TIM SANSOM-PROSE

EARTH

2011-02-04T14:14:00.001-08:00

EARTH
She floated above the floral roundabouts and knew they meant something.
But what, she could not decide. They were nostalgia’s spine. Their significance in previous lives stayed out of reach ……..She floated…………….By an antagonising fraction her hair had grown extremely long. The soles of her feet felt like dough……She floated…….The cloud formations were moving at the speed of the loss of childhood and lit up sunrise and sunset flickering like a strobe, yet it was night, she floated…Her hair grew longer still, it engulfed the globe and could by no means be untangled from it until naked winter’s magnet repels. She has no objection. She never begun to walk through the enormous empty buildings alone, neither will she ever cease to. She is from the stars. Let us call her. Watch the television reader’s face change to hers. Feel her tears of joy in your tap water. Let her faith pour off the pad of your back in the shower…..Inherit her infatuation for silence. See how it need not be dramatic. See her face outside your window and do not be frightened. Will you dance with her in Paraguay? At harvest you’ll need to be nocturnal.
　
She floated above the snow cat and knew it meant nothing.
Remember she is still hatching an we ‘if you will’ are the shell.
I don’t suppose it ill come as a surprise to you that she is reticent to smile.
She is not shallow enough to be ill fated……..How dare anyone say that?!!
　
She is watching the automobile evolve into a streamlined capsule,
The white wall tires and running boards hold no more character in her eyes.
Relativity is the basin in which she bathes.
Still her hair grows longer and longer, stifling the universe and filling up it’s every space.
I wonder if she dreams.
Last night she floated into your room and a child was born and a town gossip died and a deal was struck up and celebrations were postponed and an era lost its way and a marksman held up his Blunderbuss to the macabre Victorian gas lamp and realised in an instant he was enslaved to recurring inevitability.
　
She floated like the feather of a magpie into a candle lit asylum.
She is snuffing them out now.
She is lighting them again now.
Everting are sibling and cousin to her and nothing is her Mother.
…………………..She floated!
　
TIM SANSOM DECEMBER 1991

NERVOUS INTROSPECTION

2011-02-04T13:35:00.001-08:00

NERVOUS INTROSPECTION
Am I an artist?
Am I a writer?
Why do I write?
What do I write?
What have I been writing?
Let’s have a look at what I have written over the last month.
Why can I not write this evening?
What should a poet be, someone who is filled with things to say and so puts that into poetry? Or is a poet someone who sits there and says’ Now what is it I can write a poem about? I don’t think I like the latter one jot!.
When did I start writing? I mean really writing? Have I started yet? Will I ever?
All this bothers me a great deal.
Do I write because of a wish to be thought of as a writer?
Is that the total some of me and my writing? I hope not.
Am I purely ‘In the business’ of being a poet or a writer? I hope not.
Is it inevitable that I would have written and that I write? I hope so.
It worries me that if I am a natural poet that I should ever dry up.
I’m not worried that I would ever dry up to any length because when I know what I want to write about I do so.
But sometimes I sit there and think’ What’s going on? Why are you not writing? And am I a writer?
And is there anything of worth in what I write? Anything of a consistent style? Any fresh ideas?
Am I writing merely for myself as some diary or sounding board.
I am happy with fallibility and imperfection but I do hope that there is at least something of interest and beauty in what I do or that it has at least some philosophical content which may just make someone think. And if it were to ever heal anybody in any way, well that would be great! Why do I write? Why do I write?……Who am I? I mean really!
I desperately wanted the world to know or at least my immediate community that there are more thoughts in my head than it likely seems from how I present.
And I desperately wanted to deposit at least something to show for having lived.
That’s it I think, those two things, that’s why I write I think.
But am I a writer?
Of course to be a writer is so multi definable.
I have so very much to learn.
Do I have so many styles from poem to poem that I am actually little more than someone who impersonates what it is or at least what it is that I conceptualise to be a poet?
I do so desperately hope not.
I saw a television article today about the poet laureates and felt immediately inferior and irrelevant as though these were real writers enjoying acclaim and reverence and that the world had noticed them and that meanwhile I went on writing my unremarkable writing in deserved silence. And soon after I realised that just because I thought this may be the case did not mean that is was not the case and I suspect strongly that it is and so all that is left for me is to say I shall never stop trying and trying my hardest and that is all that can be expected of me and my poetry will be nothing more or less than a level measure of me and who I have been and who I am and of who I should like to be.
　
When did I stop working out?
Why did I stop working out?
I often fail to see just how it is that my muscles develop so well and so quickly. It seems unrealistic and not parallel to how hard and how long I’ve been working out, but instead of accepting that I MUST have earned it or it wouldn’t be there I actually regard these successes as a hollow victory as though I am in something akin to dream reality. It could just as easily be the following day when I can’t believe how little success I am achieving for all my hard work yet this thought doesn’t torture me like the ’Undue success ’thought And . Its not just working out that has this kind of nervous introspection going on
　
I also got it a lot when I was younger when it came to attracting women.
Is this for real? Does she really actually like me?
Is there a direct correlation between her level of attractiveness and the fact she’s attracted to me or is it meaningless?
In other words is it that given her ready beauty and the way the world cant help spoiling her for it by giving her passes and dividends and compliments and second chances where less striking less pretty looking people would have to make do, is it that she is harder to please and subsequently more selective and does that all mean something of a compliment to me? Or is it that she likes what she likes in a way quite untouched and uninfluenced by her cosmetic exterior? I’ll never ever know and it drives my analytical mind mad as do many other thoughts and considerations, this is what it is to be me.
　
　
What were my sentiments and points of view on this or that topic or issue? What did they used to be a little time ago?
Even in a matter of weeks I am surprised to study the stealthy evolution of how I think but what really fans the flames of my nervous introspective thinking is the question of when is the point at which my mind changes.
If I pick up an old piece of writing I read the sentiments within and I’m just as surprised at how little has changed if that is the case as I am when a lot of change has taken place which says a lot about the nature of me my surprise and the irritation it carries, the point is I want to see the workings that have lead to any result and moreover I want a clear report on which to base my judgement as to how small or large a pat I can give myself on the back for it.
　
　
We, many of us grow up with the naïve belief that we have hold of a unique idea only to learn of its mass distributed homogenous existence, we likewise learn that these ideas require no exposure in order to spread but rather they exist already in the many and not just our individual selves. On this subject I should like to know how many people relate to what I have already written here. But that’s as may be.
　
If I start worrying about terminal illnesses, I start to fancy that I may come by such a ghastly fate and how bad the actual reality of that would be. Then, barely more than moments later I start to obsessively entertain the notion that by envisaging it, I run a risk of materialising it. I really can get myself into a right state over that one and very quickly too. As I’m writing this piece I am visualising something very positive so as to overwhelm any negative imagery which in itself is indicative of how unceasing my neurosis can be. Its really quite humorous from a distance but many things appear different to what they are from distances, don’t they?
　
Fifty million people were killed for example during world war two , millions of which were murdered in cold blood and every single one of these people were overwhelmed by their unfortunate circumstances and would have stayed alive given the chance. So anything that I can say about my own death or my views and attitudes toward my own death are academic inasmuch as I will have no choice in the matter as they all had no choice. So it must be reasonable to conclude or at least to suppose that if human life is so very fragile and precarious and that no amount of unwillingness to die prevents death, particularly premature death, that all the detailed and neurotic concerns of those living, must be, have to be unimportant then? Inasmuch that death’s release would extinguish forever those concerns and that pacing and that fretting and analysing. The implications of all this is that the importance of ones earthly worries must be an illusion in the same way that life’s security and continued entitlement is an illusion the same.
　
　
　
Was it always that I wanted to archive? It was.
Was it always that I wanted to commit to a life of documented creativity? It was.
　
　
　
TIM SANSOM 31 ST MAY 2009

DOVER COTTAGE

2011-02-03T09:43:00.001-08:00

DOVER COTTAGE
　
As stark and as barren as a Victorian prison cell, the room watches a relentless continuance of lunacy, misfortune and suffering. The burdened souls whose thinking has been rocked and dislodged from lucidity sit here and smoke their cigarettes. Each of theses people veered from their normal beginnings through chemical imbalance, demonic tyranny, predisposition or even a genius which races with such intensity that its owner is giddy and bewildered and the world misses it. The floor beneath their shoes without laces upon their feet without socks exhibit’s a myriad of cigarette burns just in case an incidental visitor like myself assumes that much else goes on here, here in this room where they sit and smoke their cigarettes. The tall modern chrome ash tray, never cleaned, never emptied has taken many anxious blows, leaving its complexion peppered with dents. It leans to the left, wounded and diagonal like an idiotic miniature impression of a bombed building. The room is dull, insipid and minimal, skinned with dreary magnolia emulsion, aged and flaking. The walls are featureless enough so as to assist as a blanc page to the suppositions and dreads of psychosis, in this way magnifying the vividness of their fancies. The room is void of character and is in that an irony and an opposite pole to its human contents there within who are filled with character. Their illness numbs them into a peculiar freedom, though at the same time their self esteem is vanquished. Untouched, unaffected by the demands and expectations of norms, social cues and routines yet enslaved to rituals of acute detail and compulsively following issues and concepts in their thinking. This dungeon of disregard and inactivity in which society dumps them, compounds their luckless identity and exacerbates their unenviable ruminations. The ill fitting thrift shop apparel appears to be the compulsory uniform of those condemned to grow old here. They, elated above or depressed below any reckoning or concern for their appearance, have quite visibly been left to dress themselves. Done up like sacks of potatoes in their bleak ill matched garments, they cadge a pinch or two until next time of each other . Mood permitting, they roll a burn and watch smoke’s coiling and ascending behaviour.
As Doctors, janitors, co inmates, therapists and half familiar loved ones dance across the paths of their senses as some inane and macabre circus, setting them paradoxical goals amidst a web of gists and notions, beneath a fog of sedation and heartbreak……. they sit, and smoke their cigarettes.
　
　
　
　
　
　
TIM SANSOM OCTOBER 2002

BOY AND MAN (THE ROLLING NUMBERS)

