SPIN

for Helen Lindstrom

Shhssh! Silence is talking. Silence is driving the car. She is neutral and she disapproves of all the gloom.

What have you got to be so angry about? Would you just shut-up about the budget?

Nice things, why can't we just talk about nice things? The lovely hedgerows and lawns hereabouts. Butterflies. Our far flung children, high achievers all.

Old country recipes. Recent sporting victories. Weddings we have been to. Other public ceremonies.

Our childhood in terms of its thoroughbred horses. The weather. The good local weather. Which is not strange.

Stunned and fuming in the backseat, you and I

Being placed and viewed and spoken through like archaeology. We are fragments in a carton. Ashes in an urn.

I wish that my container keeps a coiled snake

And a curse-bearing hieroglyph in it, that yours is an aboriginal wand. Shhssh! Silence is priming her lashes, flinting her smile,

Cocking her teeth in the rear-view mirror. They ricochet and crack us both mid-forehead,

Fester in our brainwaves like eyes, like thrones and sceptres, Like all the stations of the radio. We are monsters now.

But this is not what silence calls a crisis.

She would like to know exactly what our real problem is? Are you workshy? Or perhaps it’s S.A.D.

Deal with it. Get a goddamn job like the rest of us. Go and sit under a stone-apple tree or swallow

A Halogen lamp for yourself. Go get electrocuted.

Go piss on electric wire. Didn’t you hear about Berlin? Don’t you know how much worse it gets

A thousand years ago? Silence takes her holidays In surgical resorts and has also the world’s most Incredible dentist, a true dambuilder. Shhssh!

Silence is only just paring the obvious:

Detrital, byproducted hope is foam and it is cornerless. It boils away with heat and age like alcohol, like milk.

Get doom, solidify, welcome to the real world, get a fucking grip. Shhssh! Silence floats about the sixties seeing it all before

And whatever you think is going on back then it doesn’t happen. It never ever. Silence do solemnly declare:

I am the national peaceful unity co-operation thingy.

I am fog on the lough, erasing shapes, maps, directions, memory. I am the calm that has settled after all hope has died. *

I am the broken promises factory skirting every Irish town. I am the Hotel Empty. My rating is five black-holes.

I host the most magnificent cobwebs, prestigious cracks, Glittering slug-trails, drafts of international importance.

You are very welcome to attend my International Emptiness Conference. I am a warehouse of the unrequired. Defective mannequins.

I am the vastest hangar in all of limbo, that one for the unexamined. I am the cage that traps the song, unbeknownst to the singer.

I am the code and the guard and the museum of the future. Shhssh! Silence is driving us down to the pier.

Shhssh! Silence is dragging us onto the yacht. Shhssh! Silence is taking us out on the lake.

Shhssh! Silence is packing us up in a jar,

Diving us down to her black, uninhabited realm, Roots that throttle us in wrecks, grey silt-weeds

And the drifting, boneless dead, their softening shells.

*Hannah Arendt