Friday, December 07, 2012

Thoughts on a London Plane Tree



Thoughts on a London Plane Tree

I notice it glowing from a gutter
Puddle and look up to see it
Maimed and naked, resentful
Of the tree surgeon’s pruning,
Or of that grim stave of transit,
The road.
                  But wait, the tree doesn’t resent.
It doesn’t think in blunt English, it doesn’t
Blunt think at all. If it has any tendencies,
It wields them with ardent Sloth.
But that’s no sin, a tree moving slowly.
There is no sin for a tree.

See how blunt my thinking is?
It crashes against the tree
Like a bead of rain, grasping almost
None of it.
Still, I don’t intend to give up.
Rain doesn’t give up after one drop.

I think trees must be awake
In some slow wise, must possess a gnarled sensibility.
Or at the very least, they are words spoken by the soil.

This one here is bursting with stillness.
It carves the air with numberless green-blooded swords,
Deciding to leaf or unleaf in step with the cadences
Of rainsong, the bulb flashes of day, the night’s blinks,
And the axial leanings of the great pedestal orb
In which it is plugged.

I stop to watch an invisible thought
Curling from a branch like guesswork. It might outlast me, unfurling
Arboreal inferences at the pace of an hour hand’s hour hand.

Watching a thought? I mean watching it being
Lively as a brick, livelier than a whole pile
Of bricks, and far more elegant than any built thing.
It is an ur-elegant primordial autobuilder, aesthetic ancestor
Whose swoops and jaggednesses are the original
Effortless style – but, unlike any human arrangement,
Actually effortless.
                                   Not that trees don’t labour:
They grow, stand fast, and tote the sky,
They hold off the rain, point out the stars, and guard the world
As seed-sprinkled sentinels dotted across the earth. They labour,
But they do not design themselves. Their shapeliness
Is our construction – though one may hang over a mirror
Pond for centuries, apparently dangling lovingly
Towards itself.
                            I dangle towards trees, lovingly.

My words are small and fleeting,
They land for a moment
On a branch and then are gone.

