LONDON (2006)

LONDON (2006)

London, baby: the time has come. Time to unplug and taste the mud. Time to decant my father’s blood. Ghosted concrete columns hold up the Hyde Park hostel. My Globe skate shoes stick to the Fosters-stained carpet, everything smells like Ramen, the chipped toilet door doesn’t lock. It’s perfect. My back is beaded in English summer sweat and unwashed Europeans consume me in the corridor. Come, they say. They know why I’m here. Their eyes are as hungry and wild as mine: one shared look and we all understand each other. We are here to live, not survive. We are here to party and die. Come along, come with us.

Of course I’ll come; why else am I in London?

The portal into our new world is the Queensway tube stop, bright posters for Lily Allen’s new single “Smile” beaming down on drab-faced office flops. We swagger into a street of three equidistant Tescos, the footpath an aroma of overcooked curries and compact car exhaust. We creep to Tony’s illegal late-night grog shop, lights off in case of a visit from the cops. We walk back singing and air-guitaring to The Darkness, yelling at gargoyles. We vodka and we beer in a giant concrete pipe; we soccer empty cans in the alley behind. We coronate each other’s heads with crumpled tins; on the lip of a dumpster we confess our sins. I am a teacher of deviance when I reveal the word ‘cunt’ to the Basque separatist kids, but a student when they teach me to make noise that riles the cops at 4am. Do you want to spend the night in jail? they say.

Of course I want to go to jail; why else am I in London?

Breathing in the hostel nightclub basement: shisha, hookah, weed. Agony leaks from my mouth in illicit plumes. The girls laugh and thrust their nipples in my face but I’m too busy trying to give his meat a taste. None of them know I spent the day in Covent Garden trawling for seed or that it was the first thing I ever did that made me feel free. How in that moment I was finally alive; and how in that moment I’ll remain until I die. I will forever be that boy trying to outrun himself on Tottenham Court Road. But that night, under flickering neon torus and throbbing DJ beats, I am weak. He’s Irish and Catholic and pale beef. He leaves the DF for the urinal and I bear-hug him while he pees. Do you want people to think you’re a homo? he says. Do you want people to think you’re a freak?

It’s all I fucking want, man; why else am I in London?

– Holden Sheppard

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When Poetry Spreads Its Wings … Into Prose

Inspiration always strikes at the least convenient of times.

This morning, it was just as I was about to leave the gym. I went for an hour’s run, pushing through the crusty fatigue of having returned to work this week, and I was riding a nice sweat-coated endorphin high.

As I refilled my water bottle (the gym’s water is so much cooler than my tap at home), I passed by one of the workers from the gym’s creche carrying a kid down the corridor. She said something dumb in that inane “I’m dealing with a child” kind of voice, jollying the toddler along, and it triggered some strange melange of memory and thought in my brain.

And, BAM, just like that: inspiration.

By the time I reached the car park, I had lines of written expression cascading out of my pores like water overfilling a swimming pool. As soon as I got into the car, I put the windows down (it was bloody warm) and grasped at my phone to open the Memo app. A few disjointed lines of what I thought was a poem gushed out of my fingertips and onto the screen.

Now, despite being pretty comfortable calling myself a writer, that usually extends only to the world of prose and, every so often, a brief foray into journalism (after which I usually retreat for a bit). But poet is not a word I am comfortable using on myself.

It’s not that I haven’t written poetry over the years. I went through a particularly prolific period from about 2005-2009 where I wrote notebooks and notebooks absolutely filled with poems and lyrics and stream-of-consciousness ramblings and other art.

And I did dabble in taking this a bit more seriously at uni, around 2008-2009, when I crafted a couple of cycles of poems that I actually thought were not half bad and my lecturers liked them enough, too. One longer collection of poems from 2009, GOOD BOYS, is actually something I’d love to revisit one day, because it was the first time I made a genuine attempt to tackle the themes and tone and style of what has now become my debut novel manuscript, INVISIBLE BOYS.

Nevertheless, I know my own skills well enough to know poetry isn’t really something I am going to pursue at a professional level. So, I spent the drive home wondering what to do with this piece. I figured I might chuck it up here on the blog, or even make it into a graphic and share it on Instagram and Twitter and, maybe if I was willing to be criticised by people in my family, even Facebook.

Once home, I chugged through my usual morning routine. This usually consists of:

• submerging my soul in a hot shower;
• meticulously weighing and consuming oats, protein powder and egg whites (I eat for performance, not taste, during the week, as my trainer invariably reminds me); and
• singing unabashedly into the empty, but very receptive, living room (today’s selected tune was John Butler Trio’s 2011 album track To Look Like You).

Mid-morning, I sat down at the laptop ready to work on my second novel, for which I really need a working title that I can share, because I don’t want to share the actual working title yet as it lets on a little too much, I reckon. I’ll make something up soon. It will be a working-working title.

Anyway, I open the word document and WHOOSH. It’s not the novel that explodes from the tips of my fingers like blue streamers of electricity: it’s that damn poem again! Only this time, it’s magically rearranging itself into full sentences … and … aha!

Turns out it was prose all along; the poem I spat out in the car was just a Metapod that, once given the right space, burst free from its cocoon and spread its wings as a glorious Butterfree.

HUZZAH!

I now have in my possession a sharp, 94-word piece of flash fiction titled VIOLET.

I might try to find a home for this one – maybe a competition, or a journal, or something along those lines. This one tapped into some old feelings – fear, bitterness, anger – so it’s going to be a spiky one and I almost dread certain people reading it.

Yet, at the same time, I want them to read it because I want them to know.

Holden

PS. Varuna blog post next week, I swear!