really

nearly 12 months down the line. damn. its a long fucking time.
everything has done 180degrees, and everything i see is different.
i dont know whether i like the jumped up cynical damaged bitch that i am now, hardened by this place and its people.
i think i do. sometimes its great, hiding behind a bluff, or a broken heart.
sometimes its fucking awful, and grey and dull.
attempting to kick this shit alone is kind of invigorating occasionally, and then you have to sit back and wonder if thats just an excuse.
everything you know gets dumped in a garbage truck when you're not looking.
you wanna call them back and say, actually can i put it in the recycling instead?
at least that way its still part of stuff.
and then you realise they don't do recycling.
and im kind of ok with not recycling. at least you can't go over the same shit again and again, and fall into your own cycle of use, re-use or mis-use.
and then you wonder whether you can tip the dealer or not, and get dealt a better hand.

misconstrued imaginations

misconstrued imaginations /
you cause me.
hopeful fractions dividing a
nonsense storyline of
awkward moments and /
sometimes blanks /
where equations could be
balancing ends.
take a little thing from
that side,
but matter tends to collect

where it can't

decide on something

erased skin

erased skin
and flushed cards
curled deceptions drown
in dish-drained water.
he forgot to score the table
with the edge i left there

and maybe i want those
hands of hearts
if not to score
somehow its always his word
against the draw.

round, i reckon

round, i reckon
with a small chance of corners.

polished thoughts
building on ordered cells
and he was smiling
as i threw it through the door
hazardous giggling i thought
dull horizons
probably.
a central reservation
on my thoughts that
mumbled around a freshly
dead room,
crammed with empty chances
i reckoned.

somebody said not to

somebody said not to
i think
and then i did
trying not to smirk
as i did
emptying bottles, drawing circles
painting lines with the wine
running out of images
to imagine upon
curling the strands with
a stained finger
and then again / it collapsed
stopped
and a descent to the plane
of small sounds
with missing gaps

function of a flower

when it said to me to
cancel out the other side
or differentiate the split
along the wall
i was meanwhile talking
in quiet voices
and laughing at the spiders
running away from the
integral sign.
a function of a flower
that lured a smell of
roasting happiness
to mock my (block) discomfort

bladerunner in the tropics

touch down in caracas. fade in. another metropolis.

behind humboldts’ precious round and lush mountains of the Avila national park, crawls a real Bladerunner city, a bladerunner of the tropics.
light is fragmented by the oil-slick glass buildings, and filtered by the tropical vegetation that spreads its roots throughout the city.
caracas is unforgiving. it has little interest in its history and not much expectation in its future.
it breathes in the present. its inhabitants are creatures of adaptation. their city is organic, and is forever unpredictable. people work today for a tomorrow that never dawns, while today is harsh, and fickle.
they build their houses in laberinthine patterns, on land they borrow from the city, with a loan that charges no interest. limitiation? limit’s don’t bow to square footage. limits are set by necessity or when the last brick has been used.

the third discovery of the new world, it is the city that every city will become.

caracas is everywhere.

it is invisible because it ignores and rubbishes ‘noble’ european urban models, and because somehow it lacks economic, political or cultural superiority in the field of western debate.
it discards and picks up as quickly as a magpie building its nest.
culture is volatile and flexible. the urban morphology sublimates and contaminates the inherent fragmentation, concealing a latent, somewhat torpid cultural order.

caracas presents a ludic model for a city. it is a model navigated by ‘informality’, an informality that results in a highly adaptive and metasic process of development.
it is a city that simultaneously accommodates within its boundaries guerrilla rule, national lotteries, pirate culture and free speech.
mutiny is a democratic process, and ‘the beautiful revolution’ is the name of its home policy.
'revolution' no longer suffices to describe this pattern of adaptation to tomorrow’s world.
it is a virile strain of constantly mutating cells that assume the vacillating climate of their sanctuary. a roost, whose status quo is impossible to define as either half-built or half-destroyed.

a city that is defined by the present, that bows to spontaneity, and finally where no-code is the only code.

la revolución bonita

caracas is a modernist dream, in the tragic state of accelerated post-modern decay, blessed with a socialist leader with a programme. how much that programme may be realistic or exectutable is obviously to be questioned, but there is certainly a fever infecting its veins that rams the city with its viruses and antibodies.
this is chavez's revolución bonita.
it's deadly, ...yet there is some small chance hiding behind communist masks and corrupt oil barrels that this just could be a fantasy awaiting its turn to become reality.
so....'equis'..... unquestionable..... a poisonous beautiful revolution.

passion-fruit whiskey

¿ sabes cuánto paga un inglés por un kilo de parchita ?

lo mismo que pagas tú por un whiskey en la barra.

why is that we will pay up to £3 for a fruit smoothie in some numb organic ikea-clad cafe in london, when we all have blenders at home where we could make divine juices for next to nothing?
remember to remove the plastic before you pulp the fruit......i think we pay more per kilo packaging than it costs to import the fruit.

note: whiskey is not a good mixer for passion-fruit. especially not if its single malt.
the venezuelans drink more whiskey than any other nation in the world...... what is wrong with us?
we should defend the statistics.....
and they know that its just common courtesy to sell 500ml freshly made fruit batidos in every corner store for 20p.

fresh orange juice for breakfast (no ice), blackberry smoothie lunchtime, 'tres-en-uno' carrot/orange/beetroot pick-me-up in the afternoon, and your body will forgive you several whiskey on the rocks in the evening.
surely the vitamins far outway the scottish sin in a glass....

as ive always said....they know about good-living.....

m4 dreaming

driving through neasden the other day, on my way onto the M4 returning to heathrow after barely enough days to feel ‘home’, I realised that despite previous enthusiasm for the perverse fantasy of sexy urban programme in the most drab and grey uneventful zones of London, it could indeed just perhaps be a fantasy. or at any rate, it requires delving around in far-fetched ideas about the ordinary. having got used to the tragedy and decay of a metropolis engaged in its own urban civil war in caracas, i am going to have to relearn the beauty and the subtlety of the mediocre. I have always treasured it as a quite specific english quality. it is something I yearn for, again quite perversely, whilst living in the tropics….and on return feels just a little absurd. an excuse for the fact that we don’t live with real sun to burn our urban chaos. or indeed that our chaos is rather ordered.
the fact that I was on my way to pick up a friend similarly trapped in the ccs-ldn time-warp, about to crash into all the same turbulences of living in these two cities, made neasden a little prettier.

london as it is

having been back here for over a week, i am starting to learn the significance of the moral of the story of the nonethewiser goat and the fields and the brook running through.....'the grass is always greener on the other side'.
the grass is always greener, and nostalgia paints a rosier picture than that of a somewhat familiar reality.
the small differences or the changes in the quotidian routine are those that continue to nag at ones learned patterns of behaviour.
the coffee here sucks and will never convert a sloth into a cat let alone awake the inner jaguar, and jumping red lights will land you a prosecution rather than save you from armed hooded highjackers.
the code for such minor behavioural instincts can be relearnt however. but it is somewhat more difficult to begin to unlearn cultural traits that you have adapted towards and burned into your rapidly setting identity.

however i will forgive everything, because i have walked over waterloo bridge and along the length of the southbank in the breaking sunlight of a january morning holding hands with people who know how to make me smile, and that finally makes it all ok.

la loquita

la loquita
Originally uploaded by sophieyetton.

mi gatita loca esta en caracas y me imagino cometiendo todo tipo de locura ..... como es una princesa y sin que este yo para malcriarla estoy esperando la llamada desde miraflores para avisarme que llegó alla tocando la puerta....se cree real esta niña.....