On Being Back A Week

Being a 23 year old artist in 2019, I am going places, for no apparent reason. 

Today, transporting myself around London, going places, my thoughts turned to readjusting to London Life after Six Months working on a cruise ship. It was a transformative experience, and now I have no idea what to do, but I have an idea of how to find out what I want to do. That somehow is position myself in places and spaces, places with an ineffable sense of calm, feeling like well placed plant in a garden bed. To this end, I sat in a coffee shop above a garden centre, in a sandblasted high-backed wooden chair, transcending the usual levels of unphased pretention, to figure out the what. 


My happiest obsession is towards contriving witty observations and sudden affordances, and scratching them with a blind hope in their relevance and potential into a small black notebook resting in the palm of my hand, reporting on the state of the universe, talking to myself in the past, present, and future. IUnderstandably, this means that once I flip back a few pages, I have absolutely no idea what I have written and why, but its always fun to try and work it out by piecing together the contexts. I have about 15 notebooks, of different shapes and sizes since I started doing this a few years ago. Over the course of my contract on a Cruise Ship, I filled three and a half of them, and brought one full one along as a kind of reminder to flip through, as it contains gleaned comments on what reality I actually choose to believe in, when I forget, and lose centre.  

Sitting here, now, in front of this one, It would seem now that I am being drawn back into London Life, its pace, and its senses. Social Media platforms are engineered to keep you on them as long as possible, and it feels like whatever sense of centre, or being happily lost in The Distance Between is harder to come by.

This, I feel, is the readjustment. A quick and abrupt re-adjustment is London pulling focus suddenly whilst your back is turned. This can be depressing. I've found its important to allow myself to notice, just notice, not attribute too many meanings to things whilst in this liminal state. In some senses, I feel that God, that sense of centred calm, is [citation needed] a long way off [citation needed], himself [citation needed], scrolling through his own black mirror, sucked into cyberspace, past reams of memes that appear before Him, after having been pumped out at lighting speed from the maw of complex machine with a kind of hopper on top of it, a machine that is kept fed by hypnotised facebook mums on a mixture of human and cat hair that is ripped out by the fistful from the destitute heads of vacuum cleaners that apparently once roamed cyberspace free and clean in a golden age. 

There is a knot here, and it is worth unpicking. It is not just about readjusting, blindly feeling your way back to reality like a mole scratching though mediums. This ties into having faith in the idea of centre, rather than having to consistently prove to myself that it exists. I do this by testing myself against people, against contexts. This is exhausting, and I forget that there is a certain invulnerability to being vulnerable.


Driving, I was beeped at a fair few times when turning, and saw the frustrated silent head shaking as I moved into poisiton at junctions. To these people, I thank them relentlessly as I swing out. On foot, a concerned citizen behind me in the self check out queue calls out "UM 'SCUSE ME'" as I left the machine momentarily to get a plastic bag. I turned around and said "Almost There", with a patient smile. Here, in London, in a Tesco that looks the same as every other Tesco except with different corners and a different temperature, I was Talking Back. I think she thought "This man must be from Up North/Is Talking To Me/Frequently Buys Lemons at Tesco." I'm not. And I havent bought lemons in six months. Ship Life has obviously made me a terrible driver with no spatial awareness, or maybe im just aware of how much people have somewhere to go, even though they'll never get there long enough until the next destination rears its big grinning neon face. Being away for six months, away from the Brexit Gloom means that I have lost the ability to be London-efficient in every act. I no longer dance with the lemons across the barcode scanner with grace and the ever present, ineffable threat of time-pressure. I no longer furtively stuff my purchases into my pockets so I can say I don't need a plastic bag, hoping that on some high frequency thats one more win for the Green Team.

Its this reaction to my own action that I am afforded in London,  and just learning to let go is the key. Slowly does it.

