JD Howse

JD Howse is a poet who works through text, image, collage, and film. He runs Permeable Barrier, a online magazine and micropress. He is the author of Just Meat Not God and Noises Again, as well as the collage monograph series This Is A Dagger. He lives in London, where he is from.

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Fragment after The Wanderer

You have started telling people that you are going to be writing about loneliness but nobody will listen to you. You try to explain to them how fascinating it is; how it is a subject of poems as old as the language you use itself. You cannot find anyone to listen. You walk down the street painfully aware that you are a body on a street walking, being watched as you walk.

You think about how lonely the poems in certain old books must be. You wonder if they know they are the only versions of themselves to exist, ruins of times when they would be spoken aloud from one mouth into many ears, filling the heads of an audience with noise and knowledge. Now they sit on a page in a book that people are not allowed to touch, and people argue about what they mean; the language itself has moved so far away that it is hard to tell. 

You think about how lonely it must be to be the words inside a burn hole in a lonely book. To be an absence where an eye can pass straight through a page like it is a pane of glass. To concretely mean something and yet to be removed from existence so that your meaning is and is not simultaneously, as its inability to be observed withers away from the comprehension of others.

You have read a book of riddles and find yourself attempting to resist the urge to insist an author upon them. You wonder how it would be possible to place yourself into their thoughts. 

You wonder what it is like to see things as someone other than yourself, but you experiment with this to limited success; you are able to feel their pain, their guilt, their happiness, their grief, but not to predict what will cause such things to occur. 

It has been so long since you’ve seen another person that you’ve started to wonder if such a thing exists any longer. 

You stand in front of a mirror and try to look at the full image of yourself rather than specific aspects and elements, and you fail.

You live alone and so you must find your own mercy, or you must find mercy from beyond yourself. Your heart is sick; you travel for endless ages; you move the sea about yourself with your hands. You follow your path of exile through frozen water.

You do not know the name of this place, but it has been your home for many years; maybe thirty, by now? More than 20. You’re not sure of the exactitudes. 

You feel the movement of the seasons, sometimes painfully, through every muscle in your body like screws tunnelling into your bones, but you have long since stopped counting them. 

You have sometimes, by the roadside, seen a sign directing traffic towards Rome, but you try to avoid the roads where you can. Why does a place need to have a name? The people called the place at the end of the road Rome because there was already a place called Rome and they wanted to use the name again. Maybe they were from there, maybe they just liked the implications of it. Either way, it doesn’t matter to you. You have no intention of visiting. 

You know that fate cannot be moved. Yet still you speak, as a wanderer, your mind ringing with misery and death; each morning, you go out alone, and you speak your loneliness to the dawn. You know there is no one else you can speak your thoughts to. You think it is noble to hide your mind and secure your thoughts, so that you can think as you wish. You know a tired soul cannot survive; you know a wallowing mind is of no use. You know people do not show outwardly what you keep locked within yourself. 

What was your intention? You were about the age of 20, yes, and the second youngest of 6, all boys, except your younger sister. Your mother and father never told the police you went missing. Is that what happened to you? There was a truck. You were on a very long road trip. 

So, knowing that you are wretched and miserable, homeless and lonely, you have bound your thoughts in fetters within yourself for a long time, since you buried your connections within the earth and set out travelling alone across the frozen water in search of someone, anyone other than yourself, who would console you, offer you home, offer you company, offer you friendship, entertainment, and love. 

You first went south, all the way down to Florida, then returned north but drove straight through your hometown without stopping. You thought about the strangeness of that word. It is almost as if everyone has decided that the place you are from is your home, even if this isn’t the case, as if everyone has not thought that there might be people that it doesn’t make any sense for. 

Straight past your hometown, like an arrow; ‘from’ becomes a slippery thing wriggling out of your hands like a fish. 

You have only sorrow as your companion. Cruel sorrow; you have no other friend on your exiled path; a twist of gold, your frozen spirit, the bounty of the earth. You remember home, and company, and how you once feasted together. Your joy is dead. 

