Uploaded September 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Here's another spoken-word piece from my latest book. Set to music by Paul Asher again and with some old footage of India. The book (The Best Looking Kid in the Asylum) is available from an Amazon near you.
instagram.com/shanebordoli
https://shanebordoli.wixsite.com/shan...
VELOCITY PRESERVES
(warning: may contain literary references)
The night wind is rustling through the deodars,
though to be honest I don’t know
what the fuck a deodar looks like.
Poetic license coming from the Ruskin Bond I’m reading,
that most avuncular of writers
on the simplicity and beauty of life.
These pines then, below where Salome dances,
and the holy men write by the light of the moon.
Or maybe they’re fir trees
or Christmas trees
as they call them here in India
with that wistful sentimentality
that lies at the heart of the country.
Lonely as a child, often solitary by choice
until middle age, is how Ruskin once described his life.
Me, too—it gives one a chance to shine sometimes,
like sheet lightning across the vast desperate sky.
My childhood was spent reading a medical dictionary;
there never was much reading material at my house.
J. P. Donleavy being my father’s only nod
to literary prowess.
Convincing myself that I had all sorts of diseases.
A muffled and muted cry for help perhaps,
seeing as don’t ever remember telling anyone
of my mysterious malaises.
Later I found a copy of Harold Robins’
trashy The Carpetbaggers. Which fell open
on the rude bits forever after.
The secretly stashed jazz mags
were the last discovery of dad’s home library.
There was, of course, C. S. Lewis read all too briefly
to me by my largely absentee mum.
Aslan being a favourite as
we were both unapologetic Leos.
Till I discovered he was a fucking Christian
and that put me right off.
She did leave a copy of The Lord of the Rings in the house,
in one volume! The first book for adults I ever read.
And as adults, we became thick as thieves till she passed.
Give it a few years, and I was On the Road
to finding out who I was,
using the time that college provides
to make the welcome discoveries that girls liked me
and that I liked drugs. I grew my hair,
submerged myself into alternative culture
and read the Beats.
Thin as a rake and acting like one too.
Whilst Beat totem Jack Kerouac may have lost his mojo
and died an alky living with his mum,
Allen Gins-berg, that master of poetic joy
lived on and lives on in my heart still, as does William Burroughs.
That spry old junkie lived till he was eighty-three.
I, too, took a dip in form myself to become an alky
for a decade or two, living with my dad on and off.
But it, in the end, it was him that drank himself to death,
not me.
The only other writer who really cuts for me
is the eternal Charles Bukowski, that beast
who sucks out the marrow with his poetic maw.
Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Bukowski.
My holy trinity that sat together as a little shrine
by my bedside; my Garden of Earthly Delights,
a triptych in text. I’d be remiss not to mention
the warm and cuddly Kurt Vonnegut
and the most prescient of all authors,
Philip K Dick, both of whom have been with me
for decades now, too.
All dead now, so it goes,
but the Beat goes on, like a river . . .
I must break off to say the thunder is rolling across the night
like a horny bear.
The giant expanse of the foothills
of the Himalayas is now being quenched far below.
A confluence of happy tears run down the balcony wall.
The chants of Tibetan monks rising in the valley
like steam from wet clothing. The trees smell like incense.
Something is burning. It must be my heart.
But back to my childhood, where I would stare for hours
at the weird dust conglomerations that gathered
around the nodules inside the never-cleaned gas fire
which began to take on nightmarish proportions for me.
No brothers or sisters, an absent mother
and a father working long and alternating shift patterns.
Who says only children have too much time on their hands?!
Only my mum could calm my fears,
and maybe I created
these monsters in my mind for that reason.
Except as she was hardly ever there, and like Victor Frankenstein
I was pursued across the icy wastelands of the heart
by a monster of my own making
for most of my adult life.
Perhaps I still am, just a little.
If I’m my own worst enemy,
at least I’ve got a worthy adversary.
To round o where we started
some wisdom I found through
Ruskin Bond that came to him via Malcolm Muggeridge:
“The last true Englishmen are to be found in India”.
I, for one, am here,
typing out my life in nonconformity.
