Expectations in the afternoon

Did time dry up in the rain? Was one glimpse of intimacy a stroke too many.Kisses and kindness always seeemed to fall out of the sky. Love was made up ten parts of ubiquitious accidents. Closeness to you is like putting my hand out through a mirror. A long time has wrapped itself around my mind and your mouth and the words that pass through it are the only thing that can burst the cement open.

The time on the wall

The time on the wall stood still watching us as though it had nothing else to do. It was waiting around collecting up all the seconds of our meeting where we had nothing to say to each other, you’d somehow found a moment in your diary where you could come and find me To say nothing to me; you’d deliberately scratched out a day with your disintegrating pen where you
Would have the time to tell me nothing. But the nothing said everything that you didn’t want to say.

Your refusal to speak screamed out our previous five years of silence. You played a game with your hands as though you were trying to figure out what they were for. The time on the wall reached out and said Four O’clock as it was sighing about the fact that it had to do something it had done a million times before. You synchronised your stay with me to end as it struck four, and leave me and my life as the time on the wall ended another hour for me, your hands changed from their game and picked up your bag and left. Now I was left with the time on the wall waiting for another hour to be over. This time the hour was without you.

Polity

We find our own way back to life with imagination, what is life but a recycling of the wheels we found loose one day of someone else's bicycle turning over and over your once used brain to make what your brain had already made before. My turn came to turn down the offer of the cowards who had not the courage to be themselves and made our lives hell for not confiding in their lack of tenacity and lack of backbone which in the end would never back them up in their own fight with themselves.

They took flight them that life and lived like wolves except they were on the inside of the community of the forest and not lurking on the outside. It caught us slap bang in the middle of the face that it was those on the centre in the middle of the universe acting like savages massacring savages who ventured outside of their control. It wasn’t curiosity that killed the cat, they did.

He who came crawling made pacts and acts no wolf would dare even consider as though their abuse was the only law of nature. We found out crawling was the highest art of kings and men who wanted everyone to crawl below them. Maybe at the time it seemed like rain or air or snow or wine or tears to make other people do for them that which they could not obtain through persuasion. We couldn’t understand the last fortnights brutality let alone one thousand years but we also had and have a sense that he might not turn out to be so natural after all.

She went about her business not knowing that her business was business but that business in question was never hers. She ransacked cleanliness and spun a meaning out of duty but the duty had slowly killed nine billion before her with some going quickly and some going slowly as it was the dutiful thing to do just to hang on a little bit longer. She wondered to herself late at night in the late afternoon of her life could you un-train the oppressed, but the train coming to get her was coming that following morning and she could not miss it as missing it meant missing being without her family and she did not want to let down her mother who would as far as she was concerned let down her Father who she had spent the last twenty seven years trying to prove herself too even though he had been dead and gone for the last twelve years. The hopes of the he’s and the she’s and the theys leapt up an invisible ladder back through memory. Back through history, back through genealogy, collecting up the dust particles and repetitions and flaws of learnt experience that no one whether it was a he or a she or a they could remember. But this polity of a family living room, of a community, of a couple or of two strangers making love weren’t remembering to recollect what had once happened they were remembering to forget.

We on the other hand couldn’t be bothered with all that. Wearing the right clothes seemed silly and they never quite fit anyway. So we stood back from a distance whilst the games of history took place and we tried to play dot to dot in its grey absurdity. We were traitors to where we were from but they in the end were traitors to humanity garnered by thousands of years of betrayal.

Yet we still wonder where we find the place that is the most us even if it is only inside us, let alone if we could manage to stay there.

Summer Dolphin

A clay that is no longer my clay and taken away from me and passed to someone elses hands. Someone else smoothed away paradise for me within their hands and within five minutes and thought it was help that had fell out of heaven for me .

Summer 1989, a boy did me a favour. A Summer Dolphin as blue as the sea sits in front of us. I'm saved again but is this a help or a hindrance that has been made with someone elses hand?

