Violet Trefusism II:

‘We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving: we may appear to ourselves to be as much in love at other times - so does a day in early September, though it is six hours shorter, seem as hot as one in June. And on how that first love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.'

Violet covered this section of Cyril Connolly's 'The Unquiet Grave' in red pen, elle était d'accord, je crois.

Vampires

Philip Burne-Jones, The Vampire, 1897.

---

A drossy truss, and I unfurl my gizzard
It crankles, my ear blizzards
the pitch and yaw of campfire
shadows, and a vampire clash in
the rush, the meadow, the ohm
and slake as her teeth gorge
her sack, her flabby bosom sack,
held by teenage bones,
with my iron and feelings.
I trust the cross
no more. Ugh, I roll and
she bloats and moans,
slaps me with gorgeous groans,
I should have ate a baby
she says her dress comes undone
I vacillate, I wish I didn't have to
but pale and poor I
unhinge my jaw and lie waiting for
the gush, from out her lips
spill lumpen bloods, bits of hair,
teeth, mud, bits of womb, doom,
bits of cud. I drink and slake,
and comble her naked nipple,
I chat and masturbate,
rake a pale ring around where
she tans in pasties,
I tear at her, tongue weave,
suck and heave,
it gets in her carpet-sleeve,
ugh, she is a repellent monster
she looks like a corpse
she blushes when she comes.

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Here are the most baroquely named English language poets I have discovered during my recent endeavour to read through as much 19th Century English and French literature as I can stand in one year, placed in subjective order of onomastic rococoness.


Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel, (1834-1894). Not really a marvellous poet, although Sir Edward Elgar put his 'Sea Slumber Song' to music, he was however a rather typical English aristocrat, highly educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, before wandering for years around the near East. He died in a train station in Mainz. He was often known as simply 'Noël', amusingly.

'Our wailing sighs leap winged, live talismanic words,
Dull woes and errors tempered to seraphic swords,
Love's colour chorus flames with glorious morning-red,
His alchemy transmuting the poured heart's blood of our dead,
And lurid bale from murderous eyes of souls who inly bled!'

An awful lot of Milton read at Trinity during the 1850's, it seems. From his De Profundis.


Henry Nutcombe Oxenham, (1829-1888). Sounds rather like a Peter Cook creation, but was in fact a dull religious poet, not even venturing much into mysticism, possibly because he spent most of his life in Germany, often in the company of the also oddly-monikered Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger.

'"They have not set Me for a sign,
Hung bare beneath the sunless sky,
Nor mixed the draught of gall and wine
To mock My dying agony."'

From The Child-Christ on the Cross. All very dull.



Algernon Charles Swinburne, (1837-1909). Ah, Swinburne. Only John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are as enjoyable to me among the English Romantics. His poetry was devilish, rude, filthy even, as well as blasphemous and revolutionary. The 'libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs' was one of the great masters of rhyme and metre, only matched, perhaps, by Keats and Wilfred Owen, although his penchant for ornate language has caused him to fall out of the main canon of English poets. Swinburne lived a life of sheer fantasy, imagining himself as an incarnation François Villon, the savage French poet of the 15th Century (in Swinburne's 'Ballad of François Villon') and as a debauched and wild scourge on Victorian society. In truth, he was rather more talk than action, and his exaggerated claims of sexual adventure excited derision from Oscar Wilde and the other 'true' decadents. In time he withdrew to a house in Norfolk with his best friend, withered by the fin-de-siècle spirit of modernisation, industrialisation and little time allowed for outward reverie. He 'ate like a caterpillar and slept like a dormouse' while there, accepting occasional visitors to his strange cyclical world of walking, reading, writing and internal fantasy. Not in literary terms, but in celebrity he was a successor to Lord Byron and contemporary of Wilde, but he is now reduced to something of a curiosity, at least for the time being.

