To all of you who read the pieces I write, thank you. Writing is a solitary thing and the process sometimes feels like being locked in an echo chamber. It makes a real difference knowing that at the end of the process you are going to read the words.

I sincerely appreciate your interest in my work.

A comment or hitting the like button reminds me that we share this process so don’t be shy.

Have a stupendous day.

Mike

In some near place of interminable wakefulness I walk the long grey shore of sleep, in some near place, insomnia. There where I wear my tongue as a tie pin, I wear it there since I have no further need of it.

Tongueless dialogues curl ceaselessly about me, strange voices, multitudinous waves beat a staccato indictment: you shoulda, coulda, didn’t; shoulda, coulda, wouda; didn’t, widn’t, isn’t. It is a brutal beach on which to wait for the dawn. It is not all froth and foam.

A white bull emerges from the waves and walks along the beach shrouded in soft mist that seems to sway just above the undulating waves. My mind begins to settle at the surreal beauty of this scene. I see Salvador curl and smooth the ends of his moustache with both hands as he sits lotus on an anteater while Marcel Duchamp descends a staircase not smoking a pipe and with theatrical flair extracts a pair of gold rimmed spectacles from his inside jacket pocket and throws them far away into the sea where a colossal, gilted faberge egg erupts from the waves and floats like a gleaming sun. He repeats the process and becomes a constantly throwing glitch.

Then, a movement to my right twists the ribbons of mist into a violent vortex and a minotaur armed with a curved dagger breaks the curtains of mist and thunders towards the bull.

The ground shudders. The tawny beast has the bull’s neck locked in its left arm and looking into it’s eyes it draws the knife across it’s throat and blood streams down onto the beach and turns the crashing waves pink. He lets the white body of the bull slump into the surf where it is rolled then swallowed by the sea. The minotaur turns and faces me. My mind runs but my body stays. Face to face with the beast I gape into the onyx pools of his eyes and find there, my self. The restrained anger of 50 years unleashed. The unspoken frustration at people’s unthought words swallowed for the sake of peace sits deep within, waiting, for years, decades, a lifetime, to rise up and then I smile, turn around free of thought of consequence and with the sun warm on my skin, I nudge myself awake.

So I slip to a different consciousness of crumpled bedding, cold dog’s noses and crows screaming outside and find myself returned to the world where Salvador is dead, anteaters are a continent away and bulls are slaughtered on an industrial scale for us to eat. We do not face bulls in any form except along the shores of our dreams. In some near place where we are centuries away from ourselves.

Ink is bleeding a Rorschach image onto the page where text should be. (Why should there be anything? This is something. At least there is this.)

handmade marks meander, he shifts his eyes to old light and breathes, as is his habit, borrowed air stale since Socrates, warm as flatulence. At least there is air.

The eyes in his skull close, as is their habit. Darkness closes the cluttered earth, its supermarket bounty.

Outside, it’s as brutal. The heat has turned the tops of the fern dry, water staunched. Crisp and dead. But at least he is still here, here he is being … , how shall we say this? He is entering the stasis of existence. The inkblot. The stain. He repeats these words:

I am being, … being.

Iamb bean.

Eye yam bean.

Why yam bean?

And so it goes, on and on and on

anon.

Meanwhile, it is always mean while, outside there is now a clear full moon lit night and you can hear the crickets but not the continent rip away beneath your feet. They have always been doing that. The continents. The crickets pulse so loudly you feel their sound inside you and continents move apart so slowly you don’t notice till you look back and nothing has changed for so long it seems that you are an eighty year old dream in the head of a seven year old kid falling asleep on his grandfather’s lap that smells of Old Spice and chicken pie. At least there are memories.

Memory is the residue of being. We call its residence, Self. Like a shelf for the soul. A sole shelf. A shelf. Remembering is sad theatre. Theatre performed by one for ghosts, but its got soul. He wrestles his memories. They become stronger, become demons,make him a stranger to himself. At least he has himself. We doubt, and so we become. (That seems to be the way it happens) What we become is the mystery. Maybe the mystery is only a word to describe that point of surrender. Maybe we have always been that which we become. Becoming is a stripping away. Doubt does that. Life too. You can sit in one place and life will find you and strip you to the bone.

Dubito ergo sum.

That is it. I am in that.

That I am, is being. That I feel, is being. That I think, is this being applauding on and on, anon.

At least there is that.

But what is it? I may as well breathe.

