The next day it rained again,
and so they spent the time talking and lounging around.
I joined them, but somehow couldn't get involved,
and for me the time passed in a bit of a daze.
The conversation drifted with that strange, marine quality,
as conversations inevitably do.
I didn't speak much, but listened.
They spoke about art and the latest exhibitions,
and the latest controversy which surrounded one of the exhibitions.
They talked about colleagues and neighbours,
about people they knew, and people they didn't know.
The issue of global warming was raised,
and we spoke about the end of the world.
Then the conversation returned to art, to poetry,
and they began to discuss the latest clique and its attempts
to elevate itself to significance.
I grew bored at this point, and went out onto the balcony
to smoke for a while and to listen to the rain
thrumming on the wooden canopy above my head.
It was a beautiful, stupid sound,
a noise without intelligence.
How comforting it was. I imagined that, in some way,
this was the real sound of humanity -
of the long, slow process of our lives -
just a constant, low, perpetual drumming,
the noise of the impact of many tiny events happening,
a sound of tectonic, geological stealth,
curiously uneventful, a thing which takes time,
and one entirely devoid of the jagged peaks and troughs
which seem so important to us,
who struggle and strive, imagining a personal end...
I didn't know. But I listened to the rain
and watched the sea moving in the rain.
Then I went back inside,
and they were talking about global warming again,
as we often did, the conversation flecked with glaciers and Kyoto.

I found I couldn't become engaged; but, again, I listened.
At the time, I imagined it was because you were on my mind,
and that all I really wanted to do
was to take you in my arms and to kiss you,
for us to go away, and be lovers;
but now, I am not so sure.
Where could we go, after all?
Where, which is not, in the end, somehow back here
in the provinces of our own company?
To escape with each other, to escape from ourselves,
to make each other different in love -
I suppose that was the dream.
But perhaps I am too old, now -
too passionless, and too sceptical of all that I imagine
could make me happy. And that's okay:
I am an empty province, with wheatfields slowly thrashing in the wind,
or with beet dotting the landscape for miles,
under wide, vacuous skies...

You were wise, what you said
was true: I have got love wrong - I see that, now.
I want love to end things, not begin them -
selfishly, I want love to put a stop to my days,
to this life of mine. Anyway, there was to be no escape,
and we didn't become lovers,
which was okay, because we were good friends,
and so things stood until, a few months later,
we became lovers, and completely fucked up our lives...

They were talking about rising temperatures, greenhouse gases,
the depletion or repair of the ozone layer,
and the precious forests of the world, Indonesia and the Amazon.
And as they talked, I was lost in the continental silence
of my thoughts, looking at the way the links of your lapis lazuli 
necklace flowed down across your skin
and rose over the lean bumps of your clavicles;
and I thought about the people who had found that lapis,
who had dug it up, and whose fingers had touched it,
and who had carved the cylindrical links of the necklace -
how the mineral had flowed through time and space
to come to this point, this subtle locus
of everything, the unpolished rods of the jewellry
rising and falling slightly in time to your breathing,
this dreamy wrinkle, this tiny perception of love
smoothed out and flowing with the sound of my name...

How strange it is that the inside of a person
is so intricate and entangled -
that there are voids and vaginations within us,
within a few sparkling instants of a person,
which are like Idahos or Lincolnshires,
empty counties or states
in which whole stars can burn down and be trivial,
and starlight be covered by dark cloud
as we walk by a lake
so that the rays of starlight are cut off by the cloud
and are no longer reflected in the surface of the lake,
so the lake dims
as if the stars have gone out
and we look away from the water
turning instead to look at each other
realising some things, and mistaking others,
and not caring much about anything
except the world's loss of gravity in our kiss
and our need for each other
greater than our patience or the creeping reappearance
of stars reflected in the lake...

Back then, I still hazily believed in some optimum situation,
a point at which things would fall into place,
and the struggle cease. As they talked about carbon emissions
and collapsing iceshelves, I kept glancing at you,
remembering how on the crowded train you had sat on the floor,
so gracefully, and how the wind through the open windows
had blown your hair around, lifting it up,
so that strands of it were curving up and swaying above your head
as if you were under water or in a place
where gravity was different, or as if we were
in a state magically animated
where things did not behave as normal.
Zoe was talking, her voice beginning to take on
that faint didactic whine, a machine of aggrievement,
lecturing us on meltwater and glaciers, fossil fuels and degrading icecaps -
and you, a little cold, putting on your black leather jacket,
your long thin face as ever somehow
evoking a stillness and a mystery,
the fatal, magnetic conundrum of another person,
with me dreaming of kissing you, and us making our escape
from this rather constricting gathering, and going... -
going elsewhere, to some other world
where we would lie down and be naked,
so naked there was nothing else left to be revealed,
everything else would have been stripped away
leaving us alone, the last place on earth that the world needed
before it, too, lay down
and slept...