2011-02-03T09:41:00.001-08:00

BOY AND MAN ( THE ROLLING NUMBERS)
　
I had visualised a procession of numbers and they were all allotted a brown, blue or dull opal colour.
They rolled up and back down in my mind’s eye if I wished to reckon upon their interrelated proportions or to consider how rapid or how slow they progressed. They kept their vague and watery conservative colours and had distinct and individual personalities. Quite simply these numbers represented human age, my own as it was and as it would be. This conceptualisation was composed and meditated upon regularly from the onset of my having grasped numerical guile. I knew a kaleidoscope of associations for each year old that was and I succumb to particular prejudices where the concluding of decades was concerned . The post war world indoctrinated me as well as consciously tutored me to understand exactly what was meant by being at what time of life and apprised me of the widely accepted and well established prohibitions and prescriptions that one ought recognise as obligatory guidance in youth as well as maturity. I frequently drew comfort upon considering that save falling an ill fait, a far larger proportion of my time was to come than was spent. I made constant references to characters whether barflies or barristers in their being so many times my age and still in their prime so as to celebrate my own abundant future. Or I would take to shaping justifications to see no hurry for accomplishments by squinting in summer fields at the rolling numbers and relishing that the coalman was so many times the day or that I would only be finishing school when this eternity of life so far expired had laboured on to have merely doubled. I am now ten times the age I was when I began to watch and review and speculate upon and analyse the rolling numbers. I can still see them today but they are weary spectres and have many omissions in their entirety of form as they stagger back and fourth at my whim. A life of eschewing counting them, has thinned and dulled my memory and image of their forma potency into an incomplete parade of lame icons. But though the appearance of each one has declined as a result of a tiring brain’s recall , a far greater weakening and diluting force has been more primarily active in rendering them into their current form. Today they represent at the very least half spent and more likely a life mostly spent. So the ambiguous measures of months, days and decades which I enjoyed as a child are now without mystery , defined, and I know those measures. I am driven harder to look further and find comparisons to make my mortality seem an enviable one. In truth I did not believe as a boy that this day would come. I am unchanged in every way that could possibly be of currency or worth from boy to man. I view the world exactly as I did right or wrong. I have the same thoughts, imaginings, theories and contemplations and I feel a replica of feelings likewise. All that has altered in me is that which the clocks of circumstance have demanded and the governing bodies have ordered. If I relate or gesture in a different way, it is owed to the steering of etiquette, customs and the pulls of each transient societal notion of that which is and is not savoury. If my aspirations have evolved or mutated into a different kidney I have done it to placate the sea of those who know best. I am the boy even as the man. Many try to define past, present and future. This is not one such attempt, this is not the science of past, present and future so much as the feeling of each of ,and all of the three immersed within me. There is never present ever. There is only past and future. The past is not real (remember just feeling) and even if it were real it struggles so ineffectively to be relevant. The future is of the ultimate importance and is tantamount to my precious and hallowed life. The rolling numbers are but one of many of the visualised reckonings of infancy in my case. I do not say that they tune me with reality now or then, but they are cognitions which when reflected upon sober me to my unadulterated , unadorned and unconfused self. The nouns that named the fundamental household objects in my early childhood have allotted colours just the same and even many adjectives too. I approach my forty-first year now and muse for hypnotic calm and peace in my free time along those numeric zany ghosts having to believe that the ones who represent the years yet to come are plentiful. If they are not I generally console myself by settling upon specific numbers whose colours mark life already lived and who each compensate for having lost this forma ambiguity by reminding me of the halcyon autumns and the unprecedented avenues of endeavour that have been my story.
　
　
TIM SANSOM 15 TH JANUARY 2005

A DAY AT THE SEASIDE

2011-02-03T09:39:00.001-08:00

A DAY AT THE SEASIDE
　
The English coast although I can not compare it with others has on the majority of my visits there made me happy. I used to despise the haven of commerce and tourism that it is bombarded with, but now I have returned to my infant perception of it. So what if the ‘Kiss Me Quick’ element, sneers coldly at my predictable attempts to relish a fixation of nostalgia and innocence as I traipse down the out of season boulevard. I will never see those colours quite in the way I did when I was a boy ever again, but the point is, I shall damn well try! I strongly believe that the present is the past being sarcastic where architecture is concerned in that it gives an example of what decline might be. White facades ,pink facades, European canopies , enormous lonely houses overlooking clusters of click clack pebbles
That have been kidnapped from the beach perhaps five miles along the shoreline and incorporated into the front garden to remind all those to whom which the seaside is a novelty , that that is where they are precisely located. This advertising technique hopes that momentarily afterwards, eyes gaze up at signs saying….Vacancies!…..Vacancies!……Vacancies!…….Without hypnosis who will know if this is ever effective? We observe the steep narrow cobbled back streets do we not? And I hung on tight to Mum’s hand on those first holidays, the wind puffed, our coats all flapping and coloured our cheeks in. It was fresh and we climbed those curious and quaint little streets . I enjoyed the magic…and the chapels. I was scared of reading the epitaphs because I just was alright?
The seafront was the land of milk and honey “Just over the brink” “Look you can see the gulls” “Not far now”……………Geeds navigates and we see the signs, I am very excited, everything is swirling into light blue and then finally crystal , shattering, clear, awesome alien world. God’s fair ocean, two whole thirds of this crazy bogie.
I want to dig sand. Slide ,wrench ,pat, slide, wrench, pat …..Tannah!! “Look Dad!?” “I know”
He says “You’ve shifted tonnes, have a rest son”
If nostalgia was said to be a potent phenomenon to experience I agree. It refers to the untouchable. It refers to the long ago and to the far away. Yet not only me the adult recalling me the boy but me the boy recalling?……Well I don’t know but , yea I can’t ever recall not being nostalgic.
Bed n Breakfast…the most vague memory, in actual fact so vague I am not certain I have not dreamed or imagined it. Bed n Breakfast?………Attentive, middle aged nurses changing white hazy pillow cases in a white hazy room. Obviously a little misconceived, but to my dying day I shall see those images.
This morning we’re going to drive a little. We may have a picnic and play Frisbees by the pill boxes.
Inside they are caked with soggy litter .Oh but those poor soldiers! But I’ll never be faced wit ha crisis such as that. The world is no longer red hot riffles and bullets and paralysed thumbs and forefingers torturously only just losing grip of the sepia photographs of their sweethearts only just before they drop dead at the age of eighteen into dirty [puddles with their aghast and open mouths half submerged and gunfire carrying on regardless on the unkind barren horizon …………..not home in time for Christmas.
No I’ll never be faced with an ordeal such as that . Today the world is “Man About The House” and “Top Cat “ and “Skinheads“ and “Frank Bough“ and “Slade” and “ Ivy Brogues” and Crombies and “James Bond” ah, James Bond! Penicillin fends off historical miseries like that.
Today, is as sweet as a day at the seaside.
We’re going to have a picnic now. We’ve spread down a frilly tartan blanket on Beechy Head. I love hot soup. I love hot soup in a flask. Off with the plastic cup. Then the smaller one without the handle. And finally the threaded top. Wow, steam belches out and is in high contrast with the fresh sea air.
I have to wait for it to cool but I am impatient and I burn my lip. I love my family very much. I loved my family very much then and I love my family very much now perhaps that captivates the incentive for this particular piece of work. I had a very, vary happy childhood. I am lucky.
Bob was a collie crossed with Alsatian. Jet black and full of life. All those cute canine mannerisms poke curious vision at a thrown stick. Always running after thrown sticks that dog, as do all dogs I suppose. One day on the beach we noticed his absence. Dad rolled up his sleeve and walked toward one of those huge timber and sometimes stone divisions that I can never quite remember the correct name for. They are used for separating depths and divisions in the water. He leaned over and sunk his arm into the deep side and pulled out a soaking black ball of fur. How did he know!!? Had he not done this Bob would surely have drowned. Today I am back home and all I have to remind me are some shells I collected. But TODAY today, all I have to remind me is my love for magic.
　
TIM SANSOM OCTOBER 1990-

DARK DAYS IN THE SPECIAL COUNTY PART TWO

2011-02-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

DARK DAYS IN THE SPECIAL COUNTY PART TWO
　
　
A prerequisite of long back gardens to the forever pensive if not hallucinogenic mind of a child is that at their far end exists a unique and mysterious place to play. It may that the shoddy and rotting structure to an aged shed affords an exciting enclosure and exudes an awe of escape. Perhaps dense vegetation has thickened to prohibit paths and insist upon others leading to those peculiar tarnished and magical objects which lie point blanc against the finality of the back wall or fence. Sometimes the friends of older brothers contrive dens and covert hideouts of which a portion being blackened by a handful of full terms and summer holidays, mature into alluring relics which appeal to new infant explorers. On other times in other places it is not unheard of big black gardens being blessed with a single, large, shadowy and dignified tree. My own garden was dominated by a beautiful and imposing oak tree. So far as my reckoning was concerned of its kindred semi detached house being a savoury candidate for purchase. I rather regarded it as a secondary exhibit to the tree and not the reverse, which children are inclined to do. I recall its fragrant sap and how its full and wavering branches stole the early morning daylight when with gradual allure it had became my favourite haunt. Armature gymnastic appliances assembled by my well wishing Father hung suspended from its most robust horizontal arm and survived the infantile antics of aspiring and grandiose gymnasts, who were my friends and I.
At Derwentwater school in Acton West London, Mr Shievers, Mr Paice and especially Mr Arnold, upon learning that I was taking up life in Northampton , spoke well of it, made jovial references to its shoe making industry and promised me that the world would spin at a slower, more peaceable pace there. They, being a wholesome generation of astute comprehensive teachers, were all accurate, this was my new world. This small market town is where I would have a new beginning. Here, parents allowed their children unsupervised freedom to develop, their road traffic awareness, their anxieties of being harmed by traffic in the busy capital were perhaps valid and founded. Here we could choose between green and green, Abington park, Eastfield park and the pristine Headlands where dog ends in the gutter were as scarce as the odour of carbon monoxide. Here we arrived to the salvation and sanctuary of Sandiland road and we have four apple trees, that’s two cookers and two eaters. They lift your spirit to the garden’s left whilst the fence opposite is attacked from head to foot by all manner of wondrous botanical inevitability. These things of God in turn peer down upon (apart from a splendid tattoo of psychedelic flora) two successfully transported and replanted conifers, their forma habitat being the Acton town back garden of my nature loving green fingered Daddy.
The oak tree was a loved and cherished feature for us all. It was thought evoking. When introducing new friends to our garden I remember a feeling of vague yet definite pride of its comparatively unusual presence in an otherwise modest setting such as this.. Mrs Perrin during one of those women to women (over the garden wall) chats told my Mother, who had actually planted the tree.
It was the son of the elderly lady that had been the previous owner of our house. My concept of this lady was limited to the contemplations spawned by the bunch of keys belonging to her that we’d found in the dining g room drawer. She died in a local nursing home shortly after our moving in. Some fifty years before when her son was a small boy, he planted the tree from an acorn a small boy innocent as a budding flower and excited by an idea incited by his Father that he deliberate the beginning of something bound for greatness.. When this boy grew into a young man his life was taken from him in a torpedoed submarine during World War Two. He never got to see the majestic and noble oak which had resulted from his careful preparation.and imaginative childhood fun. Excitedly upon learning this, I searched for his name Gordon Metheral in the war memorial in Abington Square……..Sadly, I found it.
　
　
TIM SANSOM MARCH 2ND 2005

