poems,
video,
etc.
something
Rob, who
speaks...
in the little room he tries to keep tidy
on the side of the house that doesn’t face the morning,
and so his speech grows quiet.
“No one” he says
but the rest is muffled
“no one”—
while outside there is so much city noise,
and by the way what are these distant engines thundering overhead,
are spy-planes flying sorties in a war?
Their monotone holds too long
doesn’t just die out
it’s a passage in the phase of what was hidden becoming visible
it’s a signal,
and it’s no use asking when it started,
was it always emerging?
The task is to recognise the violence in the air.
Back inside, silence is coming
and I wish I knew whether the timeline truly was theirs to control
or if instead it carried on
against their will,
but more than anything I hope that in the silence
someone was waiting
unleashing monsters,
that way the nightmare is like a nightmare and not...
well he doesn’t know what.
He wants to understand what it really is.
He feels like an alien where once he felt at home,
close to the soil and the past,
in this house of so many years,
among his books and things.
He sees
or thinks he sees
faces changing.
At night he watches soldiers beautiful as archangels
but sickly-seeming, drugged
or like living masks.
Perhaps it’s all a hospital now.
Still he walks, searches.
One day he cries out:
I can’t even find the words
but I sense something moving,
some force or factor
some figure
behind the curtain of whatever this new stage-show actually is,
changing the faces and the costumes,
working so that there is only make-up and costumes
and not even ghosts like me any more.
A rotten smell comes from upstairs
but nothing is dying there,
the odour has no source in the walls
or under the floorboards.
It is fake and also real
because now there is a physics of hallucination
and a law
(translation from an old play)
The way sacred things were eclipsed in ancient theatre –
as when a dead man’s daughters are told by a stranger
only after the event
how their father’s last companion solemnly shielded his eyes
so as not to see what it wasn’t right to see
– this speaks to him of what is happening now:
there are new noises in the night
far-off cries and squabbling in the early hours
agitated voices in the half-light,
and for months the city has seemed so dismal and endangered
brittle with unease and denial
and the remorse of a gambler’s mistake.
He sees people swaying as they walk
their faces too taut or too empty,
who appear to him like funeral marchers dressed in eerie bright colours
where they should be wearing black.
He remembers the lockdowns
when he had been so sick with cancer he nearly died
but he was less afraid,
it felt safe then as he walked for miles down deserted streets
crossed the river over London Bridge
then doubled back over Southwark Bridge,
and his athlete’s watch with its orange strap
measured the distance and his speed
and let him control the music player
to listen again to songs he loved when he was young
start to take each other’s place,
like screen dreams or rear projections
phantom fictions of long ago
memorials to what never happened, what could have been, life not lived
the past as a counterfeit not even believed by its forger
non-experience mourned
missed opportunities transformed into ghost memories
…until some cybernetic revolution
finally cancels out the loneliness
and grief
on the outskirts, in the old shadows
so that real and virtual are the same.
*
The night and the city are beautiful and empty
the sadness and the years have been left behind
no one speaks now of obligation
the line is
broken
and there are no ties
unworldised, you are far away
you aren’t there
you can go anywhere
and your pain out there in the dark
is a measure of the cost not only of having left
but also of
going back