Not Dead Yet

Okay, before I even start I better go and down a paracetamol, because the headache is beginning its build up, just as it has done for the last two weeks. Every morning I wake up and think, "oh, it's gone" and then after maybe just an hour it starts making itself felt. My guess is that physical activity increases my blood pressure and that pushes against the weakened wall of the blood vessel that burst and nearly killed me six and a half years back.

Yesterday I felt better than I had in two weeks and it was only late at night that I had to go for the pain killers. Also - trying not to get too dependent on them - I eschewed the sleeping tablets that my father had given me, but come 2am - feeling like shit and totally sleepless - I ended up taking one, and slept nicely for a good six hours. I've only got one sleeping tablet left. I'm completely out of valium. So, after two weeks of being in a druggy haze I'm going to have to go cold turkey.

Valium and Temazepam are fine, if all you want to do with your life is float around in a state of stupefaction, but they don't leave much room for "feeling" (be it physical pain, mental torment or even ecstatic joy). I can understand why people get into them recreationally. They are cheaper and more readily available than heroin, and - being legal - of pharmaceutical purity. No chance of ending your life in a dirty, vomity stupor because some greedy gangster type cut it with something vile and poisonous.

Nonetheless, manna from heaven they ain't. I can already feel the crawling little headfuck of addiction in my bloodstream. This afternoon, on the beginnings of my comedown, I really REALLY want a Valium. I'm even eyeing up that one last sleeping pill I have.

* * * *

Not that long ago I thought me and "blogging" were through. Truth be told, it was all beginning to seem a bit pointless, shouting my mouth out into the cyber void; and, besides, things had started taking off for me creatively again. I'd found a publisher for my third collection of poetry, "Visions Of The Drowning Man", I was deeply engrossed in writing a novel (one I was sure would not founder after ten pages) and I had also finally made a breakthrough with a couple of computer programmes that allowed me to write music.

Well, things broke down between me and the publisher; and although I was later told that things had also broken down between that publisher and another writer, it did not quite alleviate my feelings of desolation. It is NOT easy to find a poetry publisher; and the odds are stacked against you big-time if you did not study English literature or Creative Writing at Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews or the University of East Anglia. I'm not kidding, that whole "old boy" and "old girl" network is almost as strong as it was fifty years ago. It's not a conspiracy or anything, it's just that they all meet at uni, make friends, give each other a helping hand and a leg up. It's a natural human instinct to help your friends. I'm sure if I'd gone and studied English lit at Glasgow Uni when I was 18, I'd have turned into one of these people I'm complaining about.

My poetry doesn't come from an English lit tradition. It wasn't born of that usual middle-class trajectory of private school, university, arts council grants, fellowships etc. Whilst my contemporaries were at university studying Keats, Shelley, Auden and Eliot I was drifting aimlessly, not knowing what the fuck my life was about. When I was eighteen I hitch-hiked down to London, got a job - briefly - in an independent record company, before becoming homeless. Even once I found a home - a grotty bedsit in Shepherd's Bush - I still did not find a direction. I wrote poetry, but unlike some of the poets I met in London, I did not BELIEVE in poetry. There was one poet I met though, who had a profound influence on me, and that was Jay Ramsay. His belief in the power of poetry was almost mystical, but it wasn't his belief that influenced me, but the sheer visceral power of his early work. It came from a dark, very angry place. Readers of his later, more spiritual poetry would be shocked by some of Ramsay's early work. I remember watching Jay direct rehearsals of a poetry-play of his (I think it was called "Knife In The Light"). The rehearsals took place in a big, dirty space in Hammersmith. I remember watching them, utterly mesmerised. There was something so punk about what he was doing. It screamed with energy. It may well have been naive or even dreadful, for all I know, but to my eighteen-year-old ears and eyes, it was like beholding a miracle. My only previous experience of poets had been a coterie of old farts - the Tooting Bec Poets - who sat about an Irish doctor's sitting room, criticising each other's verbose, laboured and very fucking boring poetry. Jay - God love him - showed me that you didn't have to be a pipe-smoking, brown corduroy wearing, middle-class professional to be a poet.

Unfortunately, the poetry world is full of Tooting Bec Poets; people who laboriously craft verses that ultimately say fuck all... or if not fuck all exactly, just a carbon copy of something that's been said so many times before you are left wondering why they bloody well bother. It's not like anyone reads poetry anyway.

And is it any surprise that no-one reads poetry? Well, not to me. With a rare, few exceptions, poetry generally puts me to sleep. Yawn, yawn, bloody yawn! And if it has that effect on me, a poet (for want of a better word), then what must it be doing for people who aren't poets? Well, I suppose the answer is obvious. It does NOTHING for them. NOTHING. There are nearly sixty million people living in the United Kingdom. How many of them do you suppose bought the latest collected poems of one of the world's most famous living poets, Anne Stevenson? A million? A hundred thousand? No, no and three times no! According to Anne in her What Makes Poets Tick? questionnaire, it has sold somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 copies.

* * * *

So, my publishing deal fell through. Then the novel I was working on started unravelling. Then something went wrong in my head again. So, I'm back to blogging again. The only creative thing I've got going for me now - aside from pishing my words into cyber-space - is my music, but with the headaches I just can't spend hours and hours working on it like I could before. The music takes an intense sort of concentration, and you have to stare into the screen, which really fucks up your eyes and brain. Music making now hurts! It's different from writing, because my fingers kinda know where to go when I'm writing. I'm not a touch typist, but my fingers have near enough three decades worth of experience of keyboards, so writing doesn't hurt half as bad as writing music.

Painful or not, I'm still going to make music.

Oh, and as for the poetry, well, I've sent it off to another publisher for a look-see. In fact, this time I've decided I'm going to send it to Faber, Bloodaxe, Blackstaff and all the poetry big boys. You never know, there might just be an editor there who thinks my stuff rocks, that it's new, it's exciting, it's different. Unlikely, I know - improbable even - but NOT impossible. Nothing is ever impossible. I think "Visions Of The Drowning Man" is my best collection yet. If I were an editor at Faber I'd publish it. Seriously, I think it rocks. It deserves a decent publisher. It deserves a publisher with enough clout to get it into bookshops and libraries.

* * * *

So, Day 14 (I think) of the headaches and I'm still alive. Things are looking up, I guess. If I've survived this far, I guess the chances are I'll just keep surviving, even if I have to live on a diet of painkillers. And who knows, maybe the headaches will just fade out and stop? That's what happened before.

If so, I guess all this blathering is going to seem like the prattling of a self-indulgent, melodramatic drama queen.

But you know, I'd rather look like a stupid prick and survive to tell the tale than to die and keep my credibility in tact. There's so much more I want to do with this life. It would be pish if my life was cut short, just because of a weak blood-vessel in my brain.

I've got a big list of things I want to do before I die, and I'm not even a quarter of a way through them yet. I want another 200 years please!

There's so much more that I want to say now, but my head is totally fucking thumping again. So, I'm going to go and gub a paracetamol, lie down under the duvet and wait for the pain to settle down to an acceptable grumbling background noise.

What a fragile thing our sense of well-being is.