And in the streets we're running free, like its only you and me.....

Your father lives in the attic of a tiny red brick gingerbread house. It smells of bike oil and of incense. We find a sunshine yellow tea kettle on the street and fill it with sunflowers we pick from someone's garden on Barts Street. He tells us about his nineteen sixties orange sunshine experiences with Ken Kesey, dressed in a lavender shirt and a pink tie, a briefcase full of liquid madness. He tells be about an Ernest Hemingway quote he remembers from childhood, that the most important rule for being a good writer is to LIVE, for one ought to have something to write about. I cannot agree more, in essence is this not what my whole madcap journey through these green years of my life is about? We are from a similar egg. He reads us spiritual poetry and lets me leaf through his notebooks, thick with stories. When we leave next morning, he gives me a lined composition books to write in, and tells me to send him my stories. The kindness of this world surprises me every day; the horror too yet it seems that beauty is ever present in unlikely places.

We dance and drink wine and you get up and sing at the front of the bar, the star of our own show. We toast champagne flutes filled with stars and play with words projected across the walls in the gallery downtown, while boys with cut off Ramones shirts and tumbling blonde curls talk about Burroughs in a sweet yet stuck Kentucky drawl.

Every day we get a little closer to the place where my life used to be, where i will be thrown into the madness once again. Who knows when next we will meet? The uncertainty of life is dreamlike and beautiful, but goodbyes will always break my heart, especially to one such as you, who has taught me so much. For now, there is still tomorrow. There is always tomorrow, and if tomorrow fails to come, then we won't be around to worry about it.

We arrive in Chicago as the sun is setting strawberry kool-aid in the sky behind the elephant skyscrapers and the boats dream gently on Lake Michigan and people are walking their dogs and there is a Billie Holiday cover playing on the radio and we have finally arrived, yet we both have so far to go.

We fall in and out of homes and of hearts, dancing the blues and waking to a glass wall overlooking the vast lake, a potent blue reminder of the vast ocean that is soon to separate me from the rainbows. It is always me that is leaving. Goodbyes make my bones  feel dead and hollow, like dry and broken autumn branches, white noise in my head.

At the airport the flight attendant asks me to write my permanent address on my luggage tags, yet i am merely wandering. As we fly over the Ireland of my childhood, on a detour via Paris, other passengers open the blinds covering their windows to look at the human world below and the sunlight creates rainbow circles on the roof of the cabin. The rainbows make me cry because my own colour-infused world of palm trees and sheer freedom is so incredibly far away now. My heart pounds in my chest, but at least the pounding is steady and regular, a beat to keep the wild music of my life clinging tightly to the musical bars. Flying over England in order to get to England, what strange games we play. Nobody knows that i am flying right over their heads, everyone thinks that i am still in Chicago. Spaghetti legs, mushy ravioli heart.

And then i am back, back in the rambling, crying, wailing, dancing, afternoons-in-the-park-nights-in-the-pub-mornings-in-the-marshmallow ramshackle city. I am already losing that golden sense of inner peace, yet i am so very happy to be back, so excited to start the next wild chapter. Afternoon tea on Primrose Hill, drinks in our favourite pubs, grimy dancefloors, a bundle of sunflowers, a homemade birthday cake oozing through the cardboard box, a long velvet skirt and three hundred long more miles and i am home and it is my mother's birthday and the kettle is boiling and it smells of fresh laundry and she is there, soft in her pink dressing gown and it is like nothing has changed and i'm home, i'm home.

It is impossible to summarise the things that i learned in the delicate gossamer bubble of California, impossible to articulate what i found and what i have left behind, but now i am here with old faces, old places, with everything that once made up who i am. The Olympics is sending electricity through the city and there is fruit cider and grey afternoons and woolly jumpers, i'm watching Blur in Hyde Park and i'm sleeping in a tent by a lake somewhere in Cambridgeshire and we are those two tasselled and carefree flower people again. There is an enchanted forest filled with dolls houses and paper cranes and a funeral in the mud and all i want is to dance here with you forever. My future is written on the wings of an Angel, of a church with a spire and a canal and a kitten. We have no money and no responsibilities and days are spent riding new bicycles and getting lost in real mazes of books. Boris Johnson is flying through the air on a zip wire and my friends are playing ring of fire and my brother is laughing at my shoes and there is a baby rabbit living in the living room and my mum makes endless cups of tea and there is sharp wit and cynicism and there is less sunshine here but perhaps more love and i am very happy to be home.

For the road is most certainly life...

"To rule the state, have a known plan

To win a battle, have an unknown plan

To gain the universe, have no plan at all

Let the universe reveal its splendour."

