Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: allen ginsberg, america, ☭☭☭, expat, headspace, nationalism?, possibility, western freedoms
[photo by Jacques Strappe]
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
MORE: THERE’S NOTHING ON THE TV NOTHING ON THE RADIO THAT I CAN BELIEVE IN
Filed under: dubai, fumigene, nyc | Tags: dubai, expat, you can't go home again
found from dec -
I grew up in a pearl diving village five decades on
it’s now a blooming monte carlo but I’m already gone
now I watch the sun rise over morningside heights
wander abc at night, flying cherryblossom kites
in parks where human rights ostensibly aren’t yet illegal
now I’m living in the ‘free world’
in a place where you can lose and find yourself
or anyone else twice a day still
with enough time to spare for an overpriced chai latte
and the world’s my proverbial oyster but I’m just the grit of sand
strumming nacre in my dormroom but I’d rather be
in that van, touring with the band
on kerouac’s road with no place to go no assets owned
no one to phone so getting stoned alone
it’s hard to sell yourself when you’re unknown
but you can’t go home again
you can live there all your life but you’ll still be a second-class citizen
where your paycheck’s determined more by who you know and the colour of your skin
where real money’s to be made by letting flats, evicting, raising rents, doing it all
again it was once a desert expanse free of
swarming human flotsam constructing expensive lies
now that they’re livng under freehold
in a place where you can lose and never find yourself
or anyone else it’s expat transience but
the chai’s still imported and will lalways taste the same
they made the world a global village, carbon copies in the sand
i’m writing stories in my dormroom instead of
taking a stand, “sticking it to the man”
and i feel I should be doing something, anything
more than marching, sloganeering
but I don’t know where I’m going and it’s hard
to start a movement on your own, but you
can’t go home again
hello cliches abound. this is very clumsy wanting to antifolk it but not producing the patter ouf. to be reworked later
Life is Baileys and discovering Public Enemy. Life is adding another layer of snuff nostalgia to escape the present. Life is neither “How I Wrote Elastic Man” by the The Fall, nor “How He Wrote Elastica Man” but the horrible smugly self-referential yet incongruous and empty space in between. Life is cheap, it’s sold a decade at a time..”
It’s not Flipper time yet. I don’t like that I’m so careful in everything I dont care about. I can uncapitalise my name on facebook or in coda or signature but I’m obliged to capitalise and grammatise nicely. And change every s to a z, and every our to or. Maybe it’s just language but it feels like community’s a optional option now. 2/15 happened, and the anniversary of the war will bring about even more. There was the Minutemen before that and yes it’s all incredibly exciting to move to a country where something like civic participation is even an option and at the same time so frustrating. Jauary 27th in DC and I see the black flag, and the anarcho-communist and even anarcha flags beig waved. I’m wary of the sight of flag, no at that I’m uncomfortable. But I’m starting to see a little?
See, ideas are so beautiful and they get so corrupted as soon as they hit the corrosive air of reality. I never did like that phrase, “see the light of day”. Ideas, movements, emotions are diagrammed under tungsten or a fluorescent variety; daylight is for dreaming. Passed on, repeated over dogeared and spat out, sometimes unrecognisable at the other end. I don’t understand. So coming here I finally see beliefs translate to reality and it’s mindblowing, amazing. Yet it’s still filtered trough party politics and the more I learn the less I can believe in this system. But I can’t “got it alone”. I don’t even know what idiom that is I’m sick of translating into american.
My mind is a little blurry I’d like to sleep first, then not fail out of school.
Filed under: dubai, earlyjan | Tags: dubai, expat, headspace, incongruous with the setting, thomas wolfe, you can't go home again
You can’t go home again
Recently I found out about something which has been worrying me sick the last few days. I won’t know the truth for sure until probably the end of the month but it ’s an interesting insight into religion nevertheless. Lying in bed last night mulling it over (in that delightfully hazy yet alert state before you drop off) I found myself thinking oh please god, don’t let it be so. Then I remembered I don’t believe in god, or any form of external deliverance, really. And I’ve felt it before, but never such a crushing wave of realising that I really am alone in the world. Now this should usually be followed with that quasiempowering dawning slas realisation that the world really is your proverbial oyster and your life is not preordained or already determined. As an individual I have near complete control to shape – or fuck up my life in my own way.
So what happens next is really up to me. Either way, it looks like only the turning of February will really shed any light on it (what’s with the cliched phrasing today). Yet right now that harsh fluorescent glare of reality there’s no protective nacre to glow and gleam at the world, just a little transpanted gritty grain of sand. Which in itself reminds me of the gorgeously lyrical introductory stage directions of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire where protagonist Blanche is introduced as being incongruous with the setting. I seem to have come to some sort of organic truce with this place in my time ere; in a week I’ll be back in NYC. Perhaps it’s telling that I think of it in terms of ‘back to’ NYC; is that home now? I love the city in that anyone can find – and lose themselves and others (many times if you like) and it feels like it’ll still accept you just the same. Still, Thomas Wolfe had it right whe he said you can’t go home again. Ouf.
