Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (6)

VI

Prolonged sobriety – it turns out – is the strangest high of them all. Waking straight and staring out at roof-tops and satellite-dishes, first symptoms of autumn on the uppermost plane-leaves, stoned wasps pottering between them as if lost: it’s all here, if you want it, things are exactly as they seem. The barest facts hold true. The bald mechanic mooching past keeps throwing his keys up and catching them again like some tiny clinking instrument; there’s a ceremony inherent in the mundanest gesture today, the rhythm upholds us if we let it.

     There’s a pause between the simmer in the plane-leaves and the second you feel the first scraps of rain begin to wetten your arms and hands, a barely-perceptible hiatus: the moment opens if you listen for it, a mouth about to speak; it receives you in the downpour as you move through.

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Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in West London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, the London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Blackbox Manifold and other places. His first volume of poems is forthcoming from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus, and his day-job is as a college lecturer working with students with learning disabilities.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (5)

V

(After Rimbaud – the speaker has made a counter-journey to his, from Harar to London via France)

‘I am a transient, not-too-downtrodden inhabitant of a metropolis assumed up-to-date because every criterion of taste has been disregarded as much in the architectural design of its office-blocks and new-builds as in the panopticon of its urban planning. ‘Monuments to superstition’ are subsumed within the retail-facades. Morals and discourses are reduced to binary-codes. These millions of beings with no need to acknowledge each other’s existence conduct their educations, careers and retirements with such uniformity and lack of will that the duration of their lives is several times longer than what accredited statisticians have found to be the case in ‘the Developing World’. Hence, from my fourth-floor window, I make out a new species of apparition jay-walking through the fetid exhaust-fumes these never-dark summer nights – a new breed of Furies haunting the benefit-hostels as squalid as in their home-lands, but everything for them is no better than this: Death, like a social-worker, removing an unwanted baby; Love an unaffordable marketing-ploy; the pretty one with a police-record, snivelling for a fix by the bins.’

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (4)

IV

                                                                    (Breakdown)

Memory: waterboatman in a frozen puddle, rowing deeper far from any pond. Sense: the faint line of down between navel and pubic hair. Response: if witch-hazel smell, then pain. Dream: as demons scale fire-escapes to riot and loot in heaven, angels are parachuting down to aid the damned. Sign: THIS WINDOW OPENS ONLY PART WAY. Text: he opened his veins with his father’s gold-plated fountain-pen, he claimed to be crossing himself out. Recording: the black-headed oriole, a restless bird with beautiful cries, feeds on berries, nectar, caterpillars, even butterflies in flight, taking the bodies only and letting the wings fall aimlessly to earth. 

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (3)

III

‘Need any help?’ In the labile porousness of an extreme hangover you interpret the pert shop-assistant’s civil enquiry on multiple levels. Adrift in the mall, putting off everything, stationary objects and strangers keep grazing against you. Wiry overhead light-fittings, exposed by operatives from Third World countries (stymied Whittingtons in corporate overalls), threaten to tentacle down and incarcerate you.
     You hole up in Waterstones, staking out the Poetry shelves for any ‘spark of sedition’. (It borders on Fiction, not Autobiography, mind).
     Ambushed by random dipping, caught unawares, the Levine poem suddenly protrudes out of the book, like a Magic Eye Picture turning 3D.

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Back home, suppurating with toxins, you carefully remove your liver, lungs and heart and rinse them through in the kitchen-sink, wringing them out and leaving them to dry in a row as neat as an upwardly-mobile butcher’s.
     Standing there eviscerated, you feel so feathery and hollow, you must be held up by whatever ‘spirit’ might mean.
     Try praying now: how will you fit the pieces back inside?

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (2)

II

From every direction, a different noise penetrates my room. The feet of the Scandinavian man upstairs, dancing alone to his heavy techno. The tinny arguments of the soap-opera from the right; the tinny arguments of the couple aping the soap-opera from the left. The baby with colic screaming from below. In a shadowed corner, waiting to eat, the mosquito’s tremulous theremin. Even from outside, the night-racket of car-stereos, teenagers and drunken obscenities infiltrates the rattling window.

     The only way out is in. I block my ears hard and listen to the fluid undulating around my brain, and imagine myself flotsam on that viscous, bone-locked sea.

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (1)

i.m David Foster Wallace

I

Just as your life begins to assume the format recommended in the award-winning weekend supplements – your life-partner and offspring appropriately medicated, lawn plaid-mown with the aid of a theodolite, favourite reality-show pre-recorded and shown on a loop – the moment you’ve braced yourself against since early childhood is somehow a pixellated shadow flickering at the bevelled glass of your door: the policeman from the drama-series, helmet cradled like unexploded ordnance, bearing revelations you would harm anyone not to hear?