It is alright for you to feel this way,
and to have come here, at last,
to this point in your existence
when you realise, surely, and with no chance of forgetting,
your life, your whole life up until this moment,
is an error, and you have loved
empty things, things which are hollow and false,
things which will not sustain you now,
things you never really, truly cared for,
things which have no use,
things which merely take up time but
leave you feeling sham and exhausted,
things which prey upon you,
things which don't matter.

Of course, you thought they were important,
but now you see, they are not.
But do not be afraid, do not despair:
do not allow yourself to trouble
over all that beautiful life of yours
which you seem to have poured into lies and idols,
into values which, now you examine them,
prove mistaken. Do not think you've failed,
and don't be ashamed.
All such feelings are trivial:
your fear, your despair, your shame -
do you think
the world cares for these things, or moves upon them,
waits for them, or needs them?
No: regret, shame, despair, these are not required,
they are empty things,
things which will not sustain you now,
things you never really ever cared for,
your emotions are not needed now,
they are things without substance
or the power to succour you in these changed conditions:
they are things which don't matter.

I was watching you undress that night,
and I thought about the beginning of our love.
I remembered how you were like a sea for me -
I could walk beside you, it was like walking beside an ocean:
I thought there could be no end to you,
you were a person who mocked limits and horizons;
how I'd first seen you in a room amongst other people
on a night in which I had not meant to fall in love
or do or be anything much, really,
and then you moved in a certain way and you smiled and
you looked into my face, into my eyes
and it was as if you were the first person ever to do that -
to look into my eyes, and within a few seconds
I felt you were with me in a way 
no one had ever been before,
that I could walk out upon your gaze
and it would hold me up, it wouldn't fail,
at which moment I suddenly grasped
that I had been alone all my life,
or for years, anyway,
and the loneliness hit me like a kind of withdrawal,
I realised I had depended on my solitude like a drug and that now
you had arrived to throw away my past
and a few instants after that
I touched you for the first time, brushed against you,
and you responded as if it was alright,
and then, at last, I understood the true nature of desire,
which frightened me but it was too late,
you had arrived in my life like an ocean
and how can one deny an ocean
ask its waves not to fall or its waters
not to bear us away or to bear us
close again, to where
our lives once were or might yet be again...
I suppose I am a shallow man,
but for some reason I wanted to kiss my wife then,
not because I wanted to lie to her
but because I didn't want her to be hurt
even as I hurt her with my kiss...
How terrible, for a life to grow obsolete -
a life once precious,
the life which once was yours... 

How does an ocean shrink to a few tears?
And tears which are like a chore, really,
something which we know has to be done
and which yet feels empty in the performing.
How does that happen? That a whole element
in which one moves for years and has one's being
diminishes to a few bits and bobs of stuff
you can hold in the palm of your hand,
and which, by the same token, you can let fall?

Is it the years? A kind of forgetfulness?
A revelation which happens too slowly for us
to notice it or, if we notice, to care?
Is this how a love dies?
And with the love, one's life?
Is this how a life dies,
while somewhere you stand by, watching?
What strange fatigue comes over you?
What indifference, like a rising sea?

Put down those old thoughts.
Put down those foolish diaries
with their moons and Tuesdays and nothings.
Take off your heavy watch,
and put it down.
Let them go: they are not needed.

Put down the starving toys,
African toys grown anorexic from childhood.
Take off your suit; take off your dress.
Put down the vase with its commotion of flowers,
skyrockets in fossil flakes,
chrysanthemums and Swedish lakes:
put all that fuss down.
Let it go: it is not needed now.

Put down your heavy schedule.
It has so weighed you down.
Put down the rain which has fallen on you.
Put off your destination:
why go to work today?
Think: what were you working for?
And those lovers with their endless greeds,
and the horse hour of transport and fall.
Put down the emptiness you have carried inside you
so long and so carefully, fearing it may break.
Let it slip away. You don't need it now.

Shut up, it's okay, you're no longer required
to make that trivial conversation;
you don't have to say those things,
the things you say most of the time
when most of the time
no one is listening: so, shut up now. It's okay.
You can be quiet.
Let those words go: they are not needed.