Now it all seems unimportant.
Then, it seemed important, or some of it at least.
You seemed important, anyway, and our specious, phantom relationship.
Perhaps the really serious things are the ones
we cannot notice, because they are so pervasive
we live them without knowing,
and they live us, massive and vacant in the assumption.
At this time, though, I felt so ethereal, so drugged,
I was stupefied concerning priorities.
Sometimes through the haze of the dissolution,
I could still vaguely recognise we were not, after all,
so far from Kristallnacht.
My friends and I were really quite complacent.
I felt that, for us, politics had become a form of theatre -
an arena of the audience and the actor.
And only occasionally did the theatre itself seem threatened.
I wondered what would happen
if the walls of the theatre fell down,
if the flaming skyscrapers of our self-conceit
tumbled and melted away,
and we were left suddenly outside a play,
or found ourselves within a different play,
not knowing our roles at all, yet needing to act,
needing new lines to say...
But how comfortable and dead my current theatre was -
and how I would be loathe to leave it,
even though, in the end, the play was tragic
and made me unhappy...

We made lunch, and put some Frank Sinatra on,
which gave me the sense that I was somehow sophisticated,
and we carried on talking.
We talked about the war and America and Iraq,
and global terror. After lunch, wishing you would follow me,
I went back out onto the balcony to smoke,
and listened to the rain again, and watched the rain
falling over the sea.

I don't know what to do without you.
I feel calm, but it is as if my life is over.
The essence, the motor of it has gone.
I feel like a lame duck president:
I'm still in office, and must serve out my term,
but power has crested, and is in decline.
It's absurd, I know, but this is how I feel.
How can that be?...

I first became aware of the sound one August
during a heatwave. I came home late in the evening.
It was very quiet. The neighbours' houses were empty,
with one between tenants, and the other in the process
of being rebuilt with a large extension.
The whole street was pleasantly hushed,
and my house somehow hollow, adrift.
I put down my gear, undressed, and showered.
I spent a long time in the shower, just resting,
listening to the water suckling and tapping,
and feeling the water run over my skin.
I had been working hard, and my mind felt banged,
slightly unfocused, full of scuzz and dither.
After the shower, I dried off a little,
and lay in my white robe on the bed,
staring up at nothing in the soft evening light.
I lay still like that for a while,
on my back, in the quiet room,
staring up at nothing, staring at memories...

Coming downstairs, I opened some wine.
I heard birdsong from the gardens around,
and the clucking and trickle from the fridge.
I lit a cigarette, and smoked for a while,
watching the tv with the sound down.
There seemed to be a documentary on a conflict in Africa -
Sierra Leone, perhaps, or somewhere in the centre, the Congo.
There were bodies in bright shirts lying like trash in the streets,
the melon flash slices of machete wounds clearly visible.
Perhaps it was an archaic dispute, 
maybe it was old footage, or maybe it was current.
Anyway, I finished my cigarette, switched on the dvd,
and lay on the sofa to watch the film.
There was the faint click and whir as the player began playing.
The film started - Takashi Miike's
Shinjuku Triad Society. He's such a cool director, hip, a maverick.
There were rapes and mutilations,
gang warfare in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. I watched it through.
When it had finished, somehow I wanted more.
I didn't feel satisfied. I had the next day off,
and I wanted to wring more from the night.
So I put on another film by Miike,
and, fairly drunk, settled down to watch that, too.

I woke to a sound of gunfire in the rain.
I didn't know what scene I was watching,
or even, for a few moments, which film.
There was a guy in a long white coat,
wounded, surrounded by dead men, lying in the rain.
It was the tropics, the persistent rain of Tapei.
Subtitles flashed on and off beneath the action.
I felt disorientated, unsure of the characters,
ignorant of how much time had elapsed.
Was this still near the beginning of the story?
Had seconds passed? Or hours?
Was this near the end?

Then I began to hear the sound.
It was low, background, virtually inaudible.
At first I wasn't even sure I was hearing it.
Then I thought it must be part of the soundtrack
to Rainy Dog. Yet the scene changed and the noise went on.
And something about the sound caught at me.
I paused the player. The sound was still there. It was slow,
rhythmic, ceasing for a while and then returning,
as if swung on a pendulum into and out of earshot.
It made me think of the creaking timbers of a ship -
a ship at anchor in harbour,
or even a ship becalmed at sea.
Ropes or timbers slowly, methodically creaking.
And as soon as that image occurred to me,
I felt the floor beneath my feet begin to glide,
as if the house was floating, and my balance began to falter.
I stood, and nearly threw up: my head seemed to slide to one side,
the room was travelling like a waltzer,
and all the time my head was filled with those sounds -
different parts of things rubbing against each other,
hemp or oak, beam or spar,
filling me with a sense of a large structure existing in tension,
yet idling, drifting, uncaring, at the mercy
of greater forces, also uncaring.
I listened, and found I could not explain the sound at all.
When it became clear to me that the sound was real,
I had a horrible thought that the house was subsiding,
that the joists or the foundations were failing,
and the whole house was protesting now
just before it would slump into a total collapse.
Yet I couldn't locate the exact source of the sound.
I listened at the walls, put my ear to the floor,
gazed up at the ceilings, went from room to room,
and everywhere there seemed to be that sound,
and everywhere the sound was the same -
the same gentle rock of a ship,
the same creaking, then quiet, then stealthy creaking again -
as if the sound were everywhere in the world,
spread with perfect evenness through the air of the world,
and that it was the world itself which was rocking,
slowly and methodically, becalmed upon an empty sea.

