“A ‘daybook’ is a journal or ledger in which ephemeral expenses are recorded before they are entered in an account…”*.
The ‘D’ word… Or had I misheard / Miss Hard?
As promised, Shiva Yatra came to its climax at the village temple all night last Thursday, and I was present in the mass: in my ‘erotic/ascetic’ dream world, she is forever and I am ever young, and we are eternally engaged in delicious foreplay.
Misheard / Miss Hard (And about the ‘…white tiles’, I didn’t get that bit down right either – perhaps the coming economy of signs in our later years – could you repeat it one more time please, and was it ‘…white tiles’, or ‘…whistles’ you said?). Yes, I know that you are working through the ‘D’ word too. It is my dirty little secret as well, working through the death and depression words.
Miss Hard
Wick: Hardwick, or Haggy H, when we could call her to each other but not to her face, took me for my eig(h)th birthday in class early on, although I couldn’t spell that numeral right then either, hot tears, and moaning for somebody’s death, I smudged the paper with drops of ink from the my pen nib I was holding, and whatever I was writing. My own I knew it was, my death, wishing me back the life I had the summer before, and from where I had been cast out for a crime as I believed, a terrible one obviously because otherwise why would they who loved me most of all have done this sudden thing to me I asked. But I didn’t know what, all I knew, like some hungry ghost, I couldn’t go back there.
Or moaning their death’s, lost and angry and silent because some time afterwards I began forgetting, went quiet and became withdrawn. Sullen and determined, inside I planned escape, made friends, and shared my secret with the three I trusted best. We dug tunnels deep into the earth, camouflaged them and hid there, along with our supplies for the big break out – biscuits, chocolate, and our best kept treasure too, a can of Heinz baked beans, and one of us had a Swiss Army penknife with a tool to open the can, and we cut our fingers pulling back the jagged lid, and shared the spoon to eat and blood too – except, here was always the problem with our desperate plan, we knew there was nowhere to escape to, and freedom would always be refused.
Working through my depression at some point I also got me my first erection in class with Miss Hard, regardless however old and sexless, and what a dry stick she was by then. So my friends and I shared those too between us, trading our horn like contraband, until the Men from the Excise found that out and stamped on that too, another crime we didn’t understand.
You see Miss Hard, I misheard nothing, you taught me everything well in the end, including the ‘D’ for dream world too, didn’t you?
* from LRB review of Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 by Geoffrey Hill
…NOTE that the title has also misheard that Rabelaisian secular priest/poet’s actual words from The Daybooks (2007-12):
‘Rancorous, narcissistic old sod – what
makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,
he might be dead.