The cell phone goes off like a rattlesnake at the foot of my bed. Torn from the supporting machinery of a complicated dream, I am certain that I am about to die. I scramble like pale egg white in a smoking pan. The lingering stench of sleep makes me dizzy. Usually, the diabolical fumes remain unnoticeable as they seep from your reasoning and cling to your clothes, at least until the mid-afternoon when they suddenly mature with a tang of disappointment and they make you feel violently sick. The mean words of a kind idea shimmer in my head. They’re too bright to bear, and they sting my mind’s eye, punching vision holes when I look right at them. But I know what they say. Wash this all away.
Listen To Your Legs
Humid like afternoon on a tropical island, toasted and sealed to sweat in the darkness of an exiled sun. The rotten stairs bow like blades of grass under beads of damp, held together by surface tension as we scuttle down into the wrecked obscure. How many bug eyes rest on us from every angle and vertex, every cavity and void of blasted night? It’s better to slightly cross your eyes and blur the horror, the less visually detailed the tight angles we’re forced to brush up against remain, the better for our nerves this whole ugly descent will be. The ceiling squats low enough to caress the tips of my hair. Cream-painted ancient sawdust boards. Gnarled bricks look on with cauliflower faces like former boxing champs. Decades of dry red particle rain spill into sifting puddles of rust flour, kneaded by the thumbs of time into the clammy floor. Showers of brick dust caught suspended like miniature captured galaxies in a universe of spiderwebs. Wet in your lungs, dry in your mouth. Unease in your heart, decay in every direction. Your legs say you should leave. You should always listen to your legs.
They Call It Clarity
They call it clarity. It’s not like a crystal, it’s more like you’ve turned around with your eyes closed. Something was ploughing towards you from behind and you didn’t know. You would have let it impact you, but you turned around and the inside of your eyelids flash-curdled from endless dark to bright light membrane. You felt the headlights shooting at you and your joints bent in reflex and leapt you on their own out of the way. You never saw what it was though, that was coming for you. Just felt an imprint glide raised against your instinctual fabric, and that was enough.
It felt bad in every direction, but one means something and the others do not. I’m truly glad I didn’t go. I was about to, despite the desire leaving me. Despite the vigour and the lust evaporating. Suddenly the ancient parts of me ceased to grind and devour. They let go of their colossal overpowering grip and let slip thousands of years from my modern nerves. I wanted to be, but there was nowhere to be. Practically nothing made sense, and yet I was still full of dread and excitement ready to ride. There was no meaning for me, just opportunity. There was no sense, only a frail spark. I would have frozen, unable to ignite and they would have had nothing. And what about the sheer fear of the unknown and the possibilities that wander into the messy and horrific? In isolation, these are risks I would have taken in exchange for chances, but even when the discomfort was only mild, I had made myself numb to the really heavy reasoning. The parts not out there, but the ones sitting at home. The ones that know where I live and will sit with me long after the recklessness sours. To do it has no meaning, but to have done it? Well, that is vital to how things go forward. What we are facing right now is so hard and so difficult and so full of meaning spanning a decade. Comparatively, what was skipped on today is worth nothing, it’s already cumbersome and the joy would be short-lived and likely unsatisfactory. And yet it would cost so much.
I’m glad I didn’t go today, even if I let someone down. I didn’t feel like it anymore and it was going to be hard, but I was going to push myself. I would have been a fool to myself, but I checked in with real life for a second and it sucked the anaesthetic out of my bones and I felt the incision I was about to rip in myself. I stopped and things will not be easy, but as my life may fall apart, the last thing I need is more wounds. The last thing I need is more guilt to keep me awake. The last thing I need is more shame to keep me distant. I am better for this.
Feel The Physics
What is compulsion? A comfort unchecked? Sucked down and into when you fall through the cracks of your motivations. The taste you like, but you wonder if you really like this much? Enough for how little it takes. A semi-automatic hair-trigger spitting round after merry-go-round. The next is always immediately ready. A kind of absorbing satisfaction that distracts from the bartering trade off of time. An overriding warmth comes into focus, but in the back of the blurred frame a dark figure hangs just visible, watching you sink. And although your focus is drawn away, it’s peripheral imprint reminds you to feel the physics of your distracted descension.
Let Go Of Me
Who is me in a different twist of time? When the time ran out. Someone smaller as a wilting half, or stronger as a complete solid whole? This life is all I know, and I sometimes like to pretend I have seen more edges than this plane has. Who is the person that continued through the winds of the track that never merged? I made a decision when I was young. I made a deal I didn’t understand the magnitude of. The lock turned silent without me noticing and I couldn’t tell what I was really doing. I had not lived through it yet. Would I have made the same choice if I had seen visions of where it led?
