The Great Jigsaw in the Sky

I remember this one time when I was standing at the mouth of an ocean watching the sun dissolve behind soft, flat water and I felt something burst in my chest and in my hands and in the deepest pit of my stomach. It was a sudden understanding of life and love and the wind and rain and it was almost as if everything just clicked for those four or five seconds and there was nothing too dfficult to understand because everything was connected by atoms and chemistry and human compassion for the things they created. And that was all over in a few seconds and I went back to sandy feet and high stools beside granite bars. I've not spent time since trying to search out that understanding, only trying to remember the things that I knew. One day I'll take a son or a daughter back to that spot and we'll wait for the sun to drip out of the sky and when night approaches I'll tell them about the world and how it is just a neatly tiered structure of science and prayer and passion and angst that is all built on a foundation of human connections and understanding. I'll try to explain that everything is as simple as rows of houses, saturday night telelvision, raised glasses, kicked off shoes and shopping bags, and there'll never be a reason to say another word.

The Importance of Being In Situ

Ear splitting, nails down a chalkboard
Living smokeless with no expectation
Screaming into black holes
In palpable misery

Lying face down in room spinning ache
Pick up, check, place down gently
The same routine, the same agony
I am the principal of this sickness, the pioneer

Attempting to Connect through Speech and Actions

It was a million years ago today that we met. Your smile sickly sweet with a hint of regret and your words unpalatable. I was a master of penmanship and my normally steady hand was awake with a vibrating shaking that came from deep inside my nervous system.

It was a million years ago today that we met and I still remember the uncertainty flairing up between us as we talked about Sundays and where we would spend them. I asked for a notepad and pen so i could empty my head onto pages of margined and lined paper. All in order for the purposes of cataloguing my self destruction.

It was a million years ago today that we met and I loved you, and the same amount of time since I melted and sank into my electric chair, with a view of the city reaching out to grey sky. There were glances from nearby, and strange messages, and creaking of footsteps approaching the situation with cautious ease. It was clear that we were crumbling.

It was a million years ago today that we met, and I was awkwardness personified.

In the Fire and Flames of Fifth Avenue

Memo:
I drove through the wind and the rain just to be there, over borders and through cities unrecognised by my eyes but familiar in feel to my home town. I imagined the streets and buildings in the naked glow of yellow streetlight, stripped back to nothing but plaster and road signs and I never felt lonely, not even for a minute because I know that life is nothing but concrete blocks, moving cars and people jaywalking over the asphalt streets at night to get to some awful bar where the drinks are cheap and the music is beating their heads in with a ridiculous rhythm of vanity. This is an everwhere place where everybody looks the fucking same, and feels the fucking same and nobody can even imagine a life without this topshop idiosyncrasy and one-mind obsession with looking 'right'. I was never like this, but I did try and I couldn't be the same as those that are different. I am happy to live in this naked town stripped down to bare bone but I don't want to pretend like that ain't the truth. Give me a second to write a list of ten things I don't like about your freedom and I'll allow you the freedom to enjoy having your life judged, and your fucking ego's massaged. I hope you enjoy your night on the town.

Forever, and Counting

Plane of thought:
If I could have saved that night I'd revisit it with new eyes. Wipe the steam away with a closed fist and make brand new assumptions about the conclusions we made. I had a vision of a smokeless future and a skyline so clear that the birds were circling at three a.m. and we were buzzing inside with assured complexity. We were happy. All of this started when we were saddened by the pull of gravity and the lack of freedom for the better half of society. "People should just be good to each other" you said, as we tried to establish how to pull the problems back from the edge. Through the windscreen we saw the streetlights flicker and the sky brightened. The city was definately brighter at night. It fucked the sky and took it away from desperate eyes, but the light on your face from the dashboard was something that I will never forget, it made my bones shake.

Lights, Camera, Reaction

Dear Denial:
The ageing night signalled the end of summer and the life spilled out of the city and into the gutters. The camera clicked and split the atoms of our fake eyed smile so we were digitally lasting and embraced in a lifeless grasp of hands. The tables we sat at were wet with condensation, it was a cold bottle met hot air scenario and we were watching the chemistry in action. How do you say to a person you know that it's safer to bet on being lonely, but not alone? Well, I brushed the side of her face with a pale clammy hand and i saw my reflection in her eyes that answered: you don't. In the end it was just a moment which served as the final memory and our words were false again under blazing spotlights. Behind the scenes and away from the crowd of familiar faces there was a single moment of validity in the form of a parting glance which said "I never, ever seem to get what I want". The hardest part always seems to be finding the words to say.

Leaving, Summer, 1998

Let's Start with How it Felt:
I remember it as a parade of men leaving the city limits for better climes. A smile on their faces and a lit cigarette for each of the loved ones they are leaving behind. It's like a black cloud carnival of aching limbs and crooked teeth, the feeling of parting is rocking in their heads and creaking like old door hinges. On the horizon there is a vibrating sun, casting mile long shadows that encroach the powder of soil. In the city of ghosts the people look on, chastising hollow figures with careful eyes that stare a hole. In the end, from the city, the parade is an ever shrinking blip on the eternal curve of the widests of plains. If this place in my head was a desert then the scorch of the sun would have burned through the rememberance of how it was to feel departed. But the rays are a radio, and I am the wavelength that they are always tuned to.

In a City of Vacant Spaces

A Pensive:
Do you know how the skyline falls and folds between pages of prose you wrote? Well that's how the pressure is contained within manuscripts and notepads of scribble my thoughts spilled out onto. I couldn't ever be ashamed of saying nothing, when nothing was all there was to say. How could anything be so right and hit you so hard? I was walking through a time warped year smoking cigarettes in open spaces. I was an accurate arrow bursting through walls and tearing through nameless places. There was a time when we would question constitution and never cave in to resiliant arms pointing accusing fingers. There was a time when we would tip the bottle and tear the labels and talk about fighting the fires inside us. There was a time when we were standing and stable and the wires of sound were beating out music. There was a time when we were over the worst but the better years were casting shadows and moving to it.