A ditty by Doctorshoot to be recited out loud after several scotches and in the style of the brilliant John Cooper-Clarke
-
Constriction visits my chest perhaps because these cigarettes have
tarnished me burnished me vanquished me banished me from
the field of sports
ravaged me savage tar nicotar push me out throw me down
cough me off slough me off gasp me out rasp me out
lasting out inbetween fags like the stub of a man
highlunged man who once ran so / ran so /
ran the lengths with a burst
finishing burst finishing first lost that thirst now I’ve cursed
my veins my heart my head my hopes and give cancer a chance….
and the lungs bellow lungs bellow bellows
bellow out just below the next smoke next moment
next moment next moment bellows my lungs
could be the one – cough! cough! – could be the one
I’m sorry to say
here is your last sentence, cough your way through it….
But then
Maybe my chest is constricted because of
the motor cars passing me charging me rushing me battering one
battery down on another one battering rams splattering rams
motor car rotor car crossing kids tossing kids splitting lids
splatter bids bleeping and blasting and smogging and fogging me
petrol in money out stifling rifling stacking and jamming and
rushing the green orange screech at the red with their
stress factor mess factor hell bent let hell loose and
lined faces twitching from white line line fever or
is it
hard artery fever or is it the
galloping gear-change accelerator factor clutching me?
my – cough – cough – chest….
But look
Why should I care
when the trees are endangered and cut down and burned up and
woodchipped and cardboarded threeplied and hardboarded
cleared off and burned off and cast off and….
they don’t have chests to constrict but they die so
why worry why care
if I work enough hours and build enough towers
they say I can be an Australian millionaire…. like
Langhang in a plane or reefbuster Joh making cash by the bucketfull
flash flesh the skilletfull
millions you’re laughing and double it twice
and
in Switzerland clinics for cancer are nice…
-
Footnotes:
“Langhang in a plane” refers to the late Lang Hangcock spotting red mountains which he determined to be iron ore and later staked it out and founded the Iron Ore mining industry in Australia
“Reefbuster Joh” refers to the late premier of Queensland who when asked about his plans to mine the great barrier reef is reputed to have said: “don’t you worry about that, it’s only coral and there’s plenty more”
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42 comments:
I haven't time to kick back and enjoy this site yet, a treat saved for later.
John Cooper Clark's fans may enjoy this rather literal interpretation of his meisterwerk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZymVWuMKVk.
Nearly thirty years on, and having read millions of words by others, JCC's stuff is still as funny, as bittersweet and as biting as anything produced in the interim.
this is a riot! Love it and unfortunately, wheeze, associate with it all too well
I'd echo the good doctor and advise anyone to read it aloud and let it sing for itself
really great, the last verse especially has a life of it's own, full of character as always, thanks and more?
cheers file
I wish it was fiction....
Doc - Loved it. Gave it the JCC treatment with as much of a Salford accent as I could muster.
As a kid, I was given the gift of bronchitis with its wheezes and coughing fits. Not as dangerous nor as debilitating as asthma, but more than enough to put me off smoking for life.
As an aside, since the kids came along, I've barely been in a pub, so I very seldom come into contact with smoke at all - when I do, it is horrendous. I'm just a coughing machine with streaming eyes and Jane Birkin breathing all night.
Either I'm used to London's exhaust fumes (but in 27C heat they make me cough too) or the demon smokes are much, much worse than the cars. I think the latter.
Thanks Doc - my mother's still on plenty a day and if the big C doesn't get her, the waking up for a fag 4.00am will in blackened ashes.
It's the diabetes will do for me!
hmm, riot of rythym, of movement, of current
not knowing any context for poetic non-fiction can be bit of a banana skin I fear
but the music here sings for itself, has a life of it's own, and the last line just hangs like the flat joke it is
I've smoked for more than 20 years but I've always been active, now I'm starting to feel it too and I've started to look at the fillets and think more seriously about things...
Mouth
it's an odd thing but I was told how smoggy and polluted London is and witnessed the traffic first hand from the back of cabs and upstairs in buses (staying out in the reggae heartland) but I never found the smog oppressive. Inner London air actually felt clean and sparkling to me.
Perhaps that is because there is such a big population cleaning the air with their lungs.
Woody Allen said he likes to run at the back of the New York marathon because he has five thousand people in front of him hoovering all the pollution out of the air.
