It’s hard not to love you when your hair falls just that way, diagonal on your forehead like an innocent boy and your slender fingers are Dickensian . My memories of Paris are fuzzy like thick pink blotting paper catching drips and I put your body in those twisted sheets and art galleries. In fact I put your body in places past and last years gone by to see how you would fit, to watch you bend and grow with me inside of you, all those times. And once, so long ago , I did actually walk over the places you had trodden, sat in chairs which held your shape and lifted glasses to my lips that had been touched by your mouth. The one I kiss now. And we never knew, perhaps we shared the same air. Sometimes I like to lay down in days with rain on the windows trickling like time in bursts and slow drips to see you as a boy. And in my mind we were friends which took away your solitude and allowed me to brush off the shadow from my shoulder so the sky was always clear. I understood your silences and crept inside them. You looked carefully at the things I made with my fingers. And when I imagine, your hair is the same and you make me smile just from being next to you. We watch things becoming simple in their complexity. When I feel that way I want to paint and twist shapes, to bring the inside outside. When I lay in such dream-days they are real .
So time has made us this way, it brought us here and I won’t wish away the knocks that shaped you . Those sad grip times when you could have broken. And the black thoughts that chased me through days, struggling with authenticity and weary self loathing, all of them have led to this.
This is how we are now and I am glad for everything which made you what you are and were and might be with time.
Mars kissed the Moon last night and the sky was clear with bright frost shine.
Tonight she’s full beautiful , ripe for her red Tiu in opposition.
Celestial bodies to throw our earth lives in perspective.
I think that’s a good sign.
Merry Christmas everyone, have a great time whatever it is you do .
Bloody Christmas. In fact, bloody , fucking Christmas.
Today has confirmed what I knew to be true. What I expect most of us outside-of-things folk know, that Christmas is one big plastic wrapped up ball of empty gestures. Or at least it felt like that as I steeled myself to wade through shops of shite in an attempt to buy gifts for friends and family. I don’t understand the High Street. A journey through its flimsy excess and sickly perfumed packaged dreams leaves me cold. Maybe I’m some kind of 30’s throwback, but I like to give presents that have either use or meaning to their recipient. And being a disorganised type I seem to leave myself little time to achieve this. I can’t think about Christmas presents until the week before the day and then when I do, I can’t find or buy the things I’d thought about.
So today some bright ideas were shattered amongst the cold and crowds ……
A few months ago I saw , in HMV , a copy of the old stylophone, just right for someone I know. Only £14.99. Today, non left, sold out. (but available on ebay for £40 and climbing.) And, a book I’d loved, for someone I love, non in stock. Anywhere. Or at least not ‘ in time’. I know the answer to my problem of returning home, empty handed, tired and thoroughly demoralised , is to be more organised, but that sucks out the spirit of giving, of acting on immediate desire .
Anyway, after a few glasses of wine , some disastrously home made mince pies and the reckless decorating of a rather spindly yet lovely smelling tree, ( yes, even my tree is a sad specimen, left-lost, his bushier comrades had apparently been snapped up ‘days and weeks ago’, I was patronisingly informed ) I am quite philosophical about the whole business that is Christmas.
I have wrapped up my best present. A pair of shoes their owner thought had gone in the bin. They literally had holes the size of egg cups in their soles. They let the sand inside in the summer time and we all laughed in front of the fire , his feet with black grime circle patches because he couldn’t bear to see them go. But now they are mended-fixed and I shall see him smile.
And, next year, no Meadowhell for me. I’ll do the whole Tom and Barbara dream.
My mince pies will work, my mulled wine will warm us happy.
I am going to learn to darn and knit.
Everyone is getting a scarf knitted with love or a jumper mended with intent.
There was no such thing in our vocabulary as a bad trip.
We were country young. Innocents who strayed in fields to escape parental scrutiny. It was the season I loved the most when decay was slow and beautiful as things dried and other things in dampness grew. The morning fields were new and ancient. We made our own geodesy, a map passed by mouth of places where such tiny forests spread delicate. We walked down rutted tracks and stared eye-line over lichen drawn walls into far reaching fields where these muculent catalysts to stranger worlds pushed their pointed nipple tips. The first time was greedy slug and grit-grind taste to retch and swallow magic tales. Fresh from the fields. No analysis of deep seated fears but rather a step towards abandonment and seams unravelling. We blended into and ran through forests banshee laughing, collecting the dry to make the fire and then close-huddled, grubby fingered and caught in the moment. The flames burned stories as the wind caught in branches and filled our ears.
Everything was the most of itself as wood smoke clung-spun and our pupils grew to black-full-moons. And things came to us in the best way, whole, yet peeled and ripe in swimming mire.
He said she looked like a mermaid
and she loved his hair, the way
it fell across his forehead.
They walked through fields
holding hands and did not mind the rain.
The trees were one-sided wet
and they were full of each other.
They tied their hair in knots together
and watched their giant shadows,
tall-thin in the day end,
stretch over ploughed earth
as birds circled and screeched their love
because It was in everything,
to them.
In this newness the world was fresh and raw.
A broken bird fallen from a tree
pulled them together
like magnets.
The outside drew over them
like a palette knife blurring their edges.
