An Aitken Heart

I know it as well an anybody… as well as you once did.  And shifting through these memories, distances drawn out to near vanishing points, times I can only feel through these glinting metalic seams that sink into history.  And this is what I’m doing when I’m thinking back; I’m putting my ear down to the cold tracks, and I’m hearing only what can travel as far as I am now, and closing my eyes, I’m seeing only what that sound can cause to resonate, to stir.

I watch and listen to and feel what has been and gone and sometimes I find myself naive again and asking “Why?”

I know it as well as anybody, as you must have once.  Such knowledge makes the present undeniable; one can retrace their steps as much as they can bear to, yet still find themselves barrelling foward through time.

Some things are so                                  …final.

Turning In

Her house used to be a farmer’s.  It was at the end of a tree-lined road now overrun with long grass stems, except for two deep tracks where the tyres of cars kept the stone below exposed.  Above, branches interlinked and formed a leafy roof, a semipermeable membrane, and either side the gaps between the trunks reminded me of walking up the carriages of great trains that once had moved and now had settled into that heavy slumber of seized machinery and oxidising metals.

We walked in seperate furrows and she lead, always a few paces ahead.  A bright moon was behind cloud but through the trees I could see swaying fields of barley, silver and blue.  I let my eyes follow the treeline at the back of these fields and scanned slowly until I was again looking forward to the road and to the house which was now in view at the end of the tunnel.  The trees opened out as we approached the front of the house, darkened windows and door so black it looked like an empty frame.

“What is it?”  She asked softly, wide eyed.
“Can you hear anything over the trees?”
“The whispering, the sighing, no.”

I smiled, and she turned back to the walk.  The moon had been easing out of cover and shone through the canopy of leaves in thin beams that we passed through without event; leaves sifting through light and light sifting through us, letting our dark hearts pass through to the dark house.

The house cast a shadow that extended out five or so meters from the wall and she paused at the edge, staying within the light, as if this blackness was not shadow but the ground having fallen away, the house remaining somehow suspended on top of the void.

Her dress was saturated with moonlight, her eyes glimmering like coins at the bottom of a well, and one hand she reached out to me, palm downward facing.  She lead me to the shadow and stood enough back from me, with her hand in mine, so that I could see her face illuminated, ghostly, a thin smile forming.

She was once beautiful, was many times beautiful, would many times more be beautiful, and sad.  And so I took her from the light and we ascended the steps to the doorway, so dark she jabbed the key at it four times before finding the key hole; I pictured a ring of dents and chipped paint around it- like a sinkhole into which the shadows poured and waited until the night, rising like a tidal marsh.  And with a heavy sliding clunk the lock relented and the small wrists straightened and returned the key to the bag she had drawn it from.

We poured in and up the stairs and to the first room on the right leaving a trail of clothes going cold behind us.  From outside, the house looked unchanged and empty as ever.  The moon, obscured, revealed, obscured again until the early hours of the morning.  Dark blue, dark green, black and all the hiding colours of the night.

Coming to a Rest

There’s a way that bodies fall and you know they’re dead.  She came off the bike.  It was like slow motion, but it wasn’t.  I read that somebody who wanted to find out about that effect did a test where they subjected people to stressful situations.  The people were made to wear a watch whose face flickered at a specific frequency that could be read only if someone was able to process information very quickly (if they could see things in slow motion) or if time actually did slow down.

No one could read the watch face.

Still she came off the bike, surrounded by fragments of smashed up headlight plastic and mirrors.  Each piece of debri had its moment when it caught the sun, like holes in a dark picture stretched across a light box.  She fell backwards as if she was throwing herself back onto a bed, her arms outstretched in front of her.  The bike spun out in its own way, as if it had chosen to leave her suspended, coming down gracefully alone.

The smash diffused quickly into a tinkling rattle of cheap plastic bouncing and bouncing, riding out the shockwave of the impact.  She eventually touched the tarmac, just with the shoulder blades at first, her arms folding towards her chest and that’s when I saw it; that’s when I gave up hoping.  There’s a way a body falls and you can tell.

