a forty sixth poem...'islands'

Returning to the mainland

After a tour of the islands -

Nothing unseen,

Untouched, unmoved.

It’s no surprise

I can’t stand

To set eyes on you,

And yet can't bring myself

 To look

The other way.

an eighty third story...'bath time'

The air is thick with steam, a film of condensation on the white-washed walls, the painted ceiling, on the slippery, wet linoleum floor.  The single-pane sash window is fogged with mist.  There’s a maroon coloured bath towel, and a bundle of saturated clothing discarded alongside the big, grey-green copper bath tub, supported by four great brass feet.  In the bathroom mirror someone has scrawled bath time in toothpaste using their fingers, the words bath time illuminated by the shaving light, casting a soft, subterranean glow through the cloud of vapours rising from the bath tub. 

On a thin glass shelf underneath the bathroom mirror there is an ashtray filled with moist ash and cigarette ends, and a half-finished tumbler of cheap red wine, fermenting in the damp.  The sink bowl has lime scale residue around the plug hole, there are scraps of left over blue tissue paper flecked with blood, and in the soap dish, a razor blade. 

Attached to the painted ceiling is a steel bath rail, and from it hangs a faded yellow bath curtain, shrouding one half of the bath tub.  Behind the shroud is his fleshy silhouette, lying with his bare back to you, and with both bare arms resting on the sides of the bath tub.  The taps have not been shut off, and there is a steady drip from the taps into the soap-sudded bath water. 

Time slows.  You catch your breath a moment. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You notice the slowly evaporating impression of his footprints on the slippery, wet linoleum floor. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You smell for the first time the sweetness of his tobacco smoke hanging suspended in the thick, steamy air. 

Drip, drip,
drip drip. 

You wonder why he always comes back to you, why he ever left you in the first place.  

Drip, drip
drip drip.

Then, as you reach to pull back the bath curtain, you wake in a patch of sweat, find your reading light still burning, and the early morning raindrops sliding like slow, silent tears down the bedroom skylight above the unmade bed, where you - wrapped in your stained bath robes - have been plumbing the depths of another uneasy sleep.    

an eighty second story...'in the future, when all's well'

Gadgets spawned by the technicum were everywhere, and their control was almost absolute, even over the earthlings that had created them in the first place, that had subjugated the entire animal kingdom before then.  Earthling adults had regressed back into childhood, button pressing and screen goggling, taking their ethics, and half-baked ideas about humanity with them.  The distinction between what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’ in latter day morals, had been lost.  Reality was dead.  And, for the most part, pulling the arms off a new born baby in the realm of cyberspace was thought of as nothing more, or less, than tearing the wings off a daddy-long-legs in the old world. 

There was no place for nostalgia, the perpetrators of hippy ideals were talked of in cyber-schools as quasi-sixteenth-century-religious heretics, their doctrine of free and universal love described as ‘unclean’ and ‘sordid’, or simply 'irrelevant'.  Recreating paradise lost on a hill in the forest had, in some hyper-spheres, become a running joke in that earthlings were convinced by their own conceit that they, thanks to their technological revolution, were in the process of creating their own paradise in the future (always in the future!).  A paradise you didn’t have to share with anyone else, all your hopes and dreams could be made hyper-reality – if you could, in fact, remember back far enough to hold onto any of these non-binary, non-linear phenomena.

After all, the memories of most earthlings were now inextricably linked up to Google Mind.  In its infancy Google Mind required the user to wear headgear similar in weight and size to a latter-day bicycle helmet, and needed Google Glasses to achieve synchronic function.  Google Glasses had developed to become ‘AI’ contact lenses, and Google Mind, a silicon mole about half a centimetre in diameter, fused to either the right or left temple (depending on whether your pre-cog tests came back as showing if you might be more inclined to think with the right or left side of your brain).  Google Mind essentially monitored your routine behaviours and put thoughts into your head based on what the technology thought you desired, thoughts you would then almost always act upon, thereby leaving behind a form of memory in the aftermath of your actions, which would then prescribe you future (Google driven) actions.

