Issue # 2. Autumn 2009- I Found this on the Metro

If you fall like rain

If you fall like rain

If your peripheral vision greys,
And cateract clouds threaten:
Please, hold back your weather.

All those mornings with darker hair,
And cigarettes and all those people.
Not a word, fifty years of smoke to exhale in an instant.

Two globes of blue and white
Reaching out past the buildings
And the birds.

If you fall like rain, in the hallway,
Or in the street outside,
Your slowest descent will be a raging
Waterfall inside my ribcage.


Sunset on a Stone



Sunset on a Stone

I never cried but I was never here,
I'd disappeared like breath on a mirror,
Lost like fingerprints in sand,
Or a beam of light in the grasp of a hand.
I never shed a tear.


Swimming through the same played songs,
Of broken records that were skipping all along,
Stumbling through our stale stories,
Mumbling every word that will no more be
Meant now that I'm gone.

As though it were a sunset on a stone,
Reflecting the sun's shine and that alone.
No moment or feeling captured, only light,
Until shadows fade into the camouflage of night.
And I'm the stone.


Recollection of a day


Recollection of a day

Today we drove to the end of the world. Following signs in your Dad's old car to 'Le bout du monde' down country lanes and dirt tracks we came to a dead end. We parked the car and climbed a stile into a meadow surrounded by cliff faces rising 50 metres straight up out from the field's edges like walls.
As we walked to the end the cliffs narrowed and squeezed together over our heads, making it feel as though we really were reaching the end of the world. Right at the end, hidden amongst high trees came the sound of water crashing on rocks and from somewhere high above us came a stream pouring over our heads. It had to be climbed as what was beyond the end? And what was beyond the end of beyond? So we clambered and slipped, clinging to roots and rock edges till we reached the top and howled like wolves to the people below. We built a dam that broke and burst over the edge before slipping and scraping our way back down to the world below.
Driving home we saw some land on a hill for sale and thought to buy it. An empty slope sandwiched between vineyards we could call our own. We'll build a simple shed with a glass roof and a large window that could be our home, so when it rains we can sit and watch over the valley below and listen as the rain falls pitter patter pitter patter.


You, the sea and me




The edge of the world






In the Station of the Metto

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

E. Pound


Issue # 1. Summer 2009- Let's never buy iphones.

THE PHOTOGRAPH

Looking back to that summer, the memories develop in my mind like a photograph in black and white. A simple unblemished nostalgia evoked in a grainy image of smiling faces on a summer day. The grey tone camouflaging the dirt and hiding the smell, a moment captured unspoiled by babble and clatter, romanticized and disguised in a fading snapshot.

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As I remember it, the old house had been empty for months before we moved in. Joe had witnessed the owner, an aged and reclusive man, fall into sickness and eventually be taken away into care. Resparking a flippant idea from our adolescence he invited us down to stay and within a fortnight five of us had moved in. It was the start of June.

The house was small and set well away from the country road. There was no real sense of a garden, just wilderness that was overrun and wild, shrouded by hedges and trees.  It felt as if we were amidst a miniature enchanted forest, giving it the allure of being like something out of a children’s fairy tale. Inside it was dark and cluttered, full of old trinkets and worthless treasures. It reminded me of exploring a forgotten attic.

It was a good summer. The days were long and hot as summers should be. We walked down to the river every morning as the sun came up through the mist. Each morning was like a baptism as we shed our clothes and leapt off the weir into the racing water. Every evening we’d lie out on the roof and bask in orange glow and each night we would write songs and make up far fetched tales of the peculiar old man who had once lived where we lived now. On hot afternoons we would have barbecues and fill our faces till our bellies ached and burst. The days it rained we sat in under the porch and watched and listened till the water finished falling. On those days we didn’t say much to each other. We didn’t have to. When the nights were cold we’d grab our blankets and walk up to the woods. There was a den from when Joe was a kid, once a fort it was now our fireplace. We would sit around the fire with the old cassette player that played the music from our childhood and shout and sing and joke and laugh and that never-ending feeling would return.

None of us had jobs. We didn’t need them. There was no rent to pay, no electricity, and being the summer no heating to worry about. No hassles. On the weekends we would pile into the van and drive and drive. We drifted to hills and fields, woods and rivers, always returning to our mystical home in the trees. This was our sanctuary, a kind of creative kibbutz; the walls were plastered in paintings and poems and the halls were filled with different songs from different rooms.

We read the poems of Blake and Wordsworth and believed ourselves visionaries, enlightened, wanderers above a sea of fog. With Nietzsche and Sartre we were ourselves philosophers and with Kerouac and Thompson we were like them. Free spirits, carefree and comfortable, vainly believing ourselves eccentric: unmouldable, reckless and effervescent. We would paint on the walls and proclaim ourselves artists. With our songs and riffs we were musicians and with our poems and stories we were writers. And that stale stagnant feeling never returned.

But nothing stays the same; nothing remains constant, not even for a moment. With the falling leaves and slow onset of a chilling winter came a knock one day at the door. It was the owner’s family, peering in through grimy windows and tut-tutting at the dilapidated home. We kept quiet and hid amongst the empty beer cans and moldy plates. But we couldn’t hide forever. The summer was over and so was the dream. With no belongings we filed out of the house into the cold bright sunshine.

Each of us went our separate ways. It was years before I saw any of them again. As our lives each took their own course we became unrecognizable to each other. We forgot about that house like the autumn forgets the summer.

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 Nothing is how it was, not even in memory. Images of faces recede into the memory like corpses, the sounds and smells recalled each time more distant and distorted like a disappearing echo. I found an old photograph of the house, dog-eared and fading to a rose tinted sepia tone. In the foreground are the five of us smiling happily. It is all that is left now of that summer, faded like our memories but picture perfect, a moment captured and remembered Shangri- La, fictitiously flawless, a time too ideal to be real.


Recollection of a day

Dylan's 'Absolute Sweet Marie' rushes in.  We're standing under the steel arcs of Gare du Nord at the end of platform 11.  It is October 2008, you're 19 and I'm 22.  I'm making the same joke three times, but its because its not really a joke but a very real desire. You shouldn't be catching a train to a suburb twenty minutes away under a station roof like this. There should be steam and handkerchiefs and grandeur and drama- you should be going away forever- or why go at all? I feel the steam and drama anyway, I explain. You say something in french that I don't understand and smile through your flushed cheeks. The train leaves and handkerchiefs fly from the windows. I put my hands in my pockets and head underground, two steps at a time- because if I don't take stairs like this now then when I'm old I know that I'll regret it.

The metro carriage is rocking from side to side as it barrels down galleries of graffiti that everyone ignores. A woman is sitting on the fold-down seat opposite and smiling at me in a dislocated way. Its hard to tell if this is because I have been smiling to myself constantly since over dramatically entering the train, half in the air, just as the doors began to close, or maybe she too heard Bob Dylan at the train station. The carriage keeps rocking from side to side in between stations. I'm peering into the darkness to see if a man is going to hold up moving scenary to the windows- but everything is still in colour so I doubt it.