Fragments

Fragment 1:
Memory of pain in my vocal chords. After a high-paced and disappointing R&B set in a tent at Træna '14, we were told we'd reached curfew and the music had to stop.  The people rallied as one, waving our £10 cups of beer and citing past victories over every festival curfew in Europe that had dared to test our gall. The crest of this particular wave was a smiley stoned young man who clambered on stage and assumed the voice of the hive mind.
"Hey everybody, the police want to stop us but they can't if we just keep on singing!"
The suddenly sage DJ put on 'We are the world, we are the children" almost as a set of musical stabilisers till we got under our own steam and surpassed it in length and volume.
We managed about twenty one choruses of it till they came in and broke us up, all mouths rasping in protest and all ears ringing.

Fragment 2:
That Norwegian fisher boy who genuflected before taking and after passing a joint.
Ingrained respect, humour and a nod to the fear in the roof.
Discussions of rhythm. Stoic duties on water and off.
Tearing fish from the sea. Tearing the bass guitar from a friend being electrocuted.
His back injured, he potters about that island singing, drumming, smoking, saving, talking and laughing.
He'll have keyhole surgery for his lower spine and return to chasing fish.

Fragment 3:

“The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out
at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry
tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he im-
mediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter
to winter again. So this life of man appears for a
little while, but of what is to follow or what went before
we know nothing at all.”- The Venerable Bede

The literature of addiction will become set texts for explaining the state of our social body in these (then-those) years. Grotesque winners careering past the finish line with whiskey bottle and money sack in left and right hand respectively, lips stretched white over a wedge of smouldering cigars. Furiously puffing as many as will fit.
Where to go from here? Onwards and upwards. The prize for us scuzz cameos is to run into the castle and raise the drawbridge.

 Once inside we can rest pallid in settings squalid, safe in darkened rooms under the dappled glow of our visual-historical ocean sterilised and folded for child-safe 2D transmission at the pacifying bandwidth of an IV drip.

TV: “Because someone could lose an eye.”

Oh to be born at the start of the party, among names like Ford and Haber.
“Where were you when we jimmied the ecological drinks cabinet and got a hold of all that primordial hooch? Or the time we worked out how to spin six billion extra people out of atmospheric loose change?”
A forest of hands. The teacher nods to one.
“I handed them the crowbar!” says a young girl with unbearable pride, soon tempered by the jealous mutterings of anguished classmates. In all forest pools the pain sounds and the carp dart feverishly. Where’s my gold star? Each of us fought hard, for many years, to come up heads amidst the roaring beanstalks of carbon and nitrogen without being knocked off into history’s quiet-lifers pile. Where the fuck is my gold star?

When the insistent root tips of future enquiry-with-benefits first come knocking, it’s not clear who’s going to answer the door, but probably not anyone who still remembers what doors are for.

In the den they stir at the noise and look away from the screen momentarily, brows furrowed in expressions of childish concern.
“Who are you? We just want to sit here safely in the dark. We pay our taxes.”
Undeterred, the anthropologist reaches in her coat pocket for a battered copy of Junkie.

At one time the sparrow took its short flight through a lit hall. A few contemporary versions suggest themselves. Perhaps the short flight of DMT illuminates how dingy the rest of consciousness is by comparison. The metaphor holds as one coasts by the skin of their teeth through the straight corridor of the shamanic casino, exiting with more questions than answers.

A more sober, joyless and arguably realistic inflection could be that the sparrow crashes out of the darkness into the glowing greenhouse of modernity, and flaps desperately between the panels of liquid crystal dismay trying to remember what it is, why it’s there and whether stopping to think would be safe. Between humans and sparrows we know who's more likely to fly out the other side in one piece.

Fragment 4: the signal cascades, the animal surrenders


Door one in splinters from ballistic obsidian,

content there's a lesson, stay clear of panic.

blood in branches on the way, ward Davidian,

remain depressed, placation button Germanic.


the broadside of Baconian acrostics gave some hope

until we lost it in the scope of those whom left here to beginagain.

baselining C still a baseplate to be,

can't run before you walk, perhaps we're in the bargain bin again



so what to barter for your passage quadrivial?

betting on trilineal crests of rollers hitting gaps between

the sand and melting with initial shock of saturation.

didn't know the shore we chose was just the shore it had to be



trivial trajectories left dormant by the lineal,

all pine and no conarium, the bearers, seven, slumber.

lids part.symbolic animal is pineal,

every wall is broken fourth, that sweet quadratic tundra



rear view terror turns eureka viewing slopes once unapparent,

flowing states of grace and shapes of time laid out and all you had to do

was tell yourself you choose this tumble, no decisions errant,

as your campus carpents steps into the jungle of casu.



salted pillar for your troubles? can you look back on a circle's edge

in silence without laughing at the faults of living 'rail'?

when the news spreads faster than a liberated gideon

betrayed by states newtonian in lust of wholly grail



In every stranger's home a kettle

and it's usually our own,

"with a face in every mountainside,

and a soul in every stone."