 Knowing nothing is a wonderful thing. In this age of supersized certainty there is a chiming delight when you hear yourself saying I don't know, I'm not sure. Discovery? Exploration? Curiosity? Aren't these the roads to passing pleasure? Rigid opinion the road to isolation? The momentary & fragmentary is all I have, all I have ever had; substance has always escaped me. This time last year I was struggling to write anything of any length, and convinced, that in a world of bellowing & belligerent opinion, I had nothing to add to the melée. The wind, a righteous tempest, was blowing in the sturdy sails of what you were saying, not billowing the fragile & flimsy silk of how it was said, sung, painted. It was enough to drive me to drink but I was already drinking so I would have to find some other destination. What I turned to was the art of others & the daily meanderings of a small world & experimenting with red wines in the fridge. Along with the chilled Rioja, I was going to write a poem a day for a year reflecting upon what I had seen, watched, listened to, dreamt, read, cooked, thought, felt or wildly imagined the previous day. This is a celebration of that year. I made it. Three hundred and sixty five poems later I still know nothing but I have put words together, played in the prism of perception & danced on yesterday's embers. And, as T.S. Eliot would never had said, November is the coolest month. Here are twelve of my fragments, the butt-ends of my days and ways….  Abakan Orange (1968) Magdalena Abakanowicz Abakany The forest is taken to the seaside our noses are roped to wonder fraying, tears, threads tumble & turn from fabrics heft, clothes of ancient giants wardrobed in grey walls, wet woodland perfuming weave & weft, this is monstrous enchanting refuge we cannot touch hands impulse restrained, we sidle up to these wonderful creatures chasing twined snaking beyond knowing into dark delight 25th November 2022  Shelter from the Circle Line's storm Kindness has been bled dry from these bodies falling heads are bent away, shadowed from distraction mind-vised to machines, fortune’s wheel theirs, they do not see ragged exposure weeping before them, two young men the first, wiry & demanding attention, thrusting goatee electric limbed, fluent in anger & need, brown hungering eyes yearn for a seeing, money to shelter him in a hostel he holds desperate half-defiant pose in their bouldered silence I lift my eyes to his & offer sympathetic smile, an apology for having no coins, a wish for good luck, Sweet bruv, he says taking his fortified body, another layer of angry skin added to the next chorus of the deaf, heedless travellers who will no witnessing the second is like a ghost, a soft voice struggling through embarrassment & distress, a child, his pale skin, long body barely covered in the thin black jacket & beige trousers pocket patched but empty, he vanishes as quietly as he came, defeated, treading gently towards death or madness space emptied, these blunted hearts have no blood to lift eyes to raw hurt & all of their journeys trundle on, railed habit keeping them safe unseeing of the stage on which other lives are played out, another swipe of the screen, a little closer to home, a solid door shielding them from the world 29th March 2023  Don Cherry A Don resurrected at the Barbican Don Cherry’s little brassy trumpet is lifted gleamy witness to night’s spirit celebration rasps, cries & laughter do their calling a rhythmic thrum propelling them heavenward his son’s hands press the keys then hang suspended in space, phantom’s delicate hold if Don is listening, his distant feet will be dancing on the loamy joy filling our vacant hearts 21st November 2022  Idiocy Idiocy's my speciality I cook it up everyday thankfully it doesn’t take much effort, the ingredients stored & shaped lie waiting within the little cupboard I polish in my brain last week with little effort & no forethought I embraced seven years of bad luck, a sweet splintering of newly bought mirror poorly stored & hastily driven to a home it would fragment mirror mirror on the wall in pieces, cracking up who’s the stupidest of them all silence is the coolest of answers & only yesterday I spiked my heart fearful palpitations pushing gripped hands into steering wheel’s faux leather as I stared at the warning signal, dreadful illumination that my dull finger had lit if you want a lift to idiocy mine’s the fastest ride going 7th April 2023  The Sauce The soft skin of the mascarpone gives as my craving index finger presses for something, oblique & out of reach to rescue the heat exploded tomatoes flesh torn, seeded innards splattering the red roasted onions my mouth closes on cream crowned finger a gentle swell holds tongue’s sway the Italian saviour is tossed into vegetable heat martyred to improvised making watery red is churned to deeper realms lightening, clotting, exalting the sauce 7th February 2023  Shining the buttons The Brothers of Italy step from the shadows blonde wigs cling to sharpened skulls the silken flow pours from hot throat to tickle tongue into twisted shape forming the finery of smooth words camouflaged sentences trickling into lost ears looking for hope, welcoming a brute dream dressed up in a cream jacket with gilded buttons