Wake up

I woke up early today and got the coffee on for our guest.

She was already up, rummaging ready, for her waiting train.

I began to fantasise over, a packed and full day.

The day was a whickered hamper laden with food.

I was ticking off jobs imaginary.

And then I flirted with the idea of bed.

Back to it, reading.

I had merged luxurious with virtuous.

Or so I told myself, slumping

Into a bright phased, fitful glaze.

That was my first mistake,

My past ripeness rotting in its wake.

So I finally wrenched myself from paralysis,

No more moved by that sense of importance.

No longer noble aspiration whirred in my mind,

That sludge of neurons, chemical slobs

Fat with comfort.

Crammed with stimulation

Diluted by passivity

Wade through this negativity. 

No idea which foot to put first, I put both in

A hot bath.

Which was my second mistake.

My skin swollen like the rest of me.

Wealthy means to cook oneself in excess time and thought.

Privileged! Let’s take our vital heat and turn it up,

In the name of comfort.

Food, Clothing, Shelter.

Why do we wither and toil to get hotter.

Even hotter.

The rich think they gotta. 

I know better

But that don’t stop me stewing my balls,

And going all light headed.

A walk will set me straight,

Out the door I treaded.

Slouching from one worry to the next

Thinking, perhaps I will make myself ill like this.

Which worried me too.

I’m a wind chime.

I wait for wind in the darkness.

I shiver for a gust.

I tremble at the prospect of my own noise

I strain my ears for that authentic sound.

Where is my natural clatter,

blowing in another wind.

But I was in no place for rhythm

Mind settling on another anxious thought.

Do I drink enough water?

Feeling thirsty.

Coffee aching those chemical squatters into agitated hotness.

Something is gunna give.

This day is where I want to live.

I started noticing mushrooms,

More mushrooms.

Catholic in colour, shouting out little secrets.

Jumping abruptly out of every dirt ground and wood stump.

It was my joy to bump about looking for lunch and my salvation.

I inspected each green hump

With a growing throat full of lump.

A knowing sense of my inadequacy.

I do not trust myself.

I clutched the parasol too tight.

Full of moisture it oozed out its poisoned taunt.

And I badly wanted to taste its freedom between my jaws.

I carried it like a plate and paused to watch the pig.

The lucky pig.

Fending off bracken and clumsy thought.

Roaming about the acorns kicking up dust among the trees,

 thinking of her sisters,

packed pink in a slaughter house living like pigs.

I wondered if she would tell with the same certainty I had conjured,

that the mushroom was an edible gift.

It’s not the first time I have thrown my food to the pigs.

She smelled my doubt and sneered.

She’d sooner be a sausage than a convenient excuse.

I had lied to myself and she knew it.

My mood dulled for a moment.

That desire to take responsibility for my own life,

Flickering again.

My life in shadow.

But, as it often does the sun gathered and bustled behind the heavy gloom.

Thank God.

I will trust who I am, that is light enough

 for now.

I play thoughts like distractions and my toys don’t gather dust.

I never put them down for anything to settle.

Shall I get serious, that is

Is it time to trust?

Your money or you life!

You can have my toys, I reply

Into the wood and down the snicket I run.

There, comforted by the sound of my own panting

All hungry breath, wand wet warm, sweat.

I notice some sturdy logs cut down the middle.

Chestnut.

All that flesh got me.

The smell it got me too.

I would make a bookshelf,

And be useful.

I felt useful already and feelings have to be used.

So I staggered back, weighed down by wood and wonder.

Waiting for no one.

Worried only for a moment, cautious of dragging a splinter,

through my neck.

I’m no quivering wreck.

I am a maker.

I am a taker.

All I have I give to you.

Bustled back, right down I sat

To write this _ instead

Who will grade my toys

Who is there to make an unmade bookshelf made.

Managed.

See it through, Tom

Make it true, tom

Dissolving walks of ecstasy

What remains is a voice that was always there.

A nothing that needs not

a filling or stilted explanation.  

Less thinking, mind sinking into a wider field of being.

A silenced sentience this lovely loosening

All is hungry

here

Yet woods beckon

The track winds to its end. 

Sun on skin, back on

Back gone.

No path now,

just the quite tread of a new slower rhythm.

Desire changes its intensity, here drink

Anxiety stilled, no rush to remain quenched

No straining to hear the only sound that is.

Drenched in oneness

immerse into tune green and sunlight

the dance of dust pulses, sways with heat 

filling lungs and senses.

Each step a deepening, bodily tingling of peace

and pleasure now entwined, indistinguishable

flung with time on air

Dissolving walks of ecstasy

Fling into surrender.

The Dark Mountain Blog

Two of the subjects that have been cart wheeling and percolating through me over the past few months - Grief and Play - Combined beautifully in this blog I stumbled upon, happily. Click on it and read it for yourself.

http://dark-mountain.net/blog/good-grief/

Contract for Figuration

I, the manager and trustee hereby declare a Tragent contract - over increasing incremental size and depth. Importantly, immediate conduct juxtaposition will be issued at every possible angle.  This commercially termed is akin to the formalising of the verbally construed. Paramount to bridging gaps culturally but slightly less axated, flamboyant or disturbed – you decide. Concurrently the nominated guardian will destabilise.

Following text

Babistry and deluge will only be collected every sub optimal week. Ushering in, with exception to all possible horizons. Laudable sound bites, discrete often from all available walls. 

1. Please do wash thoroughly incognito, to induce supplementary clear consequences.

Micarnate, unless you want to be perennially looked over.

Sub Note[Indivisible: see fig1]

Fugitively amongst all other flewid acranims the benefactor shall sourceate acumst alt, with exception to biannual anomalies. Concurrently many times over religion, over gender, in fact all discrimotary factions apart from the telegone. Prestently secreting mediation between riboflavins and aborialacting, commencing with immediate effect.