Meanwhile, conscience was also, for many earthlings, a derivative of Google Mind: mild to severe headaches could be introduced if you tried to go beyond the boundaries of where technology decided you might, or rather should, want to venture.  Conscience (as once conceived), it was repeated ad nauseam, had led to the destruction of the old world, for it had meant latter day earthlings acting together, often with purpose, sometimes against authority – and as every-single-body now knew, authority was there to facilitate happiness, and the move towards future paradise always (incidentally, the phrase at all times no longer had much relevance, time being an archaic vestige of the old world, and obsolete reality).

Nevertheless, there were a few earthlings who had clung to the old ways, but being outside of the technicum, they were paid virtually no mind at all, free to wander the British Isles, and love (naked sex!), live, take and give.  Google Mind referred to these earthlings simply as strays, not part of the system, too much of a minority to worry about.  Paradise would happen in the future without them, too bad.

Strays were, however, defined by Google Gospel (a version of the latter-day Google powered Wikipedia) as follows: ‘feral, or ex-domesticated earthlings, sub-AI, low IQ’.  If you were to pursue your search for more information on Google Gospel, Google Mind, of course would pre-sage you and deliver a splitting headache.  Some clever earthling had come up with a slogan for this eventuality that read as both a warning and an invitation: ‘Don’t stray from the path to the future’.

The genius of Google, and the three or four other organisations that had monopolised the technicum (the world), and thereby achieved an unprecedented grasp on the day to day existence of earthlings, was in understanding the propensity of latter day earthlings to live for tomorrow, for something better than they had had in the past, or in the now, as well as the unrivalled avarice and greed alive, or at worst dormant, in many of them.  A promise of a better future, with more for you was an easy sell, especially when it came with blue screens, flashy buttons and the apparent luxury of choice.

With regard to choice, again Google and co realised that earthlings only needed the promise of choice; in the eventuality (with perhaps the constituent ingredients of earthling lunches, dinners aside), Google and co knew earthlings preferred to have somebody else, or indeed something else do their own thinking, and lead their behaviours.  Arriving at the concept of Google Mind, was ironically, a no-brainer.

Heaven’s in here proclaimed an early advertisement for Google Mind, with an evidently (self)satisfied customer pointing to his new headgear.  The tag line ran You can choose!

But the irony was lost even then, and has all but been eradicated from life today.

a sixth reflection...'a lesson in birdsong'

Since I came out the other evening about my passion for birds, I have noticed people observing me in a different way, almost as if one-step (further?) removed, through binoculars.  They squint and peer, trying to detect what on earth is going on with me, and where on earth such a strange inclination could possibly have arisen from; oh if I could tell! 

..so I will.

You see when discussing my passion for birds, I must begin by saying I don’t mean the dolled-up, flightless variety you find fluttering loaded eyelashes across dance floors in empty city bars (though some of them can be very nice, thank you), I mean the swallow on the telegraph pole, the nuthatch in the May grass, the cuckoo somewhere at the bottom of a Spring garden.

Whereas I used to lie awake, Sunday morning, hearing nothing but my partner’s drunken snores, and dim echoes of the night before; now I delight in the dawn chorus - my heart leaps and my head clears (although my partner still snores through all of this).

I swear it is a religious experience, for the Jesus-people church bells on a wedding day must be the same as birdsong on a Sunday morning: brite, gay, heralding the start of new-life.

These delicate little creatures make such a joyous noise!  All except crows, of course, with their tedious rasping, but never mind, crows are at least quite something to behold. 

Have you ever been outside in open land on a heavy, humid day, when the sky is purple and thunder is in the air?  You can sense the electricity crackle in the brooding clouds above - look up and the crows will be circling, black as doom: you're in love.

Anyhow..

From my bedroom I am fortunate enough to have a view of the municipal park.  There are several tall plane trees bordering the road that runs around the park, and in summer the parakeets flock to them, sit chattering in the branches, and Saturdays, I like to listen - good thoughts come.

Indeed, the sum of my passion for birds is understanding the art of happily going nowhere fast in accepting the present, future and past.  In their movements birds are like humans: they sit and then flit, flit and then sit, however, when they sit, they seem to do so with a lightness of being far beyond many of us for the laws of physics, and the inexorable toll of gravity, do not apply, not to mention the man-made construct of time.

Lying in bed, listening to the birdsong, makes me wonder how we’ve conspired to make life so hard for ourselves, and how we can lift one another from our earthbound existence, pigs in swill.

