I have often wondered how I might react if, when walking over a bridge, my hat were to be blown off my head by the wind and cast over the balustrade down into the Thames. The immediacy of the realisation that my hat was lost forever would surely quell any upset or franticness – save perhaps a start and a little gasp of regret. Then, calmly, I'd watch the hat flipping and spinning down into the water, always at low tide in my imagination. And I’d be already calm long before it hits the water. It is the immediacy of this resignation that appeals to me. Yes, I realise it now, this imagined scenario of losing a hat to the river, losing it first to the wind and then to the river, this immediate loss, it appeals to me! Sudden resignation must taste odd and serene. I run through this scenario in my head often. I'm sure there must be a cathartic pleasure in the snap-irreversibility of the loss. I watch myself in my mind’s eye watching the hat flip and spin, not yet even in the water, and then when it hits, watching it float off downstream, smiling, my pulse temperately keeping time, making as healthful music as ever. I'd wish the hat well in its travels and thoughts of a new hat would warm my bare head.

In the morning we go

To the place with the logs
And with other dogs.

In the morning we go
There’s grass and trees
My face by his knees
He moves very slowly
And it's almost holy.

In the morning we go
To run! now's our chance
While he’s lost in his stance
But I stand by and guard
Close, within a yard
While he waves and sways about
Churning foes, slow, in and out.

In the morning we go
I can’t see the others in the fight
If I could I’d surely bite
But loyal as my kind must be
I stand by him and try to see
Try to stand as firm as a rock
Working maybe as a block
Somehow fending off the ghost
He battles daily after toast.

In the morning we go
Even if I am no help
I stay calm and daren’t yelp
And every day he wins I think
At least when I see him blink
And straightn up, pick up our leads
The enemy surely recedes
And then the day begins a new
I bark and sigh, as you say: “phew!”
Run! I frolic, full of glee
I’m glad he’s beaten that Tai Chi.

Staples



As a child of about nine years old I was told by some school friends that someone’s mother or father, I forget which, was planning to melt down staples and make the world’s largest staple in an attempt to achieve the Guinness world record for the largest staple. Thoroughly enthused, I set about collecting old staples, of which there were thousands, from unused patches of the classroom display boards. I can’t figure out why (or if) I was actually allowed to do this since it isn’t the least bit edifying and (if I remember correctly) we weren't allowed in the classrooms during lunch or breaktimes... but I certainly remember standing there for what felt like hours (but may only have been minutes) troubling my feeble young finger nails with the pluck-pluck-plucking collection of hundreds of staples, all the while day dreaming rapturously of the stardom I might perhaps attain with a possible mention in the Guinness book of records.

Nothing, as far as I know, ever came of it all.

Some Words

Butter sweet victory.

Hispectacled (Hispanic and bespectacled).

The mine newt is the smallest of the newts.

A nanometre (one millionth of a millimetre) is how much a fingernail will grow in a second.

Hypotyposis - Vivid description of a scene, event, or situation, bringing it, as it were, before the eyes of the hearer or reader. (OED.)

At the slender hands of fate.

Pond scum is our noble ancestor. Though it is not often the subject of totemisation or deification. Is there an ancient god of algae?

Freudian ship.

Voracio: the hungrier brother of Horatio.

What do the curtains think? What do they think of me?

He turned out to be a bugler, not a burglar. The police let him go.

I am an ant on the wall past which a school mistress leads an unruly child by the ear. I understand nothing. They are mysterious giants. My antennæ tap onwards.

A truly old saw will remorselessly rust in dendrological rings which, although mimicing the circular years plotted inside a tree trunk, actually plot the years of sawing them down.

Can you water plants with saliva?

Our words dip their bare feet in ink buckets and walk the papers of our notebooks. See these inken footprints? Thoughts have walked here.

Apple Simulacrumble (- a poem from the oil dungeon)

I've had a thought, or p'rhaps its two
That while I'm here, my mind is goo,
That while I wait and wait for five oclock
Sitting on my Sisyphean rock,
Lingering unwatched and falsely free
Pretending I'm at work with industry
All I gain is money in the bank
While my brain is emptying to blank
Back to how it was before the first...

...Ichthyoids sprouted legs and clambered out of the algae.