Chocolate and all the apathy you can squeeze into an afternoon.
Starlingrad yet again from the red army's account.
The sun sinking dutifully changing nothing.
I suppose we'll all come to define ourselves very soon.
TIM SANSOM 30TH APRIL2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
THE BUS RIDE
THE BUS RIDE
You know when you find yourself in a crowd where the public’s common purpose to congregate is the usage of a provided service?
You mean like in an escalator or on a bus?
Certainly on a bus
Yes.
And have you ever experienced the contented silent amusement of individuals who have witnessed of another something comic and unplanned?
You mean shall we say for example a sudden loud ring tone of a mobile phone, that phases its owner not merely regarding the alarming volume of the not yet familiar melody but the specific whereabouts of the thing that curtly awaits answering?
Your example illustrates my gist perfectly!
What of it?
Well…….all that stifled chuckling and looking the other way of those real life people who amidst a public audience relate to but have no business with the occurrence.
Yes?
That interests me!!
……………………Yes I think I’d say that interests me too.
TIM SANSOM 10TH DECEMBER 2010
You know when you find yourself in a crowd where the public’s common purpose to congregate is the usage of a provided service?
You mean like in an escalator or on a bus?
Certainly on a bus
Yes.
And have you ever experienced the contented silent amusement of individuals who have witnessed of another something comic and unplanned?
You mean shall we say for example a sudden loud ring tone of a mobile phone, that phases its owner not merely regarding the alarming volume of the not yet familiar melody but the specific whereabouts of the thing that curtly awaits answering?
Your example illustrates my gist perfectly!
What of it?
Well…….all that stifled chuckling and looking the other way of those real life people who amidst a public audience relate to but have no business with the occurrence.
Yes?
That interests me!!
……………………Yes I think I’d say that interests me too.
TIM SANSOM 10TH DECEMBER 2010
Sunday, January 30, 2011
THE FRENCHMAN AND THE STONE
THE FRENCHMAN AND THE STONE
A great mind in a great man loses itself in a relentless endeavour.
Spending his mammal heartbeats wisely he at least has feverish purpose.
Olfactory bliss transforms him through the scent of mummification to a gone age.
A Frenchman and an Englishman race to unlock the wisdom of those who seem to have resisted the deluge.
And a subterranean prodigy of architecture with its endless outstretch of rooms and corridors is a microcosm of one’s journey from this life into the next.
The Frenchman , stricken with persisting ill health perspires and perseveres onward in awe through this cavernous crafted world wishing so vehemently to understand and to understand further.
Hushed in the desert for over three thousand years the secrets of our ancestors are revealed to the wand of curiosity he wields while in London the Englishmen pours his sober logic and arithmetic onto the seized and guarded stone.
The taught ropes choke and fray round the colossal stone slabs rolling slowly in this pounding kiln of heat to their steep ascent driven by the will of glistening toiling ebony backs who working hard into the afternoons of the ancient world are contrary to the conjecture of the modern one, well fed and well treated.
The afterlife silent and poised sits in a darkness awaiting whilst the stars never disloyal exact their poles of immense white light towards the shafts of tombs of Pharaohs of Egypt lying amidst glittering and abundant treasures in their exquisitely sculpted and ornately decorated tombs. An immortality of sorts has been born.
In his tenacious malady the Frenchmen sees these images as vivid as his colleges before him.
But are these hallucinations or apparitions?
TIM SANSOM 24TH NOVEMBER 2010
A great mind in a great man loses itself in a relentless endeavour.
Spending his mammal heartbeats wisely he at least has feverish purpose.
Olfactory bliss transforms him through the scent of mummification to a gone age.
A Frenchman and an Englishman race to unlock the wisdom of those who seem to have resisted the deluge.
And a subterranean prodigy of architecture with its endless outstretch of rooms and corridors is a microcosm of one’s journey from this life into the next.
The Frenchman , stricken with persisting ill health perspires and perseveres onward in awe through this cavernous crafted world wishing so vehemently to understand and to understand further.
Hushed in the desert for over three thousand years the secrets of our ancestors are revealed to the wand of curiosity he wields while in London the Englishmen pours his sober logic and arithmetic onto the seized and guarded stone.
The taught ropes choke and fray round the colossal stone slabs rolling slowly in this pounding kiln of heat to their steep ascent driven by the will of glistening toiling ebony backs who working hard into the afternoons of the ancient world are contrary to the conjecture of the modern one, well fed and well treated.
