David Hadley's Blog, page 165

Monday Poem: Time Slips Away

[image error]

Time Slips Away

It is long, it is slow.
The time drips like a worn-out tap
and we watch it drain away.

I take a journey like a raindrop
in a river towards the sea
that stretches out to fill the horizon.

Time takes us sailing away
from our small lives into the past,
into forgetfulness.

We are here only once
and then we will be gone.
There is nothing left,

even the tombstones fall
to be lost in the long grass
at the edge of the graveyard
where no-one visits any more.

Time will come, time will fall,
time will go. We are here
and then we are long gone.

We try to hold on to this world,
wrap our lives around it and hold on tight.
But our grip is never strong enough.

Time slips through the fingers
like sand and is lost forever
on this beach that stretches
out to touch that infinite sea.

The Bank Stress-Test

[image error]

However, the judge at the trial did – eventually – agree that although it employed slightly unusual methodology our attempt to stress-test our local bank branch using sawn-off shotguns and stocking masks was a very useful method of determining just how well it would survive a run on its cash reserves. He therefore upheld our counter-claim that police were acting in a prejudicial manner when they surrounded our hideaway and told us to come out with our hands up.

The judge was also rather relived when we later handed over all the photos of him and his professional lady-friends doing some rather unusual stress-testing of their own, only this time utilising some rather fetching leatherwear and a variety of implements more usually encountered in a medieval torture chamber.

Although, the judge did insist that we withdraw our claim for compensation from the police for the emotional distress of being woken that early in the morning by a raid. He did, to his credit, though, insist that the police return all our shotguns, as we pointed out that hunting urban foxes was not all that illegal, as we were not using hounds, and that sawn-off shotguns are more environmentally-friendly in the crowded urban environment that the more conventional full-barrelled shotguns.

So, that was all good, and it enabled everyone in the gang to get to the airport in good time for our various journeys to those few countries in the world that - at present - have no extradition treaties with the UK, where all of us each hope to have a very long and very comfortable retirement.

Lighting a Fire of Possibility

[image error]

When it began, it seemed as though anything was possible. It is like that, though, with beginnings: they can open out in so many different directions, go so many different routes, discover so many unknown new lands. There are whole worlds out there lying hidden waiting for some beginning to bring them into being from out of the shadows.

Beginnings, though, are not that easy to find. Why knows, who can say, what is a beginning? After all, so many things we think are beginnings turn out not to be beginnings at all they fade out and die before they start, like fires that never really take hold; smouldering and fading as the red sparks fade to grey ash.

Finding a beginning, though, a spark of possibility nestled deep in the protecting tinder of time waiting to catch light and for the first tentative flames to pull it out of hiding is a rare and precious thing.

So, when I turned that morning to find what seemed like a roaring fire of red hair caught in the dawn’s sunlight, lying there on the pillow next to me, I thought I’d found a new beginning bursting into flame right there in front of me.

A Journal of the Plague Years

[image error]

Still, I suppose it could be worse. After all, there are very few of them still around these days. Occasionally, you hear reports of a Labour one hiding out in an inner city, or a Tory one hunted down by hounds after living wild in the woods, but mostly these days the plague of politicians is at an end.

It started slowly like all things do, with only a few politicians here and there around the country, all easily manageable and containable in council buildings and the Houses of Parliament. Then, though, they started spreading. A new strain of politician emerged through the EU; with its open borders allowing politicians, infected with virulent continental strains of politics, into our communities, thereby spreading the disease and infecting more and more people.

There was a time in the 1980s when a virulent form of Left-Wingery took hold, infecting mainly those young enough to have not been inoculated against politics by time and disillusion. The outbreak causing those it infected to spout such idiocies as ‘everything is politics’, striking fear in the hearts of normal people everywhere who all know almost nothing ‘is politics’ and that if something does becomes polluted by politics, then the politics can easily be eradicated with disinfectant and strong bleach.

Soon, though, people began to see politics for the illness it is, and the first culls began, along with a country-wide immunisation plan where those suspected of having any unhealthy contact with the political virus were given doses of reality in order to strengthen their weakened natural immunity.

Still, though, despite all the advances in our understanding of the disease of politics, it does keep spreading. The problem seems to be that politics, especially in its more extreme Left-Wing and Right-Wing mutations, does seem incredibly virulent, considering that anyone who becomes infected soon looses all ability to act rationally, or engage in normal life, without descending into political name-calling and petty point-scoring with anyone that infected person comes into contact with.

With such high contagion rates, and the political virus’s growing resistance to increasingly high doses of reality, it has often been thought that isolation and quarantine is the only way to control the spread of the disease and stop the spread of the zombie-like plague of political-opinion espousers from running rampage through our world.

However, no matter how much we barricade ourselves behind our front doors, or pretend to be out, when the political-infected take to the streets at election time, there seems to be a steady increase on the amount of politics we are subjected to, and little chance of any of us escaping falling victim to it soon.

Therefore, if at any time you start to feel yourself beginning to agree with a politician, or start thinking that it may be a good idea for you to join a political party, please make sure you visit your doctor as soon as possible for a check-up before it is too late and the rest of us - one day - discover ourselves being implored to vote for you.

Thursday Poem: Summer Dancing

[image error]

Summer Dancing

We forget the echo of hollowness.
We forget the sound of truth.
There are only echoes here
fading slowly into silence,
leaving us to wonder,
leaving us to wander.

We do not know.
We do not want to know.
To know is to feel responsible,
to feel the heaviness of truth.

