#674

Tired Poem Now

I am tired now.
More than before.

Now everything is less:
less room for manoeuvre:
less desire to move:
less possibilities.

And that bothers me less.

The pain remains
but I just have to wait
and there is less to that now.

Here I can sense an end.
Now: for the first time.


6 August 1989
 
 

This is a little Beckettian piece. I have a few dotted about here and there. I never sought to imitate him as I recently had to remind my wife who's reading The Unnamable at the moment to help her in editing my latest novel. Yes, there are echoes of Beckett—you're supposed to feel him there—but the style is still very much my own. Sure it would've been nice if he'd written a little more than he did but he left a lot, enough. 

I'm not sure I care for "less possibilities". It should be "fewer possibilities" or maybe “less possibility” but I'll leave it as I wrote it. 

Why Beckett though? I'm not sure I can put it into words. It's strangely enough not an intellectual thing. Yes, he makes me think but first he makes me feel. The first time I ever saw Waiting for Godot I knew I wasn't getting a fraction of it but I also knew I was watching something important, something that mattered, if only to me. On the page he can be a miserable git, that's for sure, but read interviews with anyone who knew him personally and you have to wonder how the man they describe could produce the kind of stuff he did. Only it was him and he rid himself of it. That's as best as I understand it. But that makes sense to me too. I could describe it in scatological terms and have but maybe not today.