Tag Archives: We are Borg

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Thirty

Her mother’s best table cloth, the awkward smile over chicken salad or was it ham?

Churchyard trees smelt of Radox, pine crumbled in her hand. 

Closed restaurant, tattered menu through the window reflecting them.

The lager soaked pub carpet, did she mention modern art, and lost her train of thought?

The Mason’s Arms, the slight hill by the Job Centre.

In Brueton Park the aviary was empty, a sense of space, of absence in the caged birdshit and lost feathers.

And from the bench the mowed grass, sap full, fell away from them like rolling years then stopped at the sudden gate. 

Red t-shirt in the evening, pushing chicken round a ceramic bowl. Trying to be elegant. White cold stone, little Bistro walls, The Fat Cat in Solihull, it’s probably a nail bar now or tattoo parlour.

Later. The quiet house. The Fleur de Lys of her parent’s sofa. Running her finger over its edge.

The kettle boiled, she turned to him, she felt the kitchen cupboards up her back before she made the tea. 

The chime of her parent’s mantelpiece clock, the weave on his fair isle jumper.

These things.

She dropped by to watch them as though it wasn’t decades ago. 

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For Safe Keeping

Find her by the canal in her black and white skirt with bells. Find her navigating it all as she jingled, as she smiled.

And there under the August sky, find her leaning up the old Orion, in her black Mary Jane’s and her silk waistcoat.

Later, after chicken salad, no doubt, find her by her candlewick bedspread, chartreuse and tattered but perfect. The only way to end the day.

And in the morning, in the same skirt, find her smile at the bedroom door and make plans to carry her home.

Just find her. Over and over and over again. Always in August, to keep her safe.

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Fragments – Belonging

August 7th

And there were small footsteps from their home, running to the car and a wave and she would see him later.

The woman and the kettle sat in an empty room. But how full it was, how it pulsed and sparkled, full of every second they had lived. Bright with the moments, charged with the normal-ness of their life.

And she sat while their boy played elsewhere. Men and boxes came and went like the shifting thoughts inside her, until the door closed one last time and she thanked the spaces that became the past.

And there they sat, waiting in Starbucks, waiting for the call and for the keys, until they came. And their possessions poured into a new place, to fill it up, packed with their hours.

And later the small footsteps returned and they ran and they charged down a new hallway. She stood there seeing his beaming face and all the moments lined up ahead.

And now as a different kettle boils, she feels it all, every second of their world spinning in her hot green tea. Around and around in every spiral, safe inside the mug, inside her heart.

And they were there on that old green carpet that they left behind and they were here on the new blue carpet that filled up their home.

She sipped from the mug in the Now, hoisted up her skirts again and carried on.

August 9th

Always there in that morning before their evening, in the morning before their night. And her skirt waited and her hair waited, long and thick and dark. And he would be leaving soon, heading north with his plans, with his ways and her day would unfold, quiet, in the way it used to do.

Always.

This day, neurons buzzing forming shapes telling her stories again and the Now fell away, her aging body swooned and they appeared.

Navigating. A closeness. A certain intune-ness in the swish of her skirt, in the whiteness of her crinkled top.

Always under sap heavy trees and he took her home in his old car.

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In The Scent of Pine


She listened hard to the sparrow chirp outside her window and if she went deep down inside its beak, she would fall on the sweet sounds and they would propel her up, back out to an earlier day.

There on the notes of a different bird and a distant window, and there she would lie waiting for the day to unfold. And younger, thicker hair would grace her pillow and the old kitchen chair beside her bed, borrowed as a clothes rail would be covered in the bright clothes she used to wear. The leggings and silk shirts, half folded and waiting and there just to the right of her un-stretched womb was the red t-shirt ready for the day.

And sparrows called out from neat gardens, tended, they flitted past the bedroom window, a moment’s shadows where she lay. The candlewick bedspread, a well worn lime green, would be scrumpled at her feet and she’d get up, pull herself to standing, slight and small.

Birds cheeped loud as she smoothed her black waitscoat and somewhere else, unseen by her, somewhere two hours away, he pulled out his best jumper from the drawer.

Birds would have sung over his head as he climbed into the Orion and as they startled up into the air, he drove the distance between them.

Until. Her hand on the brass door handle and he appeared.

And quiet churchyards and pine trees waited and park benches came and went. And in her red t-shirt, in corners of restaurants, the huge salad bowls bought the evening. Till birds slept in trees, huddled and her mind buzzed with the hours, with his words.

