David Hadley's Blog, page 198

The Map of Dreams

What do we look for in these dreams?

We hold a map and we pore over it together, looking for a way through, looking for a route that will take us along the dream routes to a new place, a place for us to be together.

We have walked the dream corridors of this deserted mansion, opening doors into rooms that hold nothing of all we have ever wanted and dreamt about. We have searched those echoing empty rooms from doorway to window and back. We have felt along the bare walls, hoping to find some secret route out of that place. All we ever found were more bare rooms and more long corridors with doors of possibility stretching off along the length of the corridor and leading only to another door leading to a stairway that led to more floors of corridors and empty rooms.

Then, one day we found a room that had once been a library, its floor-to-ceiling shelves, empty of books and, somehow, looking emptier than any other room because of those bare shelves.

Then, on the last shelf of the bare library, just before we turned back and left it we found this map, rolled up, covered in dust and forgotten.

Then, many days later, after nights spent huddled in corners of dark bare rooms listening to the howling creatures haunting the world beyond the house, we found our way down a long sweeping staircase. The staircase ended in a hall devoid of anything except a mirror and a locked door, which lead out into this world we now stand lost in, turning the map and trying to place ourselves on it.

If we could find our way back to that mansion, we would go back, shut the door behind us and – instead – step together through that mirror, into a different world altogether, back into some dream far different from this one.

The Underwear of the Legends

It was way back in the time of legends were the women wore metal underwear – and little else – and carried swords almost as tall as they were. Of course, the symbolism of women in armour – no matter how little of it there was – carrying large phallic objects was little commented on at the time. Especially, not by anyone who wanted to end up getting too closely acquainted with the sharpest parts of those swords, anyway.

Back in those days men were men – which was the way those other men who hung around down at the docks after nightfall rather liked it, and some of those women with the swords could, with the help of friendly woodcarvers and understanding leather-smiths be men too – at least for a while (or two). Although, that did depend on a completely different approach to swordswomanship, and a confidence that the woodcarver had left no errant wood splinters to bring a premature and painful end to the experience for the ladies they thus befriended.

There was – it must be said – a much more casual attitude to life, sex and death back in those days. Back in those days, the gods were not such moralistic prudes as those invented later and were – as it was commonly known – not averse to sampling more earthly pleasures themselves, even if they did tend towards rather odd imaginings as to what passed for normal forms of sexual experience as understood by the mortals they shared the universe with.

But then, they were gods and their ways were not human ways.

The River Flowing

The moment hangs there as if it is waiting for time to catch up with it and move it on. The moment is like a stick, or some other detritus, snagging on an obstacle as it flows down the river. It's possible to see the way the current of time pulls at it, tries to free the moment from this hold we have on it. Each of us grips tight, hard, on this now, not wanting to let it go, not wanting this last moment together to be taken by the current of time to flow on, float out of sight, disappear around the bend in the river of time as it flows away down to the sea of memory.

We wanted more than a memory; we wanted more time together. We could have, if our moment had not been this moment, if our time had been some other time, flowed on down the river together. Each of us helping the other past the objects and obstructions happenstance throws into the river of time to snag us and capture those of us that flow with it.

We met though, forced together by circumstance and accident, and we know that once this – our last moment together – is over, the river will flow on, pulling us further and further apart, probably never to see each other again.

I see it in your eyes, as the river breaks our grip on each other and the torrent carries you away; the fear that you may be drowning and that I will soon be too far out of reach to save you.

Monday Poem: The Space that Lies Between Us

The Space that Lies Between Us

It begins, and there is silence.
Then there is an end to silence
when the moment starts as movement.
Shapes form in the air, dissolving
fading into loss and darkness
memory is left recalling
vague disturbances of past times.

We have words to shape memories
conjured  from empty spaces
dancing them across distances
lying here between us, something
far too solid for our words to
pass on through or our hands to crumble
into dust and all we can do
now is watch each other sitting
much too far away for reaching
all before we turn away, go
back to those small lives we're building
with invisible high walls that'll
keep us  far apart forever

Such Things were Possible

Possibly.

What is possible and what is not possible.

It can happen. There is a possibility of magic on the page. There is a chance that you will see unicorns and there will be faeries down there at the bottom of the garden. Even gods could be real, even the one of impossible contradictions and with such a desperate need to be worshipped as the one you were told about when you were still young enough to think such things were possible, even if never very likely.

It is possible to believe in magic and the possibilities uncovered by the power of the imagination when you are young. When you are young, everything is magical, even the morning seems so full of wonder, whether you wake up to a sun-filled day or discover the whole world hidden under deep white blankets of snow.

As you grow older and the mornings lose their magic, becoming just another great lump of hours you have to wade through on the way to the rest of your life, magic seems to have faded away. You no longer expect unicorns, ride on dragons or to meet Oberon and Titania in the deep woods... and as for those sad, needful gods... well, really.

She Waited for Me

I did not expect it, or demand it, but she came to me. She sat and waited for me with a patience I could not believe at first. I was not used to such acquiescence. Up until then I had thought that other people couldn't so freely give of themselves like that, without wanting something in return.

