henrybrook.com

about things that haven’t happened. Let’s not say someone said this about something somebody might do. Commentariat spooked by our digital now but the guess ahead is tainted with bias, breathless propaganda.

of the abandoned build, snowdrops through the wire fence. There are too many houses standing empty here. I’m out in the street, polishing the headlights on the wagon, trying to get it through one more test. One more year on the road. I don’t mind cleaning the lights for an hour. I don’t care that the money’s no good. I’ve no interest in cars, I just want to keep this one alive and rolling so it doesn’t join the great human scrap pile, the K2 of trash we spew out with each sun turn, the SPAM can down at the approach to the Mariana trench. And I don’t want to think about finding another car, I don’t get it with cars as sexy, cars as something I should want. I want what I already have.

these days, I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. Whispers, future shocks and blog rants presented as truths. It’s easy to bash the shaman, harder to reach the entranced. And closer to home, coming up for eight months since the vote and where’s the reform? The vote is the reform. The bosses and the observers can’t think of an answer. It’s the disconnect between all the spouting and the shift of hope in the abandoned people that I fear most.

you with your can of pils, nine in the morning, riding the train. Pudgy, beaten, rounded face. You with the laptop and the shirt that hugs every curve, you wittering and grouching, you with the sad, tailspin eyes. Do you see me? Do you hear me thinking. Am I coming through? And when it’s my turn to pack up and leave, why do I find myself stuck out here alone on the utility-grey fake cobbles, these zincland pylon vistas? Journey-ruffled and dislocated, my bike takes me home.

carry me in, all rumpled and saggy-assed. But London’s riches still warrant a skip, fresh as they were to my first, clear-eyed stare.

The ship pours shining on the quay

The plunder of the world.

And apologies to Housman.

the frozen turf, no game this morning, she said. Sky cover’s all stripped away and the cold’s biting. There’s snow in Spain, snow on the crest of the dunes that fan down from the jebel. I remember the highest peak we got to in Maroc, the guide pointed to the horizon, a trace of fire glimmering at the edge of the Sahara. This cold lays siege to my apartment, fogs the windows, cracks the skin across my knuckles. And I wish I was Tangiers tea-sipping with Bowles, flipping through Pages from Cold Point, taking a ride out of town in the open Merc he bought on his first – and only – big advance. But Bowles is gone, and Jack and Satori in Paris, and I lost sight of the true path through the woods some time ago. We have to live our own adventures now, there’s no vicarious freeloading from other drifters and dreamers. When the pitch thaws, you have to play.

I rewatch Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. It’s paper snow and spray-on cobwebs, you never lose sight of the stage, but these are glowing, picture book storyboards of folklore and fireside ghost tales, with details from someone who grew up in a land where wolves still prowled, before the smoke and dust of war consumed everything. And under the tavern and camp comedy is a dreamlike terror, how would you cope, driving home the stake? Scattered about the film are touches of greatness. An indoor snowfall from an off-screen skylight precedes the Count’s first appearance, his intended entranced. When the innkeeper is brought home dead, bitten and iced through, Polanski has him strike the pose of a man running, or sneaking about, frozen in motion. He gets the best actors, best score, best script, does all the hard work of a competent director and then adds something more. Write your line, and just when the reader reels at the close, lay on a deeper meaning, evoke a memory mislaid.

fade and crack about the neighbourhood, relics from another season. How will the pavement sweeper AI bots recognize their redundancy, will they look for degrees of decay and neglect to grade their importance? I’ve been pondering the OODA loop, as I gaze at the delaminating tennis board. I’m no fighter pilot, I pass days and months trying to orient, caught in my daydreams, slow to act. The bots will glean, assess and decide a thousand times a second. They’ll pass me under the board, broken-shoes, worn shirt, tired as the sign. And in my daydreams I’m trying to plan for a year from now, if I can imagine it, perhaps it will come to be.

the five of clubs. Glimpsed as I rush to the wagon through rain, hands too cold and clamped to reach down and peel it from the cobbles. There’s some pathway back to me in symbol or action relating to this card and how it arrived outside my door, but it’s undiscovered and unguessed as I drive out with my shopping list.

for work and worry, watching a spinning coin, or in Robert Frost’s Pang stanza, the scattering of notes at the start of the solo from 1:42, in Truck Driver Divorce. After the usual smart ass smut lyrics the guitar sweeps up, sweeter, more magic there than the sense shackle of words. It’s grafted from a live show, a Frank cut-up, and I think of Burroughs kneeling between the ash trays and coffee cups, Paris reeking and filthy outside the streaked glass, the newspaper scissored and squared and stuck together again. Frank in his house in the hills, splicing tapes together at four a.m. with the city lights stretched away to the dead, black rim of the ocean. And me, carpet-starred in my teen Yorkshire fastness, just picked up the album from HMV in town, head wedged between two old speakers borrowed from my dad. My guitar gleams in the corner, I’ll spend the rest of the night trying to work out Frank’s lines. The wind presses at the panes. And decades later, watching the coin, its time snatched a-blur, wandering, only a little shorter than my own.