tape used as device

imagine an audio cassette tape.

recorded upon the tape are confessions you never made, but should have done. after this are promises you made just to break. next comes a list of all the people you trusted and then hated. finally, the tape finishes with that secret, the one that you told to that single individual on that night beneath wretched stars and under a blanket of humidity and pollen.

you decide this tape is a bad idea. its presence, or rather your knowledge of its presence, starting to affect your health, you cannot sleep. you see your friends with decreasing frequency and enthusiasm, you spend too much money on too little. in a bid for lover’s empathy, you are closing doors. your relationships can be divided in two. your happiness depends on company.

you decide to destroy the tape. it is a matter of fidelity.

you should burn it but cannot, looking at fire hurts your eyes.

instead you unravel the tape from its spindle and great reams of shiny black tape pool around your feet as you frantically reach for every last inch of the offending material, purging the plastic case, cracking it in your endeavours to reduce and nullify.

you take scissors, and begin to cut the loops of tape. it lies in layers of concentricity, the inside of a tree trunk, but gradually you are wearing it down, diminishing it. the tape cannot be played now, repairing its chronology is an impossibility. there are only the memories now, the remembrance of what has been said. the actions fade faster than the words.

and now you open the window and look down into the street where everyone is too busy to notice a man perched upon a broad white sill clutching at segmented fibres of a past life. you drop the sections of tape into the wind where they flutter before being hauled upwards and disseminated across the neighborhood.

a disposal of sorts, then.

there is no chance of retrieval, the tape has been altered and eliminated in a sense, but now, during walks around the suburb in the haze of an early spring afternoon with a weak pallid sun tenderly resting above the clouds, you begin to notice slivers of the tape in bushes, entwined in hedgerows and lining gutters. it becomes impossible to look anywhere without seeing a length of the tape, mute and stolen away by thermals. it begins to become caught in your shoelaces when you pause at street corners, and the tape even binds together your ankles when walking through long grass. the birds begin to build their nests from it.

yesterday i saw a ghost.

masterpiece for j

masterpiece is silence. masterpiece is distance. masterpiece is erratic music shuffle, filling melody quota whilst stealing songs from don’t-know-who and passing them off as my own turgid compositions. masterpiece is late night resin in dog-leg joint covering papery tear with grubby thumb, my hands are black from the cold. masterpiece is japanese film, hana-bi, firework, all stupid violence and serenity. masterpiece is david grubbs, max richter and loose fur. masterpiece is double-glazing with tempo change, a drop, opacity, gangs of thieves stealing cars left out with engines running. frosting the police call it.

masterpiece is maximo. masterpiece is vesuvius washing up rupture, just like jaw, fresh and raw, pile upon pile leave for someone else, caustic. masterpiece is 21 metronidazole tabs 200mg to be taken with water at regular intervals with food and complete the course. do not drink alcohol throughout the treatment.

masterpiece is i’ll treat you. masterpiece is soggy bonjela. masterpiece is matrespeice or metrapascie or mostierpooouce. masterpiece is you are holding fifty-five pounds worth of umbrella stand, you know, handle it with care or not at all–if you think you can take the pressure, then fine, but don’t say i didn’t, eh?, warn you. masterpiece is scholarly is academia is institution is regulation in modification is ramification is constriction is gleaming path full of translations and irrelevance. masterpiece is listening to tv whilst watching radio. masterpiece is mater’s piece. masterpiece is staring at sun and thinking that you own it, and only you. masterpiece is journalist for manila bulletin, top echelon of field of absorption and composition. masterpiece is getting up at 10:00 and not sitting to write till 12:17. masterpiece is all these dreams one every night, and no idea why, and the ability to replay, fulsome and cold while just waking. masterpiece is directions and map and background information but still feeling vomit at top of throat just before entering door. masterpiece is saying twenty instead of a thousand or a million. masterpiece is an overlapping of content and execution. masterpiece is hidden influence. masterpiece is a different balcony. masterpiece is eating fruit scrub for breakfast.

occupied post

i have been coloring my lies with particular care recently.
i have been fully aware of the lines, and kept within them,
moving the pen in only two directions,
neatly overlapped parallels at a degree.

this is how i got this job.

who we are

rumors are appearing like bruises! hide your thighs! we should get to know each other better if we are to continue.

to continue, recent discussions as to my consciousness have been greatly exaggerated. those unsubstantiated rumours that i am not alive are indeed unsubstantiated. i may have been residing in a grave of sorts but none, and none again, has mentioned dead to me. the next-of-kin know nothing of it, and they would be sure to tell me. they have a vested interest.

