On Tuesday the lovely Miss Babs took me to the latest event by Poet In The City.

This seminar was on the Spoken Word, and poetry that’s more performed than read. Though I thought the general idea was much more effective than just listening to poets recite their work from a sheet of paper, I’m not really a fan of political poetry, which is what several of the acts came across as. I can’t help it, but it just doesn’t resonate with me. As a writer myself, I personally feel that poetry is primarily a gymnasium for emotion. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy pieces with a political bent or agenda. I just feel that this is something best left as a vehicle for resonating an emotional response or recognition with its reader, or indeed listener, rather than an explicit statement or focus.

The previous event of this very worthwhile charity I attended was very political, featuring refugee poets from Iraq, China and Malawi. But the pieces they read out explored their own personal emotional reactions to catastrophic political events in their lives: fleeing Saddam Hussein’s massacre of the Kurds; an ‘underground poet’ forced into exile as a result of the massacre in Tiananmen square; a man falsely imprisoned trying to cling on to what makes and keeps someone human in an oppressive and brutal environment. They were all very human accounts of very inhuman events. By contrast my brain just couldn’t dance to much of what I heard on Tuesday. Perhaps that’s my own failing as a white middle class man. Perhaps its just a matter of preference, like whether you like ABBA or Marmite.

Demon Holly: Not known
for her iambic pentameter

But what I do remember most about this recent performance was when the lights dimmed low, and images of prefab nineteen fifties suburban houses were suddenly projected onto the stage wall. A slim woman then stepped up onto a podium dressed in a long black dress, hair clipped in a short black bob made stark by her matching eyeliner. I suppose she looked a little like Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan or Louise Brooks. Certainly Hattie Hayridge as the demonic parallel universe version of Holly. Music began to fill the newsroom that was haunting by its very tweeness. Then she spoke. As I sat, slightly bewildered by her sinister stories of everyday horror, it was like being smacked with a rolled up Dali painting dipped in honey.

In cut glass received pronunciation, Suzanne Andrade reads macabre verses of the day all the housewives caught the clap, visited by sinister salesmen, or of pagan Brownies worshipping a goat-headed Tony Hart. Very much performance poetry, her words are accompanied by chilly music and sepia videos of faded flock wallpaper, or Tim Burtonesque sketches of horrors insidious by their initially innocent appearance. I can only describe her stories as childhood memories gone very very wrong. She was really like nothing else I’ve ever seen, and is to poetry what Punchdrunk is to theatre. Her poems are eerie but always lyrical, like Salad Fingers meets Sylvia Plath. They’re certainly worth a read, or ideally a listen or viewing, and certainly a bewilderment.

I’m a fan.

I see the moon as I leave. Ivory white. Ivory yellow. Waning. It will be a new moon soon. There are no lights in any houses. The world is fresh and alive.

I walk the dirty road to the garage, passing the sound of plates being stacked from a dark unlit window above. I recognise the man at the window in the garage. It is a ritual of unsaids. I know we are both grateful for this brief twilight interaction. Every nod is a conversation - “20 marlboro lights please.” This is a novel. I smile. “Thank you.” He smiles. A smile from a stranger is worth the universe.

Walking up North Hill, I am in the world in early morning - bird song, the faint and familiar throb of my blood bringing me movement through it. Its perfumes change, they grow. The wind blows through me and carries my memories into scents that blanket me. Suddenly I can smell the sea - seaweed rotting on North Sea-caressed sand, saltwater on limestone. For a heartbeat, Highgate becomes my favourite place in space and time. Long gone. But I feel young again. Like any fool I keep on sniffing the air, greedy for nostalgia and comfort. The scent bulges and swells, and drips down into mulchy soil. Moss, bare earth. Decay. I know this smell. I can smell the cemetery of two years ago, half a mile from where I am walking. I am older. But I still feel young.

I see a man and pretend I am special. I pretend to be paranoid. I walk quickly - I always do. He walks at a man’s pace. Is there fear here? He crosses the road before I pass him. Is he afraid of me - me walking quickly, heavily, head down and brow lined in deep thought? But I am not me. Me is in the air, in the breeze - my memories and my thoughts. My essence. My body is just someone pretending to be special. My legs are walking away from things they pretend are out to get me. This is not my body anymore, and my thoughts are not bound in its flesh.

I pass a bus. Stationary. The driver is hunched over a book or magazine. The lights are on but the cabin is dark. But I am pretending to be special and lift up my collar as I pass him. Every can that clatters on the breeze and over gutters is my assassin. Ten seconds down the road and his engine starts. ‘Don’t let him see your face.’ The bus creeps to life behind me, inching at the tip of my shadow. I walk faster as I approach the corner and the bus moves faster too. As he turns the corner I look to my left so he cannot see my face. The bus hesitates, its engine hungry and heavy, clumsy. But I am looking away. I am looking through a gateway. Into a church. I am looking at graves.

At Pond Square I choose a bench in the darkness and sit and light a cigarette. I look for the ghost of the bald chicken. I want to see the ghost of the bald chicken. But I see nothing. Instead I see a shadow by the bricked up toilets. It gets out of its car, slowly, and walks to the bricked up toilets, slowly. It stops. Is it looking at me? ‘Go away,’ I say quietly, ‘I am not cruising.’ Suddenly the shadow is not cruising. It becomes a man. He gets something from beside the wall of the bricked up toilets and walks slowly off with it, back to his car. A bin bag. He’s a bin man. Or an assassin. No, empty cans are assasins. Men just carry rubbish. A fox suddenly runs out over the Square, crosses my path. Is this a metaphor? I speak to it and it looks at me, but it still runs. I finish my cigarette. Why did I come here? What drew me here? Is this it? Have I crossed the peak? Is it all a mirror or memories and echoes from now on? On the gravel I watch the shadows of branches moving in the breeze from the streetlight above. But they are not shadows. It is light that is dancing.