The sparrow chirped outside her window and she came up and out, on its song, hung in the air, like its carefree notes and remembered when they were young.

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Hunting

When days opened in the way they used to do, when she had written notes and hidden them, when clues were tucked in cupboards, and car boots, when she’d laboured over words and folded, when mornings opened full of silly ways, there would be smiles.

When days were full of treasure hunts, of simple gifts and cakes were iced and more books bought, always books, always.

Always.

When days opened in the way they used to do and she was right there and not here. When they opened to words inscribed, to squiggles from a small boy’s hand and days were sweeter than the things she baked.

When days opened in the way they used to do, when they were there, when they were young.

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A Brief History of Us

In a park, somewhere in an old deep green and bristled wood, there was a car. It was an old car, corners had rust and the seats had seen better days but it still worked. And although the miles had built up on the clock, it still drove quite well, well enough to bring him to her door.

They sat in the car, her hair waving and him in the driving seat with his list of objectives and plans. They talked. They always talked and here in the car, near the car park at the swimming baths, they sat and talked about Stephen Hawking.

She didn’t have much time for scientists, not in those days and she listened to him chatter and enthuse. It all seemed so alien to her, so remote from her ways and her thoughts.

There in a park, far from where she was now, they would sit and think about knowledge, argue over the unknowable and as lunchtime turned towards afternoon, she promised to read the book.

A Brief History of Time became their bible and on distant settees far from his, she made notes and she frowned at the pages. And as weeks became months and strangeness seeped into familiarity, she found her way.

Planets crept into her soul and atomic mass with all its inherent uncertainty became the conversations of a Sunday night. How odd it seemed that she grew to follow his ways, his words and yet now, leaning up the kitchen cupboard, how strange it was that there could have been any other way than this one.

This was the way and they knew it at a cellular level, and certainty was woven into every interaction and every dream.

And years later their son was on his way home, top deck, front seat of a double decker. And the trees brushed past the glass that held him and his college bag was heavy with unseen words.

She thought back to first of the parks and his old car and all the talking. There seemed to be no passage of time between now and who they were back then.

Stephen Hawking had bent the fabric of their spacetime and they rolled into each other with a permanece that was unknown to them, back there, back then in the car.

In the now, the bus with their child came nearer and she thought of the worlds that had changed. And in an echo of the car wheels turning was their son playing out all the maths, their boy calculating and rejoicing in calculus and if he could, he’d have sat in the back of the car in the past and shown his parents the workings out. There, on his pure white page was the algebra to the split screen experiment and equations for Schrödinger’s cat.

In a park, in a car many light years away from here they all sat, together. And they were unaware of this day unfolding as they read, as they talked, as they laughed.

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Tiny Bells that Jingled

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She wanted to be lying awake in that bed, the one with the candlewick green cover and the white gloss windowsill would shine to her left in the early morning sun. Downstairs she would hear the sounds of breakfast and the stereo system would play something familiar that she hadn’t chosen herself. Its smoked grey plastic lid would be leaning up the honeyed pine wall and its casters would sink deep into the soft pink carpet.

At the end of her bed, the old wardrobe would loom up, so walnut, so dark and full of the things she no longer wore and the toy rabbit her friend bought her when they spent all summer in the town.

And she wanted to get up and reach into her other wardrobe on the right, the one near the old kitchen chair that she kept at the side of the bed. The new wardrobe that was fitted into the wall, which stored the clothes that she wore now and she would think. It was a morning when she’d already decided what she would wear that night and she would look at the crinkled white blouse, how its sleeves scooped out at the cuffs, like a pre Raphaelite, like someone floating down a stream. And the skirt, the full cotton, how it jingled at the waist, how she’d loved it in the shop, and bought it from the place she never visited again. And she wanted to feel its black and white fabric on her nylon coated legs and she would swirl, she would practice her turns for the evening and her smiles as he’d stand at her door.

And here now, under the ceiling light they kept from his old bedroom, coated in the dust she cannot reach, she would lie and recreate her bedroom and the sounds of the morning before that night. The day before her Father’s birthday party, when they sat and ate and laughed around the table she knows well. And only they knew about the night before, when the pub had been quiet and the breeze by the canal had russeled around her long skirt and later in the still of the house they’d hushed upstairs to her room with the green curtains closed and they had talked and whispered in the dark.

And now, for a second, for a single heart beat under the ceiling light that used to hang over his bed, that hangs over their bed now, she took herself back. And she was there, waking up in her old bedroom, brushing back the hair from her younger face and it was the day, the day he turned up in the evening and she smiled in the black and white skirt.

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