LUCY

2011-02-03T09:25:00.001-08:00

LUCY
　
Her look was clean but is wasn’t natural if you see what I mean.
Was she dead or alive? I wasn’t sure.
No one singular caring nurses face would come into the picture. Rather there were small feelings of absence dashing in and around a whole central mother ship of absence.
Her poor pink chest plate obeyed the rhythm of the respirator.
Quite a few well intended friends or the persons they came with had suggested that it might help to talk or hold her hand or strike her with something locally iconic because that’s what you say at times like this! except that………I actually believed for a moment that I may have a chance, some peculiar bead of optimism in me thought I might be able to have her glow to the return of my estranged idiosyncratic familiarities and then I saw of myself that I was merely immersed in hope. So then we were looking at a cadaver and the tiny hope dashed was so very different to the tiny hope existing.
Lucy had gone out on the Friday evening to what she called one of her poof’s parties. These guys mostly based up in Kempton are in the business of overdoing it. It seems as though last Friday night was no exception. A cluster of whispers and say so says that they’d been at it on the coke and the mdma and a new legal but actually worse kind of mdma and shit loads of booze and that a few of them late and into the early hours had decided to take her dog for a walk and that was a twenty minute endeavour and that when they returned to the flat, Lucy, who had ‘gone to sleep’ or ‘crashed out’ was actually found not to be breathing and was blue. Apparently one of them then tried in vain to revive Lucy with
All that anxious thumb pads up and down on the bread bin malarkey and so many seconds this and so many seconds that and they did it earnestly for twenty minutes but nothing, not a jot of response and she was rapidly admitted into the intensive care department of the central Sussex hospital.
That’s where I came to see her lying there with nasal tubes and nastiness.
In the waiting area in the hospital there were a dozen or so of us waiting to go in and see her and the hospital permitted two of us at a time. Her Mother, Father and brother along with myself and some other close friends made up the dozen. Some I remembered and others were more recent an addition to Lucy’s life than from the time when I had last lived in Brighton or regularly seen Lucy. They all seemed a good sort and subsequently affected by it all. The first pair were invited in, Adam (A great mutual friend of Lucy’s and me) suggested that Lucy’s Mum and myself go in first, we both of us quickly readily agreed. That takes it back to the tubes and the nastiness. I held her hand, joked and gestured and upon leaving gently kissed her forehead. Lucy’s Mother Ann and myself returned to the waiting room expecting the staff to wave in the next pair, but that was cut short by a Doctor coming out to us to talk, She told us,’ That’s it I’m afraid!’ and although that up until that point we’d all had merely miniscule hope, it was at least hope, and the finality of having it removed brought an understandable wave of sadness over us all and some gave vent to emotion whilst others dealt with the moment differently which is how people are.
Adam rang last week to say that the funeral will be delayed at least until late October ,late October!?
The police don’t seem too satisfied that drugs are what killed her. Her life long friend Jo Ward emailed today to say she’s using the first two lines of an old song of mine to begin an anecdote that‘ll be paid lip service on the day, and the day is even looking like going into November now.
One day during the early summer of ninety-six Lucy and me sat on the beach near the West pier with a bottle of ‘Teachers‘. We looked upon the neglected relic that was the West Pier with the same aspect of slight sadness that day as we were in the habit of. The day was overcast and we happily filled with euphoria together as friends enjoying a devil may care day as the bottle emptied. Events like these happen between people during the late part of their early times together and it is not that both of you are unwitting of the fact that the future will soon by the very nature of things change down a gear or two into unfortunately more responsible and less exciting times. We were both very amused with the ensuing hilarity back at her flat in Lansdowne Street where Lucy in particular was unable to identify which of the two rooms we were in.’ Let’s go into the lounge’ she suggested ‘We’re in it’ I pointed out ‘No, the room with the telly in it’ she retorted ‘ Yes there it is look’ I said pointing to the said telly and then when she saw it we both burst into a very enjoyable fit of wheezing hysterics.
Lucy Molsom was an intelligent, astute, independent, creative, individual, resourceful wonderful human being and I shall miss her very much. She was fantastically stubborn and opinionated which won her the respect and affection of her friends and associates as much as her humour and wit.
Lucy’s funeral finally came on 12th November this year 2009.
It was good to see old friends. If I remember correctly you were as atheistic as many or at least as agnostic as me but……….God bless you anyway Lucy. Your friend Tim xxxxxxx
　
　
　
TIM SANSOM 21 ST DECEMBER 2009
　
　
　

CUTS

2011-02-03T04:51:00.001-08:00

CUTS
　
I have always intended to clean up. One day soon I will go through my draws and throw out my shabby correspondence and unwanted trinkets. One day soon I will file everything . But for now it can wait. Its always that it can wait. When I die I will leave behind all manner of mess and junk, because I will never get round to it, because that’s my nature. That will doubtless cause some short lived amusement to the newcomers destined to discover it all, those young and vibrant souls of tomorrow to whom my former existence will mean so very little. I sometimes spend my time wondering what I would concern myself with next if hypothetically, I DID manage to make a tidy and ordered surround about me. I think my neurotic mind would want to continue cleaning up. I don’t ever remember not having goals and intentions. Without that my seat of consciousness almost ceases to exist, it is my self awareness and my self concept to count the pursuits in my life which give me fulfilment and which I am convinced will give me more as I continue to make improvements upon them. If I have been a long time in the practicing in or the accumulating of an endeavour, skill or pastime then so much the better, in fact there is all the reason to continue where I have already had successes and thus build bigger castles and little reason to spend energies elsewhere. For me the subject matter have been songs, poems and physical strength in the main. As a boy I was extremely impressed with the fashionable and gimmick laden interiors of the apartments and dwellings of heroes delivered to regular folk like myself through cinema and television. From the clipped and minimal Bondian lounges, to the regimented oak panel offices of congressmen I was giddy with adoration and envy. And so it was that I came to view my own ‘Apartment’ in the same light. The snag was that I was a five, six and seven year old boy, who not only was in no possession of any such apartment but didn’t even have claim to the full area of any one specific room in our West London house, much less the contents within. So I improvised and pretended to the world but more to myself that I ‘James Bond’ ‘Clint Eastwood’ ‘Simon Templar’ and many others inhabited all the palatial settings they were known to be casting deliberate tunnel vision to my own humble possessions and room area which was a mere quarter of our downstairs bedroom. This room I shared with my elder brother. My world was the desk and shelving that filled the recess in my side of the room and my brother’s was his the same. I would position my books according to the holistic look of their ornate spines along side incidental wireless sets and globes so that I was adequately deluded into believing I was entering or departing some great panelled study or beach side parlour. I would close my vision to the remaining three quarters of the room so as to maintain my fantasy. I would regularly ask and pester my brother to lend his cinema conscious talents by arranging my smaller possessions such as pen pots, stationary and toys in such a way with an artistic flare which he understood would meet with my unorthodox escape. This act of help which he understandably tired of was known as by my own title of ‘Doing me a show!’……’Oh go on Geeds, do me a show?!’…Another neurotic practice I had as a child was something which I came to entitle ‘Cuts’ Cuts were indicative of the cognitions natural to me which wish to clean up so to speak I would cogitate upon the heroes I so emulated and adored, daily and intensely. I would consider their wonderfully unrealistic existences and their subsequent omniscience and omnipotence. I enjoyed to observe and to check the continued absence of a single infraction in their plans, endeavours and business and I hungered it for myself. But being a child and being a hopeless romantic to neurotic proportions, I believed it to be attainable also! Attainable purely and simply by performing a kind of silent self baptism which rid away forever my fallibility. In this I mean that I would through my own invented ritual, conceptualise a rebirth by closing my eyes for a few seconds then reopening them, which immediately enabled me to start a fresh slate of characteristics and resolutions taking me to the status of the heroes of fiction. I was marginally more inventive than to settle for fiction’s existing heroes , I rather created my own. In this I was able to modernise them and to craft them so as to go unnoticed to the nosey and inquiring world yet maintain the vowels I had set them. My obsessive nature was unsuccessful in achieving any lasting duration to any one of these new beings. Instead I became attracted and amused by the variety of them that I could go on generating and so that is precisely what I did. The durations were not only failing to increase, but without question, they were rapidly and steadily decreasing. I began managing perhaps a week but after what now in hindsight must have been only nine or so months I was only lasting a matter of minutes and many times a day. I became weary with this neurotic habit and I came to picture my life as many lives cut up and sliced into unwanted ugly lines which I called ‘Cuts‘.I went to my Father to seek verbal advisory comfort and philosophical support in overcoming ‘Cuts’ but like all obsessions they can not be defeated but they can only be withdrawn from. Those two things aren’t quite the same in the mind of the obsessive whilst in reality those two things are exactly the same. So begrudgingly, I withdrew. But I still seem to want to clean up. Any one that knows me will tell you that I am notoriously untidy and disorganised and I’m sure that they would welcome me to tidy up in the conventional definition with open arms but unfortunately that is something quite different. One winter morning as a young man I was working on a scaffholder’s free holding when I was taken by a huge mound of weathered and industrial rubbish. In a momentary flash I saw that rubbish was constituted of many things in varying stages of decay and that each had a title and a definition which could be found in a dictionary and that therefore there wasn’t really such a thing as rubbish at all. I thought of every atom, every quark, each in it’s own place right and proper and it gave me a kind of obsessive conceptual pleasure and comfort . I had in a paragraph of thinking( Cleaned Up!) the entire world. Such rapid realisations are commonplace and are along with others like them
Often, adolescent inevitabilities. I don’t know if the same can be said of ’Cuts!’ but for me and my personal journey the two fused together pleasingly. It really looks very much like I was a child with ’Attention Deficit Hyper-activity Disorder’ long before the term was coined or the personality type regarded as a medical condition. I happen to maintain the view to this day that this is a personality type and that we all are, who we all are as my son is presenting with the very same traits and I don’t use the word ‘traits’ as exclusively negative so much as gifts.
　
　
　
　
　
TIM SANSOM 25 TH OCTOBER 2008

THE BODY

2011-02-02T13:42:00.000-08:00

THE BODY
　
This morning I have discovered a corpse, lying half submerged in wet autumn leaves on Ealing Common. The man that it has been for perhaps fifty years before is thin, bald and short. It is an alarming site. I had thought it was perhaps a drunk sleeping. I had supposed from fifty or so yards that it was all manner of things save a dead body. But it is. It is!
I have nudged him too vigorously for there to have been no response and orated as many verbal prompts in vain.
The situation has registered and my adrenaline has began to flow. As my realisation develops my alarm increases.
He was lying face down, I grabbed two slippery vinyl wads of his ill-firing anorak and laid him on his back revealing a site that caused my alarm to increase further. Fowl play! Murder! An oval pool of crimson blood on his upper chest plate. As a result of my having moved his position the bright blood dripped copiously onto his gaunt and chiselled throat.
His eyes are shut, his expression peaceful, his life over.
Whose Father was this? Whose Son? Whose employee? And in what part of London was the dingy council flat that contained his loved ones who by now would be baffled by his absence?
Perhaps not London, perhaps not a man in alignment to any of these contemplations except whose Son? Once he was a child and before that a baby. An innocent, soft ,delicate baby without knowledge of this world nor expectations of the aspects within it that can and do lead to an event like the one that has occurred here this morning.
I do not know if this Man has been shot or stabbed. It amazed me how many times, that in one way or another I would forget that he was positively beyond revival. But he was, he really was.
The taste and mood of this situation was so much more vile than the mood and taste of fiction’s portrayal of such like, and the people of this world, myself included, turn on television sets and watch such portrayals quite regularly for entertainment. What can we be thinking? On television the blows are cushioned by the cleverly edited sound track music and distorted into sensationalism with the all to familiar (goodies-badies )ethic. Reaping the viewers emotions into (being with our hero all the way) so to speak, and revelling in this thing called vengeance. From ‘Aces High’ to ‘Jack the Ripper’ there has been success in transforming something quite awful into something acceptable. This is what a dead man really looks like These are the inane and terrifying colours of a murder. His drams, his nostalgia, his imagination, his love, his anticipation, his humour, his vitality, his plans, his aura…….Extinguished His curiosity, his hope, his understanding, his relief and his perception. ……..Terminated! . And anything you and I can feel he feels no more, or is this not what death is? We do not know, but can we afford to speculate? No, we flee from danger.
So who has committed this vile act? Was it an act of justice? Looking down at him now it is difficult to believe there is such a thing. It is horrible and that is all that matters and I would much rather have found him sleeping this morning but he is not asleep.
As for dignity that he supposedly like the majority of us that dress half as proud attempt to retain through our lives, ,what is there in his current physical position?
A stone’s throw from The Uxbridge Road, that is buzzing with a potentially shallow and disapproving audience. It matters not one jot to him now, and yet I feel embarrassed for him. Embarrassed and upset, though its so obvious to say so I reiterate upset!
What inspirations may be drawn from this ghastly affair? Perhaps to reassess the value of each breath of life? each gift of being? each sweet moment? The ones we ought spend wiser?
And now the police must be informed with haste, that I may not be wrongly tied to this deed!
With nausea and a psychological feeling of dishevelment, I make an awkward, rather asymmetrical trot for the phone box.
　
　
TIM SANSOM 14TH SEPTEMBER 1992

