In early morning sheet strung and panting I leave behind wracked tales of death and longing.
My cheeks are wet and my pillow is as soaked as my thighs. Why, when dreams are iridescent and mesmerising do they fade and blur so quickly ? With eyes still closed I try to grab and clutch back images as they free-fall away from me, scree tumbling like pebbles down a cliff face or petals caught by the wind, lost in the grainy space between sleep and now. Dreams become interchangeable with memories. Memories are reflected in dreams. As I lay ungrounded and unsure I find myself back at thirteen years of age. In Sally Jones’s bedroom. Side by side, elbows touching we stare out of the window, over rooftops, to treetops, up a grassy tree lined bank to the war memorial and beyond. It is a late summer evening and the sky is red gold. On the horizon an unfamiliar shape billows red and ethereal. It isn’t the dying sun, it isn’t a sinking hot air balloon. We can’t make it out. We want it to be something other, we want it to be something out of this world.
These images, this memory comes to me in seconds. I close my eyes and see Sally before me as if it were yesterday. We leave her house and make our way through the village, towards the fields, towards the trees. We are urgent. We are expectant. I can still taste that urgency of blood pump and heart rush and yet fail to catch the wispy tails of a swollen broken dream I’ve left just minutes before.
The line between truth and fiction is untraceable. It is an obscure and snaking shape-shifter. Pin sharp, clear moments of lucid clarity can be found in dreams and imagination while waking moving sentient life can be scuffed and blurred and as tangled as the roots of a Banyan tree. And so it was.
.
.
I’ve been reading a backness of my own words, slipping down time as if I’m falling down a ladder. Until memories meld with fiction and imagined and happened merge to make a better place.
It’s 6.42 on a pale summer morning and the birds have almost finished their conversations . They are muttering to the trees and behind everything is a sadness. It will be hot – today. So hot that I should be lying in fields with a green ring on my finger sucking the sweetness out of grass ends and cloud watching. Instead I’ll be shop stuck and indebted.
Last night I dreamed of The American Dream. It was everything, all the time.
I dreamt of kissing mouths as words came out and tasting them . Sweet . Sour . Musky. New words.
” We live as we dream – alone “
I had a stark strange dream the other night. I dreamt while in a different bed in another town by the side of a busy road with the wet-orange glow of a phosphorescent street light seeping through a deep red blind. The effect was womb-like and honeyed and yet my dream was spartan and bare like a cold flag floor beside a draughty door. It seems that when I am away from home my dreams take on epic proportions, I have noticed this before.
I wasn’t embodied in the dream, I was merely hugely an eye, watching scenes unfold, staring wide and marvelling at the unravelling before me which peculiarly seemed to be inside me too.
Imagine a cold and colourless place washed out grey like a winters sky. A place of blue paleness, of eye-whites and broken birdshell. A place where sound seemed to carry smallness, metallic and pinpointing in large open spaces. A gaping place stretched like loneliness. The streets were wide and cobbled, the buildings were paint-peeled wooden. I had a sense that I was dead already. I looked down the street and then I looked down from above as if I were the Sun. I heard metal on stone and I saw a cart. Open and raddled it was pulled by a horse who knew the way, pulled deliberately and with a slow intent towards a place I couldn’t see. In the cart were two people, a young girl with a pale face and dark hair and an old women, laid on her back, dead and cold in her stillness. The girl looked up and through me, relucent and with a just formed smile, open to innocence as slowly and from everywhere the sky spilled white feathers. They fell as if they were snow and everyday. They fell against her eyes in a gentle assault. It seemed as if they fell in recognition, of the girl, of the dead women, of the moment. Quietly the cart began to fill with feathers, calamus and wisps of down gathered like fallen curls and the air thickened softly like a silenced howl.
When I awoke bizarrely my thoughts went straight to the rooks who circle each night and morning by my house beside the wood. Their incongruity struck me. In flight they flow shoal like, dipping invisible currents and soaring against the setting sun. On land they strut crudeness across my lawn, reduced to absurdity when they leave their element.
I wasn’t scared, I wanted to go back and see what happened, I thought of dying and of this poem….
Last night I had a funny dream.
Not in the ha-ha sense, but rather in the surreal-weird, slightly nauseous sense where most things appear normal while others are strangely different. Shifted, sieved through sleep into wavier lines and deeper colours and sounds which ran through my veins. When I awoke I tumbled back into myself like a clown. Spilling words and images as if I were carrying a bucket of water while walking on stilts in sawdust. Like I was back at sea. Imagine seein g wo rds wi th l o t s of g a p s an d s pac es in r an do m pla c e s. That was how it felt. The same as waking life but expanded, wide open, mixed about. Disconcerting.
I have a cat, he’s old and his name is Domino. He was an alley cat with no home until he strayed into mine and never left. He was probably a year or two old, he was smelly and bedraggled. I didn’t like him at first. He was covered with strange ticks, swollen like blood red berries. I pulled them out, groomed him with revulsion and a fascination which turned into love. Nowadays he’s clean except when he climbs up the chimney and he’s grown slightly bigger through the years and much more mellow. He’s white and black like a Friesian cow and brought his name with him .
In my dream he was bigger. Not the size of a human walking on two legs, but certainly as big as a sheep. He could talk too, and not in feline slinked-up tones or with pin prick scratchiness, but in a normal everyday voice.He sounded a bit like a young boy who’s almost a man. Soft in places but deeper than light. Gently cracked at the edges, it was a voice that still had somewhere to go. Domino looked at me and squeezed his eyes lazily as he said I know more about you than you know about yourself. I was more than a little taken aback. Not by his voice or his size, at the time, in the circumstances that felt commonplace. It was the way in which he looked at me and the words he said. As if he could see something around the corner that I couldn’t possibly have imagined.
