To read Richard's story, 'Get The Picture' on the showcase, click here or to read a poem by Richard on the showcase, click here
Richard Cabut has written for a bunch of papers, etc: The Guardian, Time Out, the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the NME. Pen names include Richard North. He played in the punk rock group Brigandage, and published the fanzine Kick. He writes fiction, cycles around London and takes pictures. To read Richard's article on Richard Hell's reading the the 2005 Meltdown Festival on the 3am website, click here
RICHARD'S INFLUENCES:
JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG
"Kerouac: "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous
roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you
see the blue center light pop and everybody goes 'AWWW!'"
Click image to visit the official Jack Kerouac website; to the Alan Ginsberg Shadow Changes into Bone website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
RAYMOND CARVER AND RICHARD YATES
"... paint it black with an isolating sense of sadness, suffocation and the
notion that everything is going to end in heart-rending sobs. The writers
cut with poignant depth at the ordinary veneer of small town life to expose
the claustrophobia beneath. The unsettled logic of a banal nightmare."
Click image to read Dan Schneider's review of Carver's 'Cathedral' on The New Review section of this site; to visit the Richard Yates website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here
Stevie speaks in tongues
in an Ibizan bar in the morning,
with spit in his white dirt beard
leaking from the hole in his dear teeth
punched out many years ago.
Steve – ‘Call me Stevie, I’d like that’ – talks trash
from drinking brandy at 9am, Spanish clock.
A legend in his own breakfast time,
as if time means anything to him.
Tick tock, fuck the fucking clock, man. Nada.
‘Midnight, that’s when today started,’ says Stevie, he’s sure,
‘but I wasn’t asleep, and I saw, I saw, I saw
one of the most beautiful people on earth,
one who did not steal from me.
A person who did not take.’
Stevie stands and then hops, hoping.
One sandal on, one foot bare, toenail long.
A trouser leg rolled up, the other down,
soiled and spattered.
He has come a long way.
Stevie declares he will sing ‘The Song of Bernadette’
To my daughter but can’t start
until first he can tell one more story
and have one more drink.
But no singing, yet, until.
Stevie rocketed in from the USA in 86
to be a hippy burning from the inside
with song, space and booze.
Less than holy, clearly a Fool
with idiot dancing grin – a trashed old soul
‘This is where I first heard The Song of Bernadette,’ he tells
while dancing with the memory
‘and learned the meaning of life, too.
Right here, ten years ago, man.
When a woman asked: “Can I sing with you?”’
Yes, Stevie can sing. ‘That I can do.’
His lyricism breathes through 9am cognac
as he performs for local laughs and kicks
jumping onto jukebox high,
snagging smokes with king jester skill.
‘I’ve been drunk, I am drunk, but I man not off my head
I am not a threat,’ he says with a look in his eye
to the parents of children who like animals and sensitive others,
can smell both difference and decay.
‘I am not a threat.’ But pure and bright as a halo, he believes.
So Stevie talks: ‘I love your family, you gotta believe me,
and I know you love your family, too,’
To me, just now, complaining, again about familial demands
on time and space running wild.
‘But really,’ Stevie says. ‘I really love the family of mankind.’
And may of them clean the vomit from his beard,
cut the nail of his toe,
pick his black teeth from the floor
and unroll his trouser leg when he can no longer bend or beg,
and smooth his deep-fried scrambled 9am dreams.
JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG
RAYMOND CARVER AND RICHARD YATES