BECAUSE OF SOMETHING FORGOTTEN

2011-01-29T09:40:00.000-08:00

BECAUSE OF SOMETHING FORGOTTEN

I’ve laid in too long this morning and that’s left me depressed. The sleep was poor quality and disturbed with guilt. Some of the guilt is owed to the needlessly wasted morning and some is always there in me because of never acting upon it and giving it reason to abate it is guilt of foundation. My hand is numb where I have had it trapped under my ribs while lying on my left. The weather is non descript. My life is atypically fortunate and forgiving. People all about me believe in the lord Jesus Christ and people all about me believe we exist in an arbitrary, Godless and meaningless existence. Tea is much the same price as it was three years ago. Childhood is becoming shorter at the hand of cosmetics and magazines. I am a hypochondriac and an omnivore. I will never amount to very much and post boxes are still very English. Most new ideas with stealth lose their importance to newer ones. I care more about myself than I do you and so I should. There is no impact or revelation in one supposing that we each perceive colours differently whilst having the same names for them, but I enjoyed the era of my believing in that impact. Road traffic accidents result in varying degrees of misery. I detest sport and the church as specific outlets and pastimes but I would stand in the way of any force wishing to pluck and remove either from the ornate tapestry of our confused and glorious society. I do not feel inspired to go on a country walk presently. In a Zen-like stillness I like to focus upon the slightly imperfect silence of the room and ponder my middle aged flabby body. One does not find a half a dozen handsome pound coins down the back of the couch, one finds an awkward and economically ineffective litter of silly, dirty coins and as a result , leaves them there. The Suffragettes would have listened to me and declared that most likely, I have too much time on my hands, but I don‘t relate to metaphors like that, perhaps I might be better off if I did. I do not now nor shall I ever support Arsenal Football Club and I hope I won’t inconvenience you by saying the same of any other club but I do celebrate the enthusiasm it fills others with. My passions are even more obvious and conventional and live in me the animal not me the hopefully higher being. I think I shall strum in a clipped and deliberate manner, a singular am chord on my acoustic guitar. Hear it’s solemnity and it’s promise of yarn in it’s resonating sound. When it’s very last vestige of chime has abated, I return to the hypnotic silence. There’s talk of a pay rise at work but there’s talk of all manner of things in all manner of places so I won’t put much store on it. I have three accents and my kinder friends call it an adaptive and versatile ilk of virtue and I tend to think I’m easily impressed and egocentric. My depression is lifting because of something forgotten.
　
TIM SANSOM 20TH MAY 2005

THE NIGHT OF THE SCHAUBLIN

2006-12-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-16T12:01:00.000-08:00

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

2006-11-14T01:04:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-28T03:20:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

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

2006-10-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

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

SIPPING THE SEASONS

2006-09-29T10:18:00.000-07:00

SIPPING THE SEASONS

The presage of razor cold walks to work
And short dark days
They lead the way to the pagan ceremony first
And are what they are second
As though they don’t have their own identity
And they have nothing to do with being in any kidney of the present
I know their smell those curtain drawing hibernating days.

A vast consignment of pharmaceutical distractions
Have lost my chronological reckoning of those calendar customs.
Halloween? No that’s from the new world.
Burns night? Don’t be ridiculous! Shrove something? Pancakes?
Oh it’s a long time ago.

Jackonory and the burnt wax fragrance power cuts. Delicious infancy.
The priceless snug warmth of having no responsibility.
Electric blankets, Mum and Dad, Jersey slice, Aunty Minter and sponge cake.

Our hallowed scullery where simple baths were taken on simple Sunday nights
In preparation for simple Mondays at Derwentwater school.

Always reflecting………….Always.
Even then during the halcyon and primary epoch looking back to a magic past with its inaccessible charm. The compulsive nostalgic. The neurotic, unable and unwilling to enjoy the present just like short dark winter days!

And now pupated into the twenty-first century so very different and so very the same I sit with a wholesome and likeminded friend.
We celebrate great thinkers in his rural retreat under skies on the turn.
Here comes the unstoppable rhythms of the earth and like all other cyclical ornaments she brings with her shorter darker days.
These days have always struck me as baring subtle gifts because the light and heat and opportunities they steal from the forma season would justify it be so.

Dark short days.

The builder walks past the cottage windows.
The yellow skies blacken.
We toast the poet’s diverse command.
We discuss the beat generation.

2

Meditative, we converse.
Its not cold just yet but soon as peeled onions I’ll need a donkey jacket.
Late October will sting my domesticated lobes enough to make me wince.

Sipping the seasons and seasons with seasons and so on one sees how little changes and how much likewise.

TIM SANSOM 30TH SEPTEMBER 2006 ( Inspired by Bruce Hodder)

NOVEMBERS

2006-09-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

NOVEMBERS

Don’t ever stop combing me with events and disturbances. Interrupt me from the weighty static numbness with your lapsed customs and cumbersome plans to laugh and strive and forget. If depression is insight then blind me back into life and pancakes sizzling into an evening as we loved them. Let me participate. Let us participate. Glumness is a malady. Real insight is a glowing belly of acceptance and disregard. When the neurotransmitters replenish into a worthy soup of handshakes and tea times let the reflections upon the ordeal thin and fade fast. There is always laundry and bills and all you do wash and pay them its simple. Did you ever make anything of yourself? You haven’t defined what’s meant by that? No me neither, we’d probably do as well to frequent parks and museums and moderate wouldn’t we? Excessive bed rest aggravates back pain so its time for an uplifting chapter in which I can look back relieved. The poles of England thrash you from icy bones into resplendent heat back and forth until you’re jarred and less than supple. I’d stoop if it were in vogue but then so many set a better example. Which fork in the road? I need to decide now or the choices will abate. Don’t ever stop sending me those recycled and replayed pastimes. Each one is unique and I am as glad of them as George Bailey was of having been born after all. Don’t ever stop the march of playing on the sweet surface. Give me one of those bewildering Novembers. Strange in not being what they were in infancy in order that they can be something other now. The only now.

TIM SANSOM 14TH SEPTEMBER 2006

THE ANNUAL HOLIDAY

2006-08-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

THE ANNUAL HOLIDAY

Mother’s carefully tended hair blows about losing its fragrance of aerosol lacquer and somewhat hinders her visual dignity. She is the front seat passenger sat next to her all providing and well meant husband who in driving the vehicle she has permitted to enjoy the transient illusion of being a master of geography and navigation. Their pigeon pair descendants fill the rear seats and are not only not heard but are in fact only seen through the rear view mirror. The motor car thunders along impressively at approximately fifty miles per hour and it does so from home to coast on two conditions. Firstly that a thorough check of the automobile’s most vital organs has been explored with a vigilant and qualified eye, and secondly that they stop on route at least twice to the something or other tea rooms or perhaps with more frugality pull into a lay-by to respectfully rest the engine. Dad’s place, occupation and misery second to driving and having a proud and masculine sense of direction is to reason with his two rear seated descendants to refrain from the continual if not futile repetitive questions such as “How far now?” “Are we nearly there yet” and perhaps “Tell him Dad, John says he can see the sea but we’re nowhere near the sea are we Dad?” Mothers place , occupation and delight second to enjoying the public prestige of travelling in a new motorcar, is to feign concern for her husband’s unwelcome interruptions by reminding them that her husband is driving and that he knows what he was doing, to reason with them that having left their front door far too recently for it to be plausible in nearing any coast especially Folkestone and finally to pat her dignified and unfazed husband’s arm with “There there” gestures. So it would seem every one has there role and plays it well and each role suffices to conceal the genuine excitement and anticipation of something novel and elating. Perhaps human beings behave like this because the exhibiting of undeniable happiness causes them a kind of embarrassed and bashful unease.
This motor car is a Ford Popular. John has saved up an adequate portion of imperial money, decimal money would have been little use to him today seeing it has not been thought of yet let alone minted and distributed into our green island as legal tenure. His sister has saved an equal portion of the very same and it worries the forma that he may have to subsidise the latter. Although John’s sister Doll earns as much from her Paper round as does he, his anxiety is not entirely without foundation for he in simple terms is frugal and she is frivolous and spendfrift. Their parents see humour alone in the matter and look forward in taking respite from being whined at by their children who are thus likely to be occupied in whining at one other.
This was the dream I have just awoken from and as with most dreams I understand them less than I do people’s motive to enjoy sport or opera, but I felt compelled to document it. I have to say I enjoyed the speed at which the world was spinning during the time of my birth and a little stretch before it, and I had imagined in a surge of early morning sleep induced optimism that there was at that time more innocence in the world.

