Black Dog Running

Soundtrack - Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins.

Oceans of something in my head at the moment. Can't really work out what is going on here. The fact that I have logged on means that I felt like writing a few minutes ago but now nothing seems to be worth anything.

In an orange-lit attic room I can see some of the years gone by. The city falls away below the window, rolling over the seven hills that every city seems to be built on until it reaches the sea. It is twighlight in some winter month and the smoke hangs in the streets swallowing the sound - the roar of the traffic heading home like a dream of stability in this catalogue of chaos. It feels like drowning. It feels like I cannot make anyone aware of what I know to be true. I am a child grown up, with thoughts of ghosts and science fighting in my head. Science is winning but the ghosts will melt away and wait in the deep folds of my brain. One day they will come back and stab me - turn my mind back into the jelly that makes me sick and useless. The music melts into silence as the batteries of the radio fade. I have no more and no money to buy any. Tonight is going to be silent and I have read all the books I have. I stare out of the window at the trees on the distant hill. They mark the edge of this city and the start of the next one. Soon the land will be a city and nothing else. We will die as the smoke wins the battle with the Oxygen and we will say why did no one do anything about this.

A pencil rolls off the table to distract me from counting the people walking along the road below. I lean down and pick it up, placing it back on the single unused sheet of paper I have left. I blink as I turn back to the window. The glass is old and has irregularities where it was cut badly. Glass is liquid I once read. Or maybe it isn't. I take a whole minute to think of the possibilities that this gives me. A poem for a window crosses my mind, a burning passionate poem to a thin sheet of silicon. It fades into the distance as I see another person cross the street. They are dressed in a long winter coat. Joy Division fan I think but then I see the briefcase and adjust this to young professional with warm coat. My children all have blue eyes. The phrase pops in my head. And then I hear my father call my name as if something is wrong. The ghosts are back; the manic daemons who make me think of spirits and kill the science. Why did he call me? Is there really something wrong or is it just a chemical in something I ate causing me to hear things? Innovation is killed by this attitude. I have work to do but can build up no enthusiasm for any of it. The man with the long coat has gone; he disappeared at the same moment as a tall blonde woman appears from behind the same wall. She is in early middle age and walks as if she has books on her head. I wonder why she has no car and why she has no coat on but she turns up into the street, which comes up the hill to the hall of my house and knocks on the door of the first house. After a few seconds the door opens and a small child - I cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl - runs out and hugs the woman's legs. The woman chats to the unseen occupant of the house for a minute while the child jumps up and down holding her mother's hand. They turn and walk away with goodbyes I cannot hear. Road, River and Rail.

Milk and kisses. Warm rooms with open fires. All the clichés of a happy childhood hit me in the face as hard as any real punishment. We are emptied of any real life and dumped on a fire like something from the Inferno. Eternity in pain would seem more interesting than this. We have piles of magazines and books and yet we complain that we do not have enough things. The world hates us all so much that it makes tiny creatures to kill us and then not content with this, it makes us kill each other. I cannot tell you the conversations I heard from that window because I cannot write down what people say. They have copyright on their speech and to write it down would attract penalties beyond measure to humans. In the last house in the street below I can just hear the television or radio playing what must be local news. I cannot hear the words but the intonation is there. The stories are told in a way that is slightly less dramatic than their national superlatives. The "I am too good for this trash" implication is obvious. It is obvious here. This is trash by any name. Rubbish to fill up a boring lunchtime with a description of a boring evening - the verbal equivalent of Sickert's ennui only they have no window and I at least have a whole city to play God over. If only I was the controller of this city. I could turn people around, pick them up and dump them in houses where they didn't belong like the Brontës' toy soldiers. It would be an urban Gondal or Angria. I could make up stories and act them out. I have all the best ideas. I would have made that plane crash into the school and then rescued everyone in a second. How do you link a paragraph? I hate paragraphs. You just don't know where to split them. With poems it is easy to create the verses. The concepts sit around for a few seconds and then fade away so you can start the next verse/stanza whatever.

With paragraphs you have to read the whole previous one back and decide whether what you are writing now relates to what you were saying a few minutes ago. Technology and spirit dressed up in one messy package of disjointed writing, a self-referential woodshed with something nasty hiding in the dark. How toxic is this image for me. Are you toxic? Terminated and tortured by the lack of poetry and alliteration. Get the rhyme wrong and you have a black verse, blank verse. No comedy ever broke down like this.

Written with no spelling mistakes according to my checker of choice and only a few fragments (No Suggestions). Life is always better for a good wallow in the past.