When you were young, you were romantic and amoral.
You believed in absolutes, in peaks and bliss.
Life was meaningful only if it was rising towards explosions,
that was how you loved and felt,
stretching yourself out until you were charged unbearably
and then, in violence or talk, sex or friendship,
you discharged yourself in lightning.
You hated compromise and the mundane.
You craved the sublime, the destruction of present things.
You were stupid and unhappy.
Sometimes, though, life felt real.

Now it passes in a dream and is without a sustainable meaning.
The world has become seamless,
and there is nothing to hold on to.
It is as if you live in the breeze.
There is nothing intractable, nothing belligerent
which will not succumb to the fatigue of the world
and sleep and in the sleeping change
and be nothing. The world is impatient with arrogant things
which believe in themselves and crave their own substance,
the world fills these things with hours and eyes,
and the hours pass and the gaze moves on
leaving in you only a faint and bitter residue,
your grief or your happiness, which tastes of days
and is haunted by the laughter of unborn children.
Then the breeze blows and the trees' shadows thrash,
and memories scatter like alarmed birds,
and you awake in a house by the sea,
frightened that while you slept the day moved on
and you missed something...

Go away. Why don't you go away?
You failed me, you walked away when I needed you,
what did you leave me with
but myself in torment and an empty house
to scrape my bones against so I could know
I still existed and hadn't died.
When life was easy and unreal, you lived it;
but when things grew hard, straightaway
you walked, you couldn't bear a single moment of it,
you had no strength at all,
nothing was real in you to stay and suffer,
you got on your mobile and right away you began to arrange
the details for your next entertainment,
and off you went, with your handsome face and your suggestible soul
liquid and amenable to a pleasure involved
but weak and skittish if the bones
beneath the pleasure showed through and the drugs ran out
and the booze ran out and the conversation ran out
then pretty soon you would run out
with your mobile bleeping and the ringtone
the sound of a lullaby from a music box
Victorian dream sweetness, the soundtrack to your lies.

So go away. You left me to die,
but I didn't die: I came back,
against the world itself I would come back,
against the whole world I could assert myself,
I am still pure and without corruption, peerless, unviolated,
so why should I fear you now
or wish to listen to you speaking,
to sift the fine scum of your opinions, 
or see the decals of your morals floating loose,
your tender, soulful voice stretched over something
pterodactyl and always hungry -
why should I want any conversation with you,
or have you forgotten
that once you left me voiceless
and my throat sore from sobbing
while your phone rang with a German lullaby chime
and you started talking about tube stations and parties,
hip hop, nightclubbing and dope...

Shut up now. Shut up, I can't bear to hear your voice.
Why don't you shut up, why don't you ever shut up?
How can you string your nothingness out so long?
Christ, must I listen to your tapeworm voice forever?
How can anyone believe you? Or believe in you?
You are literally incredible, and yet you go on and on
and people listen, and seem to believe you.
What's wrong with them? Are they all sleepwalkers?
You're so ludicrous - you're like a cheap vampire
from an old Hammer horror, you're really absurd
and yet they don't see through you -
or is it that they do see through you
but that they, like you, simply do not care?...
Is truth not the point? Do they no longer want a real person at all?
Is this what is left to us?
This noise? This thrashing of shadows?
These vacuous syllables and a glockenspiel chime,
the lullaby of everything, so each second we sleep,
and each second wake again 
into a new forgetting?...

When I believed in you the world made sense,
I believed in everyone, they all had their real voices,
even the ones who lived inside infernos or fairytales.
When I believed in you, I believed in beauty,
I believed in time, I believed in the future
and that we could still get there.
When I believed in you, I believed in words,
I believed in the way they touched people,
I believed in the world,
I even believed in myself.
Now I don't believe in you, and I'm left with knowledge,
but I don't believe in what I know.
I want to be calmed and hushed, the way it used to be.
I want to be stroked and caressed by your fingers,
to be soothed by your inanities.
I want to lie down. I don't want to know anymore...

The next day again it rained.
Some of them went off on a drive,
but the old crew remained, filled by a cushioning lethargy,
a disinclination to do anything much but lie around and talk.
I went out onto the balcony several times,
and smoked, my coat wrapped around me,
watching the rain fall slowly over the ocean,
and listening to the rain thrum and drip and respire around me,
heavy and persistent like an epoch,
and with a kind of neutral, bestial strength I admired,
forming, as it did, something immense and inarguable.

