Broken

There is a place that hides all of you inside yourself. A place no-one else can even know the name of. It is a place of beginnings that never fall into endings. A place where nothing fades into indifference and hollowness.



You have held the shape of this place between cupped hands, shaping it into the ball of possibility that you have thrown off into the future. Now, here you stand longing to get back to that place.

The maps of your longing can no longer lead you down the path, past the entangling thorns, to the secret entrance that leads to your place. No longer do you have the key that will unlock that door. You have left it alone too long. A route that was once etched on your heart, carved into your soul, but no longer can you recall it.

Even our dreams get tired with misuse and we feel the hollowness their departure leaves behind.

There was a dream once, of a world made good, but it is broken now. Broken against the solidity of this world. We could have believed in those better promises once upon a time, but now we see them for what they are, broken, shattered on the ground. Left broken in that place you once knew so well. 

Celebrity Cheese Contemplation

It seems, these days that the wonderful world of Celebrity Cheese Contemplation is once again making headlines. After the tense excitement of last week’s semi-final when the reining champion for the previous three seasons running, Depilation Boobjob, was almost defeated in an extra round of viewer voting, for - what many viewers thought was - her less than rapt attention towards the often-tricky Dutch Edam. However, after a recount of the production company’s share of the phone vote takings, Boobjob was declared the winner, and thus made her way into this week’s Grand Final.

Of course, as she later said in the obligatory post-voting tearful interview, ‘Dutch Edam has always been a bit tricky… like… for me, after what happened to me mam.’ Ironically, of course, it was Boobjob’s distraught and distressing tale of how her ‘mam’ had been caught up in the infamous Dutch Edam Riots of the late 1950s, which enabled her to get through the earlier compulsory ‘Harrowing, But Endearing And Uplifting Contestant’s Sob Story’ rounds with such consummate ease.

The makers of Celebrity Cheese Contemplation, Innitforthemoney, have always claimed that the programme is more than mere titillating voyeurism for jaded celebrity-fixated couch potatoes. The producers claim that the serious purpose of the programme lies in the way it can be used as a sociological and psychological exercise where famous celebrities help other ordinary people work through their own cheese-related traumas. By displaying and dealing with cheese in an intensive full-on 24-hour cheese contemplation environment, whilst stuck in a constantly-monitored house with other celebrities, viewers can see how the famous cope with the all the inevitable cheese-related confrontations in their lives.

Furthermore, through their tasteful use of celebrity nudity, and frank sexually explicit cod-psychology, the programme producers claim they can achieve the kind of viewing figures, and consequent advertiser revenue, which will make them all very wealthy indeed. The programme, they also claim, will forever consign to history that deep sense of shame some people undergo when they are, say, forced to contemplate a Double-Gloucester in the privacy of their own supermarket dairy aisle.

However, since Boobjob’s breakdown on the set of this year’s Celebrity Cheese Contemplation Grand Final, when she was confronted by a wedge of Sage Derby whilst undressing for the obligatory daily shower scene, she claimed the show’s producers had deliberately provoked her into making some explicitly derogatory anti-cheese remarks live on camera.

Those remarks, obviously, caused outage amongst the many fans of Sage Derby who had gathered outside the Celebrity Cheese Contemplation house, crackers at the ready, in the hope of tasting some cheese that had – however briefly – been in the vicinity of some celebrities, and thus somehow become infused with fresh celebrity magic.

‘That’s it!’ said one outraged fan. ‘I had sellotaped a picture of Boobjob next to my cheeseboard, so her magical celebrity spirit powers could always guide me to the correct choice of cheese for my cracker. Now she’s said those things about Sage Derby, I’m going to rip that picture up and replace it with one of Gary Lineker. He’s nowhere near as pretty as Boobjob but he is very respectful towards his Red Leicester.’

A spokeswoman for the production company said:

Obviously, we condemn any prejudicial remarks anyone makes about any or all of the cheese involved in the programme. However, when we see the massive increases a controversy like this causes in our viewing figures, we feel we are duty-bound to our shareholders to make as much of it as possible. So, we feel we must do all we can to make sure that Boobjob continues her provocative presence in the programme. Consequently, we fully expect that if the viewers vote her out in one of this week’s polls before the Grand Final at the weekend, that we can find some way of continuing the controversy. Perhaps by bending the rules so that she stays in the programme, and - quite obviously – becomes the surprise winner in the Grand Final vote on Saturday’s Prime Time Live Open Viewer Poll Vote Spectacular. Thank you.