TIM SANSOM 18TH JULY 2006

NEST OF BOXES

2006-08-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

NEST OF BOXES

A cat, a blacker than inky cat, a blacker than inky sable deft darting Tom cat, bolts in a blur in the corner of his eye as he lies on his tidy fragrant bed. Well! He wonders what it is does he, and he is him and him is he the very same. Lying on his bed he gets a quarter vision of a mischievous feline who is firing his OR HERSELF around in a motion that quite frankly annoys the him and the he.
I hope you won’t think it too forward of me but the nasty imposing little Felix caused the him and the he so mush unrest by his OR ITS precocious antic of pouncing like a jungle kill, that I’ve compiled a little list to have my point driven home in the same way perhaps a Lithuanian undertaker intoxicated with lysergic acid and stale Madera cake might drive home one of his bright orange coffin nails...
Ready?.............Just adjusting my bow tie……….So Then.
The incident caused him unrest
He was disgruntled by its occurrence
He considered it intrusive
He saw his room as an inappropriate corner of the earth for such caper
It woke him with a start from pleasant rapid eye movement
It put him out of sorts
In truth he couldn’t see the need for it
It disturbed his well assembled plans for the impending day
Not being a cat lover it rather alarmed him
In his view it constituted an effrontery
It left the he and the him vexed, yes it did its no good saying it didn’t for that would be a violation of truth and where’s the point in all that kidney?
So then he was indeed vexed but being a moderate and well earthed him and a he, he wasn’t livid and I think that’s a bonus don’t you?
Well what followed next were the he and hims ablutions. As he engaged in the sequence of those hygiene tending procedures he felt a little light headed if not troubled so he stepped into a large cardboard box. The box was slightly off pink and every bit as pleasant. He had purchased the box from a birthday card shop. It was a special magical box in the following manner, the moment any weight was put upon its inner bottom, a sensor would react and automate a process of beckoning its right and proper lid toward it, and adequately place itself upon the box thus enclosing the him and the he snugly inside. Now I’m not completely void of telepathy and I know what you’re choking to ask, so I’ll not leave you guessing a moment longer, yes, the lid was slightly off pink too. Now the he and the him was very impressed with his most recently acquired box, not only because of its reasonable price but because (And as though the lid closure magic wasn’t enough) its peculiar independent and unique behaviour extended to a no less breath taking ribbon tying ceremony. The he and the him was further satisfied owing to the fact that his box served the purpose for which he purchased it, and that was to hide from the ennui of ablutions rather than use it to send a tasteless gift to a tasteless person in a tasteless way. The him was very contented with the service and the general attitude of the staff at the shop to which I have referred, especially when after having been honest about his true reason for wishing to purchase it, he had been assisted with creative suggestions rather than

giggled at. One such suggestion from the bright tidy dignified expedient well mannered multi task competent fluidly intelligent desirable voluptuous surreal implausible macabre young lady that morning, was that the he and the him were to take full opportunity of the rare and atypical special offer of a nest of off pink boxes

for the ridiculous price of one groat, an early nineteen seventies Dandy annual in poor
physical repair ( Mind you it DID have to be in poor physical repair) and a fresh sample of his most acrid vomit. Well! The he and the him couldn’t see for all his vacillating and analytical agonizing that such a price was overly capitalist or unreasonable in any way. One can only imagine how the he and the him came by these three items, I mean I’ll tell you if you like but I always say it’s all a bit bumper, fun and sporty to let the reader do a little bit if the work. Can’t harm his or HER or ITS cerebral development now can it?
No sooner had the alert appropriate timely demure enterprising texturally explanatory charismatic well manicured absurd young lady in her clean clean clean bright white starched apparel mention this so called nest of boxes, did it arouse a curiosity in the he and the him. “Oh I see, yes I think I know what you mean, you mean a box within a box within a box!?” The youth filled unhindered essentially athletic dexterous communicative superficial money orientated non philosophical very slightly opinionated young lady, who being neither merely eye candy or a pile of amino acids answered the he and the him saying “No Sir, although I know the type of amusement to which you refer, no I mean the following if you’ll bare with me?” “Of course and in your own time my dear” he retorted with a consoled and consoling smile.
“Well sir, in trying to convey my meaning of that to which I am referring when I say a nest of boxes” “Yes yes do go on?” “ I Sir, in rather having had anticipated your quizzing me over the matter have…….well….taken the liberty for want of a better expression ..””Not at all do go on please”” Well I have been so bald as to have invited in to the shop this very morning, and elderly lady……my own Grandmother actually to sing you the explanation rather than my merely telling you across this bleak insipid counter because well……””Yes yes do go on” said the he and the him now radiating unmistakable excitement and agreeableness “Well Sir you just strike a chord in that something a little fresh and cheeky as that might sit well with you?”” You are not wrong young lady you are not wrong, and to think that there is no way on this earth that you could have possibly known that either myself or my eccentric temperaments would be entering this boutique this morning” “Nor either Sir that you could have possible known likewise that we sell products which perform tasks that defy the laws of physics” “Isn’t it wonderful!?” “Isn’t it?” By this time the he and the him and the slightly off pink young lady were both giggling with delight. “Come then let’s not waste another minute, bring it on, Oh I am sorry do forgive my rudeness bring HER on” “Oh that’s ok Sir I’m quite familiar with modern slang” and so saying the young theatrical possibly reincarnated joyfully erotic business representing irony astute cosmetically concise young lady called out the elderly ladies name “Ilda” and in she walked. She was soaking in dignity and disapproval. Not a disapproval of anything in particular but just austere and Victorian and queer. She sat on the bleak and insipid counter as the younger lady had described it and began her elderly frail melody. Notes suffered enough to be endearing but not enough to spoil the sweetness of either the song or its singer.

Just jump into your cardboard box when by routine you’re clawed
The gliding lid will lay itself the ribbons will be tied
We know a giant phoenix with a nest in which she hordes
Such boxes and the day you die you’ll join her nest up high

TIM SANSOM 25TH JULY 2006

THE MERIT OF MEMORIZATION

2006-08-12T10:18:00.000-07:00

THE MERIT IN MEMORIZATION

Here silence with humidity
Are trying on lucidity
Their unison’s hypnotic hum
Inspire monastic quiet in one
Shall I demise?
Have I begun?
Ought I expect?
What’s lost?
What’s won?
Each auditory tock ticks pure
To orchestrate fine tuned allure
Such gnarled hush spreads its cloak of death
Till self aware we hear each breath
Each gas expelled from lungs exhaling
Evicting what it is we gasp
When carpenters drive their first nail in
When the infant first smells grass
Each heartbeat blood thuds to our lobes
Upon our opulent fat puffed pillows
Humming so as to amount
To something we might gage or count
Or measure against scholars scribble
Were we still resolute not liberal!!!
Here silence swoons in sticky June
And checkmates my neaurosis.

TIM SANSOM 25TH JUNE 2006

THE CALM OF BARFLIES

2006-08-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

THE CALM OF BARFLIES

Everything in it’s place

A pianist and a monastic lament softer than the ascent of those anointed

And in the heavens Michael is kept as the word.

The jaded bars and the silenced speakeasies of prohibition

Evict the broken drunks during the sleaze of a metered saxophone

Into the early hours of Flint’s worst frostbitten blackness.

The piano stumbles and reels in an attempt to find direction

With an air of “Towels up!” and “Time please!”

Fingers dance through gentle jazz scales With delicious delays between each note

And subtle nuances of a bourbon bombed calm

It’s a melody of broken homes and broken lives

Everything is in its place. Each tone , each octave make a hobo’s deltoids sink with an adjacent plummet to his pectorals and feeble anchor tattooed triceps

He goes from a twitching itching to a clumsy and enviable tranquillity.

TIM SANSOM 2ND JULY 2006

YOUTH

2006-08-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

YOUTH

What are the colours , fragrances and contemplations that flood the senses of pensive passers by when they initially catch sight of a pretty glistering pebble at the bottom of a stream ?
Would that depend on the passer by ? What notion would such a sighting most likely evoke?
What aspect and what mindset would result do you suppose upon beholding its unique jade oval shiny form which so palpably there sits at too great a depth for any more exploration than that which sight affords. Most of all, what portion of the magic and delight born out of this business do you consider is owed to its beauty and what portion its inaccessibility?
Youths know more than do the ageing adults strewn about their habitats whose presence and propensity to interfere put abounding strain on their welcome. That youths have significantly less life experience is of little importance, They know a great deal more about all things than the fading adults whom they labour to tolerate as parents, tutors, friends and even lovers . Too infrequently they aquire any insight into the reality that their relevance is dissipating at an adjacent pace to the changing world. Youths are pointedly disinterested in being reminded by those older that they themselves once possessed youth and enjoyed the very same fresh agility , and took huge delight in the novelty of unprecedented social endeavour and were astute to the etiquette of their day and were quick witted and coherent to current affairs . These things are regarded by youths as trifles that warrant no discussion and when those persistent in recounting their younger years are reacted to with disinterest and contempt they retort by forewarning the rude and callow youngsters that age lays in wait for them all but with insisting impudence they in turn riposte that the future means nothing until it arrives just as the past does now that it is gone.. Often these outbursts of scathing unkindness constrain the hurt and insulted individuals to initiate a change of subject and they are as unmotivated to do so as are the young disrespectful bigots to have to hear it ,but this is an ugly existence indeed that today’s people recognise no worth in the events that constitute the very identity of their loved ones, and to spend any length of time dwelling on a theme such as that makes a change of subject quite preferable regardless of its patently obvious superficiality and despite its being correctly perceived by all present as a tiresome pretence and ongoing charade that they participate in because such needless unpleasantness and differences in viewpoint had necessitated it. Tired with years and more weary still from precisely this kidney of unfounded effrontery and spite, those who had long ago lost youth begin to crave rejuvenation because they have learned through such a curt and graceless revelation that even if they are successful in sustaining a positive attitude toward age that their efforts have been in vain in view of the fact that those most dear to them through a tunnel vision which borders upon madness will regardless take a negative view of it and as this fervent view appears to be long established and not eligible for review or any nature of democratic thinking the impending autumn years can be easily thought of in a grey and sombre light. How peculiar and disappointing the world can be when people take such a dim view of what it means to have advanced in years. Some never ever once are sobered into sensibility by considering that ageing like birth and death is compulsory and it is of course common knowledge that in the lesser developed world you are more likely to encounter cultures who celebrate maturity and its associated wisdom. So where does this acid prejudice gestate? Is it an invert and misdirected dread of ones own decay and eventual demise? Or perhaps this condemnation of age being tantamount to regarding youth as the greatest stage of life is owed to the sensitive consciousness that youth can only ever be enjoyed for a transient duration, so then it would follow that thereafter the generalised psyche of our society sees youth as something not only enriched with joys and fruitful with all manner of advantages never relived but also as something that we yearn for but is for the most part of our existence beyond our reach and inaccessible to us. Its beauty works in unison with its inaccessibility to convince us of our deep and passionate want for it, a little bit like a pretty jade pebble which draws in our gaze and causes us to wonder what continued examination would reveal and that wonder hastens to grow and evolve into a magic and a delight as its accumulates an abounding mystique as a result of its having escaped our further scrutiny. It may be argued that we human beings become despondent and indifferent to that which is available to us but there is no argument nor room for debate that we human beings are enchanted , captivated and enraptured to that which is not.

