as the crow flies.
by road
my endless iterations of attempted quantification
are thwarted like beginner’s gambits
by carefully positioned lay-bys
where i climb banks and piss in coke bottles dusted with cigarette ash and pace in bushes in silent circles
waiting for doggers who never show.

it consoles me
that marina has fuelled 47082 more seconds
of our combined fantasies
than the someone
whose shit-smeared picture pulled cubist through
a salesman’s ass
catches tears warmed by that thought.

beside open bacon
in your kitchen are two bowls of
powder paint

red and blue and tomorrow
after we masturbate on the vinyl floor
we will mix them separately with the fluids
and in the afternoon
we will chip pieces of quartz from neighbours’
driveways and talk about
how one day we might paint them purple.

A hostess who looks like Juliette Binoche demands a drink.
You say cognac and a hostess dressed like Lana Turner brings you whisky
And asks for fifty
When you only have a twenty.
Juliette says “that’s plenty, you can pay the rest with your hopes,”
Puts a notebook on the table,
Opens it, lights up and tokes and passes you her smoke,
Chokes on her whisky, strokes her wrists distractedly
And clicks her pen
And then you say

“I want to rhyme with holy fools
whose only rule of poetry is flow
where verse is free
And wordsmiths badder than the worst of me”

Behind the thickening membranes of her eyes the light retreats a little,
Fingers tighten and she whispers “start again”

“I want to suck the sacred poison from intoxicated skies
Philosophise with rent boys
High five the hell-bent and the heaven-sent
And stent the city’s arteries
With sycophantic merengues to the high priests of the moshpit.”

She dissects you with her disappointment.
Her words infect you, dripped from lips injected
With so many years of intravenous hurt
“There are more lines of poetry on my face
Than in all the rhymes that you will ever write”

And you remember:
You should be at a poetry slam
And this is why you’re not,
Your superficialities and artificialities,
Your shiteness, triteness, emptiness and skin deep sheer banalities
And you say “I want the pain to stop.”

Juliette Binoche unbuttons her shirt,
Opens a condom,
Throws the rubber on the floor
And slides the foil across her chest and takes your hand
And presses it into the blood,
Peels back a flap of skin
And your fingers slip like toes
Through the sand on the last beach on earth
And as her heart contracts beneath your palm she says
“I want the pain to start.”

Through unpulled curtains,
Yellow nets
Through sherry vodka and regrets
We watch a nation with its Christmas box –
Poptastic toss
And TV dross
And things designed to remind you of your loss

Stocking lines are shards of hope hung out to dry
Dreams are folded down to cards and enveloped
Posted and forgotten like the Christmas roast
Children’s smiles
Remind the childless of the mindless chance of life
Its idle dance while idols rise from circumstance

Don’t spare a thought for those
Who wake alone, turn on the lights alone
And watch TV and eat,
Put out the lights and go to sleep at night alone
And while they might be out of sight alone
You never ask if they’re all right alone
You just bemoan the family fights
And wish that you could spend one night alone
Watching Twilight alone
Well, quite alone,
It’s not like you’d like to share their plight alone.
Don’t spare a line at a slam or a rhyme
Or prayers to non-existent gods when the mass bells chime.
If you want to give.
If you want to stop the clocks
To put the slow tick tock of grown men’s loneliness in stocks
And let them live…
Give
Time

“steve roggenbuck” printed in every font on my computer’s version of Microsoft Word (except for Helvetica [except on the cover])

Click the image above or click here to download your free pdf copy of all these taxonomies are political, or go to the book’s smashwords page for a free copy in all digital formats.

This book is an examination of the depth to which the associations we make are hard-wired into us, and the lengths to which we are pushed if we want to free ourselves of these associations.

It puts the question whether we can tunnel so deep inside the constructs that constitute our world, surround ourselves and familiarise ourselves with them so much that they become first banal, then meaningless, then empty, and finally receptacles for our own making of the world anew.

That is to say, it puts the question of the possibility of hope.

I have chosen the limerick format because to many early twenty first century readers in the Anglophone world it is both the most familiar form and that whose association, of jaunty rhythm and glib content, is the one we recognise the most easily. It is, therefore, our perfect Virgil to lead us through the Underworld of ever deepening assumptions of necessary connection that are increasingly hidden from us, where our consciousness of their necessity is increasingly fixed and increasingly false. Associations that include but are not restricted to (and come without orer in any sense):

Rhythm/mood

Words/meaning

People/bodies

Genitalia/gender

Ordering/ordering – that is, Positioning/hierarchy

A list/the completeness of that list in the mind of its compiler

What is written/its susceptibility to a Freudian reading

This is a free version of the book, because I believe that, as art designed to widen the boundaries of culture, no one should be barred from reading it. If you can afford, and if you consider such art and literature important, any donation you are able to make wil give me the time to keep writing. You can donate by Paypal to sonsfromtheothersideofthewall@googlemail.com Thank you.

These limericks are designed to be read aloud or sounded out in the reader’s head.

In 2000, I was too frightened of the world to open my post or answer my phone for 6 months, racking up massive bank charges and getting my phone line cut off as a result. But the same year, I won the World Intelligence Championships.

Some days, it is so hard to move my legs I have to get up over an hour early just to get out of the front door. But I competed for my university athletics team and have attained a national level of achievement at indoor rowing.

Put me in a party or a restaurant and I will be so overwhelmed that I will have to make for the nearest corner or door in order to avoid a crippling panic attack. But I have won poetry slams and TV game shows in front of large, live audiences, host an acclaimed spoken word show and happily deliver presentations to international conferences.

There are days when I find it physically impossible to choose a flavour of soup at the supermarket. But I got one of the highest firsts in my year at university and one of the highest marks in the year in my Masters, and competed internationally over three years for the Great Britain juniors bridge team.