The life of the city beckons me home, wherever that may be. We draw flowers in the dust on your old Subaru and pack up ou lives with the company of only each other and and a few old cassette tapes, and set sail on our relentless journey from California to Arizona, through New Mexico to Texas, to Louisiana through Mississippi to Tennessee, to Kentucky, to Illinois, through couches and friendships and floors and kittens and kindnesses and the trunks of cars and endless freeways through the sky to London and then finally to back to my family and to Sunderland, the beginning of it all.

One dollar tacos, sangria, plastic flags and plants and strings of coloured lights hang from the ceiling of a corrugated iron shed in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Leathery grilled cactus and a Fleetwood Mac tribute band. Disco balls and photo booths, you are so excited in your wedges at the prospect of anonymity and it is fresh and thrilling and beautiful. Bearded boys in hats strum guitars and remind me of whence i came from, as long velvet kimonos and purple lipstick glisten from the shadows. Red, red wine and i am so very excited and so very scared to be back in my own dirty city once again. We trip across Sunset Boulevard and into a gaudy techno club come brothel, where an inflatable octopus looms glowing colours in the PBR light. We scream Blink 182 down the highway an sleep in an Irvine mansion upon a pile of soft mattresses, every inch the Princess and the Pea. You buy us breakfast and we bid yet another salty goodbye. No goodbyes, only see-you-laters? I grow more doubtful with each bittersweet parting.

Laguna Beach, Orange County, his parent's beach opens onto the turquoise ocean and life is no longer real. Venice Beach again in the jelly-infused sunlight, graffiti and feathers in my hair, an American flag bikini faded by a myriad of days of sunshine and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses. The cop pulls us over in your rabbit ears. Sushi on Santa Monica Boulevard, karaoke in a hot and heavy bar, we dance to David Bowie in an English-themed pub. We run barefoot on the beach in the darkness, burning white sage to ward off evil spirits. It is bad luck to light it without a candle, yet even Laguna Beach has a river of urine running through it. We wake to the sound of the waves crashing upon the shore and i feel safe, cocooned in this mad-love world, as the water gently nibbles at the toes of the edge of the earth.

Heat. Hot and sticky, dripping. Dirt-streaked legs and my blackened foot prints pressed against the car windscreen. Deep yellow heat, singed brown bodies, sickly green pounding sun. Rivulets of sweat catch in the crease of my belly button and the backs of my knees. Tiny delicious pearls. Our air conditioning is broken so we play pop punk speed metal and wind the windows down, letting the wild desert air ravage our delicate California skin. We pluck flowers and feathers from parking lots and adorn ourselves with stars and stripes to fake patriotism and citizenship to the notorious Mexico border patrol.

Tempe, Arizona is a flaming ball of dirty guitars in grimy bars. We feverishly drink gin and pineapple juice as a saxaphone plays and cold water is sprayed in a rainbow haze from jets strung among the coloured lights above our heads. The crowd sways by the outdoor stage as torches of fire flame by the door. We twist our souls to blistering funk and return home to sleep on the floor of our friend Nat in a house full of lutiers.

We couch surf a night in El Paso with a man named Gio who lives alone in his mother's house. Old lady frills and flounces are adorned with star wars memorabilia, as a tiny white dog with blue bows in her hair licks my face and chews up my makeup brushes. He takes us for breakfast and we give him a false hula girl tattoo, which he excitedly pastes across his skin and leaves for the sauna.

Austin, Texas. Mimosas to start the day, floating down the river in rubber rings. Four Loco and sunflower seeds. Old leathery man wizened from a thousand days in his weather-bleached garden, wind chimes and worn tyres, wooden toys and broken flowers in his front yard. Kind eyes, a pair of bright yellow tape-measure braces. Barefoot in the dirty old school bus, falling from our seats as we clatter drunkenly over the ramshackle road. Cold water, one thousand tiny flies skim the surface and tickle my feet. Blue dragonflies the colour of the forget-me-nots on my shorts land on my ankle and knee bones. Music drifts from further down the river as we hazily float along with the current, no agency, no urgency. Simply letting things be, arching our bodies like cats under the hot sun as light dances like chimes and bells on the water and fronds sparkle in the evening calm like ladies with long hair weeping. The sky is translucent beneath my mirrored sunglasses and i'm sure i can see into heaven (it is here). The whole world is reduced to sky and water, water and sky. Are we floating on the surface of the river or are we caught in the clouds? Which way is the right way up? Right or wrong, up or down, left or right. Is there even such thing any more?

California-hippy-car leaking oil. Dried Jerusalem Artichokes that match the one imprinted on my skin are strung across the dashboard. We stop for gas in the warm Texan night air and a man with one eye tells us slowly and deliberately to 'Watch out for the............deer'. Sparks are strewn behind us like fireworks as we speed through the dusky air, fearing for our lives. The skies here are furious and full of blood, left behind are the gentle lilac hues of the West coast. Dreaming dreams in a dreamlike life. Images and people and lives and lessons all caught like flesh beneath my fingernails. How am i to immortalise the absolute freedom and beauty i have learned across this lotus-eating country?