A Pre-Raphaelite at heart, he tended towards the subjects of sex and death, augmented somewhat with what we now know as sado-masochism (a great gift from the world of literature to the world of sexuality, it should be noted). Swinburne seemed often to try to mask his most controversial works, mixing in obscure classical references with other imagery that was already becoming platitudinous among decadent poets, such as wine being poured at every opportunity into every orifice. However, his attempts to veil his work in this way were feeble, and the passion and provocation are plain to see:

'O lips full of lust and of laughter,

Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,

Bite hard, lest remembrance come after

And press with new lips where you pressed.

For my heart too springs up at the pressure,

Mine eyelids too moisten and burn;

Ah, feed me and fill me with pleasure,

Ere pain come in turn.'

From Dolores, Our Lady of Pain, and also:

'By the ravenous teeth that have smitten

Through the kisses that blossom and bud,

By the lips intertwisted and bitten

Till the foam has a savour of blood,

By the pulse as it rises and falters,

By the hands as they slacken and strain,

I adjure thee, respond from thine altars,

Our Lady of Pain.'

For the record, I plan to name my children Algernon and Violet.



Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore, (1823 - 1896). This is a brilliant name which sounds like a local radio advertisement informing you of new Beds Direct locations in the midlands area. Coventry was, in fact, a peripheral member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, contributing one poem to The Germ and befriending Dante Gabriel Rossetti (another decent name) and William Holman Hunt. He spent nearly twenty years working as the assistant librarian at the British Museum, a job that sounds wonderful for five minutes until you realise how deathly-boring working in libraries probably is, even the incredible British Museum reading room. Patmore is mostly forgotten today, although his poetry is interesting, intelligent and highly melodic. Much of his middle-period of work was dedicated to his late first wife, although its high idealism of Victorian femininity must have seemed naive and old-fashioned even then. His humourless disposition lead him in time to criticism rather than poetry, and somewhat inevitably to the Roman Catholic Church. He remarried in 1865, but between 1880 and 1883 he lost his second wife, his daughter and his son to illness, managing to marry a third time to a friend of his deceased daughter.

Charming excerpt from The Toys

'My little Son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes

And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,

I struck him, and dismiss'd

With hard words and unkiss'd,

His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

I visited his bed,

But found him slumbering deep,

With darken'd eyelids, and their lashes yet

From his late sobbing wet.

And I, with moan,

Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;'


Wilfred Rowland Mary Childe, (1890-1952). High points for androgyny and high points for obscurity as well. I was surprised to see that my 'Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse' had him as still alive, before quickly realising that was perfectly feasible in my 1941 edition. Further research yielded very little, until I stumbled upon the 'Great War Forum', which is just as grand as it sounds, and the crossover between the Great War and poetry continues to fascinate people it seems - helped all the more that 'Mary' had three brothers who fought in campaigns during 1914-1918, including one killed-in-action in December 1915. Childe was a lecturer at Leeds University for a long time and seems, un-poetically, not to have served in the army at all, although he did manage to die on Remembrance Sunday.

'The sea-wave crashes in my ears;
Again their viols cease:
I have been here for endless years,
And the room is full of peace.
Dim-sliding harmonies
And dreaming voice of seers
Come past all barriers:
With God I have no fears,
And round me roll his seas.'

From Turris Eburnea. Excellent glide from semi-colon to colon to comma to full stop.



Frederick William Orde Ward, (1843-1922). Quite a mouthful in its entirety, and also, strangely, very easy to confuse with other people - firstly with Frederick William Henry Myers, his slightly better known contemporary who it appears was born, possibly, on the same day, meaning they are usually next to each other in poetry anthologies. Also, not to be confused with Frederick William Ward, best known as 'Captain Thunderbolt', one of those marauding Australian multifarious criminals of the 19th Century, the progeny of Newgate's finest. Anyway, Orde Ward was pretty good and I'm not sure why he is so little-known, I really quite like him.

'I saw with vision that was more than sight,
The levers and the laws
That fashion stars as straws
And link with perfect loveliness of right,
In the pure duty that is pure delight
And to one Centre draws.'

