David Hadley's Blog, page 185

Hidden Trifle Machinations

Maybe there will be a new maybe soon to move us on to a new place. Maybe the maybes will be new and shiny and clean, and we will be proud to have known them and to have eaten off the same plates and to have seen the same fish and chip shops through the same windows of the same caravans.

Is that how moistness should be celebrated, with celery and hidden trifle machinations?

I have seen the dark blue clarinets of Wednesday night gathering on the hillsides. I have seen their campfires and I have - once - eaten one of those biscuits you all dream of as the dawn rises above the blue remembered eggcups of a bright new day.

I once met a man with a piece of string.

I said "Is that a piece of string?"

He replied, "Yes, I'm taking it for a walk. It is tied to this other piece of string because it has not yet - it is only young, as you can see - it has not, as yet, learnt obedience. Consequently, it can - sometimes - get a little too boisterous, which can be a little bit dangerous in a busy street such as this deserted pathway along a dangerously sheer cliff at midnight."

Internet Dating and its Pitfalls

So, anyway…. Well, there I was all ready with the geography textbook open at the necessary page, offering a full explanation of terminal moraines (with diagrams) when she suddenly – out of the blue – said she was no longer in the mood.

You should have seen the look of disappointment on the donkey's face.

As for the bath full of homemade pasta… well, you try poking a load of Tagliatelle down the plughole at that time on a Tuesday evening whilst wearing full evening dress and a top hat. It was just lucky I had the cane too.

Still, on the whole, it was not entirely a wasted evening. The 10:47 from Grimsby was on time… for once. So we had an enjoyable 12 seconds as it sped past. Although, I am not quite sure that we are fully up to sped with all that train spotting entails. As she said: 'surely there must be more to it than that?' She has, however, said that before in the past on some far more intimate occasions, but we won't go into that, especially as it was fresh pineapple… not tinned.

So, as you can see this internet dating business is not as quite as straightforward as I'd hoped. Still, she has promised to see me again… sometime in the next decade or so, and this time, she says, I won't have to wear the paper bag over my head for the entire evening… only until it gets dark.

Losing Focus

There were times, moments, when Jess saw the world slip, stutter and lose focus. Times when it seemed as though the edges of the things that defined the world around her seemed to shift as though slipping out of and then coming back into focus. It felt to her as though, if she didn't keep an eye on, keep a watch over, this world, then it could easily slip away from her and become something completely different, something new and alien.

She'd already noticed it with people, how they seemed to slip, to change between certain characters, as though they all had a different face for different circumstances. She knew that if you watched someone carefully, especially when they thought no-one else was watching them, then they would slip into being someone else. They may still look the same, at least superficially, but she knew they had changed into someone else. There was the way Mrs Peters from down the road changed when she knew she was about to get a visit from the man who drove the green Ford, who turned up every couple of weeks on Wednesday mornings.

Jess had seen just how different Mrs Peters could be, from the lady who arranged flowers down at the church, when the man with the green Ford took her up into the bedroom that Jess could see right into, from her secret hiding place in the old tree high on the hill behind the village.

After the End

There were so many of them we didn't know what to do. Since the End Times they had gone feral, breeding uncontrollably, despite all their chants of ethical responsibility and sustainability as they held progress meetings around their camp-fires at night, sheltering amongst the ruins of what had once been the local council offices.

Some of them would hunt at night too, taking their hand-carved clipboards out into the darkness to catch one of us unawares.

When we were out scavenging or hunting, we always had to be on our guard in case the feral council officials had set one of their traps. They caught three of our tribe once as we were scavenging in the remnants of a supermarket, searching for canned goods to supplement our meagre diet.

The trap had been set in the tinned vegetable aisle, a net suspended from the remnants of the suspended ceiling, hidden under a spread of desiccated supermarket loyalty-card application leaflets. We heard the yell as the trap was sprung, then realising there was nothing we could do for our comrades as we heard the council workers emerging from their hiding places and the fearsome clicking of their pens and the tell-tale sound of compliance forms being snapped into place on the crudely-carved clipboards.

In my nightmares, I can still hear the desperate screams of our comrades as the compliance surveys began.

Waiting for Her

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When the time comes, she will know. She has stood at the window watching everything that happens out there. One day, and she feels it will be soon, it will be time for her to step out, back into that world she has watched for so long.

There was a time when she used to go out in that world; there was a time when she thought it was all there, waiting for her.

There was a time….

Now, though, there are only the slow days that pass outside the window, the shadows turning and passing as the sun moves from one side of the window to the other, and then the darkness comes and the street lights flicker into life.

She watches the life of the street outside: she knows the regulars and the strangers, the dog walkers, the traders, those who think they are secret lovers and use the room opposite hers, the old woman across the street, who watches too.

One day, she knows she will go back out there, but for the moment, she has work to do, making sure the street out there carries on as normal. She has to bring the characters that inhabit the days on from the wings where the edges of her window lie. She has to set them about their business, opening their shops, tugging or tugged by their dogs, meeting with a secret kiss out from under the glow of the streetlights, selling themselves to strangers and all the routines of the day that she has created out there so the world can turn around her.

New Book Out Now: This Brief Life of Sparks - Poems

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This Brief Life of Sparks

A Collection of 100 poems by David Hadley.

