Any Point

Said something about the canisters and walks and then the raw potatoes by the fireside – still not feeling the heat; where’s the heat? It used to burn on the side of the ears into the morning and then you’d have an excuse to make up some excuse. So you can say once the sky goes a little bit darker – God knows.

Still the same one though. In all the words that have passed through the pulses and the veins and the sayings of the what-nots and all those other things. In the back of the head, it’s the been-there-done-that but still want to go there and do that. All over again. Even down to the last syllable. Gray, clear night. Let it rain, shall we? Just so you can see to the other side. Haven’t seen that in a while, save the day you decided to give it a go and stare onto that scrap above you. Bad circulation – breathing in what you breathe out; regressing.

The thing with it though, was that the ground was all dewed up and – forgive it if it’s the same old – the image was and is. Just crossing the road. Can’t stop the black drops and in only a few more. This street cross that street. It’s there. Not a print. Actual.

To Everything...

To be completely honest, it really didn’t seem like that long ago. Was it? Still by the pond in a white helmet; been there so many times but this one always stands out in the recesses of the mind. Even when flipping through the cabinet of unlabeled albums – dusty, musty – that image still does.

But now. It’s a voice. The wires that run across half a day, filled with what the plans will be for today and tomorrow. It’s a voice. That will meet new people, see new things; grow. Not by the pond anymore and not in a blue hoodie or a backwards cap, scuttling about. Or any of those things.

Before I even knew it, you’re the voice now. It's time to sing the most beautiful verse.

Young...

Doing what we’re doing to do what we will do.

Walked for an hour’s worth of passing cars and maybe-empty houses, pit-stops for white smoke and maybe a cup or two just to rest the ankles. Another one of those. Rest the head to the sound of a dead man who’s not quite dead yet. Or wait until it all creeps up to the back of the eyes and then it’ll disappear for no good reason again. Never good reason.

Perhaps they should bury the hatchet. In a box under old wall-scrawlings-turned-essay-notes, irrelevant glossies and a whole file of 5.30 articles. No dice. Prefer the tumbling kind. Didn’t make sense but at least it did; at least red was still blue.

Then it all gets extraneous. They’ll always have that feeling. Maybe that book was right after all. It just never talked about the gray though; never taught about the gray. So what will they do about the gray?

(At least 6)

Guess I Was

Never was a third reminder. Keeping it around for no reason in particular and have been doing so anyway. Maybe the line of vision wasn’t clear after all or at least that could explain it. But that’s only assuming we still think about it.

It’s into the brain first. The outside table was almost about to lift up – would’ve been toppled coffee cups and all that. Almost. Might have been nice though. Wonder what it looked like from the inside. Or how it sounded like to anyone else. But can’t help the lurching still: voluntary, involuntary… and all over again.

The same old tracks too. Or at least in the way we fashioned them in the space of that time. All the associations, reappropriations. When it was just nothing more than a few minutes really. Before waiting for the bus, slipped back into the underpass and looked up; saw. Light before the eyes but it’s already all over the head. A breath in and a nothing out.

Still there though. There goes the glide in slo-mo. Beautiful stuff and the right cutting and right color. Here’s a sea of black and white and a tall glass of Pellegrino to pass the words. Throw in an afternoon and perhaps a good few years too late into it. According to them, it’s half of the way which means half of where they’re getting to but also enough to make an up-in-the-air lunchtime invitation. Let’s say, if the curtain hadn’t so happened to be there or if the tube hadn’t so happened to break into a million pieces across the room, then what? Then we’d all have a whole set of new things that we could postulate if it hadn’t so happened. Doesn’t help the lurching still: voluntary, involuntary… and all over again.

Environmentally Friendly...

A commercial on the bus a few years ago told me the same thing – the world’s a better place without it and your mind’s a better place too. But the 33rpm keeps spinning and spinning and spinning these notes and words that float above the brain. When you’re thinking about too much you can’t think anything at all.

It was yesterday though. Reading people through the jackets they wear or the little black strokes they leave on rectangular bits of white paper. But no one saw anything wrong with that because it was not in the intention. Until it was. Not everything is something and life is so much more relaxing with that in mind.

Halfway to where they said we all should be at. Maybe it’s done already. I don’t mind. Maybe it’s no longer there, never was and never will be. But all these horizontal lines that spoke in red kept replaying it all again. A one minute walk through the sludgy grass after a nightful of rain.

The first, the second, the third reminder tomorrow. And I’ll forget all about it in the faint blue morning.

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω."

Down the Rope

Feels like a thousand and a gray sky full of them.

Waiting for a few blue lines for the more-than-enough-th time. Pain in the bones for the empty days and then what? Then nothing. Blue card, blue curtains, blue lines. Blue nothing.

Not really here though. There’s something in the back of our minds, saying we’re in the nipping cold of the side street again. Behind some strange looking bronze figurines and a busload of strangers. There’s the wind again. Who was it who said that? “No one is anything.” Oh wait, I remember. I need to read the whole thing sometime soon. Perhaps it was wrong all this time. Pencil, pen, paper again. Remember November with an hour to wile away, tucked beneath some red-brick building. It’ll always be here.

It goes again. Like the dip. And a myriad of happenings on the other side of the coffee drinking glass. More scraps of paper dotted with black spots and what-nots. “There goes the sun” – yes, past tense. Wonder where it went but the sky’s a lovely shade without it. The sky’s a lovely shade with it too. Hell, it’s lovely always.

Back to the blue lines and how to make some sense of it. It’s not a verse sometimes – can’t go about it the same way and mark it up with pen and whiskey. It goes through my brain and your brain and his brain and her brain and what do you know?

We’re all just the same.

Thirty Years

And can I even begin to think about it?

I don’t know. The world seems such a wide place in the context of everything and my fingers find it hard to type in the midst of frozen. But it’s hardly even…when I think about just a few months ago. Just a few months ago…when the breath was caught in the throat and the every breathing was a chore not to be taken for granted…let me begin again. Just because.

Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps it was because. Of the very thing we said to avoid and then we were exposed to because when the word “avoid” really means, “do-whatever-your-veins-tell-you.” I have yet to get used to the grammar of this land; this way of writing, editorial. But below is a small extract I can only begin to fathom…yes, it’s a gas:

Once upon a time, there was a man. This man was on a roll when it came to life and he never had to worry about anything – silver spoon in mouth, all that bedazzling all. He was off on a cross-continent trip one day on a carefully-decorated wagon (this was still the age of wagons) when he fell off suddenly as the horse came to a sudden hiccupping second-long halt and, in a minute instance, he found himself in the midst of nowhere – a no-one and a nothing. Silver spoon slipped out of the mouth and the sum of everything gone.

Why didn’t the horseman notice? Perhaps he really, genuinely didn’t? perhaps he didn’t want to (this man on the roll was not the nicest man in the world). Either way, he didn’t and that’s how it was. So what happened after that?

I have as much to ask as you do. And I have only a set amount of time to find out. But that’s time enough and that’s the same amount of time that everyone has – as much as they have. Can we ever complain? Yes: about pollution, debt, the state of the world and the way things have changed since we last watched TCM. But really, has it ever changed? Years from now, they will be complaining about the ways we tried to cope and years before now they were also trying to deal with the very same thing.

I have no ideas about what where how and when. And I will never, you will never. All they say, at the end of the long long long day is: Let it Be.