We do not want to be responsible.
We do not want to bear the weight.
We still want to dance
through the summer of love
without the responsibility.

We weave the dying flowers of summer
into our thinning hair
and still do not want to see.

We dance away from knowing
wanting love from an indifferent world
to become children once again.

We do not like these games
the grown-ups make us play.
For if we are children,
we are the innocent and cannot
be hurt by cruel words and cruel worlds.

We can only play and play on.
We can only dance and dance on
as the sunset dims around us
and our long summer afternoon
fades slowly into night time darkness.

Enforced Incarceration in the Pantry

[image error]

Still, though, it is not as though she hadn’t been warned. After all, unleashing a pair of that size in a restricted environment is bound to cause some damage, if not casualties. It is not as if anyone was prepared and poised for the full effect when she let them go. None of them had a chance to even dive for cover before they were free and ricocheting around the pantry like two rapidly-deflating hot-air balloons in a shoe box.

Although, being trapped in a pantry with a woman of such liberated imagination turned out to be not quite the ordeal some of the more nervous of the party had feared. Soon, several members of the group were snuggling up to the two recently-released objects of desire as if they had been intimate acquaintances for several years. Some of the more adventurous were even contemplating camping out on one or other of the upper slopes until it was deemed safe for everyone to exit the pantry when the All-Clear eventually sounded.

Anyway, by the end of the period of enforced incarceration in the pantry, everyone involved in the incident had become the firmest of friends. Some of the gentleman she had befriended had become very firm indeed and had all eagerly accepted the warm hand of friendship she’d offered to help relieve them of their suffering, so in the end – as I said – it wasn’t quite as bad as everyone had first feared.

The High Tower

[image error]

When I first saw her, walking through this land I spread out for her, I thought I wanted her to be free, to be able to walk these hills and valleys and wander down to the stream to bathe each morning. I thought I had created the perfect world for her, that she could have the perfect life here.

After a while, though, I found she was wandering afar, going right to the edges of this world I’d made for her, constantly scanning the hillsides and searching the skies for something.

I realised then that she was alone. I thought I would be enough for her. That the obvious care and consideration I’d shown in building this landscape would be enough to show her that I loved her and wanted only her happiness.

I did not expect that she would turn away from all I‘d made and given to her, to go searching for someone else, to look around for someone like her.

I thought of going down there myself, stepping into her world, becoming the one that she searched for endlessly. Something stopped me. I was scared that maybe she would reject me, turn on me, see this paradise I had built for her as nothing more than a prison that she must escape.

Eventually, after watching her as she wandered further and further away, as she became more and more desperate to escape, I had no choice.

I built the castle.

Even then, she would wander restlessly from room to room; clamber up on the battlements to search horizons, to long for and to hope.

Now, she sits all day in that room I created for her at the top of the tallest tower, staring out of that small window, hoping that one day her rescuer will come.

Monday Poem: Distances Between

[image error]

Distances Between

Distance is always the space
in-between places and times.

We talk of distance and only speak
of the absence of closeness.

It could be so easy, if only
we allowed time to stand still

as we move between moments
as we move between places

we find hidden in the lost regions
beyond the edges of all our maps.

We take these routes into distance
seeking some new unknown land

far from the crowds of history
and all those mistakes we made

when we were too young to know
how to turn back and walk away.

When the North Men Came

[image error]

I did not want to become an adventurer, a traveller, a sometimes soldier of fortune, but when the Northmen came they took away my life, my home, my world. All I had when the Northmen left, were the clothes I stood up in, the smouldering ashes of the village that had been my home and most of the world I’d known up until then, and the bodies of my family and neighbours to bury. They had taken the young women, my sisters and the girls from whom I would have chosen a wife. All I had was the spade I’d taken into the woods that morning, to dig a grave for my old dog in his favourite hunting place, and my father’s ash-covered sword that I sat and polished once all the bodies had been buried and I waited for my life to begin again.

For a time, I thought about going north, going against the Northmen, rescuing the women of our village and killing all the Northmen. I knew, of course, that would end in only my pointless death, but in those early days, I would have welcomed my death. I wanted to avoid having to make this new life, having to grow up before I was ready.

Eventual, some few uncounted days and sleepless nights later, I packed up what few useful things I had taken from the ashes of my old world and turned towards the south. I set off, without anything but memories, without wanting to look back, walking into this new life.

Sail Me Away

[image error]

I would have spoken to her about distance and I would have spoken to her about silence. She was away, though, lost deep in her dreams while I waited on the shore of the morning for the tide of light to come easing through the window and sail me away towards the day.

I would have spoken to her about my dreams too, about those dark corridors and tunnels I had stumbled down, those dark forests I had run through, either to get away from something, or to find something. The dreams had not been that clear, one moment I felt as though I was fleeing, another I felt I was approaching something; something I both feared and desired.

I did not know.

I did not know whether to burrow down under the sheets again, knowing that like all our nights together, when she felt my presence there, next to her in her sleep she would ease her sleeping body as close to mine as she could. Even now, in her sleep her one hand held my cock, held me in the bed by her side.

So many nights I had woken, feeling caught by something to find her lying behind me, her arms wrapped around me, or sleeping on my chest, or with her hand holding me as now, as though she expected me to run away from her, to leave her and run towards something that lay beyond this bed, leaving her alone.

Then, as dawn broke through the curtains, like the waves I could hear down on the beach below, I knew she was right and how much I wanted to be gone.