I cannot know. All I can do is wrestle, now as I sit here in the future wondering which directions were right, and which were right in the wrong light. I am baked into the last decade, a person at the end of a path with a specialist’s experience in a subject I can’t bear to examine anymore. Is this misfortune? Has the richness rotted me? Am I being pulled through this pale existence by fear, or by a regret so stubborn it only pushes deeper into itself, until I am forever lost? How can I miss myself so much? Where did I go and why did I leave? What words could I untangle in a letter that might reach myself and convince them to come home?
The more life becomes motions, the more meaningless it shows itself to be. The more I am disappointed in myself, the more I despise this cubicle I have painted myself into. And worse is the dread at the sheer swallowing upkeep hours it takes to keep the paint looking fresh, as if it was what I wanted. And truly the worst is that I sweat hard for a finish I can only ever get to look half-hearted, because really it was more one-tenth hearted and four-tenths faked at my own strain for someone else who will never be happy with what I gave them, even if it is five times more than I really have. But they will still never let me go, even if they don’t like it. Not everyone is as disappointing as me. Not everyone would ask so much more of me than I have. Let me go. Let go of me.
Medium
I like books, and I like poems, and I like songs. These are mediums of art that are written, meaning that someone builds an idea in their imagination, a workshop where they possess god-like powers of universal manipulation and understanding. They fuse together electrical winds and impulse glows in the surging symbol-less language of cognition to sculpt a perfect artefact. Completely pure, powerful and unquantifiable. Impotent. Next the architect must tear it all down so that each molecule can be analysed, packaged and translated into a comprehensive set of instructions. These instructions can then be written in physical or digital space or projected into sound vibrations which may or may not be converted into data in physical or digital space for later reproduction. The words are not the thing, they are simply the directions for reconstructing the thing in your imagination’s own dimension. Well, maybe not that simply, because to me this is really where a lot of the art is, in the accuracy and conveyance of this translation in and out of unspeakable brain language.
When you paint by numbers, the number ‘3’ might be for green. But what green do you have? Is it a dark pine or a bright teal? Is it acrylic or oil? Enamel or spray paint? What art supply store did you visit? How long have you had it? Did you mix it yourself? What brush are you using? How fast does it dry? How runny is it? How workable is it? How many of these have you done before? Do you even like the colour green? How shaky are your hands? How hard are you pressing? How tired are you? How long do you spend on the delicate edges? How secure are you in your painting ability? Do you even care about this picture? Are you following the instructions? Are you even using green here? Are you adding shading without realising? Has the doorbell rang and startled you in the middle of an important stroke? Are there some sections where there isn’t any number? What are you going to do about those? Do you do this in your spare time or as a serious hobby? Are you embarrassed or proud of your work here? Is this the first moment all week you’ve had to yourself? Is this relaxing or stressful? Was this set a gift? Are you only doing this because the person who gifted you this set keeps asking you about it? Are the numbers just guidelines or absolute law to you? Do you enjoy following instructions? Do you wish to one day paint without numbers? Is this green from a memory? Is this the green of the coat you lost, the tree you climbed, the bottle you drank, the note you found? Is it an envious green? Is it a healthy green? Is it a green for GO? Is it a putrid mouldy green? And that’s just green.
Sentiments can rarely remain completely true and unaltered when translated into different languages. They can be completely misunderstood even with only varying colloquialisms. When another person builds your glistening idea in their own head using those instructions, that when compared to the precision of the original build, are impossibly vague, their artefact will not mirror yours. Because it is not yours, it is theirs. And this is the joy of books and poems and songs, they can only ever be descriptions of an idea for you to assemble for yourself at home. The emotional colouring can be as specific as it wants, the setting can be meticulously defined ad nauseum, the plot details can be entirely unwound, explored, and examined. And yet still. I see the world differently to you. I am incapable of constructing your pure masterpiece in my own dimension, because the physics there are completely different to the ones in the incommunicable place that you originally built it. And maybe that is what makes it a masterpiece. Each word delivers me your meaning. And after each word there is a space. A mystery. A void where I can fill in everything that you could never tell me. Everything that makes your ideas real and personal to me, that allows them to ring and resonate through my inner dimension as it did yours, even though they are different shapes. Everything that casts my artefact as perfect and pure as yours, despite unimaginable variation.
