Sometimes

Sometimes the thing I want most is to be left alone forever, a life so quiet I'd be awakened by blue-tit feet twig Pak saltoing the better for a bug. A house on spindly stilts carved into a mountainside with seventy-foot eucalypts washing everything's sinuses when it rained. A hut on a lake with a dinghy roped to a handful of jetty, a battered kettle, a gas-ring, pencils and paper, wine stacked under the bed and a hook hung with beads for when the water told me to look pretty. 

Sometimes I want most to know all the names of things, the crunchy ontological pith and gleeful arbitrariness of the world made language, woodwork and architecture, birds, sedges, grass, fungi, fabric and stitches, pipes and gears, yeast breads and flat breads, string, leaves, stones, feathers, bones, the pieces of an architrave. As many facets as can be polished into the loamy, windy, whirring, fleeting, squalling, glittering furl of how things seem.    

Sometimes I don't want to talk about it. Words seem appalling though the words are beautiful, awful blunt imprisoning tools of death or mediocrity or stupidity or negligent, wanton, oblivious privilege or vagueness or ambiguity or pathological clarity and ersatz definitiveness or lovely, lovely lies. 

Sometimes I want most, most I want most, to want one thing, oh, the one! The lone voice of bewitching singularity that propels all the stories, the couldn't-but-do-as-I-do, both hands wrapped around it and eyes slitted against all weathers, everything ahead knapped like flint with the right name attached: sculptor, neurosurgeon, glass-blower, biologist, cabinet-maker, writer, writer, writer. But instead I am made like a bright pile of discarded sweet wrappers, colourful and crumpled, blown into shapes by the static, television, needle calluses in my fingerpads, Stevie Nicks covers, the alchemy of eggs and butter, the dusty magicks of keeping house, cups of coffee, robins fighting, geraniums in pots.  

Sometimes I don't want anything and I watch the pigeons flirting and curl the ends of my scarf around where the wind is getting in and think about how Ishiguro wrote the lyrics for some jazz songs.