I desperately wanted you to come out and join me,
so we might talk, and perhaps touch,
and make space electric and vital in the way lovers do,
suspending quicksilver distances between us,
agonising and lovely rifts which were inches and instants
yet were also canyons and bays,
or a walk along the edge of a field in summer
with the power station and the chemical works far off against the horizon,
silent, with regal steam, and butterflies flickering near our hands...

I was thinking at that time about impersonality,
about how we amass and defend and lose ourselves,
our persons, over time. I remembered fainting once,
and how, when I recovered consciousness,
it was like a form of modified oblivion,
an infinite serenity against which I lay and in which I could play no part,
as if the entire universe had turned to a lake of pure white milk
beneath an endless, silent, azure sky.
Then, it seemed to me, as if my own self, my person, 
was a lovingly concocted conceit, an entertainment,
something like a child's sand castle, 
something over which the makers had pored
for hours, absorbed, profoundly intentional, 
complete with turrets and stairways and ramparts cunningly compiled,
a giant of an afternoon, yet, when you looked up and gazed down the beach
and out to sea and upwards, at the sky,
you could see the sandcastle was really something tiny,
a dainty thing, of futile intensity, 
something destined to be lost and left behind
when the builders went home to their sleep
in a bedroom papered with Saturns and spaceships, 
with meteors, and half-moons, and suns...

So the rain fell and the conversation went on.
I kept drifting off, thinking about Zulus and guerillas.
I was profoundly unhappy, I suppose,
being in love with you and you with someone else -
and yet my unhappiness seemed oddly like happiness, all the same.
We smoked some dope, and drank, and by the mid-afternoon
I had relapsed into a chronic daydream state.
I imagined life as the long, slow fizzle of genes,
of life as a persistent, endless genetic rain.
I pictured conversation, too, as a kind of prairie
over which we grazed, always moving on, never quite still.
And the conversation went on, and nothing was ever quite settled,
and no one could stop speaking, either,
it seemed like a kind of compulsion.
I faded out of the room, and heard the voices as music,
without meaning, just as abstract sound.
It could have been the song of rare marine creatures,
animals which rise to mate only once in a hundred years,
breaking into the light from the blind depths,
their eyes white and their scales in thousands
shining like a metal in the unseen sun.
Then you brushed against me, and in that instant
I once more heard the sound of the rain
and felt my heart shelve away beneath me,
leaving me alone, floating, above nothing.

Even nothing floats away.
And the days bound in the dust and the wind.
What were we working for? What really?
Why did I write those words?
All the immense mill of our minds, grinding away,
the wheels turning all the time
in a form of infinite idleness.
And the starving? The ones who eat no bread?
What of them? Will stars and nothing do for them?

They were talking about poetry again - poetry and reputations.
I still couldn't concentrate, all I heard was the music of the talk
bereft of significance. There was a soft, slow shower of words,
a drizzle of them. It was all quiet and calm.
I imagined this same drizzle of words happening all over the world.
The long, constant rain of language.
It was like the soft, slow drifting of the carcases of marine creatures
down to the mud and sand of the sea-bed.
All those words, accumulating their light bones in darkness.
Extended over time, it would form a crushing roar, this quiet talk,
a perpetual storm slowly blowing,
like storms on Jupiter or some other far-distant planet.
And one could be lost in that storm,
whipped perpetually from word to word,
topic to topic, and yet
not feel the storm against your skin...

The following day it rained again,
and the day followed the same basic pattern as the one before.
We lazed and talked. In the mid-morning,
we went for a walk along the beach,
and you carried a see-through plastic umbrella
which faintly distorted your appearance,
making you seem as if you were in a tank of some kind,
or walking along under water.
Your long black hair blew in the breeze,
the tresses of a dark mermaid.
You wore an old leather jacket,
and a long black polo-neck sweater.
At times you looked uncontrollably sad,
as if all the sadness in the world had come to you
looking for shelter. An instant later,
you would break into your electric grin,
and with a slender finger
tag back a stray strand of your hair
whipped by the breeze in front of your face.
You stumbled, and held my arm to steady yourself
on the scuttling shingle.

For some weeks, I had been haunted by a powerful aural hallucination -
by the sound of ropes creaking,
the ropes of an old sailing vessel, becalmed at sea.
Often, the sound would begin in the evening
when I was alone in the house.
Up from nothing, the sound would come,
rising from beneath the limit of the audible
to the threshold of audition
like the breathing of a distant surf
along a shoreline. When I heard the sound,
my heart would clutch itself.
I couldn't understand where the sound was coming from.
I knew, of course, it came from within my own mind - 
but I wondered what, in the end,
did that mean? And what strange part of my mind?
What lost, hidden, misfiring section of my mind?
And how could I stop it? How could I reach inside my own head
and drag out that sound? It was already inside me.
It came from within me. How do you escape
when something is inside you? Where can you go
which is not your own head?

