barely present
wooden beams prop up balcony alcoves —
the shifting pre-war brickwork of a private estate
a buddha plonked full lotus among stunted laurels
and the plane tree with its trunk as thick
as an inner city faux-by-faux hatchback
two girls perch on a terrace yard’s front wall
recounting the previous night’s hijinx via speakerphone
how they had to leave early before it proper kicked off
because they were getting looked up and down
what a relief to find myself here a middle aged dad in a plain baseball cap indeterminate hairline and fruit of the loom paunch barely present within every scene I drift through
Feedback
Note for an old poem about foxes and rain – “there is something missing from this poem : YOU” not realising that the poem was an attempt at writing myself out of everything
JUST YOU WAIT TIL I GET YOU HOME
I once saw the lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys sat across from me on the District Line. Me and the kids were heading back from lunch with my wife at a Garfunkels. West End Girls played in the background and I uttered some asinine observation about how their shows used elaborate staging because the duo themselves were so inert.
And here he was in front of me, an hour later, slumped in his seat without any dancers or lasers to distract from his obvious knowledge that I was trying to take a sneaky picture as my free hand fumbled to keep my toddler from destroying the communal furniture.
I have no idea how that might have all looked from his vantage point. How the internal film of one’s life might manifest when that life is already a kind of film. My poems have never serenaded diners at Garfunkels or the Harvester, for that matter. The only direction my life was headed was from the West End to the East End in a strictly literal sense.
I liked the song when it came out, when I was ten years old. We played it a lot one winter when we drove to Ireland via the ferry from Fishguard. I’d never been to East London in all those years. As a place it still can leave me feeling adrift and uneasy. As for Ireland, I became unmoored after my Granny passed. The mental island that represents it within my thoughts still bobs up every now and then, a pastoral refrain within my city slicker neuroses.
I wonder what nostalgia drifts through the singer’s head as he sits in an eastward charging carriage? Nostalgia for a time when fame felt new or for a time before fame happened? How rude of me to take his picture without asking. I’m not really a fan myself and wouldn’t have normally scrambled for the shot. But I spoke about him an hour before in Garfunkels and there he was right here in front of me. A spark of recognition. A sudden spotlight. Like magic.
VOIDTRAIN
the hills of sydenham and the jittery willow between us & the block of flats shaped like a ship
conspire to make it feel like this little flat i view it from is just a floating box
like that game demo i played where the world had been shattered into pieces bar a train track that wound through groundlessness
& my avatar flung out a grapple hook to reel in debris for crafting and other little-god things
when you live above the ground does that make the floor beneath your toes a kind of ground?
the smallness of this box no longer sinks my spirit for the world beyond it seems so ungraspable
and yearning for a bigger floating box is just another form of grasping
ars poetica
after ws graham
I
you see it
and want others
to see it too
and so you send it over
trusting that the words
will be able to carry it
but they never do
and now the reader
scrutinises your assemblage
for hidden things
that resemble their own hidden things
and you have already forgotten
whatever prompted you
to make it
in the first place
this humdrum day [1]
with its unwieldy hours [2]
shot through [3]
with brilliant fragments [4]
-
this humdrum day…
My day (1.1) is no more interesting than anyone else’s. I called it “this boring day” in an earlier draft but I am rarely bored. It’s more that when someone at the school gates asks how my day has been I scan over my recent history and find nothing worth reporting. I often default to commentary on the weather instead.
There is nothing terrible about my day either. The room that I work from looks over the backyards of houses owned by wealthier people than me. Further out, some blocks of flats in Sydenham pop above a long, green blush of Dulwich foliage.
A writer often has two paths to accomplishment: to live an uncommon life that others might wish to read about or to imagine worlds that fulfil the same need. Even Ryokan, that silly Zen sage who spent his days in a mountainside hut, whose poems I keep returning to for their lack of angst or neurosis, lived a remarkable life by today’s standards. Remarkable by measure of the standards he lived by, staring at the moon for so long that he forgot he lad left the hut to procure saki, rather than the circumstances he lived through.