Honed to Stable

Lesh vast palpable, bring one over here for your outlet subdiviser/senior babllegut to check. Cyclical pontificating sweats all parties slavishly. Banwork listless and ban suspended, piper softly only suddenly.

Bastion statements and/or requirements

The guardian is bound in additional legislation further more. The guardian is payable on return and to any retail conpot lustjigate (formally referred to in terms of ERL (established rack leveller). Critically in matters of junction or existential murmurings never do exceed anything twice. With exception to both sides of the track and anywise else he/she would deem to do so even if but a meagre portion. Firstly lancer then lancist.

Citizen client's singular assessment into acknowledgement for endorsement

I, the before mentioned benefactor and collaborative, firmly calalegislise to the ongoing restoration and benevolence off any third party that emerges from the fog.

Signed _________________  Dated_______________ 

FIG one.

Alone Together

I don’t often write in the morning, my brain and the body that houses it have not normally gained the necessary momentum; this has something do to with the process of remembering I’m alive and what a dizzy thing that really is. I start my day as a bleak little tadpole and end it a leaping dancing frog, I would rather it that way round I think. It is a journey with a positive trajectory at least. Well then today is an exception, one I will cherish. This incongruous event has been provoked by one particularly long and entrancing conversation held last night. Leaping and dancing? Well I had been croaking all night. I had spent the night with friends fully immersed in a dalliance of drink and the metaphysical. Such ideas were to blame for my night time jittering’s. Not unusually it all dispersed an existential fog over everything, yet the fog was punctuated by brief moments of unified clarity and hope.

So there I was, an over active tired blur, sat on the platform my wild hair framing bleary twitching eyes. The only sleep I had got that night was of a very foreign quality. One where my body was relaxed and sunken but my mind busy, busy connecting vivid, colourful, spurious events. I am not one to normally separate notions of mind and body too violently, but that moment they seemed autonomous and indifferent to one another. I had spent the night laid in a Jacuzzi watching a circus.

A voice rung out announcing the arrival of my train, as the pace of the women’s spiel increased so the list of stops accompanied the wobbling passengers aboard. The last few stops tumbled out of the intercom at break neck speed as though she was goading me into a run; I too staggered into the train. I looked around the carriage and recalled a book my dad was reading the last time I saw him, ‘Alone Together’. At the time my first slightly bemused thought was that it must be a book about marriage. But on closer inspection I saw it was in fact about the age of technology and its implications on social interaction. Typical of dad who proudly wears the T Shirt my brother and I made him for his birthday which reads ‘I hate com-poo-ters’ along with a picture of a turd inside a computer monitor. It’s a common pastime, I suspect, to break down the breakdown of society whilst on a train. To comment on our individualistic defaults, people unable to relate anaesthetised by fear and convention etcetera. But as I took my seat by the toilet and allowed the wall of smell to settle on me, I instead became interested in the moments of connection, flickers in the train, as individuals acknowledged their shared reality. A conspicuous bang and shudder created such a moment, as I shared a weary smile with a women waiting outside the toilet for her young son. It was the guard’s presence that temporarily jolted us into the reality of our collective present,

“Leeds! They used to have a football team didn’t they?”   

His joke provoked various titters; conversation even as he went on in this way to check someone else’s ticket. Just enough time to bathe in the liquid realisation that we were all on the same train heading somewhere together, before retreating back into the security of our own worlds. All of us islands again, aided by our books, wires and flashes or in my case a vacant veneer and a pen.

I settled my thoughts once again on last night. I had developed grand titles for my friends to frame the conversation in, they went as follows: ‘The political historian whose passion and wit is tempered by an involuntary scepticism he no longer wants’ and then ‘The philosopher who’s rhetoric cleverly illustrates simplicity and complexity and who’s own faith has undergone a recent raw refining.’ And finally ‘The adventurer with a scientists mind and Christian faith. I got to my own grand title, I was unsettled, my own faith was a baffling cocktail, ardent and yet stubbornly disobedient to any kind of description. A Christian mystic operating within an abstract positivity. The titles do not suffice, none of them. This emphasised what we had experienced that night, none of those titles render the beliefs of the individual comprehensible, that I suppose is what actions are for, what our lives are for, to create something.

For the most part our own worlds are havens, where we collect ourselves and find reason to be. Yet there is an eastern version of Descartes supposition which reads ‘I think therefore I am… not’. Our havens can be filled with substances other than thought. These havens can behave like wild animals, they are dangerous, when challenged they fight or withdraw and yet they contain a purity of life within them too. It can be a traumatic experience to doubt or refine those beliefs that have driven us forward thus far, now to a place of uncertainty. We are ships at sea, buffeted by swell and sweat. Watching the sunlight streak and wobble through the trees by the track I realise the faith I operate within day to day is childlike. My base childlike beliefs provoke openness, a faith which means simultaneously exercising doubt with a trust that good is possible and love exists. I have plenty of intellectual reasons why such a faith is worth protecting but I'm not sure that’s the point. Looking again around the train, and remembering my everyday life I acknowledge we often duck these kinds of conversations. Perhaps this is because through them we encounter the wildness of our havens, which we routinely pacify and contain for reasons like the largeness of space or the importance of I. We avoid them because they make us vulnerable.  We fear the loneliness they induce, a startled realisation, other people do not see things as we do, and even when they were using the same words they meant something else. Fly in the face of this fear with defiance and courage I say in a moment of boldness.  We must confront the loneliness, in this sense we must be alone together. Only then will we truly find and cherish those moments of clarity, unity and light and be transformed. This is a train momentarily emerging from the fog.