The Language of Street Lamps
For a long time (reports our agent in Prague)
I had taken very little notice of my neighbour,
Mr Archon, who inhabited the room above mine
in the boarding house in Linden-strasse.
I had noticed his habit of greeting inanimate objects,
with a tilt of his hat, as if they were old friends;
a gas lamp, a park bench, a glass door, a staircase.
I supposed he must be short-sighted, or pre-occupied.
It amused me that he greeted me in exactly the same way,
with the same wordless murmur, the same touch of his fingers
to the brim of that grey and rather greasy hat. I smiled fondly.
But now I find, by observing him discreetly, that he also has
conversations with the street lamps, and writes down what they say.
I have secured a few of these transcripts that went astray.
However, the language of street lamps is hard to decipher.
Mark Valentine is interested in bungalow visionaries, bedsit occultists, back-street brooders, bus station café poets, top floor troubadours, chip shop radicals, quayside soothsayers, semi-detached flying-saucerists, reading-room ruminators, rucksack ley-hunters, apocalypticks in creepered villas, terraced house neo-kabbalists, tower block zaum-niks, seekers of zodiacs, cliff-edge samphire-gatherers and allied trades.