While I Was Sleeping by Phil Durham

While I Was Sleeping

BY PHIL DURHAM ILLUSTRATED BY CARLOS VALENCIA

WHILE I WAS SLEEPING

now that it all came true and my back aches without cause and my knees crack at the bend and the mornings sneak in like torpedoes with brittle teeth and bloody gums

- just like he said they would -

the first thought of the day is that today could, just be the day that every dog and all thatthat every cloud.

but then the kettle boils thin air and the toaster trips a fuse and the shower spits at first cold like hale. like they all, together, somehow contrived the betrayal while I was sleeping.

I’D LIKE TO SHOW YOU SOME PHOTOGRAPHS

in the first photograph I’m playing with a toy truck. the truck is loaded with sand

and my spade is overflowing. the sun is beaming down behind the trees and, through the glare, I’m smiling.

in the second photograph the moon is drawn full with chalk and the carry-bags are empty.

I have a pumpkin in my arms, my top is tied above my head,

and a tiny candle tickles a flame as frayed shoelaces sit by my ankles.

the third photograph is the oldest. you’ll hardly make me out

- in the black and the white -

I was holding myself there.

I was there catching sonar when the night was ever-lasting.

in the fourth photograph you can hardly miss me.

I’m right there in the print.

I burned the fifth photograph on top of a mini-tipi bonfire.

I had nothing good to bring around.

and in this last photograph looking into the dirt

I am behind the lens.

ON WALKING THE TUFNELL PARK ROAD

walking up the tufnell park road

saw a few snoopers’ vans

at the top

– felt I was going soft around the middle –

pulled down my hood to get a better look.

grey-brick house, red door ajar, cream-painted keystone arching on a blue, crystalline afternoon

– squeezed my eyes in their sockets -

no tape, no lights, no siren

just the man in the hazmat suit

and handcuffs.

no fuss, no dogs, no hollers.

I had a moment of clarity

walking up the tufnell park road

with the bus gust in my ear with the bars and grocers ahead with the school kids on scooters with the mothers’ middling chatter with day dreams of the American kestrel and the sky above me

my feet on the ground

that life is a motion picture.

I had a moment outside of myself

again.

SOME POEMS AREN’T MEANT TO BE WRITTEN

on frost-bitten mornings, with a newspaper under-arm, I’d walk half a mile to sit, and wait, and watch the clock.

there are times when I go to sleep without a thought in my head

except, sometimes it takes me a while to dilate in the silence.

I tried to call you late at night but your phone rang out.

I had to go to work in the early hours and that cat cried from eleven to “oh, three-or-four.”

when I wake, he’s always just there – on the armrest - with his eyes half-open like mine.

they gave me a cream for psoriasis applied twice daily for a month and ten days.

last week we had good sales. I got an extra hand with the deliveries

but sometimes I think there’s a reason for all of this and then I miss the burn of the bell-ringer’s rope

so I put old socks on twice a day once in the morning, and once at night,

and I try not to think about it.

it really is nice around here- sometimes you might even get a stranger to smile. But when I think of my friends and they’re getting high together and getting drunk and talking about recording studios and house parties and an interview they did for Thrasher and a gig they saw in New York I get jealous and I want to go home. I want just to stop. I can’t see myself in the place I came from and I can’t imagine where I’m going to go and I just can’t quite hold a thought.

so I put on an old pair of socks and I get up and I try not to write a poem about it.

WHEN THE WORLD BURNS

I think I see them now

like the man said, “it’ll be guns and roving mobs”

so I’ve been keeping this collection of buttons under my bed since 1981 too scared to deal them out because

other people always want to put their noses some place and I can’t keep them back.

don’t you wish you could wear silk pants and smoke all day with a harem of cherubs to bathe you in plutonium and oil?

and don’t you think it’d be nice, on a Wednesday afternoon, to send everybody home to hold their children?

like it was a brand new day -

one more time – like it was sunday in the suburbs on repeat.

and you’d think that’s all they’d have to say, but you’d be wrongthere’ll be a litany of excuses tossed down there in that fountain.

but that’s your future, and my future, and, well

they’ve got tentacles in many pie-holes, you see, and you can bite one off, butthere’s always another joker in the pack-

and when the clown holds his face in his hands and laughs,

We laugh

COMMENTARY

When composing these poems, influenced in my approach by some of the exercises from seminars, I became aware that the juxtaposition of trauma and the everyday was an idea that I could not untangle my thought from.

Auden’s “Memorial for the city” was, in particular, an inspiration to many of the ideas I attempted to tackle – explicitly, voyeurism/surveillance in, “I’d like to show…” and, “On walking the…” and the ruin of the city in “When the world burns”. While “Slaughterhouse 5” informed some of the schizoid, irrationality of the narrative voice and “Lolita”, an element of deflection and unreliability.

My central effort with these poems was to create a speaker whose paranoia would be, to some extent, believable, whose delusions would be relatable and in effect disconcerting to the reader. In some instances, the reader is directly addressed so as to create a conversational tone and to solicit sympathy, or even – such as in, “when the world burns” – complicity. I intended for the reader to feel as though they should do something, but ultimately realise that they could do nothing – that it’s just a poem.

In terms of style and form, I undoubtedly owe most to the Beat generation et al. and hope to riff with the perspective of the flaneur while attempting incorporate a certain Britishness by way of locale, class distinction and northern idiosyncrasies.

A technique new to my endeavours is one which I became familiar with firstly through David Bowie, then the Dadaists and eventually through Burroughs. It is the “cut-up”. This is something that I played with for inspiration – printing copies of some of my favourite poems about “the city” to tear up and put together into something new, see bibliography – rather than composition concerning these poems. However, I think that the influence can be seen quite clearly in the fragmented nature of “when the world burns” and “some poems…” During the composition of these two I listened to recitals

of several poems simultaneously while ingesting copious (…) and consulting my notes. The intended effect of this fragmentation is to open the mind to previously unseen, or unconscious, connotations in the work. Another method of accessing Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses”, in this case best attested to by the reader, rather than the author.

Although the bulk of the text in these pieces concerns very mundane events, there are scattered disturbances which derail the speaker. In the first poem, the displacement of blame onto inanimate objects personifies them in a comedic, yet perturbing vision. The second poem wrestles with agency in that the speaker offers a position of judgement to the reader, only to later sit “behind the lens” in judgement. The third poem depicts a soporific neighbourhood in which the ephemeral figure of a handcuffed man jars the speaker. The fourth poem revolts at the mundanity of it’s being a poem. And the fifth discusses the futility of inertia and repetition.