Shane Bordoli
Here's another spoken-word piece from my latest book. Set to music by Paul Asher again and with some old footage of India. The book (The Best Looking Kid in the Asylum) is available from an Amazon near you.
instagram.com/shanebordoli
https://shanebordoli.wixsite.com/shan...
VELOCITY PRESERVES
(warning: may contain literary references)
The night wind is rustling through the deodars,
though to be honest I don’t know
what the fuck a deodar looks like.
Poetic license coming from the Ruskin Bond I’m reading,
that most avuncular of writers
on the simplicity and beauty of life.
These pines then, below where Salome dances,
and the holy men write by the light of the moon.
Or maybe they’re fir trees
or Christmas trees
as they call them here in India
with that wistful sentimentality
that lies at the heart of the country.
Lonely as a child, often solitary by choice
until middle age, is how Ruskin once described his life.
Me, too—it gives one a chance to shine sometimes,
like sheet lightning across the vast desperate sky.
My childhood was spent reading a medical dictionary;
there never was much reading material at my house.
J. P. Donleavy being my father’s only nod
to literary prowess.
Convincing myself that I had all sorts of diseases.
A muffled and muted cry for help perhaps,
seeing as don’t ever remember telling anyone
of my mysterious malaises.
Later I found a copy of Harold Robins’
trashy The Carpetbaggers. Which fell open
on the rude bits forever after.
The secretly stashed jazz mags
were the last discovery of dad’s home library.
There was, of course, C. S. Lewis read all too briefly
to me by my largely absentee mum.
Aslan being a favourite as
we were both unapologetic Leos.
Till I discovered he was a fucking Christian
and that put me right off.
She did leave a copy of The Lord of the Rings in the house,
in one volume! The first book for adults I ever read.
And as adults, we became thick as thieves till she passed.
Give it a few years, and I was On the Road
to finding out who I was,
using the time that college provides
to make the welcome discoveries that girls liked me
and that I liked drugs. I grew my hair,
submerged myself into alternative culture
and read the Beats.
Thin as a rake and acting like one too.
Whilst Beat totem Jack Kerouac may have lost his mojo
and died an alky living with his mum,
Allen Gins-berg, that master of poetic joy
lived on and lives on in my heart still, as does William Burroughs.
That spry old junkie lived till he was eighty-three.
I, too, took a dip in form myself to become an alky
for a decade or two, living with my dad on and off.
But it, in the end, it was him that drank himself to death,
not me.
The only other writer who really cuts for me
is the eternal Charles Bukowski, that beast
who sucks out the marrow with his poetic maw.
Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Bukowski.
My holy trinity that sat together as a little shrine
by my bedside; my Garden of Earthly Delights,
a triptych in text. I’d be remiss not to mention
the warm and cuddly Kurt Vonnegut
and the most prescient of all authors,
Philip K Dick, both of whom have been with me
for decades now, too.
All dead now, so it goes,
but the Beat goes on, like a river . . .
I must break off to say the thunder is rolling across the night
like a horny bear.
The giant expanse of the foothills
of the Himalayas is now being quenched far below.
A confluence of happy tears run down the balcony wall.
The chants of Tibetan monks rising in the valley
like steam from wet clothing. The trees smell like incense.
Something is burning. It must be my heart.
But back to my childhood, where I would stare for hours
at the weird dust conglomerations that gathered
around the nodules inside the never-cleaned gas fire
which began to take on nightmarish proportions for me.
No brothers or sisters, an absent mother
and a father working long and alternating shift patterns.
Who says only children have too much time on their hands?!
Only my mum could calm my fears,
and maybe I created
these monsters in my mind for that reason.
Except as she was hardly ever there, and like Victor Frankenstein
I was pursued across the icy wastelands of the heart
by a monster of my own making
for most of my adult life.
Perhaps I still am, just a little.
If I’m my own worst enemy,
at least I’ve got a worthy adversary.
To round o where we started
some wisdom I found through
Ruskin Bond that came to him via Malcolm Muggeridge:
“The last true Englishmen are to be found in India”.
I, for one, am here,
typing out my life in nonconformity.
Shane Bordoli
