"Blaise, Dis, sommes-nous bien loit de Montmartre?"

“Yes, every matchstick has a history.”

]I was never here[

[speaking as the fortunate
     as if elision were
adequate.

The leaves fell
                         out
of my book,
one by one by all at on[c]e,

Once,
I tried [to recollect [
ambitions tending to dreams
of never needing
to dream again]

but still the pages
yellowed into

]] [][] ] ] [ ]] [an ecstacy[]]]  never[brittle][ [[[

It's about receptivity, I suppose. I don't need to say how different what I see is to what you see, what you see to what I see. Often we're trying to expand and expand and expand that perception, but there is also something to be said for contraction, for the sight that is not-seeing something, since the act of seeing will always be the act of not-seeing something else. Equally, not-seeing what another sees always was a seeing of something else, perhaps something less, but at least something unique. You see?

"Communication is more than just words, communication is architecture; because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that Will - that desire to communicate - would not look the way your house looks today."

Aldeburgh

In the loft I would wake
to the sound of gulls.
Funny, how they only
ever squawked when
they were by the sea.

False Poltergeist

Something happened over the past few days. Earlier last week, I went to the shower and it froze me. I played the whole self-deceit act of hanging the arm under the stream, waiting for it to heat, though it never did. The next day it still froze me, though I could make it through without masking hisses beneath the sound of the cascade. By degrees, stadially, it worked up a kind of warmth, not as my arm hung, but over a course of days, until frigid went to cold to tepid to something like warm.

Helen Mort said that poems start with a "haunting": "I’m visited by an idea that won’t go away and I often carry it around for months. The shapes of poems seem to bother me. And like the glimpses you describe, they always stay somewhere just out of reach. The best poem is always the one you’re nearly-but-not-quite writing."

I suppose this is relevant because whenever I stood at the edge of the shower, pretending it would resolve into heat, I would keep getting ideas for poems, in the way you do with ideas when you have no means of keeping them. The first few times I was too slow, and they threaded out of existence. I had no pen in the bathroom, no paper, and the thought would have left me by the time I retrieved any. So instead I had the idea of writing in the deliquescence of vapour that formed on the mirror while the shower steamed up (by this point it was verging on warm). But the problem was, over the course of the shower, I completely forgot about it. Left the room scrubbing my head with a towel, not glimpsing the lines I'd fingerpainted on the glass.

But of course the marks stayed, stains, coming into sight again only when the shower misted the room up. You can imagine that it was a start, seeing them again, as though for the first time, as though they had written themselves, as though a ghost had left them (for me? for them? for anyone?), formed out of air and water into a strange space of un-air and un-water, un-lines nothing like ink that the mist clung around. And the fact is I still don't remember having drawn those notes, that's just the assumption I formed, spending soaked minutes ennunciated by drips, staring past my reflection into those lines I (must have) left there. Because even if I think I recall that writing, I can't sever it from my imagining that recollection. Like a broken shower waking you up - except these only put you to sleep - false memories are a pain, and yet such a constitutive pain.

Lips sloping off into points
and murmuring abrupt things -
how the clouds agitated her,
how she lost her fingertips.
And even with all the jaggedness
she kept, hugged tight to her chest,
she still couldn't bear to lift her eyes.

The tree's calling again. Again. I
heard it once, that night
I sat on the grass
when the rest of the park
was black, watching it
not move. It almost seemed
to tug- or clog my throat
with leaves, like a gutter.

For a moment I thought I
saw myself there,
beneath it; that I had left
myself behind.

A coda. An after-image.
Splitting off
in blades of green.

Fall

A rather unhealthy habit of not having the motivation to eat. Though eating in itself is nothing special here. I don't have the motivation for a lot of things. Not so much the food as the effort of rising, out of my bed, out of my room, out of the building, down the streets.

Today I was in a line at the checkout. My fridge has already been empty for days, I hadn't eaten in even longer, so ironically - though not at all surprisingly - this was where it happened. No one was moving. There were labels on everything. My eyelid started fluttering again. I jammed a thumb against it and swerved off to the (smaller line at the) self-checkout machines. For once, I made it through to the very end, almost had paid, before the screen spat out an error message. 'Unexpected item'. All the rest.

By this point I was almost paralysed. Rigid. Though not unmoving - I swayed almost. My eyelid started fluttering again - or maybe I just noticed it once more. Every time it happened there was a little pocket of my vision that dipped in and out of existence, warping into a sort of blurred brightness, where things moved from place in the way a jigsaw piece is plucked out. The machine kept calling out for an attendant. No one was coming to help. I stood there for 15 seconds or what might have amounted to something closer to twenty million hours, watching myself watching my vision shimmer, the bright eventually replacing itself with dark, a rippling curving nothing like volutes crawling over my eyes, almost like ink, even, though struck through with red and maybe even yellow.

