Hello

HELLO

I am not sure at exactly what point I thought putting these stubborn little jottings together as a collection was such a good idea but here it is, I hope it pricks your conscience, gives you a measure of pleasure or at least provokes the occasional chuckle and if, in the unlikely event you do die laughing please give me a good reference in your epitaph!

Every read through tempts more tampering. As Tom Waits once said about his painting: ‘You just keep doing things to it and eventually you have to stop!” No wonder too then that it took the great poetcantor Leonard Cohen five years to write the ‘do ya’ ‘to ya’ hoo-ha of the simple sounding “Hallelujah”!

Writing or perhaps ‘wordmongering’ has been a happy compulsion rather than a hobby and as such a necessity for me. Although some of these efforts date back a few years, production stepped up on the arrival of a certain Donald J. Mistake as he became Residual in the Blight House and Dent in the United Mistakes of Americans. The wildfire of social media and arrival of the Coronavirus Pandemic with its consequent filling of hospitals and emptying of hostelries further ignited my spontaneous writing combustivity as the weirdest year of most of our lives became more unrecognisable and misshapen.

We all subscribed to the ridiculousness of being sent home and locked away, many then to drop unexpectedly like flies. A few countries also tussled with political turmoil and a smattering of certain lives mattering and we later became accustomed to the dependence on smiling eyes

replacing the far more expressive mouth so easily muffled behind some kind of respiratory barrier, taking away the opportunity to lip read for those a little deaf or struggling with a second language. How easily most succumbed to being stifled in this way.

Here you will find a series of gut reactions, emotional sputum, imperfect slips, quiet and loud rage, godless goading and empathetic hubris as well as a rant or two going not so gently into that good night, quite a bit of reflection and observation plus an awful lot of nonsense - or should that be a lot of awful nonsense!

I practice-read to family and close friends who made the point that adding occasional footnotes giving an idea of the origin or reason for some pieces would add to their understanding of what I was banging on about so I have done just that. Some said scrub the poems and just leave the side-notes, and others - well I would rather not say but have to agree that the photos and illustrations do stand on their own.

I am extremely grateful to my son Pablo for his photos and design which, along with Neil Cavagan’s perfect illustrations, make me even more pleased of what lies between these end papers. Some images for colouring from muralist Ariadna Galaz, and some old family photos plus a few other images which snuck in, make this something of a putrid pot but nevertheless an unavoidable part of ‘My life on a stick’ which I can now consider out of my system!

A big thank you if you got this far.

3

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

The Mad Hatter

5

“We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone”

Joni Mitchell ‘Hejira’

7

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare: Macbeth