(NB: After writing this, I briefly flirted with the term "Lime Pressure", fantasising about true artistic integrity. To my suprise, it flirted back. There was a beautiful spark, there, at the beginning. That term promised me a one man Edinburgh Fringe Show, previewed in some pub by 15 corduroy friends, and an eight hour drive listening to alternative dreampop, smiling with a glazed expression from pink windows, going on the little rocket ship outside the service station and falling over, walking in cold dusks hand in hand until the blue of the sky makes the orange of the lights reflect in the eyes of lime like hot coals of promise, and then it promised me all quick meaningful hand gestures, and high banked seating, and just four lights on me, cold, warm, cold, warm, and for me to be received not even lukewarmly by extra adventurous fringegoers, and then it left me. And I was cold and listless, confused after such a rollercoaster of expectation and hot lime sex. The lime rolled down the royal mile. Nobody paid it much notice amongst the noise of the Fringe. And as I watched that object dissappear around the Cursed Statue of Adam Smith, I looked down to find myself holding a now hopelessly thick stack of flyers, flimsy and stupid now, wet with the perpetual drizzle, some stuck together, the top layers fluttering pathetically in the darkening breeze, plastered with my stupid face, and my stupid idea to turn citrus fruit into a sharp social commentary, and the words 'debut', 'promising', 'hilarious', once smouldering with passion, now fizzing out beningly, and promising to myself that i'd never really love again, but then a small voice at the back of my heart now picking me back up and saying "well there's always lemons" with a kick and a nudge). Lemons. 

The Cycle

Distortion arranged in chaos, loud, undending, enfolding,
Balances Out,
Centred on an emptiness
Dances always with order to wash it away. 
And sometimes, often, more often, eventually, always,
They annihilate- 
But the hope of those small moments rests on being helped back up, or talked back down.
What you have to reach out and catch between time is the emptiness. 
Needing Love, Giving Love.
Growing Love. 

When you are superimposed, you are in between two slices of time.
So, what slices of time are eternal, 
Pulled forward by the spinning of the earth?
The cycle of the simulated universe
Is the cycle of the seasons.
It goes like this: 

I heard a small bird once, after a violent and black storm
It pierced a silence so loud.
A little gold glimmer.
It feels like spring.

Then I woke up on a morning with dew resting, 
A sharp tang of countryside bonfire,
lit by the love of some eternal groundsman (who more often than not is just passing by)
fields blossoming deep blue and green,
a cold nose, a blunt stone pavement to stand on,
and to walk on back to the city.  

And in that walk back,
A road lined with hushed trees
Every step summoned summer closer,
Nature bloomed full and luscious, 
ruby red apples hang like jewels and shine,
and inaction leaves them there-  but the air is warm, 
little stones get thrown into ponds
the fire burns, 
we sit around it 
devour the smoke
and drink to quench the sun
such is the season of abundance. 

The apples are rotting! Cries the badger.
Fuck, Wait, What?
LISTEN TO ME. I SAID THE APPLES ARE ROTTING. PICK THE FUCKING APPLES YOU LAZY CUNT.
The Badger hisses, upset, as it shuffles, or waddles, back into its den, or hole or whatever, the bastard. A fox ushers the badger into the depths and flicks a contemptuous look back at me over its shoulder. A barn owl is peering out from the branches of one of the trees. "...WHAT?!" I yell at it, palms out, shocked and indignant. It raises a tufted eyebrow and flaps away. "What did I do?" I say quietly to the wind
The wind just shrugs past me, she caresses my cheek with icy indifference as she leaves me listless. 
I dont know how to pick the apples 

All through Summer into Autumn I heard myself say this.
I watched murmurations of birds dancing in formation against the backdrop of a summer thunderstorm. 
Yet there was one bird lagging behind them all,
This one bird, a shepherd, risking distance, unable to catch up
This bird with long gaps between graceful flaps
broke off, on its own path, flying south,
Over the trees, the city, 
and me standing there in the evening humid air,
I heard myself say this: 

Take no harvest now
Before this season's end.
Slick in shades of umber and crimson, 
The fog lies low and cold over hunchbacked hills,
Woodsmoke smell will hunker indoors
Along with you and the mold 
The harvest, the rejoicing,
You have been at play too long,
You are being willfully blind

The fields that I see
Are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth,
And snout and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through dead wet pages of leaves. 

Then the trees are to become skeletal. 
Some will wither and die and give themselves to fungus. 
Nothing is wasted,
Those apples on the floor are better suited
To being in love with the worms and the rot,
Than being given to others in a summer feast.
The trees’ branches will be like grasping fingers
Holding themselves, harnessed, like orants to the bone white moon! 

My eyes redshot now with power and hope I go on:
It is the Turning Time!
Let it Burn!
Let your fields burn in a raging, razing fire!
Run to the Sea!
Embrace the water,
Immerse yourself in chaos!
All this will give haste to the march of Winter, the silent kingdom! 

