In the dark,
a candlelight in my head
as I’m pulled from infinite dreams
(of what?)
Eyes closed but the mind
opened to a thousand possibilities
in the coming dawn
(at least I hope it is)
I want to hear the morning’s chatter
among the birds
and their song of the morning
Tortuous night
in pain, in the dark.
Piano wire nerves scream
in a white-heat silence,
searing through me,
blazing as I lie
longing for the morning
to bathe me in light
and chase away
this tortuous night.
Monday dawned, lumpy, grey and wet; weather to add a few kilos to already burdened shoulders. The Saturday sun had already done another circuit of the Earth and was now on it’s second; unseen.
He felt good. As most people struggled with the idea of getting up and going to work, he felt Monday as a renewal. Its sober slap in the face a reawakening.
As the rain fell and washed the streets so did this Monday morning cleanse him. Its sodden purgatorial followed the weekend’s excess (was it really excessive?). Yes; a whole new week lay ahead and who knew what it would bring? He was back in the seat, hands on the wheel, foot on the peddle and the long, sweeping curve was coming up.
Morning
Dark, dark morning
If you were an emotion
you’d be despair
If you were a state of body
you’d be fatigue
If you were a state of mind
you’d be confusion
At this hour my brainwaves
should be delta or theta
but I’m full-blown conscious
brainwave beta
If you were a book
you’d be Skeleton crew
because we that walk the corridors of night
are few
If you were a song
you’d be The Sound of Silence:
Hello darkness, my old friend.
My pen
is a stranger to me,
estranged from me.
L’etranger.
My pen
has sat for weeks,
idle, spent, silent.
Oublié.
My pen
turns in my fingers,
once a part of me.
Perdu.
My pen
welcome back, great
to see you again.
Ça va mon ami?
Hanging in the air
in spectral suspension,
in anticipation.
Then, animation:
a slow sweep,
a bob, a curtsey,
a pirouette.
Framed in light,
a dancer’s spotlight.
I get up from my chair
and in the slant of sunlight
through the Venetian blind
a million others go dancing.
Dust.
3am,
the devil’s hour.
The wind shrieks through the trees
and on a balcony
(mine?)
sends a flower pot flying.
Horizontal rain
sprays the blinds
in a machine-gun scatter.
With heavy head
and heavy lids
I sit
and wonder why.
Once in a while I look back over my previous writing just to try and gauge whether, over time, it’s improving. I think it is. I also look for patterns. Patterns reveal the state during a certain period. My writing of late, especially the poetry, has taken a darkened path.
10 years ago I started having massive sleep disruption. This quickly grew into chronic insomnia, which I chose to ignore at my peril for a few years. 6 years ago I went under the ‘care’ of the local hospital, following visits to psychiatric specialists who tried to fathom out what the problem was. I was depressed, apparently. No shit, Sherlock. A few years of sleeping no more than 4 hours a night was conducive to wiping the smile off my face. They put boxes of pharmaceuticals in my hand and sent me away.
During this time I started writing. I was trying to read a book, unfortunately I can’t remember the title, which was so bad I gave up after 20-odd pages, which is something I never do. One dark morning I decided I would try and write something, surely it couldn’t be as bad as that crap I’d just given to the charity shop?
Writing became a regular in my life and it helped me where no amount of Benzodiazepine or Escitalopram could. In fact, I stopped taking anything after two years, against the hospital’s wishes. Fine, the pharmaceuticals help you sleep, but they leave you feeling hollow, devoid of emotion. I decided I’d rather not sleep. So here I am, not sleeping.
For anyone who doesn’t know, insomnia is a bastard. Mentally, it’s a dark and lonely place that leads ever downwards, where you will eventually come to your own private Niflhel. It cleaves you open and wrenches your tortured soul from your body while leaving you running on empty.
You stop telling people. You have to, because all you hear is “Yeah, I had a terrible night as well.” What? You can’t explain and they can’t understand so your interactions become sullen standoffs. You spend the day with a head full of cotton-wool; thinking becomes laborious and even the most banal of tasks requires consideration and reconsideration. Clear thinking is a reality enjoyed by other people.
