My Hair Shirt

On the fringe of Nothingness lies a choice: tell the truth or live the lie. The lie is inviting but empty – a ballet of fear and curiosity. The truth is inviting and full as an autumn barrel. Just as river currents speed up here and there, so memories part and stream around us. My eyes pullulate with big gummy tears. We hang suspended in the heart, skulking in the jumble of each other's foibles.

'Tell the truth or live the lie.'

With a big clumsy boot heel, the life we dreamed of often is scraped in the dust. The familiar turns a stranger. Night falls and buries us alive.

'Tell the truth or live the lie.'

I stumble on, a wind from nowhere pushing me. Turning back into the corridor of our lives – a station on the underground of intimacy – I cling to your face like a fly. Your eyes are little crucibles.

"Perhaps we could adapt to a new life," you reflect, "free from all this language."

Across the blush of obscure dawn, we stare at each other like decorative bookends.

 

 

The Past

Archbishop Ussher of Ireland proved
that the world began at midnight on
the 23rd October, 4004 BC.

Perhaps you thought as once I did the Past, which made the Present possible, was the crystalline palace of ancestors? Or that Time was a mountain pass and what we thought must be a mirage turns out to be an impassable wall that makes us feel we're moving forwards in Time but standing still in Space?

Perhaps. But this is no time to discuss our appraisal of the flaws in Paradise. No, Time resides in what we like avoiding.

Does that wreck my theory of looking at maps of the past and willing ourselves there? Perhaps.

The pass is preposterous. That should read 'past'.

 

 

The Author

In the corner the fridge hums, hungry as a Venus Fly Trap. The author – he who owns the fridge – does not relish the idea of trying to buy back copies of his own book but, on seeing his reflection in its sheer chrome surface, realises that his work is less plausible after all these years of suffering his own personality, and so the contract begins...

'There were once these two towers, I mean brothers; I mean... there were once just two reasons for doing anything Power and love, ah yes, Love, soi disant and yet, so distant. There were once these two lovers...'

Morning parks a thunderstorm above the author's roof. He is made thinner by the dimming light.

'... and then your feet beat you away... My stomach made a falling leaf. So this is how you leave, I thought, listening to the blunt clock as I emptied the bottle...'

The clock's hands fan a never-ending present. He writes his billets doux long since his lover has gone. He writes his at dawn; can't justify it – feels well short of par; the words stumbling from his pen like a line of drunks.

'Love scratched in the dust with sticks will blow away. We carved our names in bark but, like the tree that falls in a distant forest, at night, whilst no one else is there, it all took place whether we were looking or not.'

The author lives off the headstones in their own back yard.

 

The Short Career

Coming from the West we have already come
From the Land of the Dead, our journey was long –
We left them there snapping at butterflies.

from an Aztec mourning ritual

"Life's emigrants extend their filaments. The chapels grunt below their spluttering flues. We haul forgotten litanies to our lips, opting for the joke in the garden; the crease between Belief & Knowledge. Hope is not enough for what's not yet happened."

You were already speaking like a ghost when you slipped on the muck of existence.

It was never you, but the thought of you that caused the pain; the truths we carried in us. Not that there was much at the end of things: a few pieces of the jigsaw scattered here; a few there.

People seem to live and die with such great crust.

Explanationless planet.

 

Copyright © Andy Brown, 2004.