72

These are empty places
Once the mood turns
And in barest winter
There's nothing but a muted sigh
Among the cold patches
Divided by hedges and walls
Where silent spirits hang
They'd be holy when all sunlit
But now
After dark
You're lost in silence

69 - A Single Season

These fields might seem contorted
Ranged in sleeping rows
But I'm just a passerby
Mistaken and misled
By brief winter glimpses

These fields go on without me
While I can only hope to see them flush with summer
I'm more temporary than spring
Less lasting than autumn

If I too were immortal
I'd be thoughtful as the mud
I'd chase the wind
And lie still as ice till I was moved

The weather's ruined and reshaped this land
But I'm a passing thing
The twisted pine will go on
Remembering or not

I have a single season
While these fields will pass through the umpteen to come
When your head swims and your legs give way
This is the ground to return to

56 - To Resolve To

There is a part of the Bible that reads something like:

Come now, those of you that say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and do trade and make some profit”. You do not know what tomorrow will bring. You are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wants it to be so then we will live well or do this or that."

I almost agree with the sentiment here, which I believe comes from one of Paul's letters. It should be that we live in each moment, sucking the marrow out of life.There should be no tomorrow or today as far as our resolve goes. And yet, I find myself drawn to make some kind of resolution.

I read somewhere that the habit of making a new year's resolution goes back to the Babylonians. This instinct of mine seems more ancient somehow. It is a worrying instinct, a fear of standing still. During pauses the pains of the past do not disappear, but hope can be seen. This time of the year, the end and beginning, when one can see the struggles behind and the possibilities ahead, is the one time when I can imagine wishing it all well.

In general this should be a year-long struggle but if I am to set goals then I should begin with a list of promises. I promise not to give up before getting out of bed; I promise not to cry into my cornflakes; I promise not to shout at strangers. These are just examples

If I were sensible, since most of my goals are ill-defined, I would bring together a committee to decide what resolutions I should make. As it stands, I can only see this much: we don't have one answer but it helps to work towards something.

51 - Conversation Fragments

I could write a worst-selling novel based on last night
Apart from the most of it
50 pound candles
Bought in a moment of insanity
And willful forgetting of debts

Then
In a turn up for the books

The stupid fashionable little bag
Paper for god's sake

To carry two heavy candles

Got wet

Broke
Candle glass smashed in the gutter

Whatever Christmas

Feel an overabundance of energy
A constant need to drink and make merry
Beautifully sordid
On a massive high

Bill Fontana's Landscape Sculpture With Foghorns has become the constant background noise to my work. With the waves and the odd gull as well it is peaceful and reminiscent of home. But I often imagine what it would seem like to a perfect stranger walking in. Me hunched over some scribbles with this bizarre stuff playing loudly.

In the olden days one would have popped round with cakes or biscuits or something to say hello and just check just in case something had happened. We do not live in the olden days.

Euphoria is not tied to sex

50 - These Dim Flickering Lights

These are dim flickering lights these loves they will go out and have to be looked after they don’t stay lit for some magic or fate you want to dream up they are forever just about to go out they are always scraps of paper ready to be lost down the back of the couch they get ripped up into the sky by winds in fires their corners curl their centres pop you can drop these loves like a ticket between the train and the platform and it’s already too late to stop everything try asking the driver to reverse slowly while you reach down and retrieve them see if they’ll go behind schedule for this ticket that is your love think again life does not work like that even if it does sometimes seem to glide on polished rails and drop joys into your lap you might not be paying attention so if it does present you with one of these dim flickering lights then whatever you do do not simply sit on our arse and hope it’ll all work out fine don’t ignore it or say I’m just popping to the loo be back in a sec you might have to protect the flame somehow cup your hand around it while you can find some better solution keep it hidden away but somewhere just right somewhere with enough air to keep it burning meanwhile you have to find some way always with one eye on the flame to make sure it’s not going to go out to build it up you can get it going turn it into a fire it will happen if you really want it to but you have to be extremely careful and you have to know what you’re doing and boy is it hard to know what you’re doing when you’ve never done it before it’s exhausting tending to these dim flickering lights that are these loves that we build our lives around.

First Pointless Literary Exercise

We’ve come through the winter and spring is a wonder. Those cold months can start to be romanticised now. Certain glimpses of nature, hard to appreciate at the time, come back as reflections of awesome beauty. Frozen trees sum it up; branches white with frost, stood still in a quiet world.

We went walking in the woods. I remember having painfully cold toes and a constantly hunched back. Muscle strains came from being so tense all the time. Walking around the icy lake, we were flanked on one side by white woods, the odd leafless sapling poking up out of the snow.

Now birdsong and sunshine are miracles. It seems we spent week after week in an anti-social fug, indoors with computers and TVs. Not so different from now, but with the added perplexity of endless night. All that darkness bored me stiff. I’m waking up now, a little late.

This aim of this first pointless literary exercise was to see what I could write in five minutes. In this arbitrary amount of time I could have simply typed as much as possible, but decided to split my time into about three minutes spent putting down random ideas and two minutes spent editing them.