Colin McGuire, you're glorious, you're smouldering, you're Adonis on the beach, honey glazed, apple bottomed, speedo adorned, boy of the century.
You are The Great Wall of China, The Shining Path, The Nation of Islam, you are the help line for abused and abandoned children of Nations.
You are E = MC2 times the speed of light, you are the galaxy of Andromeda, you are a clear night sky framing a chandelier of stars.
Your eyes, bright lights upon a cliff, guide ships to shore. Your mouth, wide open, is for orphaned birds to nest and soar.
You guide planes to land in your park sized back garden, with your massive luminous hands.
You're the Edinburgh Playhouse on fire. You are a scatter of atoms raining under lamp light. You are twelve months of the calender.
You're all the rivers converging to meet the ocean, the streams, the puddles, the rain drop, the moisture. McGuire you are the entire process of rainfall.
You commune with the Angels and Cherubs who doze to the sound of your harp in an apple orchard in Eden.
Colin McGuire, you are the hand of God, trembling slightly, as it accepts the award for lifetime achievements.
'Don't go to the station. Just get a taxi.' She explains. So I go to the taxi rank. 'How far to Reggio Emilia?' I ask the first driver. '100KM = 100Euros.' I nod, and put my bag into the boot. We set off in the air conditioned taxi from Bologna heading for Reggio Emilia. I take a moment to orient myself, look out the window, at the unfamiliar city passing by. Take the time to acknowledge I'm in Italy barely an hour since landing. Then, blank as a donkey, I stop to consider the meaning of that hurried mobile conversation.
100KM? 100EUROS O, God! Mamamia! Mio Dio! She meant go from Bologna Station to Reggio, then get a taxi from Reggio Station to her house! Idiot. Mamamia! 'Scuzi! Scuzi signore. Io, cretino. Returno per Bologna Stationze, Grazie Tanto mi amico.' No doubt confused, the driver turns back towards the station, I twiddle my fingers nipping my mind with insults: 'Scottish rare bit' 'Short bread attention span' 'Black pudding' 'Irn Bru brained girder'.
15 Euros it cost to take me nowhere and back, under a Sun that does not care and never could, and has nothing to do with public transportation. I get out of the taxi, the driver kindly brings me the bag, and leaves, I stretch in the Sun's oven, and pray for a bottle of water. 'Grazie tanto' I say to the driver. 'Niente' he says, and winks. Camomile skinned, smooth bald head, mid 30's. Bologna is a gay friendly city. Who cares? I do, now that I'm no longer ironing my mind to the impressions others may have of me.
So, off I go, needing Lassie, littlest Hobo, Flipper, to rescue me from Italy, to intuit where the correct train is, to guide me to Reggio, to help revise advanced English grammar. I get the train, sit down, talk with the man beside me. We do not understand each other particularly well. Meaning, we understand each other perfectly well. He speaks Italian, some broken English about Reggio Emilia being the stop after Modena. I speak English, some broken Italian, thanking him for the clarification.
I settle in for the ride past dry corn yellow fields, past industrial factories, and old men on ladders in Olive groves, nona's fanning themselves in deck chairs, and the firm buttocks of a guy ,
each cheek like a sand dune in a desert, down by a river. Someone is very angry with the train. It arrived late, he 's so angry he rolls tobacco, tobacco, tobacco, which is forbidden in the train, and a mother, in a hushed voice of quiet concern, asks him to put it out for the sake of the children for this Mother believes that children are cursed when they breathe in cigarette smoke for the first time.
I dream through the window. Imagine rail lines precise as a sentences, the rhythm of the wheels running through the countryside like syllabic stresses. To think in five days I must give direction to a horde of twenty screaming children. I play the role of teacher, they reluctant language learners. Life is an error, I think and rest my head on the head rest, laugh quietly to myself in a manner which is understood immediately in every language. I tilt my head back and close my eyes, waiting for the lessons ahead to teach me what I am missing.
-Rapid notation of something that will be worked on, should this be made into a short story. It's a horrible mess, I should wait and post it, what's the rush, Jim once asked? There isn't one, sometimes I think the internet is my downfall. I post it online, rather than sculpt on the page. Will I learn better practices? YES.
I'm in Italy again, two months this time, in the North, a place called Reggio Emilia, it is very small Artisan city. I can cylce around the old city in a loop within about 15minutes. It's lovely, civilised. I live in a beautiful house, with a mother and her daughter. I'm working out. I eat well. I'm teaching at a summer camp, which doesn't have an academic focus, so much as activity and basic language aim. All in all, things are going well.
It is summer and the young tree has dyed its leaves pink, in the latest fashion of the magazines. Summer liberal, drunk experiment, dope smoking moment, shhhh, don't tell mumdad time.
Streets lined with pink haired trees. Ah, so sweet, if only they knew, winter governed their choices. Still, summer is a sweet angle to view life from. Young for a day.
Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978.
Send all your children out in white underwear into the street before the carpet bombing. Bring your babies out swaddled in white linen in a procession of white prams. Grandmothers and Mothers spread the white family bed sheets flapping in canopy through the streets.
Men, pour the paint spill it over the wall, roof and pavement in brilliant white. Call the mechanics of the community; Fathers and Sons, respray your cars: Bone white, vanilla white, ice white, then drag race in your thousands through the city.
Families unscrew the milk, leave hundreds of glasses on hundreds of white on hundreds of tables in parks of green. Rally the florists, line every gutter, decorate every tree with white Roses, Gardenias, Orchids, Hydrangeas, Wisteria, let the garlands hang empty and white.
Boys and girls, let hundreds of white footballs pin pong through the streets, let fire extinguishers run through with their white breath. Bakers let your sacks of flour smoke through the air.