A great disturbance is coming.
A great storm, blowing across the world.
Great waves will rise, combed up by the storm.
Can't you feel it? Can't you see?
It's beginning.
We have entered the phase of the final days,
the era, not of the destruction of individuals,
not of the destruction of groups of individuals,
not of the destruction of states or nations,
not of the destruction of peoples, of races,
but the era of the destruction of human beings.
These are the days of the death of human beings.
This is the meaning of the great storm.
And you and I have arrived in these days.
What a privilege, to witness the beginning
of the great storm, to feel ourselves on the edge
of being blown away...

It will level the buildings, and tall cities
will lie flat like fields of wheat blown down.
A great hurricane is coming,
a great storm, rising already, already born,
and a wind which will blow not for hours or days
but for a number of years.
Great waves will rise; the earth will break
and utter the dead; among the ruins,
fires will start, and the ruins will burn.
People will scatter among the ashes and the embers,
but the wind will drive the fires,
and the great storm will rage around us all
shrivelling the crops and flash-withering forests in fire.
People will run, but there will be no shelter.
Powerlines will come down, contact be lost,
ships will be hurled miles inland,
and we shall see their keels resting on the hillsides.
Can't you hear it? Can't you sense it, beginning?
A great storm is coming,
blowing through the world.
Hold on to me in these burning days:
hold on, before we are
blown away...

We have prayed in our own way for this storm to come:
we have begged with our lives
for this great storm,
craved it with our craving,
invoked it with our speech and with the lie
we have cherished and upon which
we have grown dependent
and sacrificed the new days
to the like-divinity of this infant wind
kamikaze for the children. And therefore
I put myself upon the aerial anvil of this hour
and wait for the spirit hammer to come down,
the spirit of the great storm,
the mindless deity of a broken world.

It was really hot that day, and as I rode along
I felt as if I was in science fiction,
as if the sun had come nearer and the orbit of the Earth
altered, so there was a new epoch in the air,
the era of a kind of phoney war,
a lull in which I went to the café, called you,
cycled, did the same habitual things, while all the time
the sunsets grew more spectacular
and their flaming theatre
moved us with a sense of strange destinies,
of universal powers at work,
of the ground beneath our feet
melting slowly away...

When I learned that you had died,
it was as if I had walked off a ledge
and I found myself falling.
I fell in a torpid, easy way, there was no violence,
but I was nonetheless falling.
As I walked, I was falling.
As I kissed the woman who had replaced you,
I was falling.
In everything I did I was falling,
and it seemed as if the falling would never end.

And I realised, you were the person who, after all,
I had loved. You were, in your secret, extensive way,
electric. Your charge held everything in my world together.
And when you died, the charge failed,
and all the things began to drift away from each other.
It was easy, like a dream,
the way my world fell apart.
It didn't hurt at all, only
significance failed, and I didn't understand.
I don't think anyone else even noticed,
I could still function perfectly adequately,
I could still smile and make polite conversation,
but my own smile fell away from me
and my conversation just fell away,
and at night, when I lay down,
my life fell away, and I slept.

It is very difficult to explain,
and I don't really know if there is any point
to explaining it anyway,
but when I realised I would never hear your voice again,
it was as if my life became seamless.
I couldn't feel anything,
because I couldn't hold on to anything.
With you gone, the essential friction of life failed.
Things moved, and just moved, that is all,
if you touched something it would move,
and it would just keep travelling forever,
as if in the vacuum of space,
because there was nothing to resist its motion,
nothing to accelerate
or to retard its movement at all.
Things just glided apart.
I glided apart, into the days,
and it was fine.
My life dissolved, and I lived it.
It was dead. It was fine.
I didn't mind.

