Sadly I don’t have the photographic ability or equipment to properly capture these moments - and I don’t have much skill with a sharpened pencil either - so I'll have to make do with a few words - scattered and rearranged on the page and hoping to convey these momentary conjunctions.
[a list inspired by the title of a novel by Catherine O’Flynn]
a silver ring set with a red stone - a blue military style jacket - a bucket full of memory - the first Feeder album - unbroken skin - the girl in the paddling pool - the smile in the plastic racing car - three months in the summer of 1993 - 8 years give or take - the taste of Malibu - your middle name - unquestioned trust - the desire for great heights - self censorship - the one who walks in the snow - a real wood floor - the lost boys - a duck and a bear - milk teeth - the desire to dye my hair - a pen that wrote with pale grey ink - your untorn first letter to me - our dogwood - a blonde hair halo - belief in the mythology of Father Christmas / Jesus Christ / The Queen (delete as desired) - a handful of Friday nights and Saturday mornings - the boy with the whitest smile - the cover of my first copy of ‘Dracula’ - our get out clauses - those amber incense cones - the child with the faraway eyes - the flexibility of youth - the need to write neatly - living anywhere above the ground floor - the chance to start again
And some I like and some I don’t. The girls I like have warm snakes dancing around their faces, snakes that smile from laying in the sun. Snakes who want to chat, and sing and drink gin. And the bad girls? well, their snakes are pencil thin, with teeth of rusty nails. They snip and tear and whisper secret poisoned berries with bitter pips within.
I used to list words - no meaning needed - just for their sound or the patterns they made on the page - like a child builds a tower of blocks only to knock it down and start again
its not that I’m ungrateful or unable to appreciate beauty - but its true that the carnations fascinate me as much, if not more, now they are dead - crisp rustles as I touch and the smell of deep dark dank forgotten bottoms of lost ponds - faded relics of who they once were with weird white worms emerging from one - almost as if it was trying to eat itself, one last brittle supper
hands wrinkled by water - as if my fingertips are trying to fold in on themselves and disappear - as if they want to resign their uniqueness and keep me hidden
woodpigeons walk lines back and forth across our overgrown lawn - like little forensic men - careful footsteps - heads up, heads down - searching for evidence - tasty treats hidden between stemmed green
Wednesday. The first face of the morning is the face of the missing. Not my missing but yours. We all have one, tucked away somewhere - at the back of a cupboard, bottom of a pocket, boot of a car. A certain someone - gone but not forgotten.
It’s a game we can all play with our missing. It’s make believe and re-draw the picture how it might have been. It’s fold the corners and crumple the edges, fade the colours and bruise belief. It’s smudge the smile and place coffee cup rings around the eyes.
And however well you play, it all turns out the same - a thumbnail image of someone you never knew - who day by day grows to look a lot like you.
[an anniversary message from me and my blog] Last Friday, walking home from the supermarket, down the ramp into the subway under the big road. An onion overtook us. We stopped for a moment, slightly stunned. And then gave chase. It was our onion you see, fallen through a hole in our carrier bag. We only caught up with it at the bottom of the ramp, once it had stopped its escape attempt. These days even the vegetables outrun us.
Two years on and I’m still writing here, still chasing the impossible - and you are still reading and sometimes chasing with me. For that I thank you.
When we look to the south we face the sea. We cant quite see it, but we know it’s there - always ready and waiting for us. Sometimes snoring, sometimes sighing, sometimes sad. But just there, behind the line of houses, behind the line of trees.
But today there’s a wrenching and a ripping in the air, and you’re not here to hold my hand as they tear apart our view. As the nameless men uproot the little trees, like milk teeth with no-one to put them under a pillow, no-one to pay 50p. I see multiple green tops and tips sliding past at unlikely angles. I see bits of old fence flying through the air and soil hefted higher than it wants to go. I see a mean little digger tear apart the decaying shed.
And despite this sudden and most welcome burst of October sun (surely a sign from the sky that you’re on the way home), despite the new window they are determined to cut between here and there - I can sense the sea pulling further back. A yard or two more distant from me, from you.
I’m always drawn to those strange shapes of light that appear against the sides of buildings. Like illuminated crop circles - I guess the rational me knows they are just reflections thrown from surfaces I cant quite see - but I like to make believe.
I like to think that the sunspots dancing on the ceiling aren’t coming from the surface of your cup of tea, but are outburst and overspills of what you feel for me. And the circle on the wall isn’t bouncing off your watch face, it’s the light of time itself, darting ever always out of reach.
And the bird shaped glow that darted across the house across the road the other day was nothing to do with the car that turned the corner, nothing to do with sunlight bounced from a wing mirror. It was the ghost of the dead bird you carried home that day - just passing by to say he hasn’t forgotten.
he called me from the corner of the park - without a word - just a gesture - a beckoning made with a stiffened arm - a crooked finger - he called me close to share his secret - to warn me to mind where I walk - not to crunch so heavily through the browning leaves - because those leaves are not just cast-off thoughts of seasons past - they are the tears of trees - trees that weep - year in year out - sad at the fact that no-one wants to sit beneath them to tell them stories like they used to - no-one sits below while they read the newspaper over their shoulder - no-one kisses under their canopy to let them eavesdrop on their heartbeat
I am much like this wall. I have a tendency to gather scraps around my feet. Lately I find myself knee-deep in half finished pieces - words without pictures, pictures without words. Its time to have a spring clean, six months too late. Its time to round up these unruly thoughts and call them to order. Its time to pin them down and hang them on these walls.
But now I’ve finally got myself a decent camera, and I’m slowly teaching my eyes to focus properly, to catch my own pretty pictures. And so I thought I would repay a debt and share some of my photos with the site. They have quite strict criteria and only accept photos with decent lighting, framing etc. They also reject photos if the subject matter is not required.
Now… browsing back through my scraps and bundles I have borrowed a crazy array of images from them… so I am surprised to hear that anything is deemed unnecessary. But that’s exactly what they said of these two images that I offered up -
Obviously no-one but me will search out snapshots of a cardboard landscape - a papery city to wander through, where perhaps we might find ourselves a corrugated park, where we can stoop and pick some cardboard flowers.