Let's start by lending an ear, and being still.

an eighty first story...'with/without'

Vernon was a hot-shot in the office, driving his team on and on to more and yet more commercial success.  He’d get to work the same hour as the four Polish ladies who cleaned desks, vacuumed carpets at dawn each morning, and leave as Joel, a cheery, old, silver-winged West Indian arrived as night security.  If the employee of the month award was not a token motivational tool, Vernon would have won hands down every single time, and spent most of the year holidaying in Cancun, or any other number of exotic destinations.  Behind his desk, neatly arranged in relief, to draw the eye of perspective clientele, were several business accolades, a bronze statue here, a glass rosette there – all of course for the company; Vernon realised personal gratification held little sway, nor did he want to appear self-congratulatory.  Besides, there was always work to be done!

When, as a junior apprentice in retail, Vernon had been told by his supervisor that there was never anything that did not need seeing to, even if that something was as trivial as rearranging the stationery cupboard so employees in need of a biro would see a stationery cupboard refreshed, and feel slightly better-inclined toward their employer, the advice had stuck.  Busyness, from then on, pervaded Vernon’s work life, and his dedication and apparent attention to detail had not gone unnoticed.  Vernon had become, in essence, the archetypal Company Man, his name a by-word for the most valuable commodity of all: dependability! Ergo, he was a success.

But, when at last Vernon would leave past Joel - who was sat in the foyer each evening, defacing the Evening Standard crossword, smiling contentedly to himself – and exit through the swing doors, out of the office, and onto the street, Vernon had very little to depend on, and a duty to no-one, which is, of course, what he dearly longed for.  Vernon had work friends, and he would go out for drinks with them, talk business, and gyms, new diet regimes, cars, and so forth, but sooner or later the conversation would turn to family, and Vernon couldn’t bare the smugness of it all for very long.  Dear God, Please Help Me! he thought, but to no-one, or nothing in particular. 

On a rare evening away from the office when Vernon had some female company in Alana, his new secretary, she asked him who he considered his God to be.  Vernon replied without hesitation, ‘why, me!’ – not even a trace of smile.  Alana laughed, and Vernon then felt the desperate need to qualify his assertion, but all he could manage was some mumbo jumbo about his goal being to bridge the gap between the real and imaginary Self, which didn’t succeed in qualifying his assertion.  Alana laughed again, and tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder, announced rebelliously that she was an atheist anyway, which made Vernon feel confused, daft and conceited all at once.

So, unable to find something, or someone to believe in, in his private life, Vernon naturally compensated by extending the length of his professional life, putting in hour upon hour of over-time.  The office was his kingdom; his job title, his crown; his expensive suit, his royal robes; and his business accolades, his sceptre and wand; yet, in the realm beyond and outside - the world where Joel lived quietly and unassumingly (married, twice divorced), Alana, Vernon’s work friends, the Polish cleaning ladies, too – Vernon felt as naked as the Emperor in New Clothes, and as lonely as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Indeed, Vernon had been for some while in some part convinced that the world was weary, stale and flat, and unprofitable in the sense that all his attempts at out-of-office relationships ended in feelings of inadequacy.  Vernon was half a person, his right side, scrubbed up, professional and dapper; his left, in saggy jeans, and a baggy jumper.  Most often he left his right side at work.

Then one Friday it happened to be Comic Relief.  Whilst, for Vernon, this represented anything other than a relief, as well as a glut of bad television, in a weaker moment he had agreed to allow a dress-down day at work, in aid of charity.  Each employee could wear their casuals into the office, and in return drop £2 in a bucket marked ‘Barnardo's’.

On the Friday morning in question, Vernon awoke with trepidation, and over-looked breakfast in favour of rifling through his drawers in search of something remotely acceptable to wear to dress-down day - something other than his saggy jeans, and baggy jumpers.  Dress-down day really meaning dress-up day.  Having never really had a woman’s hand to guide him in matters of fashion, Vernon’s wardrobe resembled a charity shop rail even the verger’s wife might have been through and disregarded. ‘Oh it’s no use’, sighed Vernon, flopping on his bed, and for the five minutes he had before he needed to leave the flat for work, he actively considered pulling a sicky.

Nevertheless, Vernon had going for him two things: his aforementioned dependability, and to his credit, an occasional sense of humility.  In the end he reasoned if he was going to look like stupid, then at least he had the excuse of it being Comic Relief, when all including the presenters of Newsnight let down their hair, and revealed their true, and cringe-worthy selves; he too might even make a show of it..

