almost everything is unexpected.

Two kinds of joy.

One kind of joy is the arrival or emergence of a new, hopeful life force. Romance, say. A story on page one. In a book I read again recently*: ‘what’s the point in being young if you’re not loved?’

It was half two, Friday night-Saturday morning, just past the time when a departure – coat, shoes, gloves, gathered in a sequence of moves, just a little too hesitantly from their places of earlier, casual abandonment – would have otherwise signalled to him (an introverted novitiate of romance, or so he wished to acknowledge) either a reluctance to move too fast or – No, no don’t. – a midnight flood approaching its ebb, a sotto voce change of heart. She was an unknown. His guesses at what he hoped she might be were rapid and exhilarating, like fireworks in a cloudless night sky — dizzying psychedelic visions — so much so that he could not resist wondering if the trajectory of this night might redirect the course of his entire life. She took a sip from a wine glass on the nearby kitchen table. The song playing in the background reached a noisy, guitar crescendo. She knelt down alongside him then shifted herself across his recumbent, cruciform body, tentative but deliberate, as he lay staring at the living room ceiling. Now he found himself gazing directly into her eyes, her dark hair curtaining the two of them so completely that it felt to him as if the rest of the world no longer mattered. Not. At. All. He smelled the cigarette smoke and remnant perfume in her hair. Oh yes, this was a beginning alright. Terrifying. But electric.

Another kind of joy is liberation from the heaviness of the life you had, or that surrounds you — a kind of spiritual levitation (or separation)— either for a moment, in your imagination, or for good, or forever.
Pan Am Flight 102 from Heathrow to New York was making its southward turn across Greenland toward the Saint Lawrence, then on past New England toward JFK. Below him, inching away as he stared down through the porthole, was an expanse of ice that would be featureless, seemingly without end, were it not for the scattered dots of sharp, diamond-blue pools that his gaze scanned for intently, keening for a way to relate this empty, devastatingly beautiful canvas seen from thirty-seven thousand feet with the cluttered grey city world he had left behind only a few hours before, but that now seemed gone and far away in a past life. This was limbo, still – an eight-hour interlude of nothingness, nowhereness in which he was suspended. The skin of the aircraft was his skin. The body of the plane was his spiritual body – floating far above the worlds both that he had left and towards which he was moving. Despite the adventure that he knew lay ahead there was still something, he felt — long-forgotten, deeply-buried still but energised with rising, irrepressible … what to call it: joy, love? — that wanted this — THIS — to last forever.

* Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes

When I had the Sportster I’d drive it, aimlessly, foot hard on the accelerator, top down, dusk just over the late summer horizon, across the desolate cypress swamplands to nowhere in particular , listening to Houses of the Holy. She wasn’t there sitting beside me. Moments of peak happiness, still – intense and pure because I found myself alone – what-should-have–been-but-just-wasn’t, now or ever perhaps- a momentous realisation, inchoate, as-yet unacknowledged failure, not yet fully out in the lived world. Driving away jubilant, devastated.

October 2021

To rail is to bore
To harangue is to wish domination
To rage is to set all afire
To boast is to expose a void
To preach is to wish choice
obliterated
To plead is to dignify mercy
To stay quiet is to harness despair
To listen is to suppress
instinct. Finally.

My sister died.

I don’t have time to say it all now. She was my older, only sibling. I’d had no contact with her in many years. She lived a very different life to mine. And now she is dead. I’ll find a quiet few hours – perhaps a Sunday afternoon – to better reflect on it. But it’s important to declare how I think I feel about it. Yes, how I think I feel about her death. Because it seems to me that there are really two kinds of response to news of a death in the family. First, there is the nervous, involuntary response: waves of nausea that roll up from the solar plexus leaving your body wrung out like a rag and your mind released from inhibition in a delirium of grief. And then there is the deliberative response (triggered by asking: what do I feel? how should I feel?), that is called up by nature and orthodoxy, and hangs around until it is either satisfied or fades away from neglect. If the first doesn’t happen, then surely the latter must, because the alternative is to feel nothing at all. So how do I feel about her death, and what should I feel? These I must try to answer for, having also lost – as a teenager – a father from whom I was also estranged, the more difficult question of what ‘family’ means to me begs at least an attempt at an answer.