The afterlife silent and poised sits in a darkness awaiting whilst the stars never disloyal exact their poles of immense white light towards the shafts of tombs of Pharaohs of Egypt lying amidst glittering and abundant treasures in their exquisitely sculpted and ornately decorated tombs. An immortality of sorts has been born.
In his tenacious malady the Frenchmen sees these images as vivid as his colleges before him.
But are these hallucinations or apparitions?
TIM SANSOM 24TH NOVEMBER 2010
TIME
TIME
How science behaves is an enigma still
And perhaps time is going faster?
Both joy and ennui evaporates now in genie puffs to the wall!
For as a boy the summer days were an eternity of sorts………..
Or is this all perception?
I had supposed it might be a notion and that alone
But the Cambridge man says it bends
And if it bends its real I ‘d say.
But I can’t see its significance
And begin to doubt its existence
When all matter is removed from the equation.
All things that measure it are matter
Whether they are a clock or a star
How science behaves is an enigma still.
TIM SANSOM 30TH JANUARY 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
IF SHE RETURNS
IF SHE RETURNS
If she returns what will I say to justify myself?
Her belligerent and crushing, crashing blows whip up the winds of war and woe
If she comes here again what then?
As sited so often the piercing beauty nests up next to the lethal risk and the awesome threat.
And beads of sweat like peripheral disarray gets on its way , in its way, oh mercy!!
The aqua shades on bobbing waves and all her gentle temperament
Was heaven sent near jasmine scent
And cinnamon the same so long as she stays tame.
And anglers perched on stilts appease, a silhouetted twilight sea ,who rolls
And plops her rhythmic hands so delicate on golden sands.
Stand up and gaze the paddy fields alight all for a toenail moon
Hydrated by the known and understood monsoons.
But these look like the tears of babes compared to those colossal waves who’ll sweep away a passing train with effortlessness and disdain! Its true the cracking crust had spewed the vast sea up and up in crude anger.
Those, homeless, orphaned , dead, bereaved would surely not it truth believed this tear shaped island’s
forma peace could fall to such catastrophe.
If she returns what will I say to justify myself?
Her belligerent and crushing, crashing blows whip up the winds of war and woe
If she comes here again what then?
TIM SANSOM 25 TH SEPTEMBER 2009
If she returns what will I say to justify myself?
Her belligerent and crushing, crashing blows whip up the winds of war and woe
If she comes here again what then?
As sited so often the piercing beauty nests up next to the lethal risk and the awesome threat.
And beads of sweat like peripheral disarray gets on its way , in its way, oh mercy!!
The aqua shades on bobbing waves and all her gentle temperament
Was heaven sent near jasmine scent
And cinnamon the same so long as she stays tame.
And anglers perched on stilts appease, a silhouetted twilight sea ,who rolls
And plops her rhythmic hands so delicate on golden sands.
Stand up and gaze the paddy fields alight all for a toenail moon
Hydrated by the known and understood monsoons.
But these look like the tears of babes compared to those colossal waves who’ll sweep away a passing train with effortlessness and disdain! Its true the cracking crust had spewed the vast sea up and up in crude anger.
Those, homeless, orphaned , dead, bereaved would surely not it truth believed this tear shaped island’s
forma peace could fall to such catastrophe.
If she returns what will I say to justify myself?
Her belligerent and crushing, crashing blows whip up the winds of war and woe
If she comes here again what then?
TIM SANSOM 25 TH SEPTEMBER 2009
IN OUR GARDEN
IN OUR GARDEN
There was no jarring ascent as such.
But with stealth senses began to sharpen.
I focused on his eyes and rhetoric
Whilst the periphery around his face danced gently.
Idle candidates for hostility lurked to the left
And seas of green trembled to the right.
The discourse flowed with a pleasing vitality
Then in we went to play some ‘Jerry Lee’
Senses overlapped as they will on these occasions
Jerry, John and Elvis washed the spacetime in the staid bed sitter
And we were opportunists to philosophise.
In our garden we sit cross legged
And we go through our societal motto
It always the same
Though we don’t chant as such
All open land that the public have access to, we own
And we do so for our access to it is as unlimited as it would be
Were we paying taxes on it, which we are not and are all the more grateful for it !
A group of Kenyan lads play basketball and smoke joints yards away
The occasional jogger passes the occasional stooped old man
Its all fine and dandy with us.
And who ever mows the lawn?
Twenty-five years earlier
Alan Emptage while marvelling at the ever flowing
Sea of traffic surrounding this same quilt of fields said distraughtly
‘This kind of pollution just can’t go on much longer!’
He meant the world not the park
He meant ‘compare this to eighteen eighty!’
