Watch (October)

October watches from the cast iron balcony. His screensaver of wrought ferntrees and lyrebirds is (as expected) tasteful; vanishes to black with time lapse. His likes and wows and laughs and sads pass the solitary window day and night, even the odd angry shot. It is curious, watching the whole world without shifting an inch. ‘Nowhere Man’ plays on youtube loop. October keeps its cast iron alibis, was at the computer at the time in question and never left through the entire episode. He was working on his autobiography ‘Isn’t He A Bit Like You?’, his only company a mouse.   

Watch (November)

‘The Watch’ tick-tocks in its foreign language, a poem of impervious vocabulary many a translator abandons. “Face-save arm’s-length wrist-slash hand-twist” (line 29) it goes, but this is to be naïvely literal. Natives who know the poem by heart smile ruefully during recitations, punctuating its chorus of alarm bells with laughter. The poem’s manic skeltonic entendres prophesy the timepiece’s evolution, since someone has squashed the universe into there: “digest-touch personal-recall climate-dropdown nation-menu” (line 37). Whatever happened to time, everything is “retrieve-instant november-now” (line 7), regulated empiricism crowning the “pulse-irregular” (line 53). ‘The Watch’ is much anthologised; it’s the President’s favourite poem.