Ink is blood by David Barnes

This is a kind of declaration or manifesto about writing, about it being a deep aspect of who I am. About choosing to write. (Do you choose? Perhaps only in the same sense as you choose whether to be yourself.) About the sense of untapped potential that could be unlocked. About confidence in its fulfilment.

Ink is blood

Ink is blood that courses through the arteries of the mind containing all colours within its darkness
Flowing in search of light and release to the rhythmic pulse of the heart
Words are shorthand for experience and imagination
A currency of vision and desire exchanged without loss
Words are the seed crystals that drop into the jar that contains the soul and expand into fractal mosaics
They are lights in the dark
Syllables that touch off recollection of other voices, that re-ignite un-memories in the inaccessible corners of the heart

When I was born I drank a cup of black ink and now I bleed words
My mind is full of words and photographs of unreality
And I can see there is a wall of water coming
I know it by the pressure in my ears
By the sound of the shore
By the harmonic vibration of every water molecule in every cell of my body in sympathetic echo
There is a wall of water coming and it will break in the mind
These tears that trace the outline of my face are only the first brimming over of the flood
The false breaking before the wave comes.

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Going underground





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The Subterranean Poetry Club holds its first meeting

… somewhere under the 14th arrondisement. The square cut stone tunnels like some tomb, some long dead corridor in the soundless heart of a pyramid. 18 of us made the descent, 18 of us made it back, through a hole in the wall of an abandoned railway tunnel. So many junctions, so many twists and turns. Without a map we’d have been lost. Water sometimes deeper than our boots, how long has it been trapped down there? Spoke to some other spelunkers who were going to La Chateau – discovered a castle carved out of rock. In La Plage before a fresco of a Japanese wave we halted. David Hawkins retold a folk ballad, spoke of murder and that elusive almost perfect crime. We invoked The Hollow Men. Ink was blood and it was Interesting Times for Generation Z. Joy, Deb and Danny spoke in terrifying sinsiter unison. Conor let loose the dogs of war, by owl light. The Fifth Dentist plied his trade. Maxime made as if to endarken Buddha. And more. All by soft whiskey light, the smell of candle wax, its hot burning drip on the hand.

Thanks to Danny and Peter for the photos.

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Deep underground performance… David Hawkins takes the stage



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Watery darkness


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The flooded labyrinth





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Holes, tunnels, La Chateau





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Exploring the area La Plage





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The Subterranean Poetry Club

We’re going underground.
A poetry reading in the catacombs – next Saturday 12th May, meet at midnight metro Maison Blanche. Bring a torch and wellington boots (that’s a flashlight and galloshes to Americans.) I’m not kidding about the boots as we’ll be wading through water up to our shins.

Bring your deepest, darkest poems.
Bring verse from the locked boxes in the basement of your being.
From the subterranea of your unconscious.

David

If we’re not in the metro – go to nearby bar Maison Blanche, 107 ave d’Italie.

Leroy Merlin sell boots for ten euros.

Don’t be late.

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Seth takes a break from bashing the keys of the Ogre's typewriter

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