1:41 a.m. 1. I'm listening to Nick Drake, the only person whom I've ever heard of ever dying from an overdose of antidepressants. Bryter Layter: melancholy folk songs from a damp and heavy country beneath a white sky blank of stars and limitation, in a city where the change of seasons is marked by the brightness of the smoke that hangs everywhere. These are songs for people who wear Inuit sweaters and spend days in the bath, leaving the house without seeming to notice they're no longer in their pyjamas in bed, there where you are sitting in your apartment window wondering, surrounded by the equipment of the cats recently despatched on furtive reconaissances, and I am walking in waltz-times through the city streets (for here nobody drives automobiles, though strangely the sound of faraway traffic never diminishes, sounding like the roar of the sea) and if I looked up to your window or if you looked down to the street, we would have seen one another, and recognised with a kind of start that we know one another, a recognition that invades and thrills our spines like a lightning cleaves the heartrings of trees, we would have instantly and effortlessly fallen in love. If I had only looked up, if only you had looked down. This is the music of missed opportunities, it is suffused with a mantle of regret so thick and warm that it makes me want to sleep. These are the songs that your lover will never sing to you, because his songs would be kinetic, clever, nimble, sly, everything about him would be fidgety and darting and piercing, because being in love with you must be like be being reborn every moment into a world made progressively more perfected, it must be like discovering a new shade of blue. Falling in love with you would be unending, musical, lyrical: and your lover would not sing these songs. These are the songs I would sing to you, embarrassing in their longing, unfashionably twee in the shabby costume of my heart upon my shabby sleeve. Or rather, these are the songs I tell myself I would sing to you, although you know (you know because I pretend you will now: you do not know) and I know that we will never be together and quiet enough again to accomplish that slow, sad music of almost-love. Does it matter? It doesn't mater, because Nick Drake's already written and sang them, these songs of matter-of-fact impoverishment and ashen lovelorning: so it doesn't matter that we do not meet, it doesn't matter we do not fall in love, because the heartbreak and the irremediable sundering are already here.

2. I wish I had the lunatic conviction of my poetry. If I were the poet who wrote my poems, then I would be brave and mad enough to claim you, to make an epic undertaking to win your heart and circulatory system, inhabit and overpower your ever cell and fiber to the extent that the thought of you inhabits and electrocutes the skin beneath my skin: that man who wrote my poems, those poems of such tiger-bright ferocity and appetite, so ravenous and delirious with you in its driftwood-making of sense and rationality, the asylum poet who wrote my poems of you could forsake reality's thuds and convictions and seduce your quicksilver heart, if poems were jewels and desire bright diadems he could thread coronets through your brown sad hair. If all that ever was needed was the intention and the wish, if all that was ever needed was the castaway of everydaily sense in order to hold you dreaming through the long night, my poems' poet would qualify tenhundredfold with the ferocity of their want: that boy would bewilder all your guardian angels, a Gilgamesh of gibberish, and steal you from their gardens. Or: if it were me: if it were me, I would abandon these wilful obscurities and shadow evasions of art and poetry, I would move from nonsense to the sense of you, move from the confusion of scattered words to the delicate galaxy of your earlobe, I would move from all the languages of unfulfilment and longing and take shelter against your cheek. The length of your neck, the warmth of your face against my cheek: if only I was the desparate imaginer of my poems, hungry for you beyond reason and self-preservation, if only I was that brainless madman, and not the meek ghost of a ghost-writer that I am.

the Funny Show

agriculture poem

my life in the ghost of Bush

time-lapsed (part 1)

unreconciled

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Images are taken without permission from the fine and trusting folks at Folk Arts of Poland; please purchase something from them. Background music stolen without permission from Epitonic, Basta Music, and just about everywhere else my unscrupulous hands could grab something. No rights reserved.

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