All the World Loves Lovers...

Sun's out; the wind is fresh. A near perfect day for this time of year. A near perfect time for a cold-blooded examination of love. It's been a while since I teased out its feathers as I dip my toes in the icy river.

     
From time to time I do wonder about falling in love again - the Big-ee, a romantic dream fulfilled, end of story, credits gliding down the screen. But I've been wondering for some time, 'is that really my story?' I've had the violins, the orchestras teetering at the edge of the mountain, that sunset to end all sunsets. Sometimes nowadays I just feel like I've got better things to be getting on with.

    
Plus, there's always after the violins. That morning when we wake to a turned back on a greying sheet, rain streaming the windows. When we realise the bird has flown. When the postman leaves the side door open and wind rattles through the house. It is colder than we've ever known before. And that cold seeps into our bones and leaves us shaking.

     
It's happened to us all. It's the point when you leave or you learn what it really means to love. I guess.

I've had the best and the worst. Maybe lived it all too soon. Now the tape reel winds round again and I'm left wondering: Can I really fool myself into believing in true love? Isn't it like pretending the chopper of death isn't really coming? Can I really do monogamy again? Can I even be bothered with the story when I already know the ending? It'll end in tears as my Mum would say.

     
But none of this makes me unhappy. It may all sound dark and gloomy but in truth, right now, my heart is shooting up with the green buds and leaping about with the floppy-eared bunnies. The sounds of spring are all around me, and they're like music. But I still wonder about these things. Hey, I'd have to be blind as a mole to not.

     
All the lovers of the world cry 'We are different!' No you're not. You're just not there yet. At that point of truth where you test whether that love is enough or not. Nine times out of ten, it isn't, it can't be. It takes a lot to love. And not just willpower and an earnest heart. It takes a special something extra that can't be manufactured, cultivated. It's there or it ain't. I've had it. And I'm not sure I want it again.

Thursday 3rd April - Granada

I watch a film without sound through a sheer net curtain in a dimly lit restaurant. The Moroccan boy's face on the screen is a mixture of pain, ecstasy and conviction, as the film veers from colour to black & white then back again. There is violence, dancing.

I’m thinking about Jacques Derrida - Algerian, teaching in Paris, deconstructing his own identity and life. I look at the painting on the rough brown wall - a group of Arabic women, clustering together. One of them is staring right at me.

I can't escape the fact that England has lost itself.

We drink fresh lemon and mint and we eat prawns, avocado, peppers, hake. I slurp orange blossom water and nibble at strands of carrot. The man running the restaurant looks like he should be mates with Leonard Cohen. They should be perched on plastic chairs outside, gurgling on a pipe, discussing Islam and tobacco.

I'm in a good place.

I woke up this morning from dreams that felt serrated, that cut me as I stirred. In them I’d witnessed all manners of catastrophe and ruin. The Whitehouse had been bombed – rock-stars and Hollywood actresses were stumbling to save their lives; grenades were thrown in.

Bodies flew from a glass building, people stumbled about, limbs hanging off. Those running away were shot, and a lone man walked away from the scene holding a gun. Moving onto another group on some steps, he sprayed them with bullets, then did it again, to make sure no one was left alive.

I woke up knowing dark things exist that are too big for my mind to let in, and that evil has a tangible feel to it - a smell, even. Then I walked off for breakfast at Plaza Nueva. Taking one sip of lemonade, things began to swim... I was fainting, sweating, nauseous.

Granada has got into me like sun rays through skin.

And so... in order to quell the intensity today ... I must avoid coffee and bullfights... dark women with intense eyes... golden, crucified Christs... churros con chocolate and dark men with intense eyes. I must not give too much thought to babies, sexism, gender, marriage, duende, sexuality, Rimbaud, my mother, David, my age, my thighs, my father or any of my exes.

Or the fact that I'm never sure what the right thing is anymore, or how much that even matters...

I shall do this at least for today. I see there's too much of me here, in Granada. It’s too much like something inside me - I see my face in every wall, down each street. I see ghosts in corners, sipping ron miel in ornate bars. I wonder who I've become and why I'm here.

And what to do with all this useless beauty.

In a dream the other night, C turned to me, angry, and said "People who live through archetypes, who treat myth and story as if it were more real than anything else, who can't live without a Muse, who get their meaning from magic - they're just victims of underlying psychological neurosis. It's all just narcissism."

Remember that ultimate moment of completion that you waited for? That longing to return - that untold promise of salvation, of umbilical love or grace? To recapture a lost heaven you knew was somewhere in your bones (god knows you longed for it until you could almost taste it, till you could almost feel it wriggling between your fingers and thumb... in the shrine room... in that bed... in that aeroplane...)

It came and went, every time. Through the fog of all those loves, the friendships, the drugs, the religion, books, laughter, sex, the incredible landscapes of existence... life rolled on regardless, blessing them all, taking them all away, each bearing the sign of their own dissolution, each imprinted forever in the sky.

