Invited to contribute a note, I have in anticipation wandered from collaboration via response to chance and on, more darkly, towards fate. Or, alternatively, luck.

A long time ago I struggled with free will and never resolved it. It suggests to me personal identity isn’t resolvable, while personal responsibility can’t be disposed of. Free will is taken to mean control, but alternatively, while allowing for plenty of good please and thank you, will, that has its own kind of freedom, might return with clues to the unexpected poem.

I might write a line conveying a street, and I ‘think’ – as if ‘from nowhere’ – egg-cup and after that blue shirt and I don’t know why. Nor do I know how it came about that my parents met. Fate – or luck – is built macro and micro into what we are. No getting away from it.

I didn’t know, till my handy screen dictionary told me, that blog is short for web log. This web shifts retrospectively network of fine threads, the spider’s beautiful artistry – “Oh what a tangled web we weave”, which I’d thought was Shakespeare and is Sir Walter Scott – also membrane between the toes of a swimming bird…And on to ship’s log…

If I’d asked my English teacher many decades ago, “Miss, what’s a blogosphere?” She might have said, “Well, sphere…” More likely, “Is it April Fool’s Day?” Another teacher might have said, “Don’t try to be clever with me, lad!” And anyway, without super-precognition, I couldn’t have asked. Is web, blog, Twitter, Hi!, and whatever more thus far escapes me, altering – enhancing, machinising – luck, shift, possibility, fate?

Rehearsing my opening phrase, I saw that it might suggest d, and now that I have looked one up, it could be the opening note of ‘Blow the wind southerly’ (I’m in Birmingham). Am I right that after a performance the director might give an actor a note? What is it about nota bene that makes it seem more important? Or merely antique?

What’s interesting, I suppose, is what inhabits us, by whatever means: dreams, talk, singing to ourselves, memories, books, sighs, log noggins, webbed fingers, etc. etc., all and much more not least by chance. So that when we use, employ, devise, ride with language, it is lucky fate offering us unexpected meaning, musically. Possibly.

David Hart’s pamphlet The Titanic Cafe closes its doors and hits the rocks, or: knife, fork and bulldozer ultra modern retail outlet complex development scenario with flowers is out now from Nine Arches Press.

Many thanks, David.