File
it is a risk slotting a flat black joke into a poem but most of us have lost somebody to cancer and Zeph opened the door, so I had a few whiskies and slipped in there.
Older types tell me of London and other cities before the Clean Air Acts of the late fifties when a smogs would kill more than the Blitz.
It's seldom too horrendous for me now, but the first thing that hits me when I go to Sweden, is the clarity of the air - and it keeps hitting me every day that I'm there.
Mouth
you can be sure that too much clean air can kill you too:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E07E3D61F39F930A15753C1A96F958260
London is kept reasonably clear by the prevailing winds, I think. And the number of parks and gardens. But you do notice the pollution along the big main roads, especially in the summer.
I really like this, doc - you guys keep on writing such good stuff!
Zeph
my trouble is that I never got control of the pinball game of emotions and experiences that have rushed into my zone....
too many fabulously high scores and terrible low scores, and free games over and over....
and addicted to writing about it but never getting it beyond my hand and....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ug0I07CeE
one of the truly bizarre things, to my mind, is to watch hundreds of Bangkok Thais doing their evening aerobics in gangs around the capital, not 5 metres from the busiest streets
but now, because of spueds, I understand the true selflessness of their actions, hoovering the cities air for all
doc,
I think that this poem is really good, how do I know? 'cos it stays with me after I leave it
I think you manipulate rhythms with the ease of an old lion tamer with old lions
and my reading of the last stanza is that you are being bitingly and brilliantly sardonic
but not knowing if you are writing as someone just diagnosed with something awful, or on behalf of someone you know
or if you are writing, as I have myself, of your encroaching, and as yet unrealised fears about your health means that my praise of your 'beat mastery' might be misconstrued as flippancy over the subject
which it isn't, this is the banana skin I saw on the floor
I think it's a bit like Offside's defence mechanism of humour revealed in the thread to Zeph's 'Her Room', I am much more comfortable waxing lyrical over your poetry skills than addressing the reality of serious illness
and not knowing which is more pertinant (context) I will choose the positive
what I'm trying to say is that I hope my dirty great hobnailed boots didn't clomp around all over anyone's Persian rug
File
I once dreamed I was a baby elephant with a badly wounded knee and twelve months later to the day had a motorcycle crash and smashed my knee.
I don't think there is really any difference between the dreaming and the reality, and as you so clearly indicate, that poetry if it has any worth cuts into both the personal and universal truths equally.
no persian rug worth it's weaving would resile from hobnail boots, oiled toes, or flight, and to have yours amongst them is an honour. only to be left untouched in time's storehouse would be a shame, otherwise all else are signatures marking out the shape of tomorrow's elephants in this small tapestry slice of our collective dreaming....
d,
you're too kind and too powerful
your words in that last post cut
I'm here planning to learn more about relationship to dreams when I get back to Canada later this year, no idea if the approach of the first Australians and that of the first nations is similar or not, would be interesting to keep a dialogue going
this is a collective dream, nail meet head!
thanks doc, you got the medicine I need!
oh, sorry about your knee
....though the lions are still in the lead I fear as regards my abilities, nevertheless file you read my intent with startling accuracy.
must be that tropical air.... I am jealous of course
File
your engagement with indigenous canadians after thailand will be some journey.
There is a lot of cross refencing amongs indigenous australian and canadian philosophers and one hopes they can gain sufficient foothold to give western cultures the spiritual leadership we are so direly in need of after the fall of the church at the hands of science.
no doubt we will stay tuned here in zephie's wing of ebren's secret castle...
I guess the lions are always in the lead really
it's only by consent that they aren't already licking our bones
but while they are in our arena, they do what we tell them
or what you tell them, when I crack the whip my lions just laugh
no doubt, it's a bit like that room in Hogwarts, that's only there if you call it
some journey just about sums it up, just have to take care that we don't end up with frozen fillets!
is it not tropical where you are then?
spiritual leadership or personal spiritual practice?
hey File
I just noticed that a 'system administrator' deleted two posts toward the end of my 'when sorry seems the hardest word' blog comments....
hmmm
cannot remmeber now what offside said or what I said but must have been driunk and said something offensive!! dear oh dear.... just like being back on GU
yeh I noticed that
it is a bit like the big GU brother except here we can shout
ZEPH, OH ZEPHIRINE, COME ANSWER CALLS OF DOMINION AND REPRESSION!
of course, big sister won't have woken up yet, it might take a bit before her tousled, sleepy eyed bad self get's back to us
perhaps she'd been on the firewatter herself and in mortal indignation and floral rage ... she wiped them
I guess I mean spiritual leadership in the big sense - a world vision based upon personal responsibility and collective good....
though of course plenty of indigenous cultures engaged in what we might term unacceptable practices in order to stay in tough with their gods, but an overview of harmony and good is needed to bring this dark age of invasions and war to a closure...
