W.

It is impossible to imagine people until they exist.

I see hundreds of trees. Only the burnt ones hold my interest.

I point at grains in the rocks and pretend to understand, because then it doesn't feel as if I am wasting my time.

Geology reminds me of your hotel room. White sheets like platy crystals spread out over hopeful arms and legs.

Four thousand kilometres.

Memories of former transfigurations give rocks their flavour. Eyes wet in the morning make certain surfaces appear darker. Clouds roll over the peaks of hills. A face disappears upon take-off. A phone rings somewhere in an empty house. Windows break. A rock in the fireplace (it cannot be touched but is not on fire). Falling stones reshape the earth. One circle in place of another. On that which moves too quickly, nothing can grow. I want to see the detail of the ocean.

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Alexander Graham Bell is kissing Mabel

We are all belly up. Alexander Graham Bell is kissing Mabel. I am criticised regarding my choice of font. If I can avoid making a decision, I will. The pattern in the coral repeats. I hold it in my hand and try my very best to imagine. One hundred watt light bulbs and the resulting strain on our faces. I miss you. It grows dark here with increasing regularity. We are defined by all the things we say we like or do not like to one another. Time moves slowly when you wait for it. Take back everything and keep it safe somewhere. I only want to look at pictures of your eyes: that way it won't feel awkward. The things we are attracted to change to fit our needs. Say something beautiful and spell it like you mean it. The sound of air escaping. This is the oldest I have ever been. Distant conversations offer a sense of belonging. I leave my bedroom door open when I read. Cupping my belly with my hands makes me feel so tiny. So strange how we can touch ourselves. I would like to sleep in a ball with six people closely breathing. The night isn't dark when it is warm and human.



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The Fly

It is the fly that is manic, reeling about in 3-dimensions, while I, the greater animal, sit in stillness, contained inside the parameters of my own composure. It is the fly that is mad; air-crazed wild longing for more space while I, the superior organism, sit here doing crosswords as my muscles atrophy. The fly, insane with desire, smacks its small body against the sheets of glass we erected to better control things. The ducks are fat with bread and service. The cow snacks on garbage. The moth heads towards an artificial moon. The fly, circling for some 30 minutes, distance divided by body size, has walked Land's End to John O'Groats some hundred times, while I, the top of the food chain, sit flexing my brain and index finger, blinking. Keyboards with half the letters missing, soft heels, untested hypotheses, love songs that mean nothing, the absence of vowels, avatars, systems of measurement; this is what they'll uncover as they sift through the limestone. It is the fly that is mad, with its instincts and impulses, slave to its body, futureless and free, while we, the accumulation of all evolution, classify another sub-group of mental disorders and drink tea.




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Trouble

Trouble comes and its shape is unknown.
It is thyself she says.
But we have our doubts.

Trouble comes and its shape is doubtful.
It is the unknown she says, it is of that you are fearful.

Trouble comes and we greet it in the night.
It has snuck in because the door was ajar, because we turned all the lights out, because we left the dishes stacked up in a waterless sink, tried to forget until morning. It worries our necks with persistent tautology. We awake to red scars the shape of doubtful, self-inflicted fingers.

Trouble bellows. The noise interrupts our fitful sleep, vibrates weakly bonded eyelids. Eyes open to darkness. The heavy disappointment that follows a scream. We appeal to the sun. Eardrums ring with the sound of humanity. A bed the size of an ocean. Tides of sweat crashing against our shorelines. Lifetimes erode as the night bows out. And again. And again.



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Cycles

Cycles


the wheel was invented so
we could keep coming back here

day turns to night and
that sweat isn't mine again

something in your face
pushes me back like a tide

a beach full of eyelashes

i'm running, collecting them
but only when the water is low
and i can't see your eyes
nor you mine

because then we wouldn't want to hold hands anymore
and all of the pebbles on the beach would turn to sand.





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Scenarios II

Water Lens.

Man with soft wet legs is coming at me, dripping into the frame. I am all hydrogen, just sitting there and refracting him. There isn't even a suggestion in his mind of how I am making him look. I have two atoms of breathing fuel and if I could, I'd sigh deeply with it. The sloppy man looks so poetic, flowing, as if his life were an unbounded stream. He is coming at me, edges thicken. My environment blinks a while, my smooth dome is shielded then uncovered. The mass of man melts towards the foreground, he's all calm and dream like a fish in the ocean. He's coming at me and pink shape becomes hand, anonymous blob stretches out into finger. Cavernous deep expands into mouth. Carbondioxides and waste are projected all over me. I'm gone, assimilated. He has perfect edges. I envy him the clarity of his shape.


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Finger Exercises

Spots.

Facing a clear wall the anomalies are more apparent. When the view is busy, the dots sink into view. I am chasing them, they are chasing me. They are more inside my eyes than I am. They are more at one with me than me. Staring at a white wall, I can make them dance all over it. Black dots translated over one shade then another, always in sync, the same distance apart from one another, like a definitive scattergram of the precise points I will never see. I can sometimes see fine hair-like lines between the dots, only semi-opaque. I look up, I chase them, I follow them down. They appear the same colours as oil spills, with that rainbowesque finish - guiltily beautiful. They look like bacterias and other details. My eye is a microscope. They are shaped like The Plough now, now Pisces, and then lost. I look through them, I zoom out, I concentrate on the world, I get on with things. They look like spinning jennies late in the evenings, I am living behind a damp film.


Unstabilised.

The small head is turned, in retrospect the movement seems long and hardy. The child has grown, the parent shrunk. One second and the posture of the child becomes taller, more agile, an obelisk rising from meek jelly. One sharp impulse to check, and to both learn and bear the truth, and the child is no longer shielded beneath a heavy armpit. With the sun on its back and the terrifying wind behind its wheels, the child is on and on and up and out and neither puddle nor corner could muffle this sound. It is the sound of the speed of light, and the child grows quickly into this new body of motion. The child is leaving the skin of the earth, is off and away, as the stratosphere is but a rotation or two from here, and the parent waves, and the child does not notice the look of consternation on the old human's face, and the world is below - then above, then below - and the child flew through galaxies but now it is bleeding with its small hopeful head in the snow.



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