Sad Demolitions

I want to write about important things. I want to write poems that are carefully-crafted, lyrical destructions of the people I disagree with: the petty and the ignorant. I want to be right every time in what I say. But who is there to decide when I am right and when I am wrong? I want to listen to music that means something. But music is entertainment and entertainment is supposed to make us feel better. In these difficult times, stuff that means something reminds us of the reality of the world while all the airy-fairy pop that fills the radio these days has no meaning. Gloria might have been the last properly meaningful pop song and that was thirty years ago. Some of this personal malaise might well be chemical - though I'm not going to go into what that means; it is simply a marker to remind myself of what is happening at the moment. I'm going to turn to all those people in my head, all the thoughts of those I make up who try to understand the world by looking at it from a different angle to my own. I want to READ important things rather than the lists of facts and figures that fill up my head at the moment. Sometimes I'm wild, a throwback to something that has flowed through the junk DNA that survives from our common ancestors. I am a scientist who cries for tenderness in the face of the bleak emptiness of what science tells us is the truth.

The world looks sharper today. But as well as this, it seems further away - almost like looking at it over a video link. Anything beyond the window seems just to be part of a panorama - something like a David Hockney Painting of trees. We are just a cast tonight, lined up on some bridge to nowhere, a little arch across an ornamental lake. And I cannot work out whether the ambiance is dark and warm or light and cool as fits my empty feeling. It is high summer in my head, a network of flowers spread across the room to fill the air with heady sweetness. There are memories and dreams bouncing over me, taking me back to days when the image was everything and the future did not exist as anything more than a stark entry in a diary to tell my parents when to take me back to school. There are pipes in the distance, skirls in the hills, someone following page one of the instruction manual.

I am outside the station now, on the edge of sobbing, trying to hold myself together, to close the cracks that let out the darkness into the world for all the speeding commuters to see. In a city of thousands even a full breakdown passes unnoticed - what is one more person on the station steps with their head in their hands? I could certainly not spare the time to comfort them to tell them that we are all human and we all cry at being forced to live together so closely. The city is just buildings. It is not a community. We have simple minds; we want love, we want recognition and we want stability. Now here is a local madman, jabbing his fingers into my face, not to berate me in any particular way but simply to get across his idea of the workings of the world to anyone who will listen. He has scarlet trousers and wild hair. His angers fuels the spit that fills the air between us but he does not hate me. Even if he had a knife in that jabbing hand, I would not be afraid. He is the safest person in this place. I drift off; the street, the station, the tall buildings that frame us all disappear into some clear-aired wood. Maybe where Winston met Julia with their fear of hidden microphones and I cannot begin to care. They could fill the air with mind sensors and I would not worry.

I will distill a poem out of this. I will turn it into a scratchy, lost draft of all I want to say. I have had this idea for years - a rough list of notes - partly verse and partly simple recordings of everything that sits in here (points to head and closes eyes at the pain it brings). All that thought, the salts and electrons jumping the gaps in the brain, are drawn out, taken from the head like magic and dumped into inert paper. It is like keeping nuclear waste safe by casting it into glass when it stays solid and immovable for a billion years, monitored underground by humans and what follows humans until it can be turned into tasteful paper weights for our intellectual descendants. Maybe I am their common ancestor. Maybe the whole of post-2000 evolution starts with me and my children. I have no solutions.