At first, I offered her choices and options, but she made it clear to me that she wanted no such things. She would not choose, or decide. She said she would not do anything without me first making the decision for her. She did not want anything to do with the way I offered the options. She was only happy, she said, when I told her, or made some other signal as to, what I really desired. She seemed happy to accept, or... rather... her acceptance made her happy.

At first, I was not sure if I liked it. I did not want her to depend on me, to live her life thought me. I wanted her to be free of me, but she chose the chain, attached it to her own collar and handed the other end to me. She gave me the responsibility of ownership, of being the one who made the decisions and had to live with the consequences, while she sat patiently, waiting for whatever I demanded of her.

Not Looking Back

In the distance, there was a city, but it was in the distance behind her. She'd had enough of places like that. She did not look back, not even once, to see it fading, losing shape, in the mists of distance.

When the path she was walking down, alongside, the river, curved away so that the city, looking like the ghost of some mountain in the distance, was lost to her she did not look back, did not say good-bye.

She was going. She did not know where she was going, just that she was going. She wanted a new life, something that she had not done before. Her life was far behind her. Her old life was over and gone. She hoped the memories of it would fade and be lost from sight like the city she knew she could no longer see behind her, even if she turned and looked back. She knew know that the city was out of sight, lost past the curve of the river and the distance. Still she did not look back. She'd had enough of looking back, looking over her shoulder. She had decided that morning when packing her few tawdry belongings into her travelling pack that she would never look back ever again.

Looking back was where she had made all her other mistakes, wanting to go back and make things right had kept her in the city for too long. She could feel her life slipping away the longer she remained and she'd known that if she did not take the chance that morning, then she would never leave.

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Thursday Poem: An Epitaph

An Epitaph

Words will always change things.
The event becomes language
then disappears behind
its mask of words.

We know only the words,
when everything else has gone
only the words remain.
You left me behind here

as you walked away.
All I had left to hold
were your words of farewell
and I never let them go.

I took them back home with me
and sat staring out the window,
towards the summer fields
we would walk together, back

when everything was hand-in-hand,
and I took out your last goodbye
still warm in the palm of my hand
just to be near you once again.

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The Cold Blank Page

Sometimes it is easier to dive straight into the icy coldness of the blank page, and with a few quick strokes, swim a whole stream of words across the page, leaving it churning, disturbed in your wake.

Other times, though, you want to slip into the cold blank page, slowly and carefully, shivering as its cold blankness takes you within it. Times when you can only take a few hesitant strokes, when a mere handful of tentative words are left floating, bobbing on the uncertainty of what you wanted to say.

Here, though, it is safe to swim your words down onto the page. There are no shark shadows lurking under the surface, no monsters of the prose hidden deep below, their long sinewy tentacles reaching out to drag you down into the silence. There are no great ocean liners steaming oblivious towards you and no icebergs brooding closer.

Here it is just a small swimming pool where you can lay down sentence after sentence across the calm water, letting each stroke leave some thought bobbing gently in its wake.

Then when you feel you have done enough for the day, feel as though the exercise has purged the stiffness from your word muscles you can pull yourself up out of the word water, pick up your towel and dry yourself. All the while, promising that you will return the following day with a feeling that, yes, the exercise is doing you good.

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A Major British Olympic Contender

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Emeryboard Ducksplatter is – of course, quite-rightly regarded as the finest exponent of Un-Recalibrated Underwater Pissing-About that these islands have ever produced, getting through to the Olympic Underwater Pissing-About finals in the last seven Olympics in a row. He is all set to reach the peak of his ability in the upcoming 2012 London Olympics in the special Underwater Pissing-About bucket now approaching completion on the banks of the Thames itself, generally regarded as the very birthplace of Underwater Pissing-About.

Of course, people have been pissing about under, and in, water since long before it became an Olympic event, Hence the invention of the inflatable lilo and the snorkel. However, Olympic standard pissing about - whether in or on the water - is quite obviously taken to an extreme – some would say too extreme – level of ability, competence, physical strength and marvellous dexterity of the thumbs.

For example, Ducksplatter himself, spends up to ten hours a day in his Olympic standard snorkel, and skin-tight Underwater Pissing-About suit, in the British Olympic team's Pissing-About bucket just outside Leamington Spa. There he practices constantly the various forms of Underwater Pissing About necessary for the top-flight Olympic athlete, and – of course – keeping those thumbs in tiptop condition by peeling up to seven tight-skinned oranges a day.

Of course, the British Isles is famous throughout the world for the ability of its citizens to piss about at the drop of a hat. Furthermore, with the entire country's vast experience of spending a great deal of their days wandering about in drizzle, they have a natural affinity for the damp, which makes them ideally suited to the rigours of underwater pissing-about.

Therefore, with the seemingly increasing inability for this once-great country's youth to do anything useful with a football, other than covering it with ketchup and attempting to eat it, a strong case could be made for making Un-Recalibrated Underwater Pissing-About this country's new national sport. Therefore, if Ducksplatter does his country proud in the upcoming London Olympics, expect to see far more Un-Recalibrated Underwater Pissing-About taking place in many of the pissing-about buckets of this fair country.

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