White Streets - a ten minute Friday Sketch

In the 40 Watt light of all the most promising words written this century or last, I found the voice that described a mind we can never know. Sitting at a bleached table in seaside sunlight, came words like prayers, and I was so happy at this window on sadness. There is no fire like this one, no light so bright as this one, no voice so loud and true as this one. In the white streets of London, walks the noble manic, downbeat like winter, retreating into some unknown world, some hell, an atrium to paradise. The boldness of your approach to death is breath taking, a common-sense approach, taken in spite of yourself and how we can never be like you. I would love the world more, having been through this. Take your bright letters and turn them sideways to the sun; see the darkness, a polarising quarter-turn, and all is shaded. Can you see how it all means so much more now? A poem listed crossways, to save paper, making the paper hot - this life will self-destruct in seven years. It is nothing outside the head that does the damage; the damage is done years before. There is no time passing. A life rolls out across America in seconds, birth, loss of loved-ones, suicide, marriage, children, suicide - in one picture, a cubist painting of a whole life in a monotych. In poetry we are born and in poetry we die. We go on and we are balanced. Repeat and repeat until smooth and happy.