When the enemies of sleep come to put us to bed permanently they will see clouds of white citizens in robes of Jesus, in a City, for once, the colour of an ideal.
This is the day. The approaching bombers will be blinded by the nuclear white landscape by us all coming together in Universal whiteness.
My Dada is teacher at college can't use grammar proper and senior lady tell him wrong-wrong-wrong, he snorts like an Elephant feels strong, roars like a Tiger in his private mind, feeling inadequate but I say Dada you is 53 you has had all of life to learn the present continuous and all the pins and needles of the fretwork of grammar and language, but he pats my head rubs my hair, says he is busy. And I think to myself maybe on his tombstone I will put a to do list.
People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots. - Eric Shmidt. Me want to write so bad but no time to learn grammar me scribble best effort and leave it on internet for no-one to read.
Me no time to build a page of prose me no patience to be page doctor. Me write only best effort and leave on square screen for praise from no-one.
Everything I write is already Shakespeare because no hard work required anymore. We are so developed no longer need to know technicality of technique.
Man has eaten too much knowledge and not metabolised understanding stomach burn and rumble now man must hold back its content. Here come the next generation, the McGonagall's of illiterature. Disciples of illiterati scribbling mistakes they are proud of.
*
I could have kept this in my drawer but, I like the spirit of it, the lack of Einstein, of course working toward stronger writing is necessary, but what's the problem with pouring out some chaos? So, there it is.
Bigger ball’s, that's what's needed, one to keep us marching toward the aim, the trick, the destination in life. Another to keep our affections direct and clear as possible; all to easily the storm in the head can become the storm in the heart.
I knew a guy, Ed Lang, small stumpy blue eyed stutterer, he had to have an emergency operation, the cord of his epididymis entangled around his right testicle and as the swell increased so too the pain. He called NHS 24, under the cold yellow sun of a summer night, anxiously rolling the telephone cord between index and thumb. He had to go, the nurse assured, to get the cord untangled, if left too late, it would be lost. Some joked that his testicle had tried to commit suicide by tying the cord into a noose, for he was shy and unassuming in regard to sex; rumour has it he sails yachts around South America, with only a tiny surgical scar to remind him of that summer emergency years ago.
Another guy, the slightly camp, slender, brown-eyed olive skin Jonathan, 18 consultant of the vanity box, browning his skin, under UV light, he only had one testicle, his scrotum had a scar in the shape of a tiny mouth or a purse zipper. His epididymis had entangled round his left ball, before I ever knew him. After the operation, he could still get it up, enjoy the finer things in bed. His gender identity kit may well have been changed, but it had not corrupted his selfhood, rumour has it he lives somewhere in London, sharing only one thing in common with Hitler. Some joked he had enjoyed so much sex his testicle was sending him a warning against promiscuity.
Now come my balls, cancerous; found out a month ago, I never examined them with the precision the medical propaganda demanded. Roll them, between thumb and index finger, no pain should come, if you notice any lumps visit your G.P. I never did roll them often - my man dice! My bowling puns. I hoped for merely a cyst, a cord infection, but no luck, after ultra sound, it had been confirmed, it had been written. Finally, strange Mother, something was growing inside of me.
As I lie on a hospital bed, window view, looking out over the city from the Royal Infirmary, a dark purple sky above me, I sigh nervously, amongst purple shadows. I consider the testicles, tucked beneath fabric and norm, a gallery of eyeballs. I laugh and snort, shaking my head with a wry grin, thinking of the immaturity of our shyness. Two balls, the Sun and Mercury, fixing the trajectory of my fate. Some barely care to air them. I imagine a scene from my childhood - eight years old, a summer naked, licking into a pink ice-cream, sand blows onto the head. I lick it without knowing, salt and grit corrupt the taste. I screw my eyes and scrunch my face like eating something sour and ugly. My Mother smirks- don't get upset over anything so trivial. My Father offers to swap. The strawberry ice-cream trickles through my knuckles and fingers, I throw it on the sand and let it melt, running on to ask my brother how life is in the water.
Tears well in the ducts, salt of nostalgia and neurosis, cheer up; you will be back again, for more days, months, years, decades. Think of the odds, to live to die, all whim and chance of the past the future, and the inability to get anything back from time, then the peace of the present moment. Then, two testicles call you one Morning into the bathroom, you roll the dice, and the odds are against you, and you hold your breath, and think of a holiday in Spain, squinting at the sun, eating an orange as the juice dribbles down the chin. Think of the firm buttocks of your teenage years, sprinting through the forest, and all the boys with buttocks that were perfect, and immortal. Think of the girls with long hairless white legs that you wanted to smooth with the care and caress of a clay sculptor. Here I am an invalid, barely a man, naked to the future.
The moment is an orange in the mouth. Eat it carefully or tear it apart. Everything has a limit. Really, it might not be so bad, only 45 minutes. Imagine the face of God: the penis/the nose. The eyes/the testicles. The mop of hair/the pubic hair. There is nothing to worry about. Write a season of love letters when this is over. Rub your balls together; roll them for luck, one last time. The Nurses have arrived. 'Mr Knight, the time has come, we must administer the anaesthetic.' I'm rolled out into the corridor, with a tranquilised smile, holding back drugged laughter. I hear the patter of bare feet upon the linoleum, a young girl, in a white gown, with blonde hair and green eyes. She grips the bed, the nurses do not notice, leans over and looks into my eyes, then let’s go, and gone. She terrified me, an apparition, an omen; I lapse into reverie, mumbling as I sail off: '...chandeliers of green grapes, chandeliers of red grapes, try some, please, delicious and cold.'