I’ve shown my boy what a close scrap world war two was
By pointing out to him the railings round this place
And how every fourth or so one has been trimmed off
To make bullets.
TIM SANSOM 5 TH JULY 2009
There was no jarring ascent as such.
But with stealth senses began to sharpen.
I focused on his eyes and rhetoric
Whilst the periphery around his face danced gently.
Idle candidates for hostility lurked to the left
And seas of green trembled to the right.
The discourse flowed with a pleasing vitality
Then in we went to play some ‘Jerry Lee’
Senses overlapped as they will on these occasions
Jerry, John and Elvis washed the spacetime in the staid bed sitter
And we were opportunists to philosophise.
In our garden we sit cross legged
And we go through our societal motto
It always the same
Though we don’t chant as such
All open land that the public have access to, we own
And we do so for our access to it is as unlimited as it would be
Were we paying taxes on it, which we are not and are all the more grateful for it !
A group of Kenyan lads play basketball and smoke joints yards away
The occasional jogger passes the occasional stooped old man
Its all fine and dandy with us.
And who ever mows the lawn?
Twenty-five years earlier
Alan Emptage while marvelling at the ever flowing
Sea of traffic surrounding this same quilt of fields said distraughtly
‘This kind of pollution just can’t go on much longer!’
He meant the world not the park
He meant ‘compare this to eighteen eighty!’
I’ve shown my boy what a close scrap world war two was
By pointing out to him the railings round this place
And how every fourth or so one has been trimmed off
To make bullets.
TIM SANSOM 5 TH JULY 2009
Saturday, December 18, 2010
KIAGWARE
KIAGWARE
( Kee-a-gwar-ree)
Two hundred miles from basic roads at West Kenya’s first light
Are the Kiagware hardships of the Kiagware plight.
Malaria unrelenting kills ten children here each week
Their diagnoses comes too late their prognosis too bleak.
They cant afford the bed nets and they cant afford the drips
And they cant afford the medicine to soothe their arid lips.
The village quacks and herbalists have failed to cure their ills
Untrained, unschooled they blindly fool with boiled bark and pills
And as another child dies another starts to ail
‘Their lives are in the hands of God!’ their grieving Mothers wail
The policeman, mare and social worker is all one man the same
He watches pained and helpless, Peter Kombo is his name.
Peter asks that four young men will take this latest child
By stretcher cross the mountains, the four men look beguiled
He gives them ready bills for drinks and bus fare on their trek
The overcrowded hospital will not accept a check.
For two days they walk in the sun and no one makes a fuss
Their voyage has really just begun, they board the battered bus
It snakes along the Kissi roads, the boy lays quiet and still
They need to reach the hospital, he’s now severely ill
And finally on arrival his mother takes a look
Saying ‘Please admit my Walter now!’ ‘We can’t without a book!’
A medical book they must buy before they can come in
But all their funds are spent and gone on transport fruit and drink
This hospital sees patients here of five hundred a day
And its one practicing Doctor had had to go away.
He left a far less qualified medic to take charge
Who took one look at Walter and he opened up his heart.
‘I’ll let you pay me at some other time’ the medic said
And had he acted differently poor Walter would be dead.
They took the boy onto the ward and treated him to health
He grew into a strong young man with gradients and stealth
And now in Kiagware malaria has waned
Because Peter’s appeal attained some mercy for their pain.
But think of Kiagware a mere pin prick in a sea
That’s God’s majestic Africa, whose tide is poverty.
TIM SANSOM 20 TH MARCH 2009
( Kee-a-gwar-ree)
Two hundred miles from basic roads at West Kenya’s first light
Are the Kiagware hardships of the Kiagware plight.
Malaria unrelenting kills ten children here each week
Their diagnoses comes too late their prognosis too bleak.
They cant afford the bed nets and they cant afford the drips
And they cant afford the medicine to soothe their arid lips.
The village quacks and herbalists have failed to cure their ills
Untrained, unschooled they blindly fool with boiled bark and pills
And as another child dies another starts to ail
‘Their lives are in the hands of God!’ their grieving Mothers wail
The policeman, mare and social worker is all one man the same
He watches pained and helpless, Peter Kombo is his name.
Peter asks that four young men will take this latest child
By stretcher cross the mountains, the four men look beguiled
He gives them ready bills for drinks and bus fare on their trek
The overcrowded hospital will not accept a check.
