The Line

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its us. And them. There is a line. Its been that way for awhile now. My mother talked of it. And after she was gone so did my father. Now I talk about it. To my children.

We watch from one side of the boundary. They feign ignorance on the other. But there is a line, there is even a physical line. Its a skinny strip of land with a muddy, dirty waterway running through it. The water way is artificial with a cement bottom. Shallow. It separates us from them.

We hardly ever cross it, traffic is mostly one way. I do go over sometimes. I look at them, clutching their phones, clutching, scrolling, scrolling, clutching, scrolling as if you can eat pictures. You cannot eat pictures. Or phones.

‘Hey, wanna buy a phone.’

‘No, I don’ wanna buy a phone.’

Its better if people don’t know about us. I’ve been offered a lot of phones. I know the value of a cow and it is not the value of a phone. A phone is not worth a packet of seeds, not a single seed for a phone.

They don’t say it out loud. They mutter it under their breath, AI, its AI, its AI that’s done it. Its not AI that’s done for you, it’s the system that’s done for you. I don’t say that out loud. The phone tells them otherwise. If they just got a new skill, if they were more positive, if they got rid of the toxic people, if they were thinner or had better hair. That phone that tells them all of that, but not how to live when there is no jobs and no money. Telling, telling, telling them it is all their fault.

It is a scrappy bit of land between us, unusable, plastic polluted, smelly. The cows won’t go near it. It takes courage to cross it. They come. As a last resort, to this place which looks lush yet frightening. The insects horrify them. The plants terrify them. They are stunned by how chickens actually look and smell. The chickens I own are layers, they are not picturesque. They are not on social media. They are chickens. We eat them.

It used to be the other way. We’d cross that scrappy bit of land, looking for jobs and education and money. How did it reverse, fall apart, how am I to know? I just hear their whispers, some days when many have lost their jobs simultaneously it’s a chant, AI, AI, its AI that’s done for us. But they cannot rage against something they cannot see for long and their phones tell them all the time, eat better, work out, feed your mind, up skill, down time, it is you that is the problem.

I had a phone once. I buried it in the sand a long time ago.

And so they come.

‘My designer trainers for a meal.’

Designer trainers are no use to me, they get muddy just the same.

‘Here, here is a tomato, enjoy it, it’s the first of the season, I will take one of your shoes and you can bring me the other tomorrow and you can trade for something else.’

I do try and be generous, but I cannot save them all.

They slink away in hunger, one shoe on and one shoe off. I think I am generous, perhaps it is humour. I do smile to myself at the one shoe on, one shoe off.  Perhaps it is cruelty, but I only have two feet. I often wear mismatched shoes. I don’t really like tomatoes.

They’re too frightened to fight. Then too hungry and then they are dead. The dogs. The dogs are a problem, the other side of the line.

There are some that still live well. Some small few. Or so I hear.

It has been this way for awhile now. It will be this way until the last phone flickers out. Not the end of the world but the end of any number of lives. Do not confuse the two things. It might be the end of the them but the ‘us’ are still here. The platitudes and clichés will pass, no more pastel painted plywood signs saying ‘Love’ will hang on walls. I am not living my best life. I am just living an ordinary one.  My advice to my children, the best that I can give, ‘learn to grow potatoes, keep your chickens near, start tomatoes off indoors, and when you milk the cow, side on, further from the front, closer to the rear.’  

Fisher woman

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Its common knowledge that you should not fish at the mouth of the river. I did it anyway. It’s how I ended up in the water, although the exact sequence of events is a mystery.

I thought I could swim. That was just the waves teasing me, tossing me back and forth as I lay submerged in the early morning surf. I was trying to gasp for air because I did not yet understand that my lungs were full of water. I wasn’t sure if I was dead. I felt I was mostly dead but not completely dead. Just a bit dead, if that makes any sense.

It was a flounder who told me to relax, really just a pair of eyes poking through the sand, the occasional flurry of shell flakes announcing a presence. I don’t remember hearing fish talk before.

