non-start

Not written here for a while.

Great start.

I have been writing (this is said with a big pinch of defensiveness) although I confess I’ve probably spent more time watching Jeremy Kyle re-runs than writing. (I wish I was Larry David. Then and only then, would the words ‘you don’t know me’ theatrically repeated from the settee resound with humour, and not bastard boredom).

I’ve been writing poetry about photography.

Tried to write a review about ‘Hunger’ and the unending, piss puddles from the cells lining the Maze’s corridor while reflecting the institutional lights. I can’t quite seem to gather all my disparate thoughts about the film into a good enough sequence.

I’ve tried writing a piece ‘9 ways to plunge further into credit crunch blues’, although maybe it should be renamed ‘once a pauper, always a pauper’ because it’s not like I’m losing my house or job. I don’t own a house or have a job.

I wanted to write a review of the Manchester Carols. I wrote a few bits and pieces on scraps of paper on the train home, but discarded it. I seem to discard a lot of pieces of paper this day. Probably should put them in that blue bin. Never been good at recycling.

I need to write an essay for uni about Berryman and Williams. I don’t know enough about poetic personae. I’m excited to learn about it. So much so, I was reading on the train home semi-relevant essays about Williams and Berryman. This guy next to me, slightly pissed, kept looking at me reading. He finally says 5 minutes before he gets off : ‘is that any good, or do you have to read it?’ Before I’ve spoken he decides ‘It’s boring, innit.’ I say ‘actually, no. I sort of like it. Bit of a geek’. He rants platitudes about life being about getting from ‘A to B’ and ‘you have to know what you want to do’ and just when I’m beginning to nod off, he supplies me with this corker ‘tv’s the killer though. You shouldn’t watch tv’. How does he know? So, maybe he was infinitely more perceptive than his white chavvy ku klux klan type hoodie and his approaching middle age goatee led me to believe. He knows I’m watching too much tv. I can compare myself to Mildred in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with her 3 interactive walls of tv, if it makes me feel better. Or LD. But I know it’s not like that.

Laura Marling- Rambling Man

Watch & tremble:

Cork: night pictures

'At least, it has rhythm'

He wants to cancel everyone out.

Office parodies jollily told,
Beckett-like fishing vignettes
rhythmically crafted,
shower curtains with a touch
of the nostalgic.

He falters, on stage,
like he practiced at home
making references to his
awkward height
and ‘these poems are shite’,

‘Don’t read them, then!’
A brave girl echoes
each silent thought across
the room.

Out he comes with it,
(smearing spit on skinny jeans)
a smuttier version
of ‘Last Tango in Paris’
set round the corner, perhaps.

Anal sex this, groping her that
joyless sex this, joyless sex that.

‘At least, it has rhythm’
I concede to Anna
and when his endless elegy
to anal’s finally over,

enter ‘Death girl’,
(read hopelessly depressing
poems earlier)
mop of
strawberry blonde hair
a-fopping, following
‘Anal sex guy’’s thin black figure

and smiling, congratulating,
weighing each other up.
Anna & I think ‘Anal sex guy’
and ‘Death girl’ make
an apt couple, lovely
is pushing it.

american dreams & nightmares

A gritty visual fest of a video directed by my brother Pete Regan with a tune by my nearly husband Mark Graham, can be watched here:




www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjdE2fCJGd4

or at www.myspace.com/markgraham23

and www.myspace.com/peteregan86

a while ago; divided

So apparently Niloo looks like Julianne Moore; Shoosh like Heather Locklear, my brother Pete like Primo Levi (strange coincidence that's he's reading 'The Truce' by Levi at the mo?), Niloo in her 2nd appearance looks like Gloria Estefan, and Mark (my nearly husband!) like Kenneth Branagh... and my older bro Chris like Joshua Jackson, and moi resembles Kate Winslet...

Odd... ; )

The local loon

The local toothless loon stares at your chest,

The raffle lady wants to stuff tickets in your mouth
As you decline; penniless.

Nurses' prayer

Give us this day our endless shifts,
a stand ‘condemned’ outside
the lifts
And a smell that never leaves our nostrils.

'These pictures mean something'

Josie tears her four up
outside her local post office
with a faded sign up:
‘SAVE OUR P.O.’
‘Too yellow. Too fat.’

Tyler thinks he’s James Dean
in his.
He wants to make
Warholesque rite
of passage posters
out of them.

Fred stares straight
ahead smiling a little
too much.
He’s 70. This is his
first passport; it will
take him to Australia.

Sam and Fran are
nervous.
Her favourite film is Buffalo ’66;
his, Amelie.
They want a look which will
blend both.

The photobooths
respond silently or loudly,
beep, dry, beep, dry; red light
flashing.

‘These pictures (4 down/4 across)
mean something’
writes Tanya
bemoaning the death
of photobooths on
her blog;
normally dealing with
period sex.

numbered swan park again...