My brain is indebted to this help and trapped in it. Oppressions are riddled with ambiguities and I'm always saved by the thing that is slowly killing me by the summer Dolphin swimming through my heart.

Faith.

Your skin fell off in the middle of the night. Like overly worn out pyjamas they just fell off. You had no flimsy thin skin of deceit to cover you up anymore. I could have helped but I left you there naked with no defence. Your thoughts burst forward so often in your head that you could no longer digest them anymore. All your ideas would roll back upon each other and your dreams would somehow not discard them.

I tried to make my own landscape for you in time. Mark out a geographical space where we could sleep; a peaceful cubbyhole away from the staring eyes of reality. In a house of wood or a house of brick or a house of straw or the remotest wood your emotions made your skin feel like an old coat. I cut out snippets of seconds and minutes and hours and cellotaped them together and we made a tapestry of time together that involved picnics and piss-ups and hangovers and marriages and upsets and fall outs. The more reality cast down sunshine and snow the more you became aware there was no hiding place. I couldn't’t provide it. We are in the second century of our love now. Faith for old dead men is starting to wear thin. Who are you going to replace it with now; Old dead Women, People and things and ideas that have nothing to do but get you through? Are you going to by accident one day crawl into your old forest of delusions and find a reality of freedom with its worms or crawl backwards looking for picturesque dictators who will kill you?

.

Glass Puzzle.

Our morality and our passion was broken glass we spent our days trying to knit back together. As we rearranged it in a numerous number of ways with blood on our fingers we occasionally caught sight of who we thought we were in our temporary reflection. We didn’t know if it was us who we saw staring back at us in our disjointed glass puzzle or reflections or an error of desire.

All our idolatries have packed their bags and left this morning. Is the sympathy of tears and reciprocal recognition of each other’s bad times all we have left now? In the glass puzzle of your voice, of your tone, of your words, of your passions stencilled on your emotions I see the conjoined heaven and hell of everything you are and can’t be. The cracks between the glass are both the joins and the gaps between the promise and the jovial screams against your own reality and I don’t mind at all.

No point Bereaving an Atheist’s Bereavement.

It has now been a year since my father died and amongst the condolences and sympathies that have surrounded me with much kindness. There is one question which arises time and time again and that is do I have any more of a sense that my dear old dad is waiting somewhere, waiting to meet me again in some presumed afterlife?

To a lesser extent there is another question that is possibly more common than the one above that arises in my mind.Do I believe I will see him again? Would I want to believe that everything that had been a part of his personality had somehow managed to outlive his now non-existent body? A third question might be is it good to believe something you know to be untrue if it assuages pain?

I do not believe it an act of callous insanity to say that after all this time that I do not. I have experienced the circles of grief that all people who have someone close to them die go through. The intermittent stages of shock, disillusionment, despair, guilt, shame and slow cruel repair and back again. However bad it has ever got or however hopeless I have ever felt any potential faith that I could have acquired has never arrived. In fact I cannot see what benefit to me there could be to believe he is waiting somewhere and that I will see him again. For me to believe such a thing is to want to long for my own extinction and worse to put my own life on hold until I supposedly meet him again surely. I have missed him everyday of the last year but I see no relief or optimism to be attained through thinking I might one day see him again.

Such a wish in my view takes the edge of life and in fact abnegates it in the hope that there might be something beyond death which no one can ever know. I will grant that no one can ever be completely certain either way but to build a belief on uncertainty seems absurd to me. Further more there is no evidence that people lack in either happiness or morality through not believing in it. I feel fortunate to not have to live with the hope that my dad is sitting in some celestial room somewhere drinking tea and waiting for me. While he is dead there are so many other people who are still alive. Surely the first step forward for anyone bereaved would be turn there eyes away from the tragedy of having lost a loved one to the fact of that there are so many love ones and potential ones still here. That does not besmirch the memory of the dead but is possibly the best and true honor you can do them. There is one way in which the dead do live on and that is in our memories, our genes and what they did for us whilst they were here. These things until we ourselves die live on. Isn’t that good enough?

