My photos never cut people's heads off, but they always feel slightly out of focus to me, as if I've lost track of what I was photographing halfway through. I probably have. It's hard to keep all the things in my head; one day it'll be nouns that get elbowed out, another day it'll be phone numbers, sometimes I'll trail frayed sentences behind me like ragged skirts or smoke, and some days what vanishes will be the ability to walk from one place to another without just wanting to sit down on the pavement and stop and sleep. But usually when I walk from home to work, or work to home, somewhere with a name so that it can exist for long enough for me to get there, the forwards motion seems to carry my mind along with it; my feet know what they're doing and my head is like this:
A Boy's HeadOnly in my head at the moment there is a poem or two that I have carried around with me whose names I can't remember, and a plan to get rich by selling something that doesn't cost anything to produce, and words from an email a loved one sent me, and the sickly swerving feeling of nearly running over a pheasant, and a hatful of resolutions I won't keep, and a password and a PIN and other administrative bits of string, and a bit of the Sarabande from the Holberg Suite. And the things in my head make patterns, and sometimes I see shapes in the patterns: a weasel or a whale, a hawk or a handsaw, and ever so occasionally a thing that's all useful-shaped and shining and angled towards my hand. Sometimes it all comes together, baby. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about everything else.
In it there is a spaceship
and a project
for doing away with piano lessons.
And there is
Noah's ark,
which shall be first.
And there is
an entirely new bird,
an entirely new hare,
an entirely new bumble-bee.
There is a river
that flows upwards.
There is a multiplication table.
There is anti-matter.
And it just cannot be trimmed.
I believe that only what cannot be trimmed
is a head.
There is much promise in the circumstance that so many people have heads.
-- Miroslav Holub