Monsters

There are monsters on our streets.

I’ve seen their footprints,

Seen hints behind smoked glass,

Seen glints on paths

Like shards of broken condoms in the aftermath.

I’ve seen houses boarded,

Seen hoardings placarded with warnings,

And heard stories whispered on street corners.

I’ve seen the evidence they leave,

The detritus and the dross each morning,

The lonely and the lost,

The whores who count the cost in doorways

Scoring from the boys they babysat

Before their joy was drawn

Through the eye of a rich man’s needle.

There are monsters on these streets.

They roam in groups that loot and vandalise

And look their victims in the eyes

And spit their lies

About society

But the only thing that’s broken

Are the dreams they choked,

Flames of light put out like candles, trailing into smoke.

They took arteries of hope and opened them.

And watched a generation bleed out on the streets

And let its body rot like meat

And fester in the summer heat

While they discretely pocketed its cash

Planted stashes

And then called in the police.

There are monsters on these streets,

High priests of greed

In cashmere robes and tweed,

The seed of Adam Smith

Feeding myths of freedom

And the creed that the future of civilization’s in their gift.

There are monsters on these streets

But I will not be one of them.

When they see my hood

They may see an animal in me

But when I see their suit

I’ll see more than criminality.

I’ll see more than the brutality

Of narrow-mindedness

And I won’t be blinded by banalities

Like The Common Good and Shared Humanity.

There are only a billion individual histories

From the unreported to the unperturbed

From those distorted and disturbed by laziness

To those whose twisted thoughts we’d rather label craziness.

You see, the only monsters on these streets

Are those we choose to see.

Alibi

(click here to watch a video of me reading the poem)

Alibi

When you fail, you cry
Because you believed the lie
That if you try
With all your might
If you pursue a single line of sight
Looking neither to the left nor right,
Ignoring the distractions and delights
There is no height
You cannot reach
So when you don’t
You’re the failure, right?
Not them.
Your dreams provide their alibi.

But I know there are things I’ll never achieve
And I deceive myself if I believe I will.
My limitations are a bitter pill
Of stillborn expectations
And thrills I had to leave behind
But I was too blinded by stories
Of glory, fame and wealth
To see that I had whored myself
To the lie that I’m alone.
You see the only dream that counts
Is that we all count,
That every voice is heard
Every hope, anxiety, despair
Every tear you shed that no one saw
Because you turned away
And every desperate word
That you were too ashamed to say.
And I can’t do that on my own.
And that’s
OK.

Do not comply
With what they tell you to desire.
Defy the boundaries
They place upon your mind
And start a fire
That will not die
Until your whisper
And that of every brother, sister
Mother, father, lover,
Every angry fist in history
Unclenches and becomes a kiss
And every pair of lips becomes a choir.

Don’t let your dreams provide their alibi.
Make them accountable for every crime,
For every voice that they deny.
Look them in the eye
And let your rhymes and passion fight them.
Unite and let your love and the fact that after every disappointment you still believe in this sorry species indict them.
When you embrace humanity in its broken condition,
When ensuring those who cannot speak are spoken for’s your mission
And you chase the truth till every eye is open,
Every sleeping conscience woken,
Then your vision can incite them
To a revolution.
So take a moment, and your dreams,
And write them.
Go out into the alleys and recite them
And if humanity evolves
Sufficient to resolve
To make a reckoning
Of those who were involved
In lifting us from the mire
And those who just devolved
The choice to someone down the line
You’ll stand absolved,
Your head held high.
Their dreams,
The ones that you made fly,
With a whisper, quiet as a lullaby,
Those dreams will be your alibi.

Coming in 2012

Yes, it’s the same title as the current eight cuts gallery exhibition but it’s a title I really really like. This year, I enjoyed writing the young adult book Black Heart High so much I decided to do it again, so my first book of 2012 will be this dark, lyrical piece of young adult urban fantasy. Huge thanks to the wonderful Kate Madigan for the fabulous cover.

Anticipated release March 1st.

When Steph’s estranged brother Simon is killed in a hit and run, she finds amongst his things a suicide note from Alice, the best friend she thought had died from an overdose, and begins having recurring dreams in which she plays the violin with an orchestra of the dead.

