Selbstportrait mit Kater

Another night in.

There's a half empty glass on the table, and books piled up on the passenger side of the bed, a thesaurus open from discriminatory to dishevelled, a pocketful of loose change, a pile of CDs in the wrong boxes. He writes, but all that poetry is gone now and disjointed sentences pile up like autumn leaves and rot. He hasn't watched the TV for days, he doesn't know if Rita hit, if Brown made a good speech, if Howard got his way. His inbox goes unanswered. His jeans unwashed. His chin, unshaved. He's worn, he's fraying at the edges, he's coming loose at the seams.

He tries drinking, and not drinking, to see what works. And slowly, laboriously, he writes a story about a man who records his own life. From the moment of birth to the present day, ending with an account of the how he wrote everything down, and then the final words 'and then I put the pen down', and then 'and then I wrote "and then I put the pen down'. He wonders what it means, and decides it means it is impossible to record the present using the past tense. For a second, half a second, the revelation appears important, and then it appear trite, boring, obvious. He does not read the story because he knows it is no good. He screws it up and throws it on the floor. He puts his pen down.

Across the street a teenage girl is preening herself in front of the mirror, a naïve imitation of sexy, she won't be going out tonight either. They invited him this time, but how long till they give up.

He writes, life requires the potential for death.

He writes, Galileo will be remembered when the church is long forgotten.

He writes, standing on the edge of a cliff is frightening not because you might fall but because you might jump.

He writes, autumn leaves are obscene. The way, once fallen, they splay themselves wide, clinging to the wet pavement like skin their hard veins raised like the ribcage of a rotting corpse.

He writes, instinct cannot reason, the urge to procreate, for instance, takes no account of the prophylactic. Don't bother me with details, it shouts, lets just get in there, ejaculate, and get out.

He writes, I was desperate to have a problem, a drinking problem or a drug problem. I wanted to be not right in the head. I wanted a peg leg, a missing eye or just one arm. I didn't want a hole in a lung or a heart murmur or a kidney removed, I wanted my problem to be plainly visible. I wanted to be special like an autistic counting cards, brave like a veteran in a wheelchair, tragic like a child with leukaemia.

He writes, nothing, and watches the girl across the street. And he thinks, like every night he thinks, where did it all go, how did I end up here.