and on and on and.
pulled from the crowd, blessings beseached
now get back to your seat
the very most reverend,
getting irrelevant
but not on this watch
a space where we tie our laces and learn how to count
suspicious and statistically out of the picture
crouched down but the spring in our step has wilted
crouched down and slumped into the same angle
leg muscles eroded and siezed
no getting out of this squat
A long time ago there was a plan,
but so short a space so long and goodbye
does it even matter how exactly we got here?
well it cuts you up and if it didn’t you wouldn’t be human,
It grinds you down and no other way about it
A piece that held things together has fallen away
A reference point has been relocated. Too far away.
My orbit has been shaken, an errant dance in the cosmic ballet.
But which remains- -the satellite or the planet?
Or maybe neither, maybe only a hurtling rock on a lonesome path.
The first has become the last, and what time for notes or afterthoughts.
They would not make sense anyhow.
But no harm to sit still and listen and repeat after me.
Try and think things through and work something out.
Painting by numbers will not make you an artist, but it might get you started.
so you have tickled some frilled fancy with a word or two.
But have you drunk your fill from the teaming edge?
Is there a lead somewhere and a format to distill some sense?
And in which sentence exactly lies the insight and idea?
Or are you as yet still wandering textually on with no end in sight,
A pretentious preening bird cleaning its feathers with beak.
The bus rocked when it hit the slush, and thumped over the cat’s eyes separating the slow and fast lanes .
The driver didn’t seem stressed, but the roads were in a bad state. It was still snowing, and the right lane was bounded on its right by a tapered ridge of frozen drift. Morning, but the sun nowhere in sight, just clouds and grey and the road to Dublin and the wipers scraping and new flakes drifting down and pausing on the big flat windscreen before melting into transparency. And on my windscreen too the wipers blinking forth to stem saltier water, while two bodies trying to melt into one and sleep in unison while the time is still there, but being eaten away by every second and metre. Ah, how can we count that time and that distance now, it is too late and too far? For ten months only minutes and a short walk between us, and then after one day half a world. Was I hoping that the bus would slide to a halt, or that the planes would be frozen to the runway tarmac, or that the world was not as it appeared, and that emotions could take precedence over visa or protocol. But if it were not so, then it would not be… If it was not stopped, the momentum would not be noticed, the depth not apparent, and everything as ever would be taken for granted. The bus arrived, the bags lugged off and wheeled across the hard ground and weighed in. The first game of pool and last cup of coffee. Last last last- everlasting lastness of each step and action. Rising stress of looming departure, staff looking on while goodbyes are made. Surreal goodbyes that sound dry and empty, brave goodbyes that are curtains hanging over open anguish. You wave until out of sight. I turn and squint, try to jolt some composure into my frame, drift and then get dragged back by the normality of your friends and the banality of the airport- but how can it be? Later on, on the bus home, I begin to become aware of the absence, and later still it engulfs me, but what of it? What can I do? Move on? Move out? Move away? I try to find solace in the usual motions, the habitual efforts to learn and stay busy. But I have been deceiving myself, did not notice that what I assumed were external frills and special effects were the foundations of my edifice. And now I have to lie here and accept it, wait for those supports to collapse and reform, do battle with the inevitable pain and wait to see how long it lasts. Like all barbed things it went in easy, but cannot be taken out without tearing flesh. And now it feels almost zero-sum, that the many little showers of happiness must be balanced by an equal share of tormenting arrows, back to claim a pound of flesh and to hell with the safety of its blood, an insatiable urge to get back to zero with mathematical precision. Sleep, sleep, needed but joyless, though hopefully when I wake I will have the power to untie myself from the bed and kick myself into the day, one arm longer than the other, wisps of old and odd ambitions smoking and smouldering with some tiny hope of ignition. At least let my heart warm a little, and beat fast enough to send blood circling round some open centre.
What words, but deeds?
Ardent, aimless, flooded, forced.
Fool full flung,
Music without moment.
Current circling out of boredom, no laws between.
Natural appetite, natural order, ask Marcus.
