December 2011
45 posts
Anyone
know anything at all about submitting things to ezines / lit mags? Any advice would be really appreciated!
Thanks very much! Hope all’s well, all,
Joe
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Returning haiku
and he will not come in sandals but with torn jeans and some cigarettes
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The Travesty of the Sixth Form Kid
Sixth form used to start at like ten past nine and I’d always be home by six. We sat about shit-talking each other in the mornings, we never needed a reason to, or any motivation: our friendships simply took malice as their predicate, as entire ecosystems all vied to be king. I would spend lunchtime in my friends’ cars with coffee breath, spilt tobacco on my lap, and this raw desperado...
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hey Tumblr
Spent most of the day in a state of solidified passivity. Then at like eleven pm I wrote this really bad French poem. It would have been a good French poem if I spoke French. But then I don’t speak French. So it was a poor French poem.
Then I wrote a poem about the poor French poem justifying the poor French poem. Then I did something and wrote a haiku about it. Then I wrote some haikus about...
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looking on the internet for poetry websites
i am the raider of the lost ark and my ego is that boulder
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Return of the Prodigal Son
yeah i just learnt to read less of the old shit
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Bedroom poem
I drank loads of coffee and some of it went down a charm. Though some of it didn’t, some, enough, for me to still feel withered, shit and mushroom eyed come morning. Furiously hungover, my bedroom was a splice of heaven’s darkness and it spun about me like a ballet dancer, a disco light, a regrettable mistake. I have no idea where the rest of the coffee got to. Human bodies are too...
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Jesus in England
i think ‘all the donkeys are dead’
happy holidays / merry christmas
have a great one, everyone
joe x
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Our Lady and Crimes
She was young, we were young, and I did not treat her well enough. It was because she did not know our lady from Mexico. She did not share our visions and dreams. She did not know the gravity and arsons the most romantic dogs endure and commit, we said, we argued, believed. So she was expelled within our diocese: slammed with excommunication and heresy and illiteracy, and she left a...
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England on Christmas Eve
Walking by shops that have shut for Christmas Their owners and kids, unemployed, jobless, hungry, gaunt Reinaldo slammed the ‘FOR SALE’ sign as a ‘justification’ I will call it an epitaph of a very sad age The shop windows are boarded up now Stock has been pushed into some other merchant’s vein In another city, under another gray sky Like morphine, but less relieving and grimmer ...
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from The Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty, and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.
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i am walking past a school i did not go to with a hood up the place stinks of fear oh fuck do you not remember the violence orchestrated within the walls we used to haunt – 2011 from 2000 and what rest in peace exhausted souls in the cloak room days i lacked experience but the teachers were in love with us we were young lambs bound on slop bound to sin who did not know any thing better...
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and the sky could be a little bit darker later
the street lights are taller than you are right now and the sky will be a little bit darker later if you anticlockwise turn the tap water will come out really fast you can make the television look different if you press ‘on’ and the sofa will not look the same after you sit in it there will be a room behind every door the people in the photograph are memories in a frame you cannot hurt...
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walking down the lane it is dark it is cold there is like a pylon by the side of the lane and it is tall in the valley are some lights ‘there are a lot of houses in the valley’ i think but there is also a lot of sadness in the valley it is severe like lots of pylons though ‘Father Christmas will take the severity away’ i thought and was going to write in this poem but in between the...
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the enemy among you
every one has come home and been struck by some thing epidemic getting drunk like you were allowed to when you were fifteen has become the currency maybe it is more stable than the £ or € sorry America i am English and 18 i do not know how the $ is doing nor am i meant to care America are you the same as we are at our worst i am severely trying to diagnose the problems i am being...
and i was online when i wrote this v.2
sitting on Facebook said ‘hi’ to this girl from class she said some thing really frustrating replied ‘lol’ while thinking about ‘alcoholism’ ‘the future’ ‘my lack of plans’ like ten new people come online while i am sitting there thinking about the last time it rained and all these people i really could not care at all
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looked at the clock and it was getting late i thought ‘it is getting late it is like 5am’ went to brush my teeth and shaved then sat in bed read 80 pages of a book about this soldier returning from afghanistan and becoming a master chef who won many competitions then went to sleep and dreamt about becoming something different too
“i’d rather be a tree in lord of the rings than a person in real life”
– selections from Spencer Madsen’s Twitter by Elaine Sun (editor)
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i have never been to Manchester though some times i wonder if America has even heard of Manchester at all
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title
sitting on Facebook again with a million things i could and would be doing if not for this internet
i have to obliterate my ego via syntax and line arrangement on the internet to achieve the mindset required for activity outside the internet
i am writing a poem about my own experiences in the most vicious circle anyone could imagine within the most vicious circle anyone could...
