I look for you behind retail parks,
ghost-lit showrooms, in dark
scrubland where plastics flutter on coils
of barbed wire; where, through mean soil
strewn with pipes, cartons, slugged condoms,
streams a steep-edged brook. Drawn
to its burble and splurge
I slip on the verge, fall and splunge
stretching for the banks, reeds, not catching hold
of anything sound, my hands ice-cube cold.
And past megastores, waste yards, the suburbs’ borders,
carried along on colourless waters
ever gushing on, with no smile, no frown,
I call you down, I call you down.
City limits are fine but I spend most
days hemmed in, meshed and lost
up a tower—in front of a screen,
black plastic keyboard, black plastic machine
on a laminate desk—where the windows
won’t open much in case I throw
myself out. Dust gathers on the phone,
empty plant pots. I am alone
much of the time to the extent
that a vague itch of harassment
prickles my contact with people.
And vacuumed through the non-soul
of blank matter, with no smile, no frown,
I call you down, I call you down.
Outside on shopped streets swarm mothers,
alpha males, screenagers, old, young, lovers,
the homeless, the bewildered, ill, unique,
the beautiful with their self-as-boutique—
so many, thronged into one body,
surrounding me, squishing, cumbering me
with sucken hair and grey breath,
a cracked open swallowing mouth.
And looking through a million eyes,
slouching upon a million thighs
compelled by the shackles
of meat-headed instinct to slowly circle
around and around, with no smile, no frown,
I call you down, I call you down.
Inside the machine or, at least, on the screen
I discover everything that has been,
will be, or might never be, has a place.
You can search for God, your name, any face
and reconfigure. You can hurt someone
and they won’t know it was you. There’s a room
for all things, the wall of each room an exit
to all that’s possible, all interconnected
with, as they say, no edge and no centre.
I press enter and enter and enter
not knowing where to go, what I might find
in this flat expanding surveillant mind,
weightless, free floating, with no smile, no frown,
I commune. Then the machine powers down.