feel me
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I dragged my fingertips down dry stone walls on the way to school, sometimes knuckle knocking, just for the feel. The contrast of soft hard soft hard ,skin stone skin stone.
I counted tiles , black and white, black and white, in the chemistry lab and made stories from the periodic table , the teachers voice a background noise to my narrative.
I climbed up trees and dropped down precious things . A wooden ring from Africa , a glass bracelet from India . The far away places made them special. As a test, I would try to see where they fell . Watching them drop straight or twist and spin, to find them again, or lost forever, amongst the grass, beside the woody nettle stems.
I rode my bike. Fast down lanes. Eyes bunched to make black space for as long as I dare. Then looking through eyelashes , slit skewing my vision.
I collected chrysalis. Camouflaged amongst brown dried leaves and blown rags in sheds. An obsession for silky dust and thick fur bodies. Waiting with felt tips gripped to draw the sight. Of dry crack open to damp new life and pumping into rainbow wings. But it never happened.
I drank warm cider with lads in fields to spin our heads and loosen our tongues. Sticky-palm boy flesh pressing just begun breasts.
I split my chin against sharp rocks and tasted salt water . I watched bright red drip into rock pool . A tiny world rallied against the invasion that was my blood. Translucent crabs waving goodbye as they took shelter in dark crevices. Cold pink fingers holding the cut together as I ran along the beach, wet sand soul, wet sand sole.
I poured out words, vacuous and selfish. Onto pages, into ears. My moxie hidden under layers of self pity. A stranger abroad, setting the pace for things to come, building on how things already were.
I slam drank burning liquid to free myself. Rounded the edges off my insecurities and became brave. For nights. Gallivanting , dancing in shebeens and weaving home , loving in night time fields. I blew smoke rings and sank in opium dreams to wander inside myself as the heavy thud of my heart became a song . But cocaine crisp and hashish thickness didn’t cut . They just delayed.
I sat in a hospital . Breathed in formalin or disinfectant or death. One of those . Gripped a metal framed bed and ceiling stared, counting tiles, again. I licked a tear from the edge of an old ladies eye. Before it fell and spilled. Salty like the summer holidays . Just in case . [ It was the end ] But it wasn’t .
They ran through the rain , hand in hand like lovers , but they weren’t, not really, towards the Musee d’ Orsay.
Once inside , steamy wetness streamed from hair and a dampness soaked into their woollen coats, making them seem heavier. The museum was quiet, it was mid-week in Winter, Paris was grey with paint water skies, the parks near deserted.
They wandered through rooms, past huge biblical paintings with wild staring eyes seeped with symbolism and heavy on guilt and damnation. Their colours were rich but they were cloying and oppressive. Thick dense reminders of a collective tyranny. They made her want to do something outrageous and offensive .
The Degas room was womb-like and amber coloured . A windowless twilight zone to protect chalky pastels and rubbed swollen curves. Blurred faces and tumbling hair highlighted the sensuality of backs and thighs and shoulders. Even the air felt thicker , like the muffled ache of sound underwater. Their eyes met and she knew that when they fucked these images of quiet intimacy and simple animalism would flood inside her.
They walked down the large open gallery, watched by the huge clock, aimlessly dipping into rooms with no particular goal in mind. The outside coldness had left her bones but her black coat felt as if it were leaching dampness into her skin. As she undid the three large shiny buttons , the final one , the one that had dangled for weeks, by a thread , broke free and skedaddled across the polished floor. Bouncing like a pebble across the sea, hard metal against cold marble, it seemed to gather speed. They laughed and chased after it, like children, with a penny in the slot innocence , a caught in the moment togetherness.
It landed , spinning widdershins , on its side. Their breath was out-loud, hands over mouths stifled , and in the vast quietness of the museum their eyes shone at the game. She liked running, fleeing towards and he liked chasing. As she knelt down to pick it up she felt his eyes on her, covering her back , raking her hair. The button had landed before a huge canvas. Perhaps over 2 metres wide it dominated her vision as she stood up. At first she saw just white. Then a greyness to the whiteness and a texture to the grey-white landscape that drew her closer. As with most things that caught her eye , she wanted to feel it with her fingers . It was sometimes a finer way to see . But the sight of a tiny figure made her gasp, it took her by surprise , it flattened her instinct to touch. She felt pinned back , jolted against space, with a blood taste in her mouth and a lightness that should have sent her reeling . But she didn’t move.
She felt a desolation, that life was just a succession of events , of parallel turns, one after the other. The painting conveyed this emptiness beyond belief. Of lonely expanses , of an internal solitude that could not, would not be shared. Of being an only one . Isolation was to be her lot, it was already decided and formed and set within her. No matter how close she became with another, whatever intimacies they were to share , from those gentle flutters into the window in the dead of dark night passion, to the shared responsibility of children and work and quotidian needs, she knew she would always feel alone.
i wish you were here now
i think it would be nice to talk with you
of what it feels like when this and this and full of things.
i’d like to watch you doing what it is you do
while i did the things that i do too.
Returning non the wiser.
The tears are for my cowardice,
for a deceit undecided.
My dreams are growing stranger. The house , on the hill, where I used to live , on a Summers day.
Blindly splicing fresh young wood with a blunt axe to keep the cold and damp at bay . Because even in sun shine those moors can be cold and the house is empty . Fingertip sifting through the still warm , soft ash. I love the velvet powdery feel, of heat gone and passion spent . I think of soft thigh skin , of curves and tender lobes . And with the fire lit, my dreams remember stories and shape them to my own. The shrinking lover becomes the tiny white horse but I’m not the bullfighter lying in a coma or the ballet dancer , broken beautiful and silent. I am sentient and prone , while one bitten hand wanders over breast and belly, between legs acute, the other clutches the horse.
