Notes from the Insomniac
Until nothing remains that is surely you
–John Ashbery
by the hug of your belly, I return
warmth from the smack
of the day’s chlorine. The grains
grey, disturb themselves, become
unresolved
in the clinch of the sheet. Your language
abandoned its reflexive long ago; like the
mottled temperature of waking
in a foreign hour, the era of a
different bacteria and noise upon
the stone blurring your tenses knowing
nothing
only that we are breathless
in the mean time, the light
had turned phosphor, struck
our palate with the absurd you
had dismissed as juvenilia
on the doorstep breaking upon
what had failed to settle since
failing to go to sleep, turning
over, the continual delay,
a really, I’m going to get my shit
together kind of week, beginnings
burrowing into endings and give
me a second will you
start the update, will you
remind me tomorrow
but I am also like that. Times
beyond measure, at the unexplainable
interface of, still against a
wall of thought where we
find ourselves closer to that. Failing,
small among the sizing, since
the tempo has softened the edge of
it is both outlined &
inchoate. It doesn’t take much effort to
believe that this mood is in –
compatible with such a barren
climate. Except all of your effort
to match winter, strip the particular
blue knuckles, freezing sloes like icing
your bruises, the
ground, white &
dry & too wet: where you feel less
desperate because everything else is
not too fussed about dying, you
acknowledge
that as soon as the pitch
of your thinking joins the most
distant rhythm, it will have found sufficiency
& will no longer be enough
you can be small
& difficult, an un-jarred
hyphenation where the colour swam
like light investing mud, you can display
the cost of
your labour in the wracked condensation, like
adjectives, like being misunderstood
in spring
you can remain
beautifully un-known in winter, bearding
against the noun, pasting particularity to
collage effect
you can stress
that you are depressed, happy, in love:
in your heist of the abstract you can
be here
but refuse only silence & let me hold
your hand
accept that yes, even in the quiet
melt of notes, the hand cannot quite
keep desperation, drying
leaves, away. A raindrop expands on
impact, something like
spit & the immediate gathering of
what is immaculate in its
dryness, at its periphery, exhaling.
Think of the raked pile in summer,
caked but thronging shade like
infection, like two-inch deep
surface hurting like a certain
reactivity to sunlight, accept
that we may not be desperate
but we will be.
Think of using metaphor,
abandon metaphor for the
depth it demands. I want a
horizontal translation, traversal
across the sound & a desire to
retain the side-step of colour
without hurting for three letters:
for the structure, drawing from the
foreshortened
in the middle of an accelerating
scale, you bite your thumbnail
the taste of a chemical flowers (dehisces)
like a panic attack on your tongue,
thick & fake-like petals. Your mum
flashes about; taking you out of your
daily excretion of the prosaic, unable
to be reassured by the smoothly lit
surface of a distant water-tower, pink,
I feel weak in the hurtling bulk of the
beech saplings, older than I’ll ever
be, or was it in the city, histamine,
you can’t remember
how far the nearest A&E was the last
time this didn’t happen
the clarity, a nipple in its
immensity; the labouring
verbs of trees, an ache for puncture you are
unable to fill. You step with a propulsive
& to delay limit, congealing
fiction to clot the expanse in
something unfamiliar but
close, at least, you wound
the sky, with your life & future,
with thought. Loud and
barbaric the spatial ‘&’, doused
electric like ‘Impressions’ becomes
time, cold & delineated, you turn
back
the prophecy of urine, alternately
clouding & run clear
a flood of headlights, a phone latent
like what you overheard
about wormholes, like refusing to know
the time
from the static
they are strewing themselves, a wounding &
un-wounding of daylight. Heaving in their
return to drama & what changes by afternoon. You
check your phone,
consider an aspect
of the immediate future, I spend time
fuelling a subjunctive, like the swell of dust in
a new interface, or emotion,
clotting
Ben Morgan is in a one-man punk band from Suffolk, United Kingdom. He graduated from University College London where he studied English Literature and was published in Savage. He has received no accolades of note.