I’ve paced the island, round and round,
And climbed the mountains, watched the ground
That Tiger Lily, braves and all,
Would walk to reach the waterfall;
I’ve searched your ship, and read your log,
And looked in every hollow bog,
And in the silence, all the while,
I listened for your crocodile.

The winds and waves have ceased to breathe,
The fireflies, the bugs beneath
The rock that I am perched upon,
The very breezing mists are gone,
And all that to my eyes is shown
Is sand, and dirt, and heedless bone,
And pirate ships that float away
Across the calm and spectral bay.

I know your tricks, though grant it true,
One thing at least; this one is new;
And just to give you half a chance
I’ll wait where fairies used to dance,
And every night until you come
I’ll beat a Piccanniny drum,
And sing and holler to the sea
That Captain Hook’s afraid of me!

Oh, Peter! And your wide blue eyes
Were seas whose depths my love could tell,
Your broken heart, your broken sighs,
And I alone to mend them well!

You loved me; but my heart was strange;
You could not find your way
Within the maze of vasty change
And so you flew away;

In places where I could not follow,
Your Lost Boys, laughter, sang like breeze,
And all the while we kept our sorrow
Separate as the seas.

I left you, Peter, passed forever
Out beyond the wooded lea;
Oh, how I would have stayed if ever
You had needed me!

Was that a kiss? It was my pearl
I gave to you, my own;
But I was just a little girl,
And I could not have known.

A leopard flashed like amber light,
A zebra cantered on;
The lion roared with rough delight
As squirrels squirted out of sight
Like lightly-startled fawn;
And monkeys stared in curious surprise
Through glass at people’s mirror-matching eyes.

At sea-lions we stopped at last,
You held my hand, your breath. Beneath
A dark and varnished glass, the vast
And lithesome shadows rippled past,
To gracefully unsheath,
From unthought, unknown, savage places
They burst, in joy, with wise and ancient faces.

The unexamined life? It rules!
Don’t go to work, don’t go to school,
Don’t go where you don’t wanna go,
Just stay and play some Mario.

The unexamined life is neat,
With time enough to type, and Tweet,
And eat a sausage roll, and laugh
At YouTube’s videoed giraffe.

The unexamined life is like
A holiday, a hut, a hike,
A lovely place to sometimes go,
You wouldn’t want to live there though.

I think I have hit upon the distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is allowed its little throwaways, its clichés, its bland linking paragraphs. Prose is shored up everywhere by the base foundation of the everyday, so that even when it falls apart we can see the scaffold beneath it and guess what the writer was trying oh-so-unsuccessfully to do. Poetry, on the other hand, has no such safety net. Nothing in poetry can be familar or commonplace, every single word must be load-bearing, nothing must go to waste. Poetry, far from being flowery or lavish, is the ultimate in artistic economy.

And so it only occurs to me now that Scorsese’s films are actual poems, stripped of all life’s fat and gristle, lean and hungry as middleweights. Look at Bringing Out the Dead. Is there a single shot in this movie you’ve ever seen before, or even one obligatory scene? No. Instead, there are moments of such dark, diabolical comedy that their very perfection moves us to tears, and every camera movement is like a word of obscure beauty we had never heard before.

So I’m watching all these scenes in which Bob Dylan looks on with a blank approximation of messianic pity whilst someone or other monologises on a life well or woefully spent, and I’m thinking “What, really?” Is it all a joke about the cult of celebrity, the way we take a bunch of answers and project them onto the guy at the top of the pop charts? Is it a step beyond that, even, a joke about those kinds of jokes? I mean, it can’t be serious, can it? Does the film really think we think Bob Dylan is Christ? But then, everything about those scenes… if they aren’t sincere, they’ll do till sincere comes along.

Bob Dylan’s films seem always to have been about his myth rather than his music, and something like Masked and Anonymous makes you wonder if what we care most and know least about, in the end, is what we mean to those around us. Poems, they say, are love songs to the world; too bad the world never writes back.

It’s funny. When I was young, my greatest fear was of things that looked and even acted like people, but weren’t. Robots, androids, aliens, clones, these were the stuff of my nightmares, not the unambiguous evil of a Jason or Freddy Krueger. Evangelists ought to strike terror into the heart of my remaining youth, as even ordinary men of god do. But the fear inspired by Gene Scott, as it seems to me, is dull, throbbing, like (I suppose) your conscience. His angry eyes, staring out of the screen, are to be propitiated, not avoided. A pensioner’s dream, that, to bask in the anger-turned-love of his gaze!

But the singers! Every now and then, whilst Scott takes (I imagine) a toilet break, a display of flashing telephone numbers foregrounds a couple of Las Vegas-like singers whose every eye movement oozes with oily professionalism, smilingly showcasing the love of God like it was for sale on the Home Shopping Channel, buy now, don’t pay later! They are the chilling ones, scary like the soulless sparkle of Daniel O’Donnell and his dead, unsmiling eyes.

And I could drown in the world as if
My joy were as warm as the honeyed bee
That buzzes at night with fireflies
On the other side of the dark.

In the grand old days, football management sims were just glorified spreadsheets, rows of numbers about how good your players were giving way to a screenshot of a football pitch on which would occasionally flash such bulletins as “HARTLEP’L 1 CREWE A 0″ to the aural accompaniment of frenzied static which, as we all know, is what cheering sounded like back then.

Watching cricket on TV is still like this. It is a long, patient, inert shot of a cricket ground, along the bottom of which a statistical tickertape scrolls, informing us that 4, 19, 2, 0, 192-7, 33, that’s Numberwang! They might as well substitute the footage with a Knightmare-like graphic of your own decomposing face, age eating away at your once youthful looks and sallowing your sunken cheeks to dust. Allow me, therefore, to propose a maxim.

Any activity which is not immediately separable from its scoring mechanics is not a sport, but merely a game.

By this I mean that if you can’t imagine playing it without keeping track of the score then it isn’t a sport. It would be mental, for example, to play Monopoly without money. Darts sans scoring is just some guy throwing stuff at a wall. Kids can happily play football or rugby or basketball without keeping scores. But not cricket, though. A casual game of pick-up cricket wouldn’t make any sense.

Le it be noted that the mere relegation of an activity to the realm of games does not necessarily entail its worthlessness. Cricket is worthless not simply because it’s a game, but because it is an affectation. It has to be. There’s no beauty in it, just the same three or four things happening over and over again for hours on end. Nothing different could ever happen. Nothing different ever will. There will be no genius of cricket, no revolutionaries, just people who are slightly better or slightly worse at doing the same old thing. There’s no aspiration, no innocence, nothing even remotely human. Machines could play it. Cricket, in short, is anti-sport. And I, for one, hate it.