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.
Saturday, 23 October 2010
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.”
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.”
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Intro
The thunder sloped down in elegant crashes of noise, roiling earthwards with an electrifying jolt of sound that poured and boomed around buildings and flowed in waves through the streets, lapping up against walls and floors. The rain and lightning was mere decoration, embellishment on the percussive theme that resonated from within bones and girders.
Through this tempest strode a figure of lines, straight and angular and rigid, composed of a roiling energy that seemed permanently mustered at the level just below explosion. His entire manner was one of poise and balance, everything prepared and controlled so that the perfect amount of effort was expended. His steps were not boisterous or rapid, nor were they slovenly and lacklustre. Each step connected with the ground with the same purpose a river or an avalanche or the fall of an icicle shows; simple, unrestrained and inexpensive movement.
His body was covered in a simple black coat that fell like a sheet of woven coal about him, it’s creases hinting at darker shadows that followed the lines of his tall and indomitable form. His head was hidden beneath a black fedora, the rim slanted so it almost met the upturned collar of his coat. All that could be distinguished of his face were the bright eyes, grey and glinting like wet stones that have been polished smooth by the flow of decades of water, and the sharp nose of a patrician, a right angle jutting out from the planes and shadows of his features.
He moved through the city, and his footsteps rang out, counting time between the explosions of power that rippled and cracked in the heights above him and arced between the spires of the buildings. The lightning spiralled between glass and steel as beneath it he walked. Occasionally a window would shatter, the pressures of the wind ripping it away and send it spiralling overhead, releasing a shattering of glinting silver sharpness to fall down amidst the rain. Despite all this the figure strode onwards over the cracked concrete, past the empty yawning doorways.
But with each step, despite the sense of boundless, perfectly balanced energy he conveyed, he seemed to slow and dwindle. His steps came at different intervals, with growing pauses splitting each motion. When moving he retained the sense of boundless grace, but it was lapsing into immobility the deeper on into the city he drew. His head turned slowly, rotating about, taking in every abandoned shop front, every silent bar, every deserted restaurant and gutted office.
He reached a silent plaza. The extent of it’s emptiness yawned and boomed. In a space that could be filled by thousands, that had been filled by thousands, that had once reverberated with the pound of feet and the whirring of human speech now lay empty. His feet carried him deeper and further over the smooth concrete, ragged, scarred and pockmarked with time, the intricate patterns and designs once carved into it rendered unrecognisable. Eventually he reached the centre of the square and stood, rotating slowly. He removed his hat and tossed it into the waiting jaws of the wind, his eyes already moving away from the black gull he had released and now tracing, caressing, desperately yearning at the clean, crippled lines of the uninhabited buildings.
He collapsed to his knees, his eyes wide and staring. The disbelief that had been hidden by his hat and collar was now etched for all to see.
But there was no ‘all’ to see it any more. He knelt, broken in the square. Around him, throughout the entire city, from the river to the fields, for 30 miles, there was a terrible stillness that resounded with a horror that was too much to bear.
Nothing moved but the thunder.
Through this tempest strode a figure of lines, straight and angular and rigid, composed of a roiling energy that seemed permanently mustered at the level just below explosion. His entire manner was one of poise and balance, everything prepared and controlled so that the perfect amount of effort was expended. His steps were not boisterous or rapid, nor were they slovenly and lacklustre. Each step connected with the ground with the same purpose a river or an avalanche or the fall of an icicle shows; simple, unrestrained and inexpensive movement.
His body was covered in a simple black coat that fell like a sheet of woven coal about him, it’s creases hinting at darker shadows that followed the lines of his tall and indomitable form. His head was hidden beneath a black fedora, the rim slanted so it almost met the upturned collar of his coat. All that could be distinguished of his face were the bright eyes, grey and glinting like wet stones that have been polished smooth by the flow of decades of water, and the sharp nose of a patrician, a right angle jutting out from the planes and shadows of his features.
He moved through the city, and his footsteps rang out, counting time between the explosions of power that rippled and cracked in the heights above him and arced between the spires of the buildings. The lightning spiralled between glass and steel as beneath it he walked. Occasionally a window would shatter, the pressures of the wind ripping it away and send it spiralling overhead, releasing a shattering of glinting silver sharpness to fall down amidst the rain. Despite all this the figure strode onwards over the cracked concrete, past the empty yawning doorways.
But with each step, despite the sense of boundless, perfectly balanced energy he conveyed, he seemed to slow and dwindle. His steps came at different intervals, with growing pauses splitting each motion. When moving he retained the sense of boundless grace, but it was lapsing into immobility the deeper on into the city he drew. His head turned slowly, rotating about, taking in every abandoned shop front, every silent bar, every deserted restaurant and gutted office.
