Diary Of A Man Who Doesn't Keep A Diary

Diary Of A Man Who Doesn’t Keep A Diary

Sunday:

A drooping wing of wallpaper hangs above my couch. A patterned bat. A paper vulture pinned to the peeling, damp-dappled surface. So many things in life could be fixed with a lick of paint and stoic ignorance of their underlying faults. But I tile the floor with supplements, into which I will later fold cat litter with the same due care as crockery. The smell in the kitchen is not roast beef and Yorkshire pud, nor even last night’s leftover kebab. This afternoon, I will visit the library as if visiting a ward of comatose patients and stare unshaven at spines. All those words pressed like dried flowers between closed pages are the same as mine, but in a different order.

Monday:

Wake up with Marc Bolan. My bed a shroud in the cobweb grey of morning. The speed of light creeps slow as death across a Bergmanesque beach of grainy glaciations. And no girl of my acquaintance ever quit New York in the wide-mouthed company of amphibia, unless it was a Louis Vitton clutch as seen in ‘Heat’. The semi-somnambulant stumble along the landing establishes a base camp in the bathroom. Where more intrepid souls survey the Himalayan foothills, I view the week ahead with all the oxygen starved clarity as the cloud-curtained peak of Everest. Breakfast DJ is no Sherpa. Bolan fades. The rock I must climb is not glam.

Tuesday:

Sustenance is sought in pizza and a DVD. Deep crust filled with spicy redness. Blood heat to burn the tongue. Would that my wounds were bread and wine. A sacrament to stave starvation. Walk the plank with pirates who steal royalty from the republic of Hollywood. A million dollars to scream at blank green vistas. Like childhood make-believe when I was a cowboy of the Essex prairies. A commando spanked for getting grubby knees. An astronaut marooned in a weed-choked bombsite. A superhero whose kryptonite was soap. Now I pay others to do my imagining for me. Wash my hands with a lemon-scented serviette. Leave my meal half-eaten while those African kids mum told me about are carrion.

Wednesday:

I am Samson, holding the pillars of the week apart. My hair is lost, not through betrayal but male pattern baldness. My strength is the knuckle-headed grim determination to endure. Call me plodder, call me backroom boy. Who bears the weight does not dare to shrug his shoulders, for fear of what may fall around his ears. I am the mime artist in the invisible box who finds the seam in the air where the world might be prised apart. Glass double doors that crush his fingers. The weekend stops here. Keith Fordyce is dead and my Lambretta did not survive the mod revival. Look back in angst. I had more stature in the past, if only for my platform boots.

Thursday:

It begins on yellow Post-It notes. Hasty scribbled lines between customers. A cut-up in reverse. Pre-deconstructed thoughts already fractured. (Next please.) On the internet, hyperlinks between pages construct a meta-stream. So much is false, so much is hype, so much confessional, in churches where the walls – no more substantial than golden paper bricks – constrain a facebook heaven where god blogs. Tag or halo? The unreliable narrator who suggests this connects to this also hates those sliding block puzzles where a picture is a stratagem. And gems are formed in strata, carbon stressed and crushed.

Friday:

Call me Barb, she says. Her lips are the razor-edged wire in no-man’s-land. Her smile a serrated blade, a bayonet with which I puncture the barrage balloon of my heart. Each bottle I drain is a Molotov cocktail to throw through a poet’s window. Burn upon the imperfection of a desperate day. The kindling hours stacked dry. An arsonist’s dream of tinderbox and powder. My kiss ignites the bronze foundation on her brassy cheekbones. This trench warfare. This skulking in a boggy slit while the big guns pound. I wear a black poppy on my breast. Seven petals. One for each woman I love in memory. Lost in the killing fields, the minefields of dud diffidence. No medals for cool.

Saturday:

Market and supermarket, the Nietzchean ideal of frozen food. The irradiated flesh of fruit and veg, harder to kill than harvest mice. Then honeybees. I used to browse the racks for vinyl, for screams and licks and tough romance in grooves. Black spirals. Needles are now laser beams. I scan the barcodes for two-for-one ready meals as the tannoy plays chav anthems and calls the names of children lost. My wallet is full of loyalty cards, which tells you something of my moral stance. Take home a colour chart. Ten shades of magnolia in all but name.