When, in that scarcity of love and abundance,
the fearsome cold will harden it all,
and leave gold in those cracks, so furrowed by plough and root.  
The radiance of the flames will have left such a vastness of scorched earth,
That standing on it there can be nothing but a lightness of being, 
In reverence to the newfound empty land you stand on. 

And when you are ready, after all this,
You will see soaring overhead a phoenix, 
Death into Life,
As Spring into Summer.
As Autumn into Winter.
As Spring into Summer.  

Autumn 2

Cold cheeks and knuckles will rap against root and bark
As if to ring in this new time
In what is hollow, we find the whole

The great rotting of the summer hoard
The transfer of all energy to the silent kingdom
Masters of death dancing
Stagheaded mushrooms
Feasting on the waste of summer
Which seems naive now
Childishness has left

The havest had been in play too long
The fields are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth
And snouth and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through the wet layers of burned up leaves

I have hoarded all I can
But cannot stop this mold and mildew and the must
There is no more fruit to pick
I have to catch myself now before this all decomposes
To continue would be like peeling off my own bark
The same tree that bore sweetness and joy
Now is the time to grow wild, untamed, unpicked.

A manifesto for autumn

Take no harvest now,
Before this season's end.
The havest has been in play too long
The fields are barren and stripped
Hollow reeds rise from churned earth
And snouth and teeth and bristle will rifle
Through the wet layers of burned up leaves

Soon the trees are to become bonelike
And curl in on themselves
Slick in shades of umber and crimson and sepia
Fog is coming to lie low in cold humid air
Woodsmoke and musty leaves and the rot
For it is the turning time in this forest
 
Let it feed into your body
Let us grow wild
Untamed and unpicked
Let the fruit all drop to melt away

As small new buds
Like tiny bones
Grow from the razing fire
An uncontrollable burn
Set by turning with the world

Let it all fall again like a wildman
Coming back from the forest
Let him in again
You thought him lost
As in spring everything is prim
And squared off neat tidy
Buds of white and pink and yellow
And in summer bulging all

Now we go down to what is real
Let the cracks show
At the base of the tree
And the branches will hold their fingers up
Like orants to the bone white moon

Order was a priviledge
It was a drastic step towards heaving green masses
Direction from above
The great eye
Projecting silver linings all around future interactions
Masquerading those benefits as motivation
All the while filling the void with fear, lethargy and dogma
Staying inside a raincloud just hoping to catch the sun
Order is fakery

Long live the wildmen!

We cower for no one
Our eyes glint redshot
Mudded and mad
We speak for no one
The forest speaks through us
With a grin we shine within
And wait for Autumn to come

That fucking dense one

It's like retaliation,
It suits being rooted in the ground.
This lot of land was given water
Motes and speckles float
Falling here and now revolving.

In the heart of the ancient city
Only luminaries sit amongst stone
Their ganglion limbs wrap around
Their little inklings winking.
Growths and pores leak spores
And rush to flood the sun.

So small they live in all
So small they live in the air
Reflecting a fiery presence
By a thump and a rattle
in the deep den there.

Grey fields stand tall as shields
Tumbledown round huts emptied and
ripped apart like wet cardboard.
Under a slip of leathery mud and grit,
Hands turned crust black and meticulously scabbed
Held up like orants with the bone white moon
Pitted and stopped in orbit.

That other city

This city falls through a fragile sleep. It is a place of vivid dreams, and streets that are like coral canyons, nooklike, in a warm sea heaving and flowing with people. The tropical heat forces dark green weeds and lush grasses to burst through the brick and concrete, filtering up like insurgents through colonising stone slabs. Fruit trees, wild and untamed, stand along the long and straight roads that lead into the city, opposing old colonial lamposts that flake black paint along the empty paths. The city itself is surrounded by a vast orange scrubland, and the fruit of the trees droops down unpicked into the short yellow grass by the side of the road, melting and deforming under the humid sun like the skin and bones on a corpse left to rot.  Inhabitants drift down the footworn streets with dead eyes, trailing vortices of musty smells that mix in the wind. Living here means understanding existence and death as less a mere certainty giving room for wilful ignorance, but just a long way off. Life becomes nothing more than a process gone grey along the way of lain down tarmac, the soles of your feet grinding slowly as you shuffle out of your house, along that relentless pavement conveyer belt, until you reach the end of the road, the self checkout, life support beeping again and again, over and over, tolling like a bell for all your worthy achievements are worth until death herself packs you and carries you away in a big black plastic sack for life.

