Roddy Lumsden

It doesn’t take the full-wind sickness, just the mere, the constant threat of it, just the salt trace, its faint knocking to bring the spirits of chance and chaos into this house - they stand in doorways: quaint, foul allies, swivelling their ghost hips, tugging at their gowns of transparency and mischief. They buzz me with lust, and I’m undone. Remember these: the Cupid who ducked up from behind a wall and aimed an arrow, one evening on Broughton Street; whatever grabbed my shoulder at Earlshall; a sound of heavy boxes pushed up and down the empty hallway; the past is the self’s ghoul. What is it, Roddy, you know you’ve blocked out? What left your brain so empty that it gushed full with circus music and the safe bet of trivia? Here I am swinging on the fence of fences, in limbo, where the other world loves to try my pragmatism and it’s I who have invited them, summoned by this self-indulgent ouija. But what is it that folds my clothes as I sleep and leaves them on the edge of the bed? Who hides my slippers, re-hangs the paintings?Deja vu. Did a minor goddess filch me in Manila and follow me home, prone, as they are, to easy-led mortal men. And I’m easy, easy. So, come now, teach me to believe in the soul. Hurt me with the truth. Press me back down on this cheap, wine-coloured carpet; let me know for once and for all how fucked I am.

The man I could have been works for a vital institution,is a vital institution. Without him, walls will crumble, somewhere, paint will peel. He takes a catch. He is outdoorsy and says It was a nightmare and means the traffic. He’s happy to watch a film and stops short of living in one. The man I could have been owns a Subaru pickup the colour of cherry tomatoes. He’s in the black, not in the dark. His mother is calm. Women keep his baby picture in the windownooks of wallets. No one dies on him. The man I could have been owns bits of clothes not worn by uncles first. He has no need of medicine. He walks from Powderhall to Newington in twenty minutes. He plays the piano a little. Without him, havens buckle, sickbeds bloom. The man I could have been lives locally. He is quietly algebraic. Without him, granite will not glister. And when he sees a crisis, he does not dive in feet first. He votes, for he believes in their democracy. The man I could have been has a sense of direction. For him, it was never Miss Scarlet with the dagger in the kitchen. He knows his tilth and sows his seed. He’ll make a father. He is no maven nor a connoisseur. The man I could have been has a season ticket at Tynecastle. He comes in at night and puts on The Best of U2 He browses. He puts fancy stuff in his bathwater. He doesn’t lace up his life with secrets. The man I could have been was born on a high horse. He knows the story of the Willow Pattern. He had a dream last night you’d want to hear about and remembers the words to songs. His back is a saddle where lovers have ridden. The man I could have been has a sovereign speech in him he’s yet to give. He might well wrassle him a bear. He is a man about town. He has the exact fare on him. Without him, motley trauma. The man I could have been, he learns from my mistakes. He never thought it would be you. And no one says he’s looking rather biblical. He has no need of London and walks the middle of the road for it is his. The man I could have been is quick and clean. He is no smalltown Jesus nor a sawdust Cesear. Without him, salt water would enter your lungs. He doesn’t hear these endless xylophones. That’s not him lying over there.

The kilted porter shook my hand in welcome, drained it of blood and gave me back my luggage. I signed the register in my own name for the first time in my life of low celebrity. In the lounge bar, there were pictures by Margarita but no sign of margaritas by the pitcher. All night, the couple in the next-door room failed noisily to make love even once. The signature tune of the air conditioning was a surface B-side for any one-hit-wonder. Weary, I ordered up the late night menu from room service, but sleep wasn’t on it so, after an hour of mentally undressing myself, I donned the pyjamas with the killer bee motif and there on the bed I wrote a dozen identical postcards to friends I’d forgotten. No doubt to keep the cold tap company, the hot tap had opted to be a cold tap too. Funnel-web spiders wove their lazy way toward each other across the scarlet ceiling and when I solved the riddle of the shower, no blood came gushing, but no water either. By the bed, a Gideon Bible in Esperanto and a phone-book listing Lumsdens of the world; in the mini-bar, flat Vimto and a half-pint of someone else’s mother’s milk, turned to fur. The TV had one channel, showing highlights from my worst performances in every sphere. At three, in the courtyard, a chambermaid choir sang a barbershop version of ‘I Will Survive’. The only time I dared to close my eyes, dervishes under the bed began to talk dirty. When I left at nine and settled my check, they told me clearly Don't come back.