Understandably, I began to dread being alone, at home.
I began to fear the quiet. I stayed out late after work,
drinking with my friends, shot pool into the early hours,
engaged in hapless one night stands.
Usually, though, there would come a point
where I would have to go home
into the empty house with no neighbours.
Eventually, I would have to turn the music off,
and face the quiet. I would have to lie down,
and seek sleep. And then, very often,
it would begin - the sound of creaking ropes,
the sound of a vessel adrift or of one
riding easily at anchor on torpid waters.

It grew worse. As soon as the hallucination commenced,
I would feel my sense of balance falter,
sense the room or the street begin to glide slowly around me,
and I would have to reach out and grab something
in order to steady myself.
I would feel nauseous, exactly as one does at sea.
As my dread increased, at times I thought the sound
was the creaking of my own nerves,
of the fibres of their ropes
rubbing against each other. It grew almost unbearable.
I drank more and more heavily in an attempt
to nullify that sound. At first, that seemed to work,
oblivion was efficient, but then
as if building up resistance, the sound
began to return, even when I was almost comatose,
and the hallucination deepened.

I would be lying on my bed,
and the creaking sound would come and go hypnotically.
It seemed to trail a world of evocation.
Though I could see nothing but the normal features of my room,
I sensed the ship adrift. Its notional decks expanded around me,
and the ropes creaked from the moribund rigging.
The vessel was large, but apparently deserted.
It was rocking in a windless sea.
The waves shifted it slowly, but it didn't sail forwards,
it went nowhere, merely rocked up and down, 
and turned as if in a gigantic eddy
round and round in the ocean.
It was an empty ship, rotting on the sea.
But where was the crew?
What had happened to the people?
Why were there no human beings aboard?
What was the cause of this awful dereliction?

We woke up early, and Gee came in his new convertible,
picked us up, and we drove down the coast road
with Spiritualized blasting out of the stereo.
It was such a smooth ride, the suspension was luxurious,
I lay back with you in the rear seats,
my arm around you, the sun on us,
the palm trees flickering past, strobing,
I felt so cool, regal, relaxed and in control,
like a writer who has mastered the universe of their style
and floats in it, effortlessly, suspended, just gliding
with the world beneath me and love above me
and the future endless and empty as the yielding sky...

Gee was in a good mood, Nancy was beautiful in her sweet,
ditzy, hippy way, and we seemed to dream past other cars,
accelerating to 130k at a slight depression of the pedal,
power flowing for us, power flowing to us,
power flowing through us... The view was fabulous,
the broken sandstone cliffs and the gum trees,
the ocean a mythical blue, the rollers
breaking with their pristine white spray against the rocks below.
We lay back on the plush seats, looked up
at the faceless sky travelling above us...

When I kissed you in those days I loved you,
when I kissed you I felt as if I was falling,
like a skydiver or a tumbling bird,
I fell into our kiss, I wondered at its spaciousness,
at the thrill of the emptiness beneath it and of
the burning emptiness within it.
I felt as if our kisses could cry out,
to speak of the hurt of their passing,
how life couldn't be borne, how unbearable it was,
and how our kisses bore it anyway
dropping themselves like spots of smoking blood.
As we drove down the coast that morning,
we kissed and I wanted to laugh out
through sheer exhilaration and pleasure.
It seemed as if I had everything -
as if reality could give me nothing more.
Of course, reality had plenty more to give me;
and some things, too, to take away...

We ended up at the last beach before the lighthouse,
and swam there in the ocean for a couple of hours,
sunbathed, laughed and talked, played games.
We had lunch at a nearby restaurant,
outside on the patio, drank chilled white wine.
We had money, and therefore we had time -
time belonged to us, we had bought it,
we didn't belong to time anymore, 
other people belonged to time,
but we were free, and that felt good.
We put the day into our service.
I felt as if I had been lifted up by a tall and benign wave,
raised up and was being carried
on its rolling power, I needed to do nothing,
the wave would take care of all eventualities,
all of the world was subsumed into the seamless action
of that loving wave...

Back in the car, Gee put on Joy Zipper's
American Whip, saturated harmonies of California,
and a woozy, druggy sound of artificial bliss
and of the melancholia of the craving below,
perfect for our drive. Gee still looked healthy, then,
and Nancy used to help him with the syringe and other paraphernalia
as if the process were a form of sacrament,
and the implements ceremonial and divine.
Gee himself seemed largely unaffected by his habit,
but even then I sensed there would come a time
of disenchantment, when the spell wore off,
and our carriage turn from light diamond confection
to a thing of shit and blood and mucous,
a thing of shivering - at which point,
we would all have to get off,
and leave Gee to it.