What on earth are you on about ? I answered, all cocky bravado, but my fingers were clenched, knuckling taut white skin, pressing nail to palm.
Your fingers are clenched, you know I’m right .he said, as if it was the most simple thing, a detail anyone would notice. He tilted his face upwards to smell the fear in my limbs. In fact, I’d go as far as saying, I know you so well, I can see what you’re thinking.
Everything in the room panned out, fisheye style, and as I saw myself sitting on a bed, talking with a large cat, I caught glimpses of a scene from a film. Inside this dream, my thoughts closed around a little finger moving centimetres to meet with anothers thumb. A tiny signal of unity, as delicate and yet as strong as a thread of gossamer. A tacit acknowledgement of complicity within the given situation. A gesture so intimate, so subtle, yet so huge it had moved me to tears.
You’re thinking that perhaps I’m thinking that I can see what you’re thinking by reading your body language and that in turn prompted you to remember the scene in the film which stirred your heart in so many ways, not least in the sense that you saw how certain things are independent of communication through words, but rather they exist in an almost separate world of sense and touch and smell. He paused , his eyes lemon slices, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it ?
I’m thinking I like you better when you don’t speak , I spluttered, but already my voice was faltering, growing thinner, feeling lighter in my throat, making my mouth feel empty and round like a goldfish eating silence.
You’ve lost your voice, your words have dried up like a fish out of water, you might see in colour , but essentially you’re blind .
The floorboards around the bed began to bend, the knots in the wood pulled faces at me, their whorls became ridged foreheads as they gurned their disapproval. While my voice shrunk Domino’s grew richer, his words appeared like colourful ribbons leaving his mouth to swirl around the room and bind me with the accuracy of his observations.
I don’t like this dream, I’m waking up, I cried.
That’s right,run away, turn your back,cover your eyes,
do what you usually do.……..
his words hounded me as the weak winter light washed through the blinds and I opened my eyes and felt like I’d landed back into one side of something. Domino was foetal curled at the end of the bed and as I stretched to remember what had just happened he uncurled from his own sleep and looked me straight in the eye.
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 didn’t want to feel sad that day as I walked down the road. It was just another day.
This time the sun was fierce hot, throwing mirage water above the pavement and I felt a trickle slip tickle my back. I thought of tongue tips . I held the small pair of scissors tightly, their sharp points imprinting my palm but not breaking the surface. This road, the sense and feel of it, left me drench-exhausted but wanting to go back, wanting more, like a deep pool of you-addiction. Along this track there was an end of the world otherness with woodsmoke seeping into everything, lungs inside and hair without. Everywhere black branch shapes, charred limbs , real forests and damp undergrowth. All in vivid, trip snap clarity. And me, well, I was a slight shape , scarcely myself , a wisp of thin raggedness, a slip of nuthin. I remember looking down at my fingers, at grimed up hands and ingrained skin stained with wonder that it was still me. The ends of my fingers had become fleshy tips , like a geckos sprawl.
And in this dream which was real and lasted half a lifetime, the people came and went. Offstage, center stage . I watched them all . I felt things ; raw and bigtime, tenfold strong. Sometimes the other people knew that, sensed that, sometimes the other people didn’t even see me and sometimes the other people just didn’t care. For days the ground was hard dusted rime and with my new fingers I picked frozen grass to eat like sweet green icicle shoots and on other days, in the same dream-life, the land was scorched parched. Too dry to grow anything…….. and yet yesterday was so green, I thought to myself.
And I’m not kidding , I said as I awoke , I was there for years, it might seem like one night to you , but that’s where I’ve been all these years , walking that road, seeing dreadful , beautiful things, making my heart swell too big for this my body. Bruising myself with infidelities . Events rubbing my edges smooth like a polished stone . A brutal process. Glad to come out alive, sometimes wishing it was all over. At turns, making my heart shrink-whither until it needed nothing. Nothing but me. And that wasn’t much , and I sobbed as I stared down and mourned my fleshy tips. Of course no one believed me, they never did. Two separate worlds isabelle ? Pah ! It’s inside your head, they tapped. Like I was made of glass and they could see straight through me.
And so it seemed, each night-time, a whole life, I added to it.
I carried around a warm-hard bead to swirl in a finger tipped universe against the soft blackness of my pocket. Its honey golden walls suspending a trapped fly. And as I fell to sleep to find the road , I palm clutched a small white plastic horse. Superstitions that may have indicated madness but which seemed essential to me. One time , having woken, I knew the road had been so real because I could taste it in my mouth ; like a bitten tongue, red and palpable. And other times , I woke to feel decades older, especially when I’d seen piles of sticks along the way, which smelt of my mother and the smell was so sad I thought my throat would close up. I woke up cough tasting the iron of blood.
You know what it all means he said. You’re afraid of death, that’s why you love sex so much. You could be right I said as we fucked and he laughed but inside I felt coldness still and couldn’t bring myself to smile even. And in some ways he was right, but that didn’t seem to matter. I wanted to walk that road and it wanted my feet. It drew me like a mind magnet , to walk down its hidden pathways and neglected broken passages. I could never see an end to it, nor did I want to , but I resolved to prove its existence, its reality as something separate from me.
You can laugh at me I said , as I lay in cool sheets with the high window open on a summers evening which filled the room with an all day heat and the thickness that follows. But , tonight I’ll bring you something back, something from the road , then you’ll see it’s all been true. All those things I’ve seen . Then you’ll believe me.
My hair was tendril damp on the pillow and along with my tiny horse , I held a pair of scissors .
