills or experience to write well, whose voices are never heard, and it’s not their fault, so you could say, so what if your voice is unheard, for every one of you, lazy writers, there are a million others who will never have their voices heard and it’s not even their fault, it’s not their choice, they just don’t have the option. They may even be illiterate through no fault of their own.

But you do, you do have the choice, and the opportunities and still you produce sub-standard work simply because you’re lazy.. And don’t try and say that you have produced millions of words, published novels, short stories, poetry, articles, opinion pieces, musings and whatever else. They are lazy words. A million lazy words are less than equivalent to a thousand well-crafted.

You could say all that couldn’t you? But, what the hell, I still say that even lazy writers deserve their voices heard or at least out there in the ethers of life in the twenty-first century.

You don’t have to listen you know.

A deliberate poem – Brown Black Birds

I wrote this poem yesterday while sitting in my car in a car park in Cardiff. It took around 15 minutes to write and another 2 minutes to record after reading it through.

The original text was not edited and neither was the recording, but I was tempted.

Sometimes the raw unedited material has something special about it that should be preserved.

Here’s the audio recording.

and here’s the original text

A Deliberate Poem – Brown Black Birds

A blackbird, a finch
pecking, feeding
This is their Eden
Other birds
Chirping
as they watch
from the green leaf-laden
branches
Another blackbird
perched on a chimney pot
You don’t normally see them
up there
Maybe it’s a big starling
or a small jackdaw
It’s a bird anyway
A fat brown blackbird
a collection of worms
dripping
from its beak
It’s a car park
in an inner city suburb
where people suffer
from drugs and poverty
from ignorance and brutality
from neglect and abuse
from the greed
from the selfishness
from the well-rewarded
jailors
via each other
while the blackbirds
and the finches
and the starlings
and the jackdaws
and the brown black birds
chirrup in their paradise

Table 9

19:15-Chapter

TABLE 9

It’s kinda tucked away at the side of the Café-Bar near the entrance to the Art Gallery

Table 9

A place to look

to assess

to judge

and comment


There’s a woman with her daughter slurping on soup and munching on salad and drinking diet cola


A family with two parental figures

one presents as a man

the other a woman

They are at a long canteen-style table with 5 kids

Aged from two to ten

by the look of them

(later you realise that there are three people who are presenting as parents and just 4 kids and you realise that whatever narrative you are imposing is full of your own perspective and is not a universal fact)

Their table is laden with drinks, some alcoholic, and café-style plates of food

They have screens with games


“It’s not cheap cheese”

says a young man

delivering a plate

to a solitary middle-aged woman who must have complained about the price


I’m eating dirty vegan fries – a special order they said – and a pint of some German beer, that cost me thirteen pounds


And thinking about the fish and chips I bought in 1964 for one shilling and three old pennies

before decimalisation and before, long before, I became a vegan 30 years later

but now it’s 2022

and things have changed

as they do

always


And my friend, who works here and greeted me on my arrival 30 minutes ago told me about how he came to consciousness earlier today in the void and thought for a second that there had been a nuclear war

These vegan dirty fries are difficult to eat because the melted vegan cheese sticks them together in clumps

And when you spear one with your fork it brings half a dozen of its closest friends with it to your mouth

So you have to separate them with your fingers and stuff them in or eat too many at once

so you look around the café-bar to make sure no-one is watching you being a messy dick and then you realise, it doesn’t matter it’s not real because there probably has been a nuclear war and you probably are in the void dreaming of what might have been

And your friend, the one who woke up in the original void has disappeared and you realise that you are a dot the size of a neutrino in a universe the size of . . . . . . the universe

and it really doesn’t matter – even though it really does

Message to mes

This is a message to all the mes in all the parallel universes

It’s me

You are the light

You are the love

always

and

forever

The Younger Generation

I am a member of the younger generation and I always will be

you are too

I’ll never be old

that’s what the 60’s did

for me

and for you

Beware

Beware of people

who sit alone

in the café-bars of arts centres drinking something like a pint, or a cup of tea and they’re writing in a notebook or a paper pad or on the touchscreen of an ipad (type thing), and they look up now and again and scan the room

Beware of them

They are writing about you

Random Words of Today Podcast

Random Words of Today

*****

and while we’re at it, this is another little random podcast from the other day

it’s called RE: Tories Left Right etc.

