‘I think it is best if you leave, Brian.’

‘And don’t reel your ugly head in here again,’ said Kaylee, ‘except to give us our money back, you stupid, pathetic, self-centred mother—’

I was out the door before she’d finished so I had no idea how her sentence ended.

My sentence was just beginning.

Wednesday September 5th

not a poem

this is not a poem

only a combination of words

broken up in such a way to make

you think it is

spacing is important

as is the series of

line breaks

that I have skilfully

manoeuvred on the page (note, too, the absence of

upper-case characters

see how

they make it seem

deeper somehow)

it is still not a poem, though

enough of this now

What the hell is poetry anyhow? The tearing open of a heart? The baring of a soul? The sharing of a universe? Or is it all mere posture and pantomime?

Ask someone who cares.

I have far more important things to think about.

I am thinking about how I have been cast out.

I am thinking about how all I hold dear is slipping away from me.

I am thinking about everything that has led me to this point.

And I am thinking about Toby Salt.

And I am thinking about when to do it and where to do it.

And I am thinking about how it might be done.

September 6th to September 16th deleted.

Monday September 17th

Nothing to See Here

I was carefully coating my life

with a thick layer of creosote,

when – suddenly – out of the blue,

nothing much happened of note.

Life somehow got back to normal,

its rhythms flat and mundane,

but one evening – to my surprise –

nothing much happened again.

Now they come with endless abandon –

I’m spinning around like a top –

all these incessant non-happenings.

Oh, how I wish they would stop.

Nothing much to report today. Just like yesterday and all the days before.

I absolutely did not go out to the shed again.

Tuesday September 18th

An awful night’s sleep. Another ghastly dream to destroy the night and haunt the day to come. I have been dragging the ghost of it around with me all day. Not as far as the shed, of course. No, not that far because I obviously didn’t go back in there today.

Wednesday September 19th

Take this Hand in Yours

Take this hand

in yours,

bury it

beneath the trees,

and I will get

the rest of him

out of the

deep freeze.