Every day is a leaving party of the heart. Who remembers the Suncharms, the Badgers, Basinger and Pushkins? Songs that tell me over again of the old world: of the rehearsal rooms with nineteenth-century amps and scruffy attempts at insulation: of the autumn leaves and half-empty car parks that you look at across the green while the bass player makes his move to B and A under your circling notes. Corny, genre equivalent of a 12-bar blues (listen to the bid for epic in Pushkins� �Sea Egg�), but I don�t hear it much anymore, I can forgive: it probably seemed a one-off in a million at the time. The skies above in their permutations: on heatwave days plain blue, plus massed impressive clouds: at 5 yesterday morning, woken by the memory of the drinking, a zesty high expanse of wisps and trails, weather portraits of old June, always new. Above me now the cobalt background behind the insistent cloud cover. The other night the blast of warm early evening rain like a gigantic shower had been turned on: desperate travellers pushing past into the train, water bullets between the porches, the catharsis after too many blinding sunny days to believe. The sky at night, deep blue straight above at one in the morning; the horizon as it comes down, still dimly lit at ten like a tasteful restaurant, subtly darker blues, white clouds turning pink at the foot of the airy page. �In thinking of nature as harmonizing, in the diversity of its particular laws, with our need to find universal principles for them, we must, as far as our insight goes, judge this harmony as contingent, yet also indispensable for the needs of our understanding � hence as a purposiveness by which nature harmonizes with our aim, though only insofar as this is directed to cognition�. He leans on his bike at one end of a bridge in October, in the cathedral�s long shadow as the cars whiz past below us, talking about getting a band together. Sillitoe world of bicycles and locks: Golden Grahams, Stradhoughton prose in the bus stop�s midnight blue early morning. Lager and Lime Top every night: meek tenacity in the throng at the bar. Up and down the row of faces in the light and darkness, youth that doesn�t know its own youth. The same scanty books of poetry in crumbling houses up and down the land�s undulation. Every day is Valentine�s Day. She wears purple lipstick at the bus stop. The Henriads. - S�blood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear. - Or an old lion, or a lover�s lute. - Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe. The raindrops falling on the glass roof over summer's watery coffee. People I never know as well as I would like, unaware that they don�t know what resignation is. Snow suddenly coats the avenues from one broad side to another, tops the crimson post box on the corner of the silent street. People fade and I forget you. (The ginger leaves falling around the streets of Massachussetts, the yellow and black school bus, the Californian summer sky under which a car blinks out of memory.) I have already forgotten too much. (A sneaked video moment of last night�s match, Platini scoring in the European Championship Final, before I must scurry, hardly understanding what it all means, up the road to school.) But I have remembered more than you might think. (Grey streets of Guildford as the Berlin Wall comes down: at the top of a slope a busker singing Sting outside the Our Price.) I have forgotten you. But I haven�t forgotten YOU. I suppose (the orange street lights on the way from the Fruiterers�, the heave of the midnight traffic under overpasses, down thoroughfares) that it�s goodbye (the sun blazing off a vast green pitch, hundreds of miles away, as for two hours France in bright blue play Brazil in canary yellow, on a screen in the dark middle of a party) to the old ways. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+