Matthew Henry John Bartlett

This week EPR reminded me I must get a drum kit again before too long. This week I got my last salary pay. This week I finished Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House and Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder. This week I laid out my first book of (someone else’s) poetry. This week an old sailor told me to acheive something with my life. I asked him if he had any ideas about what I should acheive. He said, “Have children and grandchildren. They’re a pain in the neck sometimes, but you get real joy from them too.” This night I read this poem by Cameron Hockly:

and maybe after all this time./ all these e
 pidemics of losing friends/losing lovers/lo
 sing our favourite red shoes/ our glasses/

 we may have to face the fact that/we can
  lose things within us/ things we thought we
  re firmly secured/ places we called home/ m
   emories we could only go so long without /
    referring back to./

and if we have to face the reality of this
/then we can quit pretending that we have/
 never been the lost child/ never missed a t
 rain/ or disappeared from everything that w
e knew familiar./

but the thing is-/ we are all so slow to a
cknow;edge this loss/ and it's not until we
 have walked / back through warm doorways /
or put on worn out clothes that we can admi
t/ and even then- only very quietly/

          that we have been far, far away //