Dr_Z's profile

Blank white noise; whispers on a sharp white wind. Cheap clothes from a white basket. Beggar kneeling on white blanket. Organ-grinder turning a bone white handle White angels flickering a brief existence. The white ends of cigarettes Flicked into White reflecting pools of white water. White skin flashing from sleazy bellies above white hipsters white scars traced all the way to the chest. White towers over white streets My vision White Tear refracted White I recede into white numbed conscious...

frank recall spikes at moments interrupts central european sundays between rye bread, history books and the sour taste of Catholicism. a green flood of palm trees and arcadian art schools bright skirts flashing in African sun, laughter and song, isiXhosa, djembe Transkei marijuana and the Indian Ocean. how we complicated our sapling consciousnesses with hallucinogens and existentialism in circles on the river in vigils at the beach hot fast cars over snaking cape roads jazz odes to heaven sub...

It begins with a shower of dust falling through a ray of white light. The distant white noise of a pigeon's wing flapping in an echo space. Six paralell troughs of darkness running through a concrete shed. The blackness laps up against the platforms and the old man's knuckles creak once, twice and are silent. Romek emerges from the train, collar up high, hair down around his jaw, that familiar gait. He moves slowly now, there are few other passengers around. They disperse, moving toward the s...

our africa sealed off and subsituted by wadding, my head insulated and a few degrees too warm. i tilt and subside into the bodiless abcess of the afternoon. Chorzow stultifying, blackened brick houses that steam beneath mine shafts. your litheness your elfin challenge now surely secured in safety boots at an immigrant job in the heart of the Empire. I rush unchecked toward the edge, fail at the last, sink onto my haunches and enter into the new cold war.

On re-reading Sweet Thursday by Steinbeck on a series of packed and juddering commuter bus trips, I came back into contact with a favourite character of mine. His name was Doc and he worked at Western Biological, a tumbledown laboratory wherein he set up aquariums and studied sea-life. He had women, no shortage in this regard, and beer and whiskey when he wanted it. To me as a young man, he was something of a heroic figure - on his own terms, self-reliant - complete. Something mountainous and...