For two days they walk in the sun and no one makes a fuss
Their voyage has really just begun, they board the battered bus
It snakes along the Kissi roads, the boy lays quiet and still
They need to reach the hospital, he’s now severely ill
And finally on arrival his mother takes a look
Saying ‘Please admit my Walter now!’ ‘We can’t without a book!’
A medical book they must buy before they can come in
But all their funds are spent and gone on transport fruit and drink
This hospital sees patients here of five hundred a day
And its one practicing Doctor had had to go away.
He left a far less qualified medic to take charge
Who took one look at Walter and he opened up his heart.
‘I’ll let you pay me at some other time’ the medic said
And had he acted differently poor Walter would be dead.
They took the boy onto the ward and treated him to health
He grew into a strong young man with gradients and stealth
And now in Kiagware malaria has waned
Because Peter’s appeal attained some mercy for their pain.
But think of Kiagware a mere pin prick in a sea
That’s God’s majestic Africa, whose tide is poverty.
TIM SANSOM 20 TH MARCH 2009
BEDREST
BEDREST
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my feeble input.
I vegetate in front of T.V pulp.
I go to bed and get up and go to work to hide from having found no real or meaningful outlet
But loneliness has changed from adversity to normality.
In solitude we have no need to impress.
I have become a being who is content with a torment free existence.
I am content to be content.
Where are my massive appetites now?
All my life I have been motivated by cinematic notions .
Practical and sensible plans leave me cold.
If I buy a car its because of the associations evoked by its dashboard or bonnet
And nothing whatever to do with fuel consumption or performance.
When I was a soft, round boy I had a psychedelic sloppy Joe
But I don’t remember who knitted me it.
I was more resolved then to both do and not do things with a nails in the palms intensity that stealth has robbed me of. There you see neurosis is our Damon, our inner and guiding light and to be well rounded and evenly balanced is apathy and atrophy.
Hale the barking mad. Hale!…Hale!……………….Hale you feverish and frantic souls you!
Being alright comes to us all if we’re not vigilant
Some of us know where we‘re coming from and where we‘re going but that doesn‘t last.
We mostly end up muttering trivia to those woolly, bar propped individuals we set out to wake up.
Watch out .for bewilderment. Watch out for the epidemic of mediocrity.
And run from bed rest like you are fleeing from the talons of Harpies.
Always keep a belly full of butterflies.
And check the power of your punches and kicks like an air guitarist but don’t get caught because its important they think you’ve become a Morlock.
TIM SANSOM 10 TH DECEMBER 2009
Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my feeble input.
I vegetate in front of T.V pulp.
I go to bed and get up and go to work to hide from having found no real or meaningful outlet
But loneliness has changed from adversity to normality.
In solitude we have no need to impress.
I have become a being who is content with a torment free existence.
I am content to be content.
Where are my massive appetites now?
All my life I have been motivated by cinematic notions .
Practical and sensible plans leave me cold.
If I buy a car its because of the associations evoked by its dashboard or bonnet
And nothing whatever to do with fuel consumption or performance.
When I was a soft, round boy I had a psychedelic sloppy Joe
But I don’t remember who knitted me it.
I was more resolved then to both do and not do things with a nails in the palms intensity that stealth has robbed me of. There you see neurosis is our Damon, our inner and guiding light and to be well rounded and evenly balanced is apathy and atrophy.
Hale the barking mad. Hale!…Hale!……………….Hale you feverish and frantic souls you!
Being alright comes to us all if we’re not vigilant
Some of us know where we‘re coming from and where we‘re going but that doesn‘t last.
We mostly end up muttering trivia to those woolly, bar propped individuals we set out to wake up.
Watch out .for bewilderment. Watch out for the epidemic of mediocrity.
And run from bed rest like you are fleeing from the talons of Harpies.
Always keep a belly full of butterflies.
And check the power of your punches and kicks like an air guitarist but don’t get caught because its important they think you’ve become a Morlock.
TIM SANSOM 10 TH DECEMBER 2009
BACHELORS AND MADNESS
BACHELORS AND MADNESS
I can’t gaze too long into the pool of inspiration
Or the immediate doctrines will swamp my inner essence from being
And I will degenerate into a satellite who moves lumber and states nothing.
But dare I peep so as to be reminded of the sweet lawlessness of expression?
Yes and no and all those other things.
Now I remember what those flickering hand gestures betray
The tinge of autism being itself the sanity and the directive.
The panic I felt during wet playtimes or on school’s first dreary day
It felt so very right being friendless then, the solitude was an agreeable sadness.
Losing my spirit was the cost of my interacting and then I forgot me
Until moments like this.
And now as a bachelor unable to be pared
One gets to take time to consider all those played out roles
And ask yourself is there a me or are there many?
