Plumes
All
The
Wrong
Words
Accounting
For
My
Time
Thought flurry
Sound image
This
Sentence
Is
A
Sword
Silence
Why
Time
Vessels
Seeds
A
Music
Which
Speaks
For
Me
This
Country
Is
At
War
Something
Resonating
Forgotten
Places
Private
Spaces
Spend
It
Wisely
No
More
War
These
Words
Are
Mine
I poached this idea from somewhere and fell in love with it, so I made it mine own, if it's yours, I apologise, I'm not planning on selling it, I just find it comforting;
My dear death follows me everywhere,
She's been there from my start,
Gently sad, she's seen my everything,
And whatever my final end may bring,
She'll surely be with me,
My constant,
My gentle, lovely lady death.
My loving heart.
Chapter II
Altered states
Travelling between towns across countryside glittering with solar panels, giant windmills looming large in the near distance, their vast arms whirring slowly in the ever constant winds, the bullet train hisses and slows to a charging point infront of a vast, monolithic grey windowless cube. The train's hermetically sealed interior locks out the hum of the data centre and the potentially noxious atmosphere. Heaven's overcast with the pall of greyness that is now the sky, so seldom broken by sunshine these days and so rarely visited by birds that people have begun to lose the habit of looking up.
As the train clicks then moves smoothly forwards again, the squat, bucket-shaped ticket robot shuffles down the narrow aisle, holding out it's scanning arm to check passengers' ident badges.
Pausing next to a huddled shape, all in black, head covered and face obscured by a hood the robot prods the apparent bundle of rags but it keels over and slumps sideways, bumping the robot a few inches to which it objects loudly, expressing it's alarm with an ear-splitting high musical note and the train jerks in a few instants to a halt, passengers shifting only slightly in their seats, some look expectantly at the door at the end of the carriage and others with mild horror and bewilderment at the black bundle blocking the aisle. Everyone covers their ears, wishing the pulse of the panicked alarm would stop.
*
Chapter the First
Times changes
Flowers kept blooming into the beginning of Winter.
The pink Geraniums and magenta Primulas were especially delightful in their colourful exuberance. Trees hung on to their beautiful senescent leaves. Primroses rose up early.
Even the air took on a glowing, eerie luminescence.
It might be now, but it was a vision from the near future.
*
Last night a memory came to me;
That room,
Those stark walls,
The facts laid bare.
How we sat,
My head on his arm,
A sudden panicked thought rising
" Do you think she knew how much we loved her ? "
He, shifting, impatient,
" Of course ! "
" What am I going to do ? "
Our sudden vulnerability.
I hug his arm and kiss
His squishy cheek.
We like two children
Overwhelmed by sudden grief.
In the deep, soft dark,
Silent tears rolled down.
The pain has lost its edges,
The sharpness of that room
In the mourning.
He said
You're like a feather,
blown around by the wind.
And though surprised,
She hadn't questioned him.
These were the first words he'd had with her since the initial interview, in which he'd rudely asked outright whether she'd come to find a husband. Completely thrown by this idea, she hesitated, it was awkward because although she'd been told her drawings were good, she was really running away from something, rather than towards anything
Taking my own hand and walking myself back there, I give myself voice;
Well if I seem like a feather, blown around by the wind, it's maybe just because I consider things deeply. I listen to people, try to understand them, sometimes even try their ideas out for a bit.
But look around you. This is me. I've worked hard and constantly. In a different institution, even a different department, I might have done better and you could have helped and guided me more in this one. Intervened, maybe even had a couple of conversations, but you just watched me stew and struggle. You didn't do your job properly and that's the truth. I have produced a body of work here that reflects my inner struggle and here, after all these years of no helpful interventions by you, my teacher, that's all you have to say about me.
I suppose this is when he would say - you could have come to me. My door is always open.
Bitter ?
