David Hadley's Blog, page 141

The Weight of the Years

It was not easy, but then there aren’t that many easy things when you get older. Life is easy when you are young, even though – sometimes – it doesn’t seem like it.

Life is light when you are young; there is a floating freedom where life takes itself off like a kite caught by the wind, only a slender string holding it back.

As you grow older, there are more and more strings: marriage, work, children, all of them tying you to the ground. The kite of your life is heavier too, you know too much about how hitting the ground from height hurts. You no longer want to go high just to see how far up the sky is, you no longer want to be free to let the wind take you where it wants. There is too much down on the ground pulling you down, too much gravity to fly free.

Then there are the times when all those strings that tie you to the ground get entangled, when marriage and a new lover wrap themselves around each other, when the children become knots you can’t untie, when the string of work frays and comes apart, leaving you floating away from the work that tied you to the ground, but also defined you. When the string breaks you are no longer a kite, you become a toy for the winds of chance to play with, to rip you away from everything you’ve ever known, to send you spinning away into the clouds before crashing you to the ground someplace far from everything you’ve ever known.

Sometimes – even though it is never easy – you want to hold tight to those strings and never let go.

Monday Poem: No Gift To Bring

No Gift to Bring

I have no gift to bring,
this morning all I have
is a new day waiting hidden
behind curtains I can open

for you, to show you the day
spread out and waiting
for you to walk out into it.
I can take you by the hand

and lead you down the stairs
away from your warm dreams
left wrapped up in the sheets,
out into this cool morning

where the bright springtime sun
can light up your day and take you
barefoot across dew-damp grass
and out into the rest of your day.

When the Darkness was Gone

When the darkness was over, when the darkness had gone, it was like a new world out there once more. The trees were turning from cold grey sentinels back into green life and there were the early spring flowers too, bringing back colour to this once-dead world. When you turned eyes-closed to face towards the sun there was a feeling of warmth, of life.

When she came to me in the night, her body was no longer cold, shivering. She no longer clung to me, needing my warmth, my heat. Now she wrapped herself around me with her usual languid grace, not with urgency, a need to hold on to me to keep the cold at bay, but with another - more human – urgency; the need for closeness.

The day were beginning to spread too, out into the mornings, pushing the dawn further and further back into what had been the night. Now, we were awoken by birdsong and sunlight, rather than the freezing cold and the moaning wind. The evenings too, grew longer and we could feel ourselves relaxing, stretching out from the cramped, cold huddling of winter.

It seemed as though we, as with the rest of the world, were opening up, unfolding out of winter into the new brighter spring, as though everything was beginning once again.

The Door into Possibility

Then, there we were with the morning pooling around us under the bluest skies we had ever seen. The day waited there, just beyond the doorway for us to dive into it and swim together across its hours to some deserted island it had made for us. A place where we would fall on the beach together and lie there side by side, watching the few lonely clouds cross that uneventful sky.

There would be time; there would be time for both of us to take the time to explore each other. There would be no hurried fumbling with impatient clothes in a room rented by the hour, then no hurried escape back to a life that neither of us knew how to escape.

There would be time, time to watch the waves of the hours wash up on our beach, time to watch the changing of the tides. There would be too, at the edge of the beach, a hut where we could watch the sun setting over that sea of hours, setting on the old lives we had swum away from forever.

There would be a long night of languid motion and knowledge that this was a new forever and those lives we had left behind far across the seas would never come to drag us back to those lives where we’d lived so long in chains, shackled to slow dragging minutes, empty hours and wasted days.

The Crisis of Democracy in the UK

 

Earlier today it was announced by a governmental sacrificial spokesperson that the government has decided it needs more taxation money. Despite already taking most of people's money before they even have a chance to touch, stroke or fondle it, the government has now decreed that it needs to take even more of it. As the government spokesperson pointed out. 'After all, if we didn't take it off them, people would only go and spend it – more than likely on things we don't really approve of.'

However, a government-sponsored survey has recently disclosed that without some serious investment by the government, the British state will soon run out of walls up which they can piss away their tax revenues.

As the spokesman said: 'Unless there is a massive increase by about 20% per annum in the number of walls being built, then there is a very real danger that the government will no longer have enough walls in the country to piss taxpayers money up against.'

Some analysts are concerned that if the UK government runs out of these walls in the next few years, it could mean that governments in the future may have to piss tax payers money up against overseas walls, which could - in the long term – do untold harm to the ability of home-grown governments to waste hard-earned tax payers money in the way which UK voters have come to expect, which could – in a very real sense – lead to a crisis of democracy.

Thursday Poem: We Wear These Lives

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We Wear These Lives

We are here, but this
is not what we want
and here is not the place.