I have lived through interesting times, and done many rare things, but the days I pass through now have sustained a certain deadening tempo, and in that bourgeois torpor, I have found happiness. Try telling a parent at the gates about your unbidden happiness, or minting poems from it. I double dare ya.
1.1.
There is a natural feel for that temporal unit that we call a day. This natural awareness tapers from how we must vanish at either end of it. The dreamless hours where the body continues but the self dies. It is then born again within the spark of a dream or the first jolts of wakefulness.
1.1.2.
I wonder how a day feels to a prisoner in a windowless room with one dangling lightbulb that is always on? There must be a point where consciousness fizzles out for a few hours before waking to the next onslaught of sameness? Would this be enough to make a day?
1.1.3
But when someone enquires after your day, they are not probing you for your nuanced takes on intermittent selfhood. They want to know how your most recent hours have steered the grand narrative of your life on earth. While it might seem that a good answer would be something like, I finally finished that symphony/grant proposal/calculus/assassination contract —- it is actually the opposite —- I got some housework done/I saw the doctor about my hip/I cleared out the loft/I napped. These are the best answers. Answers that say you eeked out another chunk of time because you have no grand sense of purpose to gratify. A mutual reassurance of common defeat.
-
…with its unwieldy hours…
For me there is nothing objectively real about the measure of time that we refer to as an hour. At least, nothing about how the body measures its own temporality within nature. It’s an entirely abstract measure that we slice the day into. When we are aware of an hour, when our minds are stuck in clock time rather than in the body’s temporal cycle, it always drags. An hour is either nonexistent or it is unwieldy, lumpen, a drag. If time is a hex then hours are the runes of its incantation.
-
… shot through…
Only the senses can blast through the abstractions that fill our days with convoluted urgency.
3.1 The growl that may or may not be thunder followed by a sudden downpour and that smell that only comes from dry ground and heavy rain. A sharp, twisting pain within one’s guts a few hours after slurping down shellfish in that quaint, backstreet trattoria. The growling, analogue buzz that shoots from the cortex to every branching nerve when an unwelcome memory pops up and pisses on everything.
-
…with brilliant fragments
This is where I argue with myself for a bit. For each moment feels whole unto itself and yet it doesn’t quite all fit together. If there is cohesion it’s because the narrator found a way to schmoosh it all together. But when that old bore quietens down again, the moments continue in their subsequent dissonance. Even then, to call them fragments assumes that they were once whole and could conceivably be reassembled. It’s hard to find a better word. Moment seemed better but I don’t want to put it down in a line. It’s too abstract and boring and has been bludgeoned to death by advertising. All I can say is that each is ungraspable. They are brilliant because they blaze to immediate fruition and when ensuing thoughts make sense of it the next brilliant fragment has already blazed into being. You can’t keep up with it because all you are is a steady state of aftermath.
4.1
I wake from sleep in the middle of a thought that began without me
A first taste of black coffee purged by minty fluoride
A carbon dark snail shell marooned on blaring white pebbledash
The starling’s head I mistook for a flower
An abandoned toy car trilling a chirpy dirge for the life of a cheap battery
Knowing that the next thought will always be wrong
I sent the kids to school without jumpers before cold crept in
The lowkey thrill of a misguided purchase
Betwixt the hum of distant traffic and the fridge’s buzzing innards
Pneumatic clatter two streets down erodes into a growl then a hum
Billionaire’s gift —- another opportunity to spin thoughts and moods with an idle flick of my thumb
Cascading willow branches — deepening laughter lines
Thumping bass from upstairs — she must be dating again
Pavement blobs take wing to fleetly glint —- flying ant day
the lad with the tightly pulled hood and face mask pedals hard as the man he just stole a phone from gives up the chase and lets the clammy summer deep into his lungs
My wife watches a square video in a WhatsApp thread of a house burning down in the philipinnes
I lay down in the dark and look for the one within that looks to find a nothingness that suddenly swallows everything
🌳