WHEN I CALL YOU A DICKHEAD, I MEAN IT

In psychoanalysis the phallus is the symbol of authority, the attached insignia which invests a body with paternal power – the penis being the obvious imperative borrowed from our raw biology (that’s one loan that’s still not been returned, even though it’s way past its due date), though also see a crown attached to a king’s head or the high heel spike of a stiletto shoe in the work place or dominatrix’s basement. These are attachments to the body that allow points of entry and control within the symbolic social order. The phallus is the policeman’s gun in its holster, or an Obama soliloquy broadcast from a campaign platform. The policeman can have his badge and gun removed, Obama can lose his voice. But in their own supported contexts where the phallus is correctly attached, both the gun and the voice can assert power.

Despite the strength it holds over the entire myth of paternity and masculinity, as the phallus is itself a symbol, an addition, it is true that if that phallic attachment finds ways to consume a person entirely and for them to actually become a phallus, it embodies their worst nightmare. By embodying the phallus, we lose access to the negotiating channel between its role in the symbolic order and the pre-social, semiotic clearing of the body onto which it is first attached. By losing this connection the phallus embodied becomes a deanchored sign floating in space without a semiotic reference point to attach. If you become the gun, you still need a body to hold you and operate you, similarly a voice alone is not enough, you need vocals chords to produce it. When one ceases to attach the phallus and instead embodies it, what was once a symbol of power is made impotent and empty.

To become the phallus is to become grotesque, obscene and brazenly detached from the performative aspect of ones own activity in the social realm – to be obliviously disregarding of the always lingering threat of castration, a disregard that will lead inevitably to an unwitting castration. When a powerful man at the head of an organisation comes to think his power is innate, and loses sight of the process by which he has prior inscribed that power upon himself, it is then that he ceases to have a phallus, instead becoming one. It shall not be long before he becomes a clown-like figure of ridicule to his subordinates who see him stomping around his office with cocksure confidence while they undermine him by quietly fiddling the accounts for their own private ends, his embodying of the phallus exposing what is to the phallus-embodied a blinding gap between the phallic symbol and the foundation that before gave it its very power. The man castrates himself, becomes detached in his arrogance, and soon those with better control of their phallic apparatus shall usurp him.

So what this leads to is a simple social observation. Next time you hear someone bombast and bastard-like cursed as being a ‘dickhead’ for their social short-sightedness or failure to grasp their own obnoxious tendency, take a moment to congratulate the person doing the cursing, not only for their upfront criticism of the offending individual – swear words are always a comfort - but also for their astute psycho-analytical insight into the social mapping of phallic behaviour, the shift of phallic symbolism in the psychic framework of the individual accused, and their acknowledgement of man’s deep-rooted and unerring fear of castration. Similarly, if someone calls you a dickhead, take a moment to think about why. It's probably because you are one.

FLASH OF SENSE

TASTE Miles holds one arm up and calls for Peter before vomiting once more into the Vatican gift shop toilets. Kneeling at his pew he licks the sodden flakes of lunch from his teeth and spits them into the graceless water bowl. ‘How are you doing in there?’ Miles stands up, unlocks the cubicle door and washes his gums out at the tap. He smirks to Peter, ‘How’s my porcelain grin?’ Tasting his own mouth he remembers for a moment the dryness of Christ’s body on his tongue during the Eucharist of his school days. They step back out into the forty degree heat and the light coming over St. Peter’s burns their eyes, causing them both to raise their sunglasses.

TOUCH On a wall overlooking a steep drop, Branko sits admiring the Öresund strait. The mossy cold beneath his buttocks crosses the thin border control served by his trousers and feels its way deep into the forest of nerve endings rooted on the surface of his pimply white moons. Relinquishing his cold arse, he stands to get a better view. Fumbling his footing as he rises, he contemplates for a moment what people might think should he fall. Freezing cold on a solitary night, peering out over the Scandinavian tides into longing’s abyss; what a tragic way to go. But people would never know how moved by the scene he’d really felt.