From The Beatific Vision.

'Captain Thunderbolt', ci-dessous.

Mitya Dreams Of Salome

Mitya Goes Blind

Yuri's Chair

This is one of the thirty or so little pieces I'm doing as an accompaniment to the book I'm writing.

Exerpt from 'Mitya'

I sit in front of the Yuri Gagarin memorial in Star City, and try to make everything slow down. I realise that I have done more than I could hope to do again, because soon enough, sooner than yesterday or ever before, I will die. I am getting older and every memory of the past gallops away from me into the distance. It disturbs me as I can now see the end of the road and only a dusty cloud over the beginning of it.

There is so little time left. I can slow it down by thinking of Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov and also from telling my story. It began, at least the most memorable part did, in this same place I am now. Then, I would watch myself in the mirror of my simple dormitory in Star City, as we called the small secret town in which we worked and lived, squinting and looking distantly through the glass to see if I could see a Leonov somewhere in me, if I could ever go where he had been.
I wanted to tell people about the twinkle of the seas under the sun, the beauty of the veldts of southern Africa, of my breath escaping into the atmosphere to float far beyond the breath of humankind. I wanted to see the world's great cities swept up like dust into grey piles, I wanted to know if they would look still and tranquil as if I were looking down on ancient and abandoned civilisations, or if I looked very hard I could see it throb and tremble with life. I wanted to see the fingerprints of weather systems working their way across the planet, each one unique. I wanted the Nile, the Ganges, the Amazon all within minutes of each other, reflections of the tired red veins of my disbelieving eyes.

I knew that a mission like Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov’s first flight would excite me, all I saw then was a perfect rationale in risking my neck to be the first to do something or other, anything, just to be written down somewhere. I was unfortunate that I was born a little young to join the first wave of great men in space. I would be fondling the crudely bored footholds of Leonov and Gagarin and all the other heroes, scaling space with the sherpas of technology and the hereditary knowledge of second generation pioneers. Ever since I misplaced God at around the age of twelve, all I had wanted was to be in space and see the world as pretty as a pea below me, capture it between my opposable digits, and squash it into oblivion. I thought how satisfying it would be if, having squeezed with all my might, a large olive pip might shoot from the Pacific Ocean, spearing Venus in its path.

Untitled No. 256, retitled.

Ode to Vulva, for Victoria 'Vita' Sackville-West.

We were a couple of unskilled sleepers
imperfectly awake. I am sorry
Victoria, I have tried to become you.
I saw you hung from your halo, holding
your mother’s crucifix as your tongue made

new lovers of all of your teeth. I was
thicker tongued when muddied fingers pulped the
wet pages, then you wrote on my wrist the
names of your first lays as I ran blinded
into you; it’s hard to stop a wet mouth from

bleeding, the taste of your pig-iron lip on
my tongue turned the words bitter. We sat in
rain-cars, rubbed candles onto your antique
blue womb and you pulled up your skirt, checked your
maw in the purseflap mirror. A mouth cast

from the vulva of Aphrodite sang
the words from the dead wet letter, marked ‘To
Ophelia’, but given to me on
that frozen night of robed men digging their
silent, acrid tongues into the cores of jade

green apples, tasting for a dirty seed:
‘Here’s hello from what you will become, from your
distended dreams of lithium, from what
will become all that you should have done.’

