In which the Current Cad goes to work...

So, yes, I've been a little tardy with my posting; yet I have good cause. I spent most of last week moving out of my funky Leamington flat into an elegant Peterborough house, in order that I might enter...the world of work. *cue organ music* In fact, it's less of a world than a parallel universe; to an unemployed person (or should I say, someone working on their own creative stuff because they're just so gloriously bohemian), people who work inhabit some kind of universe in which they're missing all day from the real world - from shops that in the daytime are quiet and queueless, from pubs with sleepy-eyed staff, still awash with last night's misbehaviour, from houses and crazy-paved driveways all left empty, wanting. The streets are bare, silent; somehow huge and engulfing, at once quiet concrete and disquieting chasm.

And where are the people? Their lives have been sucked into some other existence. Some plain where the day is a sequence of variably interesting tasks and the night is preparation for the day. Meals have to be prepared, eaten, cleared away, leaving only the sud-scented memory of the energy consumed to power Work. Clothes must be changed, washed, dried, ironed, laid out. The living space must be tidied. You must go to bed just as the day's getting interesting, setting your alarm for some godforsaken hour of the morning. And if you don't do all these things, you try and do 'leisure', then you feel like a failure when your flat is a tip, there's no clean clothes to wear or in-date food in the fridge, and you're eating yet another take-away out of something that may once have been a shoe. But it's necessary. And the unemployed, the students, the stay-at-homes and the gadabouts can't understand it, can't really get it through their heads when a working friend says, "No chaps, I'm not drinking; in fact I should be off in a moment, it's 10.30pm and I've got work in the morning..."

You'll probably have noticed that I switched to the second person in that little deviation. Yes, ladies and gents, I've gone where most men have gone before; the workplace. Sadly for me, I'm not getting paid, since I'm doing a...an internship, let's say, since 'work experience' smacks a little of school. Fortunately, I'm working at one of the best places one could possibly hope to get some experience - a motorbike magazine. If you didn't know it already, I've got the two-wheel fever, and there ain't no cure but to ride my little heart out. So I'm damned chuffed to be working at one of the top bike mags in the country - and since I started yesterday, I've had a massive grin on my face (or a pensive smirk as I realise where my next grin is coming from). I'll keep you updated on the most interesting things that happen; for example, on Friday, I'm off on an advanced training day - which I'll then be writing about, hopefully to be included in the next issue. Watch this and future spaces for details...Well, that's assuming that the hastily fixed hole in my petrol tank doesn't start pissing fuel again and culminate in my legs a) catching on fire b) being torn off in a probably exciting but almost certainly gory explosion.

So, in conclusion, I now know what it's like to enter the Work Dimension. And here I sit, at 9.20 in the evening, with no drink in my hand and no plans save tidying my shiz, putting out my work clothes for the morrow (I'm thinking, oh, I don't know, maybe bike gear again) and getting an early night with a good book. I can't wait for work tomorrow...and there! I realise what I'm thinking. Although tinged with an inevitably naive romanticism whilst the novelty's still unworn, I'm living in the parallel universe, spending my time with strangers and sleeping in a house that didn't exist. This is a placement, it's not a job - that's what I told my panicking inner bohemian when I applied - yet here I am soaking up knowledge, names, numbers and letters, attributing importance to previously unknown matters, and caring about people whose existence meant three syllables to me 48 hours ago. Though the memories and the people of a lazy existence in Leamington are still fresh, still important, still relevant, this is current. This has taken over my time, my home, my mind, my life. This was going to be Work Experience, and maybe, I'm panicking, maybe it was better when I called it that. Because this could so easily become what I'm Doing With My Life. And what's really scary is - that it wouldn't be bad. In fact...it'd be pretty fucking great. I could pick up this feeling and run with it, let it power my future job, my home, my decisions, my life from now on. It would be so easy to become...whatever I would be. And all because I sent a casual email, thinking I should probably do something with my year out.

Well, we'll have to wait and see how life pans out. But I know that this placement is 2 months; at the end of June, I'm off on a massive adventure (details to follow at some point). What I will tell you now is that the following poem was written for the guy who I'll be travelling with over the summer. A brief bit of background; I've followed the traditional ghazal format quite closely (you might want to quickly google it to see how closely, since it's a really interesting form), but modernised it a fair bit too. And the subject deals with simpler things being somehow harder to understand - such as how much I miss my friend, who lives thousands of miles away in Toronto, Canada. Mr J, this one's for you...

