Tag Archives: deconstruction

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From Where the Birds had Flown

I wonder if the tree is still there in the churchyard where I took the pine needles in my hand while we walked? I wonder about the soft threads in my velvet leggings and whether they’re still on the planet somewhere or if they’ve biodegraded by now. And 7 Seconds played on the car radio, in a car that by now will have turned to nuts and bolts.

I think about the bench in Bruton Park and if it still exists or has it been chopped up and turned to firewood and the metal smelted down. I wonder what happened to the the cages in the nature reserve where we wandered, how even now I can taste the still air and hear the leaves under our feet, in the strangeness, in the almost stagnant places from where the birds had flown.

And what happened to the white ceramic bowl with the first of the chicken salads, did it break years ago, is it fragmented in soil, mixed with mulch, feeding roses somewhere I’ll never know? And what about the settee with its soft green Fleur De Lys pattern, with the nap I felt under my hands when my eyes closed, have those fibres disintegrated by now?

I still hear the reliable tick of my parent’s mantle piece clock, marking time, stroking the moments as though they never ended and though that mechanism has long since been deconstructed, the echo of it fills my ears now.

Of course, I wore red socks and my silk waistcoat was shimmering black. I wonder if its small buttons are sewn onto something else now or if they sit in someone’s sewing box, someone unaware of the role that they played in my life.

I wonder about the birds that had flown, whether they had chicks, and whether generations of them later, they fly over me in a different town, dropping feathers onto the new pathways that I make now.

I look out for them. It’s March 26th, I’m not bothered, it’s only time.

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To the Edge

 

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I seem to have spent many hours at train stations recently and I am draw to them, to their sense of purpose, of people moving and having plans, like they belonged, like there were places where they could go and I watch.

There are those moments, you know, when the announcement crackles overhead and the voice has such authority and it warns. Instructions issued, orders to follow and they implore us to keep away from the edge. The next train will not stop. There’s something cold about the words like a noose on a breeze and it hangs there. And then the seconds, then the air turns to anticipation. Feathers caught up in the slipstream, tussle to a safer place, a pigeon beats the detritus upwards and settles out of sight in the flaking paint of the eaves. He senses it coming.

And then it comes. There are these blisters you see, these weals of the world where people wait and wonder. It seems as though, for a frozen beat of our collective hearts that everyone waits and watches from the corner of our eyes. Is it today, is it this moment that they will choose to jump in front of the train? And we are braced, we bristle as the air charges, almost throbs with the approaching sound. And it’s nearly here and we watch and it comes. It’s here, the joyous cut, the ripping surge of an irresistible force, turning the station to dust, screaming by in grey and black. Grey-black, grey-back, grey-black whips my face to come inside, I am sucked into its rhythm, I dissolve in the repeats as it calls out I still live.

I live – I live – I live, listen to me, I’m here with all the potential to tear the heart from your form, to sculpt your skin onto my windscreen and it shrieks and it thunders and I sit, blurred in the fracture as it moves. The opposite platform startles into view, the moment that has passed and taken my hair with it, blown across my face with the chill of actions un met and I am numb.

It dips away to a hollow moaning, paper flutters in a distant screech as it leaves us and no one speaks. No one dares to raise an eye towards the look of a stranger because if we did, if we made that connection to another soul, then we might see them and in that glance, in that act of holding someone’s gaze, we might see ourselves – small and shaking, trembling in a fear we dare not name. And so we look down, we shuffle our stance and pretend we haven’t we shared the thought.

The platform settles, quiet and I check my ticket. I am still waiting for a train but not that one, not the one that doesn’t stop, not today, not here, not now. Not now in this fracture, in this scar of people with places to go to from my platform.

And I am alone in my head and I wait.

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In The Dwelling Place

Bird Nightmare

I sit in your mouth and it’s warm, it’s a round pink place which enfolds me. And how the rub of your tongue soothes my back, how I hold onto your teeth to give me structure. The food comes in, it careens around me, over and into my spaces, the familiar battering and I despise every morsel but i know their names. I sit in the corner of your mouth, I live in this dark moist world and then you mash your teeth together and I feel them crush and smear my form, stretched out fibres of myself, wavering and flipping in the cave where I live, where no one can see me, where my voice fades to dust on spittle, my streaks are a lick of taste inside your mouth.

And you swallow

and I glide down and down, tumbling into your chasm until I climb and climb. I dig in with where my nails used to be, I hold myself up in the flush. I recall myself, I wriggle on the place where my belly used to be, up and up and through to your throat, slipping, craving a ledge until I rest. I sit on your tongue, it is warm, the bristles massage where my limbs used to be.

I am still. I curl up in the corner of your mouth and when you yawn, I can see the world I used to live in, outside, over there, sparkling and remote.

I live in the crevices in your mouth, it’s dark and tight and damp. This is my place now.

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Deconstruction

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What if I walked and walked and kept on walking.

Could I move so far that my skin would leave my form, that it would crumble from this shape into the soil? Would that be possible do you imagine? It would be so helpful if it did. If the Earth, this molten ball I stand on, would take my feet from under me with a steady grating rub, so hard that the gnawing pressure would eat up my legs to my knees. And I would scrub along the ground, like a broken toy. The birds would call out to me, the sky would lighten but I would shrink. And from my stumps I’d shuffle forwards not because there was forward momentum of any sort but because it served a purpose, it erased the mass I lived in and from my hips I would waddle.
I would look a strange sight tilting to and fro, unsteady in the morning, pivoting on synovial joints with the light peeping over my shoulders as I rocked along the ground.

And further on, the corners of my ribcage would chip and break but I’d keep moving as the morning sun climbed in the sky. Heat would arrive for the others and people would fling wide their windows, breathe deep and fill their lungs with the chemicals from the fields. They would throw on their lightest rhinestone clothes and guzzle their freshly squeezed orange juice, succulent bits making their way around their pallet and down their throats. These people, lifted by the day I can’t take part in. And as they smile at strangers glinting in the rays I would have worn down my ribs to my armpits. And now with an approaching balm I’d be reduced to arms and a head shoving myself down the lane. My shoulders heaving the weight of my brain, its mind seeping into the soil.

I see it all now from my lowered point of view, the dust and the bugs in my eyes. I see roots of grasses, tiny creatures crawling, foraging for food and the breeze cuts through my hair. My neck rubs along the ground as my arms wear away and the sun, so warm, shining amber lights into distant windows, bounces off the keratin in my hair. It casts a softening glow to my cheeks as my head spins to a stop, to look up at the rainless painless sky;

I roll, at last, to nothing.

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