Saturday, December 01, 2012

Metrocount


Metrocount

I count. Not one two three four five... More like one one one one one. I have a little machine that deals with that accumulation of symbols for me, otherwise I would lose count and there’d be gaps on my data sheet. My hand-held counter cannot lose count. It is a precision instrument. I understand they use the same counters at nightclubs, the bouncer clicks once for each person entering and they stop letting people in when its hits a certain number to abide by fire-safety regulations.
But I am counting cars – any motorised vehicle with four or more wheels.
I am stationed at a different roadside location each day with my hand-held counter and a clipboarded data sheet. Each hour on the hour I write down the number on the sheet and reset the counter to start again.
I am merely the mechanism that causes the count, the eyes that see what is to be counted. The numbers themselves are in the mechanical mind my hand, so my thoughts have a little freedom to roam.
In the morning I feel fresh and clear for the first hour, my thoughts held taut in a low background hum,
like the muffled noises of someone waking in an adjoining room. Then around an hour in I start to hear my thoughts a little more clearly. My hand works almost on its own, clicking along to the quells and surges of traffic. My thoughts shifting, sifting, not quite vocal but somehow increasingly solid as the afternoon sets in. I pore over all manner of things.
Like what other kind of work I could do. Gardening maybe. Or street sweeping. I see both of these professions often as I am posted in different places around London. I like the look of street sweeping. Hundreds of times I've been on the point of asking a street sweeper what the work is really like when they're right next to me, but I've never dared. Counting cars doesn't boost confidence.
I get asked for a light so much I've started carrying a lighter. One man shouted at me for not having a lighter. He said he'd asked everyone. He took it personally. He screamed in my face. I stood stock still save my thumb jolting to the traffic passing behind him – still counting. Everything seemed to go quiet after his scream. I could smell tobacco and his bacon based breakfast on my face. I stared into nothing, unfocussing my eyes and willing his disappearance. He suddenly turned and marched away. I let go a deep breath and released myself back into the job. Solace, even in the fumes that licked my face clean of his foul spittle.
Today my tiredness was worse than ever. I am not sleeping enough. I dropped off standing bolt upright in the middle of my three o'clock hour. Nothing to lean on. I shut my eyes for a moment and it was longer than a moment. I woke up with the pavement sloping towards me. I caught myself just in time, stumbling to a crouch. I'd probably only been asleep a few seconds. Maybe a minute. I didn't know you could sleep standing up. I must've looked strange, a sleeping statue. I slapped myself hard in the face and clicked the counter furiously to make up for lost numbers. I clicked each car double for the next minute or so. I care about the rectitude of the numbers. Ifajobsworthdoingitsworthdoingproperly.
People with time to kill or rage to spill approach me because I don't appear to be doing very much. It is often the mad, the lonely, or those mad with loneliness. But you never know. An old man stopped at my side this morning. Age had set in heavy so he could only walk very slowly – it had taken him at least five minutes to cover less than a hundred meters. He stopped beside me and smiled. His eyes were folorn. I gave him a perfunctory smile, not wanting to encourage a conversation.
They say it'll rain later so I went for me run in the morning” he said, puffing out a chuckle, his eyes sadder still. I nodded and tried to click louder so he'd see that I was busy. He looked around him as one does having reached the summit of a mountain. I watched him watching a tree sway in the wind, still counting cars peripherally.
He turned back to me with a face that spoke of having tried all the other options. The tree wouldn't engage him so I was his last hope. His face was pleasant in spite of his melancholy – beautiful in wrinkles.
Whats that you're doing lad?” he said, “Counting the seconds? A clock will do that for you,” he wheezed a laugh. I couldn't hold back a smile and his face bloomed with the reciprocated joy of my smile. He drank the merest drip of my mirth as though it would save him. I was happy with his wit, it was uncommon. I let my guard down a little and was about to speak when he spoke again. “I know what you're up to, really, counting cars for the government. Its a tough job I bet. Tires the eyes eh.” I nodded. “So I won't get in your way any more” he said, “Wouldn't want to get you fired or something.”
He shuffled around, feet barely lifting off the ground, and I realised with a pang that he had walked all this way just to speak to me. He wasn't walking past me. He had spent the past five minuted dragging himself along the pavement just to see if I could be roused to conversation. I hadn't said a word and now he was going. My guts churned with regret. He was still only a couple of meters away but he had his back to me and was resolutely departing. I made an internal vow to be kinder. To give people a bit more credit. They aren't all crackpots out to ruin my day.
Black coffee from a flask. Thats the stuff. Soup sometimes. Bananas always. I get a lunchbreak in the middle of the day but I get hungry before it so I eat with my freehand. One of my front teeth is still loose from when I brought the counter to my mouth and bit it. The sandwich was in the other hand. Or was I trying to bite it out of existence. Swallow the statistics and digest them, bound for the sewers...
I count. If I don't count, I don't count. There's some sort of pun there. It occurs to me often, to work out some sort of gallows joke about the tenuous monomania of my profession, how hard you must work to make yourself feel meaningful, and even then... But instead, when I hap upon that plan of thought, I end up just repeating variations of the phrase in my head, or under my breath... I count. I don't count. If I can't count I won't count. I won't count if I don't count. I'll do counting. I'll die counting...
I live in fumes. They clog me up. I am being slowly murdered by invisibles. My skin turns grey. I check my reflection in puddles and begin to worry. I might as well smoke. Start using my own lighter, inhale a bit more death than I have to – quicken the full saturation, the fumigated cell-count... yes, counting. I can't get away from it. And somehow I count all the wrong things and let the seconds, hours, years pass by uncounted. The years have piled up like a crash. Is it already 1983?
I have started bringing a little pocket radio to work. With headphones I can listen with almost full engrossment and still do my job. This'll keep my brain alive. The news is strange to me though. I haven't heard of some of these countries. I'm losing touch. Time to reform that. Come on BBC, fill me in.
I sit on the sharpest edges. Rest my backside on the most inhospitable perches, sloped walls, spikey hedges. I've sheltered under the thinnest awnings, even crouched in the shade of bins. The craft of self-care is subtle and can make small things generous. But sometimes I have to stand all day on flat asphalt with not so much as a bottle cap to sit on. So my calves are strong. Sitting is bad for you anyway. The world of office-sitters are having their backs damaged by slouching in chairs. I heard on the radio that for most of human history only people of high status had any sort of chair at all. And even they sat cross legged on a simple raised platform, the backrest was only supposed to be ornamental. Now that chairs are mass produced we are encouraged to lean back. But that's bad for our backs. I'm better off in that respect. If I do sit, I make a stool of a bollard. No backrest.
And then the weather. The sun pummels me. Or the wind whisks me in the windiest corners. Whirlwinds of leaves and plastic bags take me for a statue and weave about me. I have known rain to fall for three solid weeks. No waterproofs exist that can answer to such wildness. So I dissolve sometimes, slip down into myself and an autopilot takes over. He is not summonable though, this pilot; otherwise I'd have him do my job all the time, I'd sleep standing up beneath his hard-work. But no, he isn't at hand when I want him. He falls to work unpredictably when I fall into this strange coma.
Then I fade to a grey brick mottled street wall paper and people turn to cough in my face, not seeing me. Dogs piss on me. Birds land on me. I am a wall that dust scuttles along, that the wind buffets, brushes, nudges. An empty crisp packet scrapes along to feed at my feet. What does it want? To be replenished? I am not a crisp packet refill station, I tell it, in silence.
There was wild garlic by the side of the road where I was posted today, Totteridge: A bit more rural than usual. I picked it and put it in my soup. There was also an abandoned sofa right where I was assigned to stand. I was surprised to find that the sun-warm sofa did not smell of urine and was comfortable. I lounged through my work. Some days are better than others.
I am lost and found in a still standing instant. The cars blur but still I count on them. Am I merely an appendage? I the sentient crud that clings accidentally to the purposeful counting hand, like the turd of a goldfish, slow motion flag-like flapping from its anus. A statistician's cipher, statistical statistic, I statisticise, collapsing in on that singular point in space and time, the singular point of it all. But what is the point, all this? The cars can't all have places to get to. There aren't so many places as that.
At least I am accountable. It is vindicating. There's a man who drives around London checking all of the enumeration agents are at their posts. If he didn't check we could just fake our data sheets and lie in bed all day. So this enumeration overseer visits on random days. Not often, but the method has a panopticonic stealth. You never know when he might be a little way up the road watching. But I never misbehave on purpose. I know how important my job is, the figures I produce are vital. I have a degree in town planning so I do know about it.
Sometimes I can hear my brain decaying, seeping out of my ears and dripping into the gutter. All that studying to end up doing this. So I remind myself. The design of the whole city hinges on my counting. And yet it doesn't... But if litter could vote. If fumes could... I'd be Duke – no – I'd be Count. Ha! Count von Zählen - roadside ghost-god presiding over the surging commuter veins, engine thunder, and lunglorn petrol; with eyes that skim the passage of time, the passages of tin, of boxed up human flesh zooming endlessly. I see faces in the fabled long grass of sunny weekends, darkening. I stay curtained in on the weekends.

