the balding, red man in the fleece knows not his significance,
ignorant heavy-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose
as he stoops to shovel paper adverts through my letter-box
nothing means nothing to him, nothing just is him
but he is not him to me, the brass clattering of his actions
is a synchronicity, a timing and a disturbance
and as i race to the window, we both feel a moment
of juncture and separation because our eyes meet
and we have been caught.

i leave the seat, just after midnight, to the kitchen to stop the boiler’s burn; a statement of economics, the sustained period of growth still vibrating in tune to the faulty refridgerator, the nation’s energy leaking away with my incompetence, a lack of training.

strangely, in the clutches of victoriana and smoldering coals, the new grate throwing heat into the center of the room, the tone shifted. a slide toward antagonizing, upon reception of a distended joke, nobody was laughing. the argument had rounded on itself, inquisitive blurs of movement and cigarette smoke, as though a theatrical backdrop.

the crowd talked in slurred fonts, spilling things in type. casual talk, always the dawn of an argument, began with tellings of leisurely infatuations. removal of person was crucial, allow for specifics but distance one’s self from the inflammation of direction. the direction of inflammation, perhaps.

playful admonishment followed, taking gunshot turns at those who dreamed of over-exercised teenagers in crisp white institutional dresses.

a perversion is a dirty secret. a perversion is an acceptable fantasy. only if they remain.

the numbers held firm and culpable, more had joined us, we were eight and full of silent influence. the promises held a recognition, pointers to what we had read earlier. wordy resolutions blossomed, an easy escape, sourcing fact and judgment, the organic referrals to something we all knew, and then god entered the room from the mouth up.

sitting with my back against the radiator and the curtains drawn, there is monotony about the noise coming from the street. holding a book with a beautiful pale green cover, i am gone.

i am holding colonial secrets, reminding me of the time i flew over santa monica with no windshield and a faulty regulator, but this book is all about the police and the corruption, and the hot lazy weather that conceals the movement of the hours. the lions upon the verandas keep you alert, and if you close your eyes for a moment there is only scrubland, as far as you can bear to see, squinting against the midday’s ferocity, while jeeps kick up great mountains of dust just above the desert bed.

and in the middle of this, the giant rock of the town, there is an imperfection, a puncture wound that dips beneath the surface. under the overhang of a grey plant-covered rock, that has points that jut like a blacksmith’s anvil but as tall as a three-storey house is the depths of a plunge pool. entirely shaded and unfeasibly cool, we would swim there in the late afternoon having slept at our typewriters, the flies clouding the horizon, shirts hanging slack in the still air.

all of which is quite ridiculous in this particular wretched dry heat. it remains though, a product of thermostat and so i rise to take liquids and open a window, the air is scratching at my throat. there is a conundrum here; a night of fresh air, or an early morning awakening, up with the non-rush hour.

i turn the pages and resume, returning to a real heat.

i take lengthy strokes in the pool, hauling myself forward in great sweeping glides, kicking out with strong legs, occasionally sinking just beneath the surface and holding my breath.

i love the shallows.

a beginning, amongst twelves and ones
paracetamol hunger after noon,
i have got myself enraged,
forced to pay for bread with coppers
and sit in my sulking room
where, in a moment’s time,
i shall upset a mug of tea
into the table’s grain
at which point i shall question
the sort of day
it will turn out to be.

and it was this lack of training that sparked the fire of discontent that night. i allow myself narrative, and fall back a few nights towards the old week.

you stepped out from behind the dog-leg bar, shelves of obscured bottles of beer, hungry faces muted in drink. the jukebox drew on soft tones, clouds of smoke circling, rotating in shifts near ducts, ordered cyclones near unreachable beams.

we struck out at an inadequacy with dirty, fallow words, the five of us; two pairs and a one. we spoke of the struggle as if it were a struggle, and factories fought with ponies in a vilification of imagined oppressors and none of it mattered very much, but we felt it, dwelling.

class definition, class defiance, class dismissed.

there was age behind those eyes, slow canopies of thought; what price the growing between twenty and thirty and forty? they all end in stories, these lives. that is all that is known; debts and stories, and nobody likes a debt.

(end on a question.)

reflection of car in window.

you claim things that are not true, and i grow bored, wearing channels into the bedroom carpet. i have rearranged everything again, turned furniture upon angles, just in case anyone thought to map upon entering the room. i am confounder.

in distance, person crosses road.

pillar to post, the heady rise of expectation, this neutrality of commitance. we build upon fallacies you and i, developers of beautiful lies. no one knows your name. if only you knew, if only they knew.

automatic doors slide open without sensing movement.

you are taken as an abstract, a quaint unknown but i know you too well. we were perfect.

red sided truck, incomprehensible foot-high letters.

i shall distract them with bouts of illness, and stories of foreign beds, i shall even try extinction and marriage as smokescreens. they are rendered laughable by the wednesday afternoon, a fully bright grey. this city, the accidental capital.

two parallel seagulls in flight.

explanations, requests for spreadsheets, the noise of an invoice; all of this is settled. the job is a waiting. the friends are occupied. the pen is laid, half crooked, propped against the yellowing novel, the novel that i had promised great things to.

there really is nothing else moving.

last night’s table, tomorrow’s intoxicant, this writing is like dead water and the closest you and i come to talking is an apology.

only now, upon this time while eating toast, do i realize. the whine of a northern hemisphere voice, gently enveloped in the afternoon drizzle, and i am performing these functions for the first time.

weeks of phone-call wake-ups, the sustained evenings denying the roll into morning, squinting to avoid the light. and the not eating, too, placating the nervous hunger with meals stolen from an officemate’s table. i haven’t bought a newspaper for a month.

earlier, i thought a microwave oven was a man, a man was a sideboard and a joke was an insult. so i made someone go and stand outside in the rain without a jacket and locked the door until i could think again.

so only now, as i rise at seven in the morning, do i realize that i’m sleeping again.

not at this exact instant obviously.