But then there are those with wild eyes and swaying step who cross the road, down off the pavement, into dirty alleys on the outskirts of town, where each footfall lands almost silent, a dull tap that reverberates around on towering buildings that creep up into the sky and hem in any wanderer or traveller. Looking up at the dusty bricks that tower up high, a one can see spiral of lush tendrils, pockmarked here and there with delicate star shaped flowers. Dark purple petals and waxy green leaves curl towards the sun. And down on the ground, as you walk, very occasionally a glint of one the many lords of the city catches your eye as a random copper coins. A coin first spent so long ago, spent for you, indebting you to this city even before you’re dragged out screaming into this unforgiving world. Born into a life of debt but nevertheless feeling the dry air on your wet skin lighting up your nerves like a blanket of ice, eyes wide and bloodshot, your gumless screams stifled by scratchy blankets covering your new nude body, trailing umbilical all over the shop until the doctor finally comes to decide if you’re an innie or an outie, your bellybutton sealed like your fate.

Most people in this city are poor, living on these outskirts. Here the streets have no signs, each twist and turn designed in absentia- a secondary effect of the decision to build homes so desperately needed by a burgeoning population. The blocks separated by dirt covered paths cross over each other like tree roots exposed by the rain. Together the children of this shanty play, chasing eachother, dry smears of dirt settling into the crags of their palms as they laugh and scrabble like feral little magpies for any shiny flake by the side of the copper coloured houses. Each house is topped by its own patchwork of corrugated rust, and the walls slant into the ground, at different angles, sinking back into the earth. Within each thin home lives a large family, so close to the next that they can hear the life next door. Screams of anguish, moans of pleasure, laughter, arguments and everyday conversations seeping through the cracks in plasterboard just as privacy relents to mold.  And as the sun goes down you can catch glimpses of soft, wind dried limbs through stained linen blinds that gently waver in the breeze.

The roots lead to central area of the city where tall white and blue glass skyscrapers hang. At a certain point the curved dirt paths give way to planned streets, each polished building casting a shadow and cooling the pavement. Every cornerstone and angle looks to be so heavily designed and ordered by architechs looking down from cold, dry, air conditioned offices. Black cars careen down wide silver highways lined with trees trimmed so perfectly by unseen hands. On weekends the city is paralysed, and warm winds flow through the square streets, the only sounds around being the gentle clatter of some thin plastic wrapping dancing down the alleys, before it disappears from view. The dull roar of the motorway that feeds the centre of the city is hushed for now. And as the work week begins the air begins to fill with a chorus of intermittent horns in harmony, distant sirens grow to scream on top of cars that careen like speeding violins towards their targets and out of earshot. And people in black suits appear out of nowhere to walk purposefully, their heeled tapping shoes crackling together and their heads bobbing up and down as they flood into their buildings hurriedly, to sit at their desks, plugging in letters transformed into demands and sentiments sent hurtling out the aeriels wobbling at the top of the buildings to other headquarters around the world, codified, encrypted, reaching satellites that perform handshakes with the reams of data beaming between computers, beaming down to be transformed back into light that appear again reflected, on the dead eyes of the ones who read it. 

A City

A beaten brow

Raised atop a rooftop

Drums a slow decay

It softly slips away

And away

Insulting little feather downs

Plucked and brazen
From a trailing vine now

Caught by masters of war to pound

There are little hands

That touch the muted swan’s song

Three brass buttons slipping to shimmer

Too full to fly out

Seeping inside a silent cry

But hushed and keen and hollow

Where outside armouries are packed

Motes lift along a wet crackle

Little radio hath come to life

Turning past the point of static
Pushed by the wind

To tune in is not listening

Choose to move to the absolute

Tall reeds and glasses raised

belie a lotus flower

its roots plunge turning low

and if unless it is let go

that is ever to be picked

and clinked again

then again risen

and to try not to again because

follow not I 

Where worthless folly

In striking at everything

creates nothing

but emptiness

What can be forgotten
Feels like losing touch
The shadows melt together
Our fingers have gently caressed
God's weathered face
He slaps it away.
What did you expect?
That's our lot.

The tip of this triangle

Folding forever

But to be settled
Where it started.