I feel my stomach fill with water and my lungs fill with air and my entire body fill with you, and then we were birds fighting over fish on the rocks, picking at their guts with our beaks and raking at each other with our talons. My wingspan expanded out until it covered all of the sky and then my body faded into nothing. I made all the world beautiful and learned nothing from the process. I was mid-air when I died, pierced from the sky by the stray bullet of a hunter, and as I plunged irretrievably into the water, I felt the stinging realisation that it had all been for nothing and then my blood was part of the water and everything was finished. 

Home would become something you patchworked together from stolen camping equipment and fallen trees, but that would come later. 

You drove upon progressively smaller roads, until eventually you abandoned your truck and withdrew into the trees, moving about on foot. You picked dead birds off the side of the road and stole potatoes from people’s gardens. All the while, you kept moving. 

Eventually, long after you’d lost track of where you were, you found a spot in a forest where some large boulders had created a small clearing. This has been home for you ever since.

You have learned, in being alone for so long, that sorrow and sleep will often entwine in the mind of one who is lonely for too long. You see yourself embracing and kissing him, laying your head in his lap as his hands stroke your hair. You know these times have gone. 

You’ve come up with certain strategies to avoid detection. In early November it starts to snow, and doesn’t melt properly until March, so through the long winter you leave your camp as little as possible to avoid leaving tracks in the snow. 

You sleep during the day when the temperature peaks and stay awake at night, pacing back and forth to keep your blood pumping and avoid freezing to death. You only have one tent, but you’ve covered it with layers of tarpaulin for insulation and camouflage. Anything that isn’t already the colour of the boulders or the trees, you cover up to keep from being noticed. 

You’ve never built a fire; the smoke would rise into the air like a signal. You heat your food on a little camping stove with a concentrated burn that runs off canisters of gas; hundreds of canisters of gas litter your campsite. 

You awake, alone, to the rolling of waves; sea birds preening their feathers in the spray; the mixing of snow and hail in the frosted air. Your longing for love is like a wounded heart hanging heavy in your chest. Your head swimming with sorrow, looking out over your memories of others; you run out to greet them but they swim away from you. Your ghosts go out to sea and bring nothing back to you by the way of language. Love will only come to you if you send your heart away with them, wearily over the waves. 

Early in the morning, you listen to a stolen radio, powered by stolen batteries, and cook stolen food on a stolen camping stove powered by stolen gas canisters. You watch people from the edge of the forest, or floating at the shoreline. You learn their patterns then steal food from their kitchens at night. You’ve committed about forty burglaries a year for decades, over a thousand all totted up. The only thing you own that isn’t stolen is your eyeglasses.   

You wonder why your mind shouldn’t go to such dark places when you think of all the people spread out over the earth, constantly leaving each other alone. You see the world droop and decay a little more each day and you wonder if you will ever live long enough to consider yourself a wise man. Will there be time for you to learn patience? You are hasty, weak, reckless, a coward, gullible, greedy, and vain. You do not see things as they are. You often think the best in people and then you are shattered when the intents of their hearts do not match your assumptions. 

You can see in yourself the terrible state of the world, lying in waste, your walls standing against the wind and frost as you barely hold back the storm. Your cities decay and you lie in their wreckage with the fallen bodies of your friends, your body carried off by birds into the sea, your body shared amongst a pack of wolves, your body as you bury it in your grave, your face sunken into itself. 

Is it actually possible to completely withdraw from society? To actually be alone? If it isn’t, then you’ve come as close as it is possible to get. In your most grandiose moods, you think of yourself as the most isolated person on earth. Hidden away, just out of sight, beyond the trees. Perfectly alone, and unsure why, surrounded by your stolen objects and watching, learning, so that you can take again, quietly, when nobody will notice. 