I am being replaced by a little metal box, I'm sure of it. They count vehicles. I'm convinced they'll install these everywhere and sack us all. Metal boxes don't need a pension, don't have sick days.
A pneumatic hose is stretched across a road. One end of the hose is plugged off to keep dirt and water from being sucked into the hose, and the other end is connected to what looks like a metal shoebox on the curb. Each time a vehicle drives over the hose, a pulse of air is generated which is detected by an air switch in the box. It counts the vehicle axles, and if two hoses are stretched across the same lane in parallel, it can determine vehicle speed and axle spacings, as well as the direction of travel.
Ned Ludd! Thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee. I'll have to sabotage these infernal shoeboxes on my own – accompliceless. It is apt that they should resemble shoe boxes, since a sabot is a shoe. A wooden shoe. They threw them into the automated looms to sabotage them, and the Luddite was born. So I am told. I'd better get me a sabot. A clog to clog up the mechanism, ha!
So I went and broke one in the night. It was very difficult. I'd imagined just stamping on it a bit but the thing is probably designed to be impervious to the hardest kick a drunkard can bestow (even one wearing clogs, which I wasn't). I had to saw through the chain that locked it up and then throw it off a stairwell a few times. I managed to dent it quite a bit. Maybe it was still in working condition. But I threw it in the Thames. It can count the fish.
The pointlessness hit home almost immediately. I had only succeeded in costing some faceless company a few quid. I was a minor nuisance. I found myself counting cars in my head on the way home as if in recompense. To placate the statistical gods for the hole I made in their proceedings. I got a beer and sat on the curb, my clicking-thumb twitching empty-handed, Lady Macbething, as if a certain feverish count of clicks would make up for the drowned box.
Well, I haven't lost my job after all. They seem to be keeping me on despite my non-metallic human body. I will try to be more of a metal shoebox from now on. I'll know no hardship. I'll be a hard ship. A shard hip. The fossil of a shard of hip. The lost dust of a fossil of hardship. I will reach the end bravely, gladly, goodly. I will go mad. Since the only glad here is mad glad.
My judgement begins to bend. I was listening to a documentary about lichen on radio four. Fascinating. Lichen can endure severe dry periods, when there's no moisture to thrive on, by entering a metabolic suspension called crytobiosis. In this state they can endure extremes of temperature, radiation and drought. I was more than usually captivated by this and wanted to turn up the volume so I went pocket searching to turn the knob. I couldn't find it. Then I tried to follow the wires from my ears to find the radio. But there were no wires. There were no headphones in my ears. My head swam in a spinning garland of lights and the documentary fell silent.
Hearing voices? Yes. I remembered the pocket radio had been broken for two years. I sat down hard on the cold pavement. O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.
I made it to retirement age just in time. The metal shoeboxes have taken over. They say there are to be no new human recruits in the trade. They're hoping we all quit, retire, or die. I almost did all three at once. It was precarious. But I'll stick to the one. Retire dignified and step out as calm as I can.
It's been years now but no escape at night: I dream I'm back on the roadsides again, clicking away. But something is always slightly wrong. Rain or a faulty counter. The data sheet blows away in the wind. Exasperating. I dream so much you'd think I miss it. Then there's a worse dream in which I'm shrunk down to a pea-size and made to work inside a Metrocount box. I am its live-in innards counting day and night. Eating only flies and ants (the size of dogs to me). Soon this is indistinguishable from the anguish of my not dreaming days. My figurings are weak. I don't know which this is any more. I don't count any more.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Beetroot.