I cross through the village High Street and walk downhill to home. I think of metaphors and avatars, of magpies, white cats and foxes. I think of mirrors and allegories. I feel the unpresent clasp of Shinbo in my hand as I walk through the oppressive morning light. Suddenly, downhill, the world has turned human again. It is clumsy, disordered. The buildings around me reflect the deep blue of the early morning sky too perfectly, making the buildings look hollow. Empty. Meaningless. I pass jasmine bushes boasting of what mine has not yet created. I sit and smoke again, and the fumes are heavy in the flesh of my lungs. Flesh. Moonlight drips through the branches. No. Not moonlight. Streetlight - manmade. The light of a human abode, with unseen windows reflecting the blue universe around it. I hear an engine from the junction downhill and turn to see a black car approaching. Next to me, above the bench, is a tree. Its leaves are the greenest here, but yellowed corpses still litter the ground, shrivelled and crushed like dreams - unfulfilled, wasted. It is a maple tree. The black car passes me but I do not look away from it. I am not pretending to be special anymore. I can’t in this world - it’s changed now. I look into the car as a man passes me. Whether he looked back or not doesn’t matter. He is gone.

I wait and a white van lodges itself downhill at the junction like a wishbone in a throat. I look at it and wonder if it looks back at me. It moves, shifts, shuffles, and drives up towards me. I remember this metaphor. I remember this from before - walking uphill on Swain’s Lane, years ago, a white van would pass me. I would always look away. I would never know if it was God or a vampire. Either would drive a white van. But this time I look. It is neither, or both. It is two men. They are both dressed in black. They do not drive past me, but turn off at the junction in front of me. They are lost.

I wait and listen to the breeze, waiting for jasmine, black cats or foxes. But the world is human again, clumsy, disorganised. And me along with it. I had pretended to be special and made myself God in my own universe in six sixths of an hour. But this has all slipped away.

As I sit here at home and write this it has all slipped away so quickly now.

Breathe. Pace. Pace. Breathe. Tea. Make some tea. Green tea. Brewing. Big Brother on in background. People. People. Humans. Breathe. Breathe. Calm. Centred. Breath. The universe. The universe. Centred. Gravity. Attracts. Planets. Planets are selfish. The Earth is not the centre of the universe. Planets think they are suns. Suns think they are galaxies. The universe. Breathe. God does not think he is anything. God looks neither down on or up to anything. God is not human. God is not a planet. God is just God. God is breath. Breathe. Breathe.

Fuck breathing.

I’m going out to buy cigarettes. It’s two days and I’m allowed.

And green tea just reminds me of Vancouver and the road to it, untravelled.

Some recent events have led me to reading up on Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s a fascinating little syndrome. Did you know for example, purely as an aside, that its diagnosis can more commonly be found in confidence tricksters or stalkers? I imagine this is something to do with the total lack of empathy required to take a cold advantage of others as a means to their own whimsical and often juvenile ends, or the absence of any apparent instinct to apologise or demonstrate remorse for their behaviour afterwards. It must be wonderfully reassuring to live in a Solipsism. I’m quite envious.

It was at this point that I particularly enjoyed discovering the irony of having been unconsciously applying the definitions to myself as I read through them. It left me wondering if genuine Narcissistic Personalty Disorder can only ever be, by its nature, self-diagnosed.

I was never overly keen on Narcissus as a flower. It always seemed a little too commonplace for me - a little too everyday and unremarkable, no rare fragility to its appearance or magic to its scent. I’ve always been much more fond of Jasmine. The scent of Jasmine at night can never be mistaken for anything else, and does not try to be anything else. It is an unashamedly silent aroma unto itself, unlike the slightly crass and obvious tarts fan-faring for attention from any old flower bed.

I’ve often found a very beautiful dignity in this particular flower’s silence.

My blog wasn’t sending me emails to let me know when someone has commented on a post like it usually does. I wandered into ‘Comment Control’ just earlier to see if it’s indeed true that no one loves me to find a whole list of scribbles left like shopping lists to yellow in the ever-increasing confidence of the June sun. Having found out that not everyone does hate me after all, there was then a feeling of discovering your Christmas presents were merely locked away in the cupboard by your wicked stepmother or Margaret Thatcher.

I started a new month of 100 words in May, but I barely finished half of them. My heart just wasn’t in it, and it’s depressing that the self-congratulatory masterpiece of One Year In The Life Of Ben is still left incomplete on the site several months after its transition, despite me going through Google’s archives myself and picking out entries one by one and forwarding them on offering to insert them if that helped. There’s no point there being just half a year up there. The whole thing was written as a big picture. It’s like printing only the second half of a novel. I’ll continue to add what little I did write to here instead.

Still no word on my little laughing girl and her pig. I’m starting to get anxious. They should have at least opened it by now, surely?

And the sun’s out - isn’t that nice? Well, sort of. Does anyone else get hayfever? I feel like there’s chili powder in my eyes and a duvet up my nose.