03 oct 2004 Tim Sansom

THE SHACKLES OF INVOLUNTARY REVERIE

2006-08-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

THE SHACKLES OF INVOLUNTARY REVERIE

As with semi conscious vision, the rolling sphere turns on it’s gentle lubricated axis to attain a holistic view of what teases from the left and is disillusioned in finding no stimulus and instead peers upon the regular urban tedium on a street suffering from the unforgiving affliction of being so very ordinary. The hydrants and trash cans in the new world may be more romantic but it’s of little relevance to an all terrestrial energy such as cold irregular stirs of rain and wind. Let us enjoy invisible status and follow the man in the dated trilby and its kindred thick thorn overcoat . I have to say that having tilted it’s frontal rim to conceal the northern hemisphere of his of his lumpy leathery F B I face he’s added some enigma to his demeanour as he shuffles and paddles up through the post modernist tar macadam which suffocates and misses the beauty of its predeceasing cobbles there beneath . He stops and digs into his loose and spacious pocket to produce a cigarette with text book cinematic grandeur. His damp silly hat dips down with his swarthy chiselled chin to set it alight and have it ignite and take the first toque and discard the match and walk on so as to establish to passers by he too regards things in a casual light . He too finds routine functions to be trivial and unimportant and on the better days of his self esteem he takes it up a cog and regards them even as a burden or a nuisance but would never retire from such ceremonies and lose his canvas for exhibiting such contempt and disinterest and subsequently quell the appearance of self importance which it affords him. God bless him he’s throwing a sharp right into Lloyds , to drink off some diabolical European beers? To buzz up his neurotransmitters with a quadruple Espresso ? Or just to continue the sequence of events tutored to us all from lullaby learned behaviour, after all cafes are places to enter and order and plead and give thanks and be seated and greeted and have all truth depleted and say with our legs in the way we sit waiting, we have an itinerary we can not be late in. Let him enter fellow phantoms, surmise his mid morning indulgences and give him his earthy 1940s privacy, lets move on. As with a semi conscious notion we look up to perched pigeons on lofty library gargoyles above, above , above and not knowing why!! The primeval cringe in the sensuous neck an erogenous dread that over our heads is a fermenting foe with arsenals of wickedness loaded to go, often its nothing and often its fear but always look up as sometimes it’s so.

Tim Sansom 09 11 2004

HANDS

2006-08-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

HANDS

I wonder if these bricks were laid by gentle rural hands ? I suspect this as they have been stacked in a delicate and askew climb where the plough is suspended. Hands perhaps of greater length than width, not gnarled but weathered.
Hands whose florin passing fingers pointed and flicked with bible reference precision at the pleasing features of bright occasion. I see those hands engaged in task and toil at the end of baggy white sleeves in high summer. Then I see them sewing and scattering seeds before breaking at noon to be rested on an oak table, with gentle stealth they submerge bread into thin soup. I never see the face or the torso of the farmer to whom they belong . I sip my ale and marvel once again at the rustic demeanour of this inoffensive building . It is one of Stony Stratford’s most visited. Focused upon a giddy stillness I feel a hypnotic calm settle upon me. I transcend the moons and clocks and seasons until I begin to feel the undocumented , upright, ordinary lifetimes of a gone age. I immerse myself in these patterns and impulses until I can hear the hymns and the creaking floor boards and until I see the elated faces of wife’s as they learn of bountiful harvests. I smell the sober leather of riding tack and the honest sweetness of fresh cut corn . I taste the zealous debut mouthful of fruit just fallen. I feel the pumping blood and laboured breathing of a mornings work in hot mad meadows. I suppose and reckon and wonder and surmise and imagine and visualise and suppose some more. I do this with my head in my own hands. In my hands I see my father’s gentle genes across the bluing tendons, pebble knuckles and dry lined pouches of callused skin . I remember him and his quiet composure and dignity. Even in the way they rest and settle upon this tavern bench I recall his kindness and selfless calm manner. He was an uncompromising traditionalist who adored nature and who sat wondering on many occasions about ( amongst other things) our forefathers like myself and observed the constant evolution of social mood and it’s adjacent chameleon values. His hands were often meshed behind his back whilst walking , typifying his serenity and his happiness with us.

Tim Sansom 02 06 2002

THEY SIT AND SMOKE THEIR CIGARETTES

2006-08-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

THEY SMOKE THEIR CIGARETTES

As stark and as barren as a Victorian prison cell, the room watches and documents a relentless continuance of lunacy , misfortune and suffering . The burdened souls whose thinking has been rocked and dislodged from lucidity, sit here and smoke their cigarettes. Each of these people veered from their normal beginnings through chemical imbalance, demonic tyranny, predisposition or even a genius which races with such intensity that it’s owner is giddy and bewildered and the world misses it. The floor beneath their shoes without laces upon their feet without socks exhibit’s a myriad of cigarette burns just in case an incidental visitor like myself assumes that much else goes on here, here in this room where they sit and smoke their cigarettes. The tall modern chrome ash tray, never cleaned, never emptied has taken many anxious blows , leaving its complexion peppered with dents . It leans to the left , wounded and diagonal like an idiotic miniature impression of a bombed building. The room is dull, insipid and minimal, skinned with dreary magnolia emulsion , aged and flaking. The walls are featureless enough to assist as a blanc page to the suppositions and dreads of psychosis, in this way magnifying the vividness of their fancies. The room is void of character and is in that an irony and an opposite pole to its human contents there within who are filled with character. Their illness numbs them into a peculiar freedom, though at the same time their self esteem is vanquished . Untouched , unaffected by the demands and expectations of norms, social cues and routines , yet enslaved to rituals of acute detail and compulsively following issues and concepts in their thinking . This dungeon of disregard and inactivity in which society dumps them compounds their luckless identity and exacerbates their unenviable ruminations.
The ill-fitting thrift shop apparel appears to be the compulsory uniform of those condemned to grow old here who elated above or depressed below any reckoning or concern for their appearance have quite visibly been left to dress themselves. Done up like sacks of potatoes in their bleak ill matched garments they cadge a pinch or two till next time off each other, mood permitting, then roll a burn and watch smoke’s coiling ascending behaviour.
As doctors, janitors, co inmates, therapists and half familiar loved ones dance across the paths of their senses as some inane and macabre circus, setting them paradoxical goals amidst a web of gists and notions , beneath a fog of sedation and heartbreak, they sit and smoke their cigarettes.

Tim Sansom oct 2002

OF WHAT IS REVEALED

2006-08-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

OF WHAT IS REVEALED

As all absorbing as the dreamer the dream is paramount and its it’s collage of gists , statements and messages are all that exists or could hope to have importance until the first lantern spills of dawn cascade into the staid and pitiful bed sitter of the dreamer and arouse his curt awakening. The immediate impulse is to share with the nearest innocent an account of the splintered revelations of slumbers, but no sooner than he feels the insecurity of his first sobering inhalation does he feel the enveloping of disappointment on realising no ears nor mind could or would listen here , far less understand, and even the moment it takes him to have that thought he forgets the dream himself and usually forever. Then in the giddy depths of open forum and in theory and debate he is taunted by ghouls akin to dwindled dreams in the form of his own hesitations and delays, for contrary to the advice of popular opinion he when boarding ladders looks down and indeed falls as warned . Worse of all a beach of grains each one a theses or a chain of domino contemplations stay inert in a swamp of eternal hush, unseen and unheard they dissipate second after their birth into a psyche that grows more faint and more vague with each new wasted, aborted idea. The child once said that he wondered if his friend was thinking that he was thinking that he was thinking but Burns night and Pancake day were given to he as better occupancy and then he like so many became a cub then a scout and believed it mattered more. What is the priority I can enjoy without guilt when I have finished the late shift? Am I perceived as an essentially capable fellow by my immediate neighbours? I s it conceit or a harmless compensatory zeal I see in the eyes of the jaded and, trapped shopkeeper ? Does he harbour a contempt of sorts for me? If so what could that be founded on? Where would he have collated such information? Would he be one to bother with pyjamas? Is he winning in life? Is he? Is he? Does he consider himself to be winning? Why are there In this existence expectations fulfilled and unfulfilled ? Why is it that often fights very nearly occur but actually don’t? Why is it that in some cases they finally do occur after all when it all looked resolved? Is there being no pattern the only pattern? How much of what we learn from pain serves its alleged purpose and steers us away from rejoining danger and how much defeats and crushes us? Tastes , feelings , smells and associations inseparable from a keepsake or a trinket or even a certain time of day in a south facing room do not require years to establish a reflective allure , hours will suffice to any compulsive nostalgic. Any front door with or without an imposing brass knocker and regardless of exhibiting a vivid poppy red skin of paint and weather or not obscured partially by tall, wavering and untended vegetation is looked at by the one looking in past , present and future and speculated by he wondering what ornaments , rituals and reticent, disapproving grandfathers may frequent and stir in the cavernous enclosure behind its secured brass bolts. Of what is revealed we shape the world and adjacently we choose to spend considerable time escaping into the many others in their covert unspoken enclosure.

Tim Sansom 13 01 2005

BECAUSE OF SOMETHING FORGOTTEN

2006-08-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

BECAUSE OF SOMETHING FORGOTTEN

I’ve laid in too long this morning and that’s left me depressed. The sleep was poor quality and disturbed with guilt. Some of the guilt is owed to the needlessly wasted morning and some is always there in me. I can’t celebrate there being guilt in me because in never acting upon it and giving it reason to abate it is guilt of foundation. My hand is numb where I have had it trapped under my ribs while lying on my left. The weather is none descript. My life is atypically fortunate and forgiving. People all about me believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and people all about me believe we exist in an arbitrary , Godless and meaningless existence. Tea is much the same price as it was three years ago. Childhood is becoming shorter at the hand of cosmetics and magazines. I am a hypochondriac and a n omnivore. I will never amount to much and post boxes are still very English. Most new ideas with stealth lose their importance to newer ones. I care more about myself than I do you and so I should. There is no impact or revelation in one supposing that we each perceive colours differently whilst having the same names for them, but I enjoyed the era of my believing in the impact. Road traffic accidents result in varying degrees of misery. I detest sport and the church as specific outlets and past times but I would stand in the way of any force wishing to pluck and remove either from the ornate tapestry of our confused and glorious society. I do not feel inspired to go on a country walk presently. In a Zen like stillness I like to focus upon the slightly imperfect silence of the room and ponder my middle aged flabby body. One does not find a half a dozen handsome pound coins down the back of the couch, one finds an awkward and economically ineffective litter of silly dirty coins and as a result, leaves them there. The Suffragettes would have listened to me and declared that most likely I have too much time on my hands, but I don’t relate to metaphors like that, perhaps I might be better off if I did. I do not nor shall I ever support Arsenal football club and I hope I won’t inconvenience you by saying the same of any other football club but I do celebrate the enthusiasm it fills others with. My passions are even more obvious and conventional and live in me the animal not me the hopefully higher being. I think I shall strum in a clipped and deliberate manner a singular a minor chord on my acoustic guitar. Hear the solemnity and promise of yarn in its resonating sound. When its very last vestige of chime has abated I return to the hypnotic silence. There’s talk of a pay rise at work, but there’s talk of all manner of things in all manner of places so I won’t put much store on it. I have three accents and my kinder friends call it an adaptive and versatile ilk of virtue and I tend to think I’m easily impressed and egocentric. My depression is lifting because of something forgotten.
TIM SANSOM 20TH MAY 2005

