Five Days, Six Poems, Random Friday

Listening to - Celtic Wedding - The Chieftains

Thinking of - going to see Kathryn Tickell next Friday.

What does a drone make you think of? Those long, low sounds become you in the darkness, the sound of blood in veins and arteries. See that pipe up there? That is one new sound, like a pipeline to heaven, the buzz of reeds and bones; the resonance of teeth in face of that wonderful sound. I am in the middle of money and it did not quite gel until John Self sat down with Martin Amis himself. I thought they were going to fight but there is no way I can like John like I like Will. Was Will a friend at the time. I was still at college then and this literary highlife was just the glow of dawn on the horizon, the beating of Gareth's whoops and yells, his theology, the intelligence I was looking for. He showed me Godel, Escher, Bach and I was hooked. Writing can be just like music. Read it on painkillers and see the world as pure number, the flute as a harmonic curve, dragged out from olod oscilloscopes. We had half the army's dronign green in that room, a mess of technology we though was the end of technology, the future in out dusty office. I used to steal the sugar and play with the mercury. We had a blank remit to write poetry or report on nothing. Life caught up with us and we forgot those viewers but I think we had found something new, the eye is tired and rests, switches to its brother just to get away from the horror that we force it to watch. We switch red to green and in any given minute see half-and-half but it is the frequency that changes. Some may change just once or twice in the minute while others switch every second. I got the feeling that some of them were playing games with us. Making a living. That's all we want of life.

Waiting for wintering. I wish I could finish this book but it has dragged me in and it is not the book to read at all times. Some books make you carry them round; annoy you when you are away from them and misuse colons, semicolons. Punctuation is sooooo important but so difficult. Where does this apostrophe go? Between Joy and Division. Those black-coated harpies are stealing the love from all those poor decrepit boys lined up in the snow, stamping to keep warm. Who made them stand on that bridge by that inner city, decaying in the face of so little interest? Love Will Tear Us Apart. Brilliant! And then the traffic started, released like fire and water at the dams of Manchester, until the snow faded into mud and the ruins were washed away in a mess of syllepsis and antonym. And the summer they executed those poor boys I thought I had diphtheria, maybe just for the lunchtime but diphtheria it was. We dissected various animals and they all made me think I was ill, those red-raw internal organs seeming still to pulse. How to play your own internal organs, that pipe is one way how, to make the body resonate, that sound with its random little black sparks, that kill a blood cell with a dance and spike and spark and power. This place is wholly magnetic; I have to spin to keep myself happy that the world is still in place, turn every knob until it lies as I would wish it to be. I am the boy who spun. Space is my place. I am a citizen of the universe and all this talk of killing aliens is so insulting to me and my kind. We would not be like you. I could be just a shade of blue, a gathering of gas between the stars, a particular flow of water which chaos gives an air, a mind or something much stranger, a flute note or the fur on a small peach, the very one Thomas Stearns dared to eat or not. Hi there J Alfred. How the devil are you? You got what I got? So much money for your fluted voice. There was that recording of Robert Lowell, the one with the Drowned sailor, and everyone laughed at you. Or maybe you prefer the wife of bath. I present to ungulates the deep resonance of this long-dead, punctuated language. This means so much to me; do not do me wrong by not completing these sentences. They reply with indifference and oceanography takes me back. Of course they prefer Chaucer; it takes them that long to learn the lingo here and after all they have so much digestion to do instead of thinking or learning. I, in allth innosentcia hath repealed thy storine with thine eyne and mine hath covered up your beauty with a mess of hope and death. You think so old and yet look so young. The music must be right and cold and the sky just right for me to love you like that wife, the tale of knights and love. The Raaby child is just a child, the walking dead of memory but in my mind so tall and black and perfect, the sink of all my fantasy and might and poetry. The meadows beckoned in the dreary light of England, Middle English was the words I spoke and how this rhythm broke my will.

The water is deep, as deep as any pacific trench and I want this to be one long line of poetry. Some words do not fit or seem to fit hexameter. The prose novel is not an option for the true poet. The White Stuff? Must see that laureate. Thought was robbed of that young man. I am still a young poet. There is time and we will endure the imposter until the empty winds take him away as hob-nobber of the other one who never was. The police view all music as riot here today. I see the green hair, the schoolboy rebellion in those deeply intellectual gatherings, the jazz and drink of every dark night out from there to clubs and dancing. They played great stuff that night, Bauhaus and Talking Heads. David was suitably manic that night and killed a duck for tea until it went off in his cupboard and gamely escaped, rising from the avian dead to be the saviour of the farm ponds and brooks. Bright and shining ducks and drakes in the moonlight. Any other over six is such a bonus. Thank you Simon for the lessons. Perfection in your high tower. That drive home will bore me always. I never get home refreshed.