Lou Reed, Jonny Hobo, The Runaways. We meow like kittens and shake our hair across the interstate, stopping only to fill up our water bottles and marvel at the tiny fragments of life lived in those moments at the edges of the road in semi-abandoned gas stations.

Austin is a smouldering cocktail of tattoos and heeled boots, of nose rings and cowboy hats and grimy terraces filled with loud music and sun caught drinks and filmy sweaty living breathing writhing bodies. We spend the night baking in the car in suburbia and wake up in a faint. We get asked to leave the bathrooms of the 'war building' where we crept to cool our clammy faces and brush our teeth. We peruse South Congress vintage shops and antique stores. You buy a red polkadot dress and become a perfect Mary-Lou. Nighttime brings Pimms and slam poetry about Ginsberg and vaginas in the Spider House. We sit in an empty bathtub and dance to a band in Hawaiian shirts called Purple Grape and everyone is beautiful. We swim with salamander in the fresh spring water of Barton Springs. Leopard print bikini, butterfly bench. We sit under cold jets and drink jalapeno cocktails, letting our lives grow rich and abundant in spice. We don ankle-length dresses and learn to Texas two-step with old men and smoky cowboys named Corey before falling asleep on kind stranger's sofas. We drink coffee by the bucketload and soak the midnight heat in dark and drug-fuelled saloons, watching girls vomit in all night diners. We fall onto the floor of more warm hearts and curl up with kittens and cockroaches. Bloody Marys in the afternoon, wearing red lipstick, forgetting about time and money and remembering how to be free, free of all constraints. The punks are flying across someone elses living room now as we meet strangers on steps and swim naked in the pool as coloured waves are projected in technicolor across the living room walls, dancing wildly in the hot summer rain. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

New Orleans. Rambling, ramshackle, swashbuckling streets. Plants spill from rickety balconies, hungry for water. Paintwork is cracked and chipped, sides of houses are crumbling. Gnarled wooden shutters that have seen it all sag under the weight of the heat. Curtains hang heavy as windows are flung open and strings of white lights and flickering lanterns make fireflies and glow worms in the balmy air, like a slice of melon in your mouth. Danger and beauty lurk around every corner. Hot and desperate jazz leaks onto the street, combining to create a raucous cacophony, made bearable by the dead weight of the bruised sky. Thunderstorm in a graveyard. Lightning illuminating the mausoleum. Ornate iron gates are creaking. When hurricanes Katrina and Rita caused New Orleans to flood, decomposing bodies rose to the surface of the graves, making it harder to identify those who were killed in the disaster. 

Jazz at the Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, hot sticky wild saxophone, a stranger in a hat teaches me to swing dance, we sit on the pavement and skip through the dirty-bright electric darkness, illuminated occasionally by neon lights. There is a piano in the bathroom and a white cat sleeping under the star-spangled banner. Corona on the porch and another airless sleep. Sprawling, spicy, blood and salt rum wonderful hurricane-drunk. We sleep on a piece of foam in an airless, lifeless room and awake to heat induced hallucinations, to sweat crawling across our skin like spiders. Then up, up and on, on and on to the next thing.

Fourth of July. God bless America. In Louisiana sex education is illegal and so is buying liquor on Sundays. The land of the free, indeed. 

Memphis: unlike any city i have ever been in. Very poor, beautiful old factories lie abandoned as street trollies rattle by old warehouse, lettering peeling and fading. Blue flashing lights and relentless sirens patrol the streets as revellers failed by their country stumble around, numbing their sadness with liquor wearing star spangled Jeffrey Campbell shoes in an act of forced patriotism. Streets are closed, megaphones boom. We visit the motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated yet the museum facade is sponsored by Bank of America. We look into the window where the assassinator took fire and watch the lights of the bridge in the water and smell july fourth firework smoke in the air. We drink beer from dusty bottle and listen to the jukebox as an old man cooks soul burgers in a fryer behind the bar and a Tennessee drawl plays pool in the back. You tell us that this place used to be a brothel, it is certainly grimy delicious. The upstairs is closed today, the owner tells us, but when we visit the bathroom we spy through the holes in the ceiling up at the gilded wallpaper and wonder at those past angels of the night. We wander through the midnight heat and stop outside the huge abandoned Hotel Chisco, were Elvis made his first radio broadcast. So much edge in this dangerous and chaotic city, a real burning sense of people feeling and fucking and failing and crying but living and breathing and working together and simply trying in this madcap world, because that's all any of us can really do, isn't it?

