I became intensely envious about exactly what was happening during those lunches.
Sales are filthy things even though they are the public’s gaze made concrete. The sales channels like coal mine shafts involve grubbiness and demeaning yourself for a quid. Just to feed yourself and your loved one. Let alone attain enlightenment. Even the fucking miners could get a flame from the coal to warm and light their dismal lives.
That’s not how it works with poetry. Apparently.
Poets are never the centre of a publisher’s attention. We are all alone and battling in the market.
James’s note continued, rambling, arrogant, scared, mediocre as always. Yes. he had lots more to say.
This is because the galleries, magazines and journals, the newspapers and book publishers, the labels and studio have no idea how to act around poets.
Especially us serious poets. Poor idiots that we are.
I’ve given up drinking and smoking grass. I also appear to have given up any form of structure that could count as living.
My wife, Jemma, is understanding or she is very distant. I think we are drifting apart like an elegant ocean liner (me) and its doughty tugboat (her).
Oh we really are, and none of it’s my fault.
I am more than aware that, minus the tugboat, the mighty and elegant ocean liner is just a hulk of metal full of rich people rammed up against each other like bad ideas.
I should have remembered to pick the car up from the garage. This simple act would have allowed me to do the grocery shopping. Enabled me – the car has no control over me.
That simple act would have given me the chance of a stable, maybe even a happy relationship.
James and his easy answers. A poet is he?
But I didn’t want to go out into this heat, this humidity and all those people. It’s too hot. That’s a simple fact, and there are few enough of those now that everybody has their own truths.
The thin skin of my forehead is peeling off me as raw leaves like a book in a hot shower.
That said, anybody who takes a book into a shower deserves everything that is coming to them. The book remains innocent, no matter its contents. Soggy but not to blame.
Where is that damned and damning car though? Which garage? Of course, like everything else, I have it written down somewhere.
I am a fucking poet. I produce… I produce lines that distill the human condition. I have insights. I understand and manifest beauty. I feel and express pain so you don’t have to.
On and on he goes. Dear, lost James.
I award myself a point for not swearing at this point.
I should have picked up that car. It would have got me out of the house for a few hours and I needed the exercise.
Dylan Thomas – the hero of my adolescence.
The man who set me on this path – he had the pub and the bar to visit and he couldn’t care less about his wife although he loved her and she loved him. Despite the violence.
I can no longer get out of the house by going to the pub or the bar or the bottle shop or the off licence or the bodega. Booze is no friend to me now that it causes me physical pain deep down in my kidneys. I am a coward in the face of pain. I am a poet but I am no Wilfred Owen.
I see all these other people beavering around the place, getting on with things and whether or not they seem happy, at least they seem engaged, attached, tethered to a reasonable and mundane reality.
Does this sound pretentious?
Yes, James yes.
It is my truth (which is now currency, so fuck you).
Their feet seem to be connected to the ground.
They seem to be at home.
They are fine.
Their hands grip the bannisters of stairs leading to public squares, where they sit eating pears or apples and talking on their phones.
I rather miss watching other people simply having lunch in a square hemmed in by grand buildings, or having park picnics in the cool green doesn’t make me hate them with envy and pain.
Or at least the idea of it.
As time went on though, I began to feel paranoid, as if the people were doing these things just to show me that I wasn’t, that I couldn’t.
For me, eating in public was a performance in the same way as an English exam in a big hall was.
Or making a cup of coffee for two? Always a huge performance.
Was I eating the correct fruit?
Was I eating it correctly?
Was the fruit the correct way up?
Should I be using a knife or eating it au natural?
Was I dribbling juice down my chin and drawing attention to my pale, pudgy face?
Was I even in the appropriate public place?
Would the combination of food and situation look attractive enough to ensure at least a passing look of approbation?
Had I got everything wrong, ensuring multiple looks askance and pitying?
After a while I knew that I was doing those simple things in such normal places wrong. All wrong. I didn’t have the script.
I was a fat clown who had removed his make-up by mistake. I was a poet but I was no Lorca, no Victor Jara. Nor will I ever be.
At last! Some insight. Some self-knowledge. Don’t be fooled. This is a standard tactic for getting someone, anyone, to tell him that he is as rich in meaning and heart as Lorca. That is as brave and ill-fated as Jara.
Of course, that was when I was earning enough money to afford the time to sit around eating fruit in public.
Poetry does not pay. I don’t know what she sees in me. Just a pathetic, scriptless flabby husk I am.
The telephone is ringing.
I should answer the telephone. I can see it’s Jemma calling from work.
