AND JUST TO REMIND YOU THAT IT IS PROSE THAT I REALLY WRITE:

LOVE IN THE ONSET OF SENILITY

Time was important once. And I wore a watch then, just to know. And the watch held to my ear and I could hear the seconds dropping, like a tap dripping or like pennies thrown in a well to buy wishes; and I counted them sometimes and my breath slowed and I was briefly still and my thoughts still. Then like a bee and minutes fizzed in my hands and I was in a hurry to be where I was going.

‘Take your time growing old,’ my mother said to me once.

And once there was a girl and her name is a silver sound to me now, no shape just sound, like whistling or a song when it is hummed, and she took my hand and it was everything and enough. Though years have run under my feet since then, yet I return to that time, like turning back clocks, and I reach into the air and I feel her hand in mine again, always in mine. Sometimes I wish she would let go, but she doesn’t.

And I read somewhere, something about happiness, and how we are undone by memory and hope, and one or both takes us away from the moment we are in, and so we miss the thing that would make us happy. It was Søren Kierkegaard I think and he said being busy was missing the point and the moment.

So I sit in this room, cross-limbed on the floor, and I empty my head of all thoughts, so I am nothing but the here and now, feeling the air on my bare skin and my cock limp, and my every breath in and breath out. And something leaves me then, so I am lighter, light as nothing and floating. And time stops or turns cartwheels away from me, and seconds are as long as hours and hours brief as moments. And if not happy, then not hurting, but also not anything.

Yet there is always the coming back to ground and my first thought when I do is my hand reaching back to hold her hand. And I think then that Kierkegaard has it wrong, for holding that girl’s hand in memory and I am happy remembering. And a hundred other happy moments held in that hand, fizzing like bees.

And the clock on the mantelpiece counts out the minutes, doles them out like pennies dropped in the cups of beggars or tossed like a handful of change at a wedding and children rushing to pick up those rolling coins.

And a woman I don’t know says I should put some clothes on or close the curtains at least. She looks at me blankly and she says my name; and if I am not mistaken, she says it fondly, though I don’t know why she should. And all my thoughts are scrambled so that I do not know when I am or where, except there’s a girl and her name is a tune or a whistle in my head, and she holds my hand still, I am certain she does, and it is everything and enough and always.