Since antiquity the beetroot has been credited with arousing, curing, purging, and cleansing all manner of bodily conditions or ailments. Aphrodisiac; promoter of hair regrowth; soother of earache, headache, intestinal pains and chilblains; curer of hangovers, dandruff and garlic breath.

So much for all that. Suffice to say it is a powerful little thing. And since today’s abiding paradigm of food value is healthiness, recent focus has for the most part been on the beetroot’s vitamins and minerals, its antioxidant and anticarcinogenic properties, and even its alleged capacity to lower high blood pressure. But I say again: so much for all that. I am not denying the importance of health or medical history, I just want to explore the beetroot for myself unmediated by statistics and factoids.

Beetroot occupies an odd place in the hearts and minds of human beings. Their tenacious red pigment is obviously the central point of focus. It stains hands, chopping boards and usually any other ingredient it touches. Because it gets everywhere, it tends to be viewed as an irritating side effect. But isn’t there also something deliciously menacing about the incarnadine stain of a beetroot? Doesn’t a chopped beetroot provoke bloody thoughts on the fringes of our minds? We may rationally know we are chopping up a root vegetable, but we must also subliminally register the visual similarity to the gory work of a butcher or perhaps even more sinister instances of bloodied hands and knives. I for one always have the faint sensation that I am slicing open a heart when I chop a beetroot. In the indistinct basement chambers of the mind, blood and beetroots have an inescapable partnership.

