David Hadley's Blog, page 142

Thursday Poem: The Shadows Unfold

The Shadows Unfold

Here everything you’ve ever known.
lies on the ground in front of you.
You cannot turn away and look
towards a new bright day out there.

We have seen all we have seen, yet
it throws its shadows dark across
the walls of all our minds, unable
to break these chains we forged, we watch
each memory unfolding here
before us, unable to turn away.

The day begins as everything
now starts again, while shadows grow
unfolding themselves here in front
of us, each watching them encroach.

But what else can we do except
let every shadow fall across
our days, while waiting here to feel
the warming light from this morning sun.

Human Origins and Out of Africa

Even then, though, there were far too many of them to be entirely comfortable. After all, the fear of such things is almost instinctive in humans, probably dating back to when our ancestors still lived in the trees. For in those times, fleeing from an opinion pollster would have been limited by the lack of available sturdy branches for escape. If you have been corned on a fruit-bearing branch, for example, there is often no other way but out and then - rather too rapidly - down, when confronted by a clipboard-wielding hominid.

Archaeologists now tend to believe that it was a desire to escape questionnaires that led to the Neanderthals moving ever-northward to escape being asked their opinions on whether it had been a mistake to descend from the trees, or whether the ice-age would have been managed better by a party more interested in expansion of the state welfare system than one devoted to increasing mammoth hunting.

After the discovery of rudimentary clipboards carved from buffalo bone in Africa, it has - now – been assumed that homo-surveyist first appeared back in the very early days of humanity, which flatly contradicts the earlier assumption that opinion polls and market research had to wait until civilisation appeared in the fertile delta around the Tigris - Euphrates triangle.

However, it now seems that there has been a parallel evolution – of sorts – between normal human species, such as: homo-erectus, homo-hablis, homo-footballist, homo-blokedownthepubist and the homo-surveyist line going back way beyond the point where the human line split from the rest of the great apes. This goes – some scientists say – towards explaining the mysterious behaviour observed in the wild, where one orang-utan will approach another orang-utan whilst holding a large leaf in one hand and a pointed twig in the other, then attempt to proceeded to engaging the other in some sort of ritualized communication, usually much to the annoyance of the disturbed orang-utan, who was - up until then – quietly going about its own business.

Chasing the Possibility

Then what?

These things do not happen in isolation, entire of themselves. There is a before and there is an after… always.

There are those moments from the time you first see each other across some distance: a street, a crowded room, a path through the woods, or whatever it is. That time when you feel that the shape in the distance resolve itself not only into a fellow human being, but there is something there – even at a distance – that makes you turn towards each other.

I – of course – never believed such things, never though such things were possible, not until we saw each other through the crowd of some party. It was as though she came into focus and the rest of the scene: the people, the room, the music, the babble of voices, all faded out until I was staring down some tunnel of distance to where she stood, staring back at me.

It lasted only for an instant, but at the same time it felt longer; as though a whole lifetime passed between us.

Then, when that moment was over she was lost again in the crowd as a couple danced between us.

I picked up my drink and moved off, steering through the crowd like some ship threading through a reef-strewn archipelago. I tried to avoid contact with the people I passed, pretending not to hear when I heard my name called, and not noticing when someone touched my elbow,

Halfway there, though, some woman whose name I couldn’t recall stood in front of me and demanded to be kissed, then whispered in my ear that she would like us to find somewhere quieter and fuck ‘…like last time,’ she whispered, her hand moving down and squeezing. ‘I’m glad some part of you remembers me,’ she said, stroking her hand along it and trying to laugh off the hurt I saw in her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ I whispered back, pressing myself into her hand. ‘But I need to find someone… urgently.’

‘Won’t I do?’ She pouted, her fingers already playing with the tab of my zip.

‘Darling… there you are!’

I couldn’t remember her name or when we’d met, but I did remember her husband. As she turned away towards him, I slipped away and made my way over to where I had seen my mystery woman staring back at me.

She’d gone, of course.

Monday Poem: Not Suitable for Children

Not Suitable for Children

Not suitable for children, due to small parts,
Our conversation pauses, as quick steps
Dash about in the hallway beyond.

Only to begin again as the door
Stays closed, shutting out the sound
Of life and play and yet another song.

We used to know the words of so many songs.
We sang them together, driving on
Down all those long roads of living,

Until that day we parked here;
Ready to learn a new song of home.

A place for all we left unsaid to sit
And brood and wait. Ready to fill
All the pauses in our stilted conversations.

Down in the Valley

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It was not that unusual. Even though I had never seen one before, I knew that such things existed… or were – at least – rumoured to exist.

There were stories. There were always stories in places like this. Everything became a story, sooner or later. In a small, out of the way, place like our village, isolated at the bottom of the high valley and often cut off from the rest of the country, stories were what we told each other all the time. It was a form of connection that couldn’t be broken, telling us who we where and how our world worked.

Our world, though, the world of our village didn’t – and doesn’t even now – work in the same way that the world outside our valley worked. We knew that. We knew we had to be cautious around strangers, not letting them know our secrets or that this world, the world of our valley, was not their world.

So, that day when I was out, deep in the woods, as night fell, I knew I would not be alone. I knew there would be someone there in the woods, someone who knew the secrets of how our world worked.

Even so, when I came across the clearing and saw the flickering shadows cast by the fire and I saw the three women, their naked bodies painted with symbols and sigils, dancing around the fire, wailing their incantations to our moon – the moon that lights our valley as it lights no other place on this Earth – then I knew something was about to happen, some fracture was about to open between our valley and the rest of the land that lies beyond.

