indeed, only yesterday i took to the arable seclusion,
the warm april air amplified by the oozing
sunshine, through the forest and into open
dilated pupil horizon - there ahead
the horrid geometry of elevated rectangular
pivots of civilisation, that ***** & Gomorrah
of urbanity; yet nearer me within a touch
a herd of horses grazing like tables in some
sort of Salvador Dalí immersion - beer in hand
i wandered among them, sat in turkish akimbo
and waited... no sooner than later i was whispering
with them, eating camomile flowers, one approached
with enough sincerity, so i cupped my hand and
poured some beer into it for him to drink it,
and he did - the african like nozzle so gooey and warm,
the eyes: goat-like slits... a pleasant reminder that
i'm yet to be fully urbane, only two generations
separate me from rural life, two... and the generation
in question was ushered out from the great project
of industrialisation, an exodus into cities precipitated
by the second world war... i too remember her
musings on the matter, she died aged ~90, in a
peaceful way, conscious, as Julius Caesar remarked
about death: rather than asleep, i want death to
come sudden! and indeed she collapsed, suddenly,
yet her memories still echo in me, donkey's years for
some, history books for others, but a vivid
eye-to-eye memorandum; so yes, only two generations
separate me and what would have been an endless
hubris in rural life, the best example i can cite
is a book of B & W photography by Edward Hartwig
entitled moja ziemia (my earth)... and that's the
beauty of what modernity can provide (given the location
you find yourself in)... on a Friday i can travel
to the hub of immigration that's east London,
namely Stratford... and on a Saturday i can walk into
a rural predictability, with owls, crows... horses...
crows... exactly! when have you ever spotted a crow
in an urban environment? hmm... never...
as the saying goes, the membrane of urban life
is predicated as: where the crows create a roundabout
and turn back among the wild - ahem - indeed my
wolf like howling, that ah woo! did get mention,
my neighbours freaked out, trigger-happy interventionists
for the police or ambulance... apparently freedom
of this nature freaks people out... more than the freedom
people have killing one another... odd, isn't it?
being asked, why did you do a wolfish in the middle
of the night? i just replied... er... because i can?
so if you think that all this social criticism i sometimes
unveil concerning western society, its values and its
shortcomings... i wouldn't want to be anywhere else...
and indeed social criticism is a sort of bitter-sweet
antagonism that just has to be evident, should another
maniac with a Kalashnikov or a suicide-vest end up
bringing a thundercloud to your little parade of
running a mile for cancer sufferers in your strange
twist-of-tale from colonial power to charity power...
added to the fact... that i write EVERYTHING drunk...
i take partial responsibility for my internal mechanics...
i'm writing... i'm not drink driving... so m'eh m'eh
and with what Shakespeare said about thumb biting
in Romeo & Juliet... indeed as cited
Samson - i do bite my thumb, sir.
Abram - do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
Sam. - is the law of our side, if i say aye?
Gregory - no.
Sam. - no, sir, i do not bite my thumb at you, sir;
but i bite my thumb, sir.
Gre. - do you quarrel, sir?
Abr. - quarrel, sir! no, sir.
well... it wasn't really a biting of the thumb, revelatory
when you hear it decoded:
you'd wedge your incisors behind your thumb's
nail and then flick it to craft a sound that's
the entire play rather than an onomatopoeia -
otherwise the meaning being, according to Nares:
'the thumb in this action represented a fig, and the
whole was equivalent to a fig for you, or the fico',
basically an f off or you're such a thick'oh /
custard brains.