NOW

2006-08-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

NOW

What a remote and obscure hinterland I have been delivered to by this depressed season. The nauseous, wilting amber season herself resists demise to the very end. Tarnishing and tiring with begrudging sloth she kicks and scissors with a weighted ,burdened and restricted motion as though enclosed in a gravity of greater density. Then after some more moons and stories she reels and totters on a cliff edge and finally falls. She drops hard and fast and is out of sight and neither you or I will know if she meets a death of sorts or whether it is she that whitens into bleak winter. How little regard she has for one’s proportions and orientations ., how disconsolate she is in her ghostly coat and bastard smile. She brings with her a giddy murder of alien stenches .They pretend to be episodic but endure and persist until they wield an attrition , upon those called to reinvent themselves through great loss. These stenches are self tuning and they tune to ones present mood but never evolve in completion away from the primary smell, the smell which labours for neutrality but who eventually yields to being unpleasant and finds identity in that……………………..I new it would be like this …I think? ….Not plausible!….. Or did I ?…….Did I dream it might be bearable?……… Did I believe that?……….Is it bearable?…Is it real?……Is anything!?…………It’s no less peculiar than existence itself really is it?………………………….. It isn’t REALLY is it?……….Hold that a while!!!!!…….Hold that notion now…………….Hold it!………….Hold it and drink up the silence and the gentle stirs of breeze there. I’m sure of it , my own existence is as foreign and unfamiliar a taste as is this new harbour of black mouthed caves.
As unprepared as one can be I feel an intuitive beckoning into each craggy mouth as I pass them by in the deepest folds of this unlit black nautical night. Mouths to untamed cavernous depths of a washing and far reaching sable void. My butterfly whims and fleeting caprices will not be indulged in this roofless and beautiful wilderness. Instead I am to be broken over the rocks of situation, as it demands a Dawinian compliance or perish, simply this…………….Is the time I spend dwelling and agonising on atrocities too great or too little?………..I do not know the answer here in this uncanny dimension and I do not know it in suburbia. Is this empty and unforgiving purgatory the wages of considering the pain of others too little and with too casual an aspect? …………Or is this the antipathy of that? Is it that I walk these dim and perculiar shores and am immersed in unrelenting blackness and solitude because Having spent excessive time reckoning upon misery and catastrophe and the disturbing images of mans wickedness to his neighbour , that I have made my own place and time materialize out of the glumness of my ruminations?……………….Or is this merely grief?
This is not internment , for it’s doors are open. This is love.

Tim Sansom 29 11 2004

THE VICTORIANS

2006-08-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

VICTORIANS

I looked at the manikins in their inane stillness and felt the ghosts around them. It’s quite enough that they pretend to be conscious to suppose that they might be. That behind those gory cloth button eyes there is vision, contempt and impudence. That their opal dust gathering hairpieces cascaded their locks upon human countenances and not mere formed minerals. These are the Victorians and I mean this literally not as a metaphor. These were the masters of sobriety and the lovers of restraint, fear and dullness. This museum exhibit shows they still are.
Look, this lady has an early hearing aid. It’s as primitive as a megaphone and as ugly and as medical as ether and tuberculosis. She gazes upon a child, sickly, wan and crushed into a delicate silence and obedience which is right and proper. Her blouse today looks like a tarnished doily or an elderly lady’s armchair covering, but in her day it may have been enviable to her immediate peers and a source of pride to mothers in the company of clergymen. Its meaning has changed and shall doubtless change again. Next to her is a man in the midst of his gait crossing the road of this typical street scene. His face is telling us that which the faces of his generation generally do, duty comes first, then God and finally a modicum of feeble mirth and tame recreational endeavour whose memory shall tomorrow morning be dissolved into non existence by guilt and atoned for by excessive ,needless, thankless labour and toil.
So the world waits in agony for the emergence of youth culture.

TIM SANSOM 10TH april 2003

UNCLE BILL

2006-08-11T06:07:00.000-07:00

UNCLE BILL

Granddad, I love you even though you’re not a nice man. I’m embarrassed that fisticuffs still impress you at seventy years of age, but I look at your balding crown and see your spectacles and feel I could learn from you. You beat up my angelic Mum and I pity your conformity and your fashionable misogyny but I think you adore her. You are a boring drunken cunt but that’s what the world has taught you to be. You smell well tended and you look fastidious and regal. I love your scarf and your cockney confidence. It is a confidence which sings out it’s expletives in kind of affection that rises above anything academia could afford and knows it. I have to confess that if I had been a youth and were present when you engaged in combat with Dad I would have been exhausted of alternative choices than to have fucked you up so as to make you labour in walking and ashamed to show your face for quite a spell. But I still love you because I can see you are unquestioning and pond skimming market trader and I approve of your general disapproval of all things in life seemingly revered by the masses without foundation. I miss you and I miss your kind. You stank of booze and fags as you persevered each night to insert your key into the Lyndale lock through your balance hindered handicap. I’m told you were a womaniser and that you broke your second wife’s heart. But I want to believe that to have been ego and mindlessness rather than snarl and sadism. Mind you, your last girlfriend was a beehive hairdo powered by a dynamo wasn’t she Bill? She might have been a bit of karma for you mate, translated into your vernacular Bill that’s “Wot goes rand cums rand” mate! She was as warm and as humane as Himmler and that was if she was having a good day, but I suppose that we should love our enemies. I loved your son too, he was a lot like me, quite mad, quite confused and not a beneficiary of the grape and the grain. I don’t blame him for protecting you (His Dad) for as I have said, I would have done the very same. Your daughter loved you and she admired you bravery in facing death. Anyone who thinks you were a cunt I understand, but for all that I’m sorry we can’t chat anymore as is the case with most of the dead. I doubt you had many secrets or even much depth, you were probably very young when you realised what a load of rubbish the latter was hey Bill?
Well Uncle Bill, I may see you soon in another dimension but if that’s not how it works and it’s just lights out only, thanks for that World War One gun layer and special thanks for joining Emily in creating the enigma that was my mother. For kicking her in the head I’m afraid I have to inflict upon you the most severe punishment I can think of and that is as follows, spend a good many moons thinking about it, then when your soul is finally destroyed with the attrition of remorse and regret, see if you can’t spruce yourself up, get on your best garb and have a walk down the Steyne. The Steyne known only to the Saints and to the Father himself and make a few changes to your outlook. Whetere or not you do, I promise I myself shall.

Your Grandson Tim
TIM SANSOM EARLY 2000

HERES TO THE ENDURING NAILED BOARDS

2006-08-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

HERE’S TO THE ENDURING NAILED BOARDS

The chain of eras bubble and jive along with a light hearted sing song manner
In this humble pre war Northampton three bed roomed nineteen thirties house though it won’t save it from mediocrity for all that.
Because this petted and rainy island is dotted from the heathens turret to England’s feet, a slender forked land of our Penzance half French muscle gobbling
Mutants with their mortgage dammed cousins of the same pebble dashed ennui
We got off on the wrong foot with our superficial twenty-first century endeavours and mangy mirror vanity giving us an illusion of security. A story we composed for our own listening and subsequently believed it, believed every fraudulent word. We’ indulge all kidney of euphoric fancies One of the Napoleon’s nagging to convince was this and nothing less.
“The house will shield us and save us and boasts an auspicious prospect”
“Do you say so with conviction Sir!?!!!” Not if I keep loading up five large a year on frivolous needless trinkets which this age recommends especially crutch narcotics
Boards laid down by toiling ambiguous men most likely passed get buffed and polished in alternating whims some of these fleeting cravings and clever ideas
Render them spoiled by the splashes of those capricious licks of silly lurid paint. These new and always new well intended reforms which in shedding skins expose a hopeful improved vogue that IS A WAY FORWARD?!!!.They are as a repetitive and unjustified as any hand washing obsession but I wouldn’t trivialise the therapeutic arm such antics afford, I wouldn’t now would I? I couldn’t now Could I!? Not me Sir!!! Look……………………………………………………………………
Can you spare a meditative moment? Get a piece of the day these nails were hammered to the hilt and if you’re not wondering if that very occurrence happened on halcyon afternoons or bone stretching and yawning dawns you ought to be , because this was very real and this happened with rural unmarred green for as far as the eye could see all around it. Our aging next door neighbour tells us cows held their inquiring heads over the bottom garden fence when these houses were first built. Now we are in a metropolis of filth and fumes. This was assembled before the Reich’s armies in blitzkrieg madness cantered for a number of paces, too few to not rapidly thirst into a gallop through Poland and the Ukraine beyond with the ease of a white hot carving knife slicing through warm butter. These stairs and banisters were erected as the stupefied and defenceless continent suffered so crushing a fait while nineteen miles of salt water alone, kept it and us and our petted plaintive counties away from the same ferocious and devouring Hun, from a tyranny and a corrosive megalomania which may have uprooted these boards without question. or prevented them from ever being laid. But look! Here they are real. Real and palpable and weight bearing just as the holocaust was real and they have required no make shift replenishments since that time. Meditate on the ease with which time transcends all. It may change everything yet for considerable durations it changes nothing.
Was it a day where the said men ate the contents of their ready made sandwiches (You know the ones that wives use to make out of love and support and not out of a begrudging obligatory tantrum of self pity as though they were oppressed slaves) and crystallized for their remaining days on earth an undying association with the laying of those boards and the taste and texture of the salmon, if that was the filling or the cheese and onion if it was that?. Did they feel the first stirs of the spring breeze on their cheeks through those fresh brand new 1930s windows? Did they for a moment reckon upon me reckoning upon them and their days of toil? I surmise we all think that to be most unlikely, but we can’t condemn them for lacking in vision unless we can hold up our heads without fear of corrupting truth and say to our own hearts that we are attempting to visualise our great grandchildren attempting to picture us and our stimulations and disturbances of what is now the present? It holds less awe for me to look forward than to gaze back. That in a nutshell is why I am a compulsive nostalgic. How can I anchor after the images and colours that I have not experienced and have no knowledge of? The past on the other hand is in my memory if it is mine personally and if it is not mine personally I can romantically estimate its structure and antics, moreover the past is so beautifully and wonderfully inaccessible and if that were not enough to constitute magic, one has to consider in a diligent contemplative manner the fact that it was at one time accessible but that at the time it was a magic not valued or even recognised. That! That is what I call fantasy and what I know to be the most special magic with which human kind comes to deal with.

Here is a metaphoric toast to all that resemble and are akin to all the enduring nailed boards of our short bewildering lives.

TIM SANSOM 23RD june 2006

PEACETIME

2006-08-11T05:49:00.000-07:00

PEACETIME

Peacetime and small market towns. Agreeable with those overseas, until next time. Weather running down this nation’s attitude in rude snakes, peppering it with droplets of mediocrity. Incidents and events have never been so scarce. This is a drought of reforms and pretty little coos to refresh the lounges of our staid and interning routines. Peacetime and pastel mid week mornings, buttoned up to the collar with jobs to be done. Then, as from an aerial view, motorcars in all manner of processions and self-asserting dance smother their own singular being in a conceptual plurality which dominates our psyche each time we come to think of them. Oil and ignorance, Yen and Drachma. Enterprise, affluence and not a shallow dreary minute to waste. This particular specie of the earth’s powers manifests it energy behind that which is required to decorate each hoodwinked Colonel’s heavy red field jacket with fruit salad. News to no one but a truth of sorts. There is all the reason to commend those constituents of the inescapable situations we find ourselves in. All the motives you could wish for to have a high regard of what we are glued to will reliably remain a constant. Then if the chess pieces change we can snarl back at what was, if the sentiment takes us for we are no longer embarrassed into enduring it for a moment longer. Now this kind of liberation is all very well but how does a man dignify the best usage of his new opportunities?
The elegance of horse’s hind sinews play like a dawn breaking strobe this game of light flickering and its essence spills upward in a ghostly hemisphere of halcyon sun just over the brink of God’s sugar pie horizon for all us lucky boys and girls to take to note of and to take note of having taken note of and best to compose rehearsals of how in the future we shall recount this and deliver it with harmless embellishment and colourful hyperbole to our callow and impressionable descendants. Peacetime calls for such drastic antics.
Someone somewhere opens up a jaded, tired, opal and illogically composed love letter with a sturdy silver knife. Somewhere its silly and bashful author prances around recounting its construct and envisaging its likely holistic effect. He does so with thumbs wedged in this braces that magnify his inoffensive overweight figure. He guesses her brand of responsive delight and mumbles involuntarily whilst doing so. He does this to comfort himself that his plan is neither being born nor coming to fruition but is in the far more enviable and magical stage of taking form and developing. There is nothing quite so pleasing as when something is coming on nicely, there are good examples of this in bakery.
However peacetime in no way halts man from bludgeoning man and its death toll confuses every earthly abacus into a mutated misshapen lump of rainbow and stardust matter.

