130

Eros once more, limb melting, stirring me,
bitter-sweet bitter creeping in, insinuating presence

Pens

Another dream. As redolent with that plethora of too-facile imagery as the last. My doctor prescribes me a new medication. Sleeping pills, of all things (I woke from this dream at around 7PM). I took the parcel home from the pharmacy and opened it up. Inside, I saw a row of neatly packed, white, plasticy capsules. On closer inspection, I saw that they were pens, it was a box of six pens. Fancy ones too, not your run-of-the-mill biro but with metal clickers fixed on the top, and some inscriptions I didn't really pay attention to.

And I understood then that I was meant to write on my arms, that once the ink sank into my flesh I would get the sleep I (apparently) needed. No list of side effects. There weren't even any instructions. I just knew what to do.

Perspective seems to have gone awry. Or rather, it has flattened. I walk towards the park and find my eyes resting on the outline of the bare trees against the bare sky, and as I'm moving nothing changes. Nothing changes. The trees are stationary and my feet are moving and the floor is surely passing beneath me but I'm static. It's like a treadmill. I move and move but nothing looks any different. Everything is far off, never coming closer, I'm tending towards a horizon and it always eludes. If the earth were flat I would have plunged from its edge by now. Still, it all seems that way. Two dimensions, at most. I think now of a poem I wrote weeks ago, without really ever understanding.

Attica

When I finally returned years later
everything seemed foreshortened
somehow, or flattened. Even the ceiling
beams seemed thinner. Lying
on the floorboards in the loft,
the dust streaming through the air
over golden rays of light -
it had never moved since.

So many people I keep thinking I recognise. Manchester's not exactly small so why do I keep running into the same people again and again and again? Except I'm not even sure they're the same people. They just seem to have the same faces. I can't walk to a lecture without spotting them, and they all stare at me. When we pass. When we glimpse. And those are only the ones I've caught eyes with. Staring at me - to make matters worse they're all beautiful. Man or woman or anyone it doesn't matter, just looking at me? If I peered out now from the window I am sure I would see someone seeing me. Is this meant to be guilt? Or brain damage? Or both. Sometimes they smile and are gone before I've registered it, before I can smile back, if I even wanted to, whether or not I was supposed to know them, or not-know them. I might even hear my name being shouted out from somewhere in a crowd in Market Street but what do I know? I thought the sound of a leaf skittering on the floor behind me was a cyclist. Most things just turn out to be the wind. Something in the air.

I swear I can hear the mountains inhaling, the Pennines catching me at the throat and stealing my breath. That's just another trick of the mind, the oldest kind, a metaphor. What a difference it does make. Knowing that.

mort de rire

"What I see is a house, or the idea of a house, enormous and unknowable in its full extent, a house in which rooms only partly reveal themselves, in which mirrors are to be walked into, pictures disappeared into, in which chairs and beds are big enough to swallow you entirely. I can never see any part of this house, not one room, not one corridor clearly, only as a patchwork of dark and light (chiefly dark) containing isolated angles of objects or furniture. [...] and it has a music too, comprised of creaks, whispers and snuffles; rain on glass, branches on windows, someone singing in a kitchen, someone listening to a radio in a distant room, a music always elsewhere. [...] Some rooms are so filled with hatred you can smell it across a stairway. I couldn't begin to number the attics and cellars; the pantries, privies and vaults; the kitchens far below. There is no outside to this house."

Dreamwork

(I dwell too long on the difference between receding and diminishing.
Perhaps it goes this way:
First you recede. Then you diminish.)

I had this dream that I swallowed a pen whole. Then I spat it out again. Three nights ago I dreamt that I was being put into my coffin (alive). Why do my dreams always vomit up clichés? I've always had an aversion to dream analysis. The things it produces seem so tidy. A cheap neatness. I don't trust the way they fit into place.

"This phonetics - am I alone in perceiving it? am I hearing voices within the voice? but isn't the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite one?"

As I’m shaving, I think of something we said and I smile in unintentional imitation of the grin I had then. In doing so, the razor cuts across my lip.

Because this actually in-the-flesh happened I can’t call it a metaphor, but I know how easily it could be. Perhaps in earlier times they named such things omens, though not prophecies but auguries of the past.

The shower is broken again; it will only go to freezing cold or burning hot. This, I realise from experience, is a feature of many showers, but considering how in the past I found a temperature in between, I can safely call the thing defective.

I choose cold. It is bearable; unlike the daggers of the other extreme, in the cold I suffer pain but do not hurt. Or I hurt but am not in pain. It is hard to call things what they are.

"Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again.

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.

My mind has now attained the unformed Nibbâna
And reached the end of every sort of craving."

                                  “wreaths of smoke”
      “in silence”

          “dwellers in the houseless woods,”

                        “alone.”
                                  “Though absent long,”





“Felt in the blood”

"A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels."