..alas, fast-forward eleven hours, and there alone in the office we find Vernon, unsure whether to go sleep on his desk with a wallet file for a pillow and a fire-blanket for cover, or find his expensive suit and go out.  As goes the saying, it’s a man’s world, but it would be nothing without..

A Necessary Holiday

Last autumn I took a holiday to Scotland. Going further west than Loch Lomond, where most tourists will sojourn, I visited Faslane and stayed on the shores of Gare Loch. I wasn’t there for mountaineering or whiskey touring or even playing on the countless golf courses around there; the trip was a pilgrimage to the Royal Naval Armaments Depot and the launching site of the Vanguard class of submarines, those monoliths of the sea that carry the Trident nuclear missiles. I could look on the Faslane base for a few minutes from behind the razor wire before being shooed off. From the shores of the loch, I could see the hillside under which some 200 nuclear warheads are stored. Settled behind giant steel doors, concrete and earth, I could feel their hulking power stretching across the water of Loch Long to where I stood in my anorak. Coulport is the name of the place where they are stored, just a couple of miles from the Faslane base and less than thirty miles from Glasgow.

Loch Long and Gare Loch are simply branches of the same inlet of the sea, piercing the map of the Scottish west coast with two prongs of blue. As a site for launching submarines, Gare Loch is sublimely suited: it is deep, isolated and narrow-mouthed. Since mid-1968, there has not been a moment when UK submarines armed with nuclear weapons have not been at sea, cruising in secret preparation to unleash forces more than a thousand times greater than those that levelled Hiroshima. These days, the Vanguard submarines are armed with the Trident missiles, built in the US. I was unreasonably troubled by the fact that our nuclear deterrent is American. The silent musing of the loch gave way to paranoid fears that the White House maintained control over the firing of these fearsome armaments.

The energy released by a nuclear bomb detonation is split roughly equally between a blast output, which tears landscapes, buildings and human bodies to shreds, and the heat energy output, which is sufficient to vaporise flesh. Considering facts such as these brought me some comfort and perspective; at least, I hoped they did.

I shared my fresh and detailed appreciation of the UK’s nuclear deterrent over a drink with the proprietor of my B&B. He trained a grey and inscrutable gaze at me for a while after I stopped speaking.

‘You have a wedding ring on,’ he said.

I fiddled with it nervously. ‘Yes. I can’t seem to get it off yet. Not literally, I don’t mean my fingers are too wide. But it’s there. Probably shouldn’t be anymore.’

‘I take it she didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust.’ This was rather sarcastic, I thought, given that I was a customer.

‘She’s not dead.’

He had nothing to say to that. So he swigged his bourbon (a deliberately obtuse choice, I thought) and spoke about other things.

‘You know, it isn’t usual to have holiday-makers stay here. We’re for the workers at the base. Men come up from Barrow; stay for a bit while working on the boats.’

‘Submarines.’

‘They call them boats. There was one chap staying a while back, he was in charge of periscopes. Just think, all day he just fooled around with periscopes. Moved them up and down, checked the camera worked…’

‘It’s a living,’ I said circumspectly.

‘It gets me though. These boats are carrying some of the world’s most powerful weapons, but they still need to poke a little tube up out of the water to see what’s what.’

It struck me then that my host wasn’t really all there. Or perhaps just a blethering drunk.

The next morning, I went back down to the shore. I was very keen to see a submarine either arrive or leave the base. Visions of a tremendous surge of water and the surfacing of an unspeakable creature chopped through my mind. I waited all day, but there was no movement out on the loch. It wasn’t like tide times: there wasn’t a publicly published schedule of the dispatch and return of the most valuable assets of the MOD.

‘What, would I be calling the Kremlin if there was?’ I said aloud to the sea and the wind.

Then I said: ‘Damn, my references are a little dated.’

Appalled with cold as night fell, I went back to the B&B. The owner was more obviously drunk tonight, yet less prolix.

I helped myself to a whiskey this time, as he started to tip forward on the banquette, chin to chest. I drank my scotch and looked out of the window, listening to the gathering gale. My reflections before bed were fallacious in their reading between unlinked lines of my life. I thought: just like the mind of my wife, it turns out the weapon depot and submarine base are closed to me. I thought: the nuclear warheads are a symbol of my wife’s terrible power – she rarely detonated, but the threat of detonation was what split us.

