somewhere and nowhere

I am above the clouds
I am within a city
I am within a language
I am somewhere
I am nowhere
I appear
I disappear

drowning

We are never fully prepared for the ferocity of a new love. We can't be. Love doesn't arrive within a gentle tap on the shoulder or a gentle nibble on the ear. It is the original sucker punch. An unannounced closed fist delivered at the speed of light into the heart, which is often followed by the sudden expulsion of air from the lungs. We've all been there and some of us never get that air back. But as you get older you learn to take the punches. The heart becomes tougher and we learn to read the terrain as we approach love. We see the exit ramps and the side roads. We realise the giddiness in our thoughts is due entirely to the slow draining of blood from our brains. The mild obsession and fascinations we realise, are no more than the encircling fins heralding our end.

But love is cruellest when it arrives too late and when a misspent life littered with mistakes tells you that you are not worthy of this love. That is a moment that I fear the most. When love is dangled before me. When happiness is within my grasp. They say a drowning man will always takes someone with him; if given the opportunity.

I however find the weight of my sins is enough to convince me that I must drown alone.

grating expectations

I like her
she makes me smile
I feel an attraction
but all I could paint
was a collage of light bondage
and chickens on crack

truly

a tastier dish
I have never seen
than lean pork sausages
and granola

still bleeding

I was chatting to someone through "WhatsApp" recently about my life. So, basically I was reducing years of pain into brief castrated sentences sprinkled with emojis. After we had finished I felt depressed. My wounds had reopened. I was bleeding again. It still gets to me sometimes. My Wife's adultery as my Father slowly died of Cancer. The 7 years alone with my children. The decision to let someone go, who I had loved and needed. But I had always put my children first and that is something I will never regret. Then when they both turned 14, they left me to live with their Mum. My daughter dropped my surname for her Mother's maiden name. She then posted pictures of her Mum's partner calling him the "Best Dad in the World." Twist a knife between my ribs and it would have hurt less.

My ex is a bitter woman. Twisted by revenge. Obsessed with money and clinging to her youth like someone clinging to a ledge. She will fall one day and she will fall hard. But that's her journey, not mine. In truth I must confess that I don't know how I manage to get up in the morning or how I even find the energy to care for others. As some days the pain is unbearable. But I don't yield to this pain. I never yield. I just keep moving forward. Life also holds not even the slightest mystery for me now, yet pleasure is found in the simplest of things. A sunrise. A smile. A child's laughter. Helping others. But I no longer suffer fools or people who take me for granted. If someone doesn't appreciate or value me then I step away without any hesitation. If someone asks me to dilute myself or take back a kindness then I return to their shadows.

For who I am now, is no longer negotiable..... and for the first time, in what fells like a lifetime, I like me.

carpe noctem

Let me put forward a memory: I am in bed with a woman. I am reading a book and then I start to feel a fingernail engrave a lascivious suggestion down the middle of my back. I don't react as I am in the middle of a paragraph, although a part of my body was already receiving and translating the message. The anatomical part to which I refer is an involuntary organ which is detached but still capable of overwriting common sense and ruining my life. The scratching continues. The paragraph is nearly spent and my mind is now split between unbridled ravaging and the journey of the protagonist in my novel. But as the last word is devoured I hear a sigh followed by a loud thump as she turns away.

"There was a time you couldn't keep your hands off me."
"I'm sorry, I was just finishing the chapter."
In that last word I felt the weight of her final judgement before it was even delivered.
"So, the book is better than me."
I was reading Milan Kundera and for a nanosecond my brain regained control and held back my "of course not" reply.
"I was just trapped in the flow of the page. I'm sorry."
"Do you still love me?"
At this point I realise that I am playing a tiresome game that only the inexperienced and emotionally insecure love to play. No matter what happens now the sex will be boiled down to an empty involuntary reaction. It will lack spontaneity and it will lack love.

I loved her. In fact I adored her. But a few months later the rot had started and within a year we had finished sleeping together. To this day I can still look at the cover of the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" and vividly recall the moment. There were obviously other reasons why we parted. The most amusing one that I surmised a week after we parted was that she was a Scorpio, a water sign, and I was a Virgo, an earth sign. Basically, we were mud.

However, my point is this. I loved her but my brain was engaged in a book. I was wrestling with Parmenides and Nietzsche. I was very willing and equally able to wrestle with her beneath the duvet but my mind needed to separate itself from sixties Czechoslovakia first. Maybe, I was guilty of lust in the beginning and maybe it had died off a little. However, to find doubt in a man's love because he didn't throw down a novel as you ploughed his back is nonsensical and slightly ludicrous.