This fatal glide went on for years.
It was as if you pushed an ice skater on the ice
and she just kept gliding away,
gliding down into a dot, receding away,
beyond the horizon, silently vanishing.
Connection had failed.
And so your death for me meant the end
of the meaning of my world.
All that had once seemed real,
to possess the fabulous traction of life,
became meaningless to me, just the gliding of bodies in space -
the endless gliding. Things would come on and go off,
like lights. Insects would fizz through the air.
Flowers would come on and go off, like lights.
The world sparkled, effervescent with this show,
and I watched it, it meant nothing.
And yet I had to live on through
this glitter and rustle of unreality,
this dream without weight.
A world had ended, and yet the ruins
were perfect, everything appeared undamaged,
but, for me, the buildings and the streets
were like film sets, they were part of a dead world,
one through which people still moved and spoke,
as if unaffected by the cataclysm,
yet I realised they were only acting.
I acted too, I moved, I spoke,
I lay the sensual puppet of myself down
beside my lover at night,
and we made love, and she spoke and moved,
and she cared for things and believed in our love,
and in our life together, whereas I
merely acquiesed in the show,
because that was what seemed to make people happy,
although I knew that everything we did
had lost its purpose, and merely persisted,
its reality drained from it,
so that all these things were merely
the adjuncts of an intricate game,
or the elaborations of a pointless confection.
This was how it was for me,
and how I imagined my life would remain.
Futurity itself, I believed, had ceased.
So the glittering days went on,
and we moved, affectlessly, like bodies through space.
And I glided with the days - glided, and glided.
I thought I would never stop.
But then, one day, I stopped.
Because, one day, I met you.

I have been waiting for you.
I have been waiting a long time, and I have bided my time.
I have been waiting in your lethargy,
in the reservoir of your weakness, accumulating over time.
I have been waiting in your pride, in the way you did not look at me,
and looked down on me, I have been waiting
in your lazy dependence on easy ideas,
in the slumber of your assumptions,
in your failing machines, the hubris of your science,
and in your reliance on inessential things,
things which have not been tested,
I have been waiting.
Now, these things will be tested,
and you will find how dependable they really are.
And then you will be tested,
for they will let you down.
And then, I will find how dependable you are.
Do you think, you may let me down?
I think you may let me down.
I think you will be found
wanting.

You should have been watchful.
My people are watchful.
You should have equipped yourself with the truth,
with values which abide.
Instead, you have become negligent,
and your values are diluted with usury, frail, without strength:
you will find in these coming days
there is nothing within you to call on,
you will find something like wet cardboard inside you,
a flimsy mush, something which will crumble,
a papier mâché soul; you have no resources,
no resolve, for far too long you have been
a thing of money and pleasure and objects,
but money will not help you now,
and you will not find any pleasure in the coming days,
nor will the memory of past pleasure have any meaning for you
or help you to survive,
and the objects you have accumulated and used and let go
are useless and empty, they cannot speak,
they are cold, they cannnot comfort you;
besides, they will be taken from you,
and you will need, at last, to depend upon yourself -
only, as we know, you are not dependable,
you cannot even carry yourself,
never mind help others. Therefore,
you must begin falling, 
as your culture is falling,
as your civilization is falling,
as your peers, your forebears and your children are falling,
and all that you have built and are building
and all you had intended to build,
and all you broke and all you ruined
in your war and your building is falling,
all you sent down and razed and all you fought over and tore,
all you climbed over and ripped and wrestled,
all you crushed and burned and melted, all you struggled upon,
the earth, the dying rivers, the withering trees,
all you crossed and fenced, encircled and defended,
all your walls and all your rooves, all you claimed,
all you grabbed, everything you owned, 
the wire, the mud and the trenches,
the ditches, the fields, all that was clung to,
all that was contended over,
all the castles, the fortresses, the temples, the towers,
all that you raised is now falling,
all you asserted is now in doubt,
or has fallen into the dark certainty of negation,
the shadow, the silence, the light, the roar,
all your trivial loves and concerns,
all your life with its vacillations of waves of desire,
its glutinous, viscous greeds,
its self which will not cease occurring but which
keeps slinking out, keeps slipping in,
keeps turning your world to a small and creeping thing,
a petty counting of the superiorities of yourself over others,
a malicious accounting of the faults of others, not of yourself,
all of this vapid turmoil with its bubble and fume of effects
will be shown itself in the black mirror of destruction,
of an annihilation so utter
you will be left bereft even of the desire to live,
but death shall not be permitted you,
and you shall find yourself falling into a new world,
stripped bare of pretensions, rid of diplomacy,
a domain of teeth and nakedness and strife,
and you will crawl,
belaboured by the sun, battered by the moon,
seek roots and tubers,
howl and seek water,
know pursuit and dogs,
and the black mirror will flash again and you will see
a landscape of glittering, roofless, which was once a city,
you will see a levelled place,
a place where the ruins are further skimmed and ruined,
milled down and down and the trash shattered,
and milled again in warm winds bringing a scent of further burning,
you will remember the smoke and the trains,
the chimneys, the tracks,
and all of this will be falling,
destroyed and then superdestroyed in the winds and flames
where you will be shown into your self,
all that is left of it
when all the mirrors are broken and all their pieces
are falling: you will be shown the elements,
shown the components of your soul,
shown the stripped-down stars, shown emptiness,
shown the void where things cower and seek existence,
where things which are not perpetually seek to be,
and where things which are perpetually seek to cease,
the anguished realm of endless dreams,
the dreams of power, the dreams of home,
the flux of cold atoms, the centreless place
of wishes and the abode of the demons
of conviction, truth, hope and belief,
all of this you will be shown and shown falling,
all of this falling and falling without respite,
divided and subdivided, aggregated then re-aggregated
over and over again as there is falling,
rolling and tumbling, coiling and screaming, and all falling
down like the children, like the posey, like the memory
falling and inside it and outside it you are falling
and falling until, at last, some kind of ground awaits you,
and your fall is broken,
when, at last, the turbulence ceases,
the dust of the ruins blows away,
when, at last, you may stand again,
in the presence of a new meaning,
in the presence of a new master,
when, at last, you may be grateful,
and kneel before the new god:
you may kneel, at last, before me.