He reached a silent plaza. The extent of it’s emptiness yawned and boomed. In a space that could be filled by thousands, that had been filled by thousands, that had once reverberated with the pound of feet and the whirring of human speech now lay empty. His feet carried him deeper and further over the smooth concrete, ragged, scarred and pockmarked with time, the intricate patterns and designs once carved into it rendered unrecognisable. Eventually he reached the centre of the square and stood, rotating slowly. He removed his hat and tossed it into the waiting jaws of the wind, his eyes already moving away from the black gull he had released and now tracing, caressing, desperately yearning at the clean, crippled lines of the uninhabited buildings.
He collapsed to his knees, his eyes wide and staring. The disbelief that had been hidden by his hat and collar was now etched for all to see.
But there was no ‘all’ to see it any more. He knelt, broken in the square. Around him, throughout the entire city, from the river to the fields, for 30 miles, there was a terrible stillness that resounded with a horror that was too much to bear.
Nothing moved but the thunder.
Friday, 23 July 2010
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Yoof Culture
Late-night analogies stumble from my fingers, and push themselves into the keyboard, twisting and bending pixels to their will. Their heat staggers out into the endless stretches of the internet, where they will tangle and whip in complete anonymity, surrounded by a hundred-million endless-other desperate poets. This sense of silence in a storm of communication gives an urgency to the urge within, and the typing speeds, a stattacco drum beat, the percussive rythmns beating along in time with the tinny music from the laptop's speaker. This is the reality of late night existence for teenagers; illuminated screens, and dimly lit rooms, whilst eyes squint at swarming social-networks, and at sordid porn sights, and at every different nuance of the internet in between, (though there are few other nuances to be found).
Whilst parents slumber, the young and unencumbered blaze trails visible only in statistics and electric impulses, and dance their way across the world in a blink of an eye, surfing a wave of information, knowledge, hyperlinks and hyperbole. Slang tumbles from their finger-nails and callussed finger-tips 'OMG' and 'LOL', 'Bled' and 'Innits' and 'ROFL's merge into one endless mutable changing language, that cannot be heard, only be seen.
Welcome to the yoof culture.
Whilst parents slumber, the young and unencumbered blaze trails visible only in statistics and electric impulses, and dance their way across the world in a blink of an eye, surfing a wave of information, knowledge, hyperlinks and hyperbole. Slang tumbles from their finger-nails and callussed finger-tips 'OMG' and 'LOL', 'Bled' and 'Innits' and 'ROFL's merge into one endless mutable changing language, that cannot be heard, only be seen.
Welcome to the yoof culture.
Monday, 3 May 2010
It doesn't matter.
Soft bricks mesh silently with shadows and angular metal lampposts along a quiet street. The tarmac road curves gently down the slope of the hill, like toffee or butter or ice-cream that slipped from some giant child’s hand, and coursed away before it could be stopped. Simple grass verges line the edges of this thoroughfare, the occasional tree, like a pillar of wood springing up amidst its smaller greener cousins, supporting the soft velvet of the sky with its sturdy, spider web strung branches.
On the edges of this simple suburban lane, houses lie, each one a different experiment, another way of making the word ‘home’ real out of rock and wires and whitewash. On the top of one, simple red slates have been turned the colour of blood mixed with silt in the cover of night, and their routine shapes, their regular simple squares, have become the feathers of a wing belonging to a silent roosting bird. The windows of another house have shifted into shields with the drawing of the curtains; the entrance way of the eyes into the house barred by sheer white fabric, warped grey in the lingering twilight that drifts like the last smoke of a cigar in a country club; genteel, refined and unpredictable, wandering through the streets.
Walk on now a little further, let your legs carry you along the pitted speckled pavements that lie beneath your feet. Can you feel it through the soles of your soft thin shoes? Can you feel the simple bumps and rises and ridges that jumped and leapt from cement mixers through the air, then fell and settled motionless? The veins of newer darker smoother flooring have spread over the cracks, covering the scars where pipes have been slipped into the body of the earth. Can you feel it beneath your striding shoes? The gentle thrum of generators, the simple beat and buzz of power, so sibilant and gentle, you might almost think it was the floor beneath you breathing.
But we’ve paused long enough. Now walk on further.
Pass the edge of the road, and cross over, careful now though, careful of the eddies and flurries of human current, the roaring traffic and the splinters of silence it hurls outward, then careers off, the drone lingering behind and to the side of it’s wake, inside the fumes it spread. You’ve crossed the road now and you’re on the other side. A simple brick wall rises up in front, ahead. Dull old stones, not even bricks really, just the tears of some ancient, weary dinosaur, twisted by pressure and heat and coiling time, until they’re contradictory rectangular globes, heaped and piled upon each other and held together with glue. You grasp the top of the wall, hands splayed, fingers spread out like nets catching a grip inside them; you tense and strain the cords inside you, as muscles creak and you vault in one awkward moment over.