Coloured Airs
The leaves are changing now. I’ve seen them turn so many rounds, but I’m still pulled apart by them. It reminds me of feeling discarded into the gust that picks up to a wind, blowing harshly through all armour. To some people I have burnt orange and crisped and brittled so far that only the limp sweep of a current very slight is enough to pluck me pathetically from their branching life. I was about to say that this is something we all must go through, but I’m feeling less and less equipped to speak on any behalf larger than my own. When I label an experience as something universal, I tend to think I’m doing it out of humility, trying to tell the void that I don’t think I’m special. But I do feel I’m special. Even though intellectually I disapprove, this feeling drifts like incense into a lot of places it has no business. Colouring the air. So who is it for when I say everyone goes through a certain tough thing I’m living in? Well it’s for me, I guess. To make me feel better when I’m feeling hurt by truths and facts, becoming emotionally churned up by their emotionless lack of leeway. It’s an adult trying to ease a child’s pain at a lost toy by explaining that loss is part of life. The kid continues to cry.
The churning river in October rose high from swallowed downpour. Short banks of tall, framing tree lines. The sun breaks the sky open and the gradients of leaves glow between green and red spectrums, alive and dead spectrums. Grey water rushes teal at the edges, a petrol coloured surface crust draped onto wriggling depthless murk. It looks cold but feels warm. This is the tension of autumn. I want to save this feeling, but I know I can’t. October becomes more and more unreliable as the days flicker past, but I can’t help but figure that that’s what deepens the beauty of these picturesque minutes. The tired sun thrown sideways over scenes and settings, growing more weathered and trodden each afternoon. The summer signals now stretched and broken up to reach us as we drift closer to the edge of their range. Our sky picks them up in shorter and shorter windows of reception. And with interference mounting in titanic banks of swirling clouds that loom in the distance, it is hard not to remain aware that this comforting texture might, by its very nature, be making its last appearance until the spring. Every time the landscape observes this subtle harmony between overtones and undertones, red and green, warm and cool, light and dark, ease and difficulty, long and short, sweet and bitter, fresh and expiring, free and held, it fills the air with a sense of quiet motion to set our lives against. Life doesn’t seem right when it stands still, and so the currents created by nature can feel so immensely reassuring to follow in the wake of. But the duality of following a transition is that it can’t last, and my brain stalls in paradoxical betrayal. I want the sense of things changing to stay the same, the feeling of velocity to pause still. I want to preserve for myself the sense of perfect balance, accidentally created, exactly halfway through the steady shifting of enormous, season sized weights across the threshold of a scale. But it is only temporary, and I can never suck enough of it up into the canister of a memory to really take it with me anywhere else. That feeling exists only while my gaze can rest here. I love it. It is disappointing. It is beautiful. It is over.
Spending all day cruising in tight circuits around the same five rooms of an end terrace is easy to fall into. If the whole day is off, then why can’t you open a window in your schedule? Nothing is decided yet, except that there isn’t room because of all the things we’re gonna decide on. I know it’s nonsense and that the fresh air will help me with whatever. Every day to work and back, stretching springy legs. Your body is built to walk across continents chasing seasons. Your ancestors would want you to get out and stride the curbed clearings, even if they could never understand life in a place like this. Such a detailed place, made of uncountable angles and materials. Stepping over dry leaves fallen from still trees in neat front gardens left in wills to children on their way to primary schools on creaking scooters that scare cats vaulting behind recycling bins that are picked up on Saturday mornings but won’t take glass so in dehydrated daylight the headaches have to haul bitter bottles in sixes and twelves down to bottle banks near river banks joined by painted iron bridges crossed by drab logo’d vans driven by vests and hard hats resting clipboards on the warmed seats as they punch in codes and swipe keys to step on rubber boots into science fiction graveyards surrounded by three types of deterrent fencing that power the entire city’s shop windows left wastefully lit all through the imposing nights that hundreds of thousands of neatly compartmentalised unconscious bodies lay limp through before six alarms and two cups of coffee spill them out flooding the skinny pavements where we weave in relaxed chaos to avoid each other and the the puddles and the piling leaves.
