Sneaker Putsch

A poem of absences is being developed at this time. It describes the world in terms of what is missing from a number of particular situations - the houses imagined when empty, the largest part of the planet that exists continuously without any of us to look at it or to justify its existence. The trees do continue to be while we don't see them or hear the sky-seen of the branches in the wind. In here somewhere is a poem for an anthropologist, a clever collection of ideas and talents that exceeds anything we could imagine in ourselves. This is of course, a practice piece, a piece of descriptive writing which has no purpose other than to allow the testing of words and sentence construction. It is like that bathroom, the battered afterthought added to some dank hotel room, the paint on the pipes peeling and flaking into a layer of dessicated rubbish across the bare boards of the floor. The light is bright, from low on the horizon and sneaks in under mostly-closed blinds, shadowing the objects on the windowsill up against the far wall. And sometimes this light is sad, a reminder of late afternoon in winter on a Sunday night, the day before school and boredom. And sometimes it is happy, the same time on a holiday, when the light of similar quality dances across the walls, bringing news of the universe to us from all those millions of mile away. There is music in the distance, a far radio playing something inane and untaxing, something unplaceable but triggering all the right memories. I cannot tell if the window is open but I think it must be for loose fabrics in this room seem to lift in tiny ways showing that the space is crossed with tiny currents of air. Outside, the trees show us that the day is still and yet something, maybe the pressure of air heated through glass has the air moving. How do I turn all this into a poem? Some poems I read, even some of mine, seem just to be prose like this, split arbitrarily and turned to verse. In these words are code for revolution, the trigger phrases for sleepers and deep cover operatives. At this command, they will turn away from their unremarkable lives and rise up like an army of estate agents to describe the world. This is mass observation for the modern age, a collection of diaries and literature to define this country and all others. We are the state. We are the state. We are the state.