She bounced, just once.  She was tense, only from that moment on, and rolled strangely to one side, like an onion ring having fallen from the table.  Her hair crashed over her face like a  breaker.  There was no blood.

I think if I’d have known her I’d have cried then and there.

But there’s a way of knowing someone that can be acquired by reliving a memory of them too many times, and once I knew her this way I did shed a tear.  My vision blurred as if my eye was surrounded by a wreath of blaring stars and I stood there with my feet above permanent shadows.

I reached out one arm to the carnage that scraped by.

I wanted to scream, or applaud, or look to some other witness and meet their gaze and without words feel some sort of comfort in their understanding.  I wanted to run across the busy lanes and take her hand in mine and whisper things to calm us both; myself too alive, and her too dead.

Tip the Cup

This is exhaustion, oh don’t worry, it won’t shake your hand, oh…you can’t be bothered to either?  Now that you’ve met you can loathe each other.  Don’t worry, it can all be on the surface, it can all be in secret.  You can live a double life of having a spring in your step and falling endlessly the second your head hits a pillow.  This is your life of dying.

You can study the ceiling in the morning.  Oh I know you won’t want to, but it’s an option I’m sure you’ll come to appreciate.

When things get worse you don’t wish for before, because that was always bad enough, right?  Progression is better than comfort.  Oh but there’s exhaustion, yes, that too.

The three of you in a room.  Mind, body and will.  Voices that drown you when your eyelids get heavy.  Dreams that escape you when your eyes are widest open.

This is the room you keep out of.  This is the room that cannot be crossed.  This is the room the shower soothes you in.  This is the room where guests would sit.  This is the room you’d lie together.

This life bustles on a level that cannot be sensed.  I am too big to feel anything but static, for now.

More Than Three Beers and a Peach Cider

The radio was loud as hell.  We careened around corners like we were sitting comfortably watching it in the darkness of a cinema.  The dashboard swam before my vision.  I shouted to Jake who might have recoiled at the inappropriate volume of my voice if he wasn’t so  far-gone himself,  “Who the fuck’s driving this thing?!”  I felt like maybe I should check his pulse because he was just staring blankly ahead looking pretty pale every time the headlights of oncoming vehicles shone on his face.  I began rolling his sleeve up but was interrupted by someone in the back seat who had lunged forward to grab the steering wheel, face contorted, mouth frothing making some strange sound that made sense when they’d righted the vehicle, “Hands on the wheel asshole!  Hands on the goddamn wheel!”  I felt like I’d been punched in the chest.  I tried to speak calmly.  “You should have your seatbelt on, I mean, leaning forward like that isn’t really…ordinary.”  I watched him stretched across me like that, didn’t care much for it, then I asked, “Are you talking to me by the way?”  Just got silence so I looked across to Jake again- he had this funny twisting grin on his face.  “Jake!  Can you believe this guy?  Who the hell invited him?…Jake!  Jake!”

I woke up in my bed like I usually do.  Jake woke up in a hospital but he was back to normal in a day, which’s normal.  The guy in the back seat probably kept the car.  It was a white car.  I know that much.

Abomination

And this is ghastly,
Most kids just build a castle in the sand,
What is this monstrosity?
A face complete with grinning teeth
And red anenomes laid out beneath.
Cnidarian eyes with purple ring irises.
Snide words rise like riled flies from the child,
Spoken as if possessed,  grim noise,
He offers the dire face his dire voice.
Parents rush in to intervene,
Kicking at the sandy face,
Fracturing razor clam shells lodge themselves,
In the soles of dishevelled feet,
Making haste as they retreat,
Grasping tightly at the boys wrists.
He screams, casts his wet eyes back for a glimpse
Of his half destroyed creation and shakily,
Years from now he relates this to me,
A story constructed from older memories,
That smouldered and could smoulder on for centuries,
A man unable to shake free from an old injury,
Unable to articulate a burning childhood fury
Buried in sand and never to be extinguished by the sea.