Those That Failed to Make the First Team, Carl Halling [mystery books to read .TXT] 📗

ev'ry one…

But I didn't want to lose her.
I’ll get over how I feel now,
And very soon.
Gradually I’ll freeze again,
Even assuming an extra layer of snow.
I have to get out of here.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

Both ‘The Destructive Disease of the Soul’
And ‘The Compensatory Man Par Excellence’
Possess as their starting points
A novel written at an estimate around 1987,
With one Francis Phoenix as chief protagonist.

Its fate remains a mystery,
But it may well be it was completed,
Only to be purged soon after
I became a born again Christian in 1993,
With only a handful of scraps remaining.

The versified pieces below
Were forged out of these scraps
In September 2011, although initially,
They’d taken shape as prose pieces,
Only to be edited and versified at a later date.

The Destructive Disease of the Soul

No amount of thought
Could negate
Suffering in the mind
Of Francis Phoenix.

That much he had always believed,
That humanity is a sad, lost
And suffering race.
Sometimes he felt it so strongly
That the worship of a Saviour seemed
To be the only sane act on earth,
And then it passed…

It was not increasing callousness,
But an increase in the number of moments
He felt quite intoxicated with compassion
That had soured Frank’s outlook.

During those moments, he wept
For all those he’d ever been cruel to.
He could be so hard on people,
So terribly hard.
To whom could he ask forgiveness?

It was his sensitivity
That bred those moments of Christlike love,
When he cared so little for himself,
For his body, even for his soul…
When it was the soul of his father,
The soul of his mother,
The souls of his friends and relatives
And everyone he’d ever known
That he cared about.

That was truth, that was reality,
That was the purpose of all human life,
That love, that benevolence,
That absolute forgiveness.
Otherworldly love is painful,
But it is the only true freedom known to Man.
Too much thought eventually produces the conviction
That nothing is worth doing.
Thought is a destructive disease of the soul.

The Compensatory Man Par Excellence

I seldom indulge in letter writing
Because I consider it
To be a cold and illusory
Means of communication.
I will only send someone a letter
If I’m certain it’s going to serve
A definite functional purpose,
Such as that which I’m
Scrupulously concocting at present
Indisputably does.
It’s not that I incline
Towards excessive premeditation;
It’s rather that I have to subject
My thoughts and emotions
To quasi-military discipline,
As pandemonium is the sole alternative.
I’m the compensatory man par excellence

Deliberation, in my case,
Is a means to an end,
But scarcely by any means,
An end in itself.
This letter possesses not one,
But two, designs.
On one hand, its aim is edification.
Besides that, I plan to include it
In the literary project upon which
I’m presently engaged,
With your permission of course.
Contrary to what you have suspected
In the past,
I never intend to trivialise intimacy
By distilling it into art.
On the contrary, I seek
To apotheosise the same.

You see…I lack the necessary
Emotional vitality to do justice
To people and events
That are precious to me;
I am forced, therefore,
To at a later date call
On emotive reserves
Contained within my unconscious
In order to transform
The aforesaid into literary monuments.
You once said that my feelings
Had been interred under six feet
Of lifeless abstractions;
As true as this might be,
The abstractions in question
Come from without
Rather than within me:

My youthful spontaneity
Many mistrustfully identified
With self-satisfied inconsiderateness
(A standard case of fallacious reasoning),
And I was consequently
The frequent victim
Of somewhat draconic cerebrations.
I tremble now
In the face of hyperconsciousness.
I’ve manufactured a mentality,
Riddled with deliberation,
Cankerous with irony;
Still, in its fragility,
Not to say, artificiality,
It can, with supreme facility,
Be wrenched aside to expose
The touch-paper tenderness within.

With characteristic extremism,
I’ve taken ratiocination
To its very limits,
But I’ve acquainted myself with,
Nay, embraced my antagonist
Only in order to more effectively throttle him.
Being a survivor of the protracted passage
Through the morass of nihilism,
Found deep within
“The hell of the inner being”,
I am more than qualified to say this:
“There is no way out or round or through”
The prison of ceaseless sophistry.
There many things I have left to say,
But I shall only have begun to exist in earnest
When these are far behind me,
In fact, so far as to be all but imperceptible.

I long for the time
When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.
I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.
Everything I ever dreaded being, I’ve become…
Everything I ever desired to be, I’ve become.
I’m the sum total of a lifetime’s
Fears and fantasies,
Both wish-fulfilment
And dread-consummation incarnate.
I long for the time
When I shall have compensated to my satisfaction.
I never desired intellectuality; it was thrust upon me.
I’m the sum total of a lifetime’s
Fears and fantasies,
Both wish-fulfilment
And dread-consummation incarnate.
I’m the compensatory man par excellence.

