Biography 2012

          In the summer of 2006 I sat down at my desk in Sherman Oaks, California, to begin work on a series of 14 sonnets, initially to address my thoughts on the decline of the sonnet form and the possibilities that could be contained within a contemporary reincarnation of the genre. To oust the conventions of courtly love, for example, and introduce some modern day language, as well as subject matter, was something that I fancied, and still believe, is worthwhile. The power of the rhyming couplet and the overall imagery of something so small yet concise and encapsulating was always forefront of my mind. I began,

Amidst the air of Godless gracious things

Shall I compose with absent rule the rule.

         I was dreaming of Wilde and WES Owen, Keats and Marlowe. All of the aforementioned danced around subjects of a horrific nature and, in their own way, modernised what Howard, Wyatt and Spenser had brought to England all that time ago. These people were clearly born with the eyes that they were born with. Educated in their language, perhaps, (Owen was schooled only to a high school level – Wilde was an Oxford Graduate) but with a vision of a world, their world, that could not be crushed by the foulness of death and war, or from the oppression of the frightened and homophobic upper classes. Some would argue that the sonnets of Wordsworth protested against the Industrial Revolution; Keats’ fear of abandonment and death is almost unparalleled in poetry. Marlowe was murdered in a courtyard; Wyatt was executed after being accused of treason numerous times, and the list could last for eternity. The power of the sonnet, in my opinion, is unequalled in any art; the power of the word is ultimate. Anything we know, we know because it was documented by another. New research and discovery extends from the records of others. Only poetry is pure because only emotion is unique.

          During the First World War the world was gifted with a half decade of sonnet creation unprecedented in History. The endurance of men took a genre of love and shocked the world in ways that politicians could not dream. Thomas, Owen, Rosenberg, and Graves (to name a few of the many) rose in the ranks of my studies to the level of Gods. Few survived and several have been censored biographically by biographers and family members (Graves and Sassoon lived into old age, one in self-inflicted exile, one in his English Countryside but neither seemed to recover from the war. Their work was never as powerful again) but the work is all we need. I have met lecturers and professors who have banned biography from their tutorial rooms because ‘the work is all we need.’ It may seem that there is no place for my small series, entitled ‘The Dogfish Grounds’ but I justify this as a constant in my life, at least while writing my piece. The romanticism contrasted to the stark realities of ‘other people’s decision’ appealed to me greatly as an alcoholic: the camaraderie, the friendship, and the love were traits that were absent from my life, self-inflicted (again) perhaps but imminent and constant throughout. I cannot love a man I have never known but his work can burn my core. I am still not sure who the hell I think I am, and yet so much has changed in my life since I began.

I should interject here (for the sake of regaining a thesis that I never, in fact, stated at all, to say that this morning I finished my series. It now consists of 117 poems, mostly in the sonnet form but not exclusively. This is important to me because people like me never tend to finish anything. Start everything, yes, but finish nothing.

          I first entered the United States in 1994. I left in 2001 and returned in 2005. Everything that happened there, in every place it happened, was accompanied by a raging alcoholism that seems so much easier to understand, address and (most of all) respect. I have to respect something that has the power to kill me at any given moment because that sort of power earns respect. The renaissance heralded a long list of artists who were under the command of respect. Religious diversity was quashed and reversed, and quashed and reversed. There is no evidence that freedom of speech ever prevailed within the poets of the time, mainly because our documentation of their lives comes mostly from their outpouring and, therefore, under the commandeered respect of the monarch and its army oppressors. Just as was the case in Scotland in the preceding 75 years, the court poets were there to document the times and, ultimately, entertain the King. My King, today, is dormant: silent, but never defeated. My freedom of speech relies upon the principles of my life and my recovery to allow it to flourish. The United States is only one chapter of that journey and only locates itself within one chapter of this series.

          I was born A Hamilton Boy, for my sins perhaps, but as I recently bore witness to the cremation of my last Hamiltonian resident descendant I realised that my opinions had changed. Four years (or so) previous to this I had sat in a bar in Santa Monica, CA, and wrote the lines,

It strikes me now that Hamilton was kind.

