VISION

 

“Look Fufie I can fee feep.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Garden’ is the password to my imaginary world.

 

 

 

There is a catflap on the radio there. Sunlight forms a golden pool on the closed eyelids of the fool as he lays out on the garden’s lawn. When he opens his eyes he sees cloud-forms floating by outside but the rest of this no, not-so-special-perception is gone.

 

 

 

Something about being a Starvationist.

Something about Autumn as Optimus Prime.

 

 

 

 

 

Still there is no such thing as Time.

 

 

 

 

 

Autumn is a time when wasps leave fag-burns in the apples, apples with toe-nails embedded in their cores, and the air has a plaintive, melancholic, wistful, elegiac note and tone… it’s when the leaves start to fall down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down in London we only had a postage stamp garden. I used to sit out there with my brother and observe ants on the blades of grass. I would ask myself if I too were but an ant unto some higher God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember having a love of hammers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It reminds me that my dad might call his poem ‘The Grit of The Angels,’ underline it with WD40, tap a nail in with a hammer and watch it spread its wings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we moved up, it was great to have such a big garden to play in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember the first time I walked all the way up Black Combe to the top. I was four and as a reward was given a toy car bought for me in Broughton, a local town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down in London, the town of my birth, High Art wears high heels. The escalators down to the Underground have Star Wars teeth chewing on insipid gum. Down in the Underground you feel the calm, velvet fart against your cheek. On the Tube you see the reflections of faces smear like black butter in the grimy glass as the Circle Line goes through Hades again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Naturalistic Observationism of my boyhood couldn’t go on in the city, would require the greenest land there is, the countryside, the sticks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I told my family round the table that first evening “I saw something in the wood today.” I was greeted by a silence then the conversation moved on to something else as if I hadn’t said anything at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also remember sitting on the school bus every day asking myself, even as Top of the Form, whether a farm local to the school had a secret underground lab where unsound experiments were conducted on animals and if one of them had escaped.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never got to find out before I had to leave. Over the issue of drawing a crude picture of a naked woman with a lion’s head in the back of my French exercise book, and blaspheming on the school bus while the very religious headmaster was driving, I was going to be suspended so my dad took me out of the school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I went from a trajectory towards headboy, as cross country champion, tallest, and sometimes Top of the Form, to having to leave over the issue, mainly, of a crude picture and my saying “Jesus Christ!” when the school bus went past an accident on the road.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not really trying to renew the wood, no, nor do I really know how, although I did hear in the wind there was an equation for doing so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I give you that I’d like to say: at my next school we we were waiting for the music teacher Mr. Williams to turn up one day. It was the end of one lesson and the start of another. We all thought Mr. Williams was gay because he had bags of sweat under his armpits and taught music. The fierce headmistress walked in and said to the teacher who was waiting to leave that Mr. Williams couldn’t attend. The teacher there asked the headmistress why and the headmistress said “Mr. Williams is invigilating.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t know what the verb to invigilate meant so struck by an aspect of horrorism pictured the poor man at home, on the edge of his bed, going through some biological reaction to do with being gay, maybe also to do with laying eggs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When my dad picked us up that afternoon I asked him “dad what does the verb to invigilate mean?” and he said “it means to oversee an exam.” I was relieved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did my school project in Junior Four on the dinosaurs. It ended on the line:

 

“last autumn, two biologists announced they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct, stingless bee found in amber.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I had been through was real as Jurassic Park coming true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The girls at the back did the 60’s, stuck in bits of velvet and denim, didn’t include anything about the Doors, and got a better mark than me. When I say they didn’t include anything about the Doors, neither did I in my scholarly work on the dinosaurs, but I should’ve. There should’ve been a middle ground between us. I should already have been writing about what had happened to me, which some say was abuse, and others character building.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Permutation games can be a rehearsal for death. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade, the gay maths teacher at my next school, stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone. Intention – what is my intention? I should declare an intended efficacy of healing the soul of the world! In this world we are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I’m stuck as usual, with a flashback to this blockade to understanding and learning forced on me; and yet some contend that I wasn’t passive – that I was literally born the witness. Some contend the mark on my hand is as good as Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voices now say they think what lies in wait for me may be painful; but that I am doing my duty nevertheless. They seem to want me to draw.