TOO MANY WINDOWS

TOO MANY WINDOWS


All around me are people less intelligent who make me feel invisible, frustrated and undervalued. Also all around me are people more intelligent who make me feel the same in exceeding my relative intelligence so as to render me as equally unremarkable. The greatest percentage of my intelligence, superfluous to the forma group can not be said to be recognisable currency in any way. In the presence of the later group I sense unlike myself a people who have been able to steer their better minds to some use. To solvency and acclaim they sail and will enjoy reverence for their well spent and happily employed thinking. Of the many forms of intelligence I have sometimes come to view my own as little more than nervous and excessive analysis as though zoomed too close in to instrument or contribute anything to the world’s benefit. As a pupil of anything I am always eventually amazed at the simplicity of that which the tutorage has struggled to impart to me. In this I am reminded time and again that my cognitive nature involuntarily complicates everything. The result of this is my presenting to be of lower intelligence which is perhaps true in a certain respect but not because I miss stimuli so much as imbibe too much of it. Similarly it is not because I am using too basic a reckoning but because I am using one far too elaborate. That certainly strikes me as ironic. Am I fated to walk the earth missing the bigger picture? Is humour the only market place to sell my excessive vocabulary? Either way its better than nothing as a place to offload it! Surreal and abstract concepts in humour seem to empty me of excessive mental energies when I can remember that to be a fact. I often forget for years until I stumble upon it again. I go into flights of fancy often giving comic anatomical components to days of the week or times of day, for example Tuesday’s cock or 4 O’Clocks’s chopper, actually I have done this since childhood. It is only neurosis, nothing alien to the modern west. It doesn’t bite. It has a well acknowledged place in society now. So it’s a good practise for me to pretend I am as admirably simplistic and subsequently productive as people about me. These are the fillers of noble occupations who possess fluid intelligence and common sense. These are the infantry of getting by and who ware the war paint of pragmatism, resourcefulness, survival and solvency. Every morning on parade the proudly orate at an alarming volume slogans such as” We don’t use big words here!” And “Has he swallowed a dictionary?” These regular foot soldiers bypass the tinsel of erudition and nail down a bad mortgage and a good woman. Good women are all in a hurry to iron the metaphoric shirts of these men and to be a supportive stay and staple to them. After all they are good with a hammer and nails and better with a lilac paintbrush. The way women see it there are talkers and there are doers and complex gentlemen are hopeless windbags, shelves will not put them selves up! And they are right, they won’t! If they want waffle they’ll execute it themselves over garden walls. So if you take my meaning I peer through too many windows.


TIM SANSOM 17TH FEBURARY 2007

THE NIGHT OF THE SCHAUBLIN

THE NIGHT OF THE SCHAUBLIN


An ugly industrial machine, it hasn’t a mind or a soul, but you think it breaks down to spite you. You think it knows when you’re negative. It was thought up by men in the ground who no longer taste glee nor woe, what thought them up to begin with? This we would all like to know! You puncture the burr from the barrels; they’re hot in the wash on the Monday. All of them whistling and wheezing, ready for the weighing in the morning. I’d never let on to the most that poems and dreams were my wavelength, but sometimes they get a bit greedy and corner me into protest. I can’t help it if they can’t feel drama, I can’t help if it makes them soppy. I respect their perception so they shouldn’t wish me a soldier.
Is it the grill?.......Is it the grill and the cables? The pistons and the wires? The fuses and the plugs and the hinges?....Is it the flash or the coolant?...OR IS IT A MONSTER?
It Is so heavy, it’s spelt in it’s aura. It must be nine tonnes.
Behold!! Now I say this, him in the shirt he says very little.
Does he know his plunger line as well as I know my Schaublin?
We are friends of numbers, friends of situation, friends of a dutiful ongoing saga that will not tolerate the prospect of demise and I take my hat off to it.
The other morning when the half nearly rubbed me out, I was in a vast military hall. Bunting hung from the rafters, bellowing, ‘Once there was jollity here, and nobody over did it with the moonshine’ This hall was so very huge that no man could ever have chartered it, not with any industrial machine………………….Ah but wait my Schaublin has stopped. I must remedy it. That’s better, no but it was colossal and then after that a slight drizzle followed by some more and then some more.
An ugly industrial machine needs to party you know, so Larry and the boys took no notice. Well I’ve said it before, bonfire everywhere.
Who in their wildest dreams would ever have guessed anything save an unglamorous industrial machine? We swapped sanity for the best part of fifty minutes, me and the old Schaublin and that’s what it came up with.