- The Current Cad.

Ghazal

This situation, friends, is quite absurd.

Expressing self in words, this rite's absurd.

My crew, dishevelled, shuffle beers, ideas,

And writing poems here at night's absurd.

These stilted, ordered bursts of truth explode

My heart and brain clenched up so tight, absurd.

This language can’t express what burns inside;

A sunset drawn in shades of white, absurd.

We sit, degrading, idle, fey and dull,

And all this mess, this life, this shite's absurd 

In that he's missing from this blissful group;

The fact he treads another light's absurd.

So few could hide a smile and understand;

Two friends in love in their own right? Absurd,

But he and I've a language all our own,

And I, unnamed, am in your sight absurd.

The Voice of Reason

...is what should have intervened when my hand started to pour another drink. Yes, folks, it's 16 minutes past midnight on what is now a drunken Monday morning. It starts so innocently...as always, I suppose...with due consternation as to the expiry date of a carton of fruit juice. 'Oh no,' I had thought, glancing from the box to the calendar, the calendar back to the box, 'this pineapple juice goes off this month!' Dilemma - solved easily by the application of reason from my mighty human brain. 'I know! I shall consume it by means of my mighty human oesophagus!' But then hero's problem begins to complicate. My brow furrowed. 'But as a youthful, happening sort of person it would be foolish, nay, laughable to sit in on a lazy Sunday evening drinking pineapple juice just to be reasonable. And since I am compelled to drink this pineapple juice whilst holding true and faithful to my evening's plans of not going out, I shall have to hit upon exitement - in beverage form!' That's when I noticed the rum, schnapps and vodka - white, peach and Value respectively. (And, may I just point out, it was bloody lovely.)

So, hours later, bottles emptier, head achier, chores forgotten...ier... here I recline (ahem, sprawl) trying to ascertain whether I'm about to ruin my credibility by introducing this next poem with drunken ramblings. The voice of reason...says I'm only increasing my credibility as a real person. And that I should introduce this next poem as one last older poem for now - on the merits of knowledge v passion. So I'll leave you to the poem, which will be vaguely more coherent than I am right now, and end by saying that I hope you've enjoyed this drunken blogging, and that even if you haven't I win, since I'm now chock full of Vitamin C. Thank you, and goodnight!

The Voice of Reason

I

Yesterday, I was sobered.

Apparently I sin in every word I write

(And, I suppose, I say)

When I could be so much better informed.

He said, “There’s always more to be done.”

He was young, confident; he made sense

But I would not hear.

As he spoke the air thickened, stank,

Stuck hope to him like honey;

Wiping expectations from his face

He tore rotting stars from vaults

And washed old bones in the dappled lamplight.

And I watched him, from some place

Where potatoes are just a side dish

And thunder says what it means –

I watched with stricken heart

As he showed me that the pen could never have its day;

Told me to read and read

In order to assimilate great minds

And learn to lose my own.

II

This android dreams…

Of having a say. Oh, one can learn,

But every minute lived is seconds changed

And I’ll never be as good as I will tomorrow.

Let’s draw the line, lay down the tome a moment

To grasp at life, instigate wild spasms,

The pen dancing as if minutes from death,

Cellophane-wrapping the perishable flesh

Just aching to go sour.

In every minute born a different self

That knows, that’s slipped, that is in no way better –

For every truth hard gained, I’ve lost sweet lies.

Who knows, I may live out my days

Some burnt-out carcinogen echoing glory,

But for now I’ll be more than content to shoot

And hope to see inky integrity festering,

Dark words smouldering in some white tissue,

An infection to bleed new verve into the darkening water –

This android screams in a pretty kind of delirium…

Reboot from start.

III

The New Year, a lack of resolution,

Where dreams are wires that spit and snarl

My overloaded mind. Slovenly, marooned, comatose,                   

I crave certainty, spent passion,

Whilst computers crash beneath my hands and waves play on the shore.

Venus’ arms could hold all my strength now.

Fleeing sunken depths of eyes, my thoughts are spurred;

I wonder if they’ll judge me

Some self-indulgent child with no mystique.