Untitled No. 391

I was alone in the park where the frozen ground had forgotten the hot soles of summer’s children’s feet, all alone except for the ghost of a girl of whom I dreamt so often she has lost her reality.
Sometimes there were a hundred dreams a day, each one burning like little hairs in a flame. The phantom girl sat and her hair, one hundred thousand shreds of darkness, grew under my nails and I watched it travel up my veins, marking which junctions it took as it filled my body with shadows. Her face was not worn from kisses, not creased from the fumbled pressings of fetching but unwanted men throughout decades.
She was once the girl that loved me, but now she is mute and can never tell me. She is still the girl I love, but she is deaf and dumb and blind and made of thin air, nighthaze and woodsmoke so I can’t let her know. I drag her down this way to save myself the horrors of vertigo, the terrors of claustrophobia that leap on me and beat me just when I think I’m gliding.
I prefer the sharp suffering of this violent cold on the soles of my dejected indigo feet. Every moment she slips further away, overused, she is yellowing at the edges, carrying that smell of old and fingered books, her skin feels like thin-worn crotch-denim and the question is that now she is immortal, where do I keep her?
I want to carry her to a great wonder, let her pull upon the mane of the Sphinx and ride him into the core of the earth, into the climax of the suns where I cannot reach her again. I want her to charge through me and break all of my bones so that I cannot wrap my arms and legs around her shadow at night in the way I am programmed so vividly to do, so that I cannot tatter her threadbare breasts and cheeks anymore and destroy her through mythology.
I want her to disappear into brilliant lights that are unknown to us who are content with the dim flicker of streetlamps, the feint emissions of traffic signals, the sickly jewellery of the moon which masks its abominable gravity. I want her to fall bald as a stone, as distended as a rotten fox so that I might become disgusted with her at last, as she leaks nothing, emits no scent and will not age or repulse me.

Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West, poet, novelist and gardener (1892 - 1962).

Vita has been an excellent muse and an excellent ancestor to me. My interest has picked up dramatically in recent months having read Victoria Glendinning's marvellous biography 'Vita', as well as 'From Violet to Vita', the flamboyant, desperate and beautiful letters of Violet Trefusis.

Here's what Violet (ci-dessous) had to say about her:















'You are my lover and I am your mistress and kingdoms and empires and governments have tottered and succumbed before now to that mighty combination.'


Indeed.

La légion de Mystères douloureux No. 4: 'Innocent and Vain'

I can't imagine that there is a darker album ever made than this. Nico reveals, piece by piece, all of the disturbing elements of her past life, with the morbid, gothic harmonium sounds produced by John Cale and Brian Eno, building from the medieval tales of chivalry on 'It Has Not Taken Long' and 'Secret Side', through to the tragic freedom of Weimar Germany ('Innocent and Vain') and the howling metallic strains of the rise of the Nazism which haunted her for much of her life - the last song is a bare and brutal full-versed version of Haydn's anthem 'Das Lied Der Deutschen', recorded in support of the German left-wing terrorist Andreas Baader. Nico also covers her love affair with Jim Morrison in 'You Forgot To Answer', telling of how she called him repeatedly, unaware he had died in Paris.

This record sits so far away from everything else that was released around the same time it's ridiculous - the endless, derivative American folk-rock churned out sounds so feeble compared to this album which transcends centuries, horrors and the quiet destruction of a European icon.

La légion de Mystères douloureux No. 3: 'The Colour of Pomegranates'

Sergei Parajanov, Sayat Nova (1968)

I've long been fascinated by three cultures more than most, namely Russia/The Soviet Union, the Catholic aesthetic prevalent in Franco-Italian culture and also the history of Iran and Persia. Sergei Parajanov's film about the Armenian-Azeri poet Harutyun Sayatyan, known as 'Sayat Nova' (The King of Songs) is a precise three-way balance of all of these. Sayat Nova was born to a peasant family near Tflisi on the 14th of June 1712, and survived until the 22nd of September 1795 when, at 83, he was executed by the invading army of the Persian Shah Agha Muhammad Khan.



Sayat Nova lived in an Armenia that was something of an outpost of the Christian Church, being bordered by large, powerful and mostly unfriendly countries (Persia, in particular) helped create a deeply religious and paranoid society, in spite of occasional support from the French monarchy. He employed music and poetry in the popular folk tradition, and although religious through most of his life, much of his work, especially as a younger man, was secular and an early example of romanticism in poetry. He was politically motivated too, performing for the King of Georgia and helping form an alliance between the two countries against the Persians. His mastery of the Armenian language and fluency in Georgian, Azeri, Arabic and Azerbaijani allowed his fame to grow. He was forced to take to the road as a troubadour in a fit of depression after falling in love with the daughter of the Georgian King and being expelled from court.

