things move around

Last night
I met a man
who marked each syllable he spoke
by slapping his inner thighs alternately.

Last night
I met a man
who uttered an obscenity each time
a cripple or a copper crossed his path.

Last night
I met a man
who, sitting down to dine,
insisted on removing socks and shoes,
expectorating, and invoking Baal.

Last night
I met a man
who wore a vial of turpentine
around his neck, except when in the bath.
Precautions never hurt no one, says he.

[Idea by W.A.]

9 professions in which beards are still acceptable:

Terrorism
Academia
Politics (left only)
Animation
Chef (celebrity only)
Religion (including nuns)
Medicine (only with snood)
Bearded ladyism / Bill Oddie impersonation
Law (Florida only)

5 professions in which beards are no longer acceptable:

Finance
Education
Piracy
Geisha
Russian chief of state

The first I knew of the sun’s return
from its 40-day sojourn
was a rumour that spread over my skin,
from pore to pore,
this morning as I sat in my car,
hungover and not all there:

the sky sprung a leak
and the sun in a molten spark
welled up like a cry of joy and broke
from behind an advertising hoarding,
and all of us stopped what we were doing
and stood applauding.

- Where are you?
- Out celebrating in the night.
- Celebrating what in the night?
- Victory.
- When was the victory declared?
- Immediately the nocturnal celebrations had begun.
- Other than nocturnality, what is the nature of the celebrations?
- The people are jubilant. An impromptu orchestra has been convened and is playing La Marseillaise on kettle drums, cornets and guitars. The night resounds to cheers and applause; the people abandon their cars and cavort. It is entirely a scene of jubilation.
- And when the day comes?
- Then the celebrations in the night will end.

I’m in Calgary where it isn’t raining. There is come cumulus cloud at 10,000 ft, to quote Auden, but it’s not raining. Non-rainy Calgary is blown-dry by the chinook coming down the mountain.

Is there a word for the absence of rain? For non-rainingness? Fine? Fair? Dry? They don’t seem adequate; even fine, fair and dry days have been rainy days in Vancouver, recently.

What I’m looking for is a word that describes the dizziness of a day without rain. The shock as your pores gasp for moisture, your skin cracks and crinkles and wrinkles and folds up like parchment, your brain shrivels into a dessicated puffball, your eyes turn to tissue paper, your ears, well you get the idea.

Today was the 24th consecutive day of rain here in Raincouver, putting us a mere five days away from breaking our 1953 record of 29 consecutive rainy days. We don’t get much saving done.

I have to say it doesn’t seem like 24 days. Sure, I’ve been underbrella most days recently on my plods to and fro work, and now I think of it I can’t remember the last dry day; all the same no-one really talks about it.

The forecast is for rain.

Rain all day long;
up your nostrils the blooming blue smell of rain;
rain thick as putty in your hand;
rain like gel on your windscreen;
rain torrenting off tarmac;
rain in the middle of the night like a tambourine;
rain in the dreams of the city,
city in a dream of rain.

Vancouver is notorious in Canada for its utter lack of new year celebration, most people opting to stay in, eat lentils and watch sitcoms before retiring no later than 22:00 in order to be well rested for their new year’s morning polar bear swim (so called - the conditions this year were about equivalent to a June day in Teignmouth). Chinese new year is a different matter, with people of all colours and creeds taking a week off work to feast on strange translucent dumplings and chicken feet, hang unidentified cabbage-like vegetables over their thresholds and stumble around the place haphazardly in massive Chinese dragon costumes while banging gongs, cymbals, cowbells and whatever else comes to hand. On Dec 21st (solstice) KE, baby E and I joined the “Secret Lantern Procession” which consisted of three or four dozen goretex-clad Vancouverites, including a few disappointed-looking kids, shambling along the seawall in unseasonably light rain, some toting damp crumpled assemblages of balsa and tissue paper, led by a handful of neo-pagans with simple percussion instruments but no ability to percuss. Baby E fell asleep almost immediately.

We carry her ’round in a thing called a “Baby Björn”, which is basically a lightweight, aerodynamic pappoose carrier which looks like the sort of thing they tell you is the result of zero-g research aboard the International Space Station. So she hangs on the front of the parent, facing forward, and will sit there happily gawking at the world, usually from underbrella, for hours on end as we meander around Vancouver. KE takes her for a long stroll in the day and I for a shorter one to the Safeway to buy dinner after I get home from work. The women in Safeway like baby E and she likes them.

Absolutely pissing down with rain as I walked to work this morning; incredible; the kind of really fat, sloppy rain that turns roads into rivers and which you generally only get for short periods in U.K. but can easily last a day or three here. What do you call a temperate rainforest that’s been deforested? A temperate rain. That’s Vancouver.

So I ask someone in our Toronto office to send me a document. For some reason this document’s been produced on software known only to, and used only by, one particular person in our Toronto office, and it isn’t text, and apparently pasting it as a picture into a more conventional program is not only impossible but contrary to office policy, applicable government regulations and the laws of physics Newtonian and Einsteinian. Too big to be faxed, it is resolved that the document be dispatched by courier. So it shows up a couple of days later on my desk in a three foot long, inch and a half diameter cardboard tube, rolled tighter than a nun’s cunt, and try as I might I can’t get the fucking thing out. I pull and I prod and I shake it like a bottle of fucking ketchup, but all that happens is it telescopes about a half inch out of one end, and then I can’t get it back in or further out. So here I am, sat here, stuck with this fucking three foot cardboard tube, thinking, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? So in the end I just say bollocks to it and glue it to the lever arch file, along the inside of the spine, and there it will probably stay, like the ten commandments in the ark of the cunting covenant, until some smarter son of a bitch than me can figure the fucking thing out.

When we wake up next door’s dog is howling and the orange sun hangs under the cloudline like a lantern from a black beam. Everything is drenched. We must prune the moonflowers, lest grandmother’s delirium comes on again.