THEN I SAID

This is as close as I get, no kidding. Any closer it sort of slips out of hand, to one side or the other, mostly the other. Depending, usually, it’s like that, days like seasick swallows.

So the truth, what really happens is something I can’t see. What? The truth? This is as close as I’m allowed, I think. I don’t really know. This comparison, if that’s what it is. Afraid of most things. Stupid, isn’t it? And made up from what? And even smaller parts unknown, flutter out of reach, under the bed, under my fumbling hand.

I Sleep with books. Pathetic. About fifteen in my bed right now. Way too many. They curl up and find some warmth under an arm or a leg. Bastards. They fall to the floor and wake me up. Insufferable things. I grab one and read it till I fall asleep again, and wake up, in the middle of the day, with books around me, on top of me. Nonsense. Very depressing.

From that point it’s impossible to tell. From any point really. Looking at the stained ceiling. Nothing there, except stains. Damn stains, how did they get there?

This starts in a weird place. I’m leaning out a window. It’s a small tight window, and I’m smoking a cigarette, looking at a window-door-wholesaler-place across the road, and I’m drunk. Beer and vodka mostly. I’m quite happy just watching those big slow snowflakes fall and melt and the sound of the drain filling up. I suck the cigarette too hard. It starts to look like a lipstick. So I chuck it half-smoked, feeling bad for smoking here, out of this window, in my mother’s house. I close it, the window, and open the fridge, her fridge, and get another beer, and stagger back to the couch and start watching something stupid on TV.

Simon here. Just got back in. Been out cycling you see. For such a jet-setter I sure travel like the common folk. Nights are colder than just a few weeks ago. Dark streets a little darker. The few light-posts just that bit further apart it seems. It’s only me out there. I use the breadth of the street, doing large, slow, lazy turns. The crank makes a noise like a broken collarbone when I need to pedal. I have a small rusty chain for a lock. It’s a women’s bike a friend said. Down Montana, a left onto 6th, past the school and the basket court, a right onto California. I roll down the slight hill, one foot resting heavy on one pedal, the other bent, just touching the other; most of the weight on the handles.

In a year that saw Thenisaid growing increasingly weary of popular culture, there were still some records that got played on the newly purchased iPods. Yes, this device itself marking a change in attitude and initially increasing the sense of dread we were feeling. Will we be downloading music now? Like teenagers? And yes, we would, as it turned out. The editor finding himself marooned in the third world for much of the year, there was no way around it. We therefore had to face the uploading of a ridiculous number of records before his departing, and the whole staff was happy to see him leave.

He told us before he left that pop music had cut his feelings short, that it wasn’t allowing him to register emotions beyond a certain number of clichés, and that this was part of the reason he had to go, that life was more than pop and rock and reading reviews and going to gigs. And what could we say? We had no idea what he was on about. He just left and said goodbye.

So while he was away we openly continued our former lifestyles, drinking our beer and discussing what he would term infantile lyrics, arrested artistic development, and worse.

We kept compiling a list of albums we liked, very discerningly we thought; blissfully unaware of what was brewing below the equator. This is what we had down before his loud and, frankly, strange return:

Deerhoof – The Runners Four (we know, 2005, but still…)
Calexico – Garden Ruin
Evangelicals – So Gone
The Tyde – Three’s Co
Ali Farka Touré – Savanne
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Graham Coxon – Love Travels at Illegal Speeds
Serena-Maneesh – Serena-Maneesh

And that was about it we thought, it wasn’t such a god year for music after all, or maybe we were getting bored and disinterested as well?

And then he came home, and all other weirdness aside, suggested we add these albums to the list:

Pearl Jam – Pearl Jam
The Lemonheads – The Lemonheads
Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Stadium Arcadium

All by former, now faded lights, and we thought he must have caught Dengue fever at least. But he insisted, saying that being away had taught him a thing or two about being cool, and who were we to argue?

I spent last weekend in a villa in the Hollywood Hills, by the pool, sipping vodka tonics and squeezing grapefruitjuice from a grapefruit that I took from a tree (when reaching for the grapefruit I knocked my head against an avocado, yes, hanging from an avocado tree) Apparently we went out and had dinner at a diner on Franklin, but I can’t remember the eating part, only the numerous vodka tonics and throwing a napkin at the owner (a feisty lady) Waking up I felt a heaviness I hadn’t felt before, a sort of hole in me, that pinned me to the soft bed, under the comfortable sheets (Egyptian cotton, if I’m not mistaken) and made me sort of worried that I was well. I didn’t have a headache, just felt heavy, heavy and strangely dizzy, probably drunk still. I threw myself into the cold pool, the heating was off for some reason, and heard a strong ticking from the pool cleaner that continually kissed the bottom tiles. Tick tick tick tick. There was no stopping that automatic pool cleaner from kissing those tiles. So I got up and lay down on a nicely upholstered sunbed, very dizzy, clearly very drunk still.

