I’ve been reviewing the contents of my slab of old bits of writing. Most of it, of course, is nonsense (for that matter, so’s this), but life is in edit, and I had reason to think of the friend I wrote it for the other day, so here it is again. The original is dated November 2000: I’ve done a minimal amount of touching-up to get it in this form.

Nine silences for a friend

I
Please listen carefully
I speak quietly
Of very small things
which could not change my life
or heal my soul. But which
Twist and soar in their own joy,
large enough to share some
at the rest of us, such as:
How I knew I was at rest at last
and not danger, how I recognised
my past and was suddenly so
not at war with truth but admit
the pierce of sunlight into dusty
book-room.

Please tread softly and slowly
For this moment is scared of sudden
movement and should not have its spell
broken. Listen to this stilled air
of perfect knowing ourselves, because
our clumsy voices are finally listening
as loud as speech; that said,
Here is the symbol and the end of
understanding, here is lazy ease,
thick and heavy as bone should be
to be the final symbol.

I have had weight inside
and know that life’s completion:
this small voice asks
very happily
not for revolution or
New Mystical Knowledge Of The Ancients
but instead says,
these were some small things
that got thought by me
and that I have now told you
and that can’t make anything
better but can quietly be themselves
and with you.

II
Here we are again
In my small safe space.
I wanted to invite you to
have one for yourself.

You can see the speech
hang in the white air, here
and be accustomed to your own ideal
and stillness can allow weak

bluster to seep away alongside
snide pretence born, we know it,
of fear, and for me I am no longer
anything I need worry for.

I see you live on the world and
with and for it and under it
and I hurt when you stumble
and rage when you hurt.

All this is simple. But some of it
is possibly true and possibility can
be kind to us sometimes if
we can bring ourselves to let it.

III
I have no muse or useful
psycho-illogical back-flip
powering the writing forward but….

I have made every false
start before and maybe again
all because of the urgency of
rain and the kindness of strangers
stapling my soul into a
crumpled sheaf, an extraneous leaf
who’d feel better in a textbook than
in Mills & Boon or Irvine Welsh
but falls like a page of Python
in a world of pain

But then I open.

IV
So the work is, what,
an indifference? Rather everything else
that doesn’t not care but from
maybe this illusory altitude and
very still where the winds of change
have not been grouped together

we have allowed the sun to rise on
an agreement, celestial Canutes,
knowing our powerlessness and so proving
ourselves in harmony in some way
as yet unknown to Gossip Science
or that vague beery clarity when it
is as simple as a fist to solve things.

I cannot bear that I have had to
come away in this direction so far
from so many of you. And I cannot
bear to return and then leave once more
to be again alone. But when I walk
away I do so knowing love & affection
to be truth and my need for them also
leads me away from those others who were
never self-confidence or extraversion
or capacity or any of the other things
(which were not so very other)
that I tried to make them be.

Hopeless naming names or describing colours.
I would rather hold you dazedly as
this stormy sea brings in joy & fear
and I would still rather help you out
very timidly but the voyage is not mine to take.

V
This poem will not try to be anything
which it is not.

VI
I have wandered around the house
looking for this poem.
I could not find these words.

(If these are the words I could not find,
around whose house did I wander?)

VII
I have never estimated
the value of precision or
the shying away from the
precipice. I have made a
virtue of navigation and so
I know I will go off well
desert-isolated and not hurt you.
Now these roads are well-worn
as am I
and I am granted a spring of the
soul to draw light forth from the
dappled branches and see the mirror
from a different angle. Where I
should be, stands someone else. I am
unfamiliar and hatchling. I am not
ever very far beyond this.

So onwards and inwards is the
difficult mission to make
and to return having learnt
the value of stopping, or How
Not To Fear Imperfection.

VIII
Sullen silences are not those
at peace with themselves
but they happen more:

the pause between the question and
the answer
for calculation

the silence between the lightning and
the thunder
in which the explosion gathers itself
blanketing other sound
sealing it up, soaking it up
to finally form itself.

or the instant response to the
news of his death
… what? (lost.)

IX
Rare silences flower and
cannot be examples but
must be moments trapped
in the mind’s rose-tinted amber.

So this perhaps florid recommendation
is just that, not wanting nor able to be an exemplar.

And these very careful words
very carefully
want you to follow them
to where for a split
second it is quiet and safe
and you can think.