FAR TO GO
I suggested to the director
if they were going to film this they should
use cross-cutting, or a Space Odyssey-type
match cut to
juxtapose my past and my
present selves and
drop a hint via a symbolic image
towards my future, presupposing
I have a future, that
we all have a future
here I am though
unawares that someone is watching me, scrutinizing,
judging
that reader, audience being
my older self, set
of older selves
and me so withdrawn, parent put-
down but still
finding space away
from that dour dreary family everyday
to really e e cummings it
them calling me back
to the house for homework, supper,
but me
having none of it
trying to
love everything, feel free, but
it such a battle
scars in my soul (lifelong) and
all sorts of scratches on my legs, cut
on my knee
leave the street behind me and suddenly it’s field upon field
and then up this one steep hill
and onto the moorland
didn’t think I would ever wander to far
didn’t think I would ever
wander to Africa
hard to imagine Africa when
you are only nine
hard to come to terms with life in
a land ridding itself of the shadow of occupancy
racially divided, needing to
acknowledge its every
breath of humanity, best regarded, reconciled
to itself
and here — fresh establishing shot
me in my twilight
in an African village
then close up so that viewers can see, read,
interrogate my failures, understand my pain
typing by a small basic energy-saving bulb
at the end of a pugged-in lead, nothing exotic
or in any way fancy
picking out the letters on a keyboard
my fingers like two grain-gobbling birds
just don’t want, at this point, having
gained your confidence, established a connection,
lapse into my usual
quantum nonsense, philosophical pretensions
project all my quirks, conundrums, contradictions
out
onto the Universe, as if I can
speak for
all that is out there
as if I am
what I so often assume myself to be
so representative of my species, of this dying humanity,
in any shape
or form
in any meaningful way
dazzled, baffled by the extremity of our current killer theories
those men with telescopes, microscopes, next-level calculus
who tell
us that this is not the world as
all that we are at
our invisible level
does experience it
that we are
as consciousness, intricately and absurdly entangled
in the most experimental kind
of theatre
most radical of absurd drama plays
that all
this mise-en-scene, these camera angles
could be different, so very other
dissolve into cloud, be
rewritten, newly
scripted,
filmed again, and again