a nightingale sang in Berkeley square

There's a particular kind of night.

It's like this, see.

There's been rain in the air. Good and proper rain, summer storm rain that beats on the car roof or damp English town rain, of shining guttering and boots and damp groceries and inchy snails. The deep, earthy sharp-scented rain of childhood and a rose, crushed now from above and shedding its petals in a woody suburban place.

And maybe you look out on the glistening copse running down outside your window at 1am, sandy-eyed and only abstractly troubled by a retreating dream, with the cold feeling only longing brings, and brings to a point where it almost spills over the edge, the same edge between which your gaze is fixed and your body immobile dispite such inertia.

As if the soaking leaves and branches, trunks stained partly up and down from the heavy earth, a road slicked for pushchairs and those who glow outwards from that damp, hot heat on the inside when the air is humid..

As if that weren't enough, there's the light of a streetlamp. And it frames your view, defines your position in an orange haze that hangs, languishing and heavy in the air, coating surrounding leaves water-plated white, a quiet confidence to draw you in.

Rushing.

Rushing.

Dripping
little
showers.

Filling
catching
binding
sucking
taking
taking
taking.


And you have to draw away, because the streetlamp longing's hanging hazy in your body

too.

evensong

Above the waterflood,
before the collapse,

could we two have walked
hand in hand

and between our
hands the no-space and between our lips the comprehension and within:
nothing...


a grace of erasure?

[Go on, then, I'll write you. But you better damn well be grateful in whatever blank virtual manner you can muster.]

It is hard to know what to say.

Except that. There is a lot of text confined to pages of various discriptions for which I have the languidly enduring desire to commit to this page, right here. To air. To present. To make pretty on a (lilac) screen.

And there's so much. a lot. a lot a lot. But.

I am only now reaching the end of what I can only describe as one piece of a pattern. It's the spiralling confusion my heart chooses to presume following that happy period of relative stability, where the imminent problems weren't apparent, and the crossing calm.

Come down. A few days worth of hours in which I fight to keep up with the lightening speeds and directions of my mind as everything before falls not into place, but at least makes a good job of yelling "Look at me! I'm not in place, and you're gonna have to do better than that to goddamn get me one!"

The thing is (if you're still with me), I sometimes wonder if the things that did become a problem in this minor sea-change

had to become problematic. at all.

It's for this reason that I decided today to give myself a break. Amid the ongoing romantic attachment to that wistful feeling (and other stories) and it's capacity for the creation of a little slice of aesthetic. i think. i oughta. lay off.

If things were straightforward, there'd be nothing to write about. However, I'm gonna just try sticking to the unstraightforward I carry around anyway (and which already makes for better posts than this one)

- and stop picking up extras.

chains

27 people.
Even more.
They were boys,
with their cars...
summer jobs.

oh, My God:

are You one of them?