a white collarless blouse hides her black heart hands clenched in victory muffle the cries of those she will crush, flanked by the state marching her through mosque, synagogue over the fallen bodies of those that have fled to the heart of Europe, civilisation’s protection handmaidens will follow with soap and stiff brushes plunging her cream coat into barrels' suds when the blood, dirt, shit cannot be rinsed they will hand her another jacket, cleansed the gold buttons gleaming, pure, blinding 26th September 2022  A son darkens The phone call when it comes doesn’t reach me I have cut the lines stopped the clot of filial loss the swelling body of my mother’s dispirited dog doesn’t try to rouse her black blood trickling from unwashed hair it carries on released from leash padding to the bar where lives are retired to liquid work detonating blue eyes lifted to where she would sit in eroding silence retreating searching for something disappeared within herself my mother lies untended her shapeless lily patterned dress dampening darkening petals a body beyond control & care seized by a surge within her shrinking head motion shrunk prone she shivers someone not too gone in the caressing of their glass sees this companionless dog stands, stirred to action in actionless seaside town is lead to her laying calls her name flattened by tonic clonic years of drinking & no love of life she stays unresponsive no scrabbling for sense the ambulance carries her to unfamiliar attention, gentle hoping hands to clean her tend her & scan her hurting brain the loveless ache I hold imagines the barren landscape beamed back from beneath her skull later unable to sleep I conjure the scene see her lying alone frightened the girl inside who was lost without the love of her parents shakes to a final falling 31st May 2023  In search of eggs Breakfast is being made to revive us from last night’s gulped celebration to escape the restless itch hatching inside of me, I go searching for eggs a man smiling with a ravaged face, purpling & pocked sore, follows me in to unloved Spa & greets the woman in the red smock plump, shielded by grubby plastic, she welcomes him to his morning ritual of ruin, frail hands hungry for the drinks aisle I scan the depleted space for a dozen eggs grey metal shelves offer nothing but themselves, Friday’s meagre delivery, bird-flu shrunk, has been swooped away, disappointment unravels into hope, a damp journey to the town’s two other shops whose lights are dimmed till mouths are open & doors held shut, the sweet fatty smell of the grill meets my return but bacon & sausages will have no yellowing accompaniment, an unfinished symphony that calls the itch to crescendo 2nd January 2023  King Street, Hammersmith He spits from inside his grey stubble towards a woman at the bus stop, the white stippled fleck doesn’t travel far, just missing the coarse bristle thrusting from grimy chin his cursing travels further, she’s a cunt, her mother’s a cunt & she should go suck her mother’s cunt, jerking spasms hustle his skeletal frame around the pavement as Christmas shoppers tighten their hands, swerve & head for home when it looks like his rash wrath is pulling itself back him turning along the high street, back into his pain some raw hurt returns & he is railing again, animating his crimson jumper which could be for Christmas were it not for the dirt, the holes, the despair, which any festive spirit would fall through the fraying & the sore fire of his speech, I think about stepping in with restraining voice, trying to silence scattering violence but this whirlwind of stoked hatred feeds on impediments when he does take up his journeying, his new voice, desperate wheedling curdles the heart’s of those that have caught his rage 15th December 2022  At your door (Rachel Clare) Endless Flight In what swampy depths of the heart did your jealousies grow? Fed and deformed in whisky’s deluge they writhe in your strict, bulging, bloodshot eyes & move to make your hands monsters, those same hands that turn suffering to lyric line, unbearable sights pressed into a language stroking reader’s soul into a magnificent pity, monstrous your fist closes on a clump of her hair, you will not let go whilst the moon runs vainly through radiant darkness & she must lie unmoving, her curling love-locked in the clasp of your palm, a token taken & held prisoner belligerent and fearful you sleep through her distress biled spite drags you deep into your own nightmares as she cuts through auburn strands to free herself from your grip & flees to a madness stoked by your rough hold Whilst reading Endless Flights: A life of Joseph Roth 5th October 2022  Who you looking at? (John Joseph Sheehy) For John Sheehy Unshaven & unhappy carving into cardboard to make a relief he tells me, he thought he’d be long gone never reaching this pain the body’s refusal to bend snatching towards a sock from agony’s realm he wishes he could be condemned like his boiler DO NOT USE adhered to his empty chest no heart for it this lugging of hurt there is some lessening in the cutting, a new face promising into the pasteboard shaped from aching limbs this portrait will not breathe nor cry out in aged pain May 2nd  another birthday The red-haired woman haunts me through the day her