Fires burn to make things darker it’s a camp side jam tonight
the show stealing fingers of the flames fingering the air which is tearing apart
like dirty pads of cotton wool tainted and painted by the fads and the fraying
ropes of smoke that the ginger digits have provided; these people have confided in
the forest; this is where they play and drink and smoke and chat I’m turning
off my phone watching the low res glow go completely so my mum can’t reach me
to ask me where I’m at because I don’t want to say I want to stay in my tree
top where the leaves are already turning from green to brown in the long frown
of the sun at sunset before the ket came out; we’re raving in the middle of a
heat wave and the trees are fast becoming hangers for the leaves and their
fruit to dry out and die on the leaves and the branches are crooked and breaking the tree was
shaking as I climbed up but I didn’t care I like being closer to the sky I always
stare at it’s always black it’s always still and it always will be there’s a serenity
in its silent colours and its dandelion moon that’s blooming fully tonight but
its glow will soon slowly flake and flutter away as the day encroaches or the crowds of
rowdy clouds much darker than the bark beneath my floating feet; dry twigs shout in an unknown naturally grown
language they crunch and crumble under Creepers and clumsy couples fumbling on
the crackling floor and under bottles that have been launched from scrawny
hands at the night but they never quite make it and instead hit the ground and
shatter and with a clatter they fade into the tawny sticks and the leaves brown
bottles disappear better than the rest but the rest vanish too in time; there’s
almost a mind to the woods that makes it cast its haggard hood of aged foliage
over the broken and the decayed smoothing out the fraying edges we have made
not with the neurotic neutering of hedges like the housewives in my cul-de-sac do
but merely with a pile of leaves that have never spoken in their lives to me
before tonight right here and right now.
I listen but I do not understand the words of this land
anymore if I ever did and that fact makes me sore deep down but I scaled up
from the ragged jagged roots rising from the ground around an old oak tree to
the tip to the top moments ago not to converse but to see the sights of these
people in the lightless night and now I’m watching a group of girls in Topshop
onesies drop for the first time and I’m seeing their eyes light up staring at a
sullied plastic cup; we’re well beyond the static of the fire now and free from
its shadows though these onesie wearers don’t belong here I’m afraid they were
never to see the cup that’s being displayed on the dark of the marked up floor left
here by a toddler before sunset god knows how long ago back when the children
used to go here when they were small.
Now they’re big and
they’re here again but they’re still so small from where I sit a lit cig in my
lips rum in my hand hand on my heart I swear to god I don’t think they’ll ever
truly depart from this place not really not nearly as much as one thinks they
could or should depending on the person this cup and this drop will still irk
them decades from now when they’ll be wondering how and why and when they let
themselves go crying in counselling sessions a repeatedly resuscitated recession still piling up around
their ears sensorium overload towed out all those reluctant emotions and all
those teenage notions so much that they’ll start to see the stability of their existence
as a crutch and they’ll throw it aside to try to clutch to what was but they’ll
never quite catch it because it’s not them anymore and that realisation will
rot them to the core.
I’m back from the curls of the canopy to the flaming sea
amid the logs that are being flogged by the whips of these cocooning waves
tripping into and lipping everything in reach constantly; there’s a girl with no face close to the
flames her hair blowing around the dark of her jaw (the one who I think
arranged this jam) who’s talking about this guy she scores from now and how I should
tag along to pick up a few grams for the next time we meet here on her birthday
which I think I’ll skip on not because I hate the girl but because I just don’t
want to drop with these guys I’m going to pop my MD cherry with my oldest friend
who spends his weekends on New College ferries discussing literature and life over
cheddar and sherry.
At least that’s the stereotype that some people here would
have you believe from my own personal experience I can tell you the hype about
Oxbridge kids and their unhealthy amounts of wealth is a farce for the most part they don’t all watch Wimbledon from
centre court they don’t all snort their savings away through 50s the ultimate distortion
these people seem to have treading and threading through their heads is that
all Oxbridge students have a fortune to squander on drugs in the first place it
took me a while myself to face that fact it was hard to except that I was wrong
and that’d I’d placed my faith in the wrong sources that often course
confidently throughout my life but that fear is long gone now and I’ve
divorced myself from the slithering source. I’ve been wrong about so many
things the idea of my words being false doesn’t raise a bead of sweat to my
brow and that’s freeing, being free to be right or wrong being free to be here
and gone from minute to minute merely riding with life not trying to win against
it life’s a competition that I cannot deny however I don’t need to constantly
try curb stomp it into submission I can just sit and talk and walk with it and see what it has to say.