There is also the distinctive earthy taste. A taste so earthy that the uninitiated beetroot eater might reasonably ask if there has been some mistake in the preparation: if some actual earth has not accidentally got into the vegetable itself.

In fact, geosmin is the organic compound responsible not only for the earthy taste and aroma in beetroot but also for that pleasant smell which occurs when rain falls on dry earth.
But to return to the vegetable itself and engage with it in person, instead of through lyrical hand-waving postulations, I went and bought a fresh raw beetroot for myself. I cleave towards minimalism, thrift and ease. Mainly just thrift and ease.

Beetroot. A most magnificent thing. Like an embarrassed potato, blushing, with a fancy outfit.



So I’m going to have a large beetroot as a meal in itself. It’s actually even easier than baking a potato. All you have to do is wash the beetroot, cut off most of the stalk, leaving an inch or so on and then wrap it in kitchen foil and put it in the oven for 45 minutes. As with potatoes you can alter the oven time for the size – since mine is huge I’ve left it in for an hour.





When you take it out of the first you’ll want to remove the skin. This can be done with a kitchen towel (to stop you burning your fingers). Apply a tiny bit of pressure and it rubs off almost effortlessly.



This done, you can chop it up into bite-size chunks and season it with salt, pepper and a little extra virgin olive oil. With exciting visuals, a unique taste, a subtle aroma and a pleasingly crunchy taste (quite unlike the mush of a baked potato), I assure you that the baked beetroot is a consummate experience all on its own.
Just make sure you don’t get a fright when it stains both your liquid and solid excreta a deep red. There’s no need to phone a doctor. It’s not blood. One really shouldn’t end a beetroot rhapsody on such an unseemly theme so I shall now try to redirect your thoughts with this picture of my friend Jack holding slices of beetroot into the shape denoting how we should all feel about eating them.

Friday, May 18, 2012

Floccule

Untitled by William Kraemer
Untitled, a photo by William Kraemer on Flickr.

The long cloud ivories await God's hands
To play sky piano for dulcet rain.
Looking on, a fading moon understands
That this great instrument was formed in vain:
No hands will come to carve the mist a song,
No ditty will jostle the cold high blue
The disappearing moon knows just whats wrong:
The day steadily brightens hue by hue,
Twisting the vapourous octaves awry
And slow motion smudging an un-played scale.
Now, godly digits could emerge and try,
but the ruins of cloud would say in braille:
"We are some scattered blobs of water fluff,
piano-time was just a luck-born bluff."

Thursday, March 08, 2012


Trope

A trope tree, bearing tropes where leaves would be,

Appears to me as Autumn’s tarnished hearts

Are gradually charging the auburn fee

Whose sum is fallen skins, as Green departs.

I wait - and soon a trope is loosed to twist,

A paper drill bit spiral-slicing air;

Perhaps aware that it cannot desist,

Being deciduous beyond repair.

Unlike a leaf, this trope - now in my hand -

Blushes and says ‘I won’t blemish or rot.

I will stay fresh forever, a live strand

In the mind’s formaldehyde, unforgot.’

It’s plain to see this is a hopeless trope:

Craving a summit, barely on a slope.


Alternate Endings:

i

What hubris! Such audacious ego scope!

I’ll lay the blame for all this on the trope.

ii

Since I’m the one whose talent stands or falls

This trope alone cannot improve my scrawls.

iii

Beholding this ambition’s foolish scope

I’m shamed into disowning my keen trope.

iv

But, sad to feel that I admit no hope

It sinks into decay - thus dies my trope.

v

‘Doubtful’, I tell it, ‘as I’m the one whose

Lack of expertise makes certain you lose’.

vi

You will rot within a minute or two,

I say, and it begins to, right on cue.

vii

Hopeless, I tell the trope, this is my first

Sonnet, you won’t live very long un-nursed.