And now sitting in my wonderful and bright and simply smashing pad in Santa Monica I’m halfway down a quart of Bushmills and smiling as the election results are ticking in, announced on the radio, seen on the TV, whooped out on the WWW. I’m ecstatic, semi-stupefied, sunburned (it was hot today, 85, at least) and I read good stuff on the beach, some ironic Stendahl and the hysterical Proust (that guy must have been one hell of a bore, so connected and in-tune with his past, his memories. What about today M. Proust?)

So, If I could have voted I would have voted today, and voted well. I’m a hell of a voter once given the voting right and opportunity. Anyway, as the saying is these days, I do promise some more special privy Hollywood reporting as soon as I can get my ass over there and start sampling those bottomless vodka tonics. Must we all pray I don’t fall asleep again.

Yours truly devoted,
Simon Robertson

His room was low,
all of it, low
nothing on the walls
the bed, just above
the floor
his clothes
books
on the floor
stuff along the walls
in the middle
of the room
To bend
down
to pick up
a magazine
I crouched
to reach a lamp switch
Too low
I thought
And went to sleep
and fell asleep
and woke up
standing up
I moved the curtain aside
looked down
on a morning street

I wish you could love me a bit more
she said
and I heard the car
ignite
her mother driving
as I leant against
a whitewashed wall
in the shady side of this place
and thought I wish I could
but that wasn’t the problem

I do however want to say that the world,
as such, can be said to be the subject
of much literature,
and that the novel, maybe,
in some way, adequately enough,
let’s not be megalomaniacs,
carries the littleness of life.
I realize you are thinking
that this is just another effort to differentiate,
to select, but as the good Australian band,
The Go-Betweens say:
You can’t say no forever.
Life, in my humble view, is choice.
The mere essence of existence
is to choose, and to sometimes say:
Yes I like this, I want to keep that,
to remind me of now.
And then at the same time
to grant the slippery poodle-dropping
on the sidewalk
its true place in the Pantheon of reality,
by trying to step over it.

The shed in Kent still free?
Yours
Simon Robertson

where you were
the cemetery steps
sealed our hands
and where you
bumped
into my affection
the hip still
stands

the way you
pulled my new
composure to
and left it
with a wet kiss
to dry
made a sweet
smell
where the bitterness
used to lie

she was running around
the house that morning
jumping off stools and tables
trying not to touch the floor
as it was water

when she slipped and tumbled
into the deep unknown
her parents dreamt of
Spotted Eagle Rays lit
by St. Elmo’s Fire
she cried to wake them
from their age
the covers lay
like explosion mats
sheltering the world
from occasional blasts of ignorance

their daughter lay drowning
in the living room ocean

I wrote a poem once
that got mistaken by some builders
for the blueprint of a house
and they set about constructing
this poem as a prefab
adding adjectives to the foundation
of nouns and verbs
and fitting it with commas
to see through

I happened upon them as they
lay a question mark down as
roof, slowly lowering it
from a considerable height

I wondered what they thought
they had built
and wandered off
one poem poorer

he rose like a swarm of locusts
a wind of flowers and tube tickets blowing
straight through his shirt
he felt worse than that
he remembered drinks
he had had and fags he had smoked wanting to
look for notes
hired tuxedos party tents inflatable fences
the raw pulsating liquid
strumming through a satin sewer
his sick and tired solution
no longer a soldier of ebb and flow
his jacket of felt and beeswax
the blinding watchful
jumpy morning
smoking
straight out of something
forming clouds disappearing
as they appeared

under a spell of two guitars
my IKEA duvet
lay flowering
in November

the time of life that
should find us all
untuned mostly
greeted with death’s
sigh

the bricks contracted
from shame and coldness
thinking of this

print print
press
for time
is on Tokyo’s side
and New York
stalks the likes
of Sydney
drop off,
but stay calm

My lament’s only
7 inches high

As executioners go
the one who did Charles I inn
must have been a tormented soul
even at his own funeral
he is said to have wept
in regret
the angry mob
in the Whitechapel churchyard
didn’t care

but he had wanted it badly
to begin with
claiming his hereditary
right
to end lives
by the law
30 pounds in
half crowns
burned their way
through his pockets
“the dearest money I’ve ever earned”

Only the dead will dance with you now
marooned on the fifth floor
a waltz across the boards under the light of one lamp
to layers upon layers of dust from drying clothes
only the dead will tell you to keep it up
though you doubt their sincerity

you shouldn’t

we emerge from our rooms
in our late twenties
and early thirties
misty eyed and puffy cheeked
we ask: how did you sleep?
how did you get here anyway?

then we listen for some call of inspiration
while making cheap tea or coffee
go out for the paper
that ridiculous thing
and see it unfold
over many pages

take a look at our robes
of shrunken cotton
touch our greasy hair
kiss our eyes
that see much further
and look much better
now than ever

Maybe I should go out
again tonight?

