What I Love

Like splake with his dvd "the cliffs" I want to show you what I love. It is, after all, a very suitable activity for a poet to engage in now that we have finished with the false business of the Bomb. "The hour's getting late," as poet Dylan says.Except it's not.
Though I spend so much of my time depressed or strung out, the things I love are many: the steady beat of a reggae track throbbing out of a radio or car window; the slinky walk of a cat slipping along against a wall, especially when it's trying not to look worried about the human footsteps behind it; finding a new old book of fantastic poetry on the shelf of a charity shop or in a box on the market; the design of old jazz lps from the 1950s with close-ups of the serious bespectacled or sweating faces of the trumpet players; the Eden-like acoustics of dawn birdsong especially when it wakes you from a long and restful sleep and you lay in bed warm and listening to it; a handwritten letter from a famous old poet lying half-open on top of my computer modem with all its perfume of fantastic longhair eras of bicycles and books; the third time you see the same man or woman and the talk between you is comfortable and easy, so you know they like you and you like them even though you don't want to do anything with it; blossom on trees overhanging pavements and walking looking up through the blossom at clear blue sky; feeling a fresh breeze blow against your cheek when you've been too hot; seeing a rabbit in a field which faint traces of early morning mist still hang over especially far out in the country before the traffic starts whizzing by; the cool quiet sanctuary of the deep woods when the canopy of summer trees catches sound like the distant call of kids on bicycles and makes it bounce around amongst the trunks and hillocks; sitting with my back to such a trunk with the warm soil underneath me reading a book of poetry or meditating with intense silent concentration as a squirrel scurries around nearby and I name him something like Kerouac or Abbey and have sudden, passing dim recall of my past lives as an animal.
AH! These things I store up against Death's inevitable victory over sullen, weakening flesh and throw into the Void like a basket full of roses