Think of all those business people society admires because they work so hard, putting in hundred hour weeks of high stress work. That gives you something of an idea of the effort I have to put in just to get out of bed, get dressed reasonably presentably and *be* at the office. But I still manage to achieve at least the output of a full day’s work.

I manage to achieve at least the output of a full day’s work. But think of all those business people society admires because they work so hard, putting in hundred hour weeks of high stress work. That gives you something of an idea of the effort I have to put in just to get out of bed, get dressed reasonably presentably and *be* at the office.

I got one of the highest firsts in my year at university and one of the highest marks in the year in my Masters, and competed internationally over three years for the Great Britain juniors bridge team. But there are days when I find it physically impossible to choose a flavour of soup at the supermarket.

I have won poetry slams and TV game shows in front of large, live audiences, host an acclaimed spoken word show and happily deliver presentations to international conferences. But put me in a party or a restaurant and I will be so overwhelmed that I will have to make for the nearest corner or door in order to avoid a crippling panic attack.

I competed for my university athletics team and have attained a national level of achievement at indoor rowing. But some days, it is so hard to move my legs I have to get up over an hour early just to get out of the front door.

In 2000, I won the World Intelligence Championships. But the same year, I was too frightened of the world to open my post or answer my phone for 6 months, racking up massive bank charges and getting my phone line cut off as a result.

Just because I have a lot to offer, don’t assume I don’t sometimes need help

In Oxford the parks all shut at dusk, whatever time of year it is. So in winter Sal and I have them to ourselves for more than half the day. It’s easy enough to slip into the trees before the guards come round on their carts talking about football or how tea in this place stinks or how the bitch wouldn’t let me and it’s been five Saturdays in a row now, and we laugh at the snatches we hear and think how dull their lives are but at least they’re not as dull as the students who think they’ve got the future beat as a rock star, novelist or a Nobel Prize winner.

In the week we hang out in Christ Church Meadow because from there you can see the windows of what must be a hundred student rooms, and we lie on the grass and watch the lights go on and off and count the curtains still left to close and take videos of the ones that don’t, even if it’s only someone making coffee or looking out of the window because, you know, one day we might want to watch someone making coffee.

On weekends, like today, we go to parties like the one where we met. People are so easy to please when you turn up late with lots of drink. And when you stay till everyone else has emptied their stomachs in the sink and staggered back home or crumpled where they stood like the pissheads of Pompeii, and do a bit of shuffling with bottles, you find yourself on the eternal guestlist of the clueless minds.

Vodka, says Sal holding up two bottles jazz hands style.

Te—QUI—la, I say reaching two bottles around her.

A redhead wearing some kind of lamé dress squeals and ushers us in like her oldest friends in the world. We squeeze through to the front room on the left and on a formica topped table under the window we find the bar, where it invariably is at a student house party.

Sal pours shots for everyone and hands them round, dancing out the steps and smiles she’s learned by heart.

Things are already slowing down. Like the end of Titanic when they’re all getting cold and the sea goes quiet and bodies start dropping off bits of debris breaking the water’s surface without a sound. It’s easy to manoeuvre my way to the wall, moving arms and legs, anorexic backsides and spotty shoulders like placemats.

I watch her, like I watched her the first time. Same dress, same flicks of the head, succumbing to the same slow stiffness of the limbs. The room goes quiet around her till she crumples onto the sofa, the last piece of the anaesthetised jigsaw.

I’m so still no one even half-intoxicated would distinguish me from the furniture. No one moves but I know to stay here, to wait, to watch Sal breathing slow and shallow.

Eventually, movement. He wasn’t asleep, just marking time. Like I’d been doing the night we met. He tries to be quiet in that drunken, exaggerated way people have. Cautious within the bubble of his tunnel vision, but not really vigilant, not enough to spot me, blended with the cheap cigarette-stained wallpaper.

He approaches the sofa. He has stopped looking around. Doesn’t notice the click. Sees and hears nothing but Sal.

They go different parts of all the way, from a hand on the outside of her top to reaching out for a bottle and going the full Fatty Arbuckle.

But invariably they’re silent.

Just in case they wake anyone.

Except me. Sal said she chose me because I started quoting Henry Miller when I put my finger in her asshole. You wanted that more than you wanted not to wake me, she said. I said, you were already awake, and she said, yeah but you didn’t know.

His first touch is light. Short. Testing. Tips of the fingers. If she moves, he’ll laugh and pretend he slipped. She doesn’t move. Of course she doesn’t. Then the full palm on her breast, through cloth. He leaves it there a good minute. Removes it. Lowers his head. Fingers lifting an edge of fabric. Looks, taking in skin. Doesn’t touch. He’s a shy one. Hand moves downward, settles briefly on her backside. Doesn’t linger. The dress is thin, loose, falls and clings, he feels every pit, pock, scar and hair, feels she has no underwear, feels the bar run through her left lip. Hand still. Taking it in. Thinking. Daring himself. Wants to look. Wants to touch. Lifts fabric, looks. Blinks like he’s taking a picture for an album.

And leaves.

I sit on the towpath south out of Oxford. There’s still an hour or so before sun-up and the laptop screen looks like a second reflection of the moon next to the silver canal.

Sal lies on the gravel beside me and I can’t tell if her eyes are open or closed, if she’s here with me or somewhere else, and if she is whether I’m there with her, and if someone’s touching her and if they are if that someone is me.

I ask her what she’s thinking, and wonder if I’m asking her, or the other Sal, wherever she is, and she says it’s cold, and I tell her I’ve finished the upload and she says that’s great because, you know, one day she might want to watch