You keep watch on the corner as we mount the railings and fall into the bushes below. We crawl through an abandoned parking lot and slice open our thighs squeezing through a gap in the wrought iron fence. Two weary old men pianos lie waiting for us in the darkness. You play an eerie tune with trembling fingers and it echoes in the full silence. I am scared.We make our way through the hotel, keeping the tiny glimmer of our flashlight away from the telling glow of the windows overlooking the street below. We carefully step around water damage, broken glass, musty ballrooms, old kitchens, marveling at scrawled notes still stuck to the walls. We can only see what is immediately in front of us, and there is no way of knowing what lurks in the huge darkness around us. It is wonderfully terrifying; every inch of my body is trembling, alert. 'Always be prepared to run', you tell us. We climb spiraling staircases until we reach the roof. Iron ladder after iron ladder, we cling to the rust with all of our strength until we reach the highest point; the metal rigging upon which the neon hotel name once hung. We climb. The metal shakes as the wind tugs my hair across my face. My long purple skirt is tucked into my knickers. The power of having my life placed literally in my own sweating palms is tantalising and electric, heavy. One wrong foot, one missed hand hold, one rung too weather worn and i will tumble to my death from one of the tallest buildings in the city. Who will think to look for us in the sky of Memphis, Tennessee? We reach the top and i am alight with anticipation and fear and it is so incredibly beautiful up here with the birds. The whole city stretches around us. Lights twinkle everywhere, a giant premature Christmas display, just for us. It is so quiet up here we can here voices calling from the street and the callous call of every blue siren rings in our ears. The whole world, the whole night, ours for the taking. Independence day fireworks shatter around us, one thousand tiny falling stars. Police megaphones crackle at our feet. It is as though there is no one real left on earth.

Crooked, wicked, brilliant demon-angels marveling at life.You point out the old brewery, the phoenix hotel. We descend to the foot of the sign and drink beer and talk revolution. The world is falling apart but you are fiercely optimistic. I drink the night with my eyes. This dirty, dangerous, ghetto fuelled spicy city is intoxicating. That golden allure of the danger of possibility. Or is it possible danger?
Briefly we are lost in the old hotel, until we return to our beds in another co-op full of beautiful souls to curl up with kittens. A place where people cleanse negative energy with electric scientology probes and a boy lives in a bathroom, sleeping in the tub and keeping his books on the disused toilet. We burn the flag, lighting sparklers or cigarettes as cicadas laugh in the hot early morning air. Little birds setting the stars alight in an identically emblazoned bikini, wearing cow ears and kissing boys on the steps as we leave and giggle and shriek our way up the interstate to Kentucky,



TO BE CONTINUED..............................

Pure California Neon Dust

My first baseball game, giant foam hand, sunset on the San Francisco bay, raspberry cider with someone else's father, sleeping on someone else's floor, vowing to watch the West Coast sunset every day until we leave.

Matted heads of hair and a garden full of warm sunlight, cold strings, fizzy acoustics, sweating writhing living room pounding with life, roses hanging from the chandeliers. A balmy bike ride, smoky back yards, glitter on our cheeks and adventure on our lips and in our hair.

Coffee on a blanket on the roof after a night cocooned in a hammock, emerging as a sunlight-infused butterfly. I drink a whole mug this morning, trying to break the ritualistic habit of  filling cups and then leaving them to go cold, distracted by the next warm thing. Santa Cruz Pride; a parade of feathers and rainbows and a glass bottle filled with raspberry lemonade in my rucksack. Four Loco and paint splattered across our tasseled bodies, sunflowers on my hat, sea salt caught in the folds of the t-shirt we made ourselves this morning. Bare feet in the grass, marijuana smoke and a tent made from dead tree branches and fishing wire, strung together by patterned shirts and old skirts, forgotten lives and periods of time fading in the relentless sun. Graffiti and bluegrass, dancing fiddles and hot cigarette kisses on your skin.

Yellow saxophone moaning and that delicious puddle of ocean yearning in front of us, so perfect that it makes my soul ache.

Hours blend into days blend into nights. I have emerged a butterfly, can't you tell?

Red lipstick and Mike's Hard Lemonade, fairy lights strung by punk pirates across the yard and all our friends are here. Music bleeds across our living room and into the night and so much has happened since i first was here. We are all more ourselves now. I watch the love grow and swell in this breathless world of sunlight and of understanding,, of dirty kitchens and black bare feet and guitars in the loft. You play my favorite song with your hot-pink toenails.

"Ah" you say, in your wonderful New-York-City drawl.

"Once you've lived in a place, it never leaves you. It is a part of you always".