Roaring dust where it belongs

This battle lines the lungs

Grit falling in time with thy breast

To turn over again

Correct Change

The car door slammed shut like a gunshot. Tim was behind the wheel and he sighed to himself softly, noticing the soft cloud of his warm breath floating around him. Tim was a delicate man on this bitingly cold morning, emotionally delicate and slightly unsure of himself. He sat in his dark blue, 2001 Vauxhall Corsa, mentally preparing himself for another day of work amongst his fellow co-workers, who Tim regarded as a brain-dead hoard of wankers, by vacantly staring through the foggy mists of his breath at the dark wooden slats walling off the cul-de-sac of where he lived. Tim didn’t know what he did for a job. He knew how to do his day’s work, though he didn’t know to what possible ends his job could take him. Tim had no idea how any of this effort went into creating a better society, a world he would be proud to live in. He shook his head slightly, to shake off the drudging tiredness that enveloped his whole being, dismissing the idea of yet another Monday as just another Monday. And so Tim slid the key in the ignition and turned. The car came alive after a few slick coughs. He clicked down the handbrake. He put the car in reverse and readied his feet against the accelerator pedal and the clutch, throwing his arm around the empty passenger seat next to him with grim determination to crane his neck around and look out the rear window, except it was completely fogged up. It seemed that he would have to wait for the air conditioning. Tim blinked. Tim remembered his seatbelt, wrapped himself with it with a rustle of his waterproof jacket, and clicked it in. Tim looked at his watch. 8.22. Fine by him. Tim looked at his hands resting on the top of the steering wheel. He imagined them covered in blood after stabbing someone brutally. He started to shake his hands as if wracked with guilt, as if acting in a play, wet crimson trails running through crags and down his pale wrists like a river through a desert, his mouth contorted in a silent scream. Tim stopped himself and glanced up at the rear view mirror. A small patch had cleared on the window behind him, revealing two story semi-detached houses, made of sandy beige bricks, and sitting in a pleasant, symmetrical line all the way down the road. That small patch would have to do. Tim had seen enough. And so with a buzzing whirr, the car reversed, did a U-turn, and bumbled on towards work.    

Tim walked down the empty corridor towards his cubicle in the main office space. He was looking down. He hadn’t noticed that the carpet was actually fuzzier than he had previously realised. It was the little things he supposed. Sandra came out of an office to his left. Tim looked up at her, alarmed, as she walked by. “Morning Sandra.” “Morning Tim!” The smell of her shampoo lingered in the breeze she created as she walked past him. Tim relaxed, safer in the knowledge of a completed social interaction. He then carried on walking down the corridor, lazily looking through the door of the empty office that Sandra had emerged from. Tim caught himself in the middle of his next step. There was a vending machine? Tim took a step back and peered through the door with a confused and intense gaze. There was a vending machine. It stood like a monolith. Its shiny glass unbelievably clean, it echoed the names of the products it bore within as the harsh fluorescent lights reflected upon it and dazzled his eyes. Bottles of drink and packets of crisps nested delicately amongst perfectly created spirals that seemed to stretch into the infinite reaches of the depths of the machine. Its rectangular form was perfectly aligned to the centre of the room. But on the machine itself, offset, on the right side of this box a small blue display rang out in digitally formed words that beckoned. Insert coin. Tim felt a jolt through his core, as if the sound of the words within in his mind were formed of the resonant frequency of his soul. And then the words had changed. Select product. “Morning Tim!” Tim whipped round, startled and terrified, to the source of the clear and bright voice to his right, and locked eyes with Peter, who had appeared. “OH GOD. Um. Sorry. Morning Peter.” Peter paused, confused, and looked at Tim with a thinly veiled sadness, before carrying on down the corridor. Tim watched him leave. He was left alone with the vending machine again. Suddenly, without recognising what he was doing, he had flicked off the light switch of the office, and was walking swiftly towards his desk. He watched his feet shuffle on the carpet beneath him. Each step felt like he was walking on sandpaper. Tim reached his desk and turned on his computer hurriedly. He looked at his watch. 9.01. Of course.

Tim was obviously distracted all day. He watched over the top of his computer monitor, his eyes following his co-workers who would come in and out of that office like bees to a hive. They came with nothing. They left with snacks, all smiling at eachother like they were in some kind of sick, demented club. All day Tim heard the thunk of yet more bottles hitting the retrival tray of that foul machine, each time felt a little louder than the last, as if they were shells coming ever closer to his little trench, zeroing in on his position. To cope, Tim began to play a game where he would guess who in the office would buy which product, who was more likely to go for savoury snacks rather than sweet. Tim thought of himself as an expert at this game of his own design. This however, forced Tim to develop an intensity of emotion towards that room which he could not pick apart. This emotional knot developed inside him and clawed at his ribs all day, desperately trying to escape, perhaps, he fantasised as a scream so fierce as to shred his throat, and vomit up a torrent of blood, with little flaps of skin and lung into his small, plastic office bin. And he would tie up the minituare bin bag with a dainty little bow knot and carry it, fit to burst and bulging with his hot guts down that corridor. But Tim could do nothing, and as such, he was being driven towards radical action. 

