Monday 30 April 2012

Just.



It was dark and she was light…much lighter than the dark air pressing on his shoulders. He had always spoken with such conviction, until he heard her voice. Hers shattered his. His words broke before they fled his mouth. But she caught them in her ears and they rested there a while, before swimming through to her mind. It wasn’t the sounds of the words that made them particularly all-consuming. She had heard the words before, spoken them, but it was the look that delivered the words…that irresistible thought-stilling look.

It almost didn’t happen. It was like juggling, only with words. What he was supposed to say, and what would have been conventionally appropriate to say was “Congratulations” or “Kudos” or any other token of praise. He didn’t need to say anything at all. And yet he was compelled to say something, and for reasons unknown to him, it had to be the right something. He had to have the right words. And what he did say...he almost need not have said.

“Though I am not…somehow…in your presence…I am.”

Puzzling words - extensively ambiguous words, words completely absent of, and yet completely electrified with meaning. And she held his stare for some time, more out of paralysis than anything else. He had heard her singing, that alchemy that dazzled and enraptured him. So…what else could there be? He had listened and she had sung straight from her soul, so what was he looking for? Did he need a visual? Could her eyes ever convey it?

And suddenly, for less than a nanosecond, less than was possible to qualify as time…he saw it. And as he saw it, she felt his, their whole lives in motion though they were standing perfectly still. The magic he had longed for…the impossible she believed did not exist. They had it…

…But that’s the tragedy - the life-breaking reality. It was over before it had begun, for that was it, that one moment, the break in the circuit. That was that moment you have all been warned about and conditioned to avoid. That was the moment when two people of our human breed felt too much.

They felt so much…that they both burst into flames. 

Sunday 15 April 2012

If I had a pet alpaca...



I want a pet alpaca. I would call it Meeko and Meeko and I would be buddies. We would compare stories and lives, my loves and her conquests. Meeko would be irresistibly funny; a humour that need not upset the feelings of others to shake my whole being and separate continents as an earthquake would. Meeko would say "mmm" and I would instantly realise that she was saying "I had a pet human once, but then humans developed brains. And my human pet beat me in an enunciation contest, saying ‘mmmmm’ - wait a minute, ‘mmm’, just one moment.” She would clear her throat at this moment. “It was simply the letter ‘mmm’, you see, this is how she won". 

Meeko and I would meander until the dark gathered up all the light and put it in his pocket. Darkness is usually the most fearsome thing, but it wouldn't be if Meeko was by my side. I would tell Meeko what her name means: that she has great strength and is very wise, according to Babynology website. To which she would respond “mm mm m mm?” which would mean “what is a website?” which would have been more convincing if she didn’t  then collapse on the floor, emitting a series of hysterical “mmm’s” asserting that EVERYBODY - even alpaca’s - know about the internet. That would be Meeko. I would tell her about prime ministers and that she is 1000% smarter and better looking than them. She would “mm mm mm, mm mm mm”, meaning “you’re too much, really too much”. I would then tell her that they are more pompous than the word pompous intended, but if that weren’t the case, then I might watch the news, because then at least the news would be news. If it is only ever what you expect (excluding exceptional, unfathomably possible events) then by definition, Meeko, it is not called news.  

I would then point out the stars and tell her that every single one of them was burning for her, because she was smiling so kindly. I would then explain that if she were to stop, the stars would die away and there would be nothing to separate me from the darkness. She wouldn’t like that idea, so she would promise that she would always smile as long as I was smiling. We would wander, and drink the finest eye-wrenching tequila, and hum along to the ukulele. We would seek out climbable trees and I would climb them and throw a rope down for her so that I could pull her up to the tallest branch. And we would see all of nature communicating, complimenting each other. We would follow the ivy with our eyes as it made its way up trees. We would watch daisies being altruistic, shedding their hair to enable the happiness of children. “He loves me, he loves me not – ohhhhhhh”, and just in that moment, the daisy would grab the spare hair they had been concealing in their stem, while the child wasn’t watching of course. Then the daisy would clear their throat. “What’s that? Wait a second…Oh! He DOES love me!” We would sit there and I would offer Meeko the hay I had brought along for her. This would be the hay I usually filled my rabbit hutch with, but Bernie wouldn’t mind sharing, especially with Meeko. He would love Meeko more than he loved hay. 

And Meeko and I would have adventures that were true, and full of feeling and life. And if I fell down, or lost my way, Meeko would protect me, because Meeko would be strong…and Meeko would be wise. I wish I were like Meeko, the entirely hypothetical, imaginary wonder. 