An unruly bunch of farmers market flowers wrapped in newspaper, bronzed shoulders and a blue polka dot dress, the smell of earthy uncertainty by my side. We shun yoga for the beach and bundle into your car and drive up the one. We scramble stealthily through a farm and clamber along a wooded path, purple daisies in our hair and buttonholes. The wind blows the sand and it whips our bodies, making them sting, shredding our skin yet we're alive, we're alive. We suck beer through sticky bottles in the gentle shelter of the cliffs. I string shells around my neck and entwine them in my shoe laces. We shed our clothes and clamber onto the rocks, the sharp edges drawing blood from the fleshy peach pits of my pale fingertips. The sun lavishes herself on the water and creates wonderful rainbow arcs in the surf. You jump into the turquoise universe and scream as the playful cold pierces your tanned skin. I am scared that i will fall on the rocks below and be sliced to naked ribbons. You count to three. I jump and let the seaweed tendrils caress my body as my feet hit the soft bed of the ocean floor and the waves ricochet through my icy soul. We dry in the sun and drive back along the coast in your car. We tumble into a record shop and i make you buy my favourite album, "Let's drive" we say and watch the lilac-rose-marmalade sunset as surfers frolic in the lavender ocean. The sky makes me ache, deep in the pit of my stomach, an ache akin to the one that creeps in when you have lost something that you once loved dearly.

This time and place will pass us by, as times and places do but there is salt water caught in my hair and quinoa in the pan and kindness in the moon and love in the sweet-soft bay air forever.

That long, slow roll up to Frisco, the sunshine biscuits factory on the BART route through Oakland, a neon green fairy vomiting all over the train. Corkscrew rows, redwoods on the summit, cold and windy city, tiny yet so full. Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park; secret geisha giggle in the bushes and your hand is clasped tightly around mine. Clinging.  A street punk blows bubbles and plays my favourite song on her radio. Everything is sugar-coated. No cavities. Falling through parties with my neck in the grass. That lucid golden bridge. Peanut butter and jam, what is the difference between jelly and jam? Fisherman's wharf, hot peanuts, The Fillmore. I can't quite believe that you were once here. Everything hurts. New York to San Francisco. Every place has such a distinct flavour. I gulp it down, spilling it all over my skin, saturating my clothes.

One thousand million tiny shards of iridescent glitter, swirling iridescent tessellation behind my eyelids before i go to sleep at night.


"Golden particles, brilliant forest-green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and glowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust". - Tom Wolfe


Goodbyes are the most crushing things.

The golden state; sun like lemon drops on my soul, the sky dripping into the forevertime ocean in a cascade of delicate pink rose petals. The beauty i have encountered here causes a fluttering sense of panic within my chest when i think of how it is going to be gone, that i cannot control the restless hands of time or preserve this sense of unreal freedom. I cycle once more through the palm trees on my unicorn, the air slipping through my fingers like dirty rocks through a pan sieving for gold. You cannot catch tomorrow.

We head to the boardwalk in the sun, rollercoaster locomotive whiplash, flashing on the log flume and letting our brains and teeth rattle in our skulls. Falling into the hot warm sand, covering our skin in beachy love bites.

We find a boat at the harbour and barter our way onto the deck with a sic pack of Blue Moon. Balloons stream from the sails as we photograph coloured yachts rolling on the waves. Frantic activity, words like poetry: port, starboard, rigging, the sail is in the water. The boardwalk looms in the distance, skeletal in the best coast haze,.. A dolphin laughs in the distance making glittering arcs like wet bridges. The next thing we know we are sipping sidecars in the yacht club with a man called Bruce and handing out birthday cake. We dance like sunflowers and giggle our way home. We always have adventures, you say. No goodbyes, just see-you-laters. Oh, too-big, to-fast, too-sad-and-beautiful world. Is it all merely a bunch of circumstances and coincidences?


Another beach, another bonfire. I let the thick black smoke fill every pore of my skin. We drink tea in an all night diner in the early hours and the clock just keeps on ticking.


A mad hatter's tea party, live sunflowers stuck to my chest and a garland of flowers in my hair. Golden glitter swallows everyone. You are dark and beautiful, fierce eyes, bare chest, youthful defiance. A queen and a doormouse, a blonde afro wig, a topless seder, Titania the seductress. The world evaporates and we hide in the lair. Things were always meant to be this way. Silver boots, lilac shorts. Sadness, mourning, loss hangs heavy in my limbs like a corpse. I never want to leave this behind.


We pack up my life and string prayer flags from the windows of the car, drawing lotus flowers in the dust. You wake early to drink coffee with us and to say goodbye. Salt burns my eyes and my limbs ache but i have almost found peace in myself and we drive again up the one-oh-one and our lives are fresh and green again and we are most certainly on our way to somewhere. Things will come together, as they always do. We will meet again.

