Take This Everlasting

 “As everything closed in around the three of us
Things you never saw, talking of the power and rescue

That were rushing through our body

And it's good...

...They’re going to hurt you...

... And they always will.”   (Tindersticks)


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Then must you speak
Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well  (Othello, Act 5 Scene 2)

What was it that made me do it?   One final attempt at heroism by my poor neglected soul?  Did the demons in my mind gain such a salient victory? Did I become all I hate and fear, or, as they lead me away to the gallows, will it be looked upon as the actions of a lover, a sage and a seer?

For oh, how I loved her so.  From a thousand leagues I watched her.  In silence I sang her songs of silver silk, and alone I read her poems made of glass.    Without speaking, I was was the one, all the time, calling her name from my sheltered cove, some place far beyond the sun.   And in the night, racked by magnolia lined dreams of Mariah in the kingdom of cruelty, it was her figure to which I turned.  When I talked to you of hopes and dreams and the sound of the waves, it was but her spirit guiding me into your heart.

For I walked for her in Winter, and I swam for her in June.  I searched for her in hiding, and brought her wisdom to your room.   I made bread for her in morning, and told lies with her at night.  It was our land to conquer, and all the land was ours.

In the morning, I awoke.  Life!  Yes!  The lifeblood of morningtime and the melody of light.   As the dawn broke over the green soaked valley, a swallow, nesting from the southern seas carried my thoughts of  her to  an unsuspecting ocean and opened the eyes of a long blinded world.  And then I stepped barefoot through the dew grass.   Stopping beneath the gentle shade of an olive tree, I raised my head to the Catalonian skies and let out a cry of such wildness and crazed exaltation that for that simple minute I sat at God’s right hand on a throne of gold.  And as I sat I gazed upon the foothills, and watched the melancholy ghosts of summer winds go slowly on their trails to the sea.


She had got out just in time.  Small town life just didn’t fit.  You can’t help where you were born and brought up. It was the tenement blocks, grey, prefabricated and soulless.  It was the lack of a decent graveyard.  The museum on the high street rejected her work.  The only magazines you could buy in the newsagents were gossip and glamour.  It was the pub.  Melancholy, dreary, bleak.   Trips to the same Chinese restaurant where she got bullied on her way by the same gang of neds on the same corner.  So one day she walked down to the harbour and sat on a bench on the edge.  She picked up a stone,  and carved her name into the bench next to where she sat.  Then she arose herself and ran.  Ran as fast and far as she could.  She got out just in time.  She was beginning to go insane.  The girls she went to school with, pregnant and married to men twice their age at seventeen.  Awaken, awaken, awaken, awaken.  All this could be you.  

So she ran off to the city - the bright lights and the gloss.  The neon in the nighttime and the stage-plays in the day.  She had to have the costumes, she had to have the gold.  No.  That is wrong.  It was not the reward, just the need to escape to bigger things.   The chorus of the jewellery was singing out her name, and the visions and sounds of the street swirled around her head like a haze.   She was never a part of that.  She didn’t need the shows on Broadway.  Maybe she’d get a job there, she thought, but she was never one of them, never part of the set.   Maybe that was what drove her there - the need to prove that things didn’t have to be done that way.   

She left me behind, like the last remaining carcass of carrion.   She did what she had to do.   So then, I thought, must I.  Not straight away, I knew, for it was only right that she be given at least some time to live the New York City way of life.

So I waited till the Springtime, then I caught her in the fall.   I took her from the needle, and the bible, and the gun.  I took her last breath, her final word was mine, and though I look back fondly, that then was my demise.


And as I walked that grey industrial town, visions of her soul clouded my mind and I did not dare to think.   In December, when I walked past the foundry in the sleet and the slush,  black smoke rose from the cars in a swirl of complex beauty.  Sirens cried like dying angels, and in the destructive solitude of this one house town, that could only mean one thing.   The road I tracked was long and cold.    What is it I must do to repay for my choices? I asked myself.  I did not believe in God, and I  renounced the notion of redemption.  I was the carrier of her blood.   Her blood, thick with love and hope and ambition, mine thin and weak and stale.   In this phial there is belonging, a future, the sun and mars.  In this phial of her blood, which I took as she slept, exists my weakness and meaning, my curse and my sustenance.



