Poetry

The Boy from the Tail End of the Goldhawk Road 2

by Carl Halling
09/04/14
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Though Are the Wonders of this Brief Life Book Four The Boy from the 
Tail End of the Goldhawk Road 2

She’d Loved Me

Without Doubt

She’d loved me without doubt

An unusually beautiful person

Both in nature and appearance

With tender slightly slanting

Green eyes

She’d loved me without doubt.

Gautier, Borel, O'Neddy, Baudelaire

I first read of the of the French Romantic extremists of the 1830s, such as Theophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Gerard de Nerval and Philothee O'Neddy, who could be said to have constituted the very first artistic avant-garde of the Modern Age, in Enid Starkie's classic biography of Baudelaire, a book which I eventually dispensed with as I did a once treasured copy of Les Fleurs du Mal...they were not alone.

I was a Decorative Dandy and Gallant

I was a decorative dandy and gallant, swathed in delusive charm, and the more I was flattered and complimented, the more peacockish I became.

I was deeply in thrall to the feminine, which may have been why in my own person, I sought to duplicate those qualities I found most irresistible in the fair.

This as I see it is the very essence of heterosexual dandyism, of which I was an acolyte.

You Knew New Wave

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Perhaps you became a Rockabilly Rebel for a time, inspired by some contemporary Hepcat act such as the Stray Cats, who fused classic Rockabilly with a New Wave attitude, or you embraced the Mod Revival pioneered by Franc Roddam's film version of the Who's concept album Quadrophenia, although as I recall, that had all but faded by the onset of the new decade.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

However, seminal New Wave band the Jam continued to fly the flag for the Mod Revival until 1982, when chief songwriter Paul Weller formed The Style Council, who would not have been seen as New Wave in the UK, although they would have done in the US, but what precisely does it mean?

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Well in Britain, it was used to describe a form of music which while flaunting a Punk Rock attitude was marked by a relative virtuosity perhaps intended to ensure its longevity.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

And given that such New Wave acts and artists as Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, XTC and the Police enjoy classic status, it was a canny development.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

Oh how electric with rebellion I was...but then rebellion was omnipresent throughout Britain in the '80s, fuelled by Post-Punk, Goth, Indie and so on.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

A degree of nonconformism is of course natural to the young of every age, but since around '55, rebellion has grown at such a furious rate in Britain that language and behaviour that would have have been widely perceived as iniquitous only a few decades ago now leaves most people indifferent.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

You knew you were part of the '80s when you knew that Punk was no longer at the vanguard when it came to epater le bourgeois, and you were scouting around for something to replace it.

That Wins Oscars

Yours was the sort of

Performance

That wins Oscars,

You were frightening, sinister,

You put everything into it

I took a step back,

You get better every time

How good can you get?

I’m proud to know you,

People love you,

You should hear the way

They talk about you.

Compulsively Strange Compulsively She

She is strange

And exciting

Compulsively ironic

And yet there’s fear in her eyes

She seems to be frightened

Of her man of mystery

Or is she still being ironic?

Compulsively strange and compulsively she.

I Cherished a Grim Obsession

I cherished a grim obsession with a hyper-intellectuality so at odds with my actual effervescent personality as to verge on the grotesque, and affected a largely fictitious sense of desolation which was only dispelled once I came to know Christ, at which point I acquired true and total purpose for the very first time.

Chances Are

If you knew him long enough, chances are

he'd tell you so to his face, and chances are few would feel moved to correct him. But he was no child prodigy, was in fact if anything the antithesis. Yet, his childhood was, on the surface of things, one masterminded to foster a high achiever nonpareil, and while the latter

never came to pass, a genius ultimately emerged. And If you knew him long enough, chances are

he'd tell you so to his face. As if to compensate. As if to compensate.

The Renewal of theMind

The fact is that within a short time of giving my life to Christ, I began to experience extreme difficulties when it came to writing creatively, as if the Lord was preventing me from expressing myself on a literary level.

The outcome was that I eventually gave up writing altogether, although I kept on periodically attempting to do so, only to end up destroying the results.

Precisely why it was that I became so burdened by a kind of forbidding leaden heaviness each time I tried to write for about ten years from the mid 1990s I can't say for certain, but I have my theories.

To begin with, my work back then reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to become a born again Christian.

I glorified these despite a false admonitory tone which served as a cover for my true motives.

Furthermore, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce an unsatisfactory hybrid.

God requires that all those who take the name of Christian adhere to absolute truth to the very best of their ability.

Others contained passages manifesting a dangerous degree of disrespect for the holy things of God; and I thank the Lord he allowed me the opportunity of decimating these.

Finally, in January 2006, God made it clear to me that I was sufficiently mature on a spiritual level to be able to write again.

I've come a long way from being the kind of man who once composed an essay so savagely misanthropic that one horrified individual he'd paid to read it referred to as a “didactic screed”.

And if ever proof positive were needed of the transforming work of the Lord Jesus Christ in a sinner's life, it was the difference between how I used to write, and how I write today, and how this reflects the renewal of the mind.