scab porridge.

 MONDAY 21 st MAY.

In retrospect, I am so lucky, I still have my bicycle. They tried very hard to break the lock and although they took the pannier bags they didnt take the wheels.
Today is going to be a glorious day. I have not stopped saying thank you to the Divine for saving my bicycle for me.
The sun is a bit shy, it was out and 0830 when i was push/pulling my bicycle along the sand, but its cloudy now and I m cold. I slept well by the side of a dune near the boardwalk, it was windy at first but thanks to super warm sleeping bag, I didnt feel the loss of the survival bag. And the inner tube and the sugar, the soap and the vingear the fork and the spoon, the black pepper and the garlic, and everything else that was in the panniers.
There is a fish market down the street at Espinho, flocks of gulls nearby attracted by the buzz. I d love a photo of the old fisherwoman in her pink skirt or the young one in her orange jacket.
I m now on my second coffee for the morning, I have muscovado sugar now which tastes great with the less-than-impressive instant coffee. Maybe today I go to the casino. Toijt meister, if I had known, if you had told me. A photo in the paper. I m not keen. I didnt like being famous. It didnt stop me from feeling like a nobody. There is a photo of me as I rub cream into my skin in the light from the balcony that will maybe become a painting one day.
I feel bad for not going to meet Iris for a coffee, instead we went to Figueira and gambled and got drunk. But the barbequed fish was superb.
John Stalk meets the Warrior girl.
The die he gives me then takes back, its interesting he carries it in his pocket for years, the shrine, the orchids, his dead father in a vase upstairs in his old studio, a pokey little room that smells of oil paint, still, always.
I try to tell the long version of why my parents are not pensioners, its important, the details, but he keeps interrupting me and after each interruption does not ask me to continue. I figure he asks questions and doesnt care about the answers. 
The clouds were fast flwoing over the ripples of the sky last night, but today they are sluggish, I went to sleep in wind but woke at 0215 when it was calm as quiet, to the alarmcall of a mosquito bite on my cheek. Maybe my bicycle is safe because of the offering I made to Manannann – but only he would know.
Senhor da Pedra. Neon green crosses, out on the rocks past the beach, Granja, Aguda, Gaia.
The  torchlights of the shellhunters coming towards me, reaching Espinho slowly then an intuition, turn back now this place is not safe, so turning tail and cycling through the seawind along the boardwalk, holding my hat on with one hand and the handlebars with the other, maddash – 

In Espinho biblioteca I find: W B Yeats ‘Uma Antologia’ – bilingual edition

Cuchulainn, battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed
(from ‘A Rosa na Cruz do Tempo’)

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
Nao me ouves chamar, branco veado sem cornos?

O may the moon and sunlight seem
One inextricable beam,
for if I triumph I must make men mad.

….. had but broken knees for hire
And horrible splendour of desire
(from ‘A Torre)

I had wild Jack for a lover
Though like a road 
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All Things remain in God.
(from ‘Jane, A Louca, Acerca de Deus’) 

and this.

I did the dragons will until you came
Because I had fancied love a casual
improvisation, or a settled game
that followed if I let the kercheif fall:
These deeds were best that gave the minute wings
And heavenly music if they gave it wit;
And then you stood amongst the dragon rings,
I mocked, being crazy, but you mastered it
And broke the chain and set my ankles free,
Saint George or else a Pagan Perseus;
And now we stare astonished at the sea,
And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us.
(from ‘O seu Triunfo’) 

This was a moment, for me, sitting in the library like a bag lady feeling very obvious, and dirty from the beach, thinking what Yeats must have thought, about the maiden – was it Psyche? – saved from the monster by Cupid, I still havent grown up from that 12 year old who wanted to be rescued from her life, damsel in distress.

Photographs: seen through old lace, or dripping with a dark substance, or ribbons of film, a face, with 4 hands or more grasping, the bends, the back of the legs.

Apple beach. A cromlech is a cromleque is a cromlech
naive art, circles making spirals.
the apocalypse do Lorvao.
The Ecce Homo in the MNAA, Lisboa, the white cloak over his filthy body, pricked with thorns, the rope around his neck loosely round his wrists, a tear of blood, a navy blue that is never the same place twice –

The hidden costs. 
The city is built from rubbish, he says, ah, but if only it were, recycled, instead of such filthy concrete beton, each cobblestone could be an aluminium can tinkling as we dance over them, bridges built from chunks of uprooted tarmac (once motorways, now joining the gaps in society that they created)

But I lost a thread, somewhere in the labyrinth, a silver one, on the Silver Route to Santiago
(I am in Salamanca, handsome, on the road to Santiago called the Silver Route, it made me think of you. I have a book to send you, I wanted to give it to you for your birthday but it didnt happen, it will have to wait until my journey is over. I hope you are well. Truly, madly, deeply.)
See, i can write to Lee but every time I try to write to Red I just get upset.
Best to leave that one alone.

A tattoo on my arm of silver?
An octopus on my back.
A bicycle on my bum: put the fun 
between your elgs
A sheel-na-gig over my burial mound:
Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

Sophia says; know thyself.