‘Is this death?’ I didn’t ask that question out loud but I guess flounder are clever.

The flounder laughed a sort of raspy laugh, sand at the back of the throat I guess, ‘Not quite, this is near death.’

It wasn’t painful, I was just a little bit alive throughout my body. The flounder was gone.

I felt the next fish nibbling at my flesh. I wanted it to go away but I couldn’t say it. My mouth was salty and dry, but really my mouth was wide open and full of water. I couldn’t see the fish. I wanted to close my eyes. Because of the sand. I could smell the sand, it was in my nostrils.

The fish stopped nibbling and spoke.

‘Fish know a lot about death.’ The voice was deeper than I expected, ‘because we are often pulled into your gaseous atmosphere and suffer gill collapse’ (fish words not mine), ‘near death, close to death, dying, maybe dead, only to be plunged back into the water, still near death, still dying, and eventually dead even though we were meant to be saved.’

I always thought they survived. The fish I put back, I thought they just swam away.

I felt something bigger tugging at my leg. It was an octopus. I could hear my leg calling to me saying goodbye. I wanted it to stay. Fortunately the femur held, disjointed, unjointed but attached. I heard the high pitched giggling of the octopus, as if being able to keep your limbs in situ was a funny thing.

The sky was darkening, I had been rolling under the surf the whole day, dead, not quite dead, some bits dead, other bits not dead, talking to the fish.

In the darkness I felt air on my back. The waves had rolled me to the beach. I thought I could expel the water from my lungs and live again. I felt the tickle of a crab. Then another. And another. I wanted to laugh. I felt their pincers, expecting sharpness but instead soft, gentle, tickly tugs. My skin gave way. I was coming apart, finally I was coming apart and the fish would be quiet again.

Yesterday

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

He calls from far away
To find out if I’m Ok

Ok?

We left ok behind some time ago
Have you seen the numbers here

His voice just fades away

He talks about the weather
His getting worse, mine getting better

He is just a noise in the background now

He’s read bout viral load
And treatment, maybe cure

No one mentions vaccines anymore

There is just the stunned silence of reality

Immune systems, vitamins

Have you been working out?
Hope you’re well, All good here
Meaningless words,
All tinged with fear

I breathe in, I breathe out

I breathe in, I breathe out

Breathing is in itself,

An act of joy,

Of hope

There are things I want to say

A long lost explanation
About why I went away

I have lived out in the world

I am not sorry for it

It was a choice I made

There is silence on the line

Then he talks of the economy
I try and pretend I care

I look at my nails,

Twiddle my fingers in my hair

I no longer lie awake at night
And think of him
The night is full of horrors
I know that I can’t share
He wants to know if I’m ok
I can’t think of the words to say
The pain of thousands dead
Will never go away

The pain it is unbearable

Intangible

Yet palpable

We are all scarred forever

We will wear it like a mark

For all eternity

They will talk of us in whispers

Stare when we come in the room

I know he’ll call again
And it will still be all too soon
Because we are worlds away
Yet I haven’t got the words to say

Something moved me on

And us, me, we,

That was yesterday

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Faces in the darkness

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I try and make out

Faces in the darkness

The ones we’ve lost

They haunt my sleep

But they aren’t there

I toss, I turn

There is no peace

We struggle on

Beneath the creep

Of slow guilt

Of relentless pain

Of all those we lost

For no reason we can easily explain

I drift through the house

Worried about flour and soap

There’s a world out there

Where there’s little hope

I can’t seem to grasp

The enormity

Of a world that shut down

In a kind of uniformity

We are one together

Yet hopelessly divided

Fed and unfed

Those home schooled

and those denied it

I must be contributing

In ways I don’t know

To this division of lock down

Into those who have

And those who have no

I sit in the bath

Crying fake tears

Because the ones that I love

Are safe and held dear

What do I know of the grief and the pain

I sat here through lockdown

Slightly worse when it rained

I look into the darkness

In the dead of night

Try to make out there faces

Understand their plight

But it eludes me and

Shames me

It stands just out of sight

I am very lucky

But it does not sit right

 

