Saturday 23 October 2010

Green.

Green. Slates of grey-powder-blue
Against it. I can see the branches like
Arms waving up over the fields of bricks,
And a plane (or is it a bird?) roars or
Soars right behind it. Ambiguity seems to be

Ruling today. Oh no, this time it’s truly a bird;
A bullet of feathers and silver and flight
That can soar over the sea of tiles
Like a cloud of flesh and far-too-early
Tweets and singings.

I’m looking out the window,
And the sunlight’s streaming across and
Through like water over sand, and I
Can feel it around and through me.
Through the glass thats

Like bars blocking the world from me.

Tuesday 19 October 2010

"Weather's here. Wish you were lovely."

The beach stretched out like the grey, broken arm of a giant. The waves lapped at it gently, carrying it out and in again, a soft loop in space, a tableau of grit and icy silver. Above the steel-shimmered sea and the decomposing stones, grey clouds roiled tensely outwards and upwards and down again, like the ghosts of mountains. A lack-lustre wind, that seemed to whisper promises of the winter, rolled gently along the length of the bay, pausing to scale or slip beneath the skeleton of a charred pier. All there was was a pervading whisper of silence that refused to dim, until it seemed to roar against the senses, compelling you to shout, scream, throw rocks at the waves, do anything to break it’s riotous conformity. The only splash of colour that rebelled was a red post box, a ruby incongruity that seemed to shimmer in the heat haze of it’s vibrancy like a mirage on the distance.

Beneath the weight of all this stood a solitary figure. They were nothing more than a black scratch on the horizon to my eyes, but their line was etched in a rigid blur. They stood right by the shoreline, where insubstantial sand met flowing water. The waves lapped to their feet, and stopped, inches before meeting toes, and then retreated, a slow rhythmic susurrus, like a heartbeat or a generator that pounded or sang, depending on how you listened to it. I watched as they began to stroll further along the beach, receding into the distance, as they became less of a scratch, then less of a smudge, then less of a presence, and then nothing at all.

I would never know their name, I realised, as they vanished into the distance. I would never know what time the clock of their mind was kept to, or what country they were born in. I would never find out what song they liked to hum underneath their breath when no-one could hear them, or to what rhythm their footsteps naturally fell. I would never discover all the tiny glass facets of their thoughts, or how much milk they liked in their coffee, and whether or not they took sugar. All these thoughts hit me like a grain of sand blown into the eye, a small irritation that grew greater and greater the more I tugged and pulled and wrestled with it.


I reached into my pocket, and pulled out the postcard that lay within it, nestled deep inside a protective shell of neon-blue plastic. I removed it and let the bag float of into the wind, a glaring jigsaw piece of blue against the granite pillars of the sky. I took out my pen and wrote upon it. Five words that expressed the truth of the day, and everything I hoped for you to be. Scribbled lines in scrawled ink upon a flimsy unguarded piece of card. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything quite as fragile or beautiful or indomitable. I strode over to the post box. The closer I came to it the brighter it seemed to shine, giving off radiance, bleeding vibrancy into the landscape around it. I came to it, and took my postcard, and abandoned it into it’s cavernous, hungry, welcoming mouth.

I turned and strode away and as I did, I whispered my prayer, my plea to the stranger who even now walked further onwards and away from me, down past the watching line where sand and sea collided in a silent storm. “Weather’s here.” I breathed. “Wish you were lovely.”