By Lassirude or Intrusion

The weightlessness of surfing,

the unmonitored pursuit that is
catching a wave
into dead space populated
by figments,

brings me crashing to the beach.
Buried. Inside out;
retching around a glassy pebble.

A gallstone.

An avalanche of unanswered mail,
virtual splintered bone.
Orbit and muscle, unblinking eye.

The sin of omission. A harbinger.

Ib Sibling

A Stench of Torment Rose Beguiling

i.
You might recall sly stooping, a little
frozen rancour on the turnstile.
A ladybird caught in the corner
of my mouth, pubic hairs
between my teeth. Snowballs.

Slipping in front of a House of Cards.

ii.
And then there was the barker
belching, tempting good grace.
The taint of cockles and
whelks, snails on the puckered lip
of a lurid painted precipice.

A wall of sudden death.

iii.
Of course, that is the wicked thing
about detours. Shortcomings.
Often there is just dereliction in
addressing the germ of things.

iv.
And again. The old lady in the sideshow
booth was only so much of a charlatan
as demand allows. Fair game for change.
A pastry in a blonde wig on a Saturday.

Black and Tan. Ill.

Stiff as a motherfucking board.

v.
Rusting zippers and jammy fortune,
fair to middling. The running soft to firm.
Long gone now, I expect.
A faltered scam laid out flat on the slab.
Or spirited away in a puff of smoke;
There is magic in a gypsy funeral.

vi.
A halogen lamp on a stairwell. A bike
of wasps travelling in circus formation.
The unstung heckler at the back of the tent.
A collapsed lung. A handkerchief waiving.

Hammer and tong on a bed of nails.

Ib Sibling

Interstellar Courtships and Couplings

A couple of decades ago, I took up residence in a basement flat in the west end of Glasgow. At some juncture long before my tenancy the factor had seen fit to remove the iron railings which would have ordinarily protected my bedsit from prying eyes and housebreakers.

Sawed off a quarter of an inch above street level, rusty and pockmarked like bleeding stumps left to fester in a yokel's mouth.

The excision was probably as a result of the war effort sometime in the early '40s. All remedial surgery abandoned.

This once grand tenement was overrun with rats and death watch beetles. At least the Jehovah's Witnesses kept away. I slept on a decrepit double mattress dumped in one corner on the floor. The roaches marched past at night on a food patrol just inches from my face.

I located the tv cable slung from the roof and drilled an entry point in the timber sill. I hooked it up to a portable black and white set which gave me a pretty decent reception. Late at night the cable would whip and slap off the front of the building in the wind. Even in the depths of summer. One evening I was working my way through a couple of bottles of red when the little screen burst with snow. I stumbled to my window. Some f@cker had severed the cable a couple of floors above and dragged it into their hovel.

I never watched any television after that. Instead I banged away on an electric typewriter I purloined on a visit to my mother's house.

With junkie logic I reasoned it might better serve me than her.

The Spaniard next door had overstayed on his visa. He was on the run from doing National Service. I didn't blame him much. His sister lived on the ground floor. Between them, their cooking smelled worse than shit. I have no idea what they served up, but the kitchen sink was perpetually choked with their leftovers. They never seemed once to clean up their plates.

One night I got more drunk than usual and when the Spaniard passed me in the hallway I pounced on him. No doubt he was as inebriated as me. I grabbed him by the neck and banged his head off the wall until his eyes rolled in their sockets. He started laughing and kept on until I finally let him slide to the floor.

F@cking draft dodger.

Of course. National Service in the UK was by then a thing of antiquity.

Living in that basement I found my perspective wholly skewed and altered. Anybody who has endured similar accommodation will know instantly what I mean. The world outside is framed from the ankles down.

Even passersby clear across the street lose their heads entirely.

Occasionally, a gaggle of youths would rumble into war without provocation. Disembodied screams and machetes dangling inches from my window in the aftermath. The glass was so thin it might have cracked under a wad of phlegm. As it was, not even the most antisocial element bothered to put it in.

There really wasn't much to steal in any case. I left my bedsit unattended once for the better part of a fortnight and when I returned it was if I'd never been gone. I didn't bother to fit curtains. It was dark enough down there as it was.