An inch from the curse and pearled by the evening heat       I shake my polo neck and a cool draught buffs my chest. What rises is my animal aroma             the scent of blue-ribbon stock      the sort a starred chef would ladle from a zinc-bottomed pan    to soften and savor the hock he has sawn and roasted for the diners out front who sip at shots of pastis and gnaw around the pits of kalamata olives. My head sits in his fridge: stooping for herb butter, our eyes meet and he touches my cotton-cold face      just as once I stroked your cheek in a dream you suffered in a room above the river.

Take this: for nothing here’s chiming, vibrating and all this vainglory and self-deprecating just goads at the tender parts, gets irritating. You’ll make no advance advocating monopoly on any vocabulary; even cacophony needs the needle to make its point properly. It’s true that you find yourself fey and bewitching, yet always you feel that the itch that you’re scratching’s soothed better by far by bravadoes of bitching. The off-pat flyting, back-biting and threnody you render and throw up, at will, won’t remedy the rot of your serenading, lute-laden wannabe. You can’t see a barrier without pushing through it; it’s a poor pearl of pathos you don’t disintuit and you now give a doing when once you’d just do it. You want my advice? Here it is: try removing the self from your argument - gluts of self-loving just pudding the gut of whatever you’re proving. That’s it on the chin and I’m sure you can take it, but that shadow you’re boxing is me, so please break it gently. Best wishes, I hope that you make it.

Eugene, OR Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through by Jacob’s Gallery, you have now entered the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book I store between my temples; in that mean and moonless city, you must hang fraught in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed, and in this cutty version of forever, forever calling on your unseen beau, one flake in a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze. And now the rain turns, light but going steady on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace from devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere and still your mouth in the haze calling is a ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam, the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which all but the bird in the fable know not to pluck.

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself, ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat (a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada, a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great). And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?) in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers. Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down, stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver. Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic. And I may as well admit that I have touched myself (who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.

Down in fame’s flood, down an alley, down wind of now, elegant in self-denial, an Iron Range wraith junking cue cards, an ideal, an idol before which the Zeitgeist kneeled. Dylan, named for a poet named from an old tale of the child who crawled to the sea, this land is yours: the black plain the needle ploughs from lip to label; be all, end all.

Kitten curious, or roaring down drinks in Soho sumps, small hours tour buses, satellite station green rooms, or conked out in the bathtubs of motorway hotels, there you were, with muck-about kisses, sharking for the snappers, before hell opened up for you and weeping sores of after fame appeared, the haphazardry and dwindling after three limelit years, recognized with catcalls, wads of spit, a nightclub fist, the scant camaraderie melts fast, like your flat on Air Street, the Lhasa Apso pups, the wraps and lines of chang, the poster pull-outs, fake tan smiles. It’s paunch and palimony time on Lucifer’s leash. But for a madcap few who cling, thin soup, one pillow Britain is simmering with hatred, just for you.

Just then, encountering my ruddy face in the grand piano's cold black craquelure, it conjured the jack-o'-lantern moon dipping up over the roofs of the Tenderloin. Only when I have done with the myths— the inner spill that triggers us to flame, breasts so sensitive a moment's touch will call down fever; the dark sea-lane between limbic squall and the heart's harbour— will I picture you, just beyond innocence, lying stripped by a thrown-wide window, letting the cool breeze covet your ardour.