Tuesday 24 June 2014

JUST TO PROVE I EXIST (2005)


From being born strangling under my own slick cord
To snorting cocamacaine in a co-op morgue
And there I saw the dead laid out in pooling red
Red as the sun setting over the Thurrock ward

From riding into an Escort doing forty
On my BMX riding the main road blindly
My dangerous load skidded right down Southend Road
A road my house is on eternally

From passing Kerouac in a Brixton theatre
To feeding on rare steak in the World Trade Center
Sobbed through a wedding, sicked in my bedding
And touched Jimmy Page in Wembley Arena

From shatting wetly in my hungover trousers
To cocktails in the bath while I had a shower
Made my boss cry, ate a cactus to get high
And smashed a Super-loo by human power

From falling fifty feet from a forest tree tall
To hear Enoch Powell speak in a London hall
I’ve drunk in the wooden pub that I fucking love
And wrote for two years after I ran from the mall

From driving down Broadway in a Lincoln town car
Drunk with hookers and Yardies in Nottingham’s bars
Forgot about Spain in a spasm of brain pain
And floated under comets and Norfolk’s stars

From running from police ‘cause arson was at play
To sliding the Siberian tundra in a sleigh
And I made small bombs to put in suburban homes
In a cold school winter down Third Avenue way

From eating a flower and smoking a shoelace
To eating caviar and planning to buy mace
Caught my legs on barbed wire, caught my head on fire
Seen my skull bone pulling grey gravel from my face

From signing on on Basildon’s Thatcher burnt floors
To hiding away for days behind closed doors
Timed the elusive ‘Tusk’, ridden the last bus…
Crashed on rich floors amid the must of the poor 

From crossing 110th Street in the dark
To having the sun stolen from my little heart
Took a pill for a thrill and I was ill, but still…
I have fallen like dusk from the swings in the park

From the dark dark dark amid the blaze of the moon
To staring out a panther until I had won
I have been big and clever, drunk in all weather
And I’ve been lost lost lost in the clear map of noon

From cocktails on the Circus Circus rotunda
To the snowing funeral of my grandfather
Fell from a Fobbing fence onto the Fobbing bench
Bruising my whole leg every single colour

From smashing a double glazed door with my head
To staying for thirty hungover hours in bed
I got up this morning and cannot stop yawning…
Broke a council estate satellite dish then fled

From walking like a Monkee in Moscow’s mass graves
To a long time reflecting on how to behave
Then there’s hot ladies breath and the cold breath of death…
Oh the snowmen and wicker castles I have made!

Leapt from a low rooftop and broke one of my feet
To sweating out my face by that atomic heat
Thrown up still cold milk, touched fields of spiders silk
And stolen cars to leave them mere yards down the street

From a Devon eclipse in a gay actors home
To stumbling round a muddy Glastival alone
And outside Heathrow I fought happy with the snow…
Bled from my head for reasons too many to moan

From pissing in homes unfinished by the sea wall
To spending hot pinty nights swaying on a stool
I have held sweating hands while waiting for the Man
And lived a decade job-hanging in the mall

From school-trip looking at the grey graves of the Czars
To wearing a yellow shirt under a pink bra
Drank a quintiple whisky, let a Beetle hit me
And dug into a bowling green under dawn's stars

From crashing and smashing the blue boat on the Broads
To carpet hashness in university halls
Broke my warm arm on ice, stole from a farm barn twice
Crunched down secret gravel my thieving on call

From the top of the Empire State to rank home wine
To short Lenin laying dead with a waxy shine
And I have ignored the phone in my own home
And ridden in the airliners that play with the time

From finding beasts and beauty and putting both back
To a fifteen car police chase on a haystack
I saw the police chopper above me hover…
Pinging my pants I’ve smacked myself in the sack

From wearing black leather and touching softly lace
To fighting in the pale forecourt of Pelham Place
And I have gone West because the West is the best
And there on the beaches I have got off my face

From writing wretched words that make pretty girls cry
To smoke on the rec. below chefs hats in the sky
And in the eighties I stole Volkswagen badges
Staying out on the Frost estate so late, oh my!

From freeing captive budgies to the winter trees
To see Multisanti in Little Italy
And I tore a dead mouse in half moving the bath
Its soft red insides strung like confectionery

From wearing their leather and eating their wet flesh
To paying to see sick people in their own mess
I own part of the moon but live in one warm room
And when I do vote I draw a monkey instead

From cycling down the Fobbing hill in sunglasses
In the rain at night on coke and fucking blasted
To hit the bottom hedge banging my rotten head
Plastered now and wondering how I’ve lasted…

From these things and many many more and madder
To the daily colon squeeze and draining bladder
I write these hard chrome rhymes in this terminal time
To prove I exist in any way that matters…

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