"Wilt thou not be loath 

To leave this paradise, but shalt possess

A paradise within thee, happier far"

 - John Milton, Paradise Lost

Rainbow road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another until i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer to anybody except my own confusion."

-JK

Spots of Time

There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence–depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse–our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. 

 - William Wordsworth 

nearly imperceptible rainfall

Watermelon bubble gum, the smell of burning tarmac as the sun languishes upon the roof outside of my window every morning. Rays of light penetrating the makeshift tie dye curtain above my bed and tickling my face. Balmy walks through the forest and the burning muscles in the backs of my legs as i race myself to the beach. Bonfires and secret violins, naked on the streets, old faces in new places and that excitement of softnight San Francisco bop in the air. Oeople lean wildly from their apartments and play music to the street below. They dance across the corporate rooftops wearing sequins, blowing bubbles, shrieking in technicolour. The kiss of the sun upon tissue paper nipples on the rooftops, madcap musicians bleeding funk upon their strings, Snoop Dogg is standing in front of me and the whole world is aflame, i pass shrines and prayer flags during a Tibetan Buddhist retreat and spin the prayer wheel, sending fragile paper happiness into the world. I didn't find peace but there is a kind of cardboard in my soul. Golden henna flowers spiral across my skin, spiral and swirl and curl in the warm air like the thick smoke that warms our bodies on the beach and the luminescent sparks that shoot into the velvet dark when a rusty nail meets its death in the fire pit. You will always be naked yellow laughter, sunflowers and candles casting violet dark shadows on the walls as we drink life beneath our makeshift fort, stroking me to sleep.A silken sunset drive; Dandy Warhols at the Fillmore. Steaming Mexican Oakland cocktails and Best Coast on the West Coast surrounded by buddha and old friends from across the ocean, acid green spandex leggings, filling the streets of the city with dirty hot ecstasy. We watch the golden gate bridge from your roof and sleep without clothes under a union jack, we drive along that coastline, curling, swirling seductive, driving without end to the top of a mountain, Big Sur this is it, the fog sets around us and everything is swathed in mist. I find a deer pelvis in the stream and make a wish upon a shooting star, so many glittering, insatiable, dead and wasted stars. Is the pursuit of art and beauty a pointless aesthetic quest? Break and lose it all, forget everything, remember nothing. The future yearns into the clouds uncertain, the past much the same. My skin smells of sunlight and of possibility. Torn books and bike stained legs, a punk band tearing a thousand paper cranes from the walls, your wish is forgotten but it doesn't matter anymore because i think we are content. We were content, once. But there's a poetry in their lives and they allow that to lead them. Corso the quickest to grasp the exotic, the weird violent. You taste of Monday mornings and the eclipse was hidden behind a purple cloud. We paint our hands and press them across my bedroom walls, leaving our sweaty fingerprints everywhere, no stone left untouched. The empty handed painter from your streets is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.Tomorrow, Kentucky, Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma Tenessee we are selling everything we own and driving through dreams back to reality but i am terrified of my delicate gossamer bubble being broken. This sky, too, is folding under you. You smell like realness but i know that nothing is real anymore.  Language is merely a game. You tell me to take the scenic route, and i'll learn more that way. Walking on dumpstered eggshells. I listen to Arabia Mountain three times every day. You brought a sunflower and left it my my bed. Hammocks strung beneath the ultra-violet stars.Dean's madness had bloomed into a weird flower.Someone told me that if i go to the beach at midnight and dig among the surf there will be phosphoresence in the sand.

There are mason jars filled with candles strung between the trees and we will all find our way home, eventually.

Madroad Driving

Mad Road Driving Men Ahead.

The Mad Road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West...

Spine heights at the world's end, coast of blue Pacific starry night - no bone half-banana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards... Illuminate.

The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass...

Orange-butted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher - the level of the world, low and flat...

The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route, fabulous plots of landowners in green unexpecteds, ditches by the side of the road... as I look from here to Elko along the level of this pin parallel to telephone poles I can see a bug playing in the hot sun...

Hitch yourself a ride beyond the fastest freight train:
Beat the Smoke...
Find the Thigh...
Spend the Shiny...
Throw the Shroud...
Kiss the morning star in the morning glass...

Mad Road Driving Men Ahead.

Pencil traceries of our faintest wish in the travel of the horizon merged, nosey cloud obelisks in a dribble of speechless distance, the black sheep clouds cling a parallel above the streams of C B Q - serried Little Missouri rocks haunt the badlands, harsh dry brown fields roll in the moonlight - dotting immensity.

The crazed voyageur of the lone automobile presses forth his eager insignificance in noseplates and licenses into the vast promise of life - the choice of tragic wives.