It strikes me I left there my fucking mind.

          I honestly never really thought much about these lines at the time but it makes sense now. The Hamilton Boy was always leaving Hamilton at the first available opportunity and he did because people like him tend to get what they want in the end, be it by manipulation, pity, or ignorance. He ran and he ran and he ran and he never really stopped until he entered a hospital in East Kilbride approximately 21 years later. This was not the first hospital that had housed me and I was to enter a psychiatric rehabilitation centre afterward but it was the end of the running. The running almost killed me twice. Today I walk.

          There are a few significant individuals that are singled out with the Hamilton series. Not necessarily (or I should say, exclusively) because of their impact on my life (they all impacted my life) but because they are what I see of Hamilton when I close my eyes. My grandmother was crippled into Hamilton. There is no reason to believe that she would ever have left, yet to have suggested that she had a choice is inconceivable. Her husband, George, in free verse here, is a dream to me. I was so young when he died. He was paralysed and dumbed by a series of strokes in his mid thirties and was gone by his early fifties. I am told that, from him, I learned my scowl and my frown. There has to be importance in that. My mother is my mother. I could not write the apology of my life without including the woman who physically created me.

          I am aware that there are people from the United States who are stated as fact and some who are treated with opinionated contempt within their appropriate segment: those demons belong to me and cannot be given away. I will release them in time. There are others who are noted only by their unintended absence. To ‘force’ them into the mix would be to construct a biography that I have no interest in creating. From Tampa Bay to New Orleans to Los Angeles, and out into the valley the only problem that I ever really had (and I had a lot) was me. Every other problem in my life centred around my confusion with people and hatred of me. I used to believe that the reality was, in fact, the other way around but I cannot afford to think or feel like that anymore. Have I learned to love all and hate nothing? Absolutely not. I work with me on a daily basis and the more I work, the more I get to know my subject.

Time still reminds of the haunted torture of one line. A simple line, penned by a grunge ridden Heroin addict, now deceased, named Layne Stayley. He said,

Am I wrong?

Have I run too far to get home?

        Scrawled on the door of my Tampa apartment, like some teenage 27 year old, I wondered and wondered if it could be so. Interestingly enough I was to make it home less than 3 years later, only to return four after that and repeat the same process almost verbatim, with the exception of the outcome being ten times worse. They tell me now that it always gets worse when you go back. And I had the gall to disbelieve them.

          Boston now seems like a distant memory of love, the first location where I ‘almost’ drank myself to death. I would like to think that in years to come when our children have grown, Katie and I can go there. To return as an old sober man would be something quite splendid. I would like to meet Walsh again and shake his hand. I would like to sit on the common and watch the wagon return. The place never seems, in my mind, like a crime scene. Uddingston seems like a crime scene, yet Boston does not.

          Glasgow flows throughout my series but does not have its own section for the sole reason that the entire era has Glasgow in its veins. I need Glasgow now like I needed other substances then. Glasgow was my original Garden of Eden. A Scotsman once said that ‘Glasgow gave me more than it ever took away.’ I have always believed this, although there were massive chunks when my life pointed it’s ever withering finger at the city and blamed it for the time on the clock, the rain and the heartbreak endured by all. I do not come from Glasgow but my son will be born there, and he will.

        I created a series, named ‘The Mansionhouse’, which I hope can be read as the volta of my series. I personally see it as a recovery Step one but there is absolutely no point in delving into such concepts here. For purposes of anonymity and respect, it is almost solely in the first person and should be seen to have a complete writer/ speaker relationship (something I understand to be shunned at the top level of anything. A peculiar little man named Lyons screamed at me so loudly that I never forgot this sentiment, and here I am performing it. Kiss that.) A man named Campbell worked wonders on my oesophagus and, basically, saved my life but it was the Mansionhouse that saved my spirit’s soul and returned to me the life of an untarnished child to repaint: to use and live in a ‘new’ way. As with almost all pieces, the titles have been removed here and replaced, simply, with numbers. Most were one word nouns of feeling, emotion and realisation. Surrender is a  self apparent given, I believe.

And all I dream of substance cannot be.