The Stormriders

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Back then we were The Stormriders; we would thunder into people’s lives like heavy dark clouds of chaos with the lightning of our steel flashing as we caused chaos, death and destruction all around us, leaving burning and bodies behind as we sped away – there and then gone like any sudden storm.

Back then: we were known, we were feared. Everyone ran for shelter when they realised The Stormriders were coming, the clouds of our horde massing on the horizon of their lives, ready to destroy everything they held dear, ready to rip all their small worlds apart.

Of course, as we became known and feared, the ordinary folk appealed to their lords, their barons, their kings, to do something, to stop us; to bring an end to the storms that ripped and destroyed their meagre worlds.

We were not heroes, we were not the kind of outlaws who become legends by taking the side of the oppressed, we were not facing the forces of overwhelming power. We were the outlaws that make children scream, women cry and men curse our shadows as we pass. We were not brave, we were not just. We were weak and cowardly, except when massed as some great storm cloud ready to tear the sun from some poor unfortunate’s life, but we did not care. We thought we were free, we thought we were wild; we thought we would never have to bow or kneel to any man, noble or common.

Most of all, though, we were wrong and we knew we were wrong and we knew that one day the world would take its revenge on us all.

Stories Everywhere

It had to happen, I suppose, although, I had never expected it to, not while I still lived. I thought I’d run out of life, long before I ran out of stories.

That is the thing about stories, they can be found anywhere. They do grow on trees, but not only on trees, they grow anywhere you happen to look and they blow in on the breezes and sail across the seas.

Stories are all around us, and they are all inside us too. We know we all are a story that begins with our birth and ends with our death, but so many other things are stories too, from the way a butterfly opens its wings to reveal all the patterns of summer to the way the frost etches its beginning on a frozen window pane. There are stories in the way your fingers take the air and shape it, and how my feet stirred up the dust upon all the roads I travelled when I was young and found stories everywhere, especially in the beds of those women willing to pay for my stories with the only coin they had.

So, when the young ones came in from the cold the other day to sit by my fire and watch the dancing flames, it wasn’t too long before those faces turned to me, one after the other, and said: ‘Tell us a story, granddad.’

So I smiled my smile of an old one indulging the young, turned to watch the dancing flames, opened my mouth and nothing came out.

For the first time ever I had no stories to tell.

It has been that way every day since then, up until I sat you down and told you this.

Thursday Poem: A New Promise

A New Promise

Do not be fooled
by this new promise.
I have made
such promises before.

And I know
I cannot be trusted.
See, I have
these shifty eyes

and the questionable motives
your mother, long ago,
warned you about.

I have no intention
of keeping my word.
Words to me
are just tools to use

to enable me
to achieve my desires
and you,
you are what I want,

even though
we both know
I do not need you
and you would be

better off without me
here to drag you
down into misery.

I am not
the sort of person
who will always
be there for you.

When you need me
I will always be
somewhere else, holding
some new one close
while your arms are empty.

Time Ripper

It was time. I mean… well, I was there, but it was time that did it, not me. Something, someone else, stepped into those minutes between us beginning one of our usual arguments and Julie lying dead on the kitchen floor.

When the police arrived, the bloody knife was on the floor next to her. My fingerprints were all over the knife; after all, I had been chopping the vegetables with it when Julie stormed into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her, yelling about what she’d seen through the bedroom window: Alice and me together, down in the bushes at the bottom of the garden, far away and hidden from the rest of the people gathered around the barbecue on the patio.

As Julie yelled and screamed, heads outside turned towards the open kitchen door. All I could think of was how soft Alice’s skin felt under my hands as we'd kissed.

Then… somehow… time jumped - I remember it like a bad edit in a film – and Julie lay dead on the floor with the knife lying next to her. I remember looking down at my hand in disbelief, expecting the knife to still be there, despite it being in plain view on the floor, the blood pooling stickily around it.

Then, Tracey, Julie’s sister screamed from the open doorway… and then there was chaos, until the police and ambulance men came and calmed everyone down.

Of course, everyone assumed I’d done it… everyone except me, because I knew I hadn’t done it…. Someone, something, had – in those few seconds – ripped time apart and stepped through, pulled the knife from my hand and plunged it into Julie, while I stood there and stared.

Then, just as easily it had ripped time and space apart and stepped back, allowing time to begin again while I stood there too shocked to move or speak.

In Want of a Wife

Of course, as is well known – at least by those who know such things – that a man with his own collection of newt and salamander tanks must be in want of a wife. It is just that most women would rather it was not them forced to make this – ultimate – sacrifice, and will have at least one friend – who they cannot stand – who they fell will be eminently more suited to the role.

Still, that - even though it does stand in the position usually afforded to the leading paragraph – need not concern us here as there are more important matters afoot. So far afoot, indeed, that they are halfway up the leg and are making serious inroads into the thigh region. Therefore some alacrity of purpose must – I'm afraid – be our watchword this fine... not too unreasonable... well, this morning/afternoon/evening/night*.

The only thing is... well, I seem to have lost the bit of paper upon which I wrote done this piece of vital information – hence the subtle (or not) attempt to divert attention away from this slight hiccup in proceedings with an opening paragraph which bears little or – indeed – no relation to the rest of the... whatever this turns out to be.

Still... until I can find the piece of paper or remember which, with what remains of my mind – as you know – is somewhat unlikely, then we will just have to think of something else to do....

So, if any single or unattached ladies would like to form a queue over by the left sidebar, I will take them all on a fascinating tour of my rather enviable – and very sexy - collection of newt and salamander tanks.

 

*delete whichever is inapplicable