face riven by angst & alcohol, her lips struggling to make lines of sense, curling & pursing, pinching & parting, she is lost amidst high empty tables, glasses traced with froth, a mumbling man with three cans of Stella stretched out at oblivion’s shore, & me, a solitary soul with a book of poetry and a pen scratching marks into emptiness on the day of his birth. Her clothes are snagged & dragged down by bags heft hanging from her body black rucksack's untempered outpourings. Before her battling down of cold demons, loneliness’s untethered thrust in maffled speech I struggle to catch, her fierce scent has landed, bladder’s abandon staining her olive trousers the darkness, neatly formed like jodhpur’s reinforcements & the smell hints at former breaches. In some form of telling, she reports the collapse of the toilet door the transformation of exposure & asks if I am a poet. I take her & the mumbling man sucking on his can in & know this is the stuff my poetry might be made off Oct 3rd 2022 © Simon Parker
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 Broken Again My brother was most certain when he was most mad. Wrapped only in a thin, orange patterned sarong, he would leave our house, turn left and walk the fifteen yards into the three lanes of traffic on the A4 westbound. Cars hurtling along at forty miles an hour were no danger to him. The horn blasts and braking, swerving and swearing were all part of the plan. He was in control. Those of us who didn’t believe him were the fools, myopic unbelievers, drone like doubters; we hadn’t been gifted with the knowledge that he had: the third eye. In his digging down into the depths of his psyche, the human self - flimsy, fragile, loveable - had collapsed. Doubt had been banished and certainty was king. I wished it were true: rather than tremble and weep as I tried to coax him out of the road, I could have enjoyed his dance with two thousand kilos of metal and fuel. The psychoanalyst Darian Leader, in his humane, insightful book What is Madness, writes: The absence of doubt is the single clearest indicator of psychosis. One of the “everyday torments of the neurotic” is doubt. He offers numerous examples of the certainty laying the path to psychosis: A woman who knew that her doctor loved her when one day she felt a pain in her arm while doing housework: he must have sent her this pain so that she would return to see him. We may laugh at such magical thinking but those holding such certainties are, perhaps, in their deeper reaches, often perplexed, frightened, trying to make some significant and comprehensible sense of the world that places them at its centre. Spending time with my brother when he was at his most convinced, I was aware of a terrible fragility within him. Initially I was seduced by his certainty, like most neurotics , as Leader says: drawn towards someone who knows exactly what they want, who insists on some knowledge or truth with blind determination. Doubt gravitates towards certainty. Once I’d regained my imbalance, I felt that my brother’s delusional certainty was a powerfully constructed, impenetrable wall that was holding back all that would make him disintegrate, but I wasn’t sure.  Ayad Akhtar in his beautifully riled Homeland Elegies, which I read last week, celebrates complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity. The book topples traditional boundaries, slipping between novel, essay, memoir and state of the nation exploration. When asked about how much of him, the Ayad Akhtar in the novel, is in his work: Did he, like the character in his Pulitzer Prize winning play Disgraced, think America got what it deserved when the twin towers were attacked? He muddies the freighted question. Born in America as a child of Pakistani parents, people clamour for Akhtar to make his opinion clear. Having heard Trump and his contentious statement in 2015 that he’d seen Muslim’s celebrating in Jersey City, Akhtar gives only what he can: The sentiments expressed in the play had of course come from somewhere, but how to express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art? The only thing I could put simply was that there was no simple way to put it. Putting it simply: words fail me. They often do. When I sit down to write doubt often pulls up a chair beside me. He sits there, small, pinched eyes, thin lips twisted into mocking grin, watching my fingers tap at the keyboard. Sometimes, it’s the familiar fraught relationship that an artist has with their material: you have an idea, a vision, a hope and scrabble to bring that into shape. You dig for words, change them, nestle one next to another, change a word, put a comma in, take it out and repeat and repeat and repeat; or you have a hunch you are getting close to what it is you are after, the inexpressible thrumming on the edge of expression; or in more prosaic terms: something that might stand up to your own self scrutiny, some measuring of what you have built that passes for good enough.  