When you phoned me up that day,
it was a long time since I'd heard from you.
I had been through a harrowing few months,
worn out by trying to work
with the increasingly fragile material of my own mind.
My sanity was a frangible, a tissue thing, and my days
were riddled with strange holes, with cavities and chambers
from which voices whispered, and strange sounds
issued, frightening me. When I realised it was you,
I almost cried on the phone,
so grateful was I to hear the voice of a friend,
someone I loved - a real, breathing human being.
I said nothing of all this: you yourself
were in a state, you cried and laughed,
and then sobbed, saying things were not quite right,
saying you missed me, and wanted to see me.
I felt a shiver go through my world
like the water in a dusty vase of flowers
being faintly jarred by somone moving.
I sensed that excitement, the tremor in myself:
I knew what it was, recognised the feeling,
but yet couldn't quite place it;
and it wasn't until a few hours later, when I saw you,
I realised what it was had become so strange in me,
and which I had found so hard to identify -
it was hope. I had almost ceased to hope.
You were the last hopeful thing in me.
You were all my life had led me to,
all that was left. All the rest had fallen away,
had failed. You were like the last of the land,
after you came the sea. And yet,
you were beside yourself, crying...

I felt slightly ashamed, because I couldn't quite 
concentrate on you as you deserved.
I couldn't concentrate on anything, much.
I had been doing a lot of drugs,
my piss smelt of pharmaceuticals.
I felt a little floating, slightly woozy all the time.
My head felt mushy at the edges,
my focus on everything was soft and seemed to possess
an aureole like the moon.
I was constipated all the time.
I never felt entirely lucid,
but felt washed out with experience, bleached like a negative
overexposed to light.

I met you at night in the city.
We went for a meal, and ended up back in your flat
on the fifteenth floor. It was hot, that night, humid, muggy,
even in your flat with the windows open onto the balcony.
I looked down on the city below.
The new bridge looked beautiful, stretched out across the water,
lights winking on and off at the summits of the towers.
Traffic flowed across the bridge, streams of red light and white light.
You brought me a beer from the fridge,
you were much calmer, put on some music.
Our faces were reflected in the window's glass,
but the night of the city showed through beyond,
so our reflections were blurred and thinned out,
electrically superimposed on the other things of light and dark,
translucent like marine creatures, with cigarette smoke
seeming to rise from skyscrapers,
and with trains entangled with our limbs
and neon streaming in our hair.

I thought you had gone forever.
I thought I had turned you to silence.
But you always come back to me.
How I hate you, the smell of you,
the look, and, above all, the sound.
Your voice comes and goes. Your presence,
pocked with absence, pervades my life.
I hear you in other rooms, muffled,
as if all your movements were wrapped in miles and years,
climbing the stairs, or walking downstairs,
or upstairs, above my head.
Then there is no sound for a while,
and I yearn for the pure silence to go on,
for the beautiful, ringing quiet to obtain.
How wonderful that silence is.
So detached from us - the dream of inhumanity itself.
But I know you are in the house with me.
I know, you have not gone away.
My peace cannot last. You will break it.
You will exist again, and say something stupid,
or something beautiful, aching with reason.
You will plunge me into the spring again,
your long hair wet from the shower,
and a petal of pearblossom caught up in your hair,
a strand stuck near the throat.
You will not leave me in peace.
You never exist properly, yet you will not fail entirely.
You return like a tide, like a sea
you bring the world with you,
and our days by the sea,
the bleaching light of the coast, scorching with salt,
and the desolate cry of gulls
avaricious for no love.

You said Put the milk bottles out.
You said I adore your little moccasins.
Now, all the things you said you don't say.
You asked Is it a whale?, pointing at a shadow.
And I asked, Where? and you pointed again.
You said Aren't the clouds lovely?
You said Owa. Nga... Gorr...
But I couldn't understand that,
and you slipped off the bed and laughed
but then you couldn't stand up again.
There were plenty of days like those.
You have such small feet. 
Like a child's. Your sweet feet...
Like a child's...

What broke you? What left you scattered, in ruins?
Was it a word? A look?
Was it a voice, not calling your name?
Is this all you had?
Is this all you could show to us?
A weakness so profound and pervasive,
sometimes the world would fall into it, and was greater?
But nothing more? Nothing to affirm?
Is it true, that only a single word could break you?
A woman's voice, no longer there?
A woman's voice, lost among mirrors, and images of your face?
A petal of white blossom, caught in a spider's web?
Is absence too much to bear?
Were you really so weak? Could you be broken
by a whisper? For almost nothing?
For a handful of decibels?

It wasn't like that. When we first kissed,
after having known each other for so long
it felt almost incestuous. But it felt natural, too,
in such a way that all my life before
felt contrived, and stupid, and artificial.
I had the sense of waking up from an endless dream.
Somewhere, the dream went on, but I
was no longer part of it.
We left it running, like a machine.
I had loved you for all that time,
it was almost as if we had slipped out of the love,
when we were together we were platonic, egoless.
Now suddenly, we were in love, and I was kissing you.
I felt all the hours I had loved you in that kiss.
All the time, we had been close and yet distant.
We had years between us, I felt the years
passing away as we kissed and I floated.
I stroked your hips and I wondered
how all the distance in the world had come to us,
and washed us ashore, like waves, together.
We had survived all the world for our love.
Now all the rest of the world fell away
and we called it back again.
We drove down the coast, and found a room.