I have walked these streets before, but not here. I have seen these iron stairs, where fifty years of feet have cut the skins of paint from around a welded joint revealing contour lines of colour that expose bureaucratic flirtations with frivolity. Brave municipal souls signed off on yellow, cautious souls returned to gun metal blue, the current trend is industrial grey. These will be our Ozymandies, rusted steel and sky scraping nests where tomorrow’s scholars will speculate on the ritual function for those who travelled here with donations to their gods housed high above the ground in concrete slabs. What stories are layered here? Which hands have crafted this iron, placed it, cursed it, clung to it and from higher up how many displaced souls have jumped from it? How many commuters passed here in the morning with lovers at home and returned in the evening to unpacked cupboards? The metal stairs cut the sunlight into ribbons leaving only strips of shadow on the steaming tarmac below. I have seen that street dog. Wanted to be its friend but afraid it would bite, walked away before it could turn and leave me looking the fool. I have seen that dog everywhere. I have seen that beggar, heard the cock crow three times in every city. He gets around, that cockerel. I have felt eyes peel back my skin, make me translucent till i remembered no one cares and then become invisible again. Able once more to lose myself in the oil dispersing rainbows on wet streets where blues and purples run over greens with yellow nebula catching a trace of my current face. Here there is a long running symposium for lost souls. Everyone’s invited. There are always cigarette stumps stepped on and black from rubber and dirt, i have noticed them too, but not here. The smells are familiar. There is the occasional waft of rotting food carried in warm, nauseating currents fused with car exhaust fumes, excrement and fast food. When you smell these you hold your breath but cannot do that for long when you walk so you settle for short, quick inhalations and move to a busier road where gasoline and warm tarmac smells are welcome relief. I have seen the homeless man asleep on his cardboard, using a plastic bag stuffed with precious possessions as a pillow, but not here. The streets, the smells, the dogs, the people and the sounds follow me to Mumbai, Marakesh, Johannesburg, London, Beijing, Madrid, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Fremantle, Newcastle, Benoni and Jaipur. Perhaps i carry them with me. I used to yearn to travel. Strangers enjoy the greatest freedom. When you are unknown you can become anything. After two years you are invisible and people expect only the essentials from you, like breathing and presence.

Physical distance seems to amplify feelings of love and loss. In this world of instant everything we learn the hard way that live video chat does not substitute a relationship. It’s why books beat e-books, vinyl beats i-tunes and why a warm hug beats electromagnetic, pixelated internet talk. But, video chat is better than none. Sound waves beat no waves. Physical proximity may foster contempt. We take for granted who is closest to us, we expect them to be there always, like the stars and the moon. Then life happens and strips us clean of certainty. When you experience loss at close quarters it’s awful. Loss with the separation of oceans is numbing and with little to hold onto we clench our fists and breathe the hurt deep down into ourselves. There is nowhere else for it to go. This is the migrants lot. Three of us in our small circle of friends have each lost a parent. We have had to co-ordinate visits with relapses in health and where travel used to be about seeing new places it has become about saying goodbyes, seeing up close the people we love whom we know we shall never see again. When a mother or father we love dies, we are physically and emotionally stranded and loss is amplified by guilt and regret. We new it would be hard, and it is.

Death is only one of the difficulties of migration, forging new identities is the other. We embrace the new country that has opened itself to us while mourning the one on whose soil we were born. We should be accustomed to death when it comes. We have practiced loss. But losing people is not a rehearsal and proximity does not ease the pain. Near or far the distance death cleaves between us is interminable. Maybe the pain of it for us trans-continental mourners is that we mix into our grief the echo of the migrants chorus ” you ran away”, ” you took the easy way out”. However, I remember it was a slow walk. The slowest of walks, almost a shuffle. We all run, it’s only the direction that differs. Some run forward despite the cost, some run backwards, despite the cost.

I sit outside on a wrought iron chair. It is deliberately aged in accordance with current trends. I too am somewhat aged, not deliberately but in accordance with the law of entropy which governs all atomic structures. It is neither trendy nor aesthetic. But it is. Being is like this chair in that both are wrought. The adjective wrought means beaten out or shaped by hammering. We are hammered into form, we people and our chairs. Iron is only malleable when heated. Metal hardens when it is cooled directly after being heated. This process is called tempering. We too are tempered. We are quickly passionate when young and the accompanying energy fires us to act. If we are fortunate, like Samuel Beckett, we have fire in our bellies in our late years. But often the heat is lost in the hammering. As cool air nips at my bare feet I feel the fire of ideas inside me and smile. Sitting outside is good still. A flock of cockatoos scratch the blue sky and are gone. This chair, those birds have demanded a response. This is how words are wrought, then written. I will hammer out the form from the fire within.