More than what it might be
1. Youth
Accept the following fact: when you are born,
the point at which you are to die is already predetermined in time,
it is already ahead of you like a black bead sliding down the thread.
If you can accept this,
then the period in between the point at which you are born
and the point at which you die
is, in fact, a period of invulnerability.
Nothing can kill you before it is meant to.
Start at one end of the Leith River and swim to the other
the water which sticks to your skin will be the water that remembers you,
even when the river forgets your shape,
even when the gulls and the fishhooks forget you.
Your room will not remember you either, although it will be years
before the last of the dust of you clears from the skirting boards,
before the print of your hand unpeels from the ceiling.
Even the air will forget. Even the chords which disturbed the air
will forget.
But the sheen of water on your skin: the coruscation, the limn,
the slick Brocken spectre, the white glove: it will recall your shape.
Even when you leave it empty it will remember.
Whatever time is like, it’s fast. Whatever bar you walk into,
you’re meat first, and a musician second. But hey—
it’s more than what it might be.
​
2. Time
In your first-year PHIL101 tutorial your tutor said
time is like a sausage
time is like an ouroboros
time is like a circle, like a disk,
like a cylinder, like gravity, like…
fucked if I know, man.
Time is like a soundwave, time is like a chord.
The icicle of you breaks through to the present
we read your lyrics on a telecoms cabinet
forty years later, they move us—they give us the chills.
​
3. Climate
It’s an old joke: take a man and walk him into a bar
except the bar is not a bar; it’s a flat
crusted with fractals and arachnoid potentiality.
Take a man and walk him into a flat
except the man is not a man, but a musician.
If form follows function, we are meat first
and our loves second.
My mother is a garden.
My best friend is the sun.
A musician walks into a flat
and we’re audience’d now—us,
and the rain, the cold, the wind, the grey
the black, the bitter, the frost.
If form follows function, a city is a ventricle-articulated heart
a city is a red fractal on a white window.
A musician sprawls on his landlord’s couch and strums a chord
and the chord leaves the guitar and disturbs the air
and the air leaves the flat, disturbing other air.
Esoteric philosophers and pseudoscientific gnostic mystics posit
that nothing which fills your heart with pink frost is ever lost
even if it is only air.
Night clouds smear the sky: burst black mould, a prey-pupil eye,
a flying nun, her white wimple a star-flash sun.
It might be velvet underground, but up here it’s sequins
white ones, clinging to magnolia branches and window panes.
Get back in your crucible and make your music, man.
Move the air with other air; with a chord.