Something had to be done with the entropy of me.  With a customary fug of overwhelm, it took a while – only over twenty years. The oldest of chasms yawned wide open via the most extraordinary of recent events.

Like the turn of a very blank page, I revisited the cold, dewy condensation of a best friend’s car.  Alert in a morning where Are Am Eye crosshatched staples to the redaction of my first line; a vehicle-scattered Snowdonian valley melting bass and time, muffled and then exact with each beat in the proudest of clouded forests.

The scene incessantly repeated from eighteen to thirty-three, each time disappearing further from sight with the heat-death of dependence – and yet via the vessel of these sublime occasions, this instance of remembrance transcended any oblique nostalgia.

I was transported back to the girl who threw her stomach on to snow, to stop it.  Back to the clutching hand of ripped Rizlas, browned inner fingers, Lionrock and subscription to The Face magazine. I was moved to when we climbed over styles to sit in long, sun-warmed grass, and I pretended not to have been kissed – and then losing you.  The paralysis of presumed failure and adolescent heartbreak was as present as my usual absence.  All things precious and swallowed in the vortex of asceticism regained a vitality.

I opened up the numb – the numb was finally open.

 

 

If you live in Brighton, or are visiting, one of the many wonderful phenomena, is to see the starlings swarm and swirl as they dance around the Palace Pier. The video is a little basic and will take a some zooming to see them in their full emergent, leaderless beauty, but hopefully you can see them against the retiring peach of the seaside sunset.

 

I write on my half day,

stand tall on my full day,

flick the ashes from my corduroy jeans,

with pock marks immortalised as burns –

the full despair of misspent time.

I curl up into a ball hereonafter,

and move mountains,

the forever – who would have thought –

a meeting of hands that are not there.

Moved and weathered veins,

predicting a path

of lattice and overture.

A delicate crossing of fingers,

in the opaque of the juridical.

Care not, care all.

 

By Leon Jean Baptiste Sabatier