Sunday, March 04, 2012




A Paper Fate

I am a character in a second hand book. Possibly out of print. Probably lost, forgotten behind other books on the bookshelf and caked in dust. I don’t really know. But in here I live out my life again and again in textual silence, as long as the ink remains – maybe even afterwards, I’m sure I’d remember my lines and directions. I’ve had enough practice.

Because you see a book, when left alone, reads itself through at a steady pace, like an audienceless cast rehearsing a play. Then, reaching the end, and knowing nothing but itself, it returns to the beginning to re-live it all again, exactly to the letter and at the same speed, to the metronome of paper.

You’ve no idea how I yearn to get done with some parts speedier than others – or skip them altogether. The first dozen pages of chapter three always fill me with a heavy boredom: a whispered altercation with a pompous, half-deaf librarian. It could contain humour but it doesn’t, it just drags on and gets nobody anywhere. Sometimes I want to stop whispering and shout at the old fool but I can’t. It isn’t written that way.

And there are parts I’d love to linger and enjoy. Like in chapter six when I’m lying in her arms, the half empty bottle of wine forgotten on the window sill and the warm sounds of a summer evening reaching in through the window as she explains the layout of her childhood home in vague murmurs and I listen enraptured. But no. My cruel prison admits no tarrying or fast forwarding; I must march to the beat of the page. No escape, no entreaty.

It is currently chapter four and she is here next to me. She is talking but I’m not listening. I don’t need to. I know her lines by heart. My mind wanders.

I love the soft curves of her hair, the way it frames her round face. But I’ll never tell her. I’ve no choice. And she’ll never know how I adore those dark green shoes she keeps on the mantle piece, how I’d like to borrow them since they look to be my size; nor will I ever be able to tell her how upset I get in chapter one when she snubs me.

I wonder what she really thinks of the fact that I make her porridge for breakfast after she stays over. I can’t interpret her faint smile. Is she laughing at me? Sometimes I worry it might be mockery, as though she might be laughing at my servile politeness and how it detracts from the unspoken rules of romance - rules that simmer beneath even the pulse of a one night stand. I should be more confident and manly perhaps.

Maybe she is also pleased when I am making her porridge since she knows that it is all I can do, that I am bound to do what I do. Is there even any point in my interpreting her glances since she, like me, may be thinking anything at all, erring wildly from the dictates of the dried ink mandate.

Perhaps she doesn’t think anything at all. Perhaps it’s a mistake that I have been given a mind when I have no mouth of my own, no means of communication. It must be a mistake – or a punishment? – that I while away the hours between my paper appearances with the thoughts that cannot but be infertile, no matter how powerful or important they may feel to me, since they are trapped in stagnant nowhere, never to be aired, never spent – as coins lost at the bottom of a well.

My mind even wanders sometimes while I’m delivering my lines… increasingly so. I’m not an actor you see so the quality of my delivery is not an issue, it can’t change. The text is the same every time and text is all I am. I am bound to be the same every time.

So it must be a mistake that I have these thoughts. I’m not even an agent. No physical apparatus. No motile volition. How do I even know the word motile? I’ve never read it anywhere, I’ve never read anything. I don’t properly exist. So where are these thoughts? Where will they end up?

Perhaps someone will find them, hear them somehow, as oddly and inexplicably as I came to have them. It’s a wretched hope but I cling to it: that my thoughts will seep from this exile to turn up for someone to know. To be found is not to have been lost in vain.

But now I’m about to speak, about to tell her I like her smile and then, wincing with embarrassment, flick my cigarette away into the Thames, exhaling a spout of smoke. Then she’ll inch along the balustrade to push her shoulder affectionately into mine, mumbling happy sounds into my chest pocket as we watch the cigarette’s slow motion purler into the low river. Here goes –