King Can

Another day another poem dear reader.

I wrote this a few weeks ago, and put it up at the

As/Is

website, where I post under the nom de plume of Scalljah and this site is a collaborative blog where Langpo poets weave their po mo madness, and has been the most instrumental point of my development over the last year. Sheila Murphy posts there and in the next few days I will begin to reveal the various experiences that have occured to me on a poetical level, which are the reasons I have faith in the divinatory aspect of poetry. There have been a couple of inexplicable occurences between myself and other poets, and the story of me and Sheila is one of them.

So that's something to look forward to, absent viewer, as Stephen King would say. He reckons that writing is no more than telepathy, the writer sending out his mind and the reader drawing themselves into it. His book "On Writing" is the best how to write manual going, and the history behind him writing it is also very interesting. He got very badly hit by a juggernaut and wrote it as part of his recovery after coming out of the coma. In the opening spiel he says that although he had been asked many times to write such a book he was against the idea because he thought

"Who am I to tell anyone how to write?"

And although he is gilding the lilly a bit the basic humanity of the man is obvious, as the voice is him, not one of his characters. And no matter what people's opinion of his work is, it cannot be denied that he is one of the most prolific writers ever, a born natural waffler. In the book he says that during interviews a common question is -

"How do you write?"

And his reply is

"One word at a time."

He says that some of the interviwers think he's being funny, but this is his genuine philosophy on the whole affair, and it cannot really be faulted, and I think most people who've been writing a while would latch onto this as carrying truthful weight. In his writing book he describes writing his epic book "The Stand." Up till this point he had been a major booze and drug freak, and his writing routine was supping ale, smoking and dancing at the keyboard, spilling out his mind in a half gone state. He would have been in his late 30's at this point and then halfway through the book he hit bottom and quit the drink and drugs madness, and this is clearly discernable in the book. The first half is all about 98% of the global population getting wiped out after a doomsday biochemical weapons leak from a top security military base, and it is very dark with some wickedly funny baddies. The second half is when the two communities representing good and evil fight it out, and a lot more emphasis on the loving and lighter side of existence rather than the conveyor belt of horror and baddies of the first half of the book, written when he was at the peak of his drunkeness. By the time he decided to quit, half way through the book, he said the plot was a nightmare as he had created so many characters he couldn't figure a way of tyinf it all up; so what does he do. Blows them all with a nuclear bomb that his "Trash Can Man" character drags to the baddie HQ of Las Vegas, and the goodie grouping in the mountains of Colorado all live happily ever after. Class A entertainment with a rehabbed second half.

Mental Illness

I like shopping in Asda
stalking the bag lady shuffling down Bride Street
supping Dutch export
collapsing in gutters
scaring my reflection
daring to be a dickhead
tipping a wink to the lunatic fringe
on ward role play with bi-polar patients
making gags 'bout all weather tellytubbies
a bit of bully,
tossing double top to finish off.
and walking in tandem with women on tow paths.

Dogging at Rufford lock
watching the Linnets at Vickie park
dancing at Barons with Burscough Billets
metaphorically vomiting on the queen mothers'
headstone in her crypt of remembrance at Windsor
and filling my boots on the slopes of Paranassus
with laurel stems
woven in a crown I make believe my own;

fantasy gifts of Minerva, Mnemosyne, Appollo and Ogma
having a party and letting me know

"We are ones who make
glitter and red carpet treatment

turned Bob Dylan to Homer

rock the souls of Elvis, John
Liam and Noel

so go tell the world of gods
whose secrets unlocked reveal
an oasis of monkeys and beatles
day-dreaming you too will join them
here beneath Partholan skies."