DID YOU EVER THINK is questionable

rhetoric; my faithful

simulacrum of you thinks of nothing

else. Shame about the annotated

jazz mags, though - and where

had you returned from, scathing

but ready to relent? Don’t know

who writes these songs, but that we must

desist from meeting - fictively - like this.

—

It’s not often you get references to Megadeth and John Martyn together in the same poem. I now have a Levinas quote in mind for the sequence as a whole, to do with failed intentionality. It ties this poem together with the various others addressed to absent or unavailable interlocutors, persons deceased or incommunicado or otherwise not correspondant to command. The Megadeth song quoted at the start is a thundering bitter tirade against, I dunno, the singer’s mother or something. It was one of my favourite songs when I was about 14 (the palm-muted main riff, alternating with a chromatically descending single-note line, is tremendous fun to play - pure melodrama, too). The John Martyn line is from Ways to Cry: Get so low in this life I’m living I don’t know right from wrong. Get so deep in this book I’m reading, I don’t know who writes my songs. (At least, that’s how I heard it. The only transcription I could find online says I don’t know the facts from a song, which given the way he slurs it is at least equally plausible. I suspect the liner notes, if there are any, would tell against me here) One assumes that the addressee is Beverley Martyn, to whom he had by his own account been quite a shit (the line, “If I ever took another woman, / I was dreaming of you”, is a fairly startling piece of effrontery). Annotated jazz mags struck me as a neat image for sexual solipsism. It is actually a literal dream-image - I dreamt that I’d been discovered writing the names of people I knew next to pictures in a tatty pornographic magazine hidden under my pillow. The people in question were unsurprisingly quite annoyed about this. Think of the episode of Star Trek:TNG where various crew members discover that they have starring roles in Barclay’s holodeck fantasy…