SIGHT A flash of sun brakes across light ripples through the air slips amongst the grass glistening water reflects blue sky all as in one, two, three, four, ooohsh. Black. Alison keeps her balance walking through the carriage checking tickets. Aaron can’t find his so enacts a fumble as a plea for sympathy. Ooohsh. As Alison threatens the penalty fare the ticket appears but it’s too late. The train has long left the tunnel and her interlarding has had Aaron miss an infinite fleet of flickering coloured moments. Soon after, the scenes he sees seem less living. Reeling into the unreal he steps to the platform at St. Pancras. The station clock strikes four with mean precision. Aaron is going to be late again.

SOUND Jelena cannot hear a single meaningful word rising from the matted blanket of interwoven foreign speech that quilts the dank canteen as her brief break draws to a close Ф Beyond the four corners of the imported puzzle page held between her coarse fingers, shapes of definition blur into absent liminal swirls Л She misses home but thinks only of the missing letters К Her ballpoint warms beneath the frustrated grip Ъ It’s a curse to be beaten by words У At five minutes to she returns downstairs Ч As she sweeps she remembers her uncles swept away Ы Tito’s secret mass graves Щ A moment later the sought after solution sounds in her mind СЛОБОДА

SMELL In a beautiful wooden villa an hour from Montpellier, Lily poses in earnest for the flash of a stranger’s camera. She smiles politely as Raoul inhales a deep gust of fragrant feminine air, before retracting his affection-spoilt arm slung around her delicate shoulders. He thanks her for making the memory. JC watches as the beast unhands the beauty, his knees twitching beneath the table in amusement. In the car, Lily tells JC, ‘they were very nice, thank you, the food was incredible,’ but thinks only of returning to her lover’s embrace far across the channel. The clear starlight smoothes over Raoul’s grimacing skin. Under the twinkling rhythms of a million bodies in orbit he tugs with intent, praying that the already-fading smell shall never leave the closeness of his face.

iPod (draft)

Charlotte Stephenson, Christmas 2007… Engraved on the back. Hmm.Well Merry Christmas to you too Charlotte, I mean I know it’s January already but really, I’m very grateful, you shouldn’t have. Playlists already formed and filed, what an earnest gesture, let me see… Bowie, Buzzcocks, Dusty and Chuck… oh you know me too well. Too well I’m sure. Ahh, I can picture it now. We, latched arms, crossed like swords at our tall gate of impudicity, tailored in vogueish charms fit for the K West; stand with shoes spat upon in a basement not two train stops and a flight of stairs down from where we first crossed paths; beer stained, drunk, lustful; two brash, fuck-starved glitter maggots, gaunt with catwalk hunger; too much coitus, too few carbohydrates, smart but senseless, threading tales clipped with artismic cadence of times we were never actually there to experience. Oh I am sorry I lose myself. Hmm, ‘loose’, myself. No, that doesn’t work. Anyway, I can’t really remember what your face looked like, nice plain hair though, you were probably very reckless too, and so you’ll understand. Charlotte, Charlotte, what an offering! You really shouldn’t have. I think I’ve already got one like this anyway. Hold. To my current concern I abide… Drury, Joy Division, Morrissey too. It’s 9am and you’re miserable now? I almost feel bad. Serves you right for getting drunk, or not getting drunk and just living your life so vacantly. Pop, you’re a bar of soap that can but lather in the palms of others, slip, here you are in my hand now… but I know that when you’re dry you’re just a cracked up, pleasant smelling lump whose only fate it is to wash away into nothing. Rather you than me, love. Not that I mind, we’re all going to end up dead anyway, and what’s a little squalor between friends? …I’m kidding! Don’t look at me like that, I can see your slack-jawed melt-face now, it’s so dull it’s dribbling down itself. Your vacant eyes are cracked like eggs, there’s thick yellow yolk oozing down your cheeks and you’re looking nowhere. I’d lick it right up if I hadn’t eaten already. No I really can’t remember what you looked like, oh well. Strange, I was staring at you for ages, too. We didn’t make eye contact. It was nice you left me your name, at least. And your iPod. If you’re like me then you won’t mind I’ve taken it, I prefer ideas to things; the impulse, my idea; the thing, your iPod, I’m sure you feel the same and you understand completely. Oh! …This is all so futile. I sit here and finger your wheel. Tee hee… …I sigh, I really do sigh, listen to me sigh, and I hope I’ll get a couple of quid for this down the electronics exchange. All I know of you is your face, which I’ve forgotten, and your iPod, whose batteries won’t last forever, yet still your thrown-together image is tainted with enough stark remnants of reality to make this whole little fantasy breathe its futile final breathe. I can dream all I want too, I can write upon you, usurp you as more of a… not I; literate the unliterable. Yes, I like that. But – wait, let’s just look a little further down this list… Spice Girls! Steps! Charlotte bloody Church!… Who am I bloody kidding, Charlotte? It’s my own sorry lack that’ll struggle with coming to terms with the fact you’re probably not the cut throat romantic that the reckless recesses of my blood-starved brain rallies with importentous fanfare, and that though I spin my weary webs of solipsistic squalor; these nets of languid empty signs that I use to tie the frays of life together and support some awkward ideal that’ll keep me going from day to day, you’re just as normal as the next. All you’ve got to worry about is where you left your iPod. Charlotte, oh my dear, dear Charlotte, you’ve given me a gift you shouldn’t have, a gift to a petty thief… a theif of signs?... a thief like me. In truth it was as you got up, still unaware of my presence, and left the row of seats, the ones where we crossed paths, it was then that the first and last thing I truly thought of you entered my mind. “Charlotte”, I thought, though I didn’t know your name at that point, “you really shouldn’t have left your bag open for us and all – but mostly me – on show for us to see.”