We made love then, in a motel room decorated with seascapes.
We made love, hunting through our bodies for the sun or
for bright shells or for the nuclear power
which drove the light and made the darkness sigh
like air in marine caves.
We hunted for our bodies,
lost them somewhere along the way,
almost carelessly, as if we were Americans, in a human way,
raving as we were in quiet for something else,
always something more, and something greater
or smaller, wider or more fine,
darker, or more radiant... Or with a different moment inside it...
But, anyway, I stopped turning things into words,
and there was sand on your breasts and I tasted
sand on your lips, and nothing, and something...
And we torqued and yelped and went running,
and it was fun, and not as beautiful as I had expected...

Or maybe it was more beautiful than I realised,
was filled with a beauty of which I, alone,
was not capable... Who can say?
It is not still there to check,
not even now, really, to remember...
Except, perhaps, the little glassy grains of sand at the corner 
of your mouth, where I touched your lips
with sand still on my fingers...

We made love again later in the afternoon.
Being with you, I felt things become far off and yet, somehow,
utterly domesticated, as if everything which had been a little wrong
moved a little step to the right or to the left
and was suddenly revealed to be in the correct position.
The whole world went like that, the dunes and the terror too.
I fell away from myself, for a while I was no one.
Oblivion moved within me the way clouds move within the sky.
And after we'd made love, we lay, flushed and blown,
drifting on the bed. We slept, I woke,
I saw the little pink plastic flowers decorating your flip-flops,
lying by the side of the bed,
roses I guess though they looked somehow anenomal
in the seaside twilight of that room.
I could feel the room filling with the ache of significance,
feel the moments I knew would mean so much to me
welling up slowly, one after another,
I couldn't stop them happening,
I couldn't stop them passing away, passing away with us, 
and nor did I want to, because those moments were our life,
but I knew there was a Russian emptiness inside those moments,
a plain of regret and resolution and failure,
of happiness pocked like a nest, and skies drifting
with the sublime melancholia of lovers passing in time
and with no destination but the sky would go on
and the sky would fill the room
and I would, in the end, understand nothing of it,
not you, not myself, not our love, not the years,
not the desires, not the sky...

You shifted in your doze and murmured something out of a dream.
I was awake, looking at you, your pink flip-flops,
the bald screen of the tv,
the bland corporate motel fittings
with the cheap reproductions of seascapes
by Steer and Sickert and Monet...
Of course, everything was saturated with meaning for me,
saturated as a honeycomb is soaked with honey,
everything had a fragile edge,
it was all the salt on your thumb and the rim of the glass
and tequila and a segment of lemon,
at once hard and ethereal, without place and yearning for place...
The motel was very quiet, everyone seemed out.
It was warm in the room.
The moments continued to pass,
burnished and iconic, yet hollow, as beneath the fine crust
there lay the indefinable and the molten,
the motive and the obscure, the sadness of reason
turning on itself, the strangeness of one's own face
looking back from the mirror and far off like the moon...

I felt peaceful. I felt the presence of a great space,
a feeling like a prairie into which one may dwindle
and ask no questions. The room was open beneath the sky,
and vast fields of wheat waved and rippled in the breeze.
Then there was my watch ticking.
I felt self-conscious again, and I wasn't sure.
I wanted to be home, where everything stopped.
I wanted to be safe, where no one would hurt me anymore.
And the subtle autism of one's ego would end,
and I could be generous at last.
And then, as my gaze travelled over your body,
I began to hear a sound, low, right down
at the threshold of audition.
I knew the world was broken, and I could never be happy,
and that it didn't matter.
I heard the sound of a rope creaking,
and of an empty ship drifting on a becalming sea.

It was a shock, and my heart grabbed itself;
and yet, once I heard the sound,
there seemed a kind of inevitability to it,
although perhaps that inevitability was just my tears.
I don't know, and I would never know.
I lay my ear to your belly, 
and the sound seemed to be coming from there.
I lay my ear to the crinkled plastic roses on the straps
of your flip-flops, and the sound came from them.
I lay my ear to the tv - the same;
and to the floor - the same; to the walls...
To the door... The same. The same. The same...

I left, I went through the deserted reception.
I walked down the coast awhile,
along the beach, away from the town
and from the people. I went round the headland
into the adjoining bay, and could see in the distance up ahead
the silhouette of the nuclear power station in the dusk,
electric lights beginning to come on
along the perimeter fence and on the buildings themselves.
The buildings and the fence and the electric lights
creaked as they turned slowly in the water.
The headland creaked, and the gulls creaked.
And my heart creaked inside me, turning slowly,
coming about, full of blood, full of the sea.
The air creaked, and the world came about,
rotting, abandoned, moribund, turning slowly,
creaking as it drifted, with no one at the helm.
And the surf washed up on the shingle,
and I remembered, hours ago, you smelled of the sea,
of salt, of life, of my last chance...

