Today I’m trying to stay off Instagram. Just for twenty four hours, just for today, just to feel that I have agency or something that feels like agency, though I’m not sure I actually have that agency or where it might begin and end. Me of little faith. I’ve been saying words but have I been saying words, really? Seems to me they’re a cloud of flies, a column of smoke, gibberish spoken from a mountaintop into a ferocious wind, swallowed by some much larger and unknowable conversation, of which I am not a voice. Not a voice at all. What is it that this stuff implies, what of the speaker, can you say it is real, that it has a soul? Could you have a conversation with it?

I’ve been compulsively checking it, Instagram, and it tastes sour, like going hungry through a pile of crisps, desiring more and annoyed at yourself and feeling kinda unwell and both full and empty at once. Crumbs and sticky fingers. I am mad needy, needing pings of love, wanting not to count the total after but to feel each tiny jolt of arriving heart, one by one. Reassure me you little zaps of soothe. The algorithms have us figured out you see, have learned how keen we are to see ourselves seen, to base our sense of ok-ness on validation by likes. Loves even. They’ve stolen our languages of love because they know we want this love deep down we want love and we’re suckers to feeling more of it, a river of love that has no end and maybe no beginning and maybe tomorrow the most love of all if I can only optimise my content. I check my phone for any new messages.

o p t i m i s e

It is raining. Steady heavy mild mist-rain, late September fading greens rain, here comes the dark half rain, shrinking day rain. Swallows still here but on the verge now. Packing their bags. On the wires. Or perhaps they’ve just now set off south? How in the fug is it late September? How now? All an abstraction, this time business. Maybe it’s already March 2028 or June 3045 or whatever. I go back to this again and again, same themes, the strangeness of being and oddness of time and the resistance to actually taking part in the normal schemes of life and living. I feel I run in tight circles, the same thoughts and maybe there is a loop that I have been in since I began. A little toddler bemused that he is already 1 and a half, almost two, and nothing done, nothing done at all.

What is it then? Let’s try to define anxiety without looking it up. A fine challenge for a man who figures out about 1 crossword clue from 20.

Anxiety is a humming shifting of unquiet, a buzz of fearful tension, a microphone turned up way too loud, a barking dog chasing a car’s wheel, grinding gears, a wobble in the spin of a washing machine, static in the nerves, a pot boiling dry, the heater left on, a phone ringing, driving into thick traffic, reading a newspaper, and the bit before you reach to check Instagram or whatever feed you feed.

Later I develop film for the first time in months and 6*6 negs begin to emerge with memories from last year. There are people. Some of these people are now out of reach. And places too, that feel like they were once a big part of me and are now a part of the big strange. And the melancholy that played for the whole summer and before starts to tune up again. It swoops and curves and there is a falling away, an unmooring that is always unmooring and never quite unmoored, falling with no ground below. AM I learning something about the nature of loss?

Work to do, work to do. I need to try and fix the tripod and order more fixer and figure out how to develop lots of film quickly.

I breathe yet and here breathe into that old website that feels a billion me’s out of date and receding.

Work to do. Work to do. We’re always living the dream, it’s just not always the good kind of dream.

I am that shrugging embodied man who does not care that he is in an advertisement.

There is a little round tabletop and a pen with a fine click and a soft blank waiting page and her darting but settled yet darting eyes from across the bay of coffee smells and clinking spoons. I add in such restlessness to make this agenda mobile, give it room. I pull on lines and tweak tensions as the hull knocks on waves and ocean opens out. But that is not what this is about.

Of course that sea is near enough for gulls to shriek in their harbour of creased skies, and the narrow street outside to parade a trail of intriguing characters. No diesel fumes here. No letters from the bank or hospital. No unexpected phone calls. But I miss the point as always.

—

Where are you now?

You cannot look?

—

My hand above the page, grasping the pen. The bustle glancing to acknowledge a hush, like new Spring watching the sun raise its conducting gleam. The apex of ease, spasm of creation, an airman heaving his propeller round until it catches and abruptly explodes into smoky clattering go.

—

Did you leave out the bins?

No.

—

No, I refuse to cast this with characters from my spare interiors. I love you all but I cannot. I cannot be let loose in my own free domains. I will bring me to a standstill again. It is another I, that comes here, sits intensely and exudes unities, notes unruffled the passings of weather and  emptying of cups and clocks. Here they will not ask exactly what it is that this I does, or where exactly it is that this I comes from or goes back to. Outside wait empty sets of possible futures, uncorrupted by script or gesture. Of course I wander as usual right off the script, such as there is.

—

Can you fill out section 3 B on Pensions?

Sorry, I was miles away. Miles away.

—

Dreams are so fragile, too eager for the intrusion of anxious ripples. The part that cooks up suggestions, that has been shouting ‘is it a ghost?’ since a child’s mind painted in the first shadows, is always busy in the kitchen. True fantasy takes diligent work. Commitment. Dedication. I imagine, in any case. My efforts to meditate are like trying to juggle with clumsy limbs. Thoughts go up, come back down, spill to the ground. What am I left holding? Bare fingers and a clock that refuses to stop beating.

—

So I’ll call you in a few weeks and organise to pick up my stuff.

Ok.

—

Americano, no milk or sugar?

Yes please.