Across the valkyrie’s curve...

Across the valkyrie’s curve mere’s molten pours
Aside a wounded watcher’s clad in warming ore;
Sculpted in skin her white heat fires lust,
O, carry him to Valhalla! Raise him in your bust!

Burn blood red upon his vein,
Thrust heaven’s shape upon his frame;
To the seat of Glandsheim ride him straight
From mortal pain tumult his fate.
In flesh alive, O force your breast,
For hips between a fire attests
To burn away the mourn and wound,
Release his spirit, run aground.
Pressing forth, de-paralyse
Until the spark of Thor shoots from his eyes!
Then part you skin at heaven’s bide
And strong he’ll stand by Odin’s side.

Some kind of failure

A quarter-block wedge
Ousted from the side of the young man’s head
His cortex only partly-pulped
A few good books forgotten
Look at him, he’s a loitering soul of the century.
Chipped at as he rolls on the smoke
Carving crumbling slipstreams as he’s caught on a breeze.
Knick, scratch, fold, look at him float like a snowflake.
…a paper cut-out by a sloppy six year old.

Now look at this automated service arm and its vacant business
It tills the land, sowing cables and
As the young man gaily skips
His lightest skip in his grazed open shell
The arm tears his head clean from its roots!
Chopped and diced a metallic taste worsens on his tongue.
Bloody dismemberment spews forth this gory pageant
The young man bumps along his path
– whack, didn’t see that coming –
While his young pup head rolls in severed silence
Dutifully behind.

He walks off into the distance
Further than I can see
His trace washed away by today’s unnaturally heavy rain.
Looking the other way there’s the next young man
Same surface cracks, same state of dismantlement.
With an industrial wheeze the iron arm looms again
- Is there nothing I can do about this? -

I think, and fear for his head
But it’s too late for that
- Riiiiiiiiiiiiiip -
It’s grabbed mine instead

minute tectonics

Tip softly scaling spine
Toe fingers hop sway
Across hips locked entwine

{Feet tread with vague ambition}

Feet tread with vague ambition
Wailing free of a suited siphon
To channel the blue-flamed burning,
Bristling fuel-dump brain,
Crackling with an envy of broken rank.
Barren aim tills the earth,
But a conflict of separateness,
The dark discrepant plotting compass rings
As lunar circles with wide eyes seeking the moment
To break orbit and smash the globe,
In destruction finds completeness.
Ego, the smallest orb of all, trills oblivious to our light giving brother behind,
Who in truth permits this ray-bound sight.
Truth shall always lay behind us in blinding eternity
Meek silver threads in ethereal absence, fragile webs
The hand could only crush, a hidden tryst safe from us, unrealised.
It is on pain of joining dull constellations on arid earth,
That our single fear or lust for truth dissolves,
Which is why, when you look around you,
Feet still tread.