Tuesday 135: The act of running

The act of running



This will hurt.
It's an ordinary matter.

One thing
at a time:
the lovely breathing
left hand side breathing
downcast,
consumed, breathing
in the hill.

Sometimes
the point
is to
hurt
yourself.

Stumps, breathing
,grass,
an incipient footfall,
voices quiver breathing
like a moon.

Push
so hard
your breathing
heart

slips

outside the fabric.

I may have already talked about this, but William Blake had this idea of writing as a “diabolical process” that could never achieve the experience of being human, and so was in some way always an affront. (I’m definitely oversimplifying this and leaving a bunch of stuff out but whatever). Even though most of my poetry is rooted in other writing or painting or sound, a lot of it starts off with the understanding that you’re not going to approach any real communicative success. It’s sort of like, you want to slip something to the reader, or shout something over a wall of noise, knowing they won’t be able to understand you. Poetry’s a gesture. That’s something I like to tell people when they ask me about it—you don’t have to get it. I usually write with the understanding that you’re not going to get it. Poetry is about something entirely other than getting it; it’s an impossible discourse between the public and the private, that which we feel and that which we endeavour to share.