The entire time I lived there I did not take even one photograph. I worked a regular day-shift and visitors were usually too appalled to come back a second time. Of course, the fault may have lain with my social skills. It was my habit to hit the bars until closing time and attack the typewriter as soon as I got home.

I became quite skilled at banging out one fairly lucid page after another while otherwise hopelessly intoxicated.

Ib Sibling

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I remember reading somewhere, vaguely, that Bob Dylan once attempted to make a go of it peddling bespoke wooden legs.

Handcrafted prostheses, to be more precise.

Is there even a splinter of truth in it, does anybody know ? Or is the tale entirely apocryphal ?

I admire the idea of it, the screwball absurdity of the very thought; the monocular attention to detail.

Had Dylan not gone stellar on the back of a purloined, well-timed lyric or two, I can envision our sage hobbling into such a entepreneurial cul-de-sac. Squirreled away; ornately skulking in the sawdust of his folly.

Had Zimmerman not come over all electric, we might have had prosthetic:

A rabid mob on pogo sticks on the fringe of a motorcycle accident. Baying for blood as the carpenter hops in the wings, knock-knock-knockin' and chalking on his board.

Ib Sibling

Don't Speak too Soon Kid, the Wind Warned: There is a Gale Brewing

The wasted tail fin hovers under the radar. Peeling decals fluttering. The cockpit has been hosed down and the instruments crackle on autopilot; a rusting colossus immune to nagging, neglect. and niggardliness.

From the ground its black silhouette hangs like a painted flag. The ghost of 'SF Sorrow'. One by one those remaining occupants crawl through the hatch and drop. It would be cheaper to get there by underground, missed opportunities refracting off steamed glass like kisses on the top deck window of a stalled bus.

The girl you covet waits at the bus stop. Her knees are trembling. She glances up and over her shoulder, where sweet wrappers and discarded beer tins pock thistle and wayward berries. There is something moving behind the fence. This is the sound of your free period on a summer's afternoon. Or the 8:00 AM journey from a suburban outback into a blotter tinctured oasis of hallucinogenics and Ritalin lozenges; an aggravated spinster in laddered tights by the roundabout who shares much in common with Sunday's maiden aunt. A spindle-legged hankering. Old English Spangles and Dandelion Clocks. Arachnids weaving unseen in the dewlaps, spotted hounds off the leash and foaming. And. Transgressions on your tongue.

Ib Sibling

The Circus is Still in Town

I am standing in the off sales at the counter - in conversation with the proprietor through the open grill - when the bell over the door behind me tinkles and a hand settles none too lightly on my shoulder. All sense of good humour evaporates in an instant.

A mendicant with a melting face appears just to my right and covers his brow apologetically as I wheel about to confront the cause of this impertinence. The purchased bottle is reassuringly heavy should provocation warrant my lashing out.

"What say you, sir, " I demand.

"Have you no manners at all, you impudent fellow ?"

The scoundrel is scarcely more than a midget, luminescent eyes set in a tiny wizened countenance not unlike a monkey's. Awash with madness and decrepitude. He opens his mouth to offer some imbecilic retort but succeeds only in drooling incoherently. Silver threads of spittle lace the upturned chin.

Quite disgusted, I brush him aside and make for my exit.

"Good day to you, sir," I sneer.

Crablike, the awful creature sidles to the door and holds it ajar. If only I had my cane, I mourn. A damn sight more efficacious than the ungentlemanly swing of a loaded bottle.

He accompanies me out onto the street, persisting still in his ridiculous attempt to engage me in what must pass for banter in the lower orders.

What new foulness is this ?

He rolls back his coat sleeve and and raps on what is evidently some loathsome wooden appendage; a prosthetic of unfathomable crudity.

"Hnnnn... See ?" he croaks, and wags the painted fingers at me in a positively Dickensian gesture. "Fuckin' see ?"

"What's this ?" I snarl. "I'll have no truck with such nonsense. Be off with you,
I say. At once!"

It is not yet dark, else I might bludgeon the grotesquerie to the pavement and make my ill temper manifest. As it is, I feel compelled to stay my hand. Given
the woeful disparity of his circumstance, I can ill afford witnesses.

Still...

I lean into him and bare my teeth.

"Fuck off, then," I tell him. "I don't give a pickled rat's arse."

He stares at me uncertainly. Well. We do what we can.

