Creativity

Which activities make you lose track of time?

Daily writing prompt
Which activities make you lose track of time?
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Which activities make you lose track of time?

I guess it depends on how you define activities. Sleeping certainly makes me lose track of time. But sleeping is not an activity, you say. So I say, what about sleep walking? A track to walk on, and sometimes sleep walkers lose track of themselves, and hands of the clock lost in the dark ahead of them, on they go, tick-tock, little clockwork soldiers marching until someone or something wakes them up. Where am I? They ask. And what time is it?

Watching my fox terrier chasing his tail as he runs round and round in circles, never quite catching it, but never giving up his high hopes of catching that little rat-tail of a tail that dangles there behind. And round about and out and in all day that silly dog did spin, spinning in prose and spinning in rhyme, until I lost all track of time.

Same thing happens with that little electric railway that ran on a single loop around the kitchen table. Diddle-da-diddly-da, just like a real train, except no smoke, no puff the magic dragon, no sense of a schedule or arriving and departing on time, when circular time is meaningless, as are the numbers on the sundial when the sun isn’t shining, or the hands on the clock when the numbers are missing, and you don’t know whether you are looking in time’s mirror or are standing on your head in the Antipodes and all the while the clock hands are marching round and round, tick-tock, and there is no track by which time can be tracked. And the runaway hands went round the track and the ghost train hooted whoo-hooo, as it vanished into the timeless tunnel of darkest night, and then exited. like Rip Van Winkle, the engine driver with a huge beard, and the carriages all covered with cobwebs and skeletons peeping out of the compartments and sitting beside some of the travellers as they snore on their seats.

And wow, the activity, if it be an activity, of walking my fingers over the keys has just made me lose track of the last ten minutes. And now it is time for me to drive to hospital, have a needle stuck in my arm, and allow a nurse to draw my blood. And the moment from the first sight of the needle to the moment it is withdrawn from the end is e-n-d-l-e-s-s and takes an eternity.

Interesting Times

Daily writing prompt
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
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Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times.” This phrase, be it a blessing or a curse, it has been called both, is rapidly becoming a cliché. So, are we living in ‘interesting times’? Good question, and I have no answer to it, not one that I would publish anyway.

As to listing 10 things that I know to be absolutely certain, I can’t. And that may be the first thing I am certain about. The other thing about which I have a certain amount of certainty is uncertainty itself. I am certain that yes, we are indeed living in times of uncertainty. Well, most of us are anyway. The other thing that I am fairly certain about, well, 100% certain about really, is that death will come to us all, sooner or later, don’t know where, don’t know when, don’t know how.

So, perhaps I can manage to achieve three certainties – 1. The certainty of death, to quote Dylan Thomas, ‘for all poor creatures born to die’. 2. The certainty of uncertainty itself, to quote Stéphane Mallarmé, in my own translation, ‘a roll of the dice will never eliminate chance’. 3. The certainty that I cannot find seven more things about which I am certain.

That said, I am not all that certain about what I have just written

Situations

Situations

I am sitting at my desk, typing to you.
Many thoughts are running through my head.

I am checking the weather regularly –
high winds and rain are due soon.

Clare has just walked past the window.
She waved at me, but didn’t ask for any help.

The washing is almost dry and needs folding.
 We need to tie down the umbrella and porch chairs.

The cat has just walked across my keyboard.
I correct her footprints. They have typed false words.
 
Now she has discovered the dried blood on the floor.
It soaked into the boards when I cut my arm last night.

I meant to clean it up this morning, but I forgot.
I can hear her tongue rasping as she licks it up.  

Real People

Real People

They lie there, lifeless, in their little black coffins.
They refuse to pick up their beds and walk.
Powerful as you are, you are powerless now.
You are unable to grace them with the gift of life.

Listless, disappointed, you turn away. Don’t look,
but now, while you are not watching them, they move.
A gesture here, a wink of the eye, a tiny smile,
a broken tooth, a scar from a dog bite, and they come alive.

Now they stand before you, dressed in the clothes
you wove for them, from their own words.
When you listened, they spoke. They didn’t want
to be forced into falsehoods, forged from your fake words.

True to their own natures, they now walk and talk,
naturally, in the words you heard when you let them speak.

Bone Fire Night

Bone Fire Night

Sometimes the sun’s too bright
and we are best, at night, by moonlight,
when shadows flicker and we seize,
in the shimmering half-light,
half-truths glowing in the dark.

In the full light of day, these ideas
take forms, flesh themselves out,
grow skin and bone, flesh and blood,
their skeletal beings standing,
fully-clothed, beside us.

