Winter remains. Copper-like evenings, still gripping me and inducing a heavy headache and I’m all aggressive and I just want some sunlight from somewhere. Just want a little more sleep; but the tiny noises are getting in. It’s a radio mish-mash, a scramble of stations on the rain-marshes of a metropolis night. There are other people around and I feel safe knowing there are other bodies near me, it is as if we are still primeval, building our own little settlements and fortresses. The lights tell me that the city is made up of loads of these hamlets all nestled together to make up the whole, in various locations smashing together and overlapping. And at various stages the identifiers, the signatures overlap too, so that you have the uneasy dual throb of conflicting wolf cries bashing together, or contrasting basslines so it’s plates and saucers in the washing machine. And I see a giant, great pattern; pockets of heat - civilisation - in the dark green or grey shrubmass that carpets this landscape. Tiny interferences to let me know I am not alone here, especially the soft drinks can getting kicked along in some near-far-off cul-de-sac and the rattling of milk bottles crisp over Pilkington glass air and the sub-stations buzzing to their own lonely spaces.
Now I’m inside though and the girl is on my mind. These moments when there’s no music, no encore, they are the worst, ‘cos I’ve got nothing to focus on except for these wet-cardboard-brown lumps of dwellings. The texts have dried up, the phone calls stopped to leave paranoia and tortured thrashings at the intercom. I slink back into the notion that home will be the saviour: a place of reassurances that hits the spot and brings the confidence back when vultures are only too keen to, layer-by-layer, strip it away.
Each night I go to bed early so I’m ready for the next day, then I rise early into pristine cloudless sub-zeroes and put the kettle on for a cup’s worth of extra comfort; a mask over troubled wiring. Make up the tapestry from the bare wires inside my head - visualise it, re-shape it, mix it, define it. Place the day’s efforts into context; remember and retune the conversations, store the needed emotions, the soft-centre soft-as-cotton paper-thin clarities. Even if it did not go to plan pretend it did and add it to the multi-textured past-head-calendar that seems to seep into itself, with no real definition between the days as the events that take place don’t diverge from a pretty small platter. Early morning. Frostbite crunchair. Exhaust fume perfume. Noisy Tesco. Huddle of schoolchildren. Bus. Crowds pour into the station. Into the dark. Sometimes out. Looking at roofs. Or looking right at someone’s chin. Or shoes. The clock keeps ticking.
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© Copyright 2016 John Maher