Now you know why machines aren’t allowed to compete in contemporary poetry don’t you? Shave their grey whiskers, shave em RASP I can’t hear you RASP OK! They’re accepting innovation now. In fact one of the old (Stick in the mud) types has actually asked me to give him a brochure on developing new concepts in logic and an insight into Coo Coo Oink Oink surrealism! ‘Hold on Par’ says I ‘ You’re walking and I can see and it’s good and you’ve recently restored my faith in mankind and who knows by dawn you might even get a trot on but please spare us the sprint!!
………………….’I only wanted the brochure to wipe my arse on, not to read you pretentious pseudo intellectual shit’ he retorted. So I said back to him ‘Thank heavens for that, I felt threatened. For a fractional moment I thought you might jeopardise my being acquainted with one of the many types of escapism and retreat. Yeah, the trouble with elitist snobs is that everybody on earth is one and so in that respect the entire specie is kidding itself.
Well my schaublin is rallying well without fault tonight, I wonder if it likes my really gear really now biceps? No just teasing ha ha, I won’t look through those machine’s lenses again.
An ugly industrial machine, it hasn’t a time nor a goal, but you think it won’t die to
spite you. You think it knows when you’re negative. It was thought up my men in the ground who no longer taste glee nor woe, what thought them up to begin with? This we would all like to know.
I like the dirt on the training shoe. I like the laces to fray. Imperfection has stylish colours, let it build up for a while. All of the brawls in the bar-rooms, when lipstick smudges and runs. Life can’t run like Formica, sometimes dahlias are tarnished. Well I’m just an ordinary Joe, look at my hungry fawn cardigan. Of course it’ll tare in a month. Isn’t it beautiful? Quote…..Unquote!
Shallow, vague, cream factory clock, dreary and dreary O’ mean! Stink as a skunk, judder all day, been here since Ovaltine. Gulliver’s toil for perfection, strange Lillyput let him not . Only the glass and page. Only the room of dry rot.
An ugly industrial machine saw an unidentified flying object on the Kentucky porch…………………….Martha!


TIM SANSOM OCTOBER 1990

JOHN AND MARIO

JOHN AND MARIO


John Hatfield and his elder, taller brother Mario live across the road. They are other people. Their Victorian pillared garden wall belongs to them, other people that they are. It’s somebody else’s garden wall. I don’t know if other people are real or weather they are conscious but if they are its only when I see them. There is something vaguely degenerate about John and Mario. They’re always in some kind of trouble. But the more I hear about them the more I get the feeling they aren’t allies. In fact they each hypocritically disapprove of each others delinquent antics as they learn of them through the grapevine at Derwentwater. My Mum and Dad aren’t other people they are us. Everyone I consider to be us, are every bit as real as me.


There are spectacular stretches of laundry paraded in arcs and crescents all along from the high rear end walls of Horn Lane’s three story houses on other people’s wire. A vast, aged and majestic tree fills up the far end of the Hatfield’s back garden and its thick robust horizontal branches have been lassoed and choked with rope for the two mischievous tykes to swing on many times during many hot summers.


All the kids around hear like to make go carts. They make them out of orange boxes, bolts, carpet off cuts, pram wheels and timber. They steer them with their feet. Joel Joseph who works for the Acton Gazette says if I can go the length of Essex Road on mine and stay inside the central path of pavement cracks all the way he’ll give me ten bob.


We’re not going to hear about skate boards yet for a few years. We might have seen the occasional one on Sesame street but for the time being it hasn’t registered into our consciousness or appetite so roller skating will do us just fine.


I love the smell of caps.



TIM SANSOM 16TH NOVEMBER 2006

MAKING SENSE OF SUNSHINE

MAKING SENSE OF SUNSHINE




How grey and overcast do you want?
The South coast out of season.
Whitehawk ,Seaford, Rottingdean, Woodingdean, Rodean, Eastbourne, Molescombe if you’ve the belly for it and even the lysergic acid experience of Newhaven.I don’t care if it sails you to Dieppe, it ought to, it’s the least it could do for you after having exposed your cautious senses to its macabre facades of staid and unnerving ambiguity. Or you can do a twirl in the deft icy breezes speared up from the sea and head out past Hove to Portslade and Worthing beyond if you’re not feeling enough solitude already. What do you think?
What’s the feel of this place?



I don’t feel welcome here.
I’m not supposed to live here.
This is a place for wealthy people to live.
This is a place for happy people to live.
This is a place for people who made the right decisions long ago.



This is a place for people who do not get bogged down with analytical thinking.
This is a place for people living in the nineteen fifties to live.
Or the nineteen somethings anyway. Something good, something romantic.


This is a place much bigger than me in every way.
I can barely make the rent for one of these large lonely Regency bed sitter rooms. The right decisions not these wrong recurring ones.
This is a part of England constructed to maximise the concept of anticlimax as it goes into the off season months.
To a child in July it is………..
To me now it is……………….