And land in sand so unexpected beneath shoes; shoes were not meant to walk on sand, you realise, understanding this in the same instant the sound of the first gentle wave laps up over the grains and into your head. You slip off your shoes in a shrug of motion, kick them off and smile, and dig your toes down beneath the tiny worlds of fine golden dust and take root like a tree for an moment. Your eyes are stretching out across the vista of roiling darkness, and for an instant all you can see is ink; black inks and grey inks, and purple-navy-silver inks and tiny bubbles of white ink riding atop it all, and you feel like you would paint the entire world in these colours, these shades of brilliant oceans that have draped themselves across it. Civilisation, suburbs, all the tiny spots of light from the lampposts are no longer real here. They don’t matter.
As you stand here looking out you feel like you’re at the end of the world, as if, as if should your foot stretch out then it will end, it will cease to stay real and drift apart into the deep black infinity that is so silkily lapping upon the sand. The water is nearly at your feet. You sit down upon the sand and smile as the sea touches your toes. It doesn’t matter at the moment, because at the moment, you are in the place you would like to be.
It doesn’t matter.
On the edges of this simple suburban lane, houses lie, each one a different experiment, another way of making the word ‘home’ real out of rock and wires and whitewash. On the top of one, simple red slates have been turned the colour of blood mixed with silt in the cover of night, and their routine shapes, their regular simple squares, have become the feathers of a wing belonging to a silent roosting bird. The windows of another house have shifted into shields with the drawing of the curtains; the entrance way of the eyes into the house barred by sheer white fabric, warped grey in the lingering twilight that drifts like the last smoke of a cigar in a country club; genteel, refined and unpredictable, wandering through the streets.
Walk on now a little further, let your legs carry you along the pitted speckled pavements that lie beneath your feet. Can you feel it through the soles of your soft thin shoes? Can you feel the simple bumps and rises and ridges that jumped and leapt from cement mixers through the air, then fell and settled motionless? The veins of newer darker smoother flooring have spread over the cracks, covering the scars where pipes have been slipped into the body of the earth. Can you feel it beneath your striding shoes? The gentle thrum of generators, the simple beat and buzz of power, so sibilant and gentle, you might almost think it was the floor beneath you breathing.
But we’ve paused long enough. Now walk on further.
Pass the edge of the road, and cross over, careful now though, careful of the eddies and flurries of human current, the roaring traffic and the splinters of silence it hurls outward, then careers off, the drone lingering behind and to the side of it’s wake, inside the fumes it spread. You’ve crossed the road now and you’re on the other side. A simple brick wall rises up in front, ahead. Dull old stones, not even bricks really, just the tears of some ancient, weary dinosaur, twisted by pressure and heat and coiling time, until they’re contradictory rectangular globes, heaped and piled upon each other and held together with glue. You grasp the top of the wall, hands splayed, fingers spread out like nets catching a grip inside them; you tense and strain the cords inside you, as muscles creak and you vault in one awkward moment over.
And land in sand so unexpected beneath shoes; shoes were not meant to walk on sand, you realise, understanding this in the same instant the sound of the first gentle wave laps up over the grains and into your head. You slip off your shoes in a shrug of motion, kick them off and smile, and dig your toes down beneath the tiny worlds of fine golden dust and take root like a tree for an moment. Your eyes are stretching out across the vista of roiling darkness, and for an instant all you can see is ink; black inks and grey inks, and purple-navy-silver inks and tiny bubbles of white ink riding atop it all, and you feel like you would paint the entire world in these colours, these shades of brilliant oceans that have draped themselves across it. Civilisation, suburbs, all the tiny spots of light from the lampposts are no longer real here. They don’t matter.
As you stand here looking out you feel like you’re at the end of the world, as if, as if should your foot stretch out then it will end, it will cease to stay real and drift apart into the deep black infinity that is so silkily lapping upon the sand. The water is nearly at your feet. You sit down upon the sand and smile as the sea touches your toes. It doesn’t matter at the moment, because at the moment, you are in the place you would like to be.
It doesn’t matter.
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Sonnet
I stood, suspended on gossamer words,
Trapped in all the simple light they span out
With gently placed phrasings that could not call me.
And in those words, and motions, a truth span.
A gentler rhythm, a kinder rhyme breathed
Out. In the audience, all the air
Stilled, and charged, and froze into it’s glory,
As upon a platform below our feet
And above your mind, in incandescence
Framed in motions, truly daring in heart
and soulful intent. we are all acting
They seem to say, declaring it to us all,
Ah, but oh, I hear us all exhaling
What beauty in this act, there is, trailing.
Trapped in all the simple light they span out
With gently placed phrasings that could not call me.
And in those words, and motions, a truth span.
A gentler rhythm, a kinder rhyme breathed
Out. In the audience, all the air
Stilled, and charged, and froze into it’s glory,
As upon a platform below our feet
And above your mind, in incandescence
Framed in motions, truly daring in heart
and soulful intent. we are all acting
They seem to say, declaring it to us all,
Ah, but oh, I hear us all exhaling
What beauty in this act, there is, trailing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)