I have spent too long
digging a reasonable grave
for you and your memory
to toss and turn in

I should go out again
tomorrow morning maybe
to slowly walk the beach
that held our promise

I might see driftwood and
you there
and move no further
stand and watch
the clear waves of
innocence
declining the shore

look at the way
these shoes lie
in the grass

look at the way
they seem to want
to wander off on their own

look at how they seem to want to be alone

look at the grass
where they lie
the brown of August

look at the shoes
off my feet
they look good

What moves the myriad hopes
away from introspection
into slumbering cells?
What releases these at intervals
and carries on as normal?
This is the scene we’re interested in:

she elegantly undoes whatever comes to mind
and many many many neurons cry HURRAH
flooding the cervix with that
MOST evasive of things
I have mentioned it before

Just something that came to mind
ON two reasonably warm and pleasant
days AT midnight
waking up before the alarm
hating it with a burning gut
standing it on its head

The things I need
to hurry doing
before I die
As if
I will feel
better afterwards
for having done them

It was Sideways on the couch
It was Saturday
It was New Orleans

took all our smiles
and my memory was beat
Someone jacked an amp up

and everything got worse
She used to wear the
things in season
I took two Vicodin and kicked the door in
I could sleep there
on a broken shoulder
the rationale was
how off season I was
then
the dry river-bed
waited for a let-down
in the reservoir
and the dam
up-stream
waiting for the rain
to pour
another year

I prefer to be
one
who haven’t
made the
big
decisions yet

I shall miss you she said
when you’re dead to me
no more thinking of me
wherever you are

I shall miss you too he said
like I always did not knowing
where you were thinking
you might have fallen ill

But I think I’ll grow less sentimental
and more forgetful soon

I was bored again
with what I did
during the day

but my nights were alright
my nights were alright

I took a ride
on the apostles’ horses
to where I drank
the city silent

I had the chemicals turning
in tune with my spine
the chords made my fingers find
the air where my heart lay

so
I scampered on
down the dark park
to where I reclined and beheld
the night with stars on

how different we were in many ways
the time allotted to us

but towards the city again
when I had seen Orion
the unclaimed God of lamp-posts
cars and laymen

When the snow was coming in sideways
I was out on the hill in my gear
up and down the little hill of my infancy
taking in the bumps and knocks
an absorption artist
a Houdini in reverse

When the snow lay meters thick
I was at home and wouldn’t leave
the fire and the warmth
looking into toys’ souls
a psychoanalyst of inanimate matter

The fun and the summer came
and made me cry
from knowing what made
the days turn long and the river overflow
a barometer of blood
knocked on by a breeze and the shining stars

After checking in
I passed security
which went well
and then I strolled around for ten
minutes looking at sun-glasses
Eau-de-Cologne
bags and other luxury items
and soon a pretty someone asked:

Are you looking for something in particular?

But I was walking towards the big windows
and sat down
to watch the planes
take off
and they did all
the time
I had a large
Cappuccino
with a toasted panini
took some photographs with my
mobile cellular phone
and
It became time
to find the gate
but first I went
to the toilet

Where do all these jerks come from? Seriously
the hail bounced like plastic pellets
on the asphalted will, I got scared
of the light for once

My city is quiet when I come home
I’m the only one walking this way
on an empty Finchley Road at 2 am
I ask the buss driver how much the
nightly fare is and he murmurs
something and I say can you please
just let me off at Camden town
I only have a tenner?
and when I come home my door is locked
and I scale the façade to smuggle myself into
the place where I can sleep
and it’s quiet here and the blossoms around our door
breath the quiet air

I’ve come from Germany tonight on a plane
I’ve read about the novel tonight on the M25
I’ve landed with a 737 tonight
but the novel’s in a dire way
and the city of London’s in a bad way
and I’m not doing too hot myself
to be honest

but what I’m struggling with is more than this
the honesty of this account
the what to say and how to feel

It was literature that saved the day and alcohol
will ruin tomorrow

Young girl singing stops what I’m doing
makes me pull the curtains apart
and think that there stands my sister
her daughter humming quietly

the way singing a melody can make her sad
she seems to enjoy her melancholy
the same tone over and over
leaves me standing thinking
there’s my daughter

and that is her life
humming by