Thingless

Anthony Wilson, , , , ,

I am taking a break from writing brand new blog posts over the summer.

Instead of posting new work I am going to give readers the chance to read material from the archives of this blog.

Starting on Monday, a new-old blog post will appear here every two days, twenty of my favourites from the last four years.

See you all in September, and happy holidays.

Anthony

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I am not at a thing.

The things have dried up (or I have stopped going). I am thingless.

I reach for my pen. I doodle. It turns out to be a bank statement.

I scratch. I put on a jumper. I take it off again. The thing has left me.

Perhaps it was never here at all. There is a robin in the apple tree.

From down the road the voices of children, from a playground.

A train in the valley, the two notes of its horn. Then silence.

There is no thing. No thing is there. Nothing. No thing at all.

I have made a face on the bank statement. A man, perhaps.

His eyes are enlarged zeroes, a joke about dollar signs ringing up.

I made this much last month. And now I have made nothing.

I am nothing. No (thing). Without the thing, nothing. I cease.

Perhaps it will come back (perhaps I will). Perhaps never.

From the corner of the desk a book, open at random, it seems.

It may have always been there (perhaps forever). Perhaps it was me.

You need to sit in silence, on your own, with no distractions, it says.

I manage for five seconds. The me without the thing, the not at the thing.

Intolerable. Intolerant of silence, of me gnawing at it. The Thingless.

Published by Anthony Wilson

I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, is available now from Blue Diode Publishing. My current research project, funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.

14 Comments

  1. Cartesian post. Je fait donc je suis. Or Conrad. Desired unrest.Puritan work ethic and Beckettian existentialism. The end of the affair. I need to play Joy Division. Marianne Faithfull. Roy Orbison.Cohen ‘let’s hear it for the captain, whose ship has not come in, for the prima ballerina, who can’t dance to anything. Elton John and Kiki Dee. ………

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