Diamanda Galas...

...sits on my balcony. well, the book i'm reading on her is, but it's getting dark, the sun is about to set, and i can still see the sun reflect in her fingernails and teeth through the book cover. There is much bone in her.



She talks about the occult, and how witches back in them witch-hunting days possessed the power over both sexes: a transsexual power that she herself presents with her voice, and her appearance (does she look more like Gaiman's Death character, or Marc Bolan?) is, although certainly not androgynous, decidedly confronting.

I put one of her recordings on the stereo in the shop that I work in once, and for a while, it seemed like a different space; a series of bony corridors; a dark vault; the rows of cds along the walls were tombstones. Cds really are tombstones, aren't they? There are names on them, and some kind of title:

Eric Clapton
"Eric was here"

R.L. Burnside
"Wish I was in Heaven sitting down"

Phyllis Dillon
"Love was all I had: 1966-71"


The Diamanda section would have the best inscriptions, then:

DIAMANDA GALAS

YOU MUST BE CERTAIN OF THE DEVIL.


So is a record a symbol of death?

On the bus

On the bus today I wrote a song, and it goes-a something-a like this:




A CHOIR OF CRAYONS
Gee I love you very much you are the sweetest thing I ever saw
I'm so glad that I found you, yeah
And I'm really glad I'm singing this (I'm way too drunk to spell)
Each consonant bangs against the head

I just called to stutter
and belch out some colours
you know the world is very red and purple and
yellow and red and purple...

I've been thinking 'bout your gender issues
and your little man moustache
and last night I went on the internet
& stumbled upon a picture of a testosterone-enlaged clitoris
I thought it looke like a little crayon

I just called to tell you that
but I dialled the wrong number yeah
you know it's stupid but I just mistook the 6 for a 9 and the 6 for a 9 and...

...the world is a cornfield of crayons singing

Hallelujah. hallelujah,
all the colours, all colours yeah
we know it's stupid but we've been singing too much and it's colouring
to red and purple and yellow and red...


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After I'd left the bus, and at the end of the day, I imagined the driver cleaning the bus: sweeping up hundreds of leftover little clitoris-crayons.