64
What violence is there in giving someone a name, carving out Ida's real name
of these fourteen strips, lacing up the endless observations each day
in the deformed images of words that tell lies by omission.
It's eleven o'clock. She just drove through the snow to drop me at home.
Her father had 'taken a turn for the worse' and I had fed her cat and fish,
feeling virtuous alone in her apartment: her father's suffering wasn't my fault
the aquarium became an aquatic jungle war-zone between well-armed shrimp and minnows.
Her cat scratched on the door but settled for a nap with me from seven to ten.
She had bought her father a child's cup to help him drink in bed while
beated and chopp'd with tanned antiquity,
but decided it looked too childish. Someone got him another one,
'which was good', so hers remained on the dashboard, hard to remove.
She asked if I would do the same for the pets tomorrow, but I said no.
Annoyed, I no longer felt noble. As if she had wanted to take it from me.
66
Heard Jens Christian Grøndahl give an impassioned defence of Proust’s ‘A Remembrance of Things Past’
in Danish: the things I could follow I already knew, and what I couldn’t, I couldn’t.
No mention of Swan’s secret motor in masochistic cuckoldry; instead, a masculine pathos of jealousy
and brass eternal slave to mortal rage
of a man who worries his mistress might cheat. But Proust knew better of love's evil.
Perhaps that’s why I chose to share yesterday’s sonnet with the object of my vignette:
Joel read it, recognising insinuations. He wrote back double quick with improvised rhymes
which that morning I read as critique but by night I read of ‘Royal purple idiots’ in camaraderie.
Hiding behind barricades of a paper fortress with pronunciations of greatness given easy.
Great material to teach on Fitzgerald, Turgenev, Ginsberg, but no classroom mastery.
Learned my school will strike from April 10. Which will damage my favourite first year class.
Drain the union war-chest, ruin the international standing of the Danish IB, and pile up a month’s work.
But I’ll be free. Go to Ida’s. Fed the cat and fish and nap and wait for her to wake me.
Her dad was upset he no longer needs calcium for strong bones. Drank a beer for sympathy.
67
Felt bad for having a quickie with Ida on international women's day;
it was supposed to be a fun way of her repaying me for feeding her fish and cat.
I just got her to hoist her woollen dress, lie on her belly, and put it in.
Before that she'd read for two hours of ‘The Naked Trees’ to her cancer-stricken dad.
I'd done two hours in the sauna and steam-bath: male bathers calmly debate
the difference between human and animal souls: tried to ace them with Aristotle
'If the axe had a soul it would be cutting'; but who moves the axe? I do.
Just as the seasons move me to think, love and reproduce in writing
shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Naturally, human souls are a part of the divine unfolding whole.
Shakespeare's sonnets: long-lasting intricate hymns of praise for his beloved
out of a duty to preserve the nature of his lover for another’s future pleasure?
These vulgar sonnets riddled with cruel impressions of lovers and friends
so that you can get a better understanding of nature’s obstacles to noble character.
68
So romantic: every spindly branch of Risskov forest bears a heavy white payload
since the Museum Ovartaci drew so many visitors there was no ticket for me
and I'm not the only one interested in a kind of alien hermaphrodite
and his connection to Pierre Klossowski's perverse obsession with his wife's sex-life,
and no wonder sex with Ida is so short-lived. That's the price of being a pimp
and maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
and before she met me Ida had never strayed
and on my way to the Friday afternoon cafe I glimpse a man bounding down the street
and protruding from his cowl-like hood, a reddish beard and smirk,
and he stared straight ahead and walked past to save my embarrassment
and truth is I don't really care that much either way that Ida is interested in him
and wants to be tied up to those two round steel hoops drilled up on high in his bedroom wall
since I don't need to protect Ida from disturbing experiences which can thrill some,
so romance walks arm-in-arm through the driven snow to hell.
69
'A work of literature is like a good weekend: you start it with a sense
of relief and escape and become very quickly intoxicated with its possibilities
before it resolves itself into a sense of restedness or a sense of obligation
towards the future.' Discuss this analogy with reference to three literary works.
Met at 11, she wore the turquoise tights I'd bought her for valentines.
Hear of how her dad really likes her reading aloud while he lies in bed.
Explain Stendhal's idea that love is like a bare branch dipped in a salt mine:
It blooms into crystal through being buried deep in our heart's darkness.
Ida asked how might this process be aided? Especially when I think of ours,
beggared of blood to blush through lively veins.
Tried espresso, red wine, ten G & Ts, three beers, arguing over the strike, returning home at 5 am
She found a dark green scarf abandoned in a bar and encouraged me to steal.
Guilty sleep all day. Skyped ex. She'd read Simone Weil’s ‘Letter to a cleric'
Sweet laugh about her brother who knows Kafka from a question on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’
70
Saw Dennis Potter's ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ and was glad I'd grown strong enough to flee.
Each child under invisible ambush from bullying, sexual desire, parental bitterness;
before these bastard signs of fair were born
and the means to gain independence from circumstance thus established.
