AN EXPERT ON LITTLE BUT... the spaces between the words

...
So,
if i have an annual cycle of life,
the old-fashioned nomadic-poet annual trail
well i also have an
annual cycle of knowledgelessness
an annual cycle of knowing nothing
an annual hoving to at Port Nowhere…
do you?
i do
in October November
after the tour is done
and before i start writing again...
the mind isn't just lifeless
its empty
Tis the season for nescience and grunting
and I’m amazed that, after all these years
all that reading
all that committed or casual hard-thinking
all those piles and piles and shelves and shelves and boxes and boxes of
books and books and books and boooks
all those random laterals and all that semi-scientific seeking
that after all this, all that
i can know so little…
can know so nothing
so zero
zilch
nil
nada
so nought point nought nought nought recurring
can sit here, again, mourning, crying out to the empty heavens
TO HAVE COME SO FAR AND KNOW SO LITTLE…
…
Yes, every year i have this zeroid phase of knowing sod all
Where, once again, all thought, lines, poetry, ideas, learning, seem
pointless
feeble
inconsistent
biased
self-serving
convenient
smug
Does this happen to you?
a time, a phase, a season, when no questions seem important
when answers are wholly unconscionable
when what you do know seems utterly insignificant
and everything you ever thought you knew is of paltry relevance
of miniscule worth, of nulled …
notness
?
does it?
it does to me
…
And my few ideas
my occasional thoughts
my mumbled words
my lumpy sentences
my quarterlit mind
seem to be nothing but opinions and prejudices
self-inflicted blinkerednesses and wilful stupidities
do you?
when all thinking, all reason, seems to be the emperor's new bollocks

seems solely based on
confidence
on self-assurance
on a willingness to ignore obstacular objections
cavilling counter-arguments
enfeebling flaws
disabling facts
seems based on unreason
on what it shuts out
on what its decided it can exclude,
on what its conveniently chosen to invalidate,
to reject, to rule out
on what exceptions
or objections
it has neatly forgotten
or happened to ignore
or blindspottedly blinkered-out
with opinion
with loaded and slanted adjectives
with your own
positive and negative assumptions
your own beliefs
presumptions
guesses
inferences
intuitions
hunches
fancies
and who’s to say which one?
and what the difference is?
and what they all mean ?
when all thought seems to be the product of a barely heard
and badly articulated
internal monologue/ dialogue …
a oneandahalfalogue… [or maybe a semilogue]
a oneandahalfalogue itself composed of little but
hearsay and
rumour and
gossip and
chinese whispers and
chitchatty tittle-tattle and
pubbish anecdote and
unabashed fable
...
so you've spent years and years,
and hours and hours,
and months and months,
and days and days,
decades,
casually or assiduously acquiring
knowledge
facts
details
patterns
ideas
metaphors
resemblances
and now none of it has any worth
it all fails to even begin to achieve...
...
I used to do this line
well there's more and more questions
but i don't trust answers
they stop the free moves of this
mental dancer
...
Well right now I don’t have any questions
Let alone any answers
…
You know what I mean?
do you get this feeling much?
i do
every autumn
the futility of knowledge
the pointlessness of trying
the delusion it could for anything worthwhile

a year zero of the head
i mean, a few weeks back i saw Baba Brinkman do some of his,
Rap Guide To Evolution
which was killer
one of the best things i've seen all year
and a great use of his intelligence
where me
i can't do that
cannot so confidently know
i have real trouble acting like I know anything at all
have real trouble writing with the certainty of knowledge
of specific knowledge
of any knowledge
of bulletproof thinking
of decent logic
of any logic
and i have to work and work and
slowly build things up
in order to know anything at all
little of it comes easy
i have to build up to it bit by bit, but by but, if by if
dodgy reasoning by spurious thinking by iffy logic by …
two step forwards by two steps back
and it don't come easy
and it don’t lead to any solid certain ground
and even if it could it wouldn’t
or would, it couldn’t…?
whatever,
cos all logic and knowledge is
in part at least,
blahdeblah,
made of language
which makes it even worse
because that’s words
and after no time at all
the words themselves
the things you use to explain the things you no longer feel like you know
start to get in trouble themselves,
they run into some deep doo-doo,
meet all manner of snaggy tribulation
they get to seem… blurred…
blahdeblurr …
indistinct…
unfocused…
not uptothejob…
friable…
inadequate…
poorly lit…
badly edited…
unrounded…
they get to seem like squarepegs in round holes…
or roundpegs in squareholes…
or Square Metaphors in Round Holes …
or Square Words in Round Metaphors
and they fray at the edges… or they crumble away… they fade… they lose conviction… they lose all hope faith in themselves…
and/ or they break off in chunks… they disappear on you… they give up trying and bugger off to the pub… to a club… to ibiza… to goa…
and/ or they go and get a job in basildon… they quit school… quit trying… quit even putting on the appearance of trying…
and/ or they abandon thinking as a bad venture returning little on investment
or they really get going, get better, get somewhere, get on with it…
they speed up, they speed themselves up, they accelerate at an ever acccelerating rate…
they roll downhill and keep on rolling…
they ramify, they divagate, they digress multiply, and again… they inspire themselves to greater and greater heights… they give birth to a multitude of monsters and then they start the real cross-pollinating…
they set themselves up as a style of art and then they evolve a whole subgenre which starts to grow bigger than the entire original genre which fades into forgotten desuetude…
yet the whole new subgenre is shit, is cheesy bollocks, even the money-grubbing tossers making the shitty music know its shite, even the writers of the fantasy garbage know how shameless their potboiling disregard of their own integrity and talent is…