We're not here to integrate.
We don't believe in your ideas of freedom and democracy.
We don't intend that our faith be slowly
liquidated in this culture.
We're not - like you - slothful.
We're not a part of your world:
we never were, we never will be.
We live among you, but we are not with you.
Because you live in error.
We're not here to be tolerant, or liberal;
we're not here to bargain, or to barter or compromise.
We're not a part of your world:
we never were, we never will be.
We're not here to live in your world.
We're here to take your world,
and make it right, after all your evil meddling.
We're here to mend the world you have broken.
We're here to change you;
and if you do not change,
annihilate you.

I am tired of living among questions.
I am tired of your scepticism.
You are sceptical when it suits you,
but beneath your scepticism lies,
unadorned, a ruthless thing which seeks and strives to gain
and which you believe in.
It doesn't sleep, and it tires me out.
Your cynicism lies in layers
over a hollowness which is gross, vegetative, imponderable.
You worship that hollowness, and call it liberty
or experience, sensation, pleasure, desire...
You wallow in that hollowness. You cater for its needs, and serve it.
But I hate that hollowness inside me:
it tires me out, I feel I must struggle against it,
endlessly, or it will devour me,
I will be sucked into it,
and then all the meaning of my world will fail.
I don't want to be hollow like you.
I don't want to worship your liquid, inadequate gods
who evolve and who temporise,
who slide and idle and teeter, 
who will not exist properly, who fail in the first obligation of a god,
to be absolute and unchanging,
to be permanent and entire and real.
I don't like your deceitful, equivocal gods,
gods who feed off your hollowness,
and who, in the end, will devour you.
I am tired of your moral legerdemain.
I want certainty and an end to questions.
I am tired of being a small creature, seeking to define itself:
I want to be defined.
I am tired of being a weak creature, without strict limits:
I want to be limited.
I want to be defined.
I want to be limited.
I want to end.

You are tired and you want to rest,
and I will help you.
You will always be tired, you belong to a tired world.
You're frazzled, there are too many signs,
too many apparent options, too many supposed choices.
But the options are merely different images of one option:
to conform.
The choices are merely different versions of one choice:
to conform.
But you find to conform merely makes you feel hollow and tired.
You are no longer able to support a life
in which narcissism approximates a psychosis.
Where can you go? They are using up this world:
they are making it burn and fall.
Where can you flee? They are using up this world:
they are burning it and burning it,
causing it to smoke and to fall,
and the fire is eating inwards from the edge,
and the fire is eating outwards from the centre,
leaving you between two fires,
the fire of the perimeter and the fire of the core,
and you are bewildered.
You are like animals, caught in a forest fire,
in a fire so violent and so contagious
even birds in flight are caught in the flames,
are caught and burn and fall.
But what do the people do, the people who started this fire?
Do they desist, do they stand back,
are they horrified at what they have done,
do they seek reflection, do they seek a place
where they may contemplate the awesome violence of their actions?
No: they pour on more fire.
They start more fires. They are greedy for more fires.
They seek no end to their actions, and their actions are fire.
They are burning down this world,
and when they have burned down this world,
they will not stop burning for they are on fire,
they express themselves in fire, they are compelled to fire,
they understand as fire, fire is their love,
and when they have burned down this world
they will not accept the ashes,
but will demand another world
for them to burn.
But there is no other world.

