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.
Some days turn upside down. A click of a button and the colours are inversed. Silky things tear at your skin, while you sink into concrete with a welcome sigh. The tame bear teeth and claws you never noticed before. While the wild draw close to your lighted window - dressed in tophat and tails and ready to read a bedtime story. Clouds slide behind the sun and shadows arrive at sunset. Words write themselves into knotty ropes while conversations are exhaled to form a stagnant layer that hangs just below the ceiling. Hands where you used to have feet - you kick me when you wave goodbye.
They say you should write about what you know. I don’t know much, hence recent posts on blue glass, paper people and lost gloves. But this week inspiration took a turn for the worse and left me struggling under the weight of a common cold. I’m under a spell cast by a cartoon wizard - my bones have turned to rubber. I wobble and bounce from moment to moment - none having much impact on me and vice versa.
It’s wrong to have a cold in the summer. The clue is in the name. I need to feel the risk of freezing. I need to laid my burning forehead against frosty surfaces. I need to feel as if I have been cryogenically suspended for a few days, and that when I thaw it might be spring.
Familiar foods have changed and grown corners. Even the roundest mouthful has edges and sharps that I never saw before, all eager to tear my throat on the way down.
My eyes water when there’s nothing to be sad about while my nose is filled with pepper tipped pins. And so I sneeze. And sneeze. And each time I do, I swear I lose precious thoughts. Words and phrases lost forever to high powered exhalation.
Boiling water. Your surprise. The way the glass shattered. The way it muttered out a couple of cracked cries before it gave up two blue tears. Sharp edged apologies that it couldn’t hold itself together for us any longer.
You know I have a thing about blue glass. Or I should amend that to had a thing about blue glass. I think my passion is fading. Individual pieces have broken and fallen by the way and those that remain on the mantel-piece are gathering more than their share of dust.
I’ve never liked rose-tinted glass, never needed that optimistic sheen spread across my world. But a world viewed through blue is a world that makes a little more sense. Every place a step closer to water, to where we came from.
But I realise that you cant just live a life of curious curves and keep me on a high shelf for special occasions. And the things you hold most tightly to are always the last, but most likely, to break.
