All I've Found (George Greenough)

All I've Found (George Greenough) - Sea Movies from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.

 

More ace stuff from Australia and the Switch-foot laboratory... How good is this track by Shannon! Shannon is pure stoke and one of the most diverse and accomplished musicians anywhere. 

 

I was glad recently to hear that Surfing World had published a story by George, which includes my first encounter with a shark.

 

Daniel Crockett wrote this bit in 2003. 'Look back at the beach and just as the eyes swivel back around to the horizon something big comes out of the water. As it leisurely breaks the surface, it twists over onto its side, before neatly disappearing 20 meters away from me and over 200 meters out from the beach. I scream like a little girl, adrenalin courses like never ever before in any situation. Scramble for a little one, clutching at straws, ride in and prone out, arms flailing like wind chimes in a storm. The water takes on a nightmarish black hue and the wave peters out. 40 meters of deep gutter and now the fear really starts. Convulsions sweep my body, almost bucking me off my board. Gibbering like a child, a petrified child I hit the beach and don't stop running until I am by my car. I know the meaning of fear.'

 

Clare (Parabola) had a short story published on The Times yesterday... go girl!  

 

 

 

Chasing Flight coming soon

 

Screen grabs by Ollie Banks

 

 

Portrait by Bill Daniel - creator of 'Who Is Bozo Texino?'

 

Coaltrain Hobo Music

Coaltrain they called him
He came out the east
Riding the rail in the
Thin trails of light
He ignited a fire
Set about a howling
Torching, tire-squealing feast
For he packed green notes
In a pewter pot
Long rolls of dough
To blow through
Forgot
On wine
On women
On song
On knowing everything and nothing
And fixing to belong
And fighting in the dirt
Fighting standing up
And falling down
Fighting as a verb, as a noun
Fighting tooth and nail
For belief, for passion
For freedom
Against pale prejudice
For coins
To avert bitterness
Fighting over lonely eyes
For hunger
For the play of the wind in an empty street
Fighting For Air
Without cease
Without remorse
Breaking skin, still less peace
And even the band stops playing
And the dogs release
As they brawl
For he came from the east
Coaltrain
Cast in copper pawl
Soon the time with money
Was bare memory
Scant mentions of
Slim little honey-notes
In the foothills of more encroaching daylight
Dim
Dawn
And even his taste for a fight was worn
Gathered coins gritty
There was pity
Pretty little tongues of scorn
That he read
And learned
to dread
And roared at the night, said
'I am not nothing
I am I
And this I shall be
Until I die'
Then the jackals crept
Amongst his limbs
The hyaena laughter carried
To all ears
And Coaltrain slept between
Bare gutters
Vanquished
The stutters of a wreck or
Mannish boy
These faculties we employ
To protect
And destroy the parasites
Are veneer
Paper thin vestiges
Of the daily fight
To disappear
Which way to implore?
Which way is right?
The music is his last delight
Cold comfort;
Death takes him
In full sight sold
To the marching, unknowing, unfeeling throng
Denied the right to belong
The last Coaltrain Hobo Song

 

 

Still by Ollie Banks

Heartwood Thrall

The wyke rests its wildness
Sleep now, beast, sleep
For we dance in the dawn
Deep in the heartwood
Morning light comes strafing
Parting the ancient oaks
Landslides under urchin paws
New pages in the book of stone
That fiend with giant hands
Who smacks eternal lips
Groans a query:
How long can this last?
Place of endless past
Vast nothingness space
Tree roots to the edge
And beast face behind
With fearsome breath
Salt in the whiskers
Fire torching the groves
Burning to the brine
The beck calling out:
We are clinging to you
You are our one hope
(But in cracked paving
Plants grow thick and free
Infinite capacity
Of this tranquil land
This rock and sand
This mist-wrapped sea,
To heal)
From beast cliff a bird keens
The peel rends
Stitches in the cloth of time
A final, futile roar appends:
This is richer than gold
The horizon lifts
The beck boils
Trees wrap the shoreline bends
Falling from the cliff,
Falling fast
Flightless, unflying, not trying to soar but resigned to the crunch of the floor
Tight with trappings
The last question unheard
Flightless bird

John Eldridge, with his van Jeremy. He has a new portfolio online. Please visit his site for Christmas!


He did a trip way down south in Jeremy. Got some of this: 

 

 

I met up with him as he headed north...  