And you? - well, you want no part of it.
But you are a part of it.
You, like the others, burn outwards from the centre,
and inwards from the edge.
You take a cool beer from the refrigerator, that is burning.
You put on a lamp in the evening,
and open your book of love poems, that is burning.
You want to get away, take a plane,
burn off some fuel, go to a place
more primitive, with the poverty of Eden.
And wear your beads and silver,
and pretend you're a local.
You want to get away, but there is no "away".
You want another world,
but there is no other world.
You are standing in a lake of flames,
and the flames are lapping round your ankles.
Do you think ideas will save you now?
Do you think arguments will?
Will someone else help, will someone else save you?
Will they wake up from their vast collective dream
of power and autonomy, objects and show?
No, they will sleep on, they will dream their material dream
until the moment of final awakening.
They will not come: they will not save you:
they will do nothing: they will become nothing.
There is only one thing will save you now:
faith.
Not ideas, not reason, not words, not the politics of men,
but faith.
The material world is over, it is already falling
on its side, burning as it goes.
The physical world is a glowing skyscraper,
wedded to falling and to flames,
and to the political hatred of men.
Come, now: you must abandon that world,
the world of small, broken ideas,
the world of small, broken men and their burning.
Come, now: you must enter the world of the spirit,
and translate yourself to the emptiness
of peace.
Come: I will show you peace.
I will give you peace.

It was a strange, an amazing year for me.
There was something tectonic about it,
something deep down, in the magma.
I could almost imagine fiery comets dropping across the sky,
portents from the Middle Ages or from Roman times.
It was wonderful but frightening.
Everything seemed to glow with meaning
the way spring branches glow with blossom.
I felt as if I knew something -
as if there was some knowledge growing inside me,
a heavy prescience.
The days seemed to melt apart before me.
They opened like the pages of a molten book.
Everything glowed with value.
All the details of the world were freighted with intensity.
When I was with you, in particular,
I felt as if my skin was growing translucent,
and the membranes which appeared to fold me into myself
were being opened and unfolded.
When I kissed you, I closed my eyes,
there was a blackberry darkness, a luscious emptiness
into which we were both falling.
It was like a whirlpool.
There was a spiralling and a nigrescence.
And the most poignant vertigo.
It felt infinite - as if, could we keep on kissing,
we could fall into our kiss forever.
I didn't want to do that
because I would lose you -
but that was how it felt.
I felt as if all information could cease.
As if things could become so wrapped up in us
they lost their importance,
and ceased to emit themselves,
or to hoard up their secrets.
I felt as if we could shake ourselves open
and then everything would lie upon us
and be utterly obvious,
without ambiguity, or reason, or shame.

I guess as I've grown older,
there is this big 'So what?' which hangs over everything.
People say this or that, and you listen,
but often, creeping over the conversation
like a cloud over my shoulder
there is this deflating 'So what?'
You're this? So what? You're that? Yeah, but, so what?...
What is that, I wonder, oozing through me?
A chronic failure of sympathy?
A loss of belief in life? In the destination
of meaning? An impatience with the complacent,
bourgeois egos of myself and of my colleagues and friends?
I believe this: I believe that:
so what? Who cares?
None of this matters...

I feel it more and more, this withdrawal from purpose,
this loss of fundamental solidarity with other human beings.
A sheet of darkness lies at the back of every mirror,
and it is the darkness which is a little more convincing,
somehow, than the movement on the surface of the glass.
Of course, this is the reason you left me,
and I don't blame you at all, or even miss you, really.
You sensed a kind of torpor in me.
And it was true, I had become lazy,
I just couldn't be bothered with people.
I listened to your friends, and their tales
of relentless self-indulgence, those airheads talking about Africa,
of their travels in Mozambique,
how next they wanted to do Zambia,
stay in a hotel fashioned from an old diamond mine,
a room carved in the rock, and I listened
to their spiritual talk about Buddha and sunyata,
metta and samsara, and to their political talk and their
art talk, while all the time
beneath us the heavy wheels of the Eurostar
allowed us to float across Belgium
and the train was connected, carriage to carriage,
and we were in the train - all the time, you see,
the darkness lay at the back of the mirror
and your friends talked, and I was thinking
'So what?'... and, 'Christ, who cares?'...