Wednesday 11 April 2012

Shadows and Quadrilaterals

Creative Writing Workshop Exercise: To walk around the room impossibly slowly and write what we saw, our thoughts and triggered memories. 

Everything. It’s staggered. A ticking clock. It is every rooms dictator. When the room is fruitful of life. The stadium sits open in the distance. The green drowning in drizzle. A light smothers my face. An air vent is nestled in the wall. So small, that no human breed could crawl through. Not if under attack. His shadow paints the board. But shadows change. Shadows are replaced by the shadows of others. Even replaced by shadows of inanimate things. Imagine that. Locomotion enabled shadow theft.

A plug hangs directly below a vacant plug socket. Teamwork is rejected I guess. Or maybe electricity has told them where to go.
                                                                                                                        
I’ve borrowed the sky to clothe my legs today. Only, I didn’t say please. That could be the reason it is raining. Someone has abandoned their phone. The Mayan Apocalypse must be imminent. Pieces of paper rustle as they are indented by caffeinated pens. Changing them. Possibly forever.

The desire to be comfortable. Maybe seated. With a cherry-flavoured slush puppy. All of those disconnected buildings. All alone, mocked by the taller ones. Isn’t it odd how taller buildings become egotistical? There’s paper supporting a table. It doesn’t make sense. My eyes are drawn to trust. Open bags exposing money bound in leather and expensive music-playing technology.

It has stopped raining.

There are but two bottles of water in the room. The rest are caffeinated and E-numbered. I really like the colour of burgundy. But it really doesn’t suit that house. The camera is watching us, wondering about us. What are we doing?

Is the clock dictating us now? Or is it not?

The screen is now blue. It also must have borrowed from the sky. That would explain why it is now raining again.

Everything is a quadrilateral. Tables. Chairs. Wall panels. Window panes. Blinds. We exist within a cube. It’s how we trap space. We make cubes. Triangles lack the capability of space-stealing.

A man crosses the road on his mobile phone. He does not look left and right. Police sat in their quadrilateral van are doing nothing but enjoying their space.

Smoke is diffused defacing building upon arrogant building. Excretions from Corus are forming new clouds, or rather, transforming existing clouds. Giving them new faces. I am thrown back into childhood, into Fern Gully. The monster whose name I momentarily forget. I watched Fern Gully on a quadrilateral screen.

We’re still staggering, barely moving, but barely still. A body that yearns to move forward, to move faster, to change shape and angle, is denied. A body that’s prohibited. Right now anyway. At least we are protected, in our cube. The mediator between me and the sky who I didn’t give an I.O.U. to. Poor sky. But come on. There’s too much sky and too little time to dress to worry about manners.  

Monday 9 April 2012

Nostalgia


Sometimes it feels like more than it is - an all-pervasive sweeping breeze of nostalgia that refuses to alter its course. Sometimes it’s a song, often and surprisingly one you haven’t heard before, or even associated with anything enough for it to be imprinted on your mind. It’s this human thing, something we all cannot shake, a surge of liquid ecstasy drifting around in our bodies. Nostalgia, everywhere, always, a feeling of “Was it better then?” or “Did I even exist then?”

I’m frequently engaged in nostalgia, for it shadows me like a cloud shadows the sun. Maybe it’s innate, maybe it has a hypersensitive sensor that simply cannot withstand an entire 3 minutes of John Denver’s senses being filled up without making my eyes secrete water like a flooded sponge. It’s "Run around Sue", and "Walk of Life", and every Jimi Hendrix song that I didn’t see live. It’s a whole collection of jigsawed words that when strung together and strummed inspire every cell of my being to make music.

A wander in the country


Thoughts give us company – they are always pining for our attention.“I’m significant! Listen to me! Stop drooling over the countryside”. Invading our liberty, “You do realise that you are sat, in the country, on a rock, alone, and its getting dark and your phone is in your car. I’m just trying to make you aware of that. Go back to ignoring me now”. And you feel like you have to because your priority lies not with safety but with experience. Because you feel that this is real, that this means everything more than everything else. And you don’t want to return to the constraints, though insulation is a beneficial one, which your very chilly back would agree with. This is you and the Earth with no middle-man or obstacle. And the strangest thing is that talking to yourself through thought makes it feel as though your brain and body are separate entities. What a strange and unfathomably wonderful thought, assuring that though walking alone, you are never lonely.