And why should it be a revelation
That the earths noises go on regardless( from the crooning pigeons
To the angry lady whose dog wont behave) , of ,for example my current and altered status?
But it is to me in truth it is.
TIM SANSOM 9 TH AUGUST 2009
I can’t gaze too long into the pool of inspiration
Or the immediate doctrines will swamp my inner essence from being
And I will degenerate into a satellite who moves lumber and states nothing.
But dare I peep so as to be reminded of the sweet lawlessness of expression?
Yes and no and all those other things.
Now I remember what those flickering hand gestures betray
The tinge of autism being itself the sanity and the directive.
The panic I felt during wet playtimes or on school’s first dreary day
It felt so very right being friendless then, the solitude was an agreeable sadness.
Losing my spirit was the cost of my interacting and then I forgot me
Until moments like this.
And now as a bachelor unable to be pared
One gets to take time to consider all those played out roles
And ask yourself is there a me or are there many?
And why should it be a revelation
That the earths noises go on regardless( from the crooning pigeons
To the angry lady whose dog wont behave) , of ,for example my current and altered status?
But it is to me in truth it is.
TIM SANSOM 9 TH AUGUST 2009
BAD DREAMS
BAD DREAMS
Bad dreams when you were a kid
Went on ages, help you!
Probably driven by the id
Help you all! Wake you up!
Witches, ghosts and empty streets
Shone so lurid, help you!
Piracy in ceaseless fleets
Help you all! Wake you up!
Mum and Dad not knowing you
So convincing, help you!
Ordeals you keep going through
Help you all! Bring you round.
Dreams you’d dreamt then woke to tell
Then you realised, help you!
You were still in nightmare hell
Help you all! Wake you up!
Episodic themes of fear
Bad as soaps? Help you!
Then came the adolescent years
And swapped your mind for mindless balls!
Oh help me! Wake me up!
TIM SANSOM 29 TH MAY 2009
Bad dreams when you were a kid
Went on ages, help you!
Probably driven by the id
Help you all! Wake you up!
Witches, ghosts and empty streets
Shone so lurid, help you!
Piracy in ceaseless fleets
Help you all! Wake you up!
Mum and Dad not knowing you
So convincing, help you!
Ordeals you keep going through
Help you all! Bring you round.
Dreams you’d dreamt then woke to tell
Then you realised, help you!
You were still in nightmare hell
Help you all! Wake you up!
Episodic themes of fear
Bad as soaps? Help you!
Then came the adolescent years
And swapped your mind for mindless balls!
Oh help me! Wake me up!
TIM SANSOM 29 TH MAY 2009
A MAN IN HIS DEFINITIVE MOMENT
A MAN IN HIS DEFINITIVE MOMENT
How old is this enormous and towering tree?
How many weary heads have rested here upon this grassy spot in autumns and summers, to look up to these wise wavering branches?
I had a certain steady ability about me as a youth.
I’m not sure I can describe it.
I’m not sure I can prove it.
I’m not sure I can put it over to you in such a way that you could relate to it ,either cerebrally or viscerally.
I’m not sure when I gained it or when with hoodwinking gradients it slipped away.
But I’m a telling you there was a certain unique spring in my whole conceptual step just about the time my balls dropped and I was a right rank Herbert!!
If you buy me a ruler for Christmas then I can start off with superb and clipped new year resolutions.
I have to say that on that very premise why not get me a compass and a protractor and some irritating coloured felt tipped pens too?
Yeah we were the last generation to play ‘Man from uncle’ and ‘The Saint!’ using cap guns and stationary brought back from the general post office.
How old is that fair ash though!? Old enough to be your this’ Says the voice of tired Tuesdays and old enough to be your that !‘said some other mediocre week day looking for some form of comic place or identity. And so the keen and eager assembled audience had to accept that the vast tree was as old as it was , not a second older nor an ion closer to peachy cheeked youth!!
This week on all the television channels the recession was said to have worsened. Apparently the main reason for this had little to do with economics and was much more linked with the stuff of bad dreams so to speak………………Cricket… and the West Indies did this and that and Pakistan have sold some high flying bowler to the other team whom I know and understand very little about! So these tainted constituents of a semi important tapestry continue to revolve about ones psyche because there is no veritable union to oppose it to be so!