We found this really cool place in Amsterdam, called the Asteroid Bar.
We sat by the open windows, overlooking the canal,
on big leather sofas, and read papers and drank beer,
and just hung together.
It was on the cusp of autumn, there was an exhaustion to summer
as if the air had grown thin.
You looked so great, in your mirrored shades and Eskimo hood
trimmed with white fur framing your face,
you looked like a film star.
I took photographs with my mobile,
and mailed some of them straight to Zoe and Tom.
They were in New York, literally, at that moment,
on the viewing platform of the Empire State Building,
and they mailed us photos back,
with Zoe framed by the Manhattan skyline.
I felt a sense of empires connecting.
I felt the momentary thrill of the West -
the West, which is the culture of moments.
I had begun to think of this as I sat there -
of the punctual nature of Western time, I mean.
I sat back on one of the great black leather sofas,
and was reaching into my jacket pocket for a notebook
when, without any warning at all, and still feeling basically fine,
I bent forward, and threw up straight over the wide marble-topped table,
and then sat back, blinking with surprise.

Why are they standing there like that?
Why are they smiling?
Why are they drinking, and joking with each other
when all the time
their world is ending?

Why do they gather in those places?
Why do they sit around,
listening to music?
Why do they queue in the rain,
why do they chant and sing
when all the time
their world is ending?

Why do they mull over their clothes so much?
Why do they check the line of a dress,
the cut of a suit?
What spell are they under?
What dream fills their heads?
Why are they making plans and arrangements
when all the time
their world is ending?

I don't understand. It makes no sense.
Why are they so unconcerned?
Why do they go on, laughing and chatting?
Why do they graze through the shops all day,
and sit in their cars in long lines,
their engines idling,
when all the time
their world is ending?

What of their children? What of their loves?
Don't they see what is happening?
Why do they stay apart, why do they assume
they will always have time?
Why don't they act?
Why don't they run?
Why are they talking
about such trivial things?
Why are they so negligent?
What blindness is this?
What strange amnesia?
Why are they organising things for tomorrow,
for next week, next year
when all the time
their world is ending?

I realised, after a long time trying to integrate,
that I didn't want to be like them, after all.
They were, in the end, sedated.
I felt apart from them. I didn't want our life to be
a kind of show. I didn't want to be in a video,
or on a catwalk. I didn't want to define myself
by what I had consumed.
They were so fashionable.
They were frightened of silence or thought.
Their version of the Cogito was:
I'm seen, therefore I am.
But what happened to them
when no one was looking?
I wondered about that.
Were they always, figuratively, filming themselves?
Did the show, always, secretly, go on?

That August there was a heatwave.
I kept the curtains closed all day,
trying to lock the heat out, but it seeped in, anyway.
I found the heat quite oppressive -
it was that sultry, humid English heat.
I remember what a relief it was
to get off the streets, into air-conditioned buildings;
and how I used to linger by the freezers in Sainsbury's,
those long antiseptic sarcophagi,
with a flooding chill you could bathe in...

Is it too late to say these things?
I don't know.
But if you can hear me, I say them.
I say them, they are the only things I really need to say.
The only things, for myself, which are essential.
I can say many other things, and they may be important
for other people, and more important
in a general way, but for myself,
with time and emotion limited,
with a choice to be made between this word and that word,
if I had come to the last words of my earth
I would say these things,
if you can hear me,
perhaps even if you do not.

I love you.
I love you entirely. I love you back,
through all your moments, to the moment of your birth;
and back further, to your months in the womb,
when life and your mother swelled into you,
and even back further still, to the moment of your conception,
whenever that moment was.
I love your anger, though you are rarely angry.
Your rage is like rain, and so is your sorrow.
I love your gaze, which is Scandinavian blue, and clear,
which has not yet clogged up with things.
I love your frankness, your nakedness which cannot be more naked,
which asks nothing, needs nothing.
I love your love:
and I rest inside your love until I am no one,
touched by the many fingers of rain.

