Category Archives: Writing

‘After those days it was as if I’d been razed. I couldn’t think or talk in the same way. I couldn’t go back, but I was still in the same place, picking for new growths in the rubble. And the old mist still hung over things. What could replace all I’d known? I didn’t even know what words to use, my own seemed part of the mist, or the rubble. But I saw living things here and there, strong and brief.’

‘After those days it was as if I’d been razed. I couldn’t think or talk in the same way. I couldn’t go back, but I was still in the same place, picking for new growths in the rubble. And the old mist still hung over things. What could replace all I’d known? I didn’t even know what words to use, my own seemed part of the mist, or the rubble. But I saw living things here and there, strong and brief.’

‘On some of those days it came down to a basic struggle between life and death. I felt out of control, or controlled by something beyond my control. Something in me was trying to kill me, something else was trying to live. I was given over at last, taken out of all pretence, it was almost a relief.’

‘One morning I awoke and came blinking out of the hole. New again, almost dazzled, I thought of ways to go until again there seemed no way to go. It was still a question of waiting. So I started over, waiting.’

‘The only solution I found was to talk to you. Another you, not the you I lost, but the you I’m always losing. My only way out of the hole was to talk myself into a new wider loss.’

‘Every step I take is in you, in my death. My mouth is full of you, I breathe you in and out.’

‘I cut you down to size, make sense of you. I shape you, think I master you. These very words are guilty.’

‘You’re my death and my chance to live. I can’t go back to a time before you, or forward to a time after you. Mirthless laughter. You’re my endless end, my very life.’

‘You disorient me, but what do I know? I speak, I shape and scatter you like clouds in the wind, look around stupidly and wonder what I’ve said.’

‘You take me to where I wasn’t, where I’m not and where I won’t be, joyfully.’