You are not quite who
I was looking for,
and I am not what you want.

This place is not the place
we expected to be.
We wear these usual lives
while we wait for life to begin.

We wait, ready to shrug off
these lives and step
into a new world we know
is almost within reach,

yet just too far to touch.
We know we will know it
only when we see it.

The Consolations of Nudity

Once upon a time you dressed so fine* which, to the minds of most philosophers does tend to undervalue the appeal of nudity, especially to those in the near vicinity of the undressed person – providing of course that the undresser is not too hard on the eye of the undressees nearby. In which case, there could be legitimate health and safety concerns, especially if the undressees all flee for the exits as a panicking mob.

Still, as they say: …..

Well, I'm pretty sure they would say something, after all in situations like this they tend to always have some pithy apophthegm to beguile us with, don't they?'

Smart-arsed bastards....

Anyway, putting that to one side while standing back to admire its rather fetching attractiveness for a moment....

It is time to step back for a moment from the... er.... rigours of philosophy to contemplate something rather less interesting than the possibility of someone in the near vicinity getting their kit off, which makes most philosophers themselves wish they'd spent less time amongst the dusty tomes and more time out meeting people with a disinclination to remain inside their clothing, but still - apparently – according to Boethius there are some Consolations of Philosophy, and he wrote that in prison, so - perhaps - he should know.

So, mind how you go**.

 

*Like a Rolling Stone – The Dylan

** Yes, It is a philosophy pun***

***Sorry****.

****Not really*****.

*****Sorry, that is.

For the Last Day

All those days that went by, leaving us alone together in that small room. We knew that, one day, that day would be the last day. We knew a day would come when we would walk out of that room together and then walk off, apart, alone; back to our separate lives and never see each other again, except – perhaps – across a crowded room where we would exchange brief, tentative, smiles of loss and regret before turning back to what our lives had since become.

There was always an urgency at the back of every moment we spent together, an unrecognised and unacknowledged understanding that these were stolen times; times taken out of our real lives. We knew, one day, the theft would be discovered and we would become fugitives from the lives we lived beyond that room.

We also knew that room was no more than a bolt-hole, a hideout; it was not a place where a new life could grow. Even if we managed to escape our old lives to build a new one together, we knew that it would not be in that room and that outside that room what we had would only ever, could only ever, crumble into dust in the harsh light of the outside world.

So, one day, when that final day came we were ready for it, we were expecting it, and we knew what to do as we kissed for one last time and stepped out through the door of that room, back into a world without each other.

Monday Poem: Dance the Spring

Dance the Spring

While singing songs to distant skies
we step and turn as we step and learn
to move again as spring returns.

That winter was so cold and hard
it needed many dances before
the first slow signs of spring were seen

and living could return once more
to take us on, out of the cold
and darkness, through the promised spring

towards the golden days of summer.
A season when it seems as though
the winter days could never return

even as the days grow shorter
again, while falling slowly towards
the winter like the leaves that fall

each floating slowly down to earth
twisting from the oldest trees
all while the birds prepare to chase

the sun across these skies above
and leaving us alone to face
the long cold nights and wondering

if we have the strength to dance
the spring and summer back again.

Public-Funded Art

Then there was the thing. Of course, those of us who saw it were rather impressed, especially when it caught the light as the sun rose in the mornings. However, since this was Britain, the sun often didn't bother to get up all that often, preferring to just let the clouds get a slightly lighter grey as the night's rain turned into the day's drizzle.

Some thought it was one of those sculptures that the publicly-funded arts bodies like to spend our tax money on so that they can give each other awards for it and tell each other how wonderfully inclusive it all is, while the rest of us wonder how long it will be before it falls over or some local freelance entrepreneur nicks it and melts it down for scrap.

Other's - citing the overwhelming avian evidence – thought it was some new method of attracting the town's hordes of feral pigeons all into a single location so they could use it as a form of communal toilet.

Some thought it was just one more way the area's politicians could get themselves on local telly – which was of course true – but since no-one actually watches or cares about the local TV news apart from wondering what on earth the newsreader thought she was doing when she chose her costume, the brief clip of the unveiling ceremony mostly went unnoticed and the local MP was still totally unrecognised as he walked the streets, which on later recollection of his stint as the local representative in the Houses of Parliament made him think he was rather lucky to have got away with it.

Still, there were some others – mostly the local loons who gathered underneath it to drink tinned lager – staying well out of the range of the pigeons above, of course – thought it was an alien space craft. Much to everyone else’s dismissive scorn, which unfortunately turned rather sour when the aliens emerged from their ship and proved the inebriated UFO watchers were right all along.