Solitude

Sometimes she walks down to the docks to watch the fishing boats return. She supposes it ought to mean something to her, but it does not.

She prefers to be high up on the headland on the opposite side of the bay. From there the boats glide into the docks like toys in a bath. The people look inconsequential and she feels a kind of indifferent omnipotence, as though she could destroy it all with a gesture. Just holding her hand up in front of her face makes the whole village disappear. Only the hotel on the beach road escapes her wrath.



She prefers to look around at the places that seem devoid of human presence: the empty sea, the thick woodland on the opposite headland. She thinks she may have grown sick of the society of her fellow man.

She turns and walks down the steep path, stumbling and slipping occasionally. Sometimes it seems as though she is not really here, as though she is a ghost who walks these paths seeking whatever it is that ghosts seek. 

Butterflies

It is easy to see how it all began, back in those warm summer fields with the haze all around us. I remember butterflies everywhere. The grass was fresh green, moist with dew in the mornings. You could get your shoes and the bottoms of your trousers wet in the space of a few yards.

Later, around midday and into the afternoon, the grass would be dry and warm, so soft, moulding itself to you as you lay there. Of course, you were there, and your nakedness suited the landscape.

I remember how you once said that clothes, in that meadow, made you feel clumsy and separate. Perhaps that was mankind's first act in cutting himself off from nature, putting a layer of dead emptiness between him and the world he should be part of; not standing separate, removed, as though there is not, and there never has been, a connection between them.

I remember how you could sit, just watching the butterflies dance, as though nothing really mattered. 

Too Far Out Of Reach

And even now the sky and seasons fill the days with life and light, while we go on down these roads towards the sea. But I do not know, not any more. I have seen the days come, and the days have gone, not leaving any trace on our lives.

Sometimes, it seems we haunt this world like ghosts, ethereal, un-solid and hardly there at all. Sometimes, it seems I have had dreams far more real than this, I have woken displaced in the night, searching for a way back to that better world that slipped away into the shadows, away from me. I have searched hard for that road that will lead me back to that place I glimpsed for a few moments deep within the deeper depths of my mind.

All that is so far away, though, too far away and out of reach. I have only this world to walk through, but it is just time to fill until I can find my way back to that truer place. The place that comes to life after darkness has fallen and my eyes have turned away from this more mundane reality. Here I am, though, and there is no escape. 

Monday Poem: The Bride

[Edward John Poynter - Erato, Muse of Poetry]

The Bride

She was there and dressed in white
I thought, for a time,
she could be a bride,
my bride.

But she is not there for weddings
she is no-one's bride.
She will not be tamed.
She is not there for easy domesticity.

She will not always be there
like the morning
to turn her face towards you
on some warm pillow.

She moves over landscapes
and through forests
along shorelines
and across cliff tops,
always just out of reach,
always beyond your calling.

She moves like a cloud
across the skies of your life.
Beyond touch, she waits
for the world to move around her.

She was there
before history began:
before kings, kingdoms, deeds,
heroes and legends,
myths and long-faded memory.

She walked these green lands
long before the forests fell,
long before the rolling hills.

She will be here
long after your monuments
and domes are forgotten,
long after the last child
dies of its father's disease.

 

[See here for an explanation of these posts labelled as Monday Poem]

Everything changes

Things are changing, but then they always do. Nothing ever stays the same; you cannot step into the same river twice. Everything changes from moment to moment; both you and the river have changed. Even if you only stepped into it a second or so before, the river and you will have been changed by that event so that neither of you is the same as before.

[Nude Woman Stepping Off Rocks Into Pool Of Water Johann Friedrich Waldeck (1766-1875 German) Newberry Library, Chicago]

Even the smallest action – or inaction – can have the broadest unforeseen consequences. The smallest pebble dropped into the river leaves ripples undulating out from the point where it hit the water. Every breath you take and every touch of your finger on naked skin can change the world in some way, has already changed the world in some way.

You cannot escape or evade the world; your lack of presence has just as much an effect as you presence. Your child’s eyes nervously scanning the audience in front of the suddenly huge stage will register the lack of your familiar face just as much as registering the reassuring familiarity when your face is finally found and recognised.

Everything changes everything else, it is all interconnected and we cannot escape that, even by escaping from it.