"Solitude. Hailey's bare feet.And all her patience now assumes."

The nine day sword has already rusted
by the time my flesh riverbeds into openness.
This is how the sky feels,
I gasp,
(still running beneath it,)
torn wide and bloodless.
Polished to an echoing sheen
by ink tongues spit and bleed.
Somehow,
for once,
not a contradiction.

It’s probably fortunate,
he goes on. Rips out a tooth and lays it on the table.
Leaves it. Leaves me
studying its pearlescent whiteness.

That’s one way to look at it,
he says, and spitshines a mirror.
Holds it in front of his face.
Asks me to stare.
Eyes and eyes needle through me.

I’m at a loss
Silly, each time. without fail
Learning to unhand an invented palm.
Certainly I could find lines there.
I could even fool myself and say I read them.
See them.

The cracks. The truth is I read another truth.
All I have. What I say now.

I saw nothing. I saw stones.
I saw your eyes.

On fire. Blaze a breeze. | I'll devastate the world

"Reveille Rebel"

late hour

Something again in the smile I can't place.

                How it creeps in after years
    and the black bark unlit behind.

"The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult of memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light..."

"Riu's house stands out on the sky,
                with glitter of colour
As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus
               to gather his dews,
Before it another house which I do not know:
How shall we know all the friends
               whom we meet on strange roadways?"

Perhaps preceded only once by those lips sloping off into points and the blurred eyes downcast.

I've developed this habit lately (I say lately, but that only describes how long I've consciously been aware of it). In a daydream or a reverie I end up remembering some past encounter or incident or even, occasionally, something that didn't happen at all. They're always in the first-person. And if it's a pleasant memory I will suddenly emulate the smile I had on my face at the time, and if it's an unpleasant memory I might grimace. I think I wrote about this earlier, about metaphors that weren't metaphors.

I had a moment where it happened again. It was at the edge of morning, and I was leaving the apartments. There was something happy (re)playing at the back of my mind, and since it was too early to have things at the front of my mind, I smiled. I think there was laughing in the memory. I don't remember what it was now. There's a girl about my age who I see around the place, probably has a room here. She mostly lives as a peripheral blur. I've only ever seen her in passing, a half-familiar face. Today her hair was glistening from a rain shower that was already destroying the snow that had arrived the evening before. She was entering as I was exiting, and crossed into the path of my eyes before I could look away, or drop my smile, and I'd slipped into her gaze, and so she mistook my echo of a grin as directed at her - as directed at all, I suppose.

And her eyes brightened and she gave me the first genuine smile I've received for god knows how long. As if she recognised me. Or as if she didn't need to recognise me. As if she knew exactly what my face meant, and knew also how often it meant nothing at all, as if she took all that and let it fall between her fingers anyway. As if she were some accident of positioning, the hunched hollow of some rock face, shrouded by trees, on a mountain opposite someone's call already ended. And then she turned against the door and was inside, and I'd ended up by the gates.

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.