A late alarm was caused by realizing that The Perfect Murder was set up in a slighly larger font but a loss of 12.5% of letter-size is something one can live with compared to 27 pages of fontage to re-edit having been thrown into disarray not long after I'd got it (I thought) right.
I might have had in mind, but didn't, how Marc Bolan always provided such good value for money on T. Rex singles by having two tracks on the b side and, since I had half a page of blank space, didn't want to fall back on the old expediency of 'giving the poems room to breathe' and thought I'd do a short one to fill the space. Not unlike Tony Hancock in The Rebel in which the painter categorizes his abstract daubs by size.
So, this will fill that half page, a bit of a reprise of some earlier themes late in the book (which is a convenient way of saying I made another poem out of bits of some of the others - never knowingly grandiose about the creative process) because what you should have in a poetry book is words, not empty space.
Nobody's looking forward to this book more than me and the editing process has become such a pleasure, I'll miss it but one has to let go eventually. I only hope that once the printer sees it he doesn't say, oh, no, mate, can't do that, you're using software that's over three weeks old.
We Could Have Been
in Films,
the
lunch dates shot on hand-held cameras
from
adjacent tables,
conversation
overheard
in fragments.
You were
Bergman,
me
without Niven’s demeanour but trapped
in
storylines to come, fondly seeing
in
them glamour nobody else could see.
Would
that it were never, though, finalized
against
further edits so that it can
shift
and shimmer, so that whenever needs
be,
when I care to, I can watch and play
the
song, re-write and then roll the credits.