Drain your basins in old Ohio and the Indian and the lllini plains...

Bring your big muddy rivers through Kansas and the mudlands, Yellowstone in the frozen North...

Punch lake holes in Florida and L A...

Raise your cities in the white plain...

Cast your mountains up... bedawze the west... bedight the west with brave hedgerow cliffs rising to Promethean heights and fame...

Plant your prisons in the basin of the Utah moon...

Nudge Canadian groping lands that end in arctic bays...

Curl your Mexican ribneck, America...

...I'm going home. ...going home.








 - JK

San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)

It is impossible to convey with words the insatiable dreamy beauty of the past few weeks but i shall try. 

A trip to San Francisco; golden city, home of the bridge of the golden gates wherein you and i perch like broken angels atop hazy tarmac hills, hanging precariously from the stars. A visit to the City Lights book shop - i sniff the summer air for the lingering smoulder of the smoke which must surely follow the flames those brilliant minds streaked across these streets, but all i find are tourists, a bored looking girl at the sales desk, a man who tries to convince us of his wonderful affinity with Neal Cassady's son and the girl from Twilight, before trying to charge us to have our photographs taken in the 'real' car used in the upcoming 'On the Road' film. i slipped an anthology of Beat poetry into my pocket, unseen. It seemed necessary in the overpriced, corporate world that seems to have sprung up over such a holy site. Cassady would have approved i'm sure. A woman pushed strings of skulls and peace symbols into our hands on street corners as sushi is served in floating boats. There is a bleeding sunset on a beach at the edge of this sprawling city and we are greeted by a flying pig. I distinctly remember flying over hat golden bridge all those months ago, its burning lights a familiar symbol in a world of murky apprehension. That is the point at which i realised i will be drunk on life forever, and nothing will be the same again.

We hire a van and drive. Curling coastal roads clinging to the edges of cliffs as Dylan, Jarvis and Lou Reed croon into the waves. That large egg in the sky forms and breaks again each day, letting her yellow sunshine yolk spill carelessly into the horizon, staining the water pink. We talk about everything and we talk about nothing. The wind rips the hair from our bewildered skulls as we stop for warm beer in glass bottles at the edge of a cliff. We pick delicious sounding names from our map and spend the night at a place called Ragged Point to the sound of frogs croaking in the clear midnight. 

We have breakfast in a garden before setting off on the road again. There are one hundred baby elephant seals basking in the sun by the side of the road and  a giraffe strolling through the centre of Santa Barbara, where pink trees line the sidewalk. We listen to a folk band called 'The Rainbow Girls' as we watch the farmer's market pass through the bottom of a wine bottle dappled with sunlight, amused at the way in which life slips through our fingers like quicksilver. Barbara seems an appropriate name for this place, which is strangely reminiscent of a wealthier but equally as elderly Benidorm, however we do wake to white sands and wash the morning sunbeams that trickle across our bare skin away in the cold ocean.

We cruise onto Sunset Boulevard accompanied by  none other than Eddie Argos. We really are drinking Hennessy with Morrissey on a beach out of reach somewhere very far away, where our problems can never find us. We do stop to write a few postcards home though, after a meander along Venice Beach. We trail feathers and friendship bracelets behind us, as a paint-stained man turns to leather from amidst his work in the sand which screams 'fuck art school!'. A police helicopter prepares to give chase above our heads as a drummer provides the beat to which the weighlifters grunt and groan  by the side of a building emblazoned 'freak show'.

Glimpsing the 'Hollywood' sign in the hills was unexpectedly reminiscent of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from the plane. Seen by my naked eye yet still intangible, surreal and yet real simultaneously, a potent simple of the wonders this world has to offer, all ours for the taking, simply if we dream them into existence. We slept in a cheap motel on Hollywood Boulevard and danced in The Viper Room, treading carefully on the pavement by the door where River Phoenix died from an overdose on the night of souls some nineteen years ago, when the coals within my own soul were yet to be ignited.

We drove out of Los Angeles as the sun was setting, and entered the desert via one hundred spinning wind turbines, their lights flashing in the darkness, glaring into the windows of our little world on wheels. We stumbled upon a midnight market and floated through the streets, delirious. Children barked like dogs from pushchairs and old men rode Harley Davidsons adorned with fairy lights up and down the street, as middle aged women in leopard print maxi dresses reveled in the coolness of the darkness. The daylight coaxed awe from our wide eyes as we awoke to mountainous red rocks surrounding us, and the searing ground upon my bare feet informed us that we truly were lost in the middle of the desert. After hours of searching and some crafty wristband spotting, we finally spied white tents and a ferris wheel in the distance, a mirage in this hot dense place. We left our camels by the door and descended into the white-hot balmy paradise that is Coachella.