I stood over a large dark round hole in the ground. This was wasteland situated not far from the end of a long and dense wood. I saw myself there looking about me right to the woods and directly ahead of me deep deep down into this vast and peculiar pit. It could have been a dream, it could have been astral projection, it could have been the memory of a forma carnation and it could have been the prophecy of one to come. I did not see outward or perceive in a way with my senses that is the usual way, rather I see myself in the same way I see the woods and the hole. Then, as I look further down into the hole I see layers upon layers of grey upon brown upon black and these are the sinking fathoms of depth and as I do so my senses return to their proper place as the woods vanishes. Then I look up to a tiny circle of light which is the top of the hole which I am now at the bottom of.
I loved the smell of paper caps. We used to hit one whole packet with a hammer. The packets were cylindrical, they made a really decent bang. This is not what they were made for. They were made for tet tet tet and not for BANG!! And this was the very beginning of the exploration of the concept of alternative uses.
Magnolia walls and torn aging Bowie posters bringing it back as it was when we first got our grubby mitts on gigantic headphones. Arthur going down the lift every morning and over to the newsagents for half ounce of old Holborn and a copy of the racing times. What a lovely uncle and what a lovely man as handsome as his Maltese D.N.A, he used to love a flutter with Rene backing the outsiders. Here in these stinking towering piles of Ealing and Acton borough council brick, and underneath a skin of growingly alien graffiti is me and my reflective contemplations and here is where it all happened, our growing up that is! Why am I telling ya ? Well its just that these times these places, these events they had something about them I can never quite define, and trying is fun. Some years earlier my Dad carrying me as a toddler had me watch on while he gave a narrative of reverence to the first crude stages of these two towers being built. The foundations were dug and the vast opal stone was being erected. I had a small hand full of large metal imperial money and listened to my Father as he explained what these buildings would be. Then Rene and John left the East Acton prefabs at the end of the late sixties and came here in the early seventies to reside in the sky, looking out from Heathrow to the Post office tower on a clear day. These were the towers of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Goodbye t Jane’.
There was a great deal of trust between me and Alec. We took turns to lock one another in a cupboard under the stairs at his house. Whoever was locked in was completely at the mercy of the other to let him out after. We composed this game whereby the person who did the locking in would lock the door and run out of the house across the road and touch a parked car then return and unlock the door. We both did it numerously and we never failed to unlock that door. That felt like a great friendship.
When we see what time really is and what before and after really mean then we find ourselves there again looking up at those wavering branches.
TIM SANSOM 3RD MARCH 2009
How old is this enormous and towering tree?
How many weary heads have rested here upon this grassy spot in autumns and summers, to look up to these wise wavering branches?
I had a certain steady ability about me as a youth.
I’m not sure I can describe it.
I’m not sure I can prove it.
I’m not sure I can put it over to you in such a way that you could relate to it ,either cerebrally or viscerally.
I’m not sure when I gained it or when with hoodwinking gradients it slipped away.
But I’m a telling you there was a certain unique spring in my whole conceptual step just about the time my balls dropped and I was a right rank Herbert!!
If you buy me a ruler for Christmas then I can start off with superb and clipped new year resolutions.
I have to say that on that very premise why not get me a compass and a protractor and some irritating coloured felt tipped pens too?
Yeah we were the last generation to play ‘Man from uncle’ and ‘The Saint!’ using cap guns and stationary brought back from the general post office.
How old is that fair ash though!? Old enough to be your this’ Says the voice of tired Tuesdays and old enough to be your that !‘said some other mediocre week day looking for some form of comic place or identity. And so the keen and eager assembled audience had to accept that the vast tree was as old as it was , not a second older nor an ion closer to peachy cheeked youth!!
This week on all the television channels the recession was said to have worsened. Apparently the main reason for this had little to do with economics and was much more linked with the stuff of bad dreams so to speak………………Cricket… and the West Indies did this and that and Pakistan have sold some high flying bowler to the other team whom I know and understand very little about! So these tainted constituents of a semi important tapestry continue to revolve about ones psyche because there is no veritable union to oppose it to be so!
I stood over a large dark round hole in the ground. This was wasteland situated not far from the end of a long and dense wood. I saw myself there looking about me right to the woods and directly ahead of me deep deep down into this vast and peculiar pit. It could have been a dream, it could have been astral projection, it could have been the memory of a forma carnation and it could have been the prophecy of one to come. I did not see outward or perceive in a way with my senses that is the usual way, rather I see myself in the same way I see the woods and the hole. Then, as I look further down into the hole I see layers upon layers of grey upon brown upon black and these are the sinking fathoms of depth and as I do so my senses return to their proper place as the woods vanishes. Then I look up to a tiny circle of light which is the top of the hole which I am now at the bottom of.