Emigrants Sometimes doubt rides in as you read the crafted lines of another, their words shaped into something truly wonderful. Can your hands, heart and mind turn them with such gracefulness? Awed. Overwhelmed. Fertile ground for doubt’s flourishing. Reading Akhtar’s extraordinarily eloquent Overture to America which opens his powerful novel, I know there is a lot of work to do. Then there's the world. Always unstable, uncertain, but there are times when it is more nakedly so. The turbulence of today - war, the future of the planet, political impunity and the consequent apathy, viruses, - is raw, brutal, bewildering. Our human frailty exposed, it's easy to go scrabbling for certainties. Fear making us forceful in our beliefs. At the end of Homeland Elegies Akhtar writes Free Speech: A Coda. He reveals how when he was invited to speak at a liberal arts college in Iowa, he was deemed 'an "unsafe" presence on the campus.' Despite not having read him, no doubt in their mind, many in the college thought he should not be allowed to communicate. The woman who invited him Mary Marconi, a former teacher of his, had travelled through her own despair when students had refused to read certain writers' work because of beliefs held. Fortunately, she moved beyond her enervating gloom to a compassionate understanding of how their rigidity rose from a foundation of fear.  Abandoned So what to do with all this doubt and uncertainty? Doubt paralyses, but it can also make you playful. If nothing is certain and you don’t know where you’re going you might test the water, seek out some hidden pleasure. Doubt leads into unexpected crannies. From a recent doubting, in which I was fretting and fumbling with the material and the matter of the world, I went playing: fashioning the words of others - some of my favourite poets - into a poem of my own. An A-Z. The form, a cento, meaning patchwork, is a collage. You may doubt it's mine, but here it is... unfolding a cento At the empty windows set in the tall house where fear leaps up inside me bathed in such unkindly light my body’ a sack of bones, broken within unfaithfulness no longer hurts in the lull before monsoon or typhoon but like bright light through the bare tree is a portmanteau of scream & babble or scrap and here I am turning your trophies to scrap at an illicit viewing but you do not have to forget mourning and mirth are two extended wings teetering on walkways that disappear I have given up all hope for what was whole the vacuous garment that limps at my heels as I go like a medieval painting’s kindling and with so much carrion in this graveyard for the sharp bones of my memory to turn my teeth to knives made out of soot, soup out of rust and, we try to understand things, each in our own way as an alchemist knows how to win your sixty trillion cells, all drunk with the live substance of a kiss polished and repolished by the hands of strangers they are frozen when there is nobody on earth who hears nothing — you heard nothing. [An A-Z through poetry. Sources in order of lines : Lot’s Wife, Anna Akhmatova/ A monologue of Prince Myshkin to the Ballet Pantomime of The Idiot, Ingeborg Bachman / The Fish, Billy Collins / His Picture, Elegie V, John Donne / No, never have I felt so tired, Sergei Esenin) / International Bridge Playing Women, Mark Ford / Vespers, Louise Glück / I’d played silence but later realised my word, Terence Hayes / Past caring, Mick Imlah / But you do not have to forget, Juan Ramón Jiménez /Lament 9, Jan Kochanowski / The Duckboards, Michael Longley / Migraine, Sinéad Morrisey / Whoever intends me harm, Pablo Neruda / The Haircut, Sharon Olds / A Musical Hell, Alejandra Pizarnik / ode to new money, Noel Quiñones / Daydreaming in the midst of spring labours, Aleksander Ristovic / The Silence of Plants, Wisława Szymborska / Wherever you are I can reach you, Marina Tsvetaeva / A drunkard, Ko Un / The Footsteps, Paul Valéry / The Divided Child, Derek Walcott / Empty Chairs, Liu Xia / A Father’s Ear, Yevgeny Yevtushenko / Siren and Signal, Louis Zukofsky]  Memory Lies in Dreamland My memory lies in Dreamland. Not that all my memories are phantom, but the most potent remembering I have experienced was at a fun fair in Margate. I remember little, especially of my childhood, but, a couple of years ago, standing in Dreamland before the wooden roller coaster of which I was terrified as a child, I was overcome with a physical sensation, returning me to my childhood with such vivid immediacy, I thought I might start shrinking. Words were locked inside a somatic experience. The leg weakening excitement and dread of the four year old me coursed through my body. Collapsing, onto the ground or back inside myself, were intoxicating possibilities. This felt like living inside a memory rather than recalling or redrafting it.  Testing times For the past year as the pandemic has writhed and retreated and writhed again, I have been meeting with M once a week. We - him, my eighty three year old father-in-law, and me, with a life long interest in ageing - explore the ideas, feelings and experiences around getting old, memory loss and how to spend the declining years as gracefully or, perhaps more importantly, as fully as possible. The enforced isolation of Covid has ravaged the lives of many of the elderly, and M is no exception to that. M comes alive in the company of others and, for most of the last two years, no company has been had. A conversationalist, his tongue has been stilled, and with it something essential to his existence lost. My mother, in her late seventies, was living alone in another country in which she does not speak the language when lockdown was enforced. She was untethered from her routine: her daily lunches in a local restaurant and the regular gathering of friends in a bar in the early evening. Silence descended on her life. And, with that silence, a retreat into an internal space unattached to others, to concrete ideas, to time. Growing old and covid: a disastrous cocktail to wrench hands from a hold on life. Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming Of Age, her fascinating philosophical exploration of ageing, and its resonances for individuals and the societies we construct, argues There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning - devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. Isolation enforced, despite the supposed connectivity of the digital world - a world my mother has never set foot in -, is a sure fire way to sever ties, to unmoor meaning. To paraphrase Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, being alone together is a poor substitute for being together. Alongside this, there is the battle against tiredness, the shrinking motivation, the sloth that an ageing body can induce. As Voltaire wrote almost three hundred years ago, The heart does not grow old, but it is sad to dwell among ruins. What else can a sad heart do but follow the body into decline? Unfortunately, these ruins are not readily visited or attended to by those who clamber over the Acropolis or the Colosseum. For a society that champions youth and independence, these ruins are, at best, hidden away, or if they are out on the streets, in cafes, restaurants or bars, they are rendered invisible.  Simone de Beauvoir Memory falters with the body. The slippage of short term memory, threatening the bulwark of long term memory, is fought against, or strategies are manufactured to bypass the forgetting. A forgetting captured in Billy Collins brilliant, plaintive poem Forgetfulness , which begins with the early disappearing nouns: The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, and continues to Whatever it is you are struggling to remember, it is not poised on the tip of your tongue or even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen. It has floated away down a dark mythological river whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall M and I continue to take our weekly stroll on the banks of Lethe, talking as the water splashes over his shoes. My mother has begun to paddle in its shallows. Her hands hold the rushes that line its side. I try to lift her attention from the waters racing beneath her with questions, attentiveness, love, to keep her at the river’s edge. But, as My Mother Weeps below reveals, the waters are rising.  A necessary companion Before Covid compounded the isolation and loneliness of the elderly in society, that of M, my mother and many, many more, I read Nicci Gerrard’s profoundly beautiful, and inspiring, What Dementia Teaches Us About Love. At the core of the book, alongside other heartrending stories, is her father’s ten year struggle with memory loss, his loosening of self and the damage done by negligent care. Tears may fall, but Gerrard's determination to bestow dignity and love on those that can no longer bestow it upon themselves is rousing. The book is a necessary companion, a boon for anyone journeying into the uncertain terrain of a loved one being plunged into forgetfulness. For Gerrard, and the throng of dedicated people she meets working with those shredded by dementia, Validation is crucial along with a patient determination to find (and hold on to) the unique and precious person who may be obscured by their dementia. Both Gerrard and De Beauvoir write about how their societies treat the old, and neither France in 1970, or Britain in 2019, come across as places you would want to grow old in. What both advocate, in their very different ways, is a reframing of how we view, care for, accept and celebrate being old. A place most of us will get to without heeding how we treat those already there. Gerrard, visiting a ward, watches a fleshless, frail, elderly woman "immmobile... only her bony hands fluttering." At her bedside is a framed photograph of her as a young woman on a beach, paddling. holding hands with a young man and smiling. What Gerrard comes to, is that within this ailing frame the young woman, seemingly buried, is alive. Our histories are contained within us, and whether we can recall them or not, or others can reach to them through touch, song or a favourite food, we should be treated in a dignified way that celebrates all that we have been. This hopeful, smiling woman in the photograph is the same woman who lies unattended in her bed. She may not be able to recall, or redraft that memory, but it is living inside her. She "housed both the old and young self and everything in between."  Sign of the Times