Sayat Nova's use of of secular and romantic imagery, often dark and troubled lyric poetry mixed with early surrealism and expressionism along with his troubadour image, political motives against an opressive (Persian) presence in his country and his employment of popular folk traditions make him something of an 18th Century Bob Dylan of the Caucases.



Sergei Parajanov's film version is a biography of the poet's journey from childhood, each scene a surreal and symbolist vision of the poet's life, work and the contemporary religious and peasant life in Armenia. Particular attention is paid to books, and their importance to the young poet. 'Without books,' says a monk to the boy, 'the world would be nothing but ignorance.'

Parajanov's cinematography may have been influenced by early 20th Century Armenian painters such as Vardges Sureniants (1860 - 1921)



Salome (1907)




Firdus i reads the poem "Shah-Name" to shah Mahmud Khaznefi, (1913)

Excerpt from 'Mitya'

This is a draft passage from about one-third of the way in:



But secretly, or perhaps it is really no secret, I am defying everything in what I do – defying nature, communism, civilisation, everything. I’m going to over-expose my mind to things it ought never to see, and marvel at the reaction it gives me. It will never be able to hide that, the magnificence of space travel. I will reach into my brain, through my eyes and my ears, finger through the grey slop inside and see my fingers come through the black haze and wrap around the little marble inside, and pull it back through my orifices, and hold it out on my hand in front of me. The wonderful little marble swirled with green and blue and grey and white will sit on my palm as I look through the little porthole and swim freely in my little craft, which is buzzing around God’s apoplectically vast and infinite stomach. The thought of the little green marble somehow reminded me of the vision of my dead and frozen father. Nothing about that seemed familiar or clear in the way that everything else did during the dream. I wondered if my mind was hiding a few things in shallower graves than normal, things that might easily be uncovered if I brushed a little. On the surface it seemed clear – I’d seen my father recently, and my mother, and both were just as they had always been. So, I might well convince myself, this blue-faced cadaver so familiar to me was just a macabre imagining in a strange otherworld.

La légion de Mystères douloureux, No. 1: 'I am still the great Isis'.

In 1884, J-K Huysman's notorious aesthete creation Jean des Esseintes fell into 'the horrors of a nightmare dream' whilst looking at the paintings of Odilon Redon. There is indeed something beautifully sinister about Redon's images. The faces of his portraits seem to have been caught in a state of unpreparedness for the painting, something most conspicuous in his various 'Closed Eyes' studies. Other works, such as 'Eye-Balloon' from 1878, show ambiguous relationships between often servile or wretched creatures and their masters. The eye-balloon itself, with its bovine long lashes, stares up towards the sky in a muted sigh while fettered tightly to the winged binocular creature below it. This relationship between the giant, passive beast and a frailer, sometimes heroic, sometimes malevolent, but usually more human-like creature has prevailed since ancient times.



It is something, although within the nature of Redon's symbolist vision often surreal and dreamlike, of a feature of many of his works. 'The Raven', undoubtedly inspired by Edgar Allen Poe, sits darkly and menacingly on the sill of a placid, slightly disarranged window, guarding the uncharacteristically bright and tempting outside world from the trapped observer, much like the raven in Poe's nightmarish poem.



The cyclops figure appears again in another of Redon's paintings, peering benevolently over a mound at a sleeping naked figure - quite possibly Odysseus, plotting how he may trick Polyphemus. Odysseus himself was later to very nearly succumb to something more fragile than he, something closer to humanity even than man's cleverness - the song of the Sirens and their promises to fulfill all of Odysseus' desires violently provoking his most basic instinct of greed, and all conducted through music (here depicted in a detail of 'Ulysses and the Sirens' (1891) by John William Waterhouse).