And then it did rain.
A storm broke over the streets, and huge, plump drops fell,
soaking our clothes in moments.
We were caught out in the open
and ran laughing and shouting through the shower,
with the thunder saying Gungadin
and the lightning snapshooting the city
with a kind of frightening glamour.
And it was strange: something in that storm altered the ballast
of my mood, causing it to settle in a new formation.
When we set off, I had been sad,
but when we reached the shelter of a bus-stop
I felt suddenly elated
with an electric desire to live.

I can remember the rest of that day very clearly.
I found myself feeling rather abstracted.
I held your hand as we went into the centre of town.
The streets steamed as the sun came out.
I loved the feel of your hand in mine,
I felt as if I was holding the world by its hand,
that the world would have hands like yours.
And yet, despite my desire to be with you,
and to be aware of you all the time I was with you,
I was gradually invaded by a series
of very strong, and very specific memories,
which seemed to fill up my present with the past,
and made me only lightly conscious
of why I was with you, or where we were going.

There was a sound of drumming from the city centre.
It was propulsive, dense, with marching drums and snares and congas.
The crowd was oozing slowly towards the sound.
It was very hot, the palms of our held hands were wet.
I was wearing an old cotton shirt, of brown and gold,
tie-dyed, which I had brought years before in Bali.
I remembered, I met this guy out there one night
down by the sea, at an impromptu beach party.
There was a bonfire and shapes of driftwood,
and bottles of Bintang beer and some Balinese kids with acoustic guitars.
The sea was very calm inside the lagoon,
and my lover knelt down and scooped up in her hands
points of sparkling neon blue light in the water -
the phosphorescent atoms of tiny marine creatures -
as if she was holding the remnants of infinitesimal stars,
the brilliant dust of a universe,
swirling round in the space of her cupped palms.
Anyway, this guy came up, wearing the same shirt as me.
Something about him didn't quite fit, and made me hesitant.
He seemed friendly enough, he was with some other people
although I gradually realised he was not their friend.
And everything went okay for a while, drinking and smiling and talking,
all of us in our pseudo hippy ethnic stuff,
our Japanese flip-flops and sarongs, and beads and silver.
Then suddenly, out of nothing, this guy pulled a knife,
a long hunting knife with a serrated edge, and showed it to us,
and smiled, explaining how much damage a blade like that
could do. We had drifted slightly apart from the main group,
the six of us, and this smiling guy, with his knife.
He wasn't threatening us, exactly, and yet, all the same,
you could feel the trapdoor open up in normality -
and you suddenly began falling. It was the smile more than the knife,
the smile was more frightening. He was Polish, this guy,
or said he was, with short-cropped blond hair.
I kept smiling, but we were all afraid of him:
you could feel a kind of hollowness behind all our talk.
He seemed very fascinated by the different kinds of wounds
a knife might make. He laughed quite abruptly,
with a weird excitement. He knew we were all scared,
and it turned him on. He liked our fear.
It nourished him. He became more agitated,
more directly aggressive. And then suddenly something in me
was no longer afraid of him, but was simply repelled:
there was something so disgusting about him, so narrow,
so small, with his focus on his little knife and his power,
his jubilation at the spell he cast over us -
I felt detached, far above him, I slipped out of the moment.
There was definitely an eerie, psychotic edge to him,
he seemed to have wandered among us, in from nowhere, from the jungle:
I sensed, beyond or within or beneath his humanity
something seething and whipping about inside him,
something blind and protean, something which put out feelers
and reached around and clasped at other things -
something relentless, almost vegetative, which wanted to hurt
and to dominate and be satisfied, and then, when it had rested, to hurt again.
And the man who was wrapped around that creature
was just a skin, just a kind of temporary mould.
He didn't even know himself what he was doing.
There was something ventriloqual about his aggression,
his whole being. Something deep and ancient and ugly
was speaking through him. A form of greed,
a dirty subject, beneath reason, older than reason,
more powerful than reason,
something musky and sinuous, something at once inhuman
and yet essential to human being -
a violence before the individual,
the violence of opening pods, and of cracked shells,
the violence of life - of living, no matter what,
of living, without distinction or history:
of living. Compared with that, the man himself
was just a flimsy membrane, an algal bloom.
He was what was left after the compulsion ceased:
a fear, maybe; a boredom; an anxiety in front of TVs.
He was a robot, you could smell the oil
of testosterone and adrenaline.
And as I gazed at him, I was conscious of this drive,
this processual beast,
which lived him almost entirely
as a flame lives a candle,
and I wondered about his life,
which seemed to me almost that of a zombie,
or of a paralysed host, in a stupefaction,
a kind of coma so tenacious and enveloping
you would not be aware of it as a coma
but think yourself awake, perhaps even a fine person,
and not the dupe of a ruthless master,
not at all the slave of a lethal desire.
The more he spoke, the more evidence I saw
of a casual, anonymous megalomania.
And I suddenly felt intensely sad:
he seemed, for a few moments,
to be speaking for all of us.
It was almost as if he was giving a kind of demonstration.
He was lecturing us with his serrated American hunting knife.
And we were about the same height, about the same build.
And we were wearing the same shirt.