I have not slept for days.  When they came and took me, I was a man bereft of breathing, and I was a lost and haunted soul.  I was lying on the floor, relaxed and calm.  I did not fight, I did not argue, for I know of that shall pass.  And here, in my prison cell, as well I lie.   My mind is restless, grasping for an end.  Haunted by a past.  Haunted by a future the city took from my grasp.   My hair is greasy and dank, my beard knotted and grey.  I fear myself like a vulture.  The prison walls look mellow, the steel of the cell door radiating some kind of warmth that evaporates into the lime yellow of the lights they keep on all night.   It is not the screaming.  It is not the coldness of the spring-mat bed.   It is not the guilt, though I know each of these things be true.  No, it is not these things that keep me awake at night.   For the still and the rest I sought have vanished into the lonesome broken night.  I cannot rest in peace,  and I cannot sleep for this cursed silence.  In the silence I see her eyes. Eyes of such depth and beauty.  Eyes of love and loving. Eyes of knowledge and tenderness and knowing.  Her sweet brown eyes shining like stars in my ocean of longing.   They always did; God knows they always will.

Man-Children With Motorcycles Aren't My Cup Of Tea

Sometimes when you search for things, you find out that they are messy and horrible.  And then you realise that's how people seem to want things.  So you end up with a weird kind of nervousness that only serves to teach you that some people you just can't reach and just should not even bother trying.  And some things are just plain wrong.  18 years?  And he's the jealous one?  I'm done, my darling, you are on your own.

In other news JD Salinger, author of the masterpiece The Catcher In The Rye, has left this mortal coil.

Farewell then, JD Salinger. 
You were a literary equivalent of a one hit wonder,
The Ultravox of the written word.  
The prose you wrote,
The character you created in The Catcher In The Rye
Served as a guide for me and for millions. 





And the rest you wrote, were never as good.



Holden Caulfield, that prototype of teenage angst and
Unrecognised wisdom.
 Me, relating, thoughtlessly perhaps,
Wanted to be him.
The girls I knew wanted to cure him.
But when addressed with the face to face version
Ran away and hid.

It was pretence.
A romantic notion of freedom.
Perhaps too, it was the split hair
Between Isolation
And Solitude.

You inspired talentless hacks and screenwriters
To supplant the words of adults
From the mouths of bairns.
If that is your legacy
Then, really,
Despite that great book,
You mean nothing to me, Vienna.

Letter From Dienbienphu

 Author’s note.  This was written in detox mansion during a power cut.  For once, I wrote it on paper, redrafted it and put it on the computer.  It was inspired by, well who knows what and it matters not a jot, but it represents how sometimes when I begin thinking of something I write it and it becomes something else entirely.   Initially, I was attempting to write a love letter from a soldier in Vietnam, just before things all kicked off, round about 1954, when the French army was essentially massacred in a battle in a small mountain village called Dienbienphu, an incident which ultimately gave the US an excuse to get involved without appearing colonial.  The protagonist wasn’t overly communicative or eloquent, but I think I did him a disservice.   He became, I hope you find, a wiser, more scholarly narrator. Perhaps this was an erroneous value judgement on my part.  The letter transmogrified into something altogether different, and it soon became clear that whoever it was he was writing to changed too.  I don’t know who this letter was written to, but I’m sure it means something to one, some or all of you.

Letter From Dienbienphu

April 10, 1954

Darling,

I write you from our camp.  They won’t let me say precisely where, but it‘s in the hills some place.  I been here so long, I don’t rightly know where I am myself anymore!  The lights have gone again - the fourth time today - and we are running out of candles.  I hate this waiting.  Waiting to see you, waiting to go home, waiting for the goddamn French to make their move.  It’s quiet now.  I like thinking of you.  It helps me to relax in the silence.  Have you heard of this new Elvis Pressley?  One of the boys has a poster.  Good looking kid.  I don’t want you staring at him too long, you hear me?  Might give you bad ideas, and I don’t ever want to go back to Manhattan if you ain’t there.

It’s raining, so I’m sorry if the paper gets all soaked through.  I hope you can still read it.    When the lights go off, we put on the battery powered transistor radio, listen to those negro boys.  They sure can sing pretty.  We boys sure can talk too, though, don’t you mind us.  We talk about home, the news, those politician men, everything.  The sergeants are real keen to meet you after I showed them your photo! 

The rain makes the strangest noise as it falls on the bamboo all around us, sweetness.  Like Fred Astair in those movies, tip-tap-tapping.  There are birds in them bamboo plants.  Pelicans and some great creatures with yellow eyes, they make quite a raucous.  Nights in the Vietnamese jungle sure are mighty peculiar.  I know you never wanted me to come, but like I told mamma, it was something I just had to do.  If we let these Communists here run amok, why, they’ll take away Grampa Granola.

