The last time I was in England, I was fascinated by the contrasts in English society and in everyday English life. It's a country of scones and cream and hat-lifting 'good mornings' and stomach-churning piles of decaying rubbish and gratuitous 'fuck-yous'. That's what this poem was about. I have just "polished it up" for La_Flaca.
Church spires lured me,
and I swooned for
greengage jam and scones.
History piled stones on history
and on that gentleness
of town and country English
born, middle-classed.
garden-rooted, pub-lunched
reasonableness, socked me
in my guts.
But there is
another England not to be
swooned for then or now or ever.
Privilege piled on poverty lying
out in doorways, town street
kip-outs, community care despairing
in dingy doorway dug-outs,
while booze and fags and fuck-you
feed on plastic food and
souless hair.
Lovely thing, Laurie... but I won't be swayed: it's still the place I most want to visit in the world, with its ups and downs.
ResponderEliminarI can't publish on your blog for some reason (I tried by accessing through friend-connect) so in the next comment you'll see a little introduction that functions as a first part of our exchange, yes?
Some people say dreams are messages from the future, warnings or signs, and there are thousands of interpretations for each.
ResponderEliminarOthers say dreams are the way in which your unconscious expresses itself, fears and desires carefully hidden in the language of dreams.
And then other people think dreams are knowledge reasserting itself, your brain processing the information accumulated.
Perhaps all of them are right, perhaps dreaming is all of those things combined - people dream of the past and the future and nothing at all, so any or all of these things could be true.
I think dreams are also stories your mind makes up to entertain you when you're quintaessentially bored. I dream about twice a week - and remember it, because apparently we dream all the time but we only remember the sharpest images, and I tend to envision quite elaborately when I'm in a certain frame of mind.
If I'm busy at work and I'm generally happy about it, I don't dream.
If I'm worried about something, I dream blurry things, like dirty water and clouds of smoke.
If I'm just bored (boredom for me doesn't mean "nothing to do", it's a bit more dramatic and depressing) I dream stories. Frequently epic stories. I have dreamt about renegade priests in the wild West, aeroplane crashes, lonely ronin on deserted roads, of dragons and fire, of rolling heads and fierce black horses, of windy moors and silvery nights in the desert.
All this I've dreamt, and I've tried to keep record as much as I could, sitting up bleary eyed and scribbling what I saw before it vanished. I am also blessed with an enormous memory. In the coming weeks, I'll try and assemble them all, one by one, no matter how strange or insane they are, and post them. I'll do so in two versions: here in English, Spanish in my blog.