It was now the end of the working day. Tim looked at his watch. It was 4.58. It would have to do. He had completed literally no work, and felt ashamed of himself. The excel sheet in front of him lied bare, its boxes lined up pristine, save for a single entry in A1 that simply said "fuck". He stared at the blinking line after the k. He felt for a moment that it might match his heartbeat. A figure blocked the light above him "You coming to the pub, Tim?" He looked up past his monitor at Sandra, her auburn hair hanging silkily down across a lovely blue pea-coat, buttoned up. Tim opened his mouth too quickly. "No" he said, "I think I'm just going to try and finish this, you know." A nervous laugh bubbled out of his mouth and fell flat. Sandra did not blink. She didnt look dissapointed at all. In fact she looked exactly the same, as if he hadn't said anything at all. "All right then Tim, I'll see you tomorrow!" Sandra spun on her heels and walked down the corridor. Tim watched her leave, for the second time, and looked back down at his monitor. Perhaps now he could finally complete at least a little bit of work. All day he had been fixated on what lay down that corridor. The office was now empty. Nobody would be buying any more snacks until tomorrow. There was quiet in the work environment, and Tim was at last, resolute. Tim began to press the backspace button very deliberately with his index finger, each press a step towards a brand new day, back through time, each press erasing the horrors of the previous hours. Fuck. Fuc. Fu. F. "You coming to the pub, Tim?" said a voice from behind him. He span around in frustration. It was Pete. "No." Tim turned to his monitor again, and paused, before turning around to Pete once more. "Sorry." he said. Pete's face was extremely blank, a mask, a perfect diguise. A smile appeared on top of it all. "OK well, if you change your mind we will all be down there." he said, extremely earnestly. And so Pete walked down the corridor, his gait laced with an added spring and enthusiasm, seemingly wishing for a landmine.

Tim looked at his watch. 10.33. Shit, is it that late? At least he had completed a substantial amount of work. Tim decided it was time to finish for the night. He saved what he had done, and shut down the computer. The monitor switched off and the computer fans stopped whirring. His territory was now silent, amd only the dull hum of the air conditioning in the office remained. Tim stretched at his desk and got up. It was time to leave. Tim began to walk down the corridor, and as he went, he became extremely self aware and introspective. He thought upon his day, how he had been so affected by what lay just within the office in front of him and to the right, how much he had viscerally hated every second of his existence behind his monitor, staring at the hungry coworkers marching in and out of that very doorframe. Tim then found himself in front of this door, and it was very nearly closed. That emotional knot, which had loosened itself throughout the evening, which Tim had managed to put out of his mind now bound itself tighter and tighter as he stood there, and Tim began to feel likewise constricted in his movement, in his thoughts. Each attempt to convince himself of the realities of the situation, of the car waiting for him downstairs, of the success he had sown for himself by completing most of his work for the day, was an attempt that came up against this dense and painful feeling, as if he was listless, beached, only to be washed away by huge waves of a cold sea. He felt that he could not allow himself to think of anything else except what lay before that closed door in front of him. Tim began to shake, and tears welled up in his eyes. These tears were borne of this frustration of emotion, and the office began to feel more empty, as if he himself were dissapearing, as if his presence was uprooting itself and soon there would be absolutely nothing. Tim closed his eyes and his tears, dangling delicately on his eyelashes, fell onto the carpet noiselessly. He leaned forward, and with a thunk, opened the door with his forehead.

Unlimited Breakfast Ch. 1 (VERSION 2)

I was born and raised in this city by my father, my mother died before I was born. I only knew her from my father’s pictures that he kept taped to the banister. He used to say her name with a little scrunching of his nose and a faraway glinting in his eyes. An idiosyncratic man he was. As a young boy I became infuriated often with the reams of sellotape he kept in every cupboard, just in case. The memory that he kept alive did not belong to me. When, at school, I drifted off into daydreams of my own design, I used to imagine a woman with tawny brown hair in a flowing white cotton dress, that softly swept in the breeze, and lingered around corners she turned. She would always be cooking lunch, some kind of light meal to get you through the day and keep your belly rounded. She placed the lunch on a soft ivory-white plate with a delicate but meaningful gesture, and purity emanated from the food that lay warm there. Then that world would be stomped out, imaginative clouds hastened away by schoolmasters berating me for looking out the window glassy eyed and vacant, the image of her, and lunch, echoing into the ether. But this story is not about her.

