The Biotic Vector

Outside, sparrows fly up to you,
kiss your fingertips.

You whisper, “Bird, bird!”
tasting the light with your hands.

Every time your body breaks
against the ground you must step over it.

She keeps her radioactive linen,
Bowl, and spoon separate. For seven days
we sleep in different rooms.
Over there’s the toilet she’s been
heaving her roots into. One time I heard her
through the door make a toast to it,
Here’s to you, toilet bowl.
There’s nothing poetic about this.
I have one oar that hangs
from our bedroom window,
and I am rowing our hut
in the same desperate circle.
I warm her tea then spread
cream cheese over her bagel,
and we lie together like two guitars,
A rose like a screw
in each of our mouths.
There’s that liquid river of story
that sometimes sweeps us away
from all this, into the ha ha
and the tender. At night the streetlights
buzz on again with the stars,
and the horses in the field swat their tails
like we will go on forever.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news — things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.