I hate it when a typo improves upon one's intent...
I meant touch not tough, but leave it with tough as it works in a wider way....
I agree that there has to be codes, but without clear minded personal exploration and experience doesn't it just become another dogma?
agreed File
I'm talking about leadership through ancient philosophy even if in a new context...
Hi guys, sorry, different time zone. What an intersting conversation.
I only deleted those posts because they had people's email addresses in. Since I set up this blog, many kind correspondents from all over the world have written to the address above offering me large sums of money in return for a trifling bit of financial aid. Or cheap viagra. Or both. So undoubtedly these blogs can be trawled for email addresses.
cool zeph
and sensible decision
though large sums of cash and viagra can be a heady mix if accepted....
understood zeph, I'm sure email addresses could be exchanged through your good offices if neccessary non?
really thought your piece on the Windies was amazingly good, well dun!
doc, It's great that we seem to agree on the importance of spirituality in life, for many people tho it's either twisted or ignored
how evangelical christians like Bush and Blair (don't know about Howard), or committed Muslims, or Budhist TH pm's, or Hindi Kashmiri's, or intelligent Jews etc etc ... can repeatedly defile the central tenets of their faiths vis a vis killing people with aplomb
is beyond me
it just means that they have no idea of spiritual truth whatever the true name of their dog
not sure if folk need a new leader or just a change of perspective
yes agreed File.
I was talking about 'leadership' not 'a leader';
leadership in the sense of having the courage to debate sensitive issues openly and transparently free of the agendas of greed or megalomaniacal thirst for power over others...
leadership in the sense of providing role models for ethical decisionmaking etc...
ahhh but now I'm raving beyond the pale I do fear.....
doc and others: I will read this more carefully with some time in hand over the next few days, but good stuff. JCC was part of the "alternative" scene I inhabited as a fan and a professional, and it's great to see this here.
Ivor Cutler, anyone?
"Life in a Scottish Sitting Room Volume II" I'm off to youtube him.
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Mimi
great tip-in you genius
I am invigorated all over again and send you chocolates and flowers....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMpQGBUJYPo&mode=related&search=
Doc, if you ever publish a book of your poems it should be called 'Tomorrow's Elephants'.
(if mystified, read posts above)
or even
'All Tomorrow's Elephants' featuring Nico on vocals
doc: thanks - the best Cutler, I think, is The Man with the Trembly Nose and I can't find it anywhere but maybe extant on a Peel Session somewhere.
Mouth and other Londoners - I don't know what it's like now, haven't been back in years, but why I left had a lot to do with pollution. I'd been up here for a few days hols, and took the sleeper back from Inverness. Arrived at Euston on a very hot August morning, and the place just stank of diesel and there was a miasmic veil of filth over everything. At that moment, I realised that I would leave. Took 6 months, but was the best thing I ever did.
Mimi - the older I get the more likely it becomes.
Although having a bolthole in rural Sweden is handy as an antidote.
psssssst, Doc, do you have a light?
offie
yeah
glad you are still around the corner
Nice thread, and lovely piece of writing doc.
My parents left London in part because it was becoming too crowded and busy.
It was 1962.
When my dad visited me in London 5 years ago, as quite a frail old man, he was dumbstruck, not least by the 45 minute journey to cover the 3 miles from Euston to Hackney.
I miss him. He would have been 84 today.
And yet London has no favelas, no shanties, no slums. Londoners tolerate each other incredibly well in the circumstances. For all its faults, it is a remarkable place.
But I don't live there anymore.
I am always just around the corner. It's just never the same corner these days. Connection is a bit of a hazard...
Bluedaddy
thank you for comments and I'm not sure I could ever live there although I was pleasantly surprised by the village within a metropolis feel....
Offie in tolouse
just finding the time to read my daily servings is precarious out here in the sub tropical wilderness....
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