They take on match-stick bodies,
twisted, pipe-cleaner shapes,
or stick their stakes into the ground,
hold out their arms, and turn into
scarecrows that scare away the truth

Do they bring us release from our
darkest yearnings, or are they those
self-same cravings, hankering after
their day of glory, that precious moment
when they stand upright in the sun?

With the advent of bone fire night,
we stack them into wheelbarrows,
place them on the gathering pile
of outmoded thoughts and ideas,
light a match, and watch them burn.

A Game of Chance

A Game of Chance

You make me think of the road not walked,
the path untaken, the bay around the headland
where we never swam, the cliffs on the Gower
that we never had the time to climb.

Who knows which path is right or wrong
when we throw the dice and stake our future
on a single moment of time when, thinking done,
we come to a decision and take that first step.

The more I know, the more I realize that I know
so little and am surrounded by a world
not only unknown, but totally unknowable,
and me with my life dangling from a frail thread.

Sometimes, I dig deep into bottled sunshine,
But find no answers there, just the same questions
swirling round the glass, and the glass filled with
the same uncertainties and lack of knowledge.

I really don’t know where to go, or how to get there.
And then I remember that, if I don’t know where to go,
any path I take will lead me there. That is when I shuffle
the cards, breathe deep, and give the dice a throw.

Hanwell

Hanwell

Here, in Hanwell Woods,
a seemingly abandoned chapel,
paint peeling, and two stark crosses
marked on barred doors.

The new copper spire gleams
as sunlight casts leaf shadows,
sending them dancing under trees.

Neither sight nor sound of bells
this sunny afternoon,
just the mosquitoes’ whine,
the black flies’ zip and buzz.

Across intervals of silence,
a far-off chain saw rips wood.
Trees and branches topple then fall.
Trails set free from winter’s debris.

The wind herds clouds instead of sheep.
Giant footprints drift shallow
across the shadowed land.

Magician

Magician

I stand on a tiny platform, high above
the upturned faces of the clamouring crowd.
Before me, the high-wire stretches across
the diameter of the circus tent.

Clad in the enormous shoes of a clumsy clown,
I grip the wire with the toes of one foot.
Now I must choose – umbrella or pole?

The spotlight outlines my face’s whiteness,
the bulbous nose, the fixed, painted smile.
My jaws clamp tight in concentration.

Clutching the brolly, a good old gamp, I walk
the thin wire plank of my current destiny.
One step, two steps, tickle you under the chin,
and I pretend to fall, grasp the wire, and raised
by the crowd’s gasp of despair, swing back up.

Then, a yard from the finish line, I swallow dive,
turn a somersault in the air, and land on my back
in the middle of the safety net as the crowd goes wild.

“The magician works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 145.

“The most difficult role in the play is that of the fool – for he who would play the fool must never be one.” Don Quixote.

Painting: Fire Sky by Moo.

A Place Eternal

A Place Eternal

When sunshine floods my body
it leads me down into a secret,
sacred space that I know exists
even though, all too often,
I am unable to locate it,
search as I may, but then,
when I no longer seek it,
it is with me, and I know
that I am no longer alone,
but wrapped in the comfort
of an angel’s protective wings.

That haunting presence lingers,
plays melodies within my mind,
invites me to return, keeps me warm
when chill winds blow.

I depart from that place,
a fingernail torn from the flesh.

“There is a place in the soul that neither space, nor time, nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us.”

“You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.”
John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 105.

Painting: Sky Wound by Moo.

Two Spiders

Two Spiders

A spider dangles from its web by a fine, thin thread
that glistens in the sunlight. She hangs there, refusing
to think about the father she never knew, the aunties,
uncles, grand-parents, sisters and step-sisters, and all
those unknown relatives that abandoned her and fled.

What can she do? What can we do? Nothing.
We think ‘ancestry’ but we know, more or less,
who we are and what we are. We are just a son
and a daughter of troubled marriages where one set
got divorced and the other stayed together through
hell and high water, and all that those things mean.

But we are a son and a daughter, brought together
by chance, circumstance, happenstance, or some
thing beyond our control, and happy together,
the outside world shut out, and us in our little web,
as we have been for more than sixty years.

We have learned that, when the strong winds blow,
we must weave our web beneath fine grasses, that
do not stand strong like the oak tree, then stubbornly
break and fall, but bend like reeds or willows, before
the life’s storms, then straightening up, to raise
their heads, and surviving, after the winds pass.