Friday, November 03, 2006

chain reaction

Its only when I stand you side by side, under certain light, that it shows. You are the ghosts of one another. Shadows cut out and folded over. If one is the paper torn from the whole and the other is the hole, then which are you?

I remember those paper doll chains we made when we were small. Outlines of boys and girls holding hands. I never tore in the right places. With anticipation, I always went to unfold and they fell apart and tumbled to the floor. Forever separated from one another. A cut that could never be corrected.




I remember the ghosts of the second sentence. Urging me to tell you the truth two days too late for halloween. That ghosts are not somethings to avoid and fear. They are only cold because we run from them. The breeze we feel is the draught from our hurried escape. Step within and they are warm and welcoming, like tea or coffee steam but faintly herbal.

So don’t forget them. They wait patiently for you. Carpets of ghosts cover this land. Although we only see them when we wear a hole through the floor boards or the pavements that we have overlaid.

Ghosts walk forever hand in hand - unlike us and our broken paper dolls. Hand in hand through walls and floors, they can stand in adjacent rooms but still be connected. Disconnected in space and time, reality and fiction, here and hereafter, but still strung smokily together.

1 comment:

HT company said...

There’s something about reading, that I never get from any other medium. It’s the feeling about connecting to the producer. That somehow that no soul is fully different from another, like characters. Sometimes I’ll read something, and I’ll understand that our minds function that same. Not that what I write lives up to what I read, but the way my thoughts travel through correspond to others. I first felt it with Jeffery Eugenedies, Sylvia Plath, Michael Cunningham. And there’s something about your work that I feel too. I am at that stage of my life when everything is so fast moving and temporary where nothing holds on for long, to read something so ??? connecting to another, makes me feel a little less alone. That somewhere, beyond my street and city there is another fighting or dealing with the same things that perplex me. And also the cryptic touch you have in your work. also the use of the real world and how it triggers off something deep within.... sorry.... the string of paper figures.... i over use the word beautiful but this is. I too remember always severing the linking arms, and even doing so with the red paper hearts.
These days I’m trying not to read into signs and such things, trying live life in the words of Van Morrison, .”... and I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines.” But I do think there is a reason why i read your piece today.” I couldn’t tell you why i think that, cause the seed is just planted...

I never do the things i love enough. I wish i visited your site more often.

Thank you for your kind and encouraging words, they are always joyfully excepted.

... you always leave enough away to make me wonder who you are? I kind of hope I never find out.

unlikely treasures. In every toilet roll i see, i look for butterflies...