Sick melody spins me out of the nothing. My arm throws a feeble arcing bat at the slippy screen to shut the plans of my hopeful former self. He thought I would be refreshed and ready, but he never remembered the feeling under warm covers skimming out of deep rest. The urge is to sink back under the surface tension, but a block stacks in my booting brain and a basic thought outputs that awake me does mostly make better decisions, and he can usually be trusted. So I tense my leg muscles and curl my toes, warming up the easier synapses before trying anything as complex as opening my locked eyelids. Once I’m ready, I have to lift and pull on them with more force than it will take to manoeuvre the whole rest of my heavy body from prone to standing. They roll open stiffly like shutter doors in winter, and the blurred murk blows in from the dark shapeless room.
You never notice how great your resting stomach always feels until it begins to ache. It’s easy to take good things for granted when for long unbroken stretches they are just literally granted to you without any real effort. Life is constant motion and we are always breaking a path through a jungle of decision trees and branching outcomes. At the start line we’re too young to understand, but after a short crawl we pick ourselves up to our feet and then we start to get it, the satisfaction of moving swiftly and easily. It feels good to propel ourselves through life’s motions with precision and efficiency. I wanna go fast and fluid, swim and carve elegantly across this existence as I eat as deeply as I can stomach into the sheerly terrifying amount of stuff there is to do. And there is a lot. Much more than the structural beams of your mind can support before they snap like twigs under your rushing feet. And so you have to keep it up, the speed, so that the G force keeps the door sealed. The draughty door to the untrustworthy regions of your brain that might be reckless enough to invite in the creeping figures. Paradoxes, voids, infinites. Villains and vampires that will infest and drain you with their undeniability. So you get good at moving fast, from places of fear and of hope, to see everything you deserve of being born. You get so good, and you go for so long that you gradually cease to notice. You are doing something as normal and mundane as hurtling through an obscene amount of life every day, and it feels kinda average. And just as the earth’s careful arc around the sun won’t feel so amazing until a moon-sized asteroid dislodges it and shoots us like a pool ball out into the frozen depths of deep space, you’ll never appreciate the astounding efficiency of your life’s velocity until it is broken. What I’m trying to say is that the pavements aren’t clear anymore. I never noticed how clean they were all through the summer. How free I could be to vary my path or to look around in any direction, soaking up the suburban details. Now my eyes are trained on the ground, scanning for urban rock pools of rain water and layered leaves that could conceal things I don’t want to rest my weight on. It costs me seconds to dodge these tiny avenues, leading to nothing worse than a damp sock or the fleeting horror of a slipped step. Denominations deep into the decimals of the day’s length, delays so small that they appear to bounce off me. And yet as they hit, it feels like my backpack has, from a secret compartment, deployed a parachute that catches their light push, dragging me as I attempt to navigate at a speed I didn’t know I was even going at until the resistance pulled me back from it.
As the world gets darker and the bright portraits of each flickering day are hung in thicker and more imposingly dark frames, we slip into October. Maybe the most truly autumnal month, fighting off the dual fronts of both summer and winter equally, without the warm bias of September, or November’s cold pessimism. October holds my Grandfather’s birthday, only eleven days before my own. These dates are much closer than our relationship ever has been, and as I pull together a card to mail vastly north to his remote edge of Scotland, I wish I had more to write.
Some people don’t sleep so long. They can almost count the hours they spend under each night on one hand, maybe casually inspecting their nails at the same time, subtly multi-tasking so simply, with an almost brutal ease. How did they become so wise? How much more life have they been allowed to live? Maybe the air is more pure out on the beaches of a sleeping sea. Is there only a finite dimension of consciousness that we all draw from through the crowded days, that if you wait into the dispersing night gradually opens up? Or are we all issued a specific number of hours we can be alive for, and it is up to us to ration and space them out using sleep, or to binge being awake and burn through them rapidly? And if this is the case then are those that blast through them any less wise, or perhaps even more so? I don’t know, probably none at all. What I do know is that I am not one of them. As alluring as cashing in some extra life bucks on the side sounds, like the engine of my parent’s old Zafira, my brain becomes pretty unreliable when you let the fuel run down. It will coast on ok, but when it’s time to hit the gas on a slip road, or make a complex considered judgement in a brief opportunity, it’s gonna spit at you and die if you were stingy at the last rest stop.