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On the inside, there’s rain

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I sit here
Resolute
A sofa soldier
Ideas out there
I can’t refute
A sober new reality
I can’t compute

Umbrella sales are down

I flop, I flip
I flip, flip flop
Its like a dance
And I can’t stop
Inside my head
Once pink, once blue
Now purple thoughts too

Umbrella sales have crashed

I don’t understand
How it came
It wasn’t in my plan
I live on crisps and cake
Thinking,
Maybe even I should bake
Because we can’t go outside
An unintended consequence
I must have looked askance
I can’t find a way to reference

I have put my umbrella away

We look forward to Sundays
Because the numbers are low
But the truth is we’re scared
And there’s nowhere to go
We call them saints
But among them are sinners
We cloak it in war
We want to be winners

I want it to rain

But the numbers are big
It’s a truth we all know
Stuck here in lockdown
Life seems to go

Slow

But somewhere out there
Is horror

Words can’t describe
And we here in solitude
We stay inside
Left to imagine
A truth to behold
Its taken our poor,
Our vulnerable, our old

I wear my raincoat on the couch

We think we’re important
But we ‘re small, we’re minute
Insignificant, irrelevant
A truth
Somehow we all know
But we’re not machines
The numbers they scare us
They haunt us and dare us
They’ve stolen our sleep

I pull up my hood to cover my face

Because the truth is a lie
We don’t all get to die
Injustice is rife
We made up this life
We must never forget
Surrounded by death
The ones who fell here
Those were the ones
We failed to hold dear

There is silence in guilt

And guilt in our silence
No pitter, no pat
On the glass or the roof
No rainbow that glows
As if we needed proof
Here in the house
Is the truth we all know
When we look outside
And there’s nowhere to go
Out through the window
Through its bitter clean pane
Its bright and sunny outside

Here on the inside, there’s rain

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A different day

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

Here we are
In that moment
Where what matters
Is your ability
To distil
The past from the present
To recognise what is gone
And what is here
To understand
Change
All change
Is not about what goes on in your head
You can’t wake up tomorrow
Full of positivity
And turn it back
You need to glance into the sun
Squint your eyes
And see the world ahead
Because what was yesterday
Is gone
Buried and dead
All the days merge into one
Time is spinning around us
Like a vortex
There are things going on
Outside, inside
That no one can see
The hours toss and turn
The minutes spurn us
As they linger here
And here it is
Later than it should be
Earlier than it could be
Skipping forward
Whilst we try and pedal back
But the past is gone
We didn’t even close our eyes
We only looked away
It ran off
Left us here
And we have to find
A pathway forward
To a different day

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The gilded lights of the golden age

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

To the gilded lights
Of the golden age
We miss you now
Now you’ve gone away

To every change
A silver lining
Life goes on
Despite the dying

Maybe its obscured
And we can’t see it yet
But the world it changed
And we must not regret

When things were plenty
And life was fun
The time we spent
Living in the sun

That time is over now
That course is run
Life moved on
Its said and done

The sun still shines
I cower in the light
I welcome change
From day to night

Because change
Change is all this really is
My heart beats on
I choose to live

Sunscreen: Super smooth

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

There is death here
But then there has always been
Except now you can very nearly
Although not quite

Smell it on the wind

I’m sitting this one out
In the middle classes
In a green and pleasant land
And not a shabby urban flat

There’s a garden and some rooms

The birds still sing
The grass still grows
We are fucking irrelevant
And we didn’t even know

I mean I guess we did but

We never really thought about it
I mean I certainly knew
That we just don’t matter
I’d simply forgotten

That nature is deadly

I soothe myself with
Documentaries,
About nature
Knowing that

It is the bastard responsible

In the middle of it all
I play guitar quite badly
I buy myself a new notebook
So I can write earnest words

As if I am truly at risk and suffering

I am worried
We are running low on crisps
And biscuits
It is keeping me awake at night

