In search of rhymes. The solitary abode
Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,
Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.
Lighting his cigarettes each from the last
Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend
The dead man in his house just up the road,
That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains
At the idea of it; cannot begin
To analyse nor even quite define
How jarringly abrupt that end-stopped line.
Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within
The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain
But finds instead its own signature tread
And sensibility. Den’s narrative
Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity,
A consequence of inability
To put forced stanzas by and only live
His language, though it goes unread
And unrewarded. No more self-deceit.
He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop,
Pay off his debt and wait for the day when
He’s had a life to write about. Just then
A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop
At the round-shouldered curbside up the street.
A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist
Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race,
The younger of the two and yet more frail
With bandages in lieu of bridal veil
Surmounting her exquisite, battered face
And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist
To emphasise the matrimonial air.
Their car left at the corner of the block
One helps the other slowly up the hill
Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still
Hear their muffled exchange before they knock
The door of the lone house that’s standing there,
This summons answered after a long pause.
There’s conversation too hushed to make out
Before the women, minus one bouquet,
Return to their parked car and drive away,
A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt
Regarding its effect, still more its cause,
But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.
Arse chill with dew he reconstructs his night,
The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been,
Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen:
A stripped-down attic statement, still and white,
Without a trace of ambiguity
Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude
To anything. Den needs a modern voice
As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare,
Words adequate to these new ruins where
We may describe the wastelands of our choice
In language that’s been shattered and re-glued
To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit
For one last cigarette then phone his mum.
Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail
Diapasons of disaster and yet fail
To mar his sudden equilibrium,
The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite
In time’s jewelled action, where future and past
Shall stand inseparable at the last.
GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN
Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams.
Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to an impasto skim.
War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The continually adjusted now — a hairline crack between the stupefying masses of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked — is a hot interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to interior, night.
Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying to minimise the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummelled by the working week just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlours reconfigured as the stylised paths of palace gardens wherein varicoloured button dynasties conduct their patient courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his speciality and he is thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic, rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box. Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the consideration of annoying games. New angle.