...
and, even worse, and even more debilitating, is that knowledge,
and language,
are, at least in part, made up of groups of these iffy words
and the line from one word to another seems to be over a
high and precarious bridge
on some very ricketty towers
which could easily slip, tumble, collapse
into any and many other possible meanings…
it’s a tightrope…
a thin and ricketty gangplank…
an old and thin and ricketty ropebridge from Indiana Jones…
a hot tin roof…
a slippery roof …
a slidey roof in the rain…
so this stops you from wanting to move…
yet you can’t stand still … on language… on words…
on that surface of nothing…
that soapbubble interface between airs…
that insubstantial membrane
if you stop look down, to examine the ground
you fall,
you sink,
you fall through…
off…
out of…
down…
into
its like a jesuslizard skittering across water…
if you move fast enough you can keep going but if you stop that’s it
you’re going down
it’s a membrane …
a skin…
a film
a shell…
a paper …
a meniscus …
a bubble…
too thin,
too skimpy,
too light,
too fragile,
to take your weight…
so, if you stop, you fall,
you tumble,
you careen,
you collapse…
you turn to liquid to dust to powder
to bone-dry component bits
…
but is it the words or their meanings [and what’s the difference], which are
fraying to nothing…
are powdering at the edges…
are corrupting…
are buckling under their own weight…
are disintegrating
whose unwieldy motion is loosening their screws and bending their axels,
breaking their threads and skewing their chassis
is breaking them apart
???
??
?
???…
So its becomes impossible to say, to write, to speak, to know
impossible to think
impossible to…
…
So this is me croaking, grunting, blurting, throating
neither consonant now vowel
this is me
now
knowledgeless and grunting
tis the season for nescience and grunting

…

forgive me, someone forgive me
for i have fallen through the space between the words
my mind leapt
but it landed in the gaps between the words
or fell off the end of the line
and I leapt again and again
and I fell through the gaps again and again
fell into the space between the
discrete in the continuum
through the hyphen between stop-motion
into the space between the frames of the film
forgive me, someone forgive me
for i fell
and i am falling still
perhaps i made of words a science
and they are not a mathematic
they are an ineffable
an infinite
the mind can skim like a stone across the water of language
but it cannot stop to stand, to examine, to over-analyse
for there is no substance there
words are only lines and curves on paper
only hieroglyphs on the water
only smoke in the air
they are not real
they only exist in the flight across them
the journey
the skate the slide the skim the ski the surf
they are like an image in a flicker of paper
are too few layers of gossamer to hold a standing weight
are buoyed by their own air
are a fleeting triumph of their own self-belief
each word can only be explained by many
and each of them by many more
and each of them dissolves on too hard an examination
they all escape themselves
no rules can contain them
for too many exceptions burst their walls at will
and they become too little more than nothing
a copy of a copy of a copy
ever more blurred
so the trick is to handle then lightly
to not dissect them too much
for few definitions stand up for long
…

And those books, those five-speed words exchanged for money
those words which work for the bottom line
their sentences are solid
are soldered tight
their words are particles
locked together
in finished matter
in tight sentences
their punctuation as nuts and bolts and cogs and screws
they exchange set meaning for set meaning
they seek first and foremost to succeed
to safely make their meaning
well I want sentences like waves
i want the threat of danger
of falling off meaning
of failing to land
of falling through the gaps between the words
i want sentences vibrating
threatening to throw you off into the void
want sentences vibrating like string
in tune in harmony in pitch in discord
in cacophony
and so I sought the words the lines the energy to achieve this
and so I fell
and I am falling still
for i sought the fall
and I am falling still
for I succeeded
and I am falling still

for I wanted a permanent revolution of the mind
but what I got was a cyclic nadir of the head

Was there ever an age where meaning was so mercury on a griddle?
Where all purity so mixes and all fixity so unfixes.
Where nothing means wholly one thing.
And everything means something else.
And all single meanings drown in the
weight and currents and tides of the
ever-growing sea of all the meanings with all its
localised riptides, storms and doldrums
all its hurricanes and cyclones, its el ninos
…
For it was as if certain hard facts of reality…
One empire more powerful than any had ever been.
Possible destruction of everything.
Unstoppability of power due to self-interest of powerful and their creators.
Long-term self-inflicted environmental catastrophe as birthright of grandchildren.
Religious fanatics out to destroy whole cities,
Were facts harder than any hard facts before,
It was as if these facts had sucked up all the possible meaning.
were a synthesized boron compound harder than diamond,
and had been apportioned all the hardness so that
everything else blew in the wind,
as ash as paper as dust as powder,
as if most things blew into myriads immediately,
while a few things were as rays and paper,
slowly fading and flaking and fraying to nothing.
…
As if beyond the walled compounds of high-rise meanings,
there was nothing but chaos.