wild friday questions

(i)

who owes the next letter,
who remembers
the coffee,
          dear cait?

the coffee? one day
(not today!)
i'm gonna write a poem
without coffee.
          hey! without coffee in it?
          or me half asleep?
let's wait & see.

i've just been reading
          something
about poems:

"convenient figures
          for an exploration
of the way the subject,
and language,
          relate
to the non-subject,
                    the other,
the
non-lingual."

convenient?
          like, now
in a handy
take-home pack?

mmm.

there was something else
about absence,
too --
          naturally enough --

i mean, what isn't
these days?

anyway, i got to thinking
(yeah, late in life. ha ha.)

about poems,
          & absence,
& how little
i actually know --
like, for example,
what          to know
actually
          means,
& whether or not
i'd know it
if i knew.
          so to speak.

          & while i'm at it,
what about repetition, iteration?
it reminds me
          of the year
of parrot fever... a collision!
this side,
          berrigan!
that side,
          primus!
collision or collusion?
anyway, appropriately anachronistic.
the year of pastiche!
i see you there,
moving like a movie,
at how many frames per second?
          (is there a test at the end?)
i like to think of skin,
          don't you,
caught in a dream of telephonic longing?
hello? operator?

          nevermind.

(ii)

it was thursday that made these
wild friday questions,
          inexorably,
          (a word that i love!)
& only time as if time
was important
held any secret more secret
than these secrets,
          these times,
a sense like insects moving
through the ultraviolet,
the things that own the night,
cool under flaky stars.

no more questions, please.

(iii)

i had bought the shoes in a vision,
          officer,
& had the traffic been lighter
the perfect crime
was only moments away...
still, we were sure
that driving fast helped,
& if you opened
like a textbook
the clowns gave the game away,
their backflips
out of order,
their pyramid
          a disaster.

(iv)

silhouettes
were as quaint
as a reference book,
ashen in the lamplight.

(v)

i fell from a feedback loop
trying to stop
my metaphoric rise --
the dust had seemed
a centre even longing
could hold onto,
but it was so tiresome,
          being tragic,
& the world hung
under the arc lights
like a question,
vaccinations.

(vi)

the stupid damned,
i liked the clash better,
though as a child of the new wave
talking heads
wrote my language,
& a hundred
          shitty
compilation albums
spun though summer
on high rotation.

years later it would be hard to forgive
scary monsters & super creeps,
which made everything after
          sound so disappointing.

(vii)

maybe it's time
to reassess the future.
i wrote bad cheques in a frenzy
& changed banks
to be petty,
but over coffee it didn't seem
such a bad idea.
people kept walking,
unaware of the credit risk,
& the mothership
got me out
before the french toast arrived,
glowing like a fringing reef
in the cafe's halflit dusk.
i believed in the paranoiac structure
           of knowledge
& grasped it like a lifeline, you bet.
the cinema was empty
but we didn't get the message,
& as i coughed up little fractals
(bemused by mathematics)
it followed me home
from the health club
like a broken marriage
& we haven't heard
the end of it since.

(viii)

the future i mean.
at night i lie awake
& think happily of dying.

(ix)

now it's winter,
in the year of
parrot fever...
           no,
just winter,
& as i cycle past gill park
council workers
are fixing gutters.
why not some parrot fever?
it's uphill to the traffic lights
at fulham road,
& a flock of cockatoos
are ripping shit
out of the schoolgrounds.
these days if i dream
i feel like a television
          flashback
& lay off the theory a while.

(x)

fuck you i guess.

there are no rivers i'd rather sleep in.

the measure of a gnome is gnomic,

the river fucks up sleeping gnomes.

          these things, these words.

shall we stumble through this rhetoric today?

i believed in parks & a lack of adventure.

the rash is getting better, thank you,

though when the bill comes i can't pay for the coffee.

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ted@magicdog.com -- 26 April 2000