Anyone passing through…

Might want to look at this competition to put together a book of bloggers’ writings in aid of the charity Warchild which is the brainchild of the Peach Blog .

I made a submission so it’s only fair I give a link even if I don’t have many readers yet.
It’s a really cool idea.

DEAD DOG

There was a dog’s corpse lying in the would-be-garden space at the back of the flats. The mass of flies crawling over it exploded lazily when Will stumbled past then immediately returned to their prior positions like they were attached on invisible elastic. The stink was faint but awful.

He was wearing only socks on his feet. His hoodie was up and covering his face. Despite the bright sun it was a cold day. In his right hand he held the grey and patchy remains of his trainers by the heel lips.

Custom stitched gold and off-white Adidas Dakotas was what they had been.

He had grown up in another, better world on a leafy street behind a glossy green door with a shining brass number ten. Up until he was eighteen he had been a prince of suburbia and had wanted for nothing. He grew up through milk; sherbet; mockingbirds; ninja turtles; South of France holidays; Genesis through PS2 computer games; an unlearned skateboard and electric guitar; Glastonbury tickets; cocaine and finally a custom stitched gold and off-white pair of shoes. They were the last purchase his parents had made for him before they died and had been the last tangible remainder. After the foreclosure of the mortgage he had got on alright for a while by drifting from one friend’s house to another. It wasn’t long though before his addictions caught up with him then left him in their dust and anything he had of value had been sold. He’d managed to arrest his fall just before complete rock bottom by taking on a council flat as the last charitable act by an acquaintance moving out of to get married. He’d found a job at HMV to cover the rent. The friends he had had back in his golden age were long since gone, moved either up or away in the world or both.

So he seemed not to notice the dog and the flies and the smell. He was preoccupied. His toe had caught on the top of a curb, tripping him. Just like that, the abstract latticed rubber sole of the left shoe had come away entirely. The sweaty bottom of his foot had touched the pavement directly when he stood up. The moment was as crystal in his mind as a car accident would have been.

They had already been unfixable but had retained enough cohesion to still serve as footwear. They couldn’t now, it was beyond question. His Adidas Dakotas with custom stitching. He had immediately removed both of them and began moving towards his home, like he was attached by invisible elastic too. How bright those three gold stripes had once been.

He set the shoes down parallel to the low red brick wall grown over with bind weed. The wall went nowhere and supported nothing. Like the entire architecture of the housing estate it had been conceived of by an untalented and impractical hack in the late sixties with a learned aesthetic that demanded geometric walls with no purpose. The area at the back here was intended as a replacement for the gardens that the higher up of the flats around it lacked. It was filled with nettles and piles of trash and a dog’s corpse. Will sat himself down on the wall and absent mindedly watched the flies. After five minutes he lifted a bony hand and slipped back his hood. The unwashed blond shock shone in the green and grey and dog’s blood rusty surrounds and stuck up at angles. He shrugged his shoulders and scratched behind his ears as they slid into coolness exposed to the air. After another five minutes he shucked his sweater. He shivered as his arms went to gooseflesh as he removed his T-shirt too and put it on top of his sweatshirt on the wall. It was an insubstantial body defined by its protuberances, the bumpy ribs and awkward elbows etc.

Five more minutes and he wetted his lips then rolled himself lazily but determinedly backwards off the wall and into the nettle patch. His naked back hit it first then after a few moments when his muscles had unclenched enough from paroxysm he was able to flip onto his front and stretch into a shape like a falling diver. Face first with eyes open. Fifteen minutes later he crawled from the complex of pulp and stems and limped back to the front of the wall to retrieve his vest and hoodie. He left his shoes and climbed the flight of steps up to his back garden slowly. That morning he had left the French window open when he left. He often did. He went in through it and drew the thick old curtains closed.

The dog lay there decaying all week.

 

- Lo speaking.

Someone always gets there before you…

If there’s anything that living in this time and place should tell you it’s that fact. Trying not to get depressed about it would be the unlocking key to getting by, I expect…

In any case here is an offbeat but intellectual Blog I just found that managed to be about ‘chiasmus, perigrinations, ruminations’ and ‘dilemmas’ all the way back in 2005 and is still going. Who knew my ‘favourite word’ was in such wide usage? It’s very good though:

Fido the Yak

Of course i don’t really have any readers so the rec seems more to be a reinforcement to myself.

The Yak manages to use the dialect of the high academy that I wish I was still using (sort of, sometimes) too. In fact the more I read (I’m reading more whilst writing this now) the more overlap of concern there seems. He uses bigger words and reads more books though, it appears.

That feeling where after working on a something you discover something else and in retrospect realise that if anyone ever saw both at the same time they would probably assume yours was a copy. I get that feeling constantly and don’t even think that it’s necessarily a generational thing. That’s saying something on my part as I tend to attribute most crappy parts of my life as to sweeping and mass produced afflictions in society. This one though I haven’t especially known other people get hung up on.

It sucks all the same.

- Al Speaking

Next up…

…something not poetry. Haven’t decided exactly what yet.

- Al

III.

Reading Tree Rings

 

I came upon

Summation and decay

Together breathing love

Recycled in each other’s air

Beneath the forest’s shade

Curled up inside the stump

Of an old bay

Recently cut

 

- Hylo Speaking

II.

A Dialogue

 

A silhouette.

Stop motion clouds behind a silo.

Farmsheds pale.

The plane whites out.

Nature runs down the zoetrope.

These are the things I begin to see.

 

Said the old man the walker met on the road.

And the walker who was a scientist said:

 

Dirtless earth, substantial air, etc.

These are well known formulations

to me. Like manipulations of imagery

to a city mind fond of rambling

and refined thinking, also.

They come easy.

 

They parted.

The path bends.

 

New phenomena include:

The hawthorn’s blossomed elation

into dissolution;

ladywort by a puddle,

weeping; campion

and wild lamb’s ear

shimmer under the shadow that summer

cuts out from the kestrel’s wing stencil.

 

I made good use of:

A British Pocket Field Guide to the Clouds and Grain,

by configuration of the RNA.

And intercepted communiqués of sorts,

from the greenwood, I peeled leaves

and was delighted. I found

a thing I had been seeking.

Confirmed and unearthed

the essential dying vehicle

so quick behind the palisade,

and pinned it like a butterfly.

i.e. what living is.

i.e. corroboration of my metaphors by an ad hoc

hiking kit of observation and nothing more.

It was evidenced and written down.

Once, I had a hand that caught a messenger.

I decoded.

Once, to the eye of the walker scientist,

all weathers were fine,

and laid bare the different elements.

 

These are the things we begin to see.

The zoetrope runs nature down

and out the white plane of

pale silos and farmsheds.

Cloud motion stops behind

a silhouette.

 

The old man said.

I.

 

…return

 

…returning

along this road

clichés feel new

again…

 

…constructions

seem true enough

to force laughter

out of the blue…

 

…desire and…

 

…red kites

back tumbling

over the trash

heaps.

 

…new country is.

 

…sky slogans…

 

…feeling the flare gun

parabola of the sun

for the first…

 

…swallow’s bow

and the recurve

of an elm sapling…

 

…the ecologies breed

the new eclogues…

 

…I see…

 

…It seems…

 

- Hylo speaking