The immeasurable tranquility of absence, which only night-time can bring, dissolves in the inevitable light of day. My very eyes pound with insignificance; sleeves rolled-up as though I have been at hard at toil, surrounded by books half-open as though half-read, my throat sore from the words which it never allowed to escape.



I take a daudling, redundant pleasure at swivelling, like a tired child, in a broken chair at five in the morning. I think: were I able to slice words from the fabric of my material life, to wire myself at once to the throbbing basslines, the empty roads echoing with faraway vomiting, the hysterical giggles and shrieks of semi-conscious sexual desperation, I would be a Thinker. To wed each separate image through a logic not apparent in the bass, the vomit or the giggling - no; not apparent even in the hysteria itself - in doing so, I would become a Thinker. Yet I am so much more: I have placated myself so far into indifference that the noxious spectacle of life acts itself out on a thousand stages before my eyes. Desolate stages staging plays I have seen a thousand times. I have far too little invested in life to simply think about it.



Life may weave itself into little bundles for the Thinker, but for a Poet, every sense, every word, every colour is itself a bundle throbbing with possibility. Yet, alas, the Poet is more of a Thinker than the Thinker himself. For the Poet decorates his imagination with the embroidery of language, and in doing this he binds himself to the imagination of others, those he has read, as well as the voice of language itself. He translates himself into Poetry, and so perishes his imagination. Rhyme and metre sculpt thought into a monument to the banal as language voluptuously revels in itself and teases us away from thought. The Poet is a Thinker who has nothing to say.

I, too, have nothing to say. Yet, bereft of rhythm and lacking the zest for an amourous affair with life, I cannot hope to structure my thoughts into recognisable hills or trees or lakes. I am no Poet. I write in order to think; like the Poet, I translate myself into a language of my choosing - only mine is the tedious language of modernist warfare. Sometimes I feel as though the most vicious of literary cycles plays itself out in me during these dreadful hours when night slips away; my one true desire in life is to think, and in order to achieve this, I write. Yet, in writing, I don that pretentious top-hat of the caricature of great introverted writing I have fashioned through years of half-baked understanding. I surrender my thoughts the very moment I become aware of them.

I laugh: that conscious inertia of which art was made before we became post-it, that multiple selfdom people abandoned in favour of apathy, is me. I have become a caricature of what I want, a student-led puppet show bursting onto a rickety old stage which once housed Shakespearean tragedy.

The chair stops spinning again and I stretch out my legs so as to dangle them and make myself feel like a child.