I walked on, and the power station vanished behind another headland.
The world creaked and drifted.
Beneath my feet, the shingle crunched and scattered.
I felt bleached, washed up, and it was good.
Dusk came on, with the sound of ropes creaking.
There was a faint breeze, and the waves rushed and oozed.
I had one of your flip-flops in my pocket.
It was like the fragment from a beautiful wreck.
And there were three of them, singing.

They lounged on the rock among the waves.
Their hair was long and black and hung like fluid anthracite
around their shoulders, down their backs.
They were very slender. They wore hooded swimrobes -
one burnt orange, one olive green, one bloody red.
The hoods were down and the robes were loose.
One carried her swimming goggles looped around her wrist.
Another had a camcorder slung across her upper body,
and other gear lay sprinkled around them on the rocks -
facemasks, snorkels, camera, and great black fins.
One was combing out her hair with what looked
like an antique comb of gold.

It was growing dark. They were singing.
I was sure of it, but no sound seemed to be coming from their mouths.
They were beautiful, with their slanting bones
and hair like coiling sumi ink,
but the only sound I could hear
was of the waves thrashing and mushing on the shingle,
and the persistent sound of ropes creaking in the breeze.
They had seen me and they waved to me,
so I stepped down the beach, close to the water.
The woman in the burnt orange swimrobe beckoned me again,
and smiled, exactly as if I was a decent person
out for an innocent stroll along the shore.
We both knew that was not the case, and she called me.

I came closer. They were clearly unwell.
There was something unnatural about them,
as if they were models in a fashion shoot
or actors in a stylised play.
Wet from their swim, they looked like seabirds slicked in oil.
You called me again, and I came closer.
The closer I came, there was more decay.
Your skin had a polluted glow,
and shone with the iridescence of greenbottles.
You didn't move very freely anymore.
You and your friends looked so thin,
there was a suggestion, beneath the shadows of your robes,
of pale ribs sticking out beyond the leathery skin.

You beckoned me again. Cold water lapped around my feet.
The closer I came, the more decay I saw.
But your eyes were a lovely, metallic blue,
not human eyes, not really,
but the eyes of seabirds, creatures of space which might cruise
for months above the sea and never settle,
riding the therms on elongated wings,
sleeping on the wing, mating on the wing...

You spoke: In the evening
clouds are very turbulent, storm bearing.
The sound of the waves is loud,
and black clouds are beginning to spread over the shoreline.
As the evening wears on, a full moon is revealed
when the clouds part. Suddenly a cry is heard:
'Help us! Help us!' But it is so faint that the audience
is uncertain as to whether they heard a voice
or if it is only the sound of the waves.

So you have come, you have found me.
Yes.
Do you want to rest, do you want to be at peace?
Yes.
How long have you been searching for me?
For years now. No. All my life, I guess -
I've been waiting
for so long.
And you want to rest, and you want to be at peace?
Yes.
You have carried a block of emptiness around inside you for years?
Yes.
And you want to put that block of emptiness down?
Yes.
And what about other people?
In the end, they are only other people. They are all
a long way away from me now.
I see their lips moving, but the sounds which come out
don't seem very real, and don't move me at all.
You have cared for people in the past?
Yes. Some. A little.
But you no longer care for anyone?
I care for them, but I want to sleep.
You want to sleep and never wake?
Yes.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Then, here: put down the block of emptiness inside you.
Put it down? How can I?
Just lie down on the shore, and sleep.
Will I be alone?
Of course.
You can wake up now.

When I got back, you had left.
I felt stunned, that you could leave me.
At first, I began to cry
but I noticed that my sobs made no sound at all,
and that my tears didn't really fall.
I drove up to Hamakura Point, parked the car,
looked down over the city
lit up, shimmering in its volts - all the different lights,
the traffic, the rooms in buildings, the streetlamps,
hard light and soft light, still light and moving lights,
dense and scattered light, light sparkling and glowing and pulsing and burning,
white light and red light, neon and halogen,
and as I gazed down at this vast bowl of light, hushed in the distance,
I thought of you, and how you meant more to me
than all the souls of the city.

Do you realise why I can't love you anymore?
Your life has become one of ruthless inconsequence.
You are not really alive at all,
with your bruise over your eye, and your skin
of lunar white. You are holed up among your things,
frittering your energy away, living not among human beings
but the elective fetishes of human beings,
the few among the many who live.
You're a ghost, haunting possessions.
You have an electric blue aura, the radiance
released from garbage, from tonnes of waste and decay.
And you don't even see it.
You think you're decent. But you're not:
you're generically corrupt.
And I don't want to love someone like you.
So go away. I don't need you now.

The dialogue continues, "The lady replies:
'Wakiki is much better than here.' The ronin retorts,
'Yes, but the hotels are empty now.'"