I am now in my early fifties. Divorced. Single. Borderline bitter. I still read in bed. But my back is free of scratch marks and my libido a little dustier. So would I close a book quicker if I had company tonight? Would I risk losing carnal pleasures again? Well, with age comes wisdom and a richer love. I like to think that today I would be reading to her and that the punctuation would dictate the best time to scratch.

malcolm

He was cremated at 9am this morning. That's the slot in the crematorium that nobody wants. So, he had no mourners to recount tall stories and no high praise for his charitable acts or simple acts of kindness to strangers. But in truth there couldn't be any stories or praise as he was a self-absorbed recluse. A man who lived apart. A man who was and will be easily forgotten. In his past, he had loved and she had tragically died. They said he never recovered. He then blamed his parents for imagined sins and found solace in alcohol. He lost years of his life to this self-abuse and finally ended up in a flat in Brixton. Alone and surrounded by music that he never listened to and books that he never read.

This morning they slid him into the cremation chamber, locked the door and at the flick of a switch, incinerated his flesh to ash. He is no more. His evil, for there was some, lives on. His good is lost and unrecorded. But he was no Caesar. He was just a man. Troubled by a life that never caught a dream or found a love. Yet he was a story that is often told and a life that is duplicated by millions. I didn't know him and I never met him. I can only wade through the detritus of his life and bear witness to the squalor in the rooms he inhabited. I can only formulate a theory as to how he lived and know with absolute certainty that he died alone in a park.

But he was an artist. He had an eye for capturing the essence of a skyline or the gentle curve of a woman's lower back. And he was also a writer haunted by deep black depressive thoughts which were wrapped within a desperately lost soul. Yet he was still someone's son and he was loved by a woman he called, Mum. So, in my heart I put aside the sins and the crimes he visited upon others and instead imagine a newly born child in his mother's arms. Then in that one perfect moment I whisper a silent prayer for them both.



(For Sue and Malcolm)

the things we don't eat for love

Throughout my life I have been influenced by the women that I have mercilessly adored. It is my "Achilles Heel" or more accurately a rare strain of emotional oscillation, which ironically almost always ends up as emotional isolation. At its extreme this weakness in the "presence of femininity" has seen me converting to Catholicism and at its mildest saw me agreeing with the importance of "New Romanticism" in 80s culture. Needless to say, I am now a militant Atheist and if someone foolishly plays Spandau Ballet at a party I feel a strong urge to kill the Kemp brothers.

This urge to mimic a passion or religious zeal in my dates is clearly based upon a wonderful weakness within my personality. I freely admit this as when it comes to love I tend to test the depth of a puddle from a springboard. That is where I actually find some solace in this incurable condition. For I am the eternal optimist, who believes that the puddle is not only deep but warm. I also firmly believe, like the proverbial bullet, that there is undoubtedly someone out there for me. So even though I approach love with the same trepidation as most. Once I get a bounce from my board I am airborne and performing triple somersaults with half twists. As I hurtle like a rocket towards my very shallow icy puddle.

Anyway, back to my latest decision and its physical and mental ramifications. I recently became a Vegetarian and to the outside world that monumental gesture is currently being miss sold as a health choice and a one man effort to combat global warming. But, I am far more fickle than that. I changed my diet because of a woman. I am now in fact more soya than man. I also know what Tofu is and how best to cook with it. Two years ago that would have been like admitting that I have watched an episode of "Keeping Up With Kardashians". I would like to make it clear at this point that I have never watched an episode of this nonsense and if pressed I could not tell you which one of the women was formally a man with a very large arse.

But unlike my decision to seek enlightenment from an omniscient entity who has numerous outlets worldwide and my short and painful dalliance with Kajagoogoo. I do at least feel that this woman has given me something of value. I am losing weight and my concertina chin has been replaced by a face I remember from my past. I am sleeping better and I feel healthier and stronger. Yet even though I know it will only ultimately lead to nothing more than acute "vegetarian warming"; the glacial retreat of visceral fat from my abs. The fact that I am beginning to look more like me and less like Jabba the Hutt is emotionally gratifying.

There is no grace in my failings or crust of wisdom to, break, bless and share. I am a man who aspires to repeat his best mistakes. I do this without any hesitation and whilst being fully aware that the odds are and never will be in my favour. I am becoming the physical personification of the "final futile gesture" and I truly expect to be listed in the Oxford Dictionary as a sub entry under "Hopeless" in 2018. Be that as it may, I am and always will be the hopeless romantic and the most loyal friend. Searching for love in places that people have long since abandoned or marked as radioactive. Befriending and defending the hopeless and vulnerable.

One day I will undoubtedly die and I will drop kick that tin bucket knowing that there is no God. But I will also know that "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode, is sublimely ironic "wake music". As for whether I will still be a sad, single vegetarian; well that remains to be steamed from what remains of my new and healthier life.

a Dublin dream

I watched the sun rise across a Dublin sky

and from my bed I heard her voice

asking if I wanted tea, coffee or something softer

so much to take in

so many senses unnumbed

so I peel back the sheets

and walk into her arms

sleepy and warm

surrounded by the smell of fresh coffee

and a voice that pulls me apart

piece by piece by piece

through the window I see the river

through the window I see her walk away

she turns

she smiles

and as I finish my coffee

I long for her "something softer"

laughing through my days

occasionally
but not often enough
I feel my life lurch forward
within a laugh
and sometimes
but not nearly enough
I laugh with someone else
and we lurch forward together