David Hadley's poems have been published in Stand, Eclipse, Envoi, Poetry Nottingham International, Raw Edge and several other magazines in the UK and US.

Several of his poems have also been cherry-picked by the editors at abctales.com.

Available now.

Fireworks

These times take the shape
Of beginnings for you.
But I've lived a life
Like this before.
The sharp sudden colours
Of fireworks exploding
Into instances of creation
Are so new to you, so you
Bang on the window
And clap and yell.

I have been here before
And every now is tinged
With memories of my first times
And how each bursting memory
Lasted longer, far longer
Than this brief life of sparks
Tumbling down onto damp ground.

Times like this are gone
So suddenly. We forget
So much about transience.
But this - it is your first time,
It will always last forever.

MPs Stalking Concerns

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UK MPs are becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of 'stalking'. As the motion before the Houses of Parliament says:

MPs should not be subjected to excessive harassment and scrutiny by the general populace as they go about their vital business of helping themselves… serving the country. Ordinary members of the public should realise that once they have done their public duty of voting someone into the House of Commons then that is where all involvement with their elected MP should end – until the next election. MPs should not be harassed and stalked by constituents demanding that they 'do something', especially when such an act would run counter to narrow party benefit or confer no short term political advantage over opposing parties.

MPs are also concerned that some 'stalkers' have taken an unhealthy interest in the affairs – sexual, business or otherwise – of MPS. Some stalkers recently even started looking into the very private and confidential area of MP's expenses, much to the detriment of some MPs. Some MPs were forced to give up their seats because of this stalking of their expense accounts and now have to survive on a handful of lucrative media appearances a year.

As one MP claimed:

Despite what some may think, being a MP is a legitimate activity, if not quite honest and noble…. Can I have my appearance fee in cash, please?

Others are concerned that this constant stalking of MPs will force them to take their activities undercover, or even – in some extreme cases – give up the well-paid luxury of being a Member of Parliament altogether. As one Political commentator said:

Once people become politicians, there is often no help… or cure for them. They have to spend the rest of their lives wandering around, sometimes all over the world looking for conferences and speech-making opportunities in order to make ends meet. Some even have to sat up Foundations to keep themselves in the splendour their deluded minds thing is their right. At the other end of the scale, though, some people through no fault of their own sometimes discover that they are Liberal Democrats. How can some one like that ever return to the real world if they are hounded out of politics by some political stalker? Sometimes it seems it would be kinder just to have them put out of our misery.

Going out

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Time and tide wait for no man. They will, however, hang on for another five minutes or so for a woman as they know that when she does say she is – at last – ready, the comment is to be taken more as an aspiration than a statement of fact.

However, we should not let mere facts and literalness spoil what would otherwise be yet another tedious excursion out into the world that lies there waiting for us like one over-large slough of disappointment (not too unlike that actual Slough of disappointment), albeit one it with ample car-parking facilities. So ample, in fact, that there is a sense of foreboding that the car – such that it is – will never be seen again by either of you as you make your weary way towards whatever form of 'entertainment' you have stumped up the annual domestic budget of a small nation for this time.

Of course, the weather gods will have all got together at their last forward planning meeting and decided that as you are making an effort to 'go out' they will schedule their latest attempt to gain media attention through the use of extreme weather on that particular night. This will only result in yet another failed attempt on their part to get the human race to start believing in them once again. Although, deep down they know that such an occurrence will need something of the size of Gilgamesh or Noah to get them ever taken seriously again, with – no doubt – some other god jumping in to take all the credit for their efforts… again.

On the way back though, after being more than passably entertained, you do say to each other, now that the worst of the storm is past, that it wasn't so bad after all, maybe even worth the eye-bleeding amount of money it cost and that – maybe, just maybe – you'll consider doing it all again, only not in the immediate future.

Of course, that is all dependent on ever finding the car again.

Monday Poem: Winter over our Heads

Winter over our Heads

The sky is dark, holding the threat
of winter over our bowed heads.

We are cold, huddled together,
waiting, ready to believe again

in the promise of the new spring
and that the world has not forgotten

all that we have offered to it in sacrifice
for the warm weather to come back to us

and show us its new growing light
and how we can live on beneath the sun

as though the winter will not come
and steal our warm lives away again.

The Collective Good

There were times when we could escape from it all and spend some time alone together. Of course, it was dangerous, the others of our Collective – like everyone else – were suspicious of people wanting to be alone, or even alone together, but it was possible.

For all their talk of The Collective and how vital we all work together for the good of us all, most people are too bound up in their own petty concerns to pay much attention to what everyone else is doing. As long as you seem to play by the rules, go along with the directives and do not attempt to draw attention to yourself, it is amazing what you can get away with.

Or, so we thought.

Our problem was Melinda. When Carrie and I discovered something in each other that we enjoyed, I immediately forgot all about Melinda and the way I'd left her after the last Monthly Meeting, waiting for me.

I had forgotten about Melinda, but – it seems – she had not forgotten about me at all. Not only that, Carrie also had problems with Melinda in the past, always making comments in the dorm, always accidentally shoving Carrie in the showers, spilling her food and so on. This had been going on since they were young girls together in the crèche. Melinda seemed to enjoy bearing a grudge and Carrie, and now I were on Melinda's list of those against whom she needed to her revenge.