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1980s

‘Strange Coldness Perplexing was forged
Using notes scrawled
Onto seven sides of an ancient
Now coverless notebook,
Possibly late at night
Following an evening’s carousal
And in a state of serene intoxication.

The original notes were based
On experiences I underwent
While serving as a teacher
In a highly successful
Central London school of English,
Which I did between the spring,
Or summer, of ‘88 and the summer of 1990.

It gives some indication
Of my emotional condition at the time,
Including a tendency, as I see it,
To wildly veer between
The conscious effusive affectionateness
I aspired to, and sudden irrational
Involuntary lapses of affect.

It also bespeaks the intense devotion
I manifested towards my favourite students
And which was reciprocated by them with interest.
All punctuation was removed around 2007,
And extracts tacked together,
Not randomly as in the so-called cut up technique
But selectively and all but sequentially.

Strange Coldness Perplexing

the catholic nurse
all sensitive
caring noticing
everything
what can she think
of my hot/cold torment

always near blowing it
living in the fast lane
so friendly kind
the girls
dewy eyed
wanda abandoned me
bolton is in my hands

and yet my coldness
hurts
the more emotional
they stay
trying to find a reason
for my ice-like suspicion
fish eyes
coldly indifferent eyes
suspect everything that moves

socialising just to be loud
compensate for cold
lack of essential trust
warmth
i love them
despite myself
my desire to love
is unconscious and gigantesque

i never know
when i'm going to miss someone
strange coldness perplexing
i've got to work to get devotion
but once i get it
i really get people on my side
there are carl people
who can survive
my shark-like coldness
and there are those
who want something
more personal
i can be very devoted to those
who can stay the course

my soul is aching
for an impartial love of people
i'm at war with myself…

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1990s

In the early part of autumn 1990,
I began a course known as the PGCE
Or Post Graduate Certificate in Education
At a school of higher education
In the pleasant outer suburb of Twickenham,
Becoming resident in nearby Isleworth.
I began quite promisingly as I saw it
Even though my heart
Was not really in the course
But I genuinely saw the benefits
Of successfully completing it,
And as might be expected,
Excelled in drama and physical education.
I rarely drank during the day,
But at night I was sometimes so drunk
I was incoherent.
The following versified piece
Serves a testimony to this sad truth.
Its original was a letter
Typed to a close friend in about 1990,
Some three years or so
Prior to my coming to saving faith
In the Lord Jesus Christ.
And concerning a series of accidents
I'd recently suffered.
However, it was never finished, nor sent.
When it was recovered,
It was as a piece of scrap paper,
A remnant from a long lost past.
It was subsequently edited and reassembled,
Before being subject
To some kind of versification in 2006.
And then some half decade later,
Further work was performed on it,
But it was still pretty threadbare for all that.

Incident in St. Christopher’s Place

Dear, I haven't been in touch
for a long time.
Sorry.
The last time I saw you
Was in St. Christopher's Place.
It was a lovely evening...
when I knocked that chair over.
I am sorry.
Since then,
I've had not a few accidents
Of that kind.

Just three days ago,
I slipped out in a garden
At a friend's house...
And keeled over, not once,
Not twice, but three times,
Like a log...clonking my nut
So violently that people heard me
In the sitting room.
What's more,
I can't remember a single sentence
spoken all evening. The problem is...

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1990s

Some months after appearing
In the "Scottish Play" at the Lost Theatre
In the onetime working class
West London suburb of Fulham,
I wrote the piece featured below,
"Such a Short Space of Time".

But in the first instance
It was part of an unfinished short story,
Not a poem at all.
My parents were on vacation
During the period which inspired it,
Which is to say early in the summer of 1999.

Hence, I spent a lot of time at their house
Performing various tasks,
Such as watering my mother's flowers.
As well as this, I took sneaky advantage
Of their absence to transfer
Some of my old LPs onto cassette.

It was something my own music system
Was incapable of doing, unlike theirs.
And it was a profoundly unsettling experience.
To listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases
Of some of them, I’d not heard
For twenty years, or even twenty five, or more.

With a heartrending intensity,
Doing so had the effect
Of evoking a time
When I was filled to the brim
With sheer youthful joy of life
And undiluted hope for the future.

Yet as I did so, it seemed to me
That it was only very recently
That I'd