Archives (1997)

‘I don’t think I can survive here.’
She stares at me awhile. ‘So, you don’t think you can survive here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘There’s nothing to hold, I can’t see any way to stop myself falling’ she looks like she understands me so I feel encouraged to continue ‘and the leaders… are butchers’ and as I talk I feel like I’m losing it but still the words come out ‘so all I see are murderers, and’ and the face changes, the woman is gone and is replaced by another face. It’s a face from my childhood and it looms large above my head. It begins to rise up into the sky with all the presence of a divinity and it tells me I’m drinking the wrong drink, I’m smoking the wrong cigarette, I’m thinking the wrong thoughts. I’m in the wrong place.
So I laugh
The sky is full of steeples, cranes, posts, high-rises
Everything points to a place above but all I see is
Nothing
Waiting for the day to end. Waiting for the night to end. Group of kids outside the arcade talking about alcohol and fucking
Stay down at the train station
The recorded voice announcing trains and apologies. If only I could
But slot machines are hungry,
Another asking ‘you want some?’
‘No, not now.’
They’re firing guns and the head splits open. Numbers explode in time with falling bodies. Wanted to get my away from this world. This wasn’t our world, not my world.
Old pop songs crackle in a new electronic voice. All the colours and lights. A marriage of violence and money. Someone wins a jackpot and all the money rains down, dragging the eyes of a dozen or so people to the pit of the machine.
Cigarette smoke drifts through the air under the noses that keep seeking the rancid scent of coppers on their fingers
Another machine flashes ‘welcome!’ A sign says you can get married here, but we never loved each other
More money falls through the slot, can’t understand the lights that run across the face of the machine. Someone punches a machine, another stands with one hand caressing
I need to buy something,
something to stop my heart beating, I say.
The woman in a white and red striped shirt with a red bow-tie doesn’t understand. ‘Can I have a coffee please?’ I ask. Her eyes flicker with recognition. She moves to another machine, returns and places a polystyrene mug on the counter. She has a nice smile so I find myself talking
‘I don’t know what went wrong’ I say and the woman nods understandingly, ‘I lost faith - how can I do something right when it’s part of a large wrong. I keep trying to escape but all I do is watch and pay the wage.’
‘£1.20’ says the woman in the red bow-tie. Empty my pocket and give her the money.
Back on the streets the streets are warm now
Rows and rows of people surrounded by Hell, marching into a Heaven of used cars, new cd’s, a different wardrobe
We defined ourselves in rags and more rags, brought an idea of ourselves now there’s nothing left to hold, nothing left to see, vague words, a cold fusion of spirit and image
A nation of retailers, a nation of buyers, we sold ourselves in a shadow, pick it up, throw it away, I am what I am what I am what I am what I buy a different slice of my new fad spirit.
Laugh at our inanity, laugh at our laughter
as the war machine wrenches the world from the brink of peace
Hide in a phone-box
All around the city we try to disappear. Find a way through this night as a wall of television screens bursts into a song, policeman down the road means something, drag me to the ground I feel like I’m losing my
Smack, smack, something smacks against my head and who the fuck are you?
Can find no release but this release and this release is
Lonely, all too lonely
She said she loved me in a Piccadilly Circus of the brain giving way
Don’t make sense of the shrapnel, just look for the bomb
cower under the wreckage, it is not shed by my eyes but hangs loosely,
And everything is drifting away from me
I ran after man, hey man, don’t you know? no, no way don’t you
Don’t do that man, don’t you know no way man no way man
And what the fuck are you and get we get out? I need to get out.
A bus pulls into the bus-stop, people get on, people get off. Stop talking about my fucking eyes and would you like a cigarette please that boy you know that boy smacked fucking out of his fucking head this mind is
“Victory!” screams the city
“Victory!” screams the great Britannia
‘can we buy something?’ here, do I need to get away?
There’s that man! The one by Leicester Square and I haven’t gone anywhere
he says “this is not my home, not our home.’ When we found ourselves in the gutter I looked to the stars and cried ‘today I walked alone
alone down streets where beggars sit like broken machinery’
and the cars that passed me by on the roadside, did they see me mumbling
bad things?
These women sell themselves on a phone-box wall
as we drag our flag across the bodies of our victims, not a clean cut, not a clean cut, do you hear me, do you people hear me?
In the corner here, beside Planet Hollywood, watching the world pass by.
I slipped under the surface of another dead city. I slipped under the surface. Stop