Saturday 22 February 2014

48. Play and Play All Day



THE POET: 
Here, then, is this place – singular & banal
The last point now of where we are written to.

We are in a cafe, upstairs, in early spring rain. THE POET is trying to write, against a low volume of voices, a hum from various essential machines, & the irregular rhythms of newspaper pages turning & coffee spoons clinking. This is a common set of conditions, unmeant, unplanned, gently forceful - background contingency, like all geography.

CUSTOMERS:
Time to tell. Our movements are our own now
Moving in & out, Poet, from that universe
You write with.
                – But listen (we speak)
What mad, sad voices then are these?

A POET:
What is desired, for God’s sake?
ANOTHER POET:
What is to be made of your silence?
A THIRD POET:
What is worth being made memorable, and how do you get it?
A FOUTH POET, FROM A DISTANT TIME:
“Where are you taking me, and for what purpose?”

ALL FOUR POETS:
What you do, fails; what you don’t, fucks.

CUSTOMERS:
OK, true, let’s push this out then now –
If we’re ever to leave, you guys better
Stop licking each other’s pus, for what you’ve got
We’re told’s a privilege – then live it together now.

THE POET (BUT NOT IN OWN VOICE):
The very taking of chance
Inserts us into time – into
The present. To take a chance
Is to enter the moment in
Relation to it
               – it is, as
Musicians would say, a
Matter of getting in time, a
Matter of being with it.

FX: SOUND OF MOCKING LAUGHTER, FOLLOWED BY MISCELLANEOUS AND VARIED WATER SOUNDS INCREASING SLOWLY IN VOLUME THROUGHOUT UNTIL END

THE POET:
OK then this calls
For rapid improvisation
Out of the decaying categories of selfhood
Into constant fluid process
Escape now into the poem
Securing a non-delusory identity for ever.

A FOURTH POET:
“I can only say here
That a poem is never ‘THE’ poem
But only a small fragment
Of an infinite calculation.”

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