My mother weeps My mother weeps My mother weeps like a small child. Her shoulders shake. One hand rests on her face covering one crying eye. It shields half her forehead, a cheek, half her mouth, lips and chin. It is a strange image, and, as I hold the other hand and offer reassurance, I am struck by its unnaturalness. The hand, the half face, the weeping. My mother weeps. My mother never weeps. Her weeping now is not my mother’s weeping. My mother is not my mother. My mother weeps. I cannot remember the last time I saw her cry. She has not cried for at least thirty years. She sits in an armchair in our living room and sobs. This is a deep, momentous and fearful outpouring. Her body convulses, the words she is trying to get out are swallowed. Gasps for air, the only accompaniment. My mother weeps My mother weeps. She has lost who she is. A woman who never weeps and this weeping does not belong to her. It belongs to a woman who cannot remember why she is here, where she lives, or what has been happening to her. The unknowing of all has brought tears. These tears will not stop because they cannot be pulled in to a history. There is no drying comfort of "It will be all right". The "It" has been severed from the continuous thread. My mother weeps My mother weeps and I have to hold back my own tears. She is the frightened child that I once was. The confusion and the despair and the terror shakes her whole body. Steeling myself, so that I am not taken by the waves, I comfort her, tell her that I will take care of her, that she is surrounded by people who love her. Through her tears she manages, Don’t put me in a home. Please don’t put me in a home. My mother weeps Simon Parker  Detail from Water of the Flowery Mill - Arshile Gorky (1944) For a writer the one thing you must do is write. Reading is vital, thinking beneficial, but where the craft is honed, and where your unique and particular voice takes shape, is in the writing. Stendhal, who scratched at the skin of realism in an age of romanticism, advocated a minimum of “twenty lines a day, genius or not.” Harry Matthews, one of the few Americans to be a member of the OULIPO group (writers and mathematicians who looked for new literary forms, game playing and all), took him at his word. Stendhal’s call to action was an attempt to finish the book he was working on. Matthews “deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page” and ended up producing a fascinating book, 20 Lines a Day, with reflections on writing, raking leaves, phone calls, friendship and much more. Since 2017, the twenty line dictum has driven my writing through the first coffee. This twenty line sprint is one of many ways to get the writing day started. Throughout lockdown, alongside playing a daily writing game exploring form, I combined my desire to write about visual art with this daily sprint. What follows takes off from a line of Arshile Gorky's which I came across in the brilliant biography of this troubled artist, Black Angel by Nouritza Matossian. Gorky, who had escaped the Armenian genocide in 1915, died alone when the weight of circumstance finally overwhelmed him. His work lives on and so does his legacy which shaped American painting from the 1940s onwards.  Detail from The Leaf of an Arichoke is an Owl - Arshile Gorky (1944) "One artist could bang his hands against the table and years, even centuries later, another could feel the rhythm." - Arshile Gorky One artist could bang his hands against the table and years, even centuries later, another could feel the rhythm; pulsings, gentle or violent, rippling through a new work, riffing on the driving beat of former melodies to make new meaning. Searching for a voice amidst the vocal outpourings of a lustier or loftier throat calling, follow me, and follow me, until you can find your own path. My footsteps will be tip-tapping in your ear but you will be dancing to your own tune. Drunk with a desire to make you stand upon the table, let that rhythm penetrate your soles. Climbing through shin and groin, your flesh will move to a newborn beat. Beating down the shrill voice that screams all endeavour is meaningless, you will dance, tap out your tune, regardless of whether others will take your hand, your lead, or any notice of you at all. Dance with your body, your body, your life, your heart. Your head left looking backwards as you shimmy into an oiled sunset. The sun also sets you know Hemingway. Its day spent in a descending rhythm that drops into darkness. An empty dance floor that has no light. You can dance in the black of night. A nighttime rhyme of black blackening, blackness. Dressed for death but too much to do before the bony hand leads you away. Life lends you its drumsticks, beat out that tempo, shred skin with your pounding, A pounding that has stolen money from the masters. They wont mind, being dead, but a small breath may touch their cold lips, kissing farewell in the earth’s loam. Thank you. I will dance until I die.  One eye kept on you, my still and silent friend. You do not hear it but it will carry me across the dance floor, the maple, the canvas, the country and the strains of this senseless life. I will dance until there is nowhere left to dance on. Your rhythm is ceaseless, like a wave that cannot find a shore. A surefire sound that syncopates the pulse, echoes in my strut, and smothers the canvass’s cries for help. Do not let the paint dry, do not let the stroke end. The end is the edge of existence and paint cannot adhere to nothingness. Dance and drip, smudge, smear and stroke this feeble brain into action, an answer: When will the rhythm fade? |