Ib Sibling

Cheap & Spectacularly Nasty

The bird - rotund; a ball of downy copper and rust - appeared wedged between an outcrop of rock and the packed soil of the bank. The only thing sharp about it was its tiny beak. Jabbing the air in tense circles like the frail arms of a punch-drunk boxer. A featherweight.

It did not look as if it would go the distance.

My son had come running to me.

"Dad. There's a wee bird over there with a huge beastie on it."

And so there was. A spider, toiling at its web, a bright pustule of iridescent green sprouting wavering filaments. The bird was clearly distressed.

"Get it off it, dad, " my son whined.

The web was unusual. I have never seen the like. Where other webs are uniformly flat, however intricate, this one was a sphere of shimmering gossamer.

A dandelion clock. Round and round it the spider went, spitting out its silk. The little bird shivered and squawked.

"Get it off!"

The closer I watched - transfixed and undecided, failing my child - the more unsettled I felt. The palm of my right hand pressed tight on the damp moss, supporting my weight. I could not reach out to dislodge the spider. I did not want to make contact.

A great shadow bore down on my neck as a pocket of cloud swallowed the sun.

Dizzy, I snatched up a twig with my left hand and prodded gingerly, spastically at the offending growth. There was something at the core of the sphere. Something dull and opaque.

"Dad!"

I am an indifferent parent. I have no stomach for it, I realized then. Neither was the slender stick equal to the task. It missed and the sphere burst open like an obscene spore, ashy tendrils ballooning out and releasing the contents of the sac.

The bird screamed and fought to release its wings. The spider scuttled this way and that, quite unable to repair the damage. An egg. Milky white and fragile as a pulsing tumor.

"Oh, dad..."

I looked at my son. The fury in his eyes. The stick lay heavy in my hand.

You can't beat an omelet without breaking eggs.

-----------------------

I came awake from this peculiarly vivid dream this morning around 05:00AM. I lit up and considered whether to leap out of bed to hammer it down. Twenty minutes later, it was etched there so consciously I decided not to bother and went back to sleep.

Much later in the day I came to the conclusion I had been visited some rather disturbing anxieties. It did not seem quite so sinister with one eye first unglued.

Ib Sibling

It's a Flatbed Affair on Four Bald Tyres & a Cracked Windshield

It is my birthday today, siblings. Like those awful greetings cards needle, I have pretty much stopped counting; I know this because often I miscalculate my age by a year of two when somebody has the effrontery to enquire. I have to think carefully and tally up the lost decades.

In preparation for the opportunity at least to engage in polite celebration, I shaved off some alarmingly grey stubble. Most of my head hair is thus far immune, happily, but the growth on my face has been bleaching out for quite some time. Having experimented with some close cropped facial topiary this past several months, I finally decided I was beginning to resemble a Captain Birdseye in training. I can think of far worse potential jobs, of course, but it is not the kind of look one wants to sport recreationally. While a more youthful countenance might comfortably advertise a fashionable pussy tickler, there is a fine line between just that and the suggestion of something altogether more unsavoury in the older male.

In my impatience to vacate the bathroom and pour myself a tall glass of something alcoholic, I managed to nick myself in several places. Those deepening creases between nostril and upper lip; cheek and jowl. I dispensed with the sidewhiskers entirely.

The first glass, then, was ultimately medicinal.

Prost!

Ib Sibling

You Can't Think Your Way Out of an Avalanche. You Can Only Feel

I miss your smile. I miss your smell mingled with mine and your laugh over nothing substantial. It's the inconsequential parts of  'a'  to  'b'  and the journey between them which makes me want to bury my face in your soul.

Ib Sibling

Beware of False Profits

The apartment was a small collection of rooms she knew only too well. It was not just that it was limited. She had spent so much of the past eight years in here that each skeletal skelf standing upright between its floorboards had grown as familiar as the fingers on one hand.

"Fuck," she said. "You need to get out of here. We need to get out of here."

He looked up at her and nodded. Lit another cigarette and exhaled a plume of acrid smoke. He thought it covered his sigh. She heard it all the same.

She had grown sick of his sighing. He, in turn, was weary of her constant protests; interruptions; and dismissals. He was just plain tired.

"Yeah. You said that earlier," he said.

