The Arresting The Detaining The Immune

The Arresting officer throttled my dog

the Detaining  officer sniffs some glue

and while there are many other dogs

like it this one was mine, arm yourselves;

they will take your dogs to die. The Detaining

of the faculty to breathe. Now my dog

is strangled and detained and the officer

is Immune I write to the officer the Starr-

s are going out won’t you hold me as we watch them

pop and split when you feel how fully

you are strangled and detained,

officer, come into my arms I will peel the bitter tears

away, turn my face to the face beneath them the kiss of death

you strangled our dogs for this we are hurt in the marrow

yet still, we steer back from our idiot violence

choose a sterner path, the dissolution of the mind

the detaining of fists as they long for eyelids to tongue,

the Arresting heart rate the problem you live for

and oh the wages, remember your sick days, 

the Ambulance Service war room, containment

and erasure of dogs string me up from the nearest

lampost, throw away the key, gorgeous repairing heart lay 
a finger on my dog, scatter the engrams, I swear I’ll do time.

oh Bloom we love you get up

It's with some real sadness I write, looking out at the grey air and thinking about Bloom. There's a strange feeling when a band you love break up, especially one that has always been there as a social lynchpin. Since the first year I was in Brighton they've been around in some form or other, as The Beautiful Word originally, and they have always been able to put on a party. Likewise they've always made music I can have on heavy rotation in my ears when I'm travelling about, a band who I can show off to people if I'm in another country making new friends and we're putting songs on. It was a beautiful thing when I was being shown round a beautiful bookshop in Chicago and my friend Nate told me he had read a post I wrote on this blog about their album, and that he put them on in the shop at closing time. Bands split up a lot and projects end. The feeling, though, that there won't be another gig or new songs is a pang. I am having a similar wrench with mewithoutYou at the moment, and now I think of it mewithoutYou and Bloom are the two bands I have listened to the most consistently for the longest time. It's strange listening habbits. One of these bands most days, then a lot of jazz and usually a bit of happy hardcore to get me from A to B. Maybe something related to the obsession of the hour. Anyways, it feels like a friend I will always have, and I want to leave a note here directing you to their last single (bottom of this page) and to say thank you to all of them for every single gig, recording, party, ridiculous adventure and all the laughter. That special impetus to keep working precariously, to give and give and give and to inspire others to do so. Thank you, Bloom. Thloom.

x

https://open.spotify.com/album/3JIoN2BwmQ0eUQSR7CyD8l?si=B02gBh3aQ_SzlrXrulYQ2Q

Triludan

And as it cleared that you lay 

to scatter by me, to dream, then

to copper the sky appears, 

which stars; its body to dream 

or clears the window bridge 

that is beating rest. Who lay 

in a beaten rest to the bridge, 

the dream that cleared to copper 

the stars, and dreams a poisoned sky

in a heat denied to sleep 

and then to dream to the stear,

or you who lay by heat for clear.

A Seasonal Banger...

I've made a little Christmas banger. You can listen to it for free or buy it for £3. It is noisy and horrid and silly and at points fairly gentle....

https://verityspott.bandcamp.com/track/jungle-bells-once-again-you-and-your-jungle-friends-have-ruined-my-nice-quiet-christmas

Out of Print!

My book "The Mutiny Aboard the RV Felicity (Tipped Press - 2017) is now out of print. If you'd like a PDF copy drop me an email at verityspott@gmail.com

You can have it for free. Donations / swaps also kindly accepted.

Some music, a lot of quiet.

Hello, if there's anybody still here. I've been really quiet for ages. I'm trying to finish writing / editing this enormous book called Hopelessness which is feeling like a huge fatberg in my throat waiting to be able to sob itself out. Luckily there are a few sewege technicians down there working on it with their hands, shovels and power hoses. It'll undoubtably fall to bits, form up again in some different configurations and block another sewer.

I want to write something here son about the passing of my friend Sean Bonney, but who knows if I will... Everything that could be said seems to be flaring up everywhere I look and in his poems and the music he showed me... We gathered for Horseplay this month at the Black Dove in Kemptown to remember him, celebrate him, read his poems etc. This was my slightly bleary response the next day:

'Hard to put into words how much last night meant. I've honestly never known a poetry event like it. Devastating. Joyous. Defiant. Radically tender. We read Sean's poems, read things for and to Sean, sat together and really listened. It was incredible to hear all these varied and vast responses; how Sean had moved through so many different stratas. Hearing about a him turning up to a poetry conference in the 90s and talking about autonomous space travel, conversations about nursery rhymes, exerpts from Walter Benjamin, some very early poems from an anthology of "free form and acid house poems", miniature reviews and responses etc etc... and then at the end we all read together. The third set of The Commons, passing the book around the room. I just can't describe it. I can't do it justice. It was beautiful and tender and empowering and devastating and all night there was this feeling that he might just appear. Remembering how delighted he was when he read at Horseplay, and he saw that broken little armchair on the stage and asked how long he could read for; his joy at being told "as long as you need to", and that reading which had someone who had just wondered in lying on the floor in ecstasy. Hearing a story about a teenager who had been thrown out of school detouring Sean's ACAB poem and performing it at a poetry event, and chanting it together. Thank you everyone. I'm not going to start listing folks. There were so many people crowded in it would be impossible anyhow. There were also a great many people who weren't there who I know would have wanted to be. The room was also teaming with ghosts; the ghosts I know Sean is swirling around with now. God. I'm crying writing this. Totally overcome with emotion. My friend. Our friend. Our comrade. Our ridiculous man. Our ghosts. Our poetries. Our eternal fires, solar winds and reveries. Sean Bonney. Love.'

Here's an exerpt of the communal reading of The Commons. Apologies for the poor quality. Reading The Commons at Horseplay

As I said before, I have been pretty quiet, more or less unable to write. I have been meddling with some musical bits and pieces though. Below is one of them. Following a beautiful chat with a friend in the Collondae Bar in Brighton where we discussed care, empathy, acid communism etc etc... It is a bit all over the place but I am quite pleased with it.

Acid Communism - Firs Improvisation

More soon. Tara for now. Send my love to Mabel. xx

Hot Foot 3

Radio silence, nothing happened

how do you feel ill. What's the length

a worm. Nibbled shit. Brighton Law Courts

komboloi, ill divised factional resent. Pass.