Slogged through 110 pages of Oliver James Dodsley's novel manuscript for 'Foxtale':
Our debased western culture tilts at windmills because our lives lack glamour;
Second generation fundamentalists think they're Sinbad, cops think they're Bond,
while the lives they inhabit filled with petty, trivial, sexual desires sublimated into hate and clothes.
It was heavy going; I stopped several times to immerse myself in that much maligned vice;
Slept at 6am, messaged Ida at 9: I wouldn't make our breakfast date at 10.
Woke at 12. Cycled to a lecture on time travel with Svend Åge Madsen;
it's already here: Riemann's curved space; Mobius strips; rotating universes; a gallop in fragments.
Dismounting before the venue, a thought flashed through me in the soft warm rain: life is better than art
Checked my watch: it had come to a dead stop when the lecture began and now wouldn't restart.
72
At his bedside, he’d asked each of his children if they’d eaten, one by one leaving Ida, his youngest, till last.
Earlier he’d had them shine a torch on the wall to see if that writing was still there, but no, it had vanished.
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.
That was at 6am. I saw him at 4. Daughters and son still tending his small golden body. His hands, waxen.
Great camaraderie, weeping freely: Ida said she’d joked with her brother about her dad’s medicine
and how they would explain to the nurses that he’d managed to take every last one before he died;
of how his morphine patches fetch 1000 kroner on the street. They are cut into strips, boiled, then sniffed.
Ida becomes cheerful. Her dad’s apartment now full, with brother, sister, and boyfriends.
Grown children pressed and stroked their dad’s hands and chest, and spoke of his remaining warmth;
I wanted to say something which wouldn’t sound insincere or worse, but couldn’t, so kept quiet and cried.
I was there because Ida thought I deserved to be included. Now who will find her so precious?
An atheist who wanted them to celebrate the day of his death. Ida had said ‘Could you wait until Spring?’
He’d liked that. We took a walk, and on the way back, she slipped in the freezing mud, and cried like a kid.
73
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
than read my diary assuming these lines more true,
when all what matters is what I did; I must have underfed the fish:
You looked in the fish-tank and said, ‘what kind of massacre is this?’
The giant prawn, with claws at least twice size of its nearest rival, lies in the gravel.
Your prize specimen dead on the day your dad died,
the second largest lumbering around with one arm less, Samson's Pyrrhic victory short-lived;
you couldn’t find it funny, and you couldn't be angry.
Slept together, until lessons begun to haunt me at 4 am, and I called for a taxi.
Messaged my boss to get the day off for the funeral, which she arranged quickly without question.
Told my classes of a death in the family; hence, the sore red eyes, the incoherence:
Fitzgerald's unwitting racism; the literary illusion of flight; who needs to hear your Howl?
An unexpected missed call from my dad’s number at 10. Relieved to hear an aunt had died and not him.
Ida will finish off ‘The Naked Trees’ so she can read the last few pages for her dad's funeral.
74
Every lover is second best. Ida looked sad. Why she hadn’t got back with her ex.
The handsome, thoughtful, young, musician. Not with me in Ris Ras. She said
they took the Sweden trip, two weeks after she’d met me: ‘But you can’t choose who you love,’
I didn’t say that I’d chosen her over mine, and that choice is never obvious.
Taxied through the freezing cold to homemade spaghetti cooked with garlic and chili pepper oil. No beers.
Promised to make love in the morning. Woke. Made her coffee, and went about it matter of fact.
The cat slunk under her bed but jumped up to investigate the sound of her purring vibrator.
He lined her thigh as he was thrown out. Proud we’ve performed on command. Which is harder for men
because while women, can lie and be miserable, men must assert their erection will arrive.
Without physical evidence in the blood,
the coward conquest of a wretch's knife.
Surprised by the ease with which passion falls back into your arms, and is gone. Receive
a message from my ex. Ida saw her fingerprint portrait. Bitterness: ‘I don’t mind;
what can I do about it?’ Exit. She had quit her internship and now struggles with time.
76
I’d like to think I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Yesterday, in the train toilet,
I noticed how there was a brilliant pure white light glowing from behind the baby changer,
and in the gaps which connected the buttons for the taps and the flush. But I didn’t press further
in case some humdrum explanation could prove that glint of heaven false.
Last night I worked out that I am about three days from perfection.
In that time, I could do the bulk of my marking, spring clean my apartment, proof-read Oliver’s novel.
Call my aunt, dad, you, without that overhanging threat of losing my job, home, love.
Compare this with the day’s pure milk-white blanket, the morning sky like a pillow, promising rest.
Either way, I’ve four more days’ worth of continuous labour, before I can love,
and you and love are still my argument.
Ida got tickets for the Beyoncé concert in the summer,
and once her father’s funeral is over, I say everything is permitted.
Even the most extreme acts of kindness I haven’t yet fathomed, as a result of former asperities:
withholding likes, staying awake, and turning away from the white-lit goddess of the internet
80
’If I haven’t prepared you for my death then I have failed as a father.’
