When I was 16, I started writing a blog in an attempt to make sense of the intense experiences I was having, from the spiritual journey of a blowjob that lasted an hour & thirteen minutes, to a failed foray into stand-up comedy, to the first time I smoked cannabis (I didn't inhale because all drugs are evil!) to the tragic death of my mum (whom I considered my best friend) to the alien desperation and estrangement from society one day while I was sitting by the river in Camden Town.
The Original Postman won't document my own life but rather it will contain my thoughts on poetry, love, music, video-games, drugs, politics & the media, ambition & self-help, philosophy, my progress with artistic endeavours, and God.
Two months ago, I started my first in-person guitar lessons to build upon the practical knowledge that I learned from online teachers such as Justin Sandercoe. Nick, my new teacher, has given me some useful tips. Although I don't play guitar as much as I could (obviously!), I feel that I am slowly improving again. But I think I'll put writing music aside for a while in lieu of writing some fantastical prose.
Although my first novel was partially set on a planet called Restralardin, its world was perhaps not as fully realised as I had hoped it to be. I'm going to try to finish my second novel by the end of November (NANOWRIMO), and I'll be posting extracts from it here. It will be called "Twice The Price of Paradise", though I do like the titles "Over Mushroom Mountain" and "The Centre of the World". It will be based on the short story I wrote last year and the poem I've recently completed, and it will be a mixture of prose & poetry. Here's the poem I painstakingly created over the course of two or three months.
TWICE THE PRICE OF PARADISE
Ain’t it just our shoddy luck to be stuck in one crappy body when we could be oddly happy in another?! If you discover the sleazy city of spirits in the Earth’s core, please promise you won’t tell Big Brother. Every kiss in that abyss is elephant-bliss and it’s there one uncovers God is the son of Satan’s part-time lover. The Earth’s core is at war with itself, and they say God started it by tampering with the heart of your mother!
The government bought a law on draw, but we scored more French fries and hench highs from Kevin’s Pies. I thought I saw the meaning of death scrawled obscenely small on the wall between Heaven’s gleaming eyes. Isabel smelt swell as a rebel then, and I fell under her spell again as plasticine thunder flowered at sunrise. Together we fought the law of sleep with the breathless parakeet Queen and her seventeen weeping butterflies.
Another long day defeated; another song half-completed. For twice the price of Paradise, the past can be repeated.
Now reddened rain leaps onto dead-end streets, and a clockwork centaur in paradoxical sleep dreams of dinosaurs. Female mail men eat nuclear snails and secrete microbe priests who feast on the bacterial spores of giant Labradors. When His burning daughter returns from the water, Christ will be uncrucified and there shall be no more wars. I had my sordid afternoon a million moons from the sensation of creation, and soon I trust you must have yours.
“The only moment worth having,” your friend sensuously breathes, “is one that you can readily repeat.” Expect the head of your affection to meet a perfect defeat soon as she encloses your love in her moon-angel-feet. Downstairs on the streets, an orphan soldier swears that God above is older than forever yet more obsolete. You never supposed you’d sever your grip on the past, but at last the present feels pleasantly complete. Another long day defeated; another song half-completed. For twice the price of Paradise, the past can be repeated.
Insanity is the profanity of the hidden soul I forgot to hide. My schizophrenic suicide is inscribed upon my limping stride. Inside what’s not, the ego rots, and the angles of angels collide. Whatever the present comprises, it’s an atom of forever. If you don’t know why it’s “do or die”, try “now or never.”
Sitting across from me on this gentrified train ride back to the clockless and visionless bliss of oblivion, a pregnant white woman enters labour. She is wearing a deathly pale wedding dress and she’s weeping. Perhaps this is because her baby is a boy, and those waterworks are tears of joy, because males are the best at everything except for thinking. The uncrucified carnivore she wears in her womb seems to be attempting to copulate with anything that isn’t himself in the mirrorless microcosm he’s at the centre of. He belongs to a past predated by the instrument of the future, where the best of them and the rest of us explode into the impossible yet inevitable ecstasy of non-existence. Irrespective of Friday’s fruitful foray into costume-based foreplay and the overpoweringly obvious fact that this pregnant white woman is clinically obese, I don’t find her tremendously attractive. Suddenly, now, the pregnant white woman births an amalgamation of her diet of root & grass & fruit & meat, and she spits out a sweet pink-elephant-chihuahua-thing. This animal follows me home. I name the elephant-chihuahua ‘Audrey’, because I am a very sentimental man (and because of my mistaken belief that ‘Audrey’ is a unisex name).
Another long day defeated; another song half-completed. For twice the price of Paradise, the past can be repeated.
In a lawless drive towards a time before the dinosaurs were alive, our robot host slows to a stop at the shore to shop for tobacco in a complicated labyrinth where many men predict four more meaningless wars and a touch too much bullshit in the neighbourhood. An impatient shrink listens to this womb of patients think about the tomb of love, but now he’s left for the room above to consume copious kegs of soviet opiates he’s harvested from the eggs. Anyhow, nobody knows how much happy this crappy map-man has stolen for good.
“We are who we are,”, The Toad Pickers chant. “We each bought one ticket to the end of the Universe but now you claim that the end happens every second before and after the start. Don’t mistake mermaids for queens or dolphins for art. I hope you haven’t stolen infinity but that’s the only probable impossibility.’’ Now the soul of the whole nation of toad picketers positively explodes in frustration when they see the big sexy priest. Now they all yell breathlessly and pray for release in the belly of a giant Police Beast, awaiting arraignment from governmental containment or just some slightly dumb entertainment, like watching Death explain to God that if he could quit the domain, then he probably should. After the dawn respawns, every frog in the dimension is reborn exotic retriever Police Beasts who receive impossibly erotic relief from reefer which simultaneously scans the unrolling scrolls written by Eureka!
Whatever the present comprises, it’s an atom of forever. If you don’t know why it’s “do or die”, try “now or never.
I seemed to be dreaming a dream while dreaming a dream, so I screamed, “God, I see through your front!” Isabel woke with a Salvation Army grunt and calmly administered the medication of a very bespoke blunt. I hallucinated ancient countries there on the chair where electric men swear or say prayers after they hunt. I meditated for a microsecond then shouted about how I never doubted that Christ took Forever’s brunt.
Another long day defeated; another song half-completed. For twice the price of Paradise, the past can be repeated.