There is a sense of
the real of the here and now and how it could all go at any moment the fire
foaming at the mouth rabid the opposite of languid even in its dying days the
flames starting to head south down the logs into the dirt they’ll extinguish
soon no longer able to flirt with and hurt the air; sensible thought is dwindling
we’re all too gone to find more kindling so we walk up into the commons and we
lie down under the scars that we call stars; there used to be cows mooing here
decades ago I’m sure but now there are cars honking and booing on dark roads
freshly paved their lights making slaves out of the black of the night as they
slice through it around my fearful ears. I don’t like the noise I feel like the
last boy of the forest to be honest I’ve painted my jeans and my blazer in its
bark and it’s mud although it’s too dark to see the marks right now and I feel
alone I feel like I’m the only one tired of seeing cars and trucks and road
drawing blood and swabs of visceral vegetation from the veins of this part of
this nation in their motorised mobs; they’re the fires don’t let the suits and
tan fool you they may be human but they’re hands are spanning outwards to tear
the world down like the flames do when hidden in their mounds of smoke and only
cowards refuse to see it.
The girl with a shadowed face is still talking now about
this article from years ago about the disgraceful displays of child pornography
at Neverland that never happened or existed to my knowledge she goes to a sixth
college I think but I can’t be sure and don’t want to ask because I don’t want
a drunken girl with no face to take me to task on the fact that I’m not paying proper
attention; I’m just thinking of the clouds and the fact that they’re not there
to hide the stars like they usually are and it’s bizarre that they feel we
deserve to see their twinkling crinkling shimmering display; I know I should
feel dismay after all they die so that we can see them and it’s depressing in
theory the idea that in order to be seen as stars they have to corrode and implode
because that’s what people like to see but the feeling of awe at the sheen of
their demise won’t leave me be and it’s funny that it doesn’t even sadden me at
all. I remember being young in summer in Swaziland and living to catch a
falling one a kamikaze star raking glitter across the tar of the sky shooting
down into the world it died to lighten and enlighten angry tired burning
frightened it landed with a crash but it barely made a gash on anyone’s heart or
soul apart from mine.
I meet a girl hand outstretched upside down she was on the
ground her hair rustling in the farce of AstroTurf grass the cricketers put
down to keep the brown of the soil off their cricket whites I study the red on
green the green on red the colours colliding about her feathered head and its
foxy features that remind me of the creatures that used to live; where we blaze
and gaze out when we should be looking in they grazed on this spot but now they
rot under the black of the tarmac trying to reach even after death through the
cracks to the sky only to find there are no cracks just the absolute of industrial
motorway black. She’s here though, she’s alive, she thrives she strives for
more than most here no fear for the future to put sutures or her world view to
steal the hues from its spectacular sight; her association to an elegance and
her irreverence towards the scorn of the norm are qualities I thought caught fire and died out long
ago the fact that she still possesses them makes me want to know her some more so for the first time tonight I speak candidly
and she replies. We rise and chat legs cross on the green of the ‘grass’ the
sounds of other conversations have been getting in the way all night but not
now even when the other voices start to tower into Empire States and Shards I don’t
find it hard to ignore them. We talk about film and futures and features we
hope to make together and her plans and mine I didn’t think I’d find someone
who saw something the same way as I did at a place like this in the mist of
these people that used to meet under the All Saints steeple but that now fool
around in the forests instead.
It’s been a night and this girl has definitely been the highlight
it’s nice to find someone you didn’t expect to find from time to time to keep
life liveable we go our separate ways at the bus stop I felt like we could have
talked the moonlight away but we don’t this time but we will another fingers
crossed I usually get the feeling that friendships will be lost eventually but
not on this occasion.
I board the bus blissfully bored by the nothingness of the
N20 there’ve been plenty of sights tonight I won’t write them all down in one
sitting because for the most part I’d be resubmitting stories that I’ve already
told stories of drugs and drinks and wild egocentric suburbicidal kids that
never think and the horrors of house parties and nauseous tendencies of
neurotic neon lights and cautious cowards throwing trembling fists in pointless
fights and sudo-Bateman-ites and boring songs about the throngs of unjust
despair that the Little Man pretends tear his lazy little life apart accusing
everyone of being in the wrong. I don’t want to repeat myself there’s a wealth of
material to be found and I want to be bounding through it eternally.
I turn the key in the lock and walk into my flat there’s a
clock ticking the second hand flicking by and by swatting clotting into the
pure of unrecorded time I think back as I kick back in my room about what I saw
on my way back from the fumes of the fireside jam but before I was caught on
the camera of that late night bus, about a sign I saw walking back from Hadley
with the crowd I sat with on the fake of the floor.
‘Beware: live dog roaming free in Hadley Lodge’
I spotted the old mutt
black from face to tail through his gut sagging dragging himself along barely
to a shoddy shank of lamb through the B of the sign on the gate he was being
kept behind and it racked my mind that they could say this dog was free when he
was so clearly being held captive from B through the L through the D through the R through the
F all the way to the E and well beyond and above thick black lines on against the
sugar shaded sky composed of cloud now lock out the world and block him inside. The dog was slow to respond to my whistle and when he did he
didn’t come to bark or to charge and merely continued to gnaw on the gritty gristle
of what could be his last meal. I felt a connection between us I wanted to call
him over I wanted to feel close to another animal just like me. But I couldn’t.
They told me not to stay, they said I’d miss my bus and sadly instead of speaking for myself I listened and I obeyed.
No comments:
Post a Comment