Achieving the Impossible

How difficult, impossible even, it would be to record even one day’s worth of sensations, sights, experiences, recollections and all the other mental ephemera that make up even a single day in life/consciousness. For even if one could note each mental impression – the scent of jasmine, the taste of seawater, the gait of your parent, a pierced earlobe – one could never really convey in words the fullness of meaning (to you) within each, between each, and collectively. The quality of experience is to be found only in recollection and yet that recollection is imperfect. We recreate – both with intent and by instinct – and in that recreation introduce all the flaws of our personality and habits of mind. Our experiences are not really our own until we make them so, and we must report on them to ourselves just as a reporter on the scene takes notes and later compiles a report, embellishes, draws out, artfully, necessarily, a merchantable narrative, to sort and make sense of the congelation of memories of sensory impressions. But is that ‘real’? No, of course not. To create ourselves we must convert the random and the quotidian into a continuum – a personal mythology (or meaning, on a small s spiritual level) and it is this product of conversion that encapsulates what it is to be human, to be me, you, us: the imprint of consciousness.

Transition (Working Title)

Thoughts of evaporation never cease, 
Seeping in, like cold up through the floor,  
While making a sandwich or cleaning teeth.
Drawn into an incandescent fog, or 
Pausing on a lake, as the ice cracks,  

Boomeranged to echoing spaces,
Seeking warm resonance in the walls, 
Or rich stories, in orphaned objects; 

Programmed errors repeating,
For all the dawn song, and  
A green haze on the willow. 

Sleep is a comfort, still, after winter,  
To escape ghosts coming up through the floor, 
The narrowing of life—the failure...to cope.
All these things a burden to lay down at last,  
And fall into the arms of distant galaxies.

Song: Hole in the Middle

There’s a hole in the middle where I should be,
I’m held against the sides, spinning in a vortex, 
It’s where I should be, swimmin' 'gainst the tide, 
Spinning in a vortex, wondering 
Is that me  Is that me?

Come and save me, will you please?
For I’m sure it’s not real; it cannot be.
Is that me? Is that me?

There’s a whorl inside, and I cannot see me,
I’m flung against the sides, sky is flexed,
I’m feeling kinda sick, inundated vexed,
Slow butterfly wings, inverted, 
Is that me? Is that me?

Can you save me, will you please?
For I’m sure it’s not the way that it should be.
Is that me? Is that me?

Man, I’m sure this wasn’t what it was supposed to be,
I’m sure this is not the way it’s supposed to be.
The sky’s about to break apart, the rain,
The square rain is falling, and I’m sure it’s not meant to be.

There’s a hole in the middle where I should be,
I’m pushed off the edge, and constantly perplexed, 
It’s not where I should be, flattened out by time, 
Spinning in a vortex, wondering 
Is that me  Is that me?

Throb

Life is -- a throb, a pulse, a vein.
No more, no more could be, 
A gilt detritus of eternity,
You must work or fall to grace, 
By virtue of slight circumstance.  
Life is borrowed gold, a speck of dust, 
Spent before it's valued--
The bane of grief’s inheritors.

Fishing

Torsioned silvered tails 
Thronged with thoughts, emerging from 
The periphery, from blinking to dreaming, 
Whipped, now here, now there, sideward
Over coffee and emails, intersecting,
In sun-glinted depths, prismed, 
Lit like glass, smashed in slow motion, 
A thousand urgent purposes ungrasped.
I am the foolish fisher, lost on the ocean; 
The sun sets and here sit I, still, vast 
Ambitions mercurial, dreamt tales unsung, 
Flash past me and disappear.

Crude Spoof on Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis.

Pour forth your tweets, lift up woeful voices;
Let the forums echo with sorrowful cries.
Grossly falls an island nation once gracious,
More than which no other was Greater
Not in the whole western world for moderation.
Shaggy He, in the fallacious race was victor
Over the smallest; he now rebellious
moderates smears, fleeces with his lying
Missiles those who, averse to cack-handed
Government, and urging the honest
Headlong, would expose his bloated lies, while
Gove-cocks peck away at weak integrity, and 
Feeble anti-kakistocrats turn their backs.
Conqueror he of straw-man ghouls beyond the
Shores of Albion's sacred sea:
Even the burgundy-passported complainers
Forces he to bend their necks to the fetters
That Farage forged, and Parliament itself
To tremble before blood-boiled music-hall dominion.