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Self-Potrait
in a Rear-View Mirror
When I sat down to write the
history of my country,
I began to mine a strange
vein of frivolity.
Ecstatic sobs escaped me,
as I realised I had no country.
I felt free to explore god-like
possibilities,
the cancelled events not
of our making,
the mudslides of worm-eaten
histories
on the move in rain that
was slanting.
This took the form of a tentative
probe
of what mine ears have heard:
mysteries,
moments in desultory small
talk
which light my mind like
flare or strobe.
I leave it to others to worry
away
at the cliff-face of official
report,
as I try to get hold of an
idea
that eddies and drifts, everywhere
and nowhere.
Within the grand architecture,
there is a grander architecture,
but no, double-no,
I don't think I'm reading
things into it, when I say so.
These anthropological pursuits
after hidden laws
are leading me through a
series of sliding doors,
towards a prospect, whose
distance I measure
in ever-increasing increments
by order of magnitude.
Through layers of misunderstanding,
filter legacies of my riotous
living.
I've known promises to turn
rancid;
I've taken hits in the face
from skidding,
wildly flung, demographic
pie charts;
and more and more my constant
own goals,
like waiter-baiting, mildly-flung
bread rolls,
have seen me at the end of
the very long day,
kept on the backburner of
heartburn.
Clues keep unravelling; bodies
refuse to learn,
in the failing light, which
itself helps provide
just the right edge of uncertainty,
as I am left to flannel on,
a face-cloth in the wind.
Always I erect rickety structures
on false premises in true
places.
I have prised apart a policeman's
stubby fingers;
I have assigned small armies
of cleaners
to wash away the sorrow that
clings and lingers;
I have raised bank shutters
and lowered my standards.
I have praised those things
you kneel on;
and I know this wonderful
undersea salon,
where seaweed and celluloid
is what my eye dwells on.
I have held my own hand to
talk myself through
a lifetime spent reaching
for petty change.
My kitchenware consists of
nothing more strange
than one rusty Wastemaster
way-station;
my existence amounts to a
concrete ghost town;
and my memory is a makeshift
parade of clowns:
such ruins have I shored
against my foundations.
©
2000
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