*

so. let us begin.

i am your barrier to learning.

focus upon the nightmare of receivership, i dare you. which of these applied sentences is/are real? i don’t believe in inverted commas, but i am willing to place faith in the forward stroke and the italicized.

focus upon relationship, the shaping of attachment. where does the bond need to be denied? grasp the link you feel with me, the leash of my words and feel its coarse intent with your palms. i am the midpoint, the coloured flag halfway down the tug-of-war rope, hungry for a marker, i am hungry for a marker. you turn away, always away.

focus upon age. the fireworks of time. do you long for a reproach, a shattering of juvenility, the rising of a voice above winds, the gulping of sound down into throat as challenge approaches? we think not, but we is invariably wrong.

focus upon aphorism? ridiculous. the hate you receive from me is fuel for love.

focus upon journeys. i feel that you wish to walk with me. a camera for the long trail, between parallels, across bridges, postcards of industry and commerce, a new city center. you decide upon me as guide, a taxi out of the town center, a cigarette-lit walk into it. you find the airport immediately with me by your side. the rest is committed to memory, condensed literary categorizations, filed away, ready to plagiarize.

focus upon focus. do you look for an emotional resonance? the drift of a knowledgeable hand? connection to the diary ethics of society’s hopelessly unaffected neutral? an unsuccessful dialogue, without doubt.

*

these are mainly questions. talk of role is redundant, like talk of the morning in the afternoon. we are remote from our creations. i refuse to die, but i shall not hear acknowledgement of my existence either. content deals in recognized forms, not actual content. process is the passage, is the reason and the antidote.

my, how dark it has become in here all of a sudden. we are bored.

all work and no play = dull words

talking with elastic syllables, she teaches pronunciation to economic migrants and organizes parties in that cold cove with its dunes and grasses, no sound escapes from the nights spent there. there is a dual boasting from her lips, she wishes to import a slander, reaches across the table, slides her drinks out of the way with a delicate fist, and offers a leafy, withering look, dull eyes. she returns the look, but as a question and continues talking to someone else, but is interrupted again, attention sought and gained, she turn and pushes hair from her eyes, impatient. he relishes an exchange. there is to be drama tonight. she enthuses, still talking to someone else, starts sentences before thinking about them, repetition of fundamental sadness, speaking as though under duress and growing slowly more disappointed as the conversation turns to the window and to the rain. she again states her happiness, a demonstrable empathic urge, i can listen, she wishes. he, officially, is now thinking about himself. there is a third party, someone not really present, and this third party has not risen to the challenge, a refusal of words, not party to the invisible game of obligation and memory, the frozen wastes of attachment that thawed too quickly and broke, fissures spearing through acquaintance, their end needed to be, but there is an assumed balance these days, the symbiosis that accompanies dead love, they are even able to sit in the same room and not speak, and someone threw themselves off the bridge yesterday, and that’s it.

idle chatter

- is there nothing left to say?
silence
- please?
silence
- i find talking helps. let’s open up a dialogue.
silence
- conversation breeds mutuality.
- what?
- nothing.

hush

without motion, i don’t know what i thought would happen. i hate this lack, this absolute zero of achievement. it was always going to be like this, scratching at my pockets and waiting for january to be august to be like last year and the next.

sitting once more upon the bed, i try to write. poetry writes itself here, time stalls. my pen has been dead for days after and before and during, always. this encroaching space of promised forgetting stays, a fulcrum of purpose among the crouching iron soldiers, kneeling in deference to the monument of another soldier with child defensively and tenderly held on the hip, like a mother’s hold. the angle of the soldier’s sword is held in deference; the stare is at no enemy but the past. the positive resides here, dulled by the wind, but it is still here as an affirmation of an old negative; the loss of war. we can but take our breath in the face of such unknowns, such is the power of exaggeration beneath the entrance to the memorial.

there is the motion; within that memory, within the visions of the slate junctures like broken bone. the everyday seeks its own landscape internally.

so the experiment of deprivation fades. even held up against the flickering light of that pale wall, a failed experiment is still an experiment, even all day by the window, just looking, the worth presides above and beyond the judgement. to not take this risk (which is to take none) places you as a symptom of yourself with illness approaching. this is a protest against ambition manifesting itself not through creation, but fulfillment of what i am supposed to be, my assimilation of affect.

and this affect echoes through the empty rooms of the house, a boundless exploration allowed by loneliness and potential, the choice of alone. and it is a choice heightened by the lure of perception, a choice always, a choice of the quiet times, my friend.

i talk of the quiet times, to myself.

jazz mess

drinking bottles of
wine under a pagoda
last night and now i

turn in shower
and seek window
outlet, raising head

towards ache,
away from ache
without escape

my head
is larger on
the inside than

on the outside
it looks tiny
from a distance

i think my eyes
might fall out.