TELL THE STARS I'M COMING, MAKE THEM LEAVE A SPACE FOR ME...

I know you know, we can fall in love to lose ourselves, or we can fall in love to find ourselves. And what we think we are seeking is not always what we are seeking, and the unexpected always turns up, just in time. And permanence is never lasting.

I am a watt in a bulb that lights up at that time of night when eyes start to strain, and faces appear in walls, the cat lets itself out, and the kettle is empty. It is 3 o clock and the day is not yet up.

I am also afraid. I don’t want to go alone in the sea tonight. I don’t want to be swallowed up by the forest. To stand my ground makes all the chandeliers shake, and the plaster come down off the walls.

I am breaking the spell of a lifetime and I can see no further than the end of my nose, yet my vision stretches out past the sea clouds on the dainty horizon, to a turquoise place of nothing special, only dust and filament and a quiet spectre of brilliance.

I strum electric tunes in time to long forgotten rhythms, and ache to Van Morrison and smile and cry at the man who loved bears, and the bears who ate him.

I will reach you in a gaze, then you are in a haze of cloud again, eaten up by past and future, the present hanging, a diamond in our midst.

This is the realest thing I can mention… the curve of your head on the pillow, your fingers stroking my nose, and a very distant image, blurred, cold seeping in, fading out…of an outline of your figure, on a ridge, by a freezing river, enveloped by the winter’s day.
He wants to die in the cold.

I become an immense wave born of infinite tragedy. And yet, I am travelling out beyond the stories of old, into places yet unborn, crashing through the ether, through a tunnel of light and a blank white crowd, glinting together, teeming. This is anew.

And I am still seeing angels in cocaine powder – they are ageless, divine, they speak the blues, sink death into sunlight, bring terrible beauty home to a hearth that is welcoming and climbing with moss and roses and ivy. The profound illusion of God, a shot at glory, at life, a moment of purity.

And that never came without a price, without the devil’s face in profile. No redemption without a fall, no fall without redemption.

At the same time, the story is reversing at the same speed as it is accelerating, and new pictures creep their way into burdened filing cabinets of hundreds of thousands of tired equations of living and loving.

Years ago, I found a Dharma, it was strong, it blinked with an eyelid that was laughing. And I am once again remembering that eye, and hearing the song, the drum beat that thuds so fierce, the Yogi down from the hills chopping himself to pieces with a damaru, the crystalline ancient wonder, perfect sea of change, a soft earth life, as delicate as the scent of a single flower from across the length of an open garden gate, from across hedges and spring lawns touched with wetness.

I can feel an ending and a beginning, a membrane in space locking me in frozen silence, a reaching out towards you, a pulling away, deep wells of understanding, unfathomable shades of unknowing and losing and we throw it all away but somewhere keep it precious, here, under heart strings and memories and hopefulness and decay… living, breathing, alive this day.

Life turns us over like a car on a speedway, but we are always only one step away from hope, and the words run out... but the writing is never finished

"sacrificed by a dark religion which almost no one understands"

If I were to give you this that is in my hands, pass to you the liquor of my childish heart - would you carry it in time, build it up without repose, the maker of all ways good, unblasted by tomorrows, not yet washed out with the flood?

     I am white and shivering in this hard daylight, on an unmade bed, two streams through the window from different directions.

     And we all rest alone in the floodlights.

     So I tip the scales this way, that way, and as much as I want to give, I take away. And want as I must, I cannot subtract the heart ache from all the tentative equations we call love, I cannot sweep the sorrow from my door step, nor from any other's. I can be a survivor, but that's the easy bit. It's jumping headlong into certain death which takes a bit more practice. Which takes the superhuman.

     You don't need to bury yourself under the frozen bodies of children to know the endless corruption of life, the terrible blast of loss and feeling, the wake of dread. Just look into the eyes of any single person, at any given second. The tenderness of that will split your heart forever.

     And this is the first mistake, to try and make that torn place good again, to seal it back up and pretend it never split in the first place, that you never really saw what they were showing. Or if you did, to tell yourself that's in the past and well, you'll learn to hold it better next time.

     No no no. We can only ever lightly touch that tear for the tiniest of moments, finger its edges as softly as windfall on a late autumn day. Press our lips to the cut, breath slowly and whisper gently "until again, until again..".

We all long for that moment of love in an endless catastrophe of living. But we all know love is impossible, and that a moment is never enough, we want the pain to stay away forever, we want the river to be always free flowing, we don't want the scars upon our chests, we don't want that reflection in the mirror, we don't want the red to keep spotting the lino flooring.

     And as much as I will hold your hand in the forest when the animals are prowling, I'll leave you to the wolves and the lions, I'll run out screaming. I'll be your pillow to rest your tired head upon, but I'll cut it off at the right time, when your tenderness is but a flapping thing, a scrap in the arms of winter.

     And you'll hold me in the morning, and cook me breakfast and read me stories. And you will leave me in the rain, when all the taxis have sped from the streets, and the lights in windows have gone out. You will cut me with a razor, just to see how I bleed, which way the blood flows. We'll swim in a sea of flowers, roll through fields of poppies, come to the cliff edge and go over together. And I'll leave you hating, you will break my fingers for a long time.

     I've seen seven bulls die before me, awash with blood, and piss, and vapour. I've seen those hooves in the air, I've seen the tongue rolling. I have felt the calls for suffering amid wine and revelling. I've watched dignity destroyed, I've heard the jeers, fallen beasts reduced to toddlers. I've seen them dragged lifeless across a ring of sand by horses.

     And I've seen the man, in the centre of that ring, on one knee only, his head bowed, his back straight. And I have wept at the unbearable, intolerable, unquestionable beauty of that gesture. For the beauty and the grace, as much as for the tragedy, for the cruelty, for the goddamn barbarity.