[mo[n]ths][

Somehow I had forgotten about April

"I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe ... we no sooner get into the second chamber ... than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere ... this Chamber of Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open - but all dark - all leading to dark passages. We are in a mist."

"cassandra: The stench of slaughter. The whole house reeks of blood.
chorus leader: How so? That's just the smell of sacrifice at the hearth.
cassandra: It's like the exhalation from a tomb."

Fall VI (Door)

Off a coat hook

(the weight being too much)

it just snapped.

"Sometimes
I'm terrified of my heart
of its constant hunger
for whatever it is it wants
the way it stops
(and starts)"

Fall V (The Tree)

I don't actually imagine the fall
would be so terrible,
cut short the way it is
by those sheets I spent months
convolving.


Hardly a breath
between the drop and the

Stop.

Perhaps the bridges here are less significant than the types of falling.

Bridge IV (Styal Woods)

I don't know how old that sleeping thing of stone and moss is.
A few years ago they blocked it off
with a low fence you could climb over
(and I did).

In the forest there's always dead leaves
flooding the earth, still, settling into years;
though mostly they slip off
the bridge. It has no rails. Nothing from the edge
to their fall. And on the other side
there isn't even a path.
It just gives way to earth,
a hill, leaves. Again.

Bridge III (Golden Gate)

Apparently my subconscious
had a thing for clichés. I dreamt

it was the calm of a face
too familiar to recognise
that lured me down
off that precipice.

Bridge II (Parc des Buttes-Chaumont)

From where I stood
it didn't look like much
of a fall, especially with the green
of that light the river cast back
to the stones.

Still, they strung wires
beneath the ledge.

A strange net for fishing.
Though, in retrospect,
it was with some difficulty
that I pulled myself away
to walk around the grotto,

studied the pool,
the artificial waterfall.

"Under the iron bridge we kissed"

The sky was iron too when you showed me that bridge Morrissey mentioned. "I hope you don't take this as a 'signal'..." you said, before you told me about The Smiths song, explained the history of that place. It was difficult. And yet such an ugly place, concrete twisted through with rattling chain links. They couldn't stop the wind.

It was the next day and everyone else had left when I was vomiting eleven times (I counted) in the toilet of your apartment. You were there in bed, facing the wall as I came and went, came and went. I'd fall back beside you for thirty seconds, before I had to climb up again. You said you were impressed by how close I was cutting it. I always just reached the bathroom before I vomited.

The next morning we had orange juice (not all had been mixed into the vodka) and croissants. Even jam. The sky was more or less clear by then, though it was still cold.

These nights I'm sat on my carpet by the light switch, hitting it whenever the next wave of nausea comes, so I can stare at the book shelves and imagine the world isn't spinning quite so much. So tired that I have to learn to sleep by increments in those small intervals. The ones when I've just switched the light back off, where I've managed to forget that there's walls all about me.

Verity Taylor

Your histrionics bow out.
I'm sorry, Verity;
you weren't soon enough,
not as late as
you should have been.

People played at imitating you.
The screams were hardly a substitute.
Even the doctors dismissed the fits -
done to death
psychosomatic
overacted
(shamelessly).


You are not found.

"I conceal myself in the shadows of a cistern or in the corner of a corridor and pretend that I am being searched for. There are rooftops from which I let myself fall until I bloody myself. At any time I can shut my eyes and pretend that I am asleep, breathing deeply. (Sometimes I really do sleep, sometimes the colour of the day has changed by the time I open my eyes)."

"I have also meditated on the house. Each part of the house repeats many times, any particular place is another place. There is not one cistern, courtyard, drinking fountain, manger; there are fourteen (infinite) mangers, drinking fountains, courtyards, cisterns. The house is the size of the world; better said, it is the world. Nevertheless, by dint of exhausting all the dusty galleries of grey stone and the courtyards with their cisterns, I have reached the street and I have seen the temple of Axes and the sea. This I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen (infinite) seas and temples. Everything exists many times over."

The tree croaks again its promise song.
what else is there to hear?
I hear it all. all I can.
sound over nothing. at all. by all. swallows all. all gone.

“GUIL: (Rapidly.) Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word—“wife” —or “house”—because when you write it down you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before.... ?
ROS: I remember—
GUIL: Yes?
ROS: I remember when there were no questions.
GUIL: There were always questions.”

The mirage is nothing,
    it is still and flat.
         Only when figures pass,
cut over sight lines
   is there anything to see.
A flicker, sweeping across their feet,
             and in a blink I can see
                     around corners, looking at sky
    that should have dried up
days ago.

And when they go,
the sky goes too;
         horizons slack and lose
their curvings, lines diminish
into sand,
like that cheap plastic
        hourglass
which you unscrewed
 at the base,
          left an awful mess
on the windowsill.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?