Swanston St

'If you belieeeeeeeeeeeve'
- Cher

1. The morning was crisp and bright and clear and cold and I rode to work through it. I was running late for work so I rode down Swanston St even though I fear death.

2. Swanston St is an experimental sound installation run by buskers. It's a bit like a giant open-mic night, but reversed. In an open mic night everyone plays in the same space, and you distribute the acts through time. In the Swanston St installation everyone plays at the same time and the acts are distributed in space instead. To hear someone else you move a few metres in one direction or another.

3. Riding along it, like I was doing, was pretty much like spinning the dial on an old-school radio. Every few seconds one signal receded and the next one took over; in between was the thrum of traffic like white noise. White noise separates signals on the radio dial like white space separates pictures in a gallery or words in a poem.

4. hey
i am
a
poem look
at all the
whiteness

if i am lucky
i will transgress something
and then i can
be famous

5. Here though like I said everything was separated by traffic sound, which is the true song of humanity in 2014, the song we keep singing to everyone and everything, beneath our breath and through our breath:

zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

ZANG-TUMB
TUMB-TUMB
TUUUUUM

6. Anyway I was lucky and I was not late, in either the late-to-work sense or the 'late Michael Pulsford' sense. I am pleased about that because I like being alive. The thing I like about it is being able to experience, also you get to do things. The world unfolds with you in it: just so. It squirms like a puppy. I am scratching its belly by mashing my fingers into this black bit of the world in front of me with language on it and language comes out of it and it squirms into your eyes and you can read it. These shapes are the happy squeals of the world when I tickle it. X