8pm

8pm?.....8pm!!!!!....I’m late. The queen is going to kill me. How many times has that old witch been pissed off with my time-keeping. I’ve ran out of excuses. I scurry down alleys and tunnels that loom like the entrance to Hades. This time it wasn’t my fault as the recollection keeps me irritatingly entertained as I lumber through streets in this burden of a costume. Ah, yes, the costume. It wasn’t the one I had wanted but it was all that was left by the time I finally managed to get to the shop. A sad, supposedly white but was obviously aware of its own colour blindness, costume with long floppy ears. I stumble. Check my watch. 8pm...8pm??.The bloody thing must of stopped. How late am I? She is going to have my head. I promised I would get to the party on time. I turn the corner and see the club in front of me, a long line of colourful characters like a row of playing cards standing on end wait outside to go in. Jam the office tart is snogging the bouncer as I walk past.

‘You must be off your head to turn up this late’ she says as she hands me a drink. ‘Drink that. You will need it when she sees you.’

I attempt the walk of the proud condemned as I enter this booming hole of flashing rainbow doom.

The place where I write

I, a lonely lover of linguistics, search for a spot to speak. I clamber over mountains  of myth that contain the broken bones of forgotten words, lost letters that constantly cry out to be used again in the songs and sonnets of heroes and ancient races. Once whispered in breathless sighs between lovers or shouted out of the angry mouths of warmongers they now lie without a place to call home. I stop. The vibration in the air has changed. A subtle breeze begins to burrow into my nostrils as I breathe in the scent of lost love letters mingled with childishly written birthday cards to fathers and mothers. This place has no end and no beginning, it has always been and forever will be. In this  shadowed realm of infinite possibilities and scenarios to be picked like precious pearls from a primeval sea I begin to feel the thin veil sunder. Two worlds start to join as I hear the sound of the traffic outside my window. This is not a comfortable place as I’m brought back to my senses to a more concrete and solid state.

In front of my desk looking out onto the apple tree in my garden I am reminded that there are places in between the one where I sit. The scribbled sentiments on the page are not only written in many worlds but from different times that converge in that one moment to find a place that they can call home. This place where I write is a consecrated circle where spells are written and cast, where literary homunculi are formed from subterraneous thoughts to walk without wires. Places are never completely physical, they are anchors to a space where the muses live and who whisper in the wind.

The Other Side of the Mirror

There is a figure that no one sees in those dark corners where light inherently knows not to venture. It’s a lonely corner you pass everyday that tugs on your sub - conscious, that whispers in your ear but revolts the laws of society. The pack mind abhors the vacuum of self trapped solitude, assimilates a misguided oneness and adapts to transform it into something it can comprehend.  It is doomed to fail, physics will build many structures in innumerous worlds with innumerous laws and with no fault of our own, leave us locked behind a glass we continuously hammer on.

Freewritten poem for National Poetry Day....

Innocuous Lie

A passing word, a lyric, a fleeting memory of a scent insipid,  

As innocuous as the games of a malicious child,

Who reads the book but understands less the rules.

In unknowing malevolence it skips on chalk,

In an empty playground where all laughter taunts

Choices past bold made, now seem worse than folly,

Promises once amethyst pretty, lie in ruinous sublimity.

How easily the Fates lose interest in a walled, broken city.

FREEWRITE - Vanishing Target

I completely missed my target. There was nothing there. He had gone.  Vamoosed, Disappeared, scarpered in the blink of an eye. One minute lined up in crosshairs, the next nowhere to be seen. Why and how would that happen? It mesmerised me, confused me. I began to search my memory for any signs of slippage. Any sign of a blip. It was a hopeless task. Maybe he saw me and fled? In the middle of a wide open space? No, Impossible. Did I blackout?  I checked my watch. The blackout monitor on my wrist was still green. No. You can never be too careful at this altitude. I dusted myself off and made to leave, Puzzled. Just as I turned around, it was then I noticed the weeds, the branches, the lush vegetation around me. YEARS WORTH OF GROWTH THAT WASNT THERE HALF AN HOUR AGO!!  The horizon had changed too. I could see the outline of the rocky cliff was different, perceptively so. Then while a dizzying feeling came over me, a forerunner of feinting,  the knowledge hit me like a wave. It was I that had moved. Not in space....BUT TIME!!!.....