 

The Isiqalo Foundation (UK) supports educational and health awareness initiatives in South Africa focusing on HIV awareness and skills creation

 

The Isiqalo foundation aims to:

Fund programs in the disadvantaged community of the township of Masiphumelele in the Western Cape that facilitate and promote the empowerment and development of children and young adults.

 

Donate to Isiqalo this week

 

 

West coasts cooking, city tensions riding high

Highbury Water

You had a fracture
Like the hands of the clock skipped a mark
A little spark crack
Hairline above your eyes black in the light of clockwork dawn
The roof of a smile
All our seconds are dust
And the bird in the cage pecks at the rust
For a while,
And my body is blurred between maybe and must
And I'm drowning, drowning in Highbury water
Drowning in wells of meaningless trust
Trussed-up vagabond - beggar to lust
Carrying the stamp of your fracture and bust
Across deserts, through private halls
buried in turn to breathe as we fall into wells
Sipping naked gasps of air
We burn, incandescent flames
Spun on proximity yearn
And I'm drowning
Knowing, nascent, willing
In fractures impacted and bare to the beat
Will you care by the next dawn? Will your fracture repair?
Will you swallow us whole with a yawn?
And maybe the dropped coin never reaches the water black
And dawn never brings
A fair crack, the track takes its promises back
Perhaps it was but a game
A sprung trap
This delicate flack
Pins the blame
And I'm drowning now,
Drowning,
In Highbury Water,
in wells with no name.


Surfing with Henry - bull seals and orange sundown. Stoke to see a friend riding a board built to glide.

 

 

Leonora Carrington

 

 

FaceKOOK

Ghostwater

 


 

Ghostwater
(Lost rivers of London)

It came from the West, slow bubbling, carving runnels in the ancient clay
Fleet runs the river, swift to downfall, flowing to dismay
The oldbourne, holding a memory of peat; a concrete song in fate
Beneath dappled banks the trout; unknowing, languid, wait
Where the water tumbles, like a trace of light, to spin the gate
The Lost River Fleet, cased in pure concrete weight
Split from her bed, bound in tunnels, flowing unknowing, blind
At times she finds the whispers of the other ghosts
The Effra hissing, missing deep beneath the crazy tramp of feet
Unseen, conveying the carcass of a rat below the hustle of market streets
Where once stood proud banks and clear flow,
Stinks Bazalgette's high level interceptor sewer now
Constricted in culverts, to take diverted course about the tube map
Robbed of riverhood by the need to pave and trap
The Falconbrook stumbles on, the Neckinger quick
Lunging through the tunnels and pipes of forgotten brick
But in the case of ghostwater they forget, these engineer folk
Wardens of the dammed, stemmers of the tideway choked
We, the lost streams of London, run forever free
For where a river once was, it always will be.

Burning in the Northland Sky

 

Foil gold

Bittersweet nothing.

Licking the geos
Point after point
Of flatness
Another thousand miles
To perch on
Weary haunches and
Watch the ocean murmur

Where the angry roar?
The thin mist
Of the forecast swell?
The pattern lure
Skipped out
A bum trace, no barb in the hook
You took me for a sucker, sea

 

Killala

'It's dour out there,' Killian said,
As the weave and weft
of another set
Strikes the ledge, and unwinds
The left
Out past Ballina
Where light moves quick
Across the thick, windtorn peaks
It's a safe bet,
This flat tongue of rock
Where west wind seeks
But gets swallowed
By armada-wrecking heights
The swell fights
about the head

Killian calls it;
'Shit' he says
Scratches his balls
And splits
Exhaust fumes and silence
But for the
pinwheeling gulls
And the left
That grumbles and spits
Rounding belmullet
Creeping past ballycastle
Dancing for me alone
With Ireland's shore
This bitter, beautiful taste
Singing
'You've grown down,
Not up.'
The left spinning
Past Lackan
The slab huge, square
Then it's a solitary race
To wear piss-ridden rubber
To bear
The brunt of 8 degree
Water
To care
More about something
Than it's possible to share

It seems the birds laugh
As they dive
These Irish blackbacks
are heard
In the ruined arches
And stacks
Of rathfran friary
Down past Killala
And at Easky
Where the sky
kisses the river
As she hisses
Across blue boulders
And spry salmon breach
And glisten
Across the shoulders
Of the reef
If you listen, she'll teach