*****

and yet another recoded just an hour or so ago

this one is Art Light Love Universe

*****

an Ordinary Bloke writes about music

Transcript below

Music is like the wind – it’s just there.

Remember that I’m not saying that making music is easy, far from it – making music is very difficult – I know that there are tens of thousands of very talented musicians in the UK and at least thousands in Wales – and I know a few of them so I know how hard they work to make those sounds.

But I am saying that making music is a cop-out – compared to writing it’s a doddle. I mean once you’ve learned an instrument and the tunes to a bunch of songs all you have to do is play and sing. Unless you’re a composer of course, but even then it’s still easier than writing. It’s still following a bunch of rules and usually that means repetitions of things like beats and lyrics.

I know a point of view like this might upset a lot of people, especially those who have spent decades learning their craft and those who profess their love for certain musical artists or genres, but it doesn’t matter, because my opinion of music doesn’t matter. I’m just an ordinary bloke, that’s all – one ordinary bloke out of tens of millions of blokes in the UK alone.

Besides, I’ve got no influence, no respect, no kudos, so just chill the fuck out – I’m only writing about how I feel – and even then I’ll probably change my mind next week or have an epiphany or something. Yeah, so just chill the fuck out. And there’s no reason or need to dislike me either, just for my opinion. I am not disrespecting you, in fact, I admire you a lot, it’s just that I don’t think music is such a big deal.

Recently I told someone whose life is music that I regarded music as just like the wind – it’s just there that’s all. They and others they spoke to in the music business were horrified. I’m a little puzzled by that reaction to be honest because I think it’s a complimentary thing to say – I mean, the wind is one of the most amazing, wonderful, varied, profound, powerful and beautiful things there is. It is an actual force of nature.

Writing on the other hand is like taking the whole of history, the whole of human evolution and experience, the whole of the universe even, in your brain all at once and issuing words that encapsulate the magic and the majesty in a conscious way. It’s not like just standing on a beach and feeling the wind in your face and the sea air in your lungs, it is the very act of creation itself. Writing is divine in the true sense, not in the namby-pamby repetitive sense.

But yes I still admire and envy you – I wish I could sing and play an instrument like a guitar or a key board.

Maybe I’ll try to learn. Is it too late for me to do this at 67 years old do you think?

Glastonbury 1971 – Episode 3

Glastonbury 1971 – Episode Three

Click for Episode 1 or Episode 2

I found a way through the gridlines of power or whatever they were and saw the sign for the Release tent. I didn’t know much about them other than that they were a charity that helped drug users. A face loomed out of the crowd that wasn’t mine, well, it was me, but it wasn’t this me, if you know what I mean. I recognised him as a person I’d met the year before, or it might have the week before. I’d been sleeping rough in Tenby, scrounging off the girls who worked in the cafes and hotels and occasionally begging off the tourists, when I met Sarge and some other people at a barbecue on the beach one night.

We hung around together for a while, Sarge and his mate, Captain I think, came from the valleys somewhere, maybe Ystrad Mynach? Anyway we marauded around Tenby, harassing the holidaymakers and the locals, for a couple of days I think. Continue reading “Glastonbury 1971 – Episode 3”

Glastonbury 1971 – Episode 2

Glastonbury 1971 Episode Two

Click for Episode 1 or Episode 3

It’s likely that this narrative will get a little jumbled up at this point. There are a few reasons for this, principally, I suppose, is that it’s about events that happened 43 years ago, but also because the events that happened were experienced while I, the narrator, was in a state of mind that had been heavily altered by drugs of one kind or another – principally LSD, which, as you probably know tends to muck about with the brain of the person who’s taken it, causing delusions and hallucinations that may or may not have any relationship to what we know as reality. Continue reading “Glastonbury 1971 – Episode 2”