Shaking my head at my own tipsy allegories, I tugged off my wedding ring and deposited it in the proprietor’s glass of bourbon before heading to bed.

an eightieth story...'another story about shoes'

Norma awoke at 6AM to the pointless inevitability of another day.  How long will it last?! She yawned and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, turned over on her side and shut off the pathetic electronic bleating of her Shaun the Sheep alarm clock.  Too often these days she wore the wrong trousers to work, and worse it seemed, the wrong shoes - for how can one accept oneself if wearing the wrong shoes?

Style, alas for Norma, had always eluded her, or at least she felt over-looked by the vanities of fashion.  Nothing fitted her curious body shape: she was no pear, rather, as she hastily spread-thin her morning toast, a damp loaf.  Cardigans were too long, dresses too loose in areas where the vogue was for them to cling, and her shoes..well!

On the daily commute into the city for work, she never ceased to notice the immaculately dressed.  And to Norma it appeared even the female guard, in her strict, boyish uniform, had on a more preferable outfit.  But, at least winter had now arrived, Norma sighed, since her duffle-coat concealed all.

..all, of course, except her shoes.

If the train journey into town from the home-counties was bad enough, the short, connecting tube ride to the office presented all sorts of opportunity for flagrant humiliation: from the city boys in their pin-stripes, to the well-fed, big-haired, rosy-cheeked London secretariat.  Being in close proximity with these other-worldly creatures made Norma blush and go hot under the collar of her blouse.  As usual, most of her highly-sexed fellow passengers gazed at the floor, or at their manicured reflections in their shiny, expensive shoes.

Norma’s desk was situated towards the back of a large, air-conditioned, open plan office on the sixth floor of an impressive glass monstrosity in an area where every other eye-sore belonged to a law firm, or an investment bank.  Norma worked for a building firm.  The man at her neighbouring desk was simply called John, he was Norma’s team leader, and among many of his curiosities, he had no legs.  While this represented a profound inconvenience to John, to Norma it bought a little light relief.

No shoes, no blues.

Nasty, pointy, itchy, scratchy, annoying little shoes!

Standing around the kitchen area during one of many tea and/or coffee breaks, Norma’s eyes were particularly horrified this day, by the scarlet-red, buckle-strap slippers her co-worker Eloise had chosen to wear.  They really were outlandish, sexy at the same time; no carpet would be too good for them worried Norma, whereas any old shag-pile might disappear as fast as it could crawl at the sight of her footgear.  Witches shoes!

Then over lunch at the office canteen, came the news that Rhian, another of Norma’s co-workers had become engaged to be married at the weekend.  Rhian, who had the physical carriage of a pregnant rhinoceros, said she was: ‘happy all over’ (which must have been very happy indeed), as well as ‘thrilled from tip to toe’.  At this Norma shot a swift glance under the table, even Rhian’s shoes seemed as if they belonged on her fat pads, moreover, someone else evidently thought so too.  Norma spent the remainder of Friday afternoon mooning like Cinderella’s step-sister.

At 5pm every Friday, the management, in their good grace, would arrange after work drinks at a trendy cocktail bar nearby.  It was always loud, always crowded, full of legs, feet, and shoes.  The jukebox played hits from the 1980s to everyone’s unapparent discomfort, including Wham and Careless Whisper.  Unsurprisingly, the line ‘guilty feet have got to no rhythm’, positively shrieked out to Norma, and made Eloise’ scarlet-red slippers sparkle even more brightly. 

The evening dragged on, in an orgy of excitable patter about the future, to Norma, a big black-hole.   Holidays, engagements, weddings, baby-showers, all floated in and out of the conversation, but the more Norma’s head swam with jubilee punch, the more talk of these things sunk her gin-soaked spirits, and when the time came for her to leave, it was raining outside.

On the walk home from the station to the sanctuary of her bedroom, in a rare fit of peak, Norma took off her shoes, and deposited them in a rubbish receptacle. Gone, forever.  The uneven surface of the wet pavement hurt her feet at first, but by the time she reached her front door, she felt nourished by rebellion, and cleansed; she had at last had forced herself to walk on (metaphorical) hot coals, ready to turn a corner.