I have had it with your click-tracks and time-codes,
the twenty-sixth take the bewildered sound man.
I have taken down for the last time that quiet blue of the sky
into something a little more . . . dramatic by use of filters.

I have been there. I do not intend to return.
No longer will I be obliged to cull from the inconsequential
     ramblings
of numberless would-bees, wannabees, sycophants, heirophants,
soul-searching, coked-up, neurotic nobodies a few lucid moments,

placed just-so, so that the illusion of coherence is achieved:
that, I am delighted to announce, is a thing of the past.
The hypothetical cutting-room floor and editing suite -
which so very often was the back of a transit with a broken heater -

will be swept clean of the unsightly debris of someone else's
     vision
by someone other than me. Or not at all. And I am pleased
to leave to posterity a dog-eared library of shot-lists, treatments,
rough-transcriptions, notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes

saying can we trim this by another two minutes but leave in the
      best of the medium close-ups?
It will be a particular pleasure to witness the slow procession
of daylight and not need to check the studio clock to know when
      it's too late to go home.
Similarly I look forward to being officially ignored in the roll-call
      of eternity

when the index of excellence is finally published, because anything
is better than being remembered, like a distant uncle, in the welter
       of emotion
and bleary radiance of the chosen few. Friends,
keep the carriage-clock/whiskey glasses/commemorative tankard.

I have spent half a lifetime remembering the stories of your lives
for you; tomorrow I start with mine. No tape, no
red light, sound level, hairs in the gate. All that malarkey
has been wiped. It's just me and a new leaf. Turning over.

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