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what are we??
‘We’re human beings, my son, almost birds, public heroes and secrets.’
Roberto Bolaño, Godzilla in Mexico
* * *
the world looked down into the crowd and saw a city crying
but sorrow for a dead man nay who the world accused of lying
and it is hard to relate pain with a man who kept no tears
but no pity for any dead man nay is the heart beat of my fears
19th...
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i sat in the university library this afternoon
on Facebook i told Kristen about me enlisting in the Socialist Worker’s Party earlier because i wanted to authenticate my own enlistment
cool she said nice
then i crashed a cigarette off Robert when we were sitting outside by the bikes
Robert went to the toilet for condoms and left his coat so i took the remainder of the cigarettes ...
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i got hung up on semicolons and sentences that were more complicated than they should have been
i had started searching the Bible and featuring it in poetry
but all i saw in the Bible was lots of sadness
and when i checked my cheeks in my HTC the stanzas were not gelling the same
and my smile was more complicated than it should have been
and there was a skin and an...
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A nightclub beer garden, yada yada, yada yada. No-one was drinking beer in it. A couple were having a domestic in one corner. Two others were climbing down each others throats in others. A security was leaning by the door, arms folded and ear piece in. He was standing like a totem pole. Maybe he thought himself a god.
I only smoke when I drink, said Hatch.
That’s how every one starts, said Frank....
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the jasper sea
the dunes were asthma white and the sun was drizzling heat
engines wouldn’t work here the humans couldn’t breathe here
my feet were sinking into glass and i didn’t know no poetry
though there weren’t any winds look down a voice said, to the ground
and there was a pool of water free cigarettes on new jerusalem were playing palm trees
i tried to take them and grappled...
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Wilfred Owen, 'The Parable of the Old Man and the...
So Abram rose, and clave the wood and went, And took the fire with him, and a knife. And as they sojourned both of them together, Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father, Behold the preparations, fire and iron, But where the lamb for this burnt-offering? Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps, And builded parapets and trenches there, And stretched forth the knife to slay...
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“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in...”
– Corinthians 14:12-13
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i got a prayer bracelet from my sister when she saw the virgin in barcelona it was so hot there that yorkshire’d be melting and glasgow wouldn’t stand a chance it will take me many years to understand or reconcile a religion but i wear it these days over a wrist-watch some day we’ll come home again to starlight i want to go without remorse when i do
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a packet of cigarettes and love all i had in mind as i left town in papa’s fiesta and i haven’t really found either though my friends’ smokes that my clothes’ve caught have made them smell better and love can wait a few suns longer i’m in no rush to leave the city
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geckowithayellowribbon:
for should i be damned, cast out from your faith let the worms crawl in my skull let me be part of the depth.
the whisperers hear me soft, sweetly they call.
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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”, Jack Kerouac
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A (very unqualified) introduction to Roberto...
Back in summer (which is back a hundred years ago, it seems) I was browsing through books to read in some store when I stumbled across The Savage Detectives, the seminal novel of a relatively unknown (at least in Britain I think, though he’s more popular in the States) Chilean expatriate/Latin American writer, Roberto Bolaño. The book is a beast, something like 600 pages (I don’t have...
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prodigal in love
i was poisonous sort of prodigal and it was time to come home but i was too alcohol and hungover and so i stayed here in a crying bed on the ebon side of ecstasy curtain-shut from sunlight, door-locked out of love and soul; ‘the city stinks of lovelessness’
so i stayed inside by the shadows of pigs
and the lovelessness walked with me and grew to haunt the digs
DEAD BEATS: transmission by Joe Vaughan →
deadbeatsblog:
We have sharpened down our fingers
and blackened out our tongues
We transmit like razors
We see each other’s shadows behind shower doors We die to ask - - … but our lips are nothing
We are despairing
and embedded in code and the violence of code and…
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painted faces
everyone was standing around looking like they were having fun there were lasers, there was music, there were fishbowls of alcohol, cheap enough mdma though the coke was more costly there were more colours than a rainbow in the furthest shadows and alleyways were naked girls; passed-out tossing their heads with unlocked skirts, hearts, white eyes, poison lips boy, it was the loudest end of...
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the first one to die
he didn’t come here to learn anything really he didn’t come here for the alcohol or the drugs or the girls in the nightclubs every way naked no he didn’t come here for that he got a handful of a levels, as’ and gcses and so many handfuls of cash from his family that he had to go and open up himself a bank account with cash in his pocket and an absence in his soul he caught a cab across the...
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“listen carefully, my son:
bombs were falling over Mexico City
but no one even...”
– Roberto Bolano