No blood in this deliverance, just pus;

I lance the boil of feeling with my pen.

Beauty’s rarely truth, words both and neither,

Just mediums to lie/confess before a stranger’s jury.               

The page is severed, crumpled to the pale mass grave

And, finally undone, I’m lost to blushing depths of hands,

Suffocate in scoured palms; I drown oceans.

But with no hope and just a pen

Somewhat reluctantly

I’ll live, and rend my heart and paper,

And wonder if it is enough.

Now that I look at the title of this post again, I'm a little scared that I can't live up to the overconfident grandeur that it seems to promise so cockily. (Note to self - look up 'cockily'. If it doesn't exist, use it with such devastating frequency and arrogance that it'll just be easier for everyone to go along with it.)

So here's another poem from the dusty old vaults - about two years ago I wrote this short piece, and although not one of my best, I thought it was worth throwing it in now to explain - well, the profile name for one. A bit of a change in style and substance this time, see if anyone bites; because I think that while many established poets really work to develop and maintain a sort of dignity by unifying the style of their work, it's so much more fun for us madcap unpublished nobodies who can really mess around with poetry. I mean really mess with it, with ideas that we ourselves fervently and breathlessly revere with all our tender, aching unplumbed souls in one poem and then spitefully, maliciously, horrifically tear a gory literary new one in the next, leaving all our previous notions of form and linguistic ornamentation in bloody tatters by the roadside for weeping CSIs to some day tell their therapists about. We have no dignity to maintain, and no rules - just words, and endless possibilities for fun.

Crap - now I feel like the poem I was going to post doesn't live up to that in the slightest. But for continuity's sake I'll try and slake your literary bloodlust by stating that the previous barrage of verbosity that seemed to promise some kind of Tarantino-esque entrail-spilling slaughter haiku was just a metaphor for the way we can change style and substance a hell of a lot when playing with poetry for our own appetites. In short - this one's a little different from the last, folks - I hope someone is amused.

(Note to self - do not start typing 'short' introductions to poems at 3:45 a.m. Also, write a Tarantino-esque entrail-spilling slaughter haiku.)

The Meaning of Things

I found a baggage tag today,

Two years’ degraded memories

That prove only that a girl who was once me

Went to a place that certain people call New York

And ‘time’ - then, in a place that could be home

A slice of blue card surfaced in the trash

With trapezoidal recollections

That stroke a vagrant stain of meaning  

In some current cad who’s not all there.

To briefly (and I mean it this time!) summarize the commentary I made on this when I wrote it, I was exploring issues of transience and things being given meaning via context - even a person’s character, their 'self', which is perhaps a composite of thoughts, experiences, and memories, however long forgotten. Thanks for reading it - and if you're less of a fan of the simpler language and modern rhythmic discrepancies, I'll pick something deliciously linguistically twisted for my next post. ;)

- The current Cad.

7.03 a.m.

A random poem from the archives to start off this blog - I suppose something's got to be first! Here's a poem I wrote in 2008, unsurprisingly at around 7 in the morning. After debating the merits of artistic and romantic endeavour through poetry for some time, I finally reached a blissful and liberating apathy with the matter that struck me as sweeter than the topics themselves. Raping the sonnet form was great fun - in the commentary for my portfolio I described it as a 'bastard of form' - though I also mentioned my 'strange and frightening impotence'. Don't know what I was talking about? Don't worry, neither do I...

 

7:03 a.m.

I am still awake

Bone weary, dawn’s clarity

Breaks upon my chest.

You still sleep – I picture what I cannot draw –

And in a few pale hours you’ll start the day

Another person.

But before I can faint again                                      

Into a frayed old question, love or art                                                        

Revitalised into this cynic’s brain,

There’s sudden sweet exhaustion; when alert

These jumped-up arty hands will not begin

In case rough transit to the page

Damages the weak idea within

But hell - enough! - with poetry’s wretched dirge,

Now falling in, now out of love with form

It doesn’t matter; I’ll cast off the grey

And grasp with inky fingers at the pale blue dawn

That strokes my hands and colours in the day.

Beyond the night’s taut focus, lines are blurred;

Familiar shapes are not what they once were.

And though I cannot be sure that I mean it,

That I can really mean anything at this moment,

I somehow trace the velvety words;

I love you very much…

Perversely, it feels right.

An ending.