This leads me on gently to the next installment, a record whose distorted guitar, horn and drum sounds create a hypnotic siren call, while Jeff Mangum's frail gentle voice strains and howls his dreamlike recounting of one poignant story among millions which could have been told from man's greatest fall into his own greed and malevolent desires - the Diary of Anne Frank. The record is In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Jeff Mangum created the cover artwork himself, and has said that he was inspired by turn-of-the-century European art. The first time I saw the Redon image at the top of this article, I thought immediately of the cover of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, as quite possibly did Jeff Mangum on seeing Redon's paintings for the first time.

Victoria

Tolerant kisses, Valentina,
Tolerant kisses.
I got you drunk on Mr Sheen
employed to bring flies down in a raid.
Do flies have feelings for you?

I close your eyes when I kiss
but laughed when I shut mine.
I saw Fra Angelico, and I never wanted to kiss him,
he just jumped in from the darkness
In satin gown and pomade.

I kept smelling things in your house
that prickled my memory:
Outside the art room in school,
my first cunnilingus,
pencil case,
sunflowers,
talc.

I wrote you something,
but only this poem. How more impressive
must Tolstoy have been giving 'Anna'
to his wife? And why do I never seem
to quite get good enough at this?

Hope is not a tree that bears many fruit,
but quietly oxygenates our every day.
Maybe only a poet can be exalted by
the moment when water boils,
a serious moment it is indeed.

CLARK GABLE HAS YELLOW LINE SYNDROME

That beautiful dress made of the fur of Mata Hari.
Wherever did you get it? It was soft, and the pictures were unique.

Your hair smelt blonde today. I didn't let on I was blinded by the paint I used
To cover the mildew in the bathroom - so you didn't think I was bad.

I had to throw out the shower curtain made from the silk of Errol Flynn.
I hope you don't mind. I'll read The Blind Owl to you
Because your skin smells somewhere between...the sea and a Cypress Tree.

I hadn't shaved my beard, but you wanted me to look more like Disraeli on his banknote. I was sorry.

I saw mother. We sat in the car and watched her, and the seat hugged you,
Like the splinters hugged the sailors aboard the Victory

The double-yellow lines in the road reminded you of Clark Gable,
You couldn't be bothered to explain any more than that, it was to do with the paint.

We sat outside. The sandwich was good. The weather was fine. You went.

'Don't get murdered!' I called.

TOWER BLOCK

A
p
o
i
n
t
sc
rape
ing the
cold alloyed
sky scarred by
paper cut vapour trails
a lid for the boiling pot of
seething humanity breeze blocked in.
5
Patent shoes and well pinked cheeks,
obese beaks and quacks, checking
    their almanacs for a mention of their     S
names, property fat cats screwing
Archimedean the blood from below them.
4
Floor fillers in black and white striped
uniformity, bank robbing, sex traffic
       bottlenecked in suburban tenement,      U
property is bereft, existence is theft,
deception provides criminal success.
3
Well spiked carpets, unpaid medical
bills fill the walls, the junkies den too
       smacked out to make it too high.         I
Uniformed in crystal loveboats wet/dry
vanity in black pupil chic is mediocre unique
2
Human male of no consequence seeks
well-heeled faceless female for middle
      living, above the stairwell but not the     C
hypocrisy, voting conservative democracy,
he’ll probably take a gun to her in M&S
1
Pinked cheeks again, but now cased in
leather, breathy carcass, whipped and
     clipped, vials of blood to be drunk over      I
dinner, Venus in Ermine gown and slippers,
she’ll probably take a dildo to him in S&M
G
Monomaniac devoid of hope, hooligan
misanthrope, dangerous dog owner
       voyeur left to only ever look upwards,       D
hoping to steal a cheap snap of spread legged beauty,
thinking that the scent of her flower might shake him from his mangy pot.
B
Supporting the vicious reality above him
lives the dreamer, the artist, the basement
      dweller, soaking the damp and cold and         E
turning it to beautiful things, the only truly
serious philosophical problem is suicide.

