Three years ago, in the first dismal season of lock-in, the musical Zen master Lorcan Byrne hosted a very cool experiment, inviting guests to interpret his quadrupedal beats to their own ends. This was my humble contribution. In all the stuff I’d written up to that point, I felt I’d never really nailed an honest-to-god proper poem. The One was about that pursuit:
these blots of ink
these Rorschach characters
have eaten the foetuses
of their twins,
crawled across carcasses
of ancestors
to clamp themselves
against the blank spaces of these pages
& hold on –
& what does it mean
to have written a thousand lousy poems
& still the labour pains come on
& you, you simpleton,
persist with the question:
are you the one?
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