First past the post

And so? So far, the summer has been spent thinking aloud and somehow managing to get tanned through my father’s old jumpers.

I miss faces. News doors don’t replace the old ones. But they help me forget what is behind the closed ones, if even for a moment.

Nor does the scent of berries. Pine trees. Roses on either side of a Midnight Garden. An idea has been planted just like a pot-plant reclining on some sunny sill in Brighton. Soon it grows and stretches down to the apartment below and pedestrians comment on its blooms and are distracted in a half-degree tilt of observation.

Do birds need fed in the summertime? What makes a musician- music or feeling?

Sand makes no demands, that I know. It’s like a puppet in the winds and blows a shadow on the shore. And when it moves no more, it speaks in shapes and shifts towards the moon which is always present in daytime. We are just blind to its blueness, its mooonness.

In the hostel with the uneven floors and tint-glass medieval windows, a girl named Rafa slept beside me and spoke Spanish in her sleep until the light crept through the curtain cracks. I wondered what beautiful dreams hauled their sorry shoulders over the flagstones and between her closed eyelids.

You can be shut in dreams, I thought, sleeping or waking.

And I ventured to the tower at eleven to think some more, and paint the cathedral. Three large apples stood behind me and commented on my lack of line, my vision, and my concentration.

I ate one of them.

Off to the cold north, the colder portion of the border that bleeds its slurs into machines. Talkshows, teatime, thorns and a return to the dutiful meantime.

They knew me by my burrow. A well chosen ford, narrow fit. Beyond, the carcass of a car, the peeling paint, the priest’s dwelling on the brown mountain. I wore my hands in gloves so I could dig down deep. I met a riverbed, I met a reef.

Now I hear this! This is it!

And I add Bous to my list of projects. Things to be done. Things to be scrawled alongside boxes and mentioned only once again.

A different class of weather meets our ears, here, you know. The savage gooseberry, the farm shop, the scales, the pund a punnet preached by idlers and wrens.

If I have taught a dozen, I have learnt a thousand.