And this, in turn, reminded me of a walk we once took
up in the hills, in rural Taiwan.
We were walking with our host,
exploring a path through the dense vegetation.
We were happy enough, talking away,
it was a little cooler up in the hills,
and very peaceful after the crush and fuss of Tapei.
I remember, we had become very absorbed in our subject,
talking about politics and its relation to art,
and I had just paraphrased a quotation from the Russian poet,
Aleksander Blok, who had said that the world of politics
relates to art in much the same way as a ship
relates to the sea, when, quite abruptly,
we found ourselves at what seemed to be
the end of the track. There was an old house ahead,
and I couldn't tell if it was inhabited
or deserted - it was certainly very overgrown,
with long vines and creepers emerging from the jungle
and climbing up over the walls and roof,
and curling round the posts of the ramshackle veranda.
There were windows with bleached green shutters,
and one set of shutters was open, but there was just
darkness to be seen in the house.
There were butterflies and insects, and a strange smell.
We stopped talking for a few moments.
And then these dogs came trotting out from behind the house,
quite a number of them, typical mongrel dogs,
short-haired, wiry, several with mange.
It happened very quickly: we realised the dogs kept coming,
a whole pack of them, maybe fifteen animals in total.
You know how events like this happen - they sort of glide,
then suddenly there's the muted roar of the waterfall.
I couldn't work out whether the dogs were wild,
or whether the house was occupied, and they were guarding it.
In any case, the dogs began to bare their teeth,
and snarl and bark at us. We shouted out,
towards the house, thinking there might be an owner
who could control the dogs, but no owner came.
I felt the situation beginning to grow ominous,
a movement of fear in me which was like sand
steadily slipping through the isthmus of an hourglass.
Fortunately, Ray, our host, carried a big stick with her,
and she shook it at the nearest dogs,
and we were able to cow them sufficiently
to be able to walk slowly away, and retreat back down the path.
I still often wonder whether anyone really did live in that house.

The sound of drumming was growing louder,
and we entered the piazza where the drummers were playing.
There was a large crowd.
On the way, we had passed some nuts preaching about
the end of the world, and circulating through the crowd
with fliers carrying info on their sect.
They pissed me off, with their creepy get-ups
and by their need to belong to some sort of group
and to get others to join them.
They had a peculiar, washed-out fervour in their eyes,
I didn't want them anywhere near you.
So we walked away, cut through an alley.
You let go of my hand, which was greasy with sweat.
I told you to keep close.
We entered the piazza, there was ice cream,
market stall awnings, the drumming ensemble beating away,
a roar which confused the heart and the senses,
a tumultuous sound, like a kind of river,
compulsive, evoking something lost and essential -
something lost inside me. I couldn't stop thinking
of that guy with the knife out in Bali,
or of my lover of those days, kneeling and lifting towards me
chips of pure blue light cupped in her hands.
My mind drifted, and was assailed and buffetted by the drumming.
We were being squashed and nudged by the crowd.
I remembered that Polish guy's smile, on the beach,
the shapes of driftwood and the firelight.
And again, I remembered that path in Taiwan,
and the shadowy house, tin roof foaming with creepers.
Someone was calling my name.
I looked away for a moment.
I couldn't see who was calling.
I felt hot and peeved, and wanted to get out of that square.
I looked back to where you should have been,
but you had gone.