I grew up with my father, Benedict, in a greasy iron coloured apartment block in the east of the city. Our area was fairly historic, well known for its tall, matte, brutalist tower blocks that looked over criss-crossed little alleyways like monolithic sentinels. Footbridges broke up the skyline like the branches of trees, stretching across from building to building and casting canals of shadows on the pavement below. Through it all itself ran a solid, deep canal, which used to be the main artery into the city centre, heaped stacks of coal making their way slowly by way of long barge, their engines rumbling deep as they slipped through the oily brown water. We used to play alongside these boats as children, running up and down the lengths of water, shrieking, and dodging the workmen, and as teenagers we sat on the brick walls that flanked it, drinking wine and laughing, having arguments over simple facts, making ourselves in eachother's image; foolhardy and raucous.

In the present day, tourists come through to feel the remainders of this grit and ardour, of which all remains are those hulking husks, buildings that once were home to friends now transformed into the depraved and derelict. The tourists clutch cameras to their chests, looking around at this part of part of a much larger and fast-paced town. They are wide-eyed and happy, bemused and kept deluded by their notions of a vibrancy that no longer has any material grip in the present. Their chatter bounces emptily off concrete as they walk slowly through the large plazas between the tall tower blocks in their brightly coloured puffer jackets, where flat leaves dance lifelessly in cold gusts of wind. The visitors are safe in their quiet detachment when looking through their viewfinders, and when they have seen it all, they hurry back to cleaner streets, and brighter lights.

When I was growing up here, we had a saying in our tiny two-man family: don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. You couldn’t afford to lose any eggs at all. My father assured me he came up with the phrase, and at the time I believed him. But then he died in an omelet fire. 
I came home from school one evening to the carnage of a crowd kept at bay by police tape, the reflection of statue-like figures sitting on the pavement, foil blankets flashing intermittently as they were lit by the blue strobe of the siren lights. People were looking up in awe of this great destruction before them. To the edges of the crowd a couple of news reporters stood silently, microphone in hand, their faces lit bright, bleached and horrible by camera lights, as they stared into the barrel of lenses, waiting to catch a signal. From above, flecks of ash fell like gentle snow, transforming the once profane pavement to a strange, dusty carpet, that all felt unwilling to walk on. The smell of smoke and burnt plastic permeated everything. It was the top half of the tower block that sat stolid, black, charred, and steaming densely; drops of water fell off the burnt wooden siding. There once was a great inferno, it seemed, and now it had turned to skybound clouds. I counted the floors upwards from the bottom.

The fire brigade, coroner, and several independent officiators decided that the cause of the accident was one man cooking his morning meal. It was the insatiable lust for breakfast that was my father’s life force, his drive, and it killed him in the end. My father loved breakfast. He loved making it, and he loved eating it. He used to make an omelet every single morning for fifty-four years. He taught me about the hob, how to twist and wait for that fiery metal glow to flow through your pan, to give your breakfast life and energy. The phrases and words that had become etched on the walls of my mind now seemed to glow with an internal force like that very same induction hob on full- and it hurt. It really hurt. These words he spoke to me were tempered in their creation, they shone a path through his grimace borne of the gentle searing splatter of bacon grease that glittered so finely in the morning sun, caught like dewdrops on his hairy arms. “Make your own damn breakfast!” he used to shout at my bleary eyed face, half smiling, half in pain, but with an endlessly hungry glint in his eyes. He used to wave his shiny, melted plastic spatula up and down like a wizard’s wand.