Howling winds lick round and lash the stone and bricks of pink and yellow buildings here in winter. Whoever owns them knows more than me and lives their lives in a way more admirable and commendable than I do my own.
The hue and stature of these colossal mansions are tantamount to the vast distance between my failure and their success. Their abundant numbers vanquish me into……………………

Oh I can’t make it work here I’ve tried three times.
I’m going home.


Hove goes on forever with roller coasters of lonesome back streets filled with enormous properties. Most are opal and soulless. Seagulls like ethereal Meshershmits scavenge bin liners, which, half blown away already make this whole place yet one more gradient more inclement.


Three time yes. Once beyond the Palace peer up at The Marina near The Hand In Hand. Once at Lansdowne place and once when I got married at Montpellier Crescent there at The Seven Dials. But I’m off home I can’t make it stick here.


TIM SANSOM 13TH NOVEMBER 2006

BATHING REVERIE

BATHING REVERIE


Its safe and sound and permanent this view from where I bathe.
The flaky ceiling has survived many a near decision to be decorated .
These decisions pass because the occupants of this house have an unwitting love of the ageing faces of comforting familiarity. The greater their age the deeper they are established as the inner belly lining of a safe and secure castle in which they may go on taking refuge. I accuse myself of this mostly. Guilty as charged.


Who would dare throw away that cluster of toiletries?
They have permanent status and rights to go with it don’t they?
They’ve been here years and their definition reaches out to sun block and medicines.
Can I really blow the cob webs of the situation away by simply binning the lot?
It might be a very liberating feeling.


I think of footage of the blitzing of London and the bombed houses left half standing. The explosions often leave a cross section of these building’s structures exposing various rooms from all angles. I see that the staid and ancient ceiling with its air of permanence is as vulnerable as child to a cold in winter after all.


I should get out soon. But I ‘ m not getting out yet seeing how its too cold in the house and too hot and agreeable in here.

These turquoise tiles are coming loose. That would be a concern if this bathroom were modernised and fresh with vogue patterns and colours. It would be a concern because there would be a standard to maintain. But that is not the case and it is subsequently of no concern whatever. In fact the tiles being loose actually compliments the charismatic antiquity and relative disrepair that gives this room its aforementioned qualities.


When I was a kid living in London the bath was in the scullery. We doubtless bathed more than once weekly yet Sunday nights have stayed in my mind as significant. My brother and me religiously tuned into the top twenty chart countdown on the radio on Sunday evenings also. We would be filled with excitement regarding who would be number one. It was usually Slade or T Rex. It was Lieutenant Pigeon which first drew me to that and rendered me an archetypal younger brother that looked up to his older brother to be educated about music and youth culture. In the bedroom that my brother and me shared were two large recesses. My Father had filled each one with an old Post office desk with locked drawers. This was much to our delight. At that time he often brought home stationary for us too. Then above the desks he had fitted bookshelves for us in the recesses. I had an obsession about the organization and visual appearance about my desk, shelves and possessions. I would often ask my brother or Father to arrange it for me. What I meant when I asked that request was for them to arrange it in a pleasing and creative way and if it resulted in it resembling sets from T.V and cinema then so much the better. Both my brother and Father knew only too well that these were my thoughts and aspirations. I used to call this request ‘A Show’ “Geeds, do me show will ya?” Then when either my Father or my brother had done me ‘A Show’ to my liking or if I had managed the task to my own satisfaction myself I would give it one last look each time I departed from the room. As I gave my recess of possessions that last look on leaving the room I would vocalise a short piece of music. The reason I did this was because I had learned from T.V and cinema the marrying of score music with something visually stimulating. The music was partly created and partly stolen from my subconscious I should think.


Now the water’s getting cold but I’m not leaving yet. I’ll run some more hot water.