My legs gave in then and I crumpled. I wasn't unconscious, or if I was, not for very long. People finally crowding around. Though not exactly helping. I think the machine was still calling for assistance by the time I got up, but at that point I just swept the rest of the food into my bag and left. No one stopped me.

Not so much a person built
                                                to last.
                   Years and years of patchwork
and stitches;
                   overwrought repairs always giving in to time, tremors
and exhaustion.

Someone dims the lights and she comes to life,
holds aloft her Spanish dolls.

Something in the dangling,
the suspense.
I find myself impaled by strings.

"My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. "Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat softly."

Snowing. Of course, I can't find yesteryear. Can't even find this year.

Hours spent trying to suffocate something even less, and when I give up I fall asleep. I ask myself what use there is for a frozen hour. I don't know how things thaw.

It is a horizon I tend towards.

She said she wanted to be
more, she said
more than the least,
which was the less
of what she was

the half of her that wasn’t that was
not to be to be overwhelming
to her, a bowl overfull with water
and petals,
falling out

I would have told you it was dusk but the sun set long ago, so long ago now that I find it strange, how still I’m only ever diminishing

"Nigh and more nigh the awful echoes drew,
Tremendous to a mortal tympanum."

Another dream. And I forget it again. Concrete walls and paths and a phone call. A quiet parting.

It's not so surprising that I have trouble sleeping when I think of how thin the walls are here (which is not a good thing to think of, because like the ring of tinnitus, the beat of your heart, the draw of your breaths, as soon as you fix your mind on it you can think of nothing else). I can hear whole epochs of private lives played out. People clearing their throats. Pacing from one wall to another for whatever purpose. Running taps. Creaking beds. Lone voices, phone calls - or at the very least conversations with themselves. Once your mind is fixed on it, it becomes like a wave, a whole collection of waves, sweeping up and down the building and over you, submerging us all in personal histories never repeated.

I can't stand it. I had this friend once who was in a stage play that toured the country, and often she would perform outdoors. When she looked into the sitting crowd she saw something similar. It even made her forget who she was, who she was playing. A vast shimmer of fluttering movements which her mind coalesced into some kind of pattern, some continuous ripple, until she realised it was just the accumulation of a crowd scratching their own itches, brushing aside their hair, shifting to get comfortable. But it still bothered her and I from what I last heard, I don't think she acts on the stage any more.

In my old house I could do something similar while I lay in bed. I would close my eyes and the familiarity of all my years would let my senses spread out into the walls and floorboards and carpeting and foundations, and I'd recognise every footstep, know the meaning of every creak, the thudding plunge of my brother down the stairs, the clumsy quiet of my father creeping in at night, and sometimes now I forget where I am and when I wake up to the sound of someone moving down the hallway outside, I think for a moment that I am back there, until the footsteps come nearer, then pass, diminish, and I remember. But every sound makes up the elements of something like an identity, imagined or not, and our sense spread out until everything becomes part of us, or part of a kind of Sight that if you're lucky will devour it all before it intoxicates you.

No, that’s all wrong too.

It is All Right. I mean it.

The providence of something,
a voice, maybe a whisper,
even a song,
that will promise some day to cover
these nauseous contours.

Forgive me please for all of this. The yellow light. I have asked much already, but this much I also ask.

It’s all twisted. But that implies it was ever not so. Maybe once. Before my time.

Somehow, I find myself far into a conversation with someone talking to himself.

Do you understand?

When I was younger, and I still lived in my family house, I had these little plasticy stickers that were the shape of stars. I saw them in a shop, actually, a poundstore chain that's now gone bankrupt. I actually saved up for them - not that they were expensive, but I rarely got money. They were glow-in-the-dark and I pushed them all up against the ceiling of my bedroom. And because I had a bunk bed I could reach up and touch the constellations I'd invented.

My sleep cycle's whirred out of control. I have a habit of waking up at four, or later (and habit is the right word - "habēre, to have" - although in this case, habits tend to have us more than we ever possess them.) The simplest thing would just be to go to bed earlier. Decide to sleep earlier. End the cycle.

But I can't force myself to my bed. There's just a strange hollowness as though I'm waiting for something, and I can't sleep until I get it, but I never get it. Sleeping right now seems so premature. The effort of it, of reaching nothing at all, is so much somehow.

I tried it before, once, but it didn't work then, and by now it might already be too late.

“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l'ai pas fait exprès.”

“Uuere beþ þey biforen vs weren,
Houndes ladden and hauekes beren
And hadden feld and wode?
Þe riche leuedies in hoere bour,
Þat wereden gold in hoere tressour
Wiþ hoere briȝtte rode...”

“Were is þat lawing and that song,

Þat trayling and that proude ȝong,

Þo hauekes and þo houndes?

     Al þat ioye is went away,

Þat wele is comen to weylaway,

To manie harde stoundes.”

“and making practised smiles,
As in a looking-glass”