Our eggbasket had burnt down. All our eggs lay in that one place. My father had died making an omelet. It was all a sick joke, really. Chaos and death dressed in a two-man horse costume, clopping down the avenue of fate. I could not accept this grief that had been thrown on me, ashladen. I became consumed by a battle between the absurd and the real. Every day and every night seemed to blur, my memories chopped and changed upon recall. Each single moment of experience could be used as evidence to define my existence as consistently painful, as if I was guilty of a crime. On recollection on my own again, where I thought I could be whole, every action I took further proved my guilt, though I was guilty of nothing. The knots of this double bind were tightened on every movement. The worst of us all now lay in my smallest action. I found myself hopelessly lost in a reality where my father could not have been. It was as if my whole being existed deep in long and empty canals, clouds hung lifeless far above me. In these nightmares, I as a human being stumbled through these long, deep paths, and as i looked back the torrent of water rushed forward. And, though I tried, I could not turn my mind around, and stop that flood behind me to save myself from drowning. And so I drowned. 
The only option was to adapted to this life, to cease even slight analysis, to cast myself in the image of my own mind. In fact, I became very good at hiding, quietly masking any interaction with others, with towering thick walls between us, fearful that they might hear myself stifling internal screams, until I would be alone again, and my internal screams turned louder and directed themselves further inward, burrowing like worms through boggy soil. And as I tossed in this existence the very fibres of my being became frayed. I was stretched too thin. I began roaming the streets, seeking something without knowing it. My beard grew long and ragged, my soul became black and empty as a cold and unused saucepan. This went on for months. 
I woke up one morning and caught myself in the bathroom mirror. My eyes were sharp and bloodshot. The sudden reflection of a man who’s identity I did not know frightened me. Unrooted I cast my mind back to any memory with a pulse, perhaps I thought about what I used to look like, but I could not remember. Instead, standing before me, was a man, small, weak, frail, emaciated. But in that moment, I felt a pause. And instead of the of loss, the desperate desire to be seeing a recognizable figure, instead of the compulsion to hide my eyes from the sight of my very own skin, or rip my own skin off, I felt a pang deep in my gut and a deep booming of a distant gong far away over a shadow covered hill. Without my conscious decision, I had decided that it was breakfast time.
From my gut started to bloom a very soft sadness, which ached and  unraveled through my stomach slowly, like the growing tendrils of an ancient fire, so ancient as to be inalienable, and undeniable even from within a wild nightmare. I understood this longing not with words, not as a consideration, but as a wholeness, and as it began to grow, for my father, for my mother who I had never known, and for myself- for what I had missed in these months gone by, granted to me was the idea that it was no wonder I could not have seen myself eye to eye. And then, the wholeness that had suddenly appeared left me. I found myself beginning to weep, tears running down my cheeks and leaving track marks along the grime I had accumulated on my face. I heard the droplets hit the sink with a dull tap. I looked out through the bathroom door behind me, through my bedroom that lay naked of any semblance of order, through the window at the end of the room as the dawning sun burst a soft orange through the clouds, razor sharp beams of morning light hitting the corners of my furniture and casting odd shadows, igniting the motes of dust floating calmly in the very same air that I was aware now, that I was breathing. I was gripped with warmth and a fearsome power, the recognition of my self, my place in this sunlight, and a true desire, a hunger and a craving. I stood there still unafraid, and surrounded by mess. As it was, it made me want to laugh. I set off towards the kitchen to cook breakfast.

I decided with absolution that I would make breakfast every morning, pious to this new lease of life. At last I have understood my father's practice. My allegiance has never dwindled. The spirit of breakfast, I have found, transcends location. My morning meal finds me, as much as I now gravitate towards it. 
I write to you now from within a police academy. I have the wish and solemn promise to myself to save those from death, which so patiently followed me as it took my father, death in the form of a starvation of the soul. This particular morning, I had soft-boiled eggs with buttered toast, and a cup of coffee, which set me in good spirits when I left the house. As I shut my door behind me, I had no idea that it would be a long time until my next breakfast.

I've got places to BE

There was a loud crackling noise from beneath the floor of my 6th floor flat. It sounded like a mix between speckles of granite being mixed together and a rush of cold wind through a hole in a rock. I looked up at my friends bewildered. They were likewise confused, and we all stared at the floor expecting it to erupt at once. Then the noise simply stopped and silence filled its gap. Though it was far too soon to sigh in relief, before a neat circle opened like the aperture of a camera before us. Slowly, almost painfully, we peered in, trying to squint through the murk below. I caught a glimpse of something silver, and suddenly what appeared to be a gleaming metal flagpole careened out of the hole and embedded itself in our ceiling. There was a slight shuffle and tinkle of carabiner. A solemn bugle rang out from below. I felt morose under its flattened brassy spell. A flag slowly was being raised out of the hole, and written on it, were red cross-stitched letters. I spoke the words aloud. "SHUT THE FUCK UP"