Victor Hugo Casquet's Lighthouse

Open Letter to Beatrice Dalle

Dear Beatrice Dalle,

Or the Girl Who Looks Like Her, or Acts Like Her, you know, shoplifting razorblades, fighting with metermaids on a balanced diet of cocaine and deadly nightshade. But I am aware of your divinity, as I’m lead to your wet place by my own insatiable thirst for disgrace.

I will try to enchant you with tales of our bizarre imaginary honeymoon spent in a beautiful Assyrian glade, or in Marlene Dietrich’s loftspace or at a Sublime Motorway Intersection. It doesn’t really matter about the setting with me and you.

So anyway, we’ll fuck under our motorway bridge and I’ll smash all the plates and glasses with Grecian fervor which only serves to further my affection and unbelievable L.O.V.E. for you. But I get so attached to our lyrical and poetic moments that I forget the truth that lacks lyricism, but I’ll smash away and we’ll make love on all the broken glass (and you can go on top that day).

Because, Beatrice, you know you really do look that way I like, you talk and dance with such gritty-pretty-pointed-tongues and feet. Then we’ll have baby, just one, and it will be read Rimbaud at bedtime, and tattooed with Camus, and fed Mockingbird Soup, and rubbed dry with Francis Bacon canvas, and wake up singing ‘Tu-ray-lay, tu-ray-lay, tu-ray-la-lu, seul oreiller, mur familier, il siffle l’air connu!’, and be dressed in clothes fashioned from a page of Ginsberg, and earn ten pounds for watering the windowboxes of the Flowers of Evil.

And even with child sicking and screaming you are elegant beyond all known sophistication. Yes, shoot me, shoot me, this is a ballad of a beautiful woman. And what’s more is I heard your brother went insane and that makes me feel a little more comfortable around you, and you can quote from Dorian Gray, and you never go to gymnasia and others pale against your pale complexion, and you run around sleek and nakely, unconcerned for these imaginary flaws.

And I the blue eyed boy, slip my slender Frankish frame out of your bedroom window and extinguish our candles with wax on our bodies, our candles of whose light you invited with charm and wit ‘Please, please be lit.’ When Lust becomes Limerance becomes Love. And I, who was named for Angels, warrior and messenger, And I, the boy, will throw myself at your feet and wonder at how remarkably pretty they are, fearing a glance at the rest of you, let alone inside.

So Beatrice, fare thee, fare thee well, signed MG.

Au Début

It's hard to know where to begin, particularly if one dares to be so self indulgent as to write about oneself; that is to say, I can't start at the start, from birth or childhood, because I want to write about today and yesterday.
It is important to make an introduction. I live in Paris. I have been here for four months, having run away from England with a suitcase and no money and nowhere to live.


I eloped on my own to Paris, which is much, much less fun in the beginning. Still, I had an agenda, which was to live as though I was hanging on the edge, wandering aimlessly through self-destruction, just to see what it is inside people apart from bones and blood.

So I'm opening this zoo, because people are often intrigued.

I would like to talk about May. I don't know who to thank - in a strictly agnostic world - for it being May, but, O Isis, O God/Christ/Buddha/Fuck, O in the name of Courteney Love, it pleases me. It's at this time I can erase the memory of picking up milk bottles which had little tongues of frozen cream pushing the cap up towards the sky, like a heliotrope plant screaming for the sun.

But May has a smell, like leather on the wind, like a funeral pyre of straw dolls being burnt in effigy to the coming of the big burning, the Parisian summer. The Parisian summer comes like the storms and rain, the sun burns all the microscopic and old life from the city, while the rains wash away the bits and pieces, the general flotsam of humans and humanity. I can see the trials of endurance the perma-striking French lorry drivers will have to take on, like Pantagruel's Labours, now the heat is rising. There is a sort of grazing ennui among people - they are less hungry. They move around like lizards,

But May is the perfect time, the perfect time to be 23, the time for the Girls of May; like Fuschia in Handcuffs, like Velvet in Canelle, they are improbable children.