As the calendar catapults us
And we contemplate the new new year’s resolutions that propose to make us into version 2.0 of what we are
Version new
Version something else
Version improved
They escalate
The numbers accumulate.
Going on the 4G
To connect with the six degrees of Kevin Bacon
And download another 50 shades of grey or maybe just catch up with Catch 22 at long last
Now that’s what I call music, 363. Have I got news for you, series 144.
Or listening to the fifth, or the ninth, of somebody with an actual name, who put some notes in sequence,
I glimpse myself as an old man looking back on me now
Peering through the curtain folds of time
Wondering what the hell I was doing. What I am doing.
That old old man that is me suffers.
He has an aversion, an affliction
His inerasable permanent personal history.
What I did, what I do, stabbing him like pins in voodoo
He knows the answers to how fast is superfast and how much is much, how soon is now and how we spilt the hours whilst carrying them in a champagne glass.
And he knows how much is enough. Enough is enough, at the last. The rope unfurls. The knot untied, it lays loose from each frayed end to the other.
Up and up the numbers go
Like the elevator in the triumphal tower
So proudly looking down until another comes to loom over
Ding ding ding ding
And on the musical score rings
The numbers never cease, always climb, until we reach the roof
And the mists dissipate
And the winds die
And I am looking down and there is nothing to see upon the ground
There were no footsteps because they went over themselves, repeatedly
There is no keeping track if you never face a direction
The sands of our foundations were cracked, and they bled with the tides
We dug shallows; nothing was raised but air and phantasms
That we mistook for our levels.
I had a version sickness
Craving something new and new
Until I was too old and old to care
And there were no more versions left but one
Nothing to invent but be
Nothing to know but me
And disappearing like the perfect point
I occupied nothing
And was content
At the last.
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