TIM SANSOM 2ND MAY 2006

THE ICING GARDENS

2006-08-09T19:12:00.000-07:00

THE ICING GARDENS

I was engaged in my usual ranting and aggrieved mindset early this winter morning. A taxi was late. I as a result was pacing, panting and spitting expletives to the walls which is my way. Of inconvenience and misfortune I suppose I am in some way convinced that either deity ( if it exists ) or a witting force of nature if it does not, is actually deliberating an effrontery or and a mockery upon me. I am very much in the habit of orating at a disruptive volume my anger and displeasure and by doing so I escalate my own ill feeling. I am at all times fully aware that such behaviour is not only futile to the end of solving the initial cause of irritation, but that it is likely to lead to ill health. Continued participation in this role breeds an even lower tolerance to obstacles and frustrations inevitable in daily life. Indeed were it not for my infrequent moments of self sobering resolve, during which I consciously and methodically instruct myself into resuming calm and reason , this snowballing emotion could easily lead to my becoming a savage in need of containment. I know where this behaviour originates, it’s definition and how to terminate it. Why do I not do just that? No reason at all excluding procrastination which comes of absent mindedness, which in turn is fed by distractions. So, for the time being the extent of success in halting my infantile tantrums through self instruction is far too short lived.
This morning I rediscovered something wonderful which transpired to be a more thorough and lasting medicine for treating the unenviable part of me as I have described. Far deeper and more significant than my own rare flashes of mellowing prudence is to be startled by the striking beauty of nature.
This crisp, chilled march morning, snow draped it’s pure ethereal white cloak over insipid suburbia. It adorned our prestigious privet hedges with bands of reflective divinity. All the crafted and tailored flora of our competitively tended front gardens were dressed at natures whim with silvery garments while suspended wicker baskets topped with bright spills of Swiss icing liberated the facades of the houses from their forma ennui .With a heavy diagonal downpour of thick full snowflakes our homogenous crescents and avenues became rapidly carpeted with a dense layer of pure unblemished snow. This gave my neighbourhood a dampened hush as it smothered the sounds of routine into a serene and pleasing quiet. A taxi was late. I was standing in my front garden in hope that I would see the taxi arrive. I was under a common illusion that my waiting outside may even influence it’s earlier appearance. I was immersed in negative emotion enough to entertain the idea that the source of annoyance was deliberate, neither myself or anyone sane earnestly believes these notions yet we evidently feel it to be so at times. In truth we think with a rational mind less and less as our primeval vexation climbs. Also I tend to regard these occurrences as happening more frequent to me than is feasible to one person. Clearly the wrath abounding inside me alters my thinking into a blinded and defensive bitterness. I have followed the paths of my angry gestures and expressions to their origin and I see that they are the ways of men who I have mistaken as assertive, productive and disciplined. I have watched their low tolerances and short fused damnations and unwittingly hoodwinked myself into regarding such conduct as virtuous. I have supposed that to bellow and sigh will get things done. I have veered from truth.
Suddenly I saw the beauty. A curt change of mental focus fell upon me. I saw the beauty all around me. I began to take pleasure in it’s abundant and varied manifestations across the breadth of the facing houses and gardens within my immediate vision . There was the beauty. There was the unfathomed bloom and grace of nature all about me. There was the fairness and allure which was not a revelation to me nor ever is to anyone for we know it of old. Rather the beauty which revisits us over and over again in our lives, which never fails to lift us into awe and excites our mood into it’s honest and dignified colours and yet the very same beauty which we seem to reckon upon when we face it and only then. Once we turn our gaze from beauty to chores, study or affluence, we generally forget it exists. Forget indeed, which is why no number of revisits to experience it fails to surprise us. But from my cantankerous tunnel vision I awoke to remember once more that it was so very there. It was as it always was as vivid and as palpable as granite and candles. I see beauty and am aghast and stunned . The elegance and complexity of it’s every exhibit, the vast panoply of it’s pretty permutations. That which is known against the enormous shanks of that which is unknown . Terrestrial beauty . But though our hymns extol it and our painters show their love of it. Though our poets try to define it and our leaders possess it, though our writers give themselves to it and our inventors steal from it, we forget. I forgot.
Then I remembered myself as a youth, I recalled in particular how baffled and disgruntled I was with peoples obliviousness to earthly beauty in their slavery to shallow endeavour . I saw my anger, I saw it began as mimicry , replicating the idiosyncrasies of the hot headed famous and those unsung. I looked at a quaint silvery coated conifer and listened to the woolly hush . I saw my mimicry and the game that it all was. I came to know that the mask of snarl had been for me an attempt to conceal weakness by the use of a pretence that my wrath meant that I stood no injustice, but this itself was weakness. It may have began as a game, conscious adolescent hero-worship. But I had forgotten myself and allowed an evolution of habit to deliver me into the business of inciting on plain Mondays and ordinary Wednesdays these self perpetuated frenzies.
Beauty shows us how to know with a doubtless clarity, triviality from importance and how the stealth of modernity weaves us into a web of rituals and aspirations that prohibit our questioning the sequence of our priorities.

Tim Sansom 21 12 2004

GREY HEAD ROTTING

2006-08-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

I lie mute and unshaven in a room, damp, staid and still all but for a surfacing desire to pace, a numbness triumphs over me. Broken and content to be a grey piece of a grey day. I lie in the posture of a convict resigned vanquished and pensive with hands behind a heavy head burdened and fingers meshed, I exhale a lengthy sigh if only for the sense of conclusion it affords before sitting bolt upright like a corpse with riggamortis so as to make a clean break from my abounding lethargy. I pace the pace a farcical dance to appease neurosis then lie back down again, the rain is relentless pouring, roaring, hissing and painting the morning with solemn and funeral colours. The pimpled pattern from my worn faded bedspread itches and tickles my gangly clammy limbs strung with sinuses brittle, lacking in agility and damming, I contort and grimace then I see it, my gaze falls upon the hearth, it drips with waxy stalactites and cylindrical protrusions of decay as though its comprising matter is stricken with a corrosive and malignant condition. My stubble thickens and hardens to a glassy bristle underneath investigative fingertips, the pale flaky walls around me are infected and blistered with the same leprosy and rotting affliction, all this curt alarm and atrocity is an idle threat amounting to nothing the room resumes its former state and I my former calm in halcyon bare footed days it had been rows of pansies "Black eyed Susan's" bellicose and poised for assault my fancies my dreads. Presently a brain in continual unrest tied to unceasing vigil ceased through laboured glances all manner of banshee's ghouls and phantoms dotted random. Aesthetics sit cross legged, pious and delivered holy meditative, resolved and indentured to deities untouched in their trance they see these apparitions glowing in their yellow ceremony, a circus of ghosts adorned with the broaches and sparkle which enduring fatigue supposes, masters they are, trekking the lowlands with Romany hearts on best behaviour cages beasts and bearded ladies collided with the peeling bells of unknown pitch and maddened notations the century is no longer mindful of his slavery or his night watch, his ankles give, his limbs falter and like Talos he collapses and plummets to the earth so nothing is guarded save his garish cognitive pantomime, wholesome with much to do yet in a charcoal grey day overcast and enveloped in a firmament of shadowy miseries. The acrimony and vitriol trickles from sickly mouths with broken teeth in inky unlit alcoves. Dark hooded faceless brethren intone their dead languages to metre their slow zombie march. I will shave, the razor is wet grey cardboard and the opal sink is cracked like a biscuit. With crisp and thorough upward strokes I wield the gruesome gleaming blade, it clears the filthy wiry growth, "the wild beard that begged for stinky months a liberation" free from my unearthed relieved dermis but when the fowl and furry sludge, the terse untended goatee wisps wide eyed my shave continues with continued swipes ploughing I clear away my foul imploding feted face it rolls and splatters on the boards, my brow and crown spills upon the awful chrome sink taps. Now fully decapitated my black blood treacle thick sits and glistens in a level puddle where my neck tapers to its mannequin end so only now the grey clay dreary day abates and dwindles.
TIM SANSOM MARCH 2004

DARK DAYS IN THE SPEACIAL COUNTY

2006-08-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

DARK DAYS IN THE SPECIAL COUNTY

In Northamptonshire skies too dark for daytime television aerials bend as loosened slates rattle to the keen stirs of an icy winter wind. Through my tightly shut and flaky window I gaze upward. Bleak birds rasp and swoop in societal patterns . Here in the sanctuary and warmth of home, a cumbersome and spacious sheet of " The Guardian" newspaper yellows steadily then browns and blisters across the hearth to draw on the prepared and eventually lit fire. The piping hot porridge is served. Pleasantries are exchanged. The sentiment is uplifting. The property choked horizon begins at roof level with opal smudges upon bluing folds. This, the urban firmament blackens upon it’s point of ascent having reached heights not a finger above the bend and sway of our modest trees in their naked season. It all affords us a feeling of enclosure and of timeless wilderness. Our town, to it’s early east , is laden with cobbled alleys which manage to assert themselves through all the broken brick, untended weeds and dry grass. This room is aglow with the closeness of family. Dark days in the special County were special days for me. The exuberant youths as with the inconsolable hounds of those alleys cry ambiguous auditory excitements into a secret and unseen system of pathways in airspace. With a steering intuition they each ride the chilly breezes until they come to orchestrate the drone of traffic in unceasing yet reassuring symphonies. A family sit down to dinner and even though saying grace has not survived the way in which our Christianity is lapsed we are as grateful to be eating as we are to be indoors and not out on this overcast afternoon. The fire excites into an amber roar and crackle. The irregular violence of the building gale smites the hedge and fencing upon our patio, whilst blowing some shrill notations through our feeble and antiquated drainpipes. I remember my first impressions of this honest house. The memories of what it means to be this close to both town and country. The "Bulls" the "Jacksons" and the glorious "Berrils". The helpful "Perrins" and the pro establishment "Burtons" all gave us a warm, warm welcome. I was nine years old and felt about sixty. It was quite a delightful time. It was a new beginning. I like those. I notice the sky darkening further before my eyes and it isn’t yet four O Clock! There really is all the reason for one to want to draw the curtains and so my father takes our democratic vote with his silent facial question and upon reading that we all approve, draws them.
Tim Sansom 12th feb 2005