And at last the dusk is combed gently into the sky’s crown. The evening that has been stalking behind the months progress, tonight ambushes to kill the soft sinking gradient. To extinguish our last dying comforts and put the light out of its misery. It is as mechanical and unmalicious as the natural laws it is designed to offset. I cannot hate it and I cannot blame it, there is only acceptance and dread. Tonight, the sorry neck of our kneeling day rests extended over the guillotine’s mantle. We tried so adamantly to stretch it out on the dungeon’s rack, but it wouldn’t surrender an inch, and so today it is the hard way. The blade will fall and the crowd will turn away and the crack-thump will echo from the walls, like the sound of an axe splitting firewood. Later, in the basement levels, the severed, shrunken head is pulled up by the hair, out of the tinged basket and sewn onto the reverse side of its limp owner. A gruesome perversion. It’s nice to wake up in the light for a couple more weeks, but at what cost? Back then, sunset was ducking a little deeper each day, but now we have kicked it in the back and it is crippled on the floor, dropping suddenly below the horizon of our duties in a painful jerking fall.
Becoming Breeze
Cycling, right? Biking. Riding a spinning scaffold, becoming a part of the breeze. Floating on captured tubes of that same air, ploughing up speed from the ground. Cracking silently through close space. Becoming narrow. Sharp. Cutting the partitioning rope between path, road, plaza, park, street and field. Slicing on the surface tension of two spinning rubber blades, balancing perfectly.
Sharing breaths with the world, watching. Drifting in its detail. Catching the subtle show.
Cranking the reel, not so tediously easy that our audience walks out, and certainly not so hard that the film burns up and we miss it all. Take it in. It doesn’t cost money and it doesn’t cost time, all it asks is a little attention and some knee-grease. It’s free, and it makes you free. It is the gift of precious headroom, despite somehow also making you taller. You are now 50% beak, a bird flying an inch above ground. Sorely soaring. Alive while you are. Here while you are.
The Grange
How many times did I ride past that fence ally entrance and assume it was still intact, just beyond the mouth of the walkway? One of countless mazing pedestrian threads that quietly turn off from the road to web behind the green gappy suburbs of a newish city. The opening act of my life spent dragged around these inner sections. And one of their most highly regarded corners is this play park, on one edge of a continent of fields. Against the borders of stretching allotments when sitting on the swings one way, and on a distant edge of the vast grass between the pleasantly angular lines of a prefab house horizon when spun around to the other. A weathered wooden assault course with platforms and jumps, shifting planks, and swinging cyan rope that is rough on your hands. Bars and steps over vertical levels suspended high above the bark impact below. Ankle shocks and summer sweat, scuffing shoes and aching arms, creaking chains and the taste of watermelon.
I was brought along last minute to Ivano’s after school. His grandmother convinced my mum in the school playground. She walked us over wide and familiar pavements with large flat slabs that lay cracked and uneven. We twist through the back roads of tesselating homes and down a path I haven’t seen before, opening out into fields I never suspected grew lush, veiled just off a familiar street. We played unfair games at my expense on the best playpark I had ever imagined.
Throughout childhood, I returned many times with all kinds of close people from that part of my life. Even after we moved out, I would find myself there a few scattered times with old friends from beyond. Still, after that last afternoon sitting on the swings, looking out across the flat planes of growing up, on the edge of an old spot at the edge of an old stage of youth, talking and playing more honestly than I have often since, I have on occasion drifted past that point where the path turns off, and thought of good times.
I found out today it isn’t there anymore. I wonder how long it’s been that way? How many times did I look into that entrance, catching the shading trees, the garden fence alley, the slight glimpse of wide open lawn, and think of being a happy kid? Just finding joy in climbing stuff and falling to the ground over and over again at my favourite playpark. Simply assuming it was still there. How many times did I peer into a pathway to the past without realising that it had been built over? Without realising that the obstacles, the wood, the eaten rubber, and the fraying blue rope, the framework for a simple kind of happiness that becomes hard to come by, exists now only in the warm swimming memories of dry days, long afternoons, and yellowing grass. A much smaller world that somehow contained everything you could want, including a place as wonderful as that one park.
Treading
Just enjoy the sun on your skin, not close to home and not clinging to the rung of any wider jungle gym plan. Somewhere plain becomes pretty with a drop of summer light like cordial in a glass. Subtle and uncomplicated, you are just here, fallen from any strangling context. The things you care about make life worth living, the causes you shred yourself for, but sometimes you feel most alive in the spaces between things that don’t really matter. When you are left alone with the world, by chance allowed to stop in one of its corners. You can tread your personal void for a while and observe the hiding museums of this world’s patches and details. Tracing the curves of structures and boundaries that fall outside the brackets of your own life. You feel gravity holding you against the pavement, and are reminded that despite your time spent working up to lofty goals, and sailing behind flying ambitions, everything that means anything in this life happens pressed to the surface of a planet.
Quit Vision 