I now look at my expensive hand bag, differently

Or at least one day I will
I went to the supermarket
And I think that makes me brave
I don’t get my groceries delivered

Like some

Although there is the milk
I am positively a saint
I waste toilet paper
Which to us in the middle classes

Is the ultimate sign

Of our superiority
These days.
Didn’t I make good choices?
I understand viral load too

This virus is the great equaliser

I can’t say it enough
There is no dust here
Except the bits I haven’t cleaned myself
But I will clean

Right after my online yoga class

And the heat
Comes from the central heating
And the extra sweater I bought
Just before this thing broke

I will reduce my sweater buying habits

Because I don’t understand supply chains
And I am not hungry
Dear God, I am clever
It is proving I am more equal than you

Somewhere there in the darkness, there is a light

Because I can afford to pay for it
I have missed the lesson
I did not hear it
It is not this virus that will equalise

But it might be the next, or the one after that

I look at my stockpile of sunscreen
One day I will die from something horrible
In the comfort of an A and E ward
Surrounded by bravery I cannot imagine

And my skin will be super smooth

Invisible

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

She passes through a door
One that is not held open
She sidles past everyone
Takes a table in the corner
She sits there for hours
And no one notices
It’s one of her superpowers
Something only menopausal woman can do

Spurned

She flushes blue,
Then red and then grey
Taps on the table
No one sees
She types on the lap top
Words of alacrity
That no one ever reads

Glorious

Its poetry
But without the rhyme
The cappuccino she orders
It never arrives
She pays anyway
Someone will profit
She can afford it
A fiver in the tip jar
No one even saw it

Salubrious

In between it all
She sips on a coffee
That is not hers
She takes it from the table
Of the man sitting to the side
He seems endlessly puzzled
Why his coffee is shrinking
He frowns, he gesticulates,
Spreads his legs
Keeps on drinking

Ostentatious

She forgets about pace
If life is a race
She has crossed the finish line
Later on she slips between tables
Through the crowded café
Her hand slips in and out of bags
Wraps itself in scarves
That belong to someone else
No one seems to see her
This is what life is like on the shelf

Perplexing

But there is pleasure
And there is freedom
In being nothing anymore
She hovers in the corner
Takes her clothes off
Drops them on the floor

Egregious

She stands resolute,
Naked and free
She walks through the café
She bumps and she sways
She lets it all hang out
As she wanders away

Gregarious

She has earned her nakedness,
Found out her truth
She walks to the station,
Gets onto the train
Splays her legs open wide
No one says a word
She lives in a world
Where voices are blurred

Salacious

Triumphant, victorious
She walks on home
The joy of just being her
was simply hers to own
No longer judged on how she looks,
What she wore
She laughs til she cries
As she walks through her door.

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Love is just a feeling

Posted on by tuesdaylatte

I have brought a box of chaos
And left it at your door
You might have thought you’d had enough
But I know you wanted more

If there is a holy grail
I have never seen it
And all those words I said
You know I didn’t mean it

When I played the song
I said it was just for you
But it’s the same song
I played for all the others too

There are dark, dark corners
In the glorious estate of the mind
Thoughts lurk beneath the surface
That no one else can find

Waves on a beach
Pebbles on shore
Lots of lovely ideas
Lots of wild metaphor

But hidden in the silent moment
In places dark and deep
There is evil in our memory
I watch you while you sleep

Will it be you or will it be me
Its always been a gamble
When thoughts reach our finger tips
Never forget we are animal

And so we walk a line
A tender loving stretch
As if tomorrow was our yesterday
And we were not a sketch

A vague outlined idea
Of what our lives should be
A house, a car, a dog,
Two kids and you and me

Wretched, wicked and worn
I toss it into the flame
The world will say I loved you
Because there is no other name

But love is just a feeling
It exists inside your head
It does not exist without you
It goes where you are led

So when you hear that song
Words you thought you’d never say
Remember love is a feeling
And like all feelings, it can go away.