My anger has been dissipated over the years. Life has a way of teaching you what's really important and worth losing sleep over. And I know that anyone who has been through the art mill is scarred by it. It's like being thrown to the lions every day, so when I look at people creating and producing stuff, I feel for them and applaud them, whether they've been through the same mill as me or not.
*
You have reached your destination
The train speaks with friendly assurance and offers up the platform to the next stage
Here in that liminal moment,
She feels it all;
The warmth and security of the journey in the train cocoon
Travelling, you are taken somewhere
And for that short time,
You’re off the hook
Suspended in that time it takes,
Given over to only the immediate environment
It can be soothing,
If luck serves you
Here, she’s remembering,
Poised on the cusp
As the darkness of an unknown future greets her
Despite the billowing beauty of her turquoise skirt,
The grasp of uncertainty holds her tight
For a moment
I was a gate
on a path with no fences
either side,
A strange anomaly,
Anachronistic ? perhaps a little,
A small inconvenience to some,
A bloody useless eyesore to others.
Get rid ! they cried.
Others just smiled and leaned a while,
Chatting o'er my top to friends.
I had a kind of function for them.
People think gates have no feelings,
But between me, you and the well-chafed post -
They do.
Her beating heart, so tired now, nerves worn thin with worrying,
Her legs, led her, running on empty, to the place
where she could rest ;
A clearing
The ground lay soft and welcoming,
Leaves would cover her.
She would look up through trees
to the heavens
what did Wilde say ?
" that little patch of blue
that prisoners call the sky "
He suffered.
My how he must have suffered.
She offered up a prayer of thanks
for all the love
all the love and suffering
bravely borne and conveyed so beautifully
that brought her to this place
I was stuck in my Nana's house, where I was born. In the front room, transfixed by the pink glass light shade painted with flowers and hanging from the ceiling by three chains.
I've remembered what my fascination with it was now - the dead moths and flies lying in the bottom whose shadows blotted out some of the light.
Every Friday and Saturday night, Teddy boys would fight in the back alley behind my auntie's flat. Broken glass would litter the ground so you didn't go that way til someone swept up, ready for the next bout.
Once there were whispers in the house about a severed finger left wedged in-between the railings outside our school.
Another time my mother told me not to walk near the edge of the pavement lest someone was to grab me and pull me into a car
At home; my Nana's bedroom, small and pretty with its trinkets on the dressing table and a flowered silky counterpane, somewhere I would peep to see if Granny was still dying there. My mum had told me that she had died in my nana's bed, quietly, of stomach cancer. " I'll dance at your wedding Aggie " she would say apparently. My mum loved her granny as I loved my nana and I thought I heard her sometimes, chuckling, sighing, once my fancy saw her shape, small and slender, stirring under the covers against the grey light of a foggy November day, and was not scared, but heard my mother's watch tick tock as it dangled on my wrist and ran to tell her that her granny was alive and the once broken watch had started tick tocking
It opens in a shop, a really small pharmacy, I'm keeping one hand on my baby's pram, I don't want to wake them by picking them up, but I need some Ibuprofen. The pharmacist asks who is it for, me or the baby, but before I can answer, someone who I take to be his assistant distracts me. Next thing I see is that there's a box of Calpol in the pram and I don't want to ask for any for myself so I exit the shop, really worried now that the baby is so fast asleep and feeling anxious about the pharmacist's ' assistant ' did she give my baby Calpol ? and she's actually following me down the road but suddenly we're at some kind of tip or quarry and my toddler child is standing at the top of a huge slag heap or mountain of dust or something hideous and as I open my mouth to call him, he decides to slide down. The pharmacist's assistant is watching me as I stand, paralysed with overwhelming fear, tinged at its edges with admiration for the way my toddler boy launched himself with such gay abandon down the steep slope of the slag heap.
Abrupt end to the dream. I wake with a gasp.
Plumes All The Wrong Words Accounting For My Time Thought flurry Sound image This Sentence Is A Sword Silence Why Time Vessels Seeds A ...