They have closed the roads.
Closed them to traffic,
closed them to possibility.
All I wanted was to pass along them,
to find out where they led.
I don't know where I ought to go
so I was hoping they could do
the thinking for me.
Lead me to where I should be.
But it's too late for that.
I have a crumpled map,
a page torn from a Road Atlas
of Great Britain from 1992.
It is more generous in spirit
than the mean tarmac of today.
It at least offers the possibility
of travel and destination.
I hold it in my hands
and something escapes –
something in the rhythm
of the thing between my fingers.
A paean to a time gone by,
a whisper from a world
wrapped in upon itself.
It is, I have decided,
an object of magic,
defying the arrow of time
not just in and of itself but
for the places and pathways
it describes.
I trace a route along an artery,
down one capillary after another
to a bordered blob on the page.
And that's where I stay
for a couple of decades
in my head.
They were in the shallows
casting for a language
to describe a depth
that existed but which they
had never known.
They were in the shallows
splashing like children.
Not splashing as children do,
but doing as children splash.
He pressed the tool against the thing
trying to impress upon it
something of the character of tooling.
Structure.
Coherence.
Rods and cones.
Primitives.
"When Afram sings, mysteries pour forth."
Run, runners, run
where the running is good
and pace comes quick.
Run where the floes go,
where the rivulets carve through
brilliant aluvium.
Run, runners,
incrementally downwards
never up.
Nature's rule of descent.
Run, runners,
and tell yourselves
you are the living proof
of locomotion.
Put your theory into motion.
The water carriers are here,
clutching margins fat with nothing.
Fat, empty margins,
bigger than any page you or I have seen.
Counted by the ream.
The one with the silent blue eye
fixes me with her gaze.
"I only learned music in school," I mumble
I have notes not letters after my name,
notes with names like A, D, G.
"I only learned languages," she says,
"so I have no idea what you are saying."
I only hear "eaed agage – ae dea a ae ag."
The water carriers are here.
They have a brace of swallows
strung between them on a
piece of orange nylon baling twine.
"They fell from the sky," they say
by way of explanation.
They have single plastic cup
held between them, and thrusting it
towards me, speak as one.
"We have worn this weight for centuries.
Worn it through the misery
and the conflict that misery invites.
It can be yours now."
They push the flimsy vessel into my hands.
I can barely feel its weight
but for the burden they have passed on.
The water carriers are here.
They have brought with them
a shadow from the colonies,
a stain upon the air itself.
For all the world a hologram,
an apparition, but for the fact
they've been carrying it since
the age of steam and nitrous oxide.
Some look upon the stain and declare
a badge of civilisation.
Some see the neck scarf of a hero buccaneer.
Maybe it can be whatever you want it to be.
I have important work in London,
in the city of dreams turned
city of nightmares.
I should go and find the standpipe.
Should go and shut it down.
It would be the end of me.
Caught between stations on the DLR,
somewhere between East India
and Perpetuity.
The signalmen have said
there will be no signals,
only signs.
They conjure them by night.
They think they own the track
but in truth the track owns them,
– owns all of them who ride,
as well as some of them who don't:
Dreamers on the fringe,
riders of imaginary stock
hitched in desperation
to the guile of the horizon.
Complicit in the trick
perspective plays on gaps
that can't be bridged.
The houses that you occupy
can't discuss the fact of their occupation.
The houses cannot speak.
These are the truths we sought and seek.
The houses cannot speak.
It was the tens
versus the hundreds.
That was just the way it was.
The natural order.
Order of magnitude,
that is.
It didn't bother me exactly –
I had other things to worry about.
They found his body
down by the embankment
on the tuesday morning.
Twisted like a discarded wrapper.
No one bothered with the maths.
The coroner concluded that he'd
overreached himself
emerging from the shadow
of a giant lion.
When the third integer arrived
they knew then they would solve it all,
command it all.
There must be a fourth,
after all.
"The world is integers"
a man passed around,
impressed by himself
in a way that nothing else
would again impress him.
They pronounced him wise
and ran to the integer drawer
where they kept them
catalogued in indices.
"Everything's ordained" he said
confusing ordinals for cardinals.
And in light of his eminence,
they could hardly disagree.
Of all the ways to kill a man,
carelessness has got to be the worst.
The carelessness of money
better spent.
The carelessness of action
without thought.
The carelessness of a thousand poisons
taken at their word,
and biology content
to do its stupid thing.
Taking comfort in lazy habits,
pointlessness painstakingly
pointing to a dead certainty.
I am a maker too, she says.
What do you make? I ask.
Plans and sandwiches,
fires and excuses.
I make promises, I say.
Promises I cannot keep
but cannot bear to break.
You should become a breaker,
she suggests.
Makers are ten-a-penny these days.
Look at the bookstores
and music streamers,
look at the influencers,
channels, podcasts, news sites –
all with their armies of makers.
What about making peace?
Making a space for something?
Making something of yourself?
I've had enough of trying
to make it as a maker,
I just need a break.
And so a breaker I will be.
I have a stainless steel suitcase,
long snd thin,
that looks like
it ought to house
a titanium violin.
I don't travel with it
but it travels with me
on microscopic escapades
through radians, microns,
and principally,
degrees.
The hypotenuse and I
are enemies of old.
I am the zig to his zag,
unniggled by his nagging
insistence that we always
take the shortest path
rather than a scenic deviation.
I sit easy with orthoganols
and can resist,
without much stress,
his compunction for
premature conciliation.
Now is the when of then and thence,
the sickly patch of butterflies that dance
to herald blessed pressaging,
while simple shepherds cower, angels sing,
and wise men follow stars.
Now is the when of thee and thine,
the deft submission of the blind
to belief in solid things
while higher matters throw their forms
like cloaks across the puddles at our feet
as we step into the dark.
Now is the when of faith and fire,
the honest architecture of the byre
that the unconditional are privileged
to call a home for just a sweet short while.
The Pope died this morning at 7.35
and suddenly being good
seems to be The Thing.
The world's media who usually prize
the prices of commodities over human lives
now camp out in St Peter's square and gush
without a hint of irony
on the value of humility and charity.
Washing the feet of beggars and
kissing the hands of AIDS victims
is what is really important.
Tomorrow the News cycle
will round upon some novelty or other
in some god-forsaken place,
but for now, Godliness is in.
The pope died this morning at 7.35
There was magic in those hills
they knew that much.
Felt it in their bones,
in their souls,
in their bowels.
They were scratching
in the ground.
Scratching for something
that would give up
something of itself
through seams of loam and chalk.
Something they could not
rightly name, but which
they would recognise,
in that instant, as a
delegate of the substrate.
Downwind from the tower
small ideas in big hats
were hunched over soil samples.
From the watchtower
word is passed
through intercontinental relays
lightning fast
transmissions that confirm
the null hypothesis
that we are being watched.
Somewhere between Diogenes
and nineteen seventy-two
mushrooms were planted on the moon
by a passing species
little interested in antidotes
or scientific modes.
They were here to play –
play havoc with the brains of apes.
Sometime between Euripedes
and nineteen ninety-three
a species dumber than is possible
installed themselves
right here
in this place that we call home.
Anger, malice and the other acolytes
bent eagerly to capture every misdirected word
from that eccentric satellite
as it screamed into eternal night.
Somewhere from the falling man
to twenty seventeen,
reason took its leave and left
on blind crusades of bile.
There between the marsh-grown folk
and the maris stella,
planetary motions turned to rot.
The music of the spheres
is simply numerology
until it's not.
Basic arithmetic laws
and google pins
will only get you
to the parking lot.
Pobrecito Avicenna.
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