I loved the smell of paper caps. We used to hit one whole packet with a hammer. The packets were cylindrical, they made a really decent bang. This is not what they were made for. They were made for tet tet tet and not for BANG!! And this was the very beginning of the exploration of the concept of alternative uses.
Magnolia walls and torn aging Bowie posters bringing it back as it was when we first got our grubby mitts on gigantic headphones. Arthur going down the lift every morning and over to the newsagents for half ounce of old Holborn and a copy of the racing times. What a lovely uncle and what a lovely man as handsome as his Maltese D.N.A, he used to love a flutter with Rene backing the outsiders. Here in these stinking towering piles of Ealing and Acton borough council brick, and underneath a skin of growingly alien graffiti is me and my reflective contemplations and here is where it all happened, our growing up that is! Why am I telling ya ? Well its just that these times these places, these events they had something about them I can never quite define, and trying is fun. Some years earlier my Dad carrying me as a toddler had me watch on while he gave a narrative of reverence to the first crude stages of these two towers being built. The foundations were dug and the vast opal stone was being erected. I had a small hand full of large metal imperial money and listened to my Father as he explained what these buildings would be. Then Rene and John left the East Acton prefabs at the end of the late sixties and came here in the early seventies to reside in the sky, looking out from Heathrow to the Post office tower on a clear day. These were the towers of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘Goodbye t Jane’.
There was a great deal of trust between me and Alec. We took turns to lock one another in a cupboard under the stairs at his house. Whoever was locked in was completely at the mercy of the other to let him out after. We composed this game whereby the person who did the locking in would lock the door and run out of the house across the road and touch a parked car then return and unlock the door. We both did it numerously and we never failed to unlock that door. That felt like a great friendship.
When we see what time really is and what before and after really mean then we find ourselves there again looking up at those wavering branches.
TIM SANSOM 3RD MARCH 2009
THE CHIMNEY
THE CHIMNEY
A proud fat chimney squats on the roof of the house opposite.
It’s my chimney because I’ve noticed it.
It will become a point of reference for me for my having noticed it.
In its stillness is a large feline attitude.
It’s been watching the soap of our lives here for seventy years and it holds its judgement.
Crowned with generous rotund pots of dark orange it sits in a majestic dignified silence.
This morning its been watching me watching it watch me.
Indifferent to ennui and non-event its self contented demeanour sets an inspiring example.
People who prefer animals to people ought to try the inanimate
Its even less intrusive.
TIM SANSOM 4TH DECEMBER 2010
A proud fat chimney squats on the roof of the house opposite.
It’s my chimney because I’ve noticed it.
It will become a point of reference for me for my having noticed it.
In its stillness is a large feline attitude.
It’s been watching the soap of our lives here for seventy years and it holds its judgement.
Crowned with generous rotund pots of dark orange it sits in a majestic dignified silence.
This morning its been watching me watching it watch me.
Indifferent to ennui and non-event its self contented demeanour sets an inspiring example.
People who prefer animals to people ought to try the inanimate
Its even less intrusive.
TIM SANSOM 4TH DECEMBER 2010
Friday, May 16, 2008
THE WARM AND THE KIND
THE WARM AND THE KIND
Labouring to assert itself
A tame electric light
Made an opal cotton curtain
Amber in the night.
Outside it was superfluous
As summer raged and bloomed
And all this touched my soul
So that my infancy resumed.
It took me back to caravans
And all which paints the theme
Of being cared and catered for
Under a kind regime.
TIM SANSOM 16TH MAY 2008
Labouring to assert itself
A tame electric light
Made an opal cotton curtain
Amber in the night.
Outside it was superfluous
As summer raged and bloomed
And all this touched my soul
So that my infancy resumed.
It took me back to caravans
And all which paints the theme
Of being cared and catered for
Under a kind regime.
TIM SANSOM 16TH MAY 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
WE THE PUBLIC
WE THE PUBLIC
We the public
Paint our nails
Turn in circles
Chase our tails
We the public
Send our faxes
Sit on crappers
Pay our taxes.
We the public
Wash our faces
Flush our faeces
Tie our laces.
We the public
Kiss our spouses
Rot in factories
Dwell in houses.
We the public
Go on line
Send our texts
And read true crime.
We the public
Drink in dives
And break up with
Our modern wives
We the public
Do our best
To earn more money
Than the rest.
We the public
Forward notions
So as to attain
Promotions.
We the public
Hope all see
When we tend
Our Bonsai trees.
2
We the public
All invest
We plan ahead
We feather nests.
