Something about you that I can’t shake,
Don’t know how much of this I can take,
Baby I’m under your spell.

I was knocked out and loaded in the naked night.
When my last dream exploded, I noticed your light.
Baby, oh what a story I could tell.

It’s been nice seeing you, you read me like a book
If you ever want to reach me, you know where to look.
Baby, I’ll be at the same hotel.

I’d like to help you but I’m in a bit of a jam,
I’ll call you tomorrow if there’s phones where I am.
Baby, caught between heaven and hell.

I’ll see you later when I’m not so out of my head,
Maybe next time I’ll let the dead bury the dead.
Baby, what more can I tell?

Well the desert is hot, the mountain is cursed,
Pray that I don’t die of thirst,
Baby, two feet from the well.

Bob Dylan and Carole Bayer Sager

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum,
Dodging lions and wasting time.
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, I could hardly stand to see ‘em,
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb.
Train wheels running through the back of my memory,
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese.
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece.

Bob Dylan

Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.

Leonard Cohen

I stood as one in a maze. My only chance was to open my eyes and let the confusion in. One day I gave it all up and the path opened up for me. I saw laughter coming from every blade of grass. The ground grinned up at me and every cell in my body thanked me. I had a day’s walk on all sides. I walked till I got tired then realised I didn’t know where I was going.

It seems like a lifetime since I got scared and lost our love in the rough. I still go to the chapel of partial remembrance now and then, when I’ve got nothing better to do. I don’t come out light on my feet and all that, just empty and needing a drink. It’s not like it’s going to bring you back, and I doubt, as I’m sure you do, that that’s what I really want.

I live at the bottom of a street that ignores the entrepreneurs; where people like me like to imagine we’re on some kind of Path; where your half-open mouth is almost forgotten. But this morning’s all wrong. I sense the noonday demon sliding under the door and up the stairs to my room; I wonder if there’s a beer in the fridge left over from last night.

A collection of six notes from a room  in a little ebook on Six Sentences.

When I first met you, you were going nowhere fast. You looked up at me with puffy eyes and said you thought you knew what you needed but weren’t ready to start looking for it; you’d tried, but always fell back to the bottom of the ladder. To me it looked like you were sticking your head in the sand so your black dogs wouldn’t find you. You were digging for freedom, but with truth nowhere to be seen. Sometime afterwards you told me I wouldn’t see you for a while, that you were going away to get clean and thin. When I saw you a month later, you were even more bloated with booze and antidepressants. There was a gluttonous mistrust in you that sabotaged all your puritan exertions. You’d have said you knew all that, and maybe you did. The last time I saw you I didn’t recognise you at first. You’d been up all night and were talking too fast, but you were thin and happy. You said you’d finally got your orders and were going away for good now, but didn’t say where. You told me you’d found a way to live for next to nothing, that everyone had their own desert and you’d found yours. You were finally ready to patch things up between the soul and the world. It was all a question of finding a place with the right temperature. Walking backwards, you shouted that you’d keep a record and send it to me, a magical distillation of your trip that would help me with my own, that would help everyone. But you never did. I’ve spent far too much time thinking about you.

Sincerely, PHJ

I wrung the neck of a robin with a broken wing today. It was lying on the sidewalk with glassy alien eyes. It was a fantasy I’d had for a while, putting a wounded bird out of its misery, but as a way of impressing a girl: she’d be horrified at the suggestion at first, but I’d convince her it was the only thing to do. If I’d been with a girl I probably would have done it right away, but being alone I was less motivated. I passed the bird on my way to the supermarket and again on my way back. It had started raining and people were walking by giving it fleeting glances. When I got back home I’d thought about it too much: without taking off my coat, I got my umbrella (I discovered it had a broken stem and had some trouble opening it) and went back out. As I approached the bird and made to close the umbrella, it stuck out in the wrong places and I had to cram it shut. This sounds like a contrived poem, but that’s what happened. If I were a poet, this is the sort of thing I might have rushed home to write a poem about: maybe not about how a squirt of white excrement came out of the bird while I did it, maybe not how I had to do it twice, and especially not how, while I was carrying it home to put it in my bin I thought I felt it move in my hand, threw it to the ground and stepped on its neck hoping no one was watching; but about how the things I touched afterwards reminded me with a shudder of its damp bony body and open beak, about how my grandfather the farmer used to do the same thing as a matter of unsentimental necessity when he slaughtered chickens and when the cats in the hayloft produced superfluous kittens, and how I’m a futile child of the postmodern age who’s lost touch with the noble and natural art of neck-wringing.

I made sounds with him I never made with you. He never talked about being shipwrecked between my legs, he never bored me with speeches about the essential solitude of sex. He never clutched Madonnas in bed. His house was airy and free, he gave me room and gave my body what it needed. He couldn’t have cared less about the Rose or the fullness of my lips. I never missed him.