It’s 35 minutes to midnight on the 4th of January.
If I can tell you that this one room

holds all candles —
tapers, tealights, pillars,
plain white power-outage poles,
small votives for struggling souls,
delicate dinner-party decoratives —

in all scents —
sandalwood, ylang ylang,
rose, smoke, vanilla, mint,
and many nameless synthetics, novel,
teasing, but ultimately leading back

to the natural — and if I can say
how this one shop sells all
the bells, drums, chimes and microphones
we could ever want, and all the crystals,
with their real and imaginary functions,

then I can show you how this one tune
includes all notes.
Light and dark
up and down
infinity and one.

All flavours of quarks
All chantings of monks
All parts, all syntheses,
all theses
All sounds of all systems.

When we taste and leap and whoop, the tune cavorts
When we moan and clutch our rags, the same tune begs
When we go as deep as we can, the tune goes with us
For as long as it hurts — the tune stays with us
When we come up screaming, the notes are our output

When we dance in the rain of our making,
the tune is the dance and the rain
This tune, and the next tune,
and the next,
yours and mine

But it’s thirty-five minutes to midnight on the 4th of January.
A man is barking like a dog and I don’t know why.
Is he having an orgasm? Beating a woman?
Or just drinking and shouting?

No name for those steps I sat on,
where the sun sings through the leaves,
where the old stone is painted and marked
by pilgrims who give what they have,
words, marks, symbols. I used
my little knife, carved a crude
tetrahedron, its sides not as equal
as I wanted, to say I’d be back
some day.

Did my tears drip onto the dust?
I photographed my feet to prove
to myself that I’d stood there —
as if it isn’t burnt into my memory,
as if it isn’t in the screensaver of my head,
as if it wouldn’t always be there waiting,
my symbol weathering with the rest.
As if the newsfeed would never tell me
that the steps and walkway may be removed.

I guess all us pilgrims are causing a problem,
hiding in there, making noises at night,
tossing things over the walls,
stalking by the graffitied doors,
scritching with little knives,
worrying the children and gardeners
and the dogs.

But… so many of the places are going
in the name of now.
Where will we say our words?

The notes and beats and lines
are stored in my head.
The keepers might say I should need
nothing more. And the sites
are theirs to destroy, theirs
to replace. But I have breathed
in
those places so imaged on the Net. I have sat
on the dusty bench and got the actual mud
on the cuffs of my jeans, in the treads
of my boots.

Theirs to destroy.
Dare I ask?

The purple-nailed, blacksuited,
mad-hatted, workbooted,
vodka-drinking, rollie-sucking,
McCartney-bashing, Lennon-hugging,
clanging, slanging, banging, whanging,
smoothfaced and making up for it
poems

Here’s Jack White*, with Satan still in front of him and without
the marimba

— Ain’t that a kick in the head?

Nah, it’s a bottle of vodka
Drown yourself

*From The White Stripes

(First published in The Word Is Out)