You lie bent up in embryo sleep
below the painting of the blue fisherman without a pillow.
The cover kicked and tangled on the floor
the old house creaking now
a car going by
the wind
a fire engine going up the hill.

I've disentangled myself from you
moved silently,
groping in the dark for cigarettes,
and now three cigarettes later
still elated
still afraid

I sit across the room watching you---
the light from the street lamp coming through the shutters
hysterical patterns flash on the wall sometimes
when a car goes by
otherwise there is no change.
Not in the way you lie curled up.
Not in the sounds that never come from you.
Not in the discontent I feel.

the first part of Stanyan Street, Rod McKuen

This just happened to be the first page of the poem as it is laid out in the book, it is actually much longer. But I really loved that line, 'not in the discontent I feel'. Picked this collection from a second-hand bookshop last weekend. It is this intoxicating place near World's End, full of excellently witty gruff misanthropes, 'discontents'.

I'm reading On the Road. (though I am told that this is the kind of book most people get over by the time they're sixteen.) I read it on the tube, mainly. I'm going from SW to NE London on the Picadilly line, shooting through Green Park, Covent Garden, Holborn. And Sal is going from East to West. God, just the very sound of the places he passes through sound so intoxicating. Testament, Georgia, New Orleans, New Mexico, Arizona, Denver, the mysical and revered 'Frisco'. He writes of purple darkness, a heaven of a sunrise, red mountainsides, transmuting clouds of gold. The sentence 'We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn' isn't remarkable or poetic in itself, but somehow it makes me so itchy and hopeful. I met a woman today, a colleague from our sister company in America, who mentioned a post-Wellesley road trip to Denver, and I nearly passed out with excitement.

Exact diagrams of...

Read this on the tube this morning, found it strangely comforting.

Time + consciousness = foreknowledge of our passing. Our only unique gift; we can act knowing, in some sense, that we are already dead.

The trees in winter, those exact diagrams of all our dead yearnings.

(Don Paterson - The Book of Shadows)

It just felt nice to think about non-essential things, rather that my usual: 'how many minutes late for work will I be if I go and get a sneaky coffee from Starbucks first?' / 'Did I file those invoices?'

I thought about the coffee and the invoices on the 3 minute journey between the station and the offices, instead.

With a foetus eye

A new record - I managed to get coffee, icing (from delicious danish) and blood (from surprisingly deep paper cut) onto my white shirt this morning, all before 9 am. A friend told me that 'coffee, icing and blood' sounded like something Plath would write about. He then sent me this -

Sylvia Plath tells the story of Goldilocks - Sebastian Faulks, Pistache
	I am the doctor who takes The temperature of each bowl. Daddy Bear, your gruel, Grey as the Feldgrau, Pungent as a jackboot, Rises under an ailing moon. I have been sleeping In your bed, Daddy. Mother's oats are blebbed With ruby stains of fruit preserve Beside the glass fire Of her blood-orange juice. The baby's porridge bubbles With a foetus eye. I swallow the sins it is not His to shrive. I devour The cancerous pallor With spoons of handled bone. I plough the winding-sheets Of each bear bed with my Surgical breathing, as I die and rise Three times before dawn. My golden hair is electric With the light of Borrowed stars, spread out On my pillow of skulls.

Now I really like Sylvia Plath's work - Bell Jar is hysterically funny - and I'm not so keen on sex scenes being described by using key and lock terminology, but this was a Very Good way to start the day. Thanks, M. xx