TIM SANSOM 28TH OCTOBER 2006

ESSEX ROAD

ESSEX ROAD


In addition to being in London, Essex Road was in the world. It was earthly and palpable, observing laws of physics and seasons, sanitation and the delivery of post.
The infant shut one eye and raised a thumb to get a measure of its length and dimensions and the generalised definition of its dignified Victorian properties as one collective entity. But the adult was forced to yield to an inquisitive expression and confess that his memory had been somewhat disloyal. Although, in respect to colours, ghosts, moods, smells, nuances, innuendoes, presences, demeanour, character and holy story, the infant and the adult were in unison. Both toasted the spontaneous parties of mirth, celebration and harmless drunken relatives who left these addresses as they were back then late at night. They doubtless staggered and spilled into early motorcars bound for Hayes and Perivale after, “Course I luv ya” and “Show us ya teef!” and “Wen yoo git auld eenuff I’ll teech ya ow t box!”
Both felt the heavy thud of slammed gates and landlord’s rent book and knew with an ancient intuition how Monday mornings here ascended inclines whilst Friday tea-times descended declines in terms of gossip, slippers and heavy bags of groceries.
Next door we’ve got Bollom’s, you don’t ever get to see him though. Only his privet hedge and tailored balsa fencing which looks down to his yard unseen. A secret and thought evoking, covert enclosure. My first taste of mystique. A place from which balls and Frisbees do not return. He’s very proud of a green Morris Traveler who’s hubs get a respectful look at cloth, water and Duraglit it appears. Then there is the vast, majestic horse chestnut tree and yarns from neighbours concerned with his early career, but the point is you never see Bollom! That’s left. Now right are Ruby and Mrs French. Both are very much in the business of being old ladies, I mean they must have studied it! White hair, Frenchy and Ruby. No teeth Ruby, not Frenchy. A hindered gait Frenchy not Ruby. Underweight, fists up to trespassers, laddered stockings, cups of tea from Wavy Line, quality headwear, Frenchy and Ruby. “Giv us me faaags Charlie!!” Only in her dressing gown, nearly always Ruby. MAD AS MARCH HARES!!! Mrs French and her old asylum friend and co tenant, Ruby.
They co exist under the same roof as an extended family of aloof West Indians who enjoy gambling and orange couches and who meet bed wetting with corporal punishment severe enough to be audible to the neighbourhood. Wayne, Hillary, Cleo and Christopher who along with their contemporaries, swing on our green wooden front gate, wounding its hinges, saying in shrill and enthused tones, “Timmy’s Dad
Timmy’s Dad!” and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
In addition to being in Acton Town, Essex road was a community peopled by many nations. Let’s look down upon it from a sparrow’s perspective. Let’s get an eyeful of slate, pigeon and chimney. There goes sombre Mr Tagg with his shinny red setter and there’s Callahan, Vincent and Cheryl Powell. He’s walking past Bobby and Vee Jay’s where I fought Ali Boba lu-lu. There’s that bloke with the two German sheapards, one Lambretta and no brain…………And Youngy and Rowdy stare pensively through their yellowing net curtains. Rowdy like Punch Young, died before my birth. All these things happening at different times, different eras all years apart as though the cosmos and its beautiful chaos has granted permission for those roaming the earth to break-dance to acid house stereos underneath the drone of the imposing Lufftwafa. Or to light up the grey and bleak gas lamp at the foot of the street so as to afford illumination over a damaged and redundant mobile phone. Essex road knows and absorbs the imagery of every age. It sees only timespace and it tastes it through its tar, its curbs and its golden blowing leaves. What changes would Essex Road make? Well, we can’t ask her…………….If I sit or kneel, I could be the infant again……I could yearn for that, to be given back my agile, clean slate infancy. Yes if I kneel I could remember all this from a child’s height, but I’m not willing to ruin these jeans, think of that! Zephers,Pops, Oxfords, Cambridges, Minxes and Concils have mutated into Hondas, Saabs,Golfs, Citreons, Toyotas and Suzukis. Spokes and chrome have grown into an insipid and homogenous plastic and the litter in the gutter now exhibits bar codes upon its curious wafer surfaces, but look, you can’t have everything.

TIM SANSOM 30TH MAY 2003

MARTIN'S YARD

MARTIN’S YARD

Actually the dreams are finally done and the rude sunlight pulls no punch as a replacement in filling my senses. Iron groans and hooters chorus from the railway. Bass booming trucks and tenor mopeds compete to insult the air with an untainted din. There’s a whole lot of brick and cloud in Spencer and my window wares the charcoal morning sky like a Quakers hat. Martin’s yard is a secret and important tomb these days; you can’t just wonder and browse the free holdings anymore. It’s all part of an inane reform if you ask me and it is if you don’t. The satirical architect that dipped the bridge into the choked and meagre Nene doesn’t have to look at it today much less fill up with vertigo and nausea for crossing it southward to the fishes and whore’s corner. Gladstone road stretches out straight and yawns into the Heath. Underclass Herberts fuelled by the welfare state chop up and retail the dreaded rock round here and we get a helicopter a day to remind us but its normally sanitised before the doors fly of the hinges, bless em! Here comes the buzzing whistling morning dumpster, reminding me of my stagnation and redundancy are these people sadists? We’ve got Christendom bubbling across On the corner of Newport. It’s always morning praise and nowhere to squeeze a small saloon car by the time they’re sat for parables and prayers. As a youth I dealt with rubbish mail, rebate and Christmas pressure up Glebeland Rd. As a man I receive it and can see him walking for a half a mile! Police sirens slice through the gray and empty airspace and it means less every day. Nobody suspects a great tribulation, nobody sees anything untoward in it all.




TIM SANSOM 5TH OCTOBER 2006