He neglected to add that not five minutes before, he had given up the same response. He watched a larder beetle drop into a gap between the floorboards to escape a shaft of paling sunlight. It wasn't that they were everywhere. It was that the actuality of their cohabitation was tacit which aggravated him more than just a little. And their deftness in eluding rent. They scurried while he squatted.

She looked at him in disgust and hurried into the kitchen. He overheard the sound of crockery scraping and knocking against the taps. The sound of running water and plumbing groaning. He wondered how many cups might survive the tea making ritual on this occasion ? If he would be prompted to go outside and grudgingly purchase some more.

"You know, " she said, her colour rising in spite of her determination to remain unperturbed. "You really ought to do something."

He belched out more smoke, and rose to his feet irritably as the coughing started up again.

He could hear the children fighting in the next room.

"Yeah, " he said. "You said that earlier."

Ib Sibling

addendum:

She was right, he needed to do something. He picked up the pair of shears lying beside the chair & walked quietly into the kitchen. He felt the tiredness drain from his being.

NØ

Life’s a Drag, Petrolhead

Today I feel crippled by inertia and irritated by the nagging impulse to 'do'. There are many things I could do; there are many things I should be doing. Already I am on my sixth cup of coffee of the morning, and I am drumming my fingers next to the keyboard and mentally logging strokes.

Woolworths is in the death throes of its closing down sale. I should throw on my jacket and speedwalk on over there to see if there are any bargains still to be had. Ignore the pained expressions of the soon to be jobless drones manning the cash registers and throw in my lot with the slavering mob. The prospect of doing so is not overwhelmingly appealing. Ho-fucking-ho. If I suffered from hemorrhoids, I would sooner scratch my ass.

Ib Sibling

Whispa Cat in a Sinister Hat

There is a single overhead bulb burning in the centre of the room. It looks to be 60 watts, maximum. Not too bright and sickly yellow.

It casts a shadow like a rug on the floorboards. The detritus. Something is taped to its underside, and when I get right under it and reach out both hands it burns my fingers.

The bulb has been burning for a long time.

The adhesive is melted to the glass and when I pull on it gently it almost wrenches the bulb out its socket. I have to ignore the burning and press my fingers firmly onto the hot glass to hold it in place.

It is a Yale key. Wadded inside the masking tape like a piece of spent gum.

I sit down on an upturned packing case and turn it this way and that. It is nothing special. There is only one door leading into the room, and that is hanging from its hinges. There is nothing else in here which looks designed to hide a secret. A lot of crap and soggy cardboard.

I reach in my pockets and dig out a cigarette. I hesitate briefly before dropping the match, but everything is too damp to catch a flame. It smells of mildew and the elderly. Tumors and fungus. Water drips from a broken sink in the far corner.

I push the hair back out my face and examine the key. What a waste of fucking time.

I have not the faintest idea what it might unlock, and even if I did, what good would it do me?

I hate puzzles.

It's like a dead battery on Christmas morning. A dog wagging its tail and running circles and a cupboard full of junk.

Ib Sibling

I am a Long Odds Wager...A Dark Horse

Clouds intrude. Tubercular fingers
seizing up the blue. Pinching in
from the south-east on a mission
of little mercy. Harbingers of hard
cheese. Errand boys of slothful
mistrust; creeping pillars of rain.

Watch out for rainbows. They sneak
in from the north, winsome smiles
that inoculate and provoke confusion.

Ib Sibling

Come on, Brothers & Sisters. Follow the Pavlovian Bouncing Ball

The settee lies not just at the side of the road but in the ditch, halfway down the grassy verge of a two seater relationship come unstuck. Stunned and gasping as if reclining weight just sent it backwards on a slow sliding sprawl.

Hollowed out cushions. Sad indentations still bolstering not quite visible occupants. Ghosts.

Squat and ugly, it sits basking in 2:00 AM halogen glare. Stoned and bleeding stuffing; invalid and in denial. How did it get here? How could it have come to this? Left for dead on the hard shoulder where the hairpin bend turns savage tricks.

You blink and glance in the rear view mirror. Light another cigarette and put your foot down in the rain.

Ib Sibling

The Perfect Soundtrack to a Cocaine Deal Gone Sour

I am inordinately fond of
venting my spleen.

However.

I am often quite squeamish
when it comes to
picking up the pieces.

In the Morning.