A talisman of love , of freedom, I slide him into softer than woodash folds , into warm and wet.
Perversion and madness blend seamlessly , shamelessly , and become commonplace.
”My leg between yours”, I hear and lose myself in the feel of thigh and slowgrind.
alchemy
-
So dreams merge with fact and stories twist and multiply .
From copper to silver to gold .
But still the birds taunt-haunt me. In barely dawn I awake and hear their pale notes just beginning.
The window is open , like it always is, I need that air-gap , just in case . Even as a child I insisted the window was left a fingers width open . So the house could breathe, I said, but quietly , inside , I felt it was to let things in . Under heavy blankets with my worlds , those strange imaginings would come quickly , and , more importantly , I felt I could fly out. Because I did so want to believe in fairies.
Where the grass was thick and wet at the bottom of the garden , amongst the sweet-rot smell of dead leaves there were tiny worlds, I knew them to be there, I just had to look the right way.
And so, last night.
Under lighter blankets with a heavier mind, as the birds started too early , I awoke with darker dreams.
I’d been walking the fields in shorts and legs bare. An exhilarating feeling of climbing , up and up. A rope ladder journey with no visible end and no definite aim. Tall drystone walls barrack the fields around here, some mended , some broken. The one I stumbled over was broken-bowed : wet-dark slick with sponge mossed cushions. I finger gripped and scrabbled. But my hold was precarious, my pumps slipped and my fingers blindly tore.
The falling was inevitable .
Backwards , arms pushed crucifix taut and real terror in the darkness of dreamsleep.
The fall was surreal.
My feet planted into thick earth, legs pressed together as stones gathered about me. Scraping, shin-skin in silver slivers . Slicing and pinning me with their wet cold weight. Up to my thighs, held like a scarecrow, a darkly comical Zebedee. I grappled to free myself, pulling at old stone, lichen slipping and staining , putting hurt fingers to bruised mouth and tasting dirt. Grit slime dankness sinking into a mouth trying to form the right words, as tears burned.
The grainy morning light was a relief. And now the sun burns hotter still. I am escaping to the sea. I hope the waves will cleanse me , I hope I find, and give, some solice .
Solve et Coagula .
I could take all those notebooks and pile them tower high to burn. I’ve done it before. I could grasp handfuls of hair and hack and hew , scatter curls across the floor. I’ve done it before. But when the ash has cooled and the words have gone, when the rooks have flown away , to line their nests with golden thread , I am still bare- bone here. The same eyes look back from sideway glances or full frontal stares , and there’s no escaping me.
I used to frighten myself into black dread when I was fresh-young. Gaze into the glass long enough to become someone else or further enough until I lost myself.
But now it’s not a game and there is no escape.
People traipse through on pale Sunday afternoons while down South I hear tell it’s warm and blue-clear, but here it’s just damp and cold and still want-waiting for spring to thrust.
The light is ominous , the air is wet and the pressure makes my hair twist more, a sure sign a storm is brewing. Sometimes the shop feels like a haven to me. A ship in the middle of a turbulent sea. But this is just another Sunday , another working day for me, another day to wonder at what I’ve become , another day without.
Perched behind the tiny counter on a high folding chair, I wonder what picture I present, as the shop bell rings , as folk step in, with Sunday papers and blown faces. Do they see bitten-torn nails and a heart that bruises easily, a mind that wanders and wallows , or the outside picture, a big smile and an absent minded disheveled appearance ?
I watch the weekend regulars. I invent names for them, of course.
The Greyhound Couple come in about once a month. Wiry walking types , as lean and sharp as their dog, reinforcing every stereotype about dogs and their owners. Both have close cropped grey hair and chiseled features, the dog wears a mac in the rain and they are karrimored up to the nines. The dog drips everywhere from his long pointed nose , but I don’t mind , his eyes are submissive. Then there’s Puppet Lady, not very original it has to be said .She buys puppets and old silk Chinese men. But I share her taste in the peculiar. We both like scary Jesso faced puppets and worn faded rag dolls with painted faces. She has a silver ring on each finger and smells of mothballs. At twelve o’clock, with a beam and a bag full of groceries, Babyface steps in. I feel a bit mean giving him this name, he’s one of my best customers, the first person ever to buy something when the shop opened. But Babyface suits him. He’s big and has a boiled, pink look with pale silky hair and a round smiling face. Mr and Mrs Farrow and Ball come in after lunch. Perfect couple, perfect kids, their polish gives me the creeps. Assiduously , suitably bohemian but with a self awareness that jangles. Their egg shell shine is just too much.
Missing today though is my favorite customer. He’s a customer who never buys anything but rather brings me things. A hand-full of snowdrop bulbs, a musty and curled copy of War and Peace, a bag-full of knobbly- gnarled Jerusalem artichokes , still earthy and damp from morning fields. He’ll roll his eyes at the fancy folk who come and go , looking them up and down, weighing them up like a sack of corn , an innocent boy in an old mans frame. ” He looks like a map man to me, Isabelle ”, he’ll comment, as a tall dark haired man walks purposefully in and up the stairs to the room of maps and books. Or, on quiet days when I haven’t sold a thing and we’ve drunk tea and talked of how this little town has changed, he smiles, ” You should charge folk an entry fee, just to come and look. Everyone that is , apart from me .”
And so, I sit and think of Benny. I climb the stairs to the back room and look out the window. A wisp of smoke curls from his chimney , across the river , 3 fields away and I smile that he’s still here.
And from him, my mind wanders to dreams of the sea and of things to come.
