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Rupert Loydell
Memories for Amnesiacs
I like being told what to do,
the music I should be listening to.
One student knows far more than I
and is glad to voice his opinion,
another wants to reinvent hip-hop
and give up smoking without any pain.
Fantastic voyages are to be had
by intentionally going nowhere:
I can fold time and space,
be whoever I want to be.
Frontiers and countries keep moving
without warning, walls keep tumbling
down. My daughter's favourite phrase
is 'when I was a baby I used to...'.
She invents a past she can't remember,
paints pictures to hang on memory's wall.
The Map of Hearing
Was it the hum of the printer
or music he could hear?
Nothing had changed except
his relationship to the room
and noise that seemed
to come from nowhere.
Cabin fever, perhaps, or
signals from outer space,
the house full of tones,
unabridged equations and
out-of-balance sound,
broken wires scrawled
across the map of hearing.
Inside Rain
He found it hard to cope with,
autumn already being here. And
it was Friday. Next week at work,
students would arrive, days blur
into photocopying and lectures.
Summer? What summer? Outside,
rain was falling, fields were on fire.
He smouldered with impatience,
tried to find time to make time to
do the things he should have done
when he'd had the time. A week ago
he thought he'd relaxed, been glad
to be; now the sun set earlier and
earlier, and every resolution failed.
How he feared the days to come,
misunderstood the principle of night
and day, couldn't see how it slotted
all together. Later on, he watched
the rain, the visiting foxes and owls,
wondered about money, light, and love.
A Religion Concerning Essays
for John Burnside
'Cuz there will come a time
When time goes out the window
And you'll learn to drive out of focus.'
- 'Going Inside', John Frusciante
Off to a great start, almost godlike in fact -
moments of understanding in need of enlargement.
I have been spared any camaraderie of loneliness
and now understand what I am expected to do.
Faint horizontal lines in pencil, footnotes and asides;
declared intention and clear evidence of thought.
Truth matters, according to the book I am reading.
I don't know if that is true or just a construct.
From a distance, knowledge is a good and constant
sort of companion. Love is mentioned just the once,
faith only in passing; in the future we will not see at all.
I put doubt in my pocket and take it across town.
For punctuation there are footsteps, car horns, mobile phones,
barking dogs, strange voices off and disconnected speech.
'I love colour more than anything else!'' she is still wont
to exclaim. We all thank Providence for deliverance
but this is soon matched by fears of critical discernment:
those wretched academics have a lot to answer for.
There is no excuse for not wearing my glasses, none
for leaving the road. This trip is an artistic pilgrimage,
the assignment merely a ruse to see if you were listening.
When was that deadline again? Rightly or wrongly,
we are all in this together, nothing less than human,
spilling into self-absorption and superstitious ways.
Copyright © Rupert M Loydell
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