She is a professional. She probably wants a lift home. She has been busy with work. Meetings with colleagues and clients. She is probably exhausted and wants to avoid the stink of a bus or the idle chat of a taxi.
I really do need to go outside and get that car before the garage closes. And my marriage goes with it.
Not just the car, Jimmy. Let’s not fool ourselves.
Nowadays I don’t bother to attempt going out unless I absolutely have to: to wit, my wife Jemma’s car. The one she needs for business and pleasure.
Not having to get drunk or stoned is a relief, especially in the heat and humidity.
Not waking up hungover.
Not waking up slack jawed with anxiety.
Nowadays, guilt is something I sneak out to church with.
That’s where you go! Mystery solved.
Except for the car.
The damn car.
My wife.
My soon-to-be-ex-wife.
Gave me the money to get it fixed.
It is not fixed. Or rather it is. The man at the garage sent a message electronically and told me it was ready. I wasn’t ready. It was fixed. I am not fixed.
I’m going to join a gym next week so I will get out of the house. Jemma wants me to. She assures me that not only will it make me feel better, it will also make me feel.
But I am a poet. But I am no Sylvia Plath. But I am not Vladimir Mayakovsky. Not Hart Crane nor Anne Sexton, nor Randall Jarrell.
She should really have left me by now.
James only sees love as a form of exchange. Not too poetical if you ask me. He’d like to think I’m imminently going to walk out. I am not. Yet.
Two years ago, I was indeed running my own company, selling pieces of words wrapped in designs to people who sold them on around the world. I absolutely (I am a poet) hated it.
Driving or flying hundreds, maybe thousands of miles a week, talking to people whose names escaped me just as mine were lost to them. The evening binges were different, more difficult to stick at because they required us to form relationships – these were good for growth. Me and my three partners needed growth, growth, growth. Cash, cash, cashflow. The fact that we weren’t bothering to have fun, fun, fun was by the by.
Instead of cracking on with creativity, I was flipped and I flopped into sales, which I discovered to my astonishment that I was actually quite good at.
What James means, but will never admit, is that he’s always been a salesman. Not matter how he looks down on Sales, he’s good at it. He should stick to it. We’d both be happy.
Even pissed I could retain the plot and close. Every time I closed I felt the need to get pissed and tell everybody. Every time I told everybody my partners dampened a remnant of my joy with, “You’re only doing your job”.
They were also paranoid. It was business after all and the thought of anybody outside the confines of our high-rental walls knowing about anything that happened inside filled them with fear.
The only time that they left the building was to go to lunch at the Greek bistro across the road.
I should answer the telephone.
I should go get the car.
I should get dressed.
I should leave the house.
I am a poet but I am no Emily Dickinson. No Hanshan. No Shiwu nor W. B. Yeats.
Christ, this is the sort of thing that dribbles out of his mouth after one glass of wine.
I became intensely jealous about exactly what was happening during those lunches. Not just eating. Eating and talking about me.
I had lunch with them several times. After saying how much they worry about you, James. We talked about food and finally about whether I’d like to invest a little more in the company.
One Friday I got back to the office, with a sale closed, at three in the afternoon and no one was there.
I got drunk and I stayed drunk through Saturday punctuating the hours with love calls and fights with Jemma. All of this in the house that we, she, was trying to turn into a home.
Well, fights.
I smoked dope. I drank rum. I took pills and I drove a hire car into a wall on Sunday night. Jemma was at her wits end. I was in hospital having tried to do for myself in an expensive hotel room with an expensive bottle of rum and not very expensive over the counter pills, all of which I paid for with my company credit card.
I was sacked by my partners on the Wednesday for betraying company secrets, misuse of company funds and for being an unstable addict, which I was not. I was quite stable most of the time. I was certainly an addict but it was me who was bringing home the bacon while the others played at being in business. As for betraying trade secrets, that was a bunch of hooey.
I’d stood on a table in a bar and yelled out the names of our client base and revenue (all of it down to me) at a bunch of hardened Sunday evening drinkers who couldn’t have remembered, had a few of them not recorded my performance and uploaded it to various popular internet sites.
It was in the hospital that I decided to become a poet. Unlike many poets, I had built up quite a substantial amount of savings, and various financial instruments against my old age. Unstable addict, my fat backside.
The telephone has stopped. I have just realised the best way to solve this conundrum.
Suicide!
This is where this rambling note from my husband James stops. There are two red wine rings on the paper. He doesn’t even say sorry. Never mind though. I found him slumped into the couch, drooling but alive. I’m writing this from the hospital. I’ll take him home soon. We’ll have words.