A lucid melting-pot of music and dancing, of ice cold lager in the shade and of lemonade bubbling in the van, boiled by the sun. A glutinous cacophony of feathers and of flowers, of silent dance parties and James in the eternal afternoon sunshine. Tangerine sunsets and scorched yellow grass, handsome miners from Wyoming shotgunning PBRs with dirty woodstock fairies, a place of tasselled waistcoats and morning yoga, a place where the sun makes rainbows in the water and phosphorescent palm trees and chinese lanterns are indistinguishable from balloons in the sky. We lay on the roof of our van and let the stars take us as one of their own as we sipped hot wine from the bottle and Tupac came back to life. A flat battery in the morning meant we were stranded    forever, until an oasis named Ernie appeared in overalls and shocked our engine back to life with a quick bite of his jump leads.

Unwashed and unafraid, we drove slowly through the Joshua Tree national park. Fat beige rock formations languished in the sun  as furry cacti taller than our heads peered down at us, curious furry creatures protecting their hot dry nirvana from the sticky palms of prying humans. The Joshua Trees themselves were a comical army holding their arms up to God. I fear he has forsaken them , and they will be left to singe in the unrelenting scorch of the Californian desert for eternity.

We carried on our way through the Mojave desert in search of elusive hot springs. We stumbled upon a railroad which stretched for miles across the cracked expanse of America. A thousand names were spelled from blackened rocks along the tracks, where a thousand weary travelers such as ourselves had stopped to take in the vastness of life, and to leave their mark on this unchanging landscape in a desperate attempt to find meaning. We jumped over snake holes as freight trains rumbled past us and wondered at the liquor bottles lining the sides of the sandy road. The heat made puddles on the road in front of us as we drove straight across the country feeling for once in our lives as though we had purpose and meaning, and we were going somewhere.

Full of doubt, we followed a fake address a hundred miles across the state, past a man made salt lake into a world of trailer parks and life lived on the peripherals. We found our way to slab city, a community build on the remains of a World War Two marine barracks, guided by the enigmatic 'Salvation Mountain', emblazoned with colourful messages of God's love by past resident Leonard Knight, who claimed to have had a spiritual experience and came to inform the Colorado desert. There is something undeniably eerie about the abandoned state of Knight's intricate bed nestled in the side of the mountain, complete with what one can only assume to be trophies from his childhood, of photographs and letters left abandoned under the sun. The community itself is inspiring, life made simple, making art from debris, fairy lights strung between ramshackle trailers. We left the slabs feeling like Chris McCandless and stuffed with dreams of alternate lives and visions, before running straight into the arms of aggressive border patrol, demanding to see our visa documents and to let their dogs run through our temporary home. We spent the night by the side of the road in a truck stop, before grimacing over hot dark coffee in a roadside services where time seemed not to pass, complete with church. We let The Black Lips lure us out of my liquid sunshine California haven and into the wide expanse of Nevada.

Las Vegas. Unreal city, where everything is made by man. Eiffel tower. Statue of Liberty. Candy striped neon fireworks enticing, leering, mocking, goading. A distorted Shangri-La of vice and of possibility, of Donald Trump's sugar coated promise to transubstantiate your problems into fairy dust around every corner. It is fascinating, it is repulsing. I looked into the eyes at the man in front of us at the ATM, lamenting because it had torn his one hundred dollar bill in half. I wished i could get caught up in the metallic thrill of gambling but i couldn't. We won little but lost nothing and purchased a sparkly hip flask to remind us of this place of juxtaposition. Even the clouds glowed pink neon. We stayed for one day and one day was enough. Everyone seemed dead. Fear and Loathing, indeed.

We drove ten hours and hundreds of miles back to the place i call home. We drove through insatiable silver streaks of lighting and the threat of thunder in the heavy clouds. Raindrops washed the dust of the desert from our car until dusk began to fall and the sun came to bid us a watery goodbye as she fell through the sky to her bed for the night, we really, truly drove side by side into the sunset.

We returned to the redwood coven of Santa Cruz and clinked glasses by the lilac sea, we drove through the forest and we scoured the thrift stores. We fell into an art auction in San Francisco where wooden horses guarded a stage and pink peacock feathers were up for auction. We left irishmen and kind cab drivers named Norman in our wake and sat up all night talking, never wanting tomorrow to come.

Bubbles wafted down the street and people leaned out of windows in the carefree Haight-Ashbury sun, as the deep violet green underwater bitter wrench of goodbye entered my life once again, an all too frequent occurrence in these recent years.

Yet soon i will be saying goodbye again, to this world that has given me so much. 

Remember: 'Tylko trwa wieczna chwila'

- 'only the moment is eternal'

(Czeslaw Milosz)