This great, sad, immaculate machine, gathering no dust.

always two sides to the damn story

i light a kerosene lamp to this bruised evening, where there are no wishes dovetailing the mightiest springs of togetherness, and almighty dream clouds come a shivering into the brazen sky, all hung with spits and spats of a deadly youth.

withstanding nothing i adore you and follow skittish tails towards the deeper woodland of my own forests, breathing, sometimes clearing, never hearing, almost on top of listening, shape shifting, these times are lent to be unbroken.. but still i laugh at wrong moments and inappropriate time scales.. weather me abroad.. i am squealing, sheeting off the mountainside and into pleasure.
what will the neighbours say?

what price to pay for anew, for playtime to come unannounced in the deadest of seasons. a guest without shoes on, can we let him into our mansion, all covered with green and mould and rolling hills all rolling by the wayside? Breaking pots fill the sideboards and cupboards streaming over with lice and fish hooks, the washing all a tumble, the grey sky all a crooked and untidy like a nest of whispers. i can't leave the house, yes i can, no i cant leave the house today, too mmany spectres darkening my way out of the cellar, into the light, i've been here before in the silence of twilight.
bless me, i shiver a blessing like it's not quite true, better the devil you know, than the one who is leaving now out the back entrance. let him go into the night? what if his trousers are too tight? what if his car won't start and he is stranded by the road side? how bad will bad be then?

we must push longing to the final frontier of reason and over the edge it must go and down to the cavern below.

but now i am here...these rocks are steep, i didn't bring my right shoes. i wore the wrong skirt, i should never have eaten that last bitter pill. no, it's too sharp up here, i'm all unequipped. i should be sipping out of chipped mugs down Brick Lane, not here like a fool, announcing my Other Name. I am not meant for the high life, am i not more suited to the suited and booted, the roller coaster riders of black death espionage and true romance shot up like heads on sticks before the flaccid King?

What i mean to say, is, Am i not too wrong for the Right life? will my feet fit the shoes of a fine tailor? i am used to hobbled walking. This isn't me, This isn't me. i am able bodied in dementia, i am a prism in a sea of light beckoning to stranded sailors and mermaids simple and bowing. i dread the step forward, i dread the night alone. i am safer in a cell, and i say that without irony. i closed the door on love, now donn't ya go tell me you may open that dream well again like the most fantastic conjuror off the telly?

yes, my roots aren't intellectual, but i never fitted the old life anyway, and won't fit either into melancholy or the happy flappy brigade. i hate middle class living and working class too, but at least my roots are showing now, an i boot out one from the other, and skip off to play football with Stephen and smash windows of my old school. i was 16 and discovering life and kick out the jams.. i was braver then, and oh so scared to seek the soul inside me, but longed for it all the same.

and i live in fear you won't understand me and this isn't the stupidest fear out, and let's face it, shame is on the menu today, and i felt that long before i could even speak to anyone to say "don't look at my pain". and instead, i play with imaginary friends as have done all my life, they talk to better than human, and they give gifts of solitary miracles, but sorry, they always were the substitute for saying who you really were to people who wouldn't listen.
dodge the chair flyingover your head, raise your voice o#ver the bellowing lungs of catastrophe and whinnying and tip out the ashtrays and the empty bottles of booze and well, you gave up triyin g long ago to be heard over the drone of nothing being said at all, and yes we all know you're a#ngry as the mountains at Mumbai, but well, fucking breaking out isn't an option you ever held seriously amongst the middle class liberalism, and buddhism and counsellingism, and comfy cosy " we have a reasonable life and we are reasonable ", who just don't understan what it's like to have your sister cut her arms over and over and over and over andover and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over gain til you want to scream stop stop stop stop as many times, but how to tell the ones you love to stop wh en they aren;t listening and really you

wa nt to say stop hurt#ing me too, stop cutting my arms with your blunt razo##ores, i never wanted it anyweay i never wanted any of this i got off my arse and searched a better life and why the fuck am i still screming in this blackout which is not my own it is theirs it is yours it is not my doi ng not# my keeping. but happiness is another breed entirely, and one i feel extremely uncomfortable about.

for my friend

The cups are all put away, the tea things set straight and tidy, the film is over, the ending final.

I watch your face, a barrel of tears in the daylight, a configuration of spattering grief, and somewhere I can sense we are near home now, it isn't far away.

You walked with serenity in the garden of bliss, when your toes were blessed with dew and whimsy,your eyes were clear and looking upward. The door was obvious to find, the key turned easily, just the way it should.

But now, your face is bright with pain, fueled by longing. The garden has grown all a tangle, there's no way of knowing where to step.

We talk of the wheel of life, you and I... we talk of turning, turning, turning.

Today, I'm a spring daisy, feeling warm rain after a long hard winter. You are an icicle, threatening to melt, sliding down into streams and puddles. Together we form a current, pulling at the harbour. Together, we fall apart, in our own ways, into life and yearning.

We trade places like fishermen keeping watch through the early dawn. I never meant to stumble upon happiness, I never meant to fall into the river. And you, you are resplendent and glowing, pain shooting you like the greatest gun slinger.

We match, living and dying in our own ways. We track the paths to our hearts through dangerous terrain, all sorts of weather. And home, it isn't far away, it is calling below the shadows of sea birds, beneath the valley of nightfall, through the watch of the ever rising, ever setting moon and sun.

"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.