So says the King of Wakanda to his son in Black Panther,
egging him on to something like heroic deeds to protect conservative values.
Better was the low moan of ‘The Streets of Philadelphia’.
The story of one man whose natural LXXX leads him into a private hell
Diogenes, ostracized, has lost his sense of humour:
My saucy bark inferior far to his,
Now Ida sits beside me in Café Englen, finishing off her Graham Norton.
Earlier a burst of LXXX after we lied naked and restless in bed for two hours
I’d returned from the bathroom as she drew up thick black stockings
and I thought of Egon Schiele, buried my face in their gusset
‘Make me come’. And we did. Made it out in time for noodles in Kowloon restaurant.
At the funeral, the family took good care of Erland’s Filipino girlfriend, Lou, even when they knew
she’d take 13% and be gone. He’d raised them well. They knew his LXXX was true.
82
Yesterday’s trip to Ikast with Ida: giant black spray-painted tags on the metal backs of road-signs.
The regulars: SMAK, 42!, THEOS, then further up: THEOS ANNIE. Who was ANNIE? THEOS’s girlfriend?
Two young idealists out to make the town theirs through a pact to make nocturnal art illegal
How romantic, I remark. Not enough to go on for Ida. Maybe THEOS is a woman. ANNIE absent.
But even if not true it should be. This morning Ida wanted to be nice and made a rich breakfast:
Eggs, toast, mushrooms with onion fried sweet. Then drove us to the swimming pool where I just sauna’d.
My tongue-in-cheek complaint about the challenge of finding grapefruit juice later used against me,
as was the lift to the pool, and the tightening of a cheek when she suggests we go for fruit-juice afterwards.
As if she knew I was only with her to be kind, and she only kind to keep me with her. Which even if true
should not be. Like the ritual clash of the upcoming public service workers strike.
The unions must be seen to try and resist, the government wants to show tolerance and firmness
The workers have to believe they tried, and we’ll all have an image we can live with. Even if it’s a failure
And their gross painting might be better used
As a rolled-up rag to dab at the drips of THEOS and ANNIE’s hot black breath.
83
It’s 2.30am and Ida sleeps on while I write up in the humming quiet, the night’s a black square.
For once her dining room table is almost completely clear. And it’s sad to think of
how she must have tidied through her whole apartment; nothing to do
now the password was dead and her dad could no longer renew their subscription to Netflix;
sentimental reflection being my preferred key
as opposed to, say, the silent likes and smiles of a reply to
minute descriptions of being plucked and be-haired by a fully committed Lebanese
or the trouble she had in waking up for work after dreams of her father, but what can you do?
Spent four hours at the school writing up my students’ individual oral commentaries
before meeting a girl at Løve’s who returns my Clarice Lispector. Discuss with dull endurance
and thrills the modes of love: nothing but a battlement against the skies,
when others would bring life, and bring a tomb
if you want meaning, I freely translate Mallarme. More fun to take you into Ida’s bedroom:
where Stormy Daniels and Trump threaten to unlock the whole Christian Ideal. Good heavens.
84
Would it be a problem if money were synonymous with power and someone likes being useful?
The girl in Løve’s whose name I refuse to supply gets her weaker boys to learn English
by claiming she has a female friend who wants to exchange messages with them online.
And so they do their best in vague unstated hopes of sex.
And she helps them seduce with well-chosen words, good grammar, and wit.
Because even if they know it’s a set-up, it’s the teacher they want to impress
without the risk of being direct. Of course, this is something you can’t say.
We want our teachers to be emotionally vulnerable so that we can have their full attention.
After all, we’re paying for it. It’s one o’ clock. I have been up since ten, washed up at Ida’s,
done a little translation, had a burger and fries, admired a stylish redhead in skin-tight pants
wondered whether I’d dare cash in my relationship with Ida, after the next threesome,
for a new fragile monogamy irreducible to comfort, practicality, and exchange.
For what? A younger, slimmer version of the same? Or a saint I create in my own image
and then long for hell. Besides, what have I got to lose. Even the sense of losing out is a pleasure.
89
In last night’s threesome against the dungeon master it was two nil to us.
When he praised the fine vintage I’d bought, I knew something had changed;
I was just in too good a mood to feel intimidated, I just joked too much.
Only warmth when he opened his under-settee treasure chest of ropes, dildos, whips and manacles
and the steel horse de-shedding comb repurposed to break human skin and leave three bloody rings.
You worried that as his fingers and tongue brought you off, I’d feel left out.
Could I see how he pounds your behind, chin raised, half choked, Ida’s exquisite pained look,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange
intense eye contact between the couple, as he dragged out your most powerful cries,
then the threshold passes. Now I could take off my underpants and join in half mast.
Strange polite exchanges. ‘Would you like to fuck her now?’ But I didn’t expect to, nor the dungeon master
to transform into a marriage counselor, after giving up sex for touching conversation. So human after all.
Tells of an ex who left an open relationship for monogamy with his best friend. Cross your heart, goodbye!
But Ida and I were thirsty for kisses all night, and when we woke, our lips were full, red, and swollen.