We the public
Ail and age
Lose our zest
And quash our rage.
We the public
Roam round lost
But always keep
Our fingers crossed.
We the public
Trust and vote
And swim the
Party leader moat.
We the public
Pass and die
In the public
Turf we lie.
We the public
We the public
We the public
We the public
We the public.
Some of us
Walk other ways
Do different deeds
And solve the maze.
3
Hymns and things
Help us hope
We’re resolute
To never mope.
Prayer can’t hurt
The hard try game
Pause to reflect
Be done with blame
For me the Man
And you the girl
And him the soldier
And them the cousins
And we the public.
TIM SANSOM 17TH MARCH 2008
We the public
Paint our nails
Turn in circles
Chase our tails
We the public
Send our faxes
Sit on crappers
Pay our taxes.
We the public
Wash our faces
Flush our faeces
Tie our laces.
We the public
Kiss our spouses
Rot in factories
Dwell in houses.
We the public
Go on line
Send our texts
And read true crime.
We the public
Drink in dives
And break up with
Our modern wives
We the public
Do our best
To earn more money
Than the rest.
We the public
Forward notions
So as to attain
Promotions.
We the public
Hope all see
When we tend
Our Bonsai trees.
2
We the public
All invest
We plan ahead
We feather nests.
We the public
Ail and age
Lose our zest
And quash our rage.
We the public
Roam round lost
But always keep
Our fingers crossed.
We the public
Trust and vote
And swim the
Party leader moat.
We the public
Pass and die
In the public
Turf we lie.
We the public
We the public
We the public
We the public
We the public.
Some of us
Walk other ways
Do different deeds
And solve the maze.
3
Hymns and things
Help us hope
We’re resolute
To never mope.
Prayer can’t hurt
The hard try game
Pause to reflect
Be done with blame
For me the Man
And you the girl
And him the soldier
And them the cousins
And we the public.
TIM SANSOM 17TH MARCH 2008
BUT NOW IT'S AN ARCADE
FORGOTTEN CAFÉ
Here Nosegays got dragged on by dishevelled spivs
While intrigued historians observed how one lived
And bank jobs got planned over fowl cups of tea
And the loveys came in from the theatre at three
But now it’s an arcade.
Overweight ruddy faced ladies guffawed
And drunks spewed expletives as coffee pots roared
And tobacco smoke billowed to form a dense cloud
So that even eccentrics got lost in the crowd.
But now it’s an arcade.
Mods aired contempt here for old die hard Teds
With a quid’s worth of blues they’d be bombed off their heads
Sipping on cokes telling bum pinching jokes
Their Vespas a gleaming from mirror to spokes.
But now it’s an arcade.
Old girls with beehives would moan at the prices
‘Is that all the change from ten Bob for two slices?’
Occasional vagrants came in trying it on
‘ Giv us a tanner son and I’ll be gone!’
But now it’s an arcade.
Everyone listened to heavyweight fights
On a crackly wireless on Saturday nights
They’d congregate with an at tentative ear
And in wonderful unison hollowed and cheered.
But now it’s an arcade.
This was a place to come in for a warm
And where lasting and meaningful items were formed
This was a haunt where we came to be sane
In that pleasantries could be explained and exchanged!
But now its an arcade.
TIM SANSOM 20TH MARCH 2008
Here Nosegays got dragged on by dishevelled spivs
While intrigued historians observed how one lived
And bank jobs got planned over fowl cups of tea
And the loveys came in from the theatre at three
But now it’s an arcade.
Overweight ruddy faced ladies guffawed
And drunks spewed expletives as coffee pots roared
And tobacco smoke billowed to form a dense cloud
So that even eccentrics got lost in the crowd.
But now it’s an arcade.
Mods aired contempt here for old die hard Teds
With a quid’s worth of blues they’d be bombed off their heads
Sipping on cokes telling bum pinching jokes
Their Vespas a gleaming from mirror to spokes.
But now it’s an arcade.
Old girls with beehives would moan at the prices
‘Is that all the change from ten Bob for two slices?’
Occasional vagrants came in trying it on
‘ Giv us a tanner son and I’ll be gone!’
But now it’s an arcade.
Everyone listened to heavyweight fights
On a crackly wireless on Saturday nights
They’d congregate with an at tentative ear
And in wonderful unison hollowed and cheered.
But now it’s an arcade.
This was a place to come in for a warm
And where lasting and meaningful items were formed
This was a haunt where we came to be sane
In that pleasantries could be explained and exchanged!
But now its an arcade.
TIM SANSOM 20TH MARCH 2008
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