Ib Sibling

You ars Varied Walcum, Brooders. Give Us Your Love.

apology
I shed
my skin more readily
than I do
a grievance. Or
a grudge.

It is not
an attractive
characteristic,
I know.

I concede that much.
I concur.

But,
coming out my hole
like
invertebrates, generally,
tasting the air,
I do my best to let
it
slide.

Ib Sibling

Hasta la Vista & a Glasgow Kiss

 

Just this morning after dropping my son off at school I witnessed a fight. That it was immediately preceded by much shouting and hurling of threats is usually enough to convince me that such an event will probably not escalate into serious violence.

It was too public, in addition. Scores of people looked on impatiently to see if anything juicy might materialize out of it. An entertaining scrap of a story to later trade with work colleagues over lunch. I met Rosa coming in the opposite direction and, since she had to queue to withdraw money from a cash dispenser, it provided me with the perfect pretext to stop, look and listen.

The confrontation appeared to be prompted by an incident involving both parties' children. Neither of whom were present by this point. Possibly, those kids had exchanged blows earlier. Or one of their parents had said something out of turn.

This in itself is sometimes enough to ignite a major incident. A couple of months ago a child's father was concussed with a claw-hammer outside his daughter's school. The young man wielding the offending instrument - a parent himself - did not pause in cycling past the playground to reassure himself that serious injury had been done. Vengeance was dispensed. The hoods were up and identities protected.

After a fashion.

Anyway, the exchange of insults this morning reached a more dramatic conclusion than I expected. One woman kneed the other into the street and fell on her with fists and feet. Somebody in the queue for cash behind me laughed. The victorious woman's partner stood above the bloodied party and jabbed his finger at her lying prone in the road. His face was marked with intersecting lines of scar tissue.

Open razors are still very popular in Glasgow, although carpet knives are more frequently the weapons of choice. They can easily be folded away, of course, and are less awkward to attempt to explain away.

I know him and his wife vaguely. To nod to at least. He walks a pit-bull regularly, and his wife sometimes says hello. Despite appearances, neither of them have struck me as being unpleasant in the past. Or best avoided. There are far worse out there. More indiscriminate offenders.

The fracas drew to a close without a blade being drawn. That much was evident, and I dare say some people were disappointed.

There will be repercussions, though. No doubt.

"Tell your man I'm goin' to fuckin' do him an' a'!"

And turning to his wife. "And don't fuckin' get me out my bed for fuckin' pish like that again."

My apologies if I've labored the event. Maybe you too were hoping for a more visceral denouement. \

Ib Sibling

A Scream from the Balcony

 

It's after 4:00 AM here in this shitty tower block and I can't get back to sleep, brothers and sisters. Oddly, the little clocks on my sidebar both seem to have disappeared. Who knows for sure? Maybe they have decided to strip the code off the page and let me bleed out into the black. I have no idea any more what time it is in New York. 

Ib Sibling

Where Would Punk Rock Be Without Neil Young ?

Before the new day shyly arrives with its threat of tortured failure and betrayal, I want to give up a little honesty. This is for Beer and Matt and Nathan and Brushback - who I very nearly forgot to mention in my inebriated state - and Jon and a whole lot of others. Keep On Keeping On, motherf@ckers.

I just glanced up at the kitchen clock. I'm too late.

Ib Sibling

Ideal for Any Funeral as an Antidote to the Bogus Angst of the Big Chill

 

Several years back, I bumped into a roadie in a bar in Glasgow. He was taking a break from rigging a tent for T in the Park. I despise T in the Park. The only thing remotely appealing about this event is that it's sponsored by Tennents, a Glaswegian brewery. I told the roadie this and he concurred good-naturedly. He was a decent bloke. I asked him who was headlining in this tent and he grimaced and looked away. Travis, he replied. Bad luck, I said. We both laughed and ordered another drink. A pint of lager for him; a Jack Daniels for me. He took out some rolling tobacco and I offered him a cigarette. On his left arm he wore a tattoo of his young daughter. We swapped stories regarding tattoo parlours and the perils therein. Above the newly inscribed tattoo I could make out something much older, indelibly reposing in the folds of his shirt. I squinted and gasped. "The Ruts D.C." was the partially obscured legend, an open invitation to a brotherhood of tainted blood and a sibling regret.

Ib Sibling