Friday, August 13, 2004

Shaded and Jaded

Much rain this week. The sly and slimy snake with two heads has left the lake and is on the footless march to our building. Standing by the fountain this morning I saw the world with all its workings exposed, every thought and comma broken down to parts and laid out on the grass like one of those diagrams in a car manual. I could almost see the little lines linking the small and well-formed numbers to each component. I have here a diagram of the world and how to put it back together. Here is a solution for every problem, food for every starving person and a new mind for every melancholic. Lake and snake. See rhymes in all landscape and those starving girls with their notebooks and tiny writing, hunched up, darkly cool in the corners of the hospital. I loved all of them and knew deep down I could make them better, make them whole again. I have a blue tool box, filled with music and happy sounds, the sounds of going home for Christmas, filled with sky both grey and blue. These high clouds have shown you islands in the far Pacific and you hight above them like some dream of flying. We sledged over the edge here one year when the sky was grey to the horizon and down from the sky came millions of spirits, each flake possessed and subject to gravity. They tell me we were happy, holding each other onto the sledge as it hurtled down into the fog and white voided fields. We have all this snow to ourselves, a perfect sheet of nothing to join the dots on.

Where is the world going today? I still have the back off it, no place for these leftover bits and pieces. We must just sweep them under the carpet and hope everything still works. Maybe somewhere, some sad person will be better because we have lost their dark soul. Some goth will jettison her black dresses and all that dark make-up and instead lighten up. Well at least we made her parents happy. There was a drunk and sun-tanned shaven-headed man at the take-away yesterday. Some woman was with him, following his instructions over what to but but she was in those black clothes with dark eye-shadow and small-rimmed glasses. He was too intoxicated to ask his own questions but she understood him, shrugging and tutting when he stumbled next door to get the paper. She had to be his girlfriend but she might have been his daughter. I hope they didn't see all this floating into my head before them.

I sat once on my own in Belknap house and made music for it, floaty, drifty pieces where the machine made more of the sound than I did. Here is the lack of melody and drive that means so much to people now. Two ns in this sentence and no apostrophes. This is Spooky like love and relatives. How could these people have known so long be even friends of mine? How is my father my father? What makes a family? Turn it all up so loud that the very thoughts are knocked around and made more real. I think I love everybody at this moment. The trains come and go and seem to talk of art, some reference to old stuff, dusty paintings from at least a few years ago. And the fire said it was safe to go out, that the enemies had left. It was safe we thought. I'll make you smile. Those angels standing in the rain outside the only club in town, waiting to get in and drink themselves silly in the view of the made-up boys with there silly clothes. Once we tried to see Throwing Muses at the Poly student union. It was so full and there were no tickets left so we had to leave via various pubs on the way home. Disappointed we heard the Sundays doing their support slot and never knew what we missed. And Kristin ran after us with the list that our names weren't on, dancing down the boulevard like a dervish. Here she is, two people mixed up into one with talents spilling out. She is some benevolent goddess, listing with the weight of all her gifts and poetry. I am important, taking you through a lie just to explain it. It is a secret that I have a secret to keep no longer. And we are back trying to write down guitar music in words. Here is that word - squally - a perfect word, an overused word but still perfect for what it is used to describe.

It must sound so sweet, this music of bees and other flying insects. I sit back happy in this garden, shaded near the bottom hedge, in all the flowers and insects and lost in some book here. And yet all the insects are in some horror story. Their sweet life is one step away from disaster, from a flattening hand that will take them to mush in the quiet afternoon. How are we for time? 35 minutes? Plenty more to come.

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