For terror noosed the nerve that hanged me high

Above the droning pipes, the clocks, the sea;

The panic paranoia and the sky.

          My title segment, I would prefer to say nothing of, other than  that it is the centre, the nucleus for everything else that surrounds it. It consists of people who never were, or shells of selves that lived their own success and demise. It is, to me, the most precious thing I have ever created, although I have not created very much. The insertion of Oscar Wilde is something that happens several times throughout my series. My envy of the twist on words cannot be contemplated in terms of homage, mainly because such a God given perception does not exist within me or any other alive today.

          If the Mansionhouse be the volta then the rhyming couplet must project itself in the form of the final series and the appendix of my collection. When Katie and Milo arrived there was life on life’s terms and the acceptance of the concept up until a point. Behind it lay a 6 foot man with blood on his hands. Fingernails had not stopped falling out. Hair was growing back but the skin on my scalp was dead. The physicality of me still seemed, at times, to be decomposing whilst still alive. I don’t suppose I knew it then: that I was still clinging onto my life with the film attached to my teeth’s skin. Katie has given me a life, a wife, a purpose, a partner and an opportunity to display the self: the self that was always supposed to be me. Milo is too young, too undisturbed to be included in this diatribe and the poetic work that it details. We await the birth of our son, Wilfred. He, like is older brother, is intentionally distanced from this place. He is the outcome of this place: of me.

         I like to see my sequence as a journey. Not necessarily a journey of my life but of a journey that ran parallel to the life that I almost forgot to have. The biggest difficulty in my ‘time’ till now, with retrospect, is that, in seeing all the wonderful places I have seen; in meeting all the wonderful people I have met, I had to travel. And I had to take me with me. Eventually I gave up. On September 9^th 2009 I walked from a cab into an emergency unit at Mount Auburn hospital in Cambridge, MA, and told them that I had been bleeding for three weeks from my mouth and my anus. They pumped my stomach and quickly induced a coma type effect upon me that was to last for the remainder of the month. My body went through Armageddon during that time, well documented from the mouths of my family and my dear friend who witnessed thence. I awoke, unable to walk but alive. My oesophagus had been banded and my blood replaced. My body had previously rejected a plasma blood transfusion that apparently nearly killed me again. And blah, blah, blah, fucking blah! Me and people like me have horror stories and battle scars at our disposal, left and right, that would make most mortals vomit. We were afraid of everything except this: except death. Personally speaking, life scared the shit out of me: death was a different story altogether. The point is that I survived Mount Auburn against the odds and, as honesty prevails, against my better judgement and my want. I gave up again: I started bleeding. I collapsed again. My father crossed the globe, breaking his own heart, and bailed me out again. I owe that gentleman my life. I returned home again. I was hospitalized again. The bleeding was stopped again. I was sent to rehab again…

And then, for some reason I surrendered to my commander and ‘again’ stopped. I accepted his victory and brushed my will aside. There was literally nowhere left for me to go. All I had was the remainder of a lease on a box that I had almost died inside, a few guitars, and a bunch of books. Every opportunity that had been pushed and handed my way was gone.  In the process of trying to get rid of myself, I lost everyone else: those who loved me and those who did not, the irony being that I was still stuck with myself. I knew that if I went back there I would die. This was not news of a negative type, or so I thought. I had believed that that had been my intention. I never knew that someone like me could actually get too sick to die; could become too physically sick to physically drink. I had no idea.

I wrote, as the final rhyming couplet of my signature series,

But as her timepiece chimed to leave or stay

I died at will and washed my wish away.

I believed that: I still do, but somewhere along the line I realised? I learned? Who gives a shit what it was? Somewhere along the line it became known to me that, with life, we get more than one wish. That, with life and hard work and responsibility and belief of the self, we regain, we recompose; we reform. It is with this notion that I included the appendix to this series. It should tell a tale of its own, a strange type of love story, perhaps. A psychotic juggernaut of death defying bullshit, or of two people who woke up on different days, who were processed, and then self processed, on different days. Then…all of a sudden… they bumped into each other…

We, The Mouthless Dead, Return.

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I am a Pejorist in recovery, Sober in intent.

BMC2012