Physically it leaves you hollow, like a wind-blown wheat husk dried in the summer sun, light and directionless yet always hoping for a respite, a resting place from its torments.
On the other hand, creatively it has been a wonderful input and output, where my notebook, 2H pencil and I join hands in the early hours and together we chase away the demons that frequently slip the pillow out from under my head. Those deep still hours of the morning welcome me, absorb me in their serenity and give me time and space to write. Ideas form and become words because of this. The majority of what you will find here was written while the world outside slept.
I hope reading this blog gives you at least a little of the pleasure it has given me.
3am, Sunday morning.
Dragged from dreams,
where feet walk on frosted blades
as a million stars fall from the sky,
which shivers
over silent faces hidden from me.
I reach out, they turn away
I call out, and they fade
The day,
still hours distant
is crawling round to meet me
I stand in the moon’s shadow
as the snow peaks stand hard and white
against black sky brushed with sweeping cloud,
the air cold on my skin
and I awaken under its kiss.
Nocturnal sighs in the blackened boughs
and, once again,
I have been tossed out into the night.
Lugano night, 3am.
The hand reaches for the button
that flashes the green numbers
counting down the hours
of a night that is endless; and awake,
as I long to fall into sleep,
be it restless and haunted,
sleep it remains.
I envy it.
I’m not a cat;
I can’t see in the dark
yet it’s always dark
when I awake
and draw the line
under another night’s sleep.
So you keep writing. At least, you try.
You lie awake in the darkness waiting for the morning sounds; the crows in the fir tree, the far-too-early church bells, the Harley Davidson that surely must have an illegal exhaust system stuck on it. And so you lie awake and you write, except it’s all in your head. You know you should get it down on paper lest you forget (and you will) but you don’t want to disturb the part of the bed whose soft breathing confirms she has finally found sleep, so you continue writing in your head.
Enough! You ignore the hour, you defy the fact the crows are not yet even moving, let alone crowing in the treetops. You’ve anticipated the church bells and the (no doubt fat, short-legged) Harley Davidson owner is probably still tucked up in bed, riding noisy dreams.
The pen and paper await you like dogs waiting for their morning walk. You ignore the need for coffee as you rush to put on paper that which was rushing through your mind, lest you forget.
Sat at the table on the balcony breathing in the cool morning air with pen-scrawl for company. A pink-blue sky crawls out from under a dark cloak. A small bank of cloud above Mount Tamaro resembles the first huffs and puffs of a volcano, cars hiss along the distant road and birds chatter their morning stories.
The words on paper reveal themselves to you in the cool, blue light of day and have taken on an aspect and meaning different to that which came to mind, lying there in the darkness. The words that ran like liquid silver now seem lead-filled, dull and heavy.
So you keep writing. At least, you try.
The summer sun sighs through the strains of a morning
So humid
I open a window;
to sounds that fill my space
The unwinding of the blinds on another day
A car coughs
and a motorcycle
screams down the motorway
Birds wittering and nattering in an air
thick with heat
a fly whines, a bee hums
as a cat pads through grass
No breeze murmurs in this sultry morning,
just scratching
as my pen rolls across the page
like a bead of sweat between the shoulder blades
The cat, bird stalking,
early morning dog walking,
the sun rises over the eastern hill
behind the fir trees.
Spring morning chill
meets
spring sun warmth.
It is still early.
The plants, freshly watered,
drip and gleam in the light.
Geraniums, pink and red
and rosemary lifts her violet head,
the lavender flowers, purple
while bees flit, feeling Provençal.
Sarracenia, the fly catcher, lies
and dreams of catching flies.
The brevity
of morning’s clarity
Crystal-crusted peaks
standing sentinel
A sheer-sided cliff
black against blue
hides the sky above me
Its sides thick
with winter’s skeletons
stalking stick shadows,
stark
against night’s incandescence
which chases up the sun
A once waterfall
in winter suspension
and, