John Eldridge, with his van Jeremy. He has a new portfolio online. Please visit his site for Christmas!


He did a trip way down south in Jeremy. Got some of this: 

 

 

I met up with him as he headed north...  

 

The Isiqalo Foundation (UK) supports educational and health awareness initiatives in South Africa focusing on HIV awareness and skills creation

 

The Isiqalo foundation aims to:

Fund programs in the disadvantaged community of the township of Masiphumelele in the Western Cape that facilitate and promote the empowerment and development of children and young adults.

 

Donate to Isiqalo this week

 

 

West coasts cooking, city tensions riding high

Highbury Water

You had a fracture
Like the hands of the clock skipped a mark
A little spark crack
Hairline above your eyes black in the light of clockwork dawn
The roof of a smile
All our seconds are dust
And the bird in the cage pecks at the rust
For a while,
And my body is blurred between maybe and must
And I'm drowning, drowning in Highbury water
Drowning in wells of meaningless trust
Trussed-up vagabond - beggar to lust
Carrying the stamp of your fracture and bust
Across deserts, through private halls
buried in turn to breathe as we fall into wells
Sipping naked gasps of air
We burn, incandescent flames
Spun on proximity yearn
And I'm drowning
Knowing, nascent, willing
In fractures impacted and bare to the beat
Will you care by the next dawn? Will your fracture repair?
Will you swallow us whole with a yawn?
And maybe the dropped coin never reaches the water black
And dawn never brings
A fair crack, the track takes its promises back
Perhaps it was but a game
A sprung trap
This delicate flack
Pins the blame
And I'm drowning now,
Drowning,
In Highbury Water,
in wells with no name.


Surfing with Henry - bull seals and orange sundown. Stoke to see a friend riding a board built to glide.

 

 

Leonora Carrington

 

 

FaceKOOK

Ghostwater

 


 

Ghostwater
(Lost rivers of London)

It came from the West, slow bubbling, carving runnels in the ancient clay
Fleet runs the river, swift to downfall, flowing to dismay
The oldbourne, holding a memory of peat; a concrete song in fate
Beneath dappled banks the trout; unknowing, languid, wait
Where the water tumbles, like a trace of light, to spin the gate
The Lost River Fleet, cased in pure concrete weight
Split from her bed, bound in tunnels, flowing unknowing, blind
At times she finds the whispers of the other ghosts
The Effra hissing, missing deep beneath the crazy tramp of feet
Unseen, conveying the carcass of a rat below the hustle of market streets
Where once stood proud banks and clear flow,
Stinks Bazalgette's high level interceptor sewer now
Constricted in culverts, to take diverted course about the tube map
Robbed of riverhood by the need to pave and trap
The Falconbrook stumbles on, the Neckinger quick
Lunging through the tunnels and pipes of forgotten brick
But in the case of ghostwater they forget, these engineer folk
Wardens of the dammed, stemmers of the tideway choked
We, the lost streams of London, run forever free
For where a river once was, it always will be.

Burning in the Northland Sky

 

Foil gold

Bittersweet nothing.

Licking the geos
Point after point
Of flatness
Another thousand miles
To perch on
Weary haunches and
Watch the ocean murmur

Where the angry roar?
The thin mist
Of the forecast swell?
The pattern lure
Skipped out
A bum trace, no barb in the hook
You took me for a sucker, sea

 

Killala

'It's dour out there,' Killian said,
As the weave and weft
of another set
Strikes the ledge, and unwinds
The left
Out past Ballina
Where light moves quick
Across the thick, windtorn peaks
It's a safe bet,
This flat tongue of rock
Where west wind seeks
But gets swallowed
By armada-wrecking heights
The swell fights
about the head

Killian calls it;
'Shit' he says
Scratches his balls
And splits
Exhaust fumes and silence
But for the
pinwheeling gulls
And the left
That grumbles and spits
Rounding belmullet
Creeping past ballycastle
Dancing for me alone
With Ireland's shore
This bitter, beautiful taste
Singing
'You've grown down,
Not up.'
The left spinning
Past Lackan
The slab huge, square
Then it's a solitary race
To wear piss-ridden rubber
To bear
The brunt of 8 degree
Water
To care
More about something
Than it's possible to share

It seems the birds laugh
As they dive
These Irish blackbacks
are heard
In the ruined arches
And stacks
Of rathfran friary
Down past Killala
And at Easky
Where the sky
kisses the river
As she hisses
Across blue boulders
And spry salmon breach
And glisten
Across the shoulders
Of the reef
If you listen, she'll teach

 

buy the new kook, y'hear

 

 

Tall dance the poppies

Abscond abscond you vagabond rat 
but leave me that gunny and the tall straw hat
Sell you the pastry and the cannonball tat 
and the skipping ropes and the old goose-fat
Take you the bowery and that bovine cat
Leave the peacock feather pinched from my cap 

Depart depart oh rotten fiend you 
And stir up the soup and obsidian stew 
The stairs are broken and the roof is not new 
And the maggoty offal is turning to blue 
The silence between us it grows as it grew
Tall dance the poppies on this heart you slew

Begone begone you wiley judge old
With your whiskers and whispering voice in the cold
Gather the terrapins and the housepig bold
And cast them out, for the seller got sold
For I taught you a lesson, but it was I who got told 
Now you'll dance and laugh at the night till it folds

We'll laugh at the beauty, the sadness, the hate 
We'll laugh at our laughing, the darkness negate 
The sand will slip through our fingers at a terrible rate
For I was the rod and you the bait 
And I'll catch you walking, in some woman's gait
Catch your memory wandering - that is my fate