Funny thing is, I ain’t scared one bit.  I just know for sure I’ll be seeing you after the summer.  Cousin Jimmy’s coming up from Missouri to New York City to open one of those fancy fashion boutiques.  Before you ask, when my war veterans’ allowance comes through, I’m gonna buy you the prettiest dress you ever did see.  Just you wait. 

Oh darling, I’ll be home before the snow falls, and we can go ice skating in Central Park.  How does that sound?  Your folks don’t need to know, it’ll be our little secret.  We’ll go skating, then we’ll take in a picture show, you can choose.  We’ll go to Joe’s Diner on 9th and Hennepin and then  stay out all night jitterbugging on Times Square.  And it’ll be like we never were apart.  When the French make their move, and the NVA fall, they’ll put me on the first plane home.

Sometimes, my sweet, it rains and it rains and it seems like it will never stop.  How is it in Brooklyn?   How do people cope since the Dodgers left for California?  And your jealous brother, how is he?  Though you know I would never wish him any harm, must we forever keep our love in secret?  What more can I do?    I can’t believe you don’t say anything.  You know my concerns.  For as long as this petty feud continues, we can never really be together.  And then how’ll we celebrate halloween then?  That’s no night to be alone.

You know, I kind of feel for these yellow people here.  They never did nothing to me, and we’re just hanging around to bail the French out of another mess.  We all know it.  It’s been this way since ‘48.   It’s been goddamn raining since ‘48 too.  How do these poor people cope, living in huts that the French blow to kingdom come?   They haven’t ever really done anything to us.  But now it seems even they don’t want us here.  I can’t walk anywhere without some Gook telling me to “Go home, Yankee”.  Why don’t they want us here? 

So my angel, here I sit, trapped between a world of futile love and practical hate.  The more I write, the more I find I have had too much to think.  When the thunder rolls and the night-time brings the bombing I wonder where you are, and I wonder what you are doing.  Who are you speaking to?  Is it jealousy?  Is it love?  Is it something bigger than either of us?   When I write to you my thoughts open up and the words spill out like a fountain.  I get deeper and deeper, and perhaps really I ought to stop.  I ought to have stopped a long time ago, but I need to hear your voice, sweet angel, and I need you to read my innermost thoughts.  This war I’m fighting, in the rolling hills a million miles away from you, I do it out of some kind of belief in what is right and what is worth keeping.  I do it for you and for some kind decency.  Is any different for you?  Things that you do, things that you allow yourself to do and be done to you...

I ain’t scared, baby doll, not one bit , because I know one day I’ll see your sweet face again.   But if I don’t make it out of this war I’m in, well I’m sure you’ll do what’s right, stand up for the oppressed, against aggression.  Sounds strange that, given my job, but I believe in your fundamental sense of decency.  Don’t ever let someone, whoever that may be, suppress you, put you down, block your self expression.   Don’t let them tell you the things you enjoy are somehow wrong, somehow vulgar, something to put an end to.  If it makes you happy, don’t you dare let anyone stop you doing it.  And you know, darling dear, you do it to yourself.  That’s the worst crime, those times when you let others convince you that you are doing something wrong.  Maybe I’m just a fool, or maybe a sociopath, but I always thought love was just about all that is necessary.  Necessary for good things to happen, for people to understand, for empathy to exist.  But people are greedy, selfish and possessive.  They want to control, they want to keep and maintain and stunt.   Don’t let that happen to you, with or without me, don’t let that happen to you.

I can hear guns in the distance, but please stay in my mind so I can write some more.  My mind isn’t on fighting right now.  But when this war is over, I’ll be a different man.  I’ll have different fears and I’ll have seen different things.  I won’t change the way I think of you, but you too, you’ll have moved on.  These battles do funny things inside a man.  He sees things nobody should ever see.  He wakes in the night with feelings that no good person should ever have to fear.   When the sun rises he awakes to the beat of a different drum, and the shining don’t mean nothing to him no more.  He feels the warmth, but at the end of every vista he only ever sees the gallows.   And when I meet you, be it on the boulevards of Manhattan or on a dust track somewhere behind the sun, I look into your eyes and for that fleeting instant - that brief moment in time when the guns and the gallows and the shooting goes away - well then, darling, sweet angel, you sooth my soul.  That is your gift. Your burden is to never hide, never close yourself off to another, never let four walls keep your magic from the world.  With or without me, girl, with or without me.