You destroyed the cities you created; you deprived them of noise from gathered crowds of yourself until they stood empty. You wallow in your thoughts and you think deeply on your darkness, on your spirit, on your wisdom, on your memories of your conflicts, and you speak; You are alone, you have been left, you are unloved, you are disliked, you are disregarded.

You find little pleasure or interest in doing things. 

You find yourself feeling down, depressed, and hopeless. 

You have trouble falling asleep. 

You have trouble staying asleep. 

You are sleeping too much. 

You have been feeling tired. 

You have little energy. 

You have poor appetite. 

You have been overeating. 

You are a failure. 

You have let your family down. 

You cannot concentrate on anything. 

You speak slowly. 

You move slowly. 

You would be better off dead. 

You hurt yourself.

You are bereft of the beautiful things and beautiful lives and beautiful bodies that once surrounded you; you have passed into the darkness of the night as if you never were with them, so you huddle in their remnants, like bodies crowding against a wall, impossibly high and wound through with serpents. Your mind swims with the absence of warriors and weapons, separate from spears greedy for slaughter, you feel your fate. Storms beat against the cliffs. 

You turn around just in time to see the bookcase coming down on you, the books already tumbling out of sequence in a sequence of dull thuddings, as through instinct alone you couch down a split second before you hear the loud crash of the case making contact with your desk, followed by a last cascade of smaller thumps as the remainder of the books fall off their shelves. 

Your body half numb and half throbbing from the stream of impacts you rotate yourself, slowly, still crouching, to be facing the object above you, and then raising your arms, you steadily push upward from your knees through your spine and into your arms, pushing the bookcase back into its place against the wall of your bedroom. 

Your body is fettered with frost, bringing you the winter, as you stumble through a deepening darkness into the North, when hailstorms besiege you with the malice nature holds for men. You know only that you are alive, as events cascade about you and the world is crushed by the weight of heaven. Your wealth is fleeting. Your friends are fleeting. You are fleeting. Your love is fleeting. You feel the foundations of the world turn to rubble beneath your feet. You know these are only words.

You survey the mess of books on the floor and your head swims and your body tingles as you notice the blood on the uncoated cover of a copy of Robert Lax’s poems next to your bed, and inspecting yourself you notice that the back of your right calf has been torn open, your skin lolling forward revealing the layer of your fat half attached to the flap and half to your muscle below, your blood running down to your ankle and onto the creamy grey carpeting of your bedroom floor. 

You wonder how that happened, and how you didn’t feel it. You don’t feel it even now, even as you look inside your body at the red and white interior of yourself. You are made of glass. 

In certain lights you can see straight through your skin to the veins and muscles beneath, and glowing hot you begin to bulge and contort in front of the mirror in strange ways that you don’t really understand once you look away from yourself; the curve of your belly billowing out of yourself like a disguising bloated balloon in a way that makes no sense as you grasp your hand to your stomach flat against yourself. 

You know it is good to keep your faith; you know you must keep this grief in your chest and let it live within you, unless you already know how you will deal with its release. You know a man must act with courage. You know it is better to seek out mercy than to try and find it within yourself, but you are unsure where to start. Permanence cannot live within yourself. 

You experience your life as though you are looking out at it through a convex pane of glass, with everything muted slightly and warped in such a uniform way as it becomes hard for you to perceive the distortion, so natural it has become to you. You know nothing else but this distance, and the curved understanding of the world as it relates back to yourself. 

You have an awful propensity for rumination. Last time you tried to write a poem about yourself you showed it to a friend, and in his hesitant, tender way he asked you if the purpose of the poem was to make people worry for you.

You’ve never thought of the purpose of writing as being to make someone else do anything. You are an abstraction inside your own body; you are a body horror billowing within yourself. You have a statue of yourself put up in a bench-filled square near your house so that birds can shit on your metal head for the rest of time. You wonder if the action is any different from the act of writing, while knowing it is of no interest to anyone, either way. You disappear deeper into the woods, but soon you will be found.

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