As her grip on reality loosens, Steph locks herself away in her brother’s flat, emerging only under cover of darkness to take lessons in the violin from the mysterious Professor Szabo. She takes to the instrument so naturally it feels as though she’s been playing all her life, and she begins to believe the notes themselves can tell her the secret Alice and Simon were keeping from her. If only she could play just a little better. With a little more…soul.

This is Oxford

(written for the event This Is Oxford at Blackwell’s)

This is Oxford
Centre of learning
Burning ambition
A war of attrition
With intellectual ammunition
I don’t mean to cast suspicion
On your mission for erudition
But if you have a moment
I think you should listen

This is Oxford
Sheldonian and gowns
Proud parents coming up to town
For kids so high they daren’t look down

This is Oxford
Bodleian, Blackwells,
Manuscripts and yellow books
Reading Keats on the pavement
Casting upskirt looks

This is Oxford
Promising the earth like
It’s your birthright
Till it finds your imperfections
And decides that you’re worth shite

This is Oxford
Spotting celebrities in Jericho
Would she take you to bed
If you said you saw someone from Radiohead
All this music
Could make you lose it
But if you had to choose it
Would be Gaga singing Born This Way
But you tell all the girls you’re the drummer from Stornoway

This is Oxford
The hour before sunrise
Alone in the alley behind Blue Boar
The last drops of darkness clucking for dawn
Glimpses through drunkenly-drawn curtains of someone else’s porn

This is Oxford
Nightmaring spires where choirs caress you to your rest
And dress you for your final journey
Everything burns but the lingering lies
In his cataract eyes
A sick old man in a shabby gown
John Huston at the end of Chinatown

How to Make a Soho Quilt

I haunt the street building a life from other people’s pieces
And souls switch off the lights while bodies do their thing
And poets pen anarchist tracts to paste in booths
And cologned and sweaty suits pass them up for Frida, firm and forty double D
And clucking youths wear Brando moods
And blackened glasses keep each passing glance unseen
And skins naked under neon veins and leather sweat the madman’s shakes
And snake man screams falsetto dreams
And basement prophetesses roll their eyes
And loose-limbed priests shriek hymns at peeling skies
And jacked-up maids howl Baudelaire at their whores
And slickers slip one another roofies and condoms and lies
And louche ladettes in lamé queues stub half-smoked cigarettes
And lips wrapped up in chat slap noodle sauce on Louboutins
And a student passes the porno door the fifteenth time
And chalk and chucked up chips duet
And anxious eyes feel out the night for open doorways
And anxious hands are fast behind
And eyes slide and smiles slip and oils glide
And in the glitz the glare I hunt and hide
And in windows the reflection of my patchwork skin
And I can’t go home.
I would not let me in

Adam

I lost my soul in the quarter mile from Foyles to Jerry’s
or maybe it was Jerry’s to Foyle’s
and what I lost was my mind.
His name was Adam
or maybe I only call him that
because he was my first man
and he told me let’s take some of this and we’ll get caned.
It was the way his T-shirt stayed angel-white in the citygrub
and the way his tattoo moved but his teeth stayed still when he smiled
that pulled me across the street
or maybe it was some wet-sheeted memory
he drew to him that sticky six o’clock
like a cloud of backflowed blood swilling round before the shot.
I would have studied at Cambridge
or maybe I wouldn’t
and that was the lie I told myself
because I knew I needed guilt
and neither the junk nor the ejaculations gave me any.
I lost my life somewhere by Bar Italia
or maybe someone found it
and put it to good use
or maybe they wasted it
and now I haunt the shelves of Foyles, perpetually browsing
or maybe I’m outside Jerry’s
and this absinthe in my blood is just too strong
or maybe it’s not strong enough
because I can’t stop thinking of Adam
or maybe I only call him that because he fell.

Her Body

(I gotta Facebook page thing!)

