I had him under the clippers.
\nI asked him apropos if
\nHe could have been present
\nAt one gig in all of music history
\nWhat would it have been?
\nHe thought about this for a while.
\nLittle sheaves of dry dark hair
\nFell about his shoulders. All
\nThe blonde goes out of it
\nAt the cut, like an aura.
\nHis shoulders heaved with breath.
\nHe was tall, very athletic.
\nFinally he said, \u2018Miles Davis,
\nThe Cellar Door, 1970, that would\u2014\u2019
\nI stopped the clippers, looked
\nHim in his mirrored eye. He wore
\nAn ironic smile that flickered
\nA premonition of guilt. The cold
\nNostalgia of a hedonism desired
\nLike a final-salary pension scheme.
\nHe could have been my lover.
\nHe could have had the guts
\nTo pack into The Shed and sweat
\nHis losses. I wanted to split
\nThat accentless skull,
\nMassage the knotty intellect,
\nBring him home without envy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If only the shtick <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trim I had him under the clippers. I asked him apropos if He could have been present At one gig in all of music history What would it have been? He thought about this for a while. Little sheaves of dry dark hair Fell about his shoulders. All The blonde goes out of it At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[408,405],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nweren’t so hackneyed, but I go on.
\nAs you perhaps already know, I say,
\none day, rather than doctor, cloud
\nconsultant, equity fundamentals data
\nanalyst, immunoassay prober, systems
\nmogul, all the dream jobs, everyone realises
\nthe only thing worth being is poet. Probably
\nyou won\u2019t realise this until between, say,
\nthe age of 27 and death, assuming
\nthey run in that order. I speak in what
\neducationalists call a knowledge-rich<\/em> tone,
\nhanding out the handout, which is
\n\u2018Dover Beach,\u2019 of all things. With perfect
\nrationality, now, one highly verbal<\/em> child asks
\nwhat, in that case, I am doing here
\na teacher. Later, I ask my mentor
\nis there such a thing as begging the question
\nin reverse, but since the majority
\nare 11 or 12 years old, adeptly
\nmisrecognising the moment, I twinkle off
\nsome remark about analogy. No,
\nthe truth is I do not. I draw a graph
\nshowing a simple Gaussian distribution
\nof ages when people realise X
\n(that is, the only thing worth being &c.).
\nNo fewer than 3 claim already to be outliers.
\nTo ironise the sudden ripple of life
\npassing across the room at head-height
\nis natural, in that \u2018biological agents like animals
\nor brains resist a tendency to disorder\u2019.
\nTo dignify, then, must be to disorder.
\nBottom-up prediction errors interact reciprocally
\nwith top-down predictions to optimise expectation.
\nA handful of eyes flicker to the clock.<\/p>\n