So delicate and deft,
How substance has always bent easily to your will,
But not words,
And not the world.
What were you thinking when you bought this piece,
Of freedom,
Of slavery,
How strange and cruel the world
we brought you into.
Each day you make it better.
Walking backwards has few merits. You're still going to bump into that same lamp-post.
This time, she should have been looking at the kerb, but she cannot take her eyes off the dark figure at the end of the road.
She freezes half way, not daring to look back.
Is God a man.
Is the Devil a man.
Is Death a man.
Sunshine hides the darkness. The face of the assassin is only revealed at the point of death.
He wanted to go back. He wanted to go back to that place and find a point. A point at which things could be made different from then onward.
Magical thinking kicks in.
He begins to voice his thoughts aloud.
Life is loss
Time is loss
We have this feeling of going forwards, but its really a question of undoing.
What we have at our end is no thing.
When things cease to respond to your touch, you begin to wonder.
Each time she wrote, she felt something had been lost. It was a kind of throwing away. Even if she
wrote about the future, the packaging of the dream up into a parcel of words would seem to isolate
it's emergence as a real thing.
The conversation had turned to cutlery. She ran to a drawer and pulled out a set of knives; " These,
these are fish knives ", she exclaimed vehemently. The style was recognisable to anyone who'd
dined in a fine restaurant no doubt. And so it went on. Each object had to be sorted and each one had
a story. Even long after everything had been dealt with and the house packed up and sold, stories
would bring objects back to mind and they would lodge temporarily in the ether between their
their conversations, now ghostly memories, sometimes holding more power despite their
insubstantiality. What one pined for, another was glad to see the back of; a string of false pearls
masquerading as cultured, a set of pewter candlesticks, battered in a rather interesting way, that
cutlery hamper which sadly had inexplicably lost its legs, and the pure linen cloths, some
exquisitely embroidered.
For years, conversations would often turn to stories which in turn conjured the various objects which
must be dispensed with once and for all; the final tip filling with the absurdity of displacement,
a kind of lost property office but deep and dark like a well and hopefully not somewhere to
ever have to venture into.