I took an evening walk to the numbered swan park again. Took a few snapshots, nothing too serious. Suddenly I heard a 'psssst'.... quickly started to walk on, was worried it was some wino fisher or something, but it was my mate Jamie... even though they're not the most special photographs... they somewhat remind me of Roger McGough's poem 'what you are', my favourite line being 'you are a derelict canal where the tincans whistle no tunes'... in fact maybe I should include the first 1/2 here:

'What you are' --- Roger McGough

you are the cat's paw

among the silence of midnight goldfish

you are the waveswhich cover my feet l

ike cold eiderdownsyou are the teddybear (as good as new)

found beside a road accident

you are the lost day

in the life of a child murderer

you are the green

whose depths I cannot fathom

you are the clean sword

that slaughtered the first innocent

you are the drop of dew on a petal

before the clouds weep blood

you are the wind caught on barbedwire

and crying out against war

you are the apple for teacher

left in a damp cloakroom

you are the litmus leaves

quivering on the suntan trees

you are the ivy

which muffles my walls

you are the first footprints in the sand

on bankholiday morning

you are the suitcase full of limbs

waiting in a leftluggage office

to be collected like an orphan

you are a derelict canal

where the tincans whistle no tunes

you are the bleakness of winter before the cuckoo

catching its feathers on a thornbush

heralding spring

you are the stillness of Van Gogh

before he painted the yellow vortex of his last sun

........................... (can't seem to edit this blank space out!!! aaargh, why am i shite at html?

Place cards

Made these place cards today for our wedding... Was looking on the internet last night and they were so expensive.... 60p each... Anyway, I cropped a photo that I took in a 2nd hand bookshop, now closed... I'm pretty happy with the results.

here yesterday

I went here yesterday; to the park of numbered swans. It didn't look the same. These pictures were taken in 2006.

bottles & wrappers

That evening; our clothed bodies
drenched in sun

(although your eyes still sung for me)

I held on to you like the empty bottles
& wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

Shuffles Nervously

1.

And on the train I see landscapes I know well transformed from their banality by the screaming sunlight… particularly a concrete sports field populated by puddles reflecting trees, pylons- an array of scorched melting metallic.

Stalling. Stalling.

Two Goldfrapp posters disappear quickly and are therefore indelible in your mind. A runner of your ilk, the kind that does this out of necessity, rather than a love of running. Then at the station you spy a guy that wouldn’t look too out of place in the Lake District with backpack and thinsulate hat, eating a pastie. There are ghosts that turn into people at Oxford Road Station by coming out of the frosted glass stairs.

Stalling. Stalling.

A lad with a hairdo like a girl’s is being kissed by his older girlfriend. People at the station are always gazing upwards with that look of slight consternation on their faces, to view the train times.

‘Has my train left yet? Am I on the right platform?’

Out of nowhere some pigeons attack the boy with the girl’s hairdo, a half ponytail…

‘ Is this an indiscriminate attack?’

Then movement again… The aircon systems at the top of buildings become giant hamburgers.

Stalling. Stalling.

A middle-aged man with neon green laces in his trainers and black dye in his hair shuffles nervously, wondering whether to get on my train. A giant billboard in the distance shouts: ‘INSTRUCTIONS: CHILL AT HOME’.

2.


An old gentleman in his 80’s seems to frequent the laundrette almost as much as the black-maned woman. He has an aristocratic face even though his clothes are gray, old, ill-fitting, much as all of us in the laundrette are in our commie type rags. That’s why we appear there, to absolve ourselves from the dirt, the clothes that sometimes should have been washed a while ago. One day I start talking to him, properly. I learn a few things from him, he comes to get away from home. His wife has Alzheimer’s.

‘She’s been a good mother. A good wife’…

I remark that some men go fishing, much as he comes here. He laughs quietly. His cheeks are a dangerous rosy. I start talking to him rather quickly, almost nervously…

Fifteen minutes ago a skinheaded young male with the necessary neck tattoos, is f-ing and blinding, remarking that this

‘laundrette’s gash!’…

Hmmmm, never heard such strong sentiments levied towards such a simple establishment as a laundrette. He has no washing powder and is getting increasingly irate. Thankfully, no-one reacts and they just calmly inform him that in the shop 3 doors down, they do sell washing powder. ‘Right’ he concedes, which coming from him, sounds like a

‘Thank-you kind sir’.

The tense, violent attitude impresses no-one and by the time he comes back and strips down to his boxers, he is more of a comic figure, an abrasive version of the Diet Coke guy, without the patented prettiness. I shuffle less nervously. Just a cocky young lad wanting attention.

I return to my bittersweet conversation. The black-maned woman sings. She repeatedly sighs always recounting that these washing rituals are for

‘the grand-kids’… ‘You wouldn’t believe how many clothes they go through’.

I can. I know she lives there. Camps out there like a Blyton Faraway Tree character- the washerwoman. The bull with the swagger holds the door open for the rosy-cheeked old man.

‘Thanks, son’.

He goes to his battered white car, smiling, back to his old love who can’t remember him.

3.

We look at her with the indifference of tired commuters. Her stories are more entertaining than her poems. Her voice comes alive, sings, is louder when retelling the instances in which her poems were just semblances.

We, the audience sit scruffily attired in faded fleeces and unclassifiable pieces of clothing while a slight air of pretentiousness pervades the room.

The students cannot stop scribbling the names of every poem and huff desolately if they miss the title of one. They do not hang on her every word, but shuffle nervously, asking their companions for the titles. It’s getting late; I can’t afford to miss my train.

On the narrowly caught train the sole sound I can hear are the remains of a crisp packet’s crumbs being devoured. I look out and see a girl and boy contriving pictures.

The boy holds a camera and signals to the girl to throw the bread NOW. The birds scatter, and click goes the shutter I can’t hear.

wrong words

you become an idiot,
a malnourished mind
with blindingly stupid answers
always uttering the
wrong words

never the right ones.
your tone is mere drone
with absolutely
nothing to recommend it.

you could surpass einstein
and their ears
would still not hear.
in their eyes no recognition
would appear

because
they’ve decided
that you’re wrong
beyond redemption
and your drone can’t
drown their doubt
towards you- neither now
nor tomorrow.