The experience of death in close proximity also does something else which actually is very positive. That is it makes us aware and almost too aware of our own death. This might lead some people to be gloomy and pessimistic but that doesn’t have to be the case. Suddenly at the ripe old age of 25 knowing that I only have so many decades left on this planet and I might as well start enjoying it and savoring every day, however tough that sometimes might be. Prior to my Father popping his clogs I had no sense of how finite and fragile life is and it might just be in a perverse way the best thing that ever happened to me. The pivotal kick up the arse that I need. One big part of me longs every day for him to still be here and part of me will always want to give everything to just to have half an hour with him so we can have a coffee together and discuss anything, however trivial. But I did go for coffee with him dozens of times and had dozens of interesting conversations with him about both the trivial and the important. I had him for 24 and a half years and relish and value every moment.

To me his conscience, ego and personality went out like a light bulb when his heart stopped one June day on a London train station and he has since ceased to exist. Tough facts that the most diehard atheists find tough to rest with but like knowing that someone you fancy does not fancy you back one eventually comes to accept it as fact or as highly likely. I am not immune from wanting to believe things that are appetizing to the mind or I would wish to be true. I have seen beautiful insects, which I have for a split second hoped, would be him reincarnated and looked up and seen stars that I likewise wanted to be him. But human psychology is more powerful than any God is. The mind can spin a yarn and tale to make meaning out of anything; that is pure necessity and you do it more when you dream than you do when you are awake. The very presumptuousness of human beings reflects this and it is ineradicable as you think before you even think as a reaction to every event you experience. That capacity is bigger than all the worlds religions and superstitions combined. In fact if the big bulk of theology tells us anything it is the inherent necessity of our minds to make meanings out of the world around us. Whether it is being to get across a road safely or what beliefs we have about the cosmos and our place in it. The existence of a belief in God is a testament to human imagination in human culture. It being held in common belief for much of human history no more proves the validity of a deity than the fact that for most of human history Women have been second class citizens or even worse. It is only in relatively recent history that the later has changed. Does the previous centuries and centuries of male power over women make the assertion of female inferiority any less absurd?

But what does the above have to do with my Father you might ask? Certainly not much at first sight perhaps. But scratch the surface and actually quite a lot. My proposal is that no nice and pleasing belief actually can actually really alleviate the pain of having someone close to you die. Also any belief that cannot be validated is in essence a complete waste of time. No one ever gets over death, all people can do is learn to live with and actually isn’t there something vaguely absurd about wanting to get over the death of your Father? I am only a year on from the brutal fact and my feelings are far from pretty. Bereavement is an enormously heavy meal and all the people who experience it can do is swallow it. Actually my biggest mistake has been to delude myself that you can avoid the horror and pain that must be felt by anyone who has someone they love die. You have to give in and allow it to permeate your entire body and then you can move on and get on with the rest of your life.

Finally I can say I don’t feel like I miss anything through being faithless. I have feelings about my Father and his life and what he did for me while he was here. But I have feeling or thought that he is up on some cloud or that his ghost is following me down the street on some sunny day (a strange idea) or that he has grown wings and is running errands for some imaginary God. I do not berate other people for their own private convictions about an afterlife or a Divine creator but similarly I do not respect their views anymore than I should respect that someone likes Yogurt when I do not. People do not grow in emotional strength by believing their thoughts, feelings or beliefs are somehow so sacred that other people must tiptoe around them. This does inoculate people from the harsh side of life anymore than avoiding newspapers inoculates someone from the harshness of the world. Anguish can’t be avoided in life so perhaps it is best we all whatever we believe or in my case don’t believe start learning to deal with it, however difficult that can be.