I endeavour to project a light and open confidence. A high road overlooking the ocean. A break in the clouds. There are some people in but the table is free. It is always free.

And could I get a chocolate brownie?

For here?

Yes.

I will sit and flicker between shabby slouch and collected poise. It is more difficult with the backpack shoved under my legs. It is far too bulky and old. I wrestle out another sheet of blank paper. It is the same sheet. If only I knew how to draw. Then I could be free.

Chords: C#m A (5th) E and C#m B E Bit samey, may need a bridge and some variety

Demo:

Lyrics
Now I’m curled up in a ball
Need to walk since I can’t crawl
Now I’m hiding in the pockets of your warmth
It heats us all

Now I’m searching for a shoe
Need to find a way to you
But what I’m finding is that all I am
Is the sum of what I do

Now I’m running down the stairs
Chasing days and chasing wares
Now I’m counting every step away
From the places my heart tears

And I’m dying to see the light
While I’m trying to seize the day
You cannot win if you will not fight
Or love without losing your way

Now I’m stumbling down a road
Taking heat for being cold
And I’m feeling every metre from
The comfort of your hold.

Now I’m waiting on the street
As the rain falls down in sheets
While my mind is getting soaked from all the
flowing thoughts it leaks.

Now I’m balanced on a chair
Drinking toasts to you somewhere
While my clothes dry out and I wrestle doubt
For the love in the world out there

Now an older man sits near
And he tries to tell me clear
To count my blessings and count my scars
Because they all add up to what we are

Other verse, not recorded
(Now I’m curled up in a bed
waiting for the dreams I’ve fed
On the ways I grow and go toe to toe
With the emptiness and dread)

ADIO (original recorded version)

VIDEO (outdoor onetake version with different bridge section)

G Em C D7

It’s hard to start when everything seems so far apart
No centre to turn into when lovers lose their heart
It’s tough to say when exactly night becomes day
When the blackest backdrop begins to fade into grey

I was at a crossroads, at a standstill
come on over, you’ve got time to kill
I was at a junction, out of the running
Come on over now, what is done is done.

I’ve seen the tears fall away through the bad years
Fears burning holes out of dreams hitting low-flying jeers
Of the people from the people to the people on the ground
Social trauma being so blunt packs a punch when you’re down

Every coin’s got two sides and an edge like a sledge,
Money’s money honey drives a big wedge
See the green bills, won’t take you from the ledge
Won’t take you from the pills
Look how the time spills

I was at a crossroads, at a standstill
Come on over, there’s still time to mend
I was at a junction, out of the running
Come on over now,what was then was then

–bridge–

I thought I knew enough to steer clear of dark days
Here in the haze ways veer through the maze
Of the people from the people what the people say they know
Catch you off your guard and hit you; such a low blow

I needed help needed rescuing from myself
Twos company threes a crowd, but one’s lonely- see
from the bottom of a bottle far too often how the world can be so
grey, turn to get away, turning all day

I was at a crossroads, at a standstill
Come on over, there’s still time to give
I was at a junction, out of the running
Come on over now, it can’t be undone.

Chords are very simple… A D C Blues 12 bar with interlewdeling bits.

Lyrics. Mouthfuls and mouthfuls or rambling lyrics:

Well I parked up my dreams, in a house by a field, called up the the operator, said What do you need?
He said grow your own vegetables, comb your own hair, take your own advice, and don’t listen to what’s there.
I reached out for the medicine, but it fell out of sight, I reached out for everything, woke sweating in the night.

I went and took my temperature, listened to the clock, counted how many heartbeats, It took for tick to tock.
I silenced every idle thought, and read a bunch of books, that showed me all the tricks you need, to have good thoughts and looks,
And I rolled back the curtains, and squinted at the sky, and everyone I had to meet, had already gone by.

I went to the doctor and demanded what he knew. He said I have no secrets now, all them TV shows are true.
I held up my swollen limbs, and wrote my symptoms down, then I put on his rubber gloves, and gave myself a gown.
I imagined up some conditions, and cured them in a flash, I created some prescriptions,aAnd I had some peace at last.

But it turned out to be temporary, too good to be true. By the time I’d done the verse, my world once more turned blue.
I went right back to searching, for there must be a cure, for every little annoying thing, that makes it all less pure.
There’s dirt in the water, and noise on the line, there’s blood in my arteries, and stains on my mind.

But entropy keeps telling me, that all we are is dirt: Wake up your dreams from slumbering, to give it all some worth.
If you really have no little itches, you’d better check your pulse. You might have drifted off again, to a far less interesting world.
Pinch yourself to test this, Kick yourself for luck, try another experiment, Or wallow in the muck.

I can tell they are familiar with people as they eye me up and bob around the short piers, balancing their hopes for scraps of food with natural wildness. They have been fed before. The cob snaps at a scrap of wet brown bread that I offer, his ridged beak catching my fingers, all the while signalling his independence with that hiss, his neck raised and eyes watchful of the cygnets as they paddle and chase and chirp.







Mute swans were hunted almost to extinction, saved perhaps by royal decree, and can be killed by pollution such as discarded lead weights (banning these weights saw a recovery in some populations). With luck this brood will avoid the pollution, escape the jaws of pine martens and mink, and moult their way to strong stately white wild royalty.