Her body
Was the canvas where you painted your myths
In come and similes and piss
The focal point of all your bliss
The only part of her you’ll ever miss

Her body
Will be a vanishing point in the desert
A line in the sands of time
Running through your hands
The silken strand
That drags your eyes
To the horizon
Where your future stands
The wandering caravan
That spans
The skeleton road to Samarkand

Her body
Will be a theme park for ideologues
Self-righteous pedagogues
Gender-political demagogues
Who hog the scene
Flogging anarchist zines
Filled with revolutionary schemes
And Utopian memes
While under the clogs of your flag burning screams
Her body slips into the soil unseen

Her body
Will be a garden planted with your fears
A bowl to catch your tears
A reminder of the years you spent
And those that went astray
The hours, minutes, days
You couldn’t bring yourself to say
Because you knew her body stayed
But not that she had slipped away

She is not the sum of all who went before
Her body’s not a metaphor
Her unkissed lips are not a funeral pyre
Her gaping wrists are not the mouths of liars
Her clitoris is not the primal fire
(the truth of it is infinitely higher)

Her body
Was woven from pieces of pain that no longer hurt
Has wounds that will not heal
Indignities she will not feel
Skin peels
Winds wheel
Limbs kneel
To hymns bashed out with soulless zeal
And dust steals back
The only proof that she was ever real

Holly

(I gotta Facebook page thing!)

A new poem, first performed at Hammer & Tongue Oxford on November 8th. Written after re-reading Katelan Foisy’s Blood and Pudding. In 1997, Katelan went on a road trip with her best friend Holly. She took a tape recorder and after Holly’s OD, the transcriptions of their conversations, intercut with anecdotes from the years between that road trip and Holly death, formed the basis of Blood and Pudding. I’ve taken many narrative liberties, so the poem is “inspired by” or “based on” or whatever.

Holly

Just a road trip
That’s what it seemed
Two more teenage hipsters
Zipped on xanax
Paying lip service to the Kerouac dream

Holly’s hands on the wheel
My feet on the dash
And the sun splashed
Our lips
And every rash decision
Slipped into our private mythology
Major key rips in a minor key mixology

We lived at 200 beats a minute
I was drum and she was bass
Life was numb and we chased
The sun from dawn to dusk
The dust in our face
The delirious race left us crazed
Till we spent days playing space invaders
On porn booth joysticks
Placed every cent on black
Jacked up
And had infinities tattooed on our backs
To seal our Beatnik pact

But Holly wasn’t so strong
I think I’d known all along
She was no survivor
And now she was falling apart
I tried to revive her
By making our lives into art
I tried so hard
But her life was a shard that had stopped reflecting the light
Her heart was the dark on a starless night

I couldn’t keep her safe from harm
I couldn’t be her lucky charm
And when she placed it in my palm and pleaded
I couldn’t even put the needle in her arm

Just a road trip
In truth it’s already fading
Her outline’s lost its shading
Our friends have got desk jobs and jaded
There’s little left of those two teenagers
Kerouac and Cassady are someone else’s dream
And Ginsberg is their melody
But Holly is their theme

A New Book! Ode to Jouissance

£0.86 in the UK

$0.99 in the US

The cover photo is by the wonderful Veronika von Volkova. The model is inspirational Katelan Foisy. You can learn more about both here.

An ambitious scientist plots alone in her flat in 1930s Berlin. Her experiments, stolen from colleagues she has sent to their deaths in the madhouse and concentration camps, are sure to impress the new Minister of Propaganda. But a lifetime spent learning to control those around her is about to come back to haunt her as for the first time she falls under the spell of a more skilled manipulator than her.

A Spanish civil servant drives through the heart of the country to his mother’s home town where he must build a car factory to stop the town sinking into the desert. His companion on the journey is the Chinese businesswoman sent to finalise the deal. The woman who had been his first lover, decades earlier.

An elderly lady sits among friends in a care home. Together they remember the loves of their distant past. But Catherine has no interest in the past. She is certain a young Polish man is on his way to marry her.

Ode to Jouissance is a collection of three full-length (5000 words) short stories that explore nostalgia and eroticism in the fragments of modern Europe. From the youthful Ilke, through the middle-aged Ignacio to the elderly Catherin, these stories weave together to form a tapestry of desire that grows stronger and more fulfilled with age. With echoes of Kundera and Murakami, a gentle but insistent theme of hope amidst the ruins builds to a heartbreaking but uplifting crescendo.

Angels and Avatars

(originally posted over at eight cuts gallery)

Angels and Avatars: does the internet provide us with a metaphor for intersubjectivity (Dan Holloway)

Put simply, the problem with talking about a relationship of two equals is that we don’t have a vocabulary for doing it. The erotic discourse bequeathed us by Platonism and the Abrahamic covenantal traditions provides us with a raft of metaphors – God/human; penetrator and penetrated; admirer and gazed upon; active/passive; spirit/body – each of which throws those who relate into positions fixed at either end of a hierarchical pole where one is totally swallowed up by the other (the very best we can say, with Derrida or after Freud, is that things are the opposite of how they seem – the one who fixes his gaze is not objectifying, holding prisoner the one he gazes on but is, rather, overwhelmed by the need to gaze, held prisoner by his addiction to his muse).

My four years of doctoral study were an attempt to resolve this problem, as most eloquently put by the Belgian theorist Luce Irigaray, who also hinted at the answer I was looking to flesh out.

Angels.

Angel, as you probably know, is a word derived from the Greek angelos, or messenger. An angel is, literally, a go between, delivering communication first one way then another and so on.

Irigaray believed the best hope for getting out of the fix of creating hierarchies between lovers, or having one swallow the other whole, was the metaphor of angels, of go-betweens, of something outside of both parties where the interacting between them would take place without touching their subjectivity, but where something of themselves would actually be able reach so that interacting could happen. Sort of like a one-way permeable membrane, some kind of valve, where you could, once the relating had happened, change the direction so that you could reclaim your interacted-with self so that it wasn’t lost on the space walk.

Irigaray thought the most promising way of thinking about this was mucus, a very bodily way of conceptualising it but nonetheless a very fruitful and interesting metaphor, albeit one that was limited in scope by the fact the mucus membranes she identified were human lips and the female sexual organs.

I found a promising metaphor in the most unlikely setting of seventeenth century Puritan marriage tracts. There was one particular use of the term Special Providence that was unlike others, the long and the short of which was that a separate space – almost a forum or agora – was created where relational duties could be bargained.

Now, my doctoral studies were curtailed by a massive breakdown in 2000. Which isn’t a plea for sympathy. Rather, it’s an excuse for not having explored the path of enquiry that seems, as I lay out the problem like that, bleeding obvious.

Avatars.

Now, of course I was aware of the internet. I used it largely to access documents and articles. What I wasn’t really aware of was the burgeoning bulletin board culture. And when I emerged several years later into the world of chatrooms, Second Life, and social media with its avatars and gravatars, I had a full time job I needed to pay the rent and the hours in the day and spare brain capacity for study just weren’t there.

But it’s been there, gnawing away, the book I know I should have written, the chance to get my doctorate at long last, maybe even the chance to have a few years of an academic career in the twilight of my working years, or at least a punt at cultural punditry.

The internet is, of course, a buzz topic in academia. And bulletin boards and social media are buzz topics within buzz topics. There is plenty of cultural theory about subjectivity, crowd-sourcing, ghosts in machines, post-modern accretion and eclecticism; social theory about the way online communities behave. But I haven’t sensed much in the way of rigorous attempts to dial that in to two and a half thousand years of erotic discourse.

I don’t want to begin speculating about answers (but all thoughts are welcome), but it really is about time I started asking the obvious questions:

• To what extent is the internet a “separate space”?
• And the sub-question – to what extent are our avatars separate from us?
• And how does this change across the spectrum from bulletin board to Second Life?
• How does the interaction of our avatars take place and what is the permeability or leakage between that interaction and the people we “really” are?
• When we talk of “our own subjectivity” being preserved in online intersubjective relations, are the degrees and nature of retention different for the “our own” and “subjectivity” part of that statement?
• How do we tease apart the metaphorical and the actual? Or, can we talk about eroticism in terms of avatars?
• If the interrelation of avatars is angelic in Irigaray’s sense, does that make the internet a paradise offering genuine intersubjectivity, or an inferno into which our bodies banish us?