Caledonian Road daydream remembrance

I should really be writing some new poems, but I need a new, perhaps more prosy, style, and I haven't found it yet. This one, which I wrote about ten years ago, I've copied out of my notebook—with some difficulty, since my handwriting is so bad—reconstructing it as best I could according to the spirit of those days, and leaving unchanged its slightly idiosyncratic punctuation.
If I remember rightly, I had a thing about Shakespeare, blank verse and "the line as a unit of measurement" back then—all of which seems a bit quaint to me now. Nor would I be so tempted to use the device of the "fictional I" anymore, I think.

A warm wind tickling my features
as I rose on the escalator staircase,
I closed my eyes like a child enjoying affection,
at home in the moment for once,
emerging from the depths of a dark mood
as I emerged from the underground.
The ticket machines I leapt, no problem;
all inward insuperable cowardices I also cleared
easily, or mentally belted like Super Mario
so that they shattered to fragile shark teeth
briefly, before exiting harmlessly the screen.

Rain fell in the swallowing gutters
as I leaned on the Piccadilly railings to see
the numerous, hatted office workers scuttling
in mackintoshes through the slanting rain,
refreshing lights of the Carlsberg billboard
fill and empty, green beams of the lettering
igniting the drizzle into little green flecks of flame;
the wrinkles in the yellowed rainwater
that trickled in the guttering completely absorbed me
so that my mind swam like a curious fish
through the white ruins of a crinkled moon.

What would it matter, said my free-wheeling
brain, if I woke on a blustery night that's dark
to find a new flood rapping at my door?
An elegant lady angel, I had the feeling,
would be dispatched to the disaster scene
with nails and toolkit to knock up an ark
and, gathering clean and unclean thoughts
in pairs, she and I would sail safely
over the submerged pubs and clubs of Soho—
taking time out, maybe, for a relaxing cruise
until the worst of it had blown over.

(1998)

Winter ode

Weak wind through a Soho passageway
just manages to lift
a couple of fluffy seedlings,
a lost, erratic foodbag,
a mad black rook with a quiff.
All afternoon I watch clouds drift, consciousness drift,
from behind the glass in a chrome and brass café
my mind filled up with leaves
and deceives,
and, broke, ignoble-feeling,
in trance, in dream reflection
absolving myself of ground-bound grieves:

the time, for instance, I swept
without a sound
around the knotted oak
outside my first-year student room (inside, I half-slept):
in soft light flooding golden, supernatural
I could see
the brilliant, living markings of the tree
—its wisdom—
with me in love, a curling bridegroom from Chagall;
or my mind that stark November with the white gulls sailing free,
on currents cold and invisible, clear—
I looped the loop and hit the brakes,
I did a u-turn in mid-air.
O, it was fine, it was lovely—so much better than ecstasy!

But the waitress, black-clad and sneakered, who sees me
blankly staring
as she brings to my table
3rd-ordered black coffee,
double strength,
what does she know of the chain-smoking stranger
from whom, misunderstanding his clumsy remark about her accent,
she wheels in apprehension?
As clouds drift and consciousness drifts
and I light up another year to smoke I wish she knew
—I sip the bitter drink—
I wish she could have seen me when I flew.

(November 30th 1998)

More Tulips in the spring?

Prospects for political instability in Central Asia
Outbreaks of unrest, as far apart as Vladivostok and Kiev, Latvia and Bulgaria since the end of 2008 seem likely to be only the first stirrings of far greater eruptions of social protest in the year to come, as the full impact of the global economic crisis is felt. These events thus raise starkly the question of the possible implications that the global economic crisis might have for political stability in the region—that is, not just for the continued rule of incumbent governments, but also for the continued existence of established political systems.

For the Kyrgyz Republic, this question takes the form of whether the political system that has developed since September 2007 is sufficiently robust to face down any possible surge in political and social unrest, stoked by the economic downturn, or weather it would be more prudent to expect a re-enactment of the "Tulip Revolution" of 2005, in which perceptions of corruption and electoral falsification led to mass demonstrations and the removal of the previous president, Askar Akayev.

To this end, the Economist Intelligence Unit has developed a Political Instability Index to facilitate comparison of countries' vulnerability to unrest, conceived as a product of the interaction of underlying social and political factors brought into sharper relief by economic distress. For this reason, the overall index is made up of two component indices: one that tries to capture underlying vulnerability, and a second that measures economic distress. (For the full results and methodology, see here and here.)

Table: Political Instability Index for Russia and Central Asia in 2009

Although the Kyrgyz Republic does not rate as the east European country most vulnerable to political instability in 2009—that accolade goes to Ukraine—within Central Asia, it vies with Tajikistan for this position, with the two ranked in joint 33rd place globally, along with countries that include Myanmar and Argentina, on an overall score of 7.1, out of a maximum possible instability score of 10. This marks the two Central Asian states as slightly more susceptible to unrest than Columbia, but slightly less susceptible than Sierra Leone.

In our index, the Kyrgyz Republic, along with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, starts off at greater risk from the impending economic stress, on the assumption that poorer countries are less well-equipped to cope with it. However, the overall political instability scores for all countries in the region, and Russia, worsen significantly in 2009 relative to 2007, reflecting a large increase in their scores for economic distress. This is because, in light of the intensification and spread of the world economic crisis to the region, all of them face a significant risk of a fall in real GDP per head this year—of more than 4% in the case of Russia—and all except Kazakhstan are at significant risk of the rate of unemployment rising above 10%.

For all of the countries in question, corruption is rated as high, and all of them, except Russia, have only become independent states in recent years—that is, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Tajikistan is scored as slightly more vulnerable to the underlying causes of unrest than the Kyrgyz Republic, partly because it has a greater number of large-scale episodes of political instability in its recent past (an estimated 50,000-100,000 people were killed in its five-year civil war in the 1990s), and partly because its infant mortality rate is higher than expected for its level of income level, a measure that stands in as an indicator of the level of social provision. The Kyrgyz Republic, however, is more vulnerable as a political regime that is neither fully democratic nor wholly authoritarian, whereas all the other Central Asian countries (but not Russia) have the advantage, from the point of view of state stability, of being authoritarian regimes. Additionally, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Russia are more ethnically homogeneous.

Consequently, the least we can say is that for a young, semi-democratic state in a "bad neighbourhood", mired by corruption and enjoying a low level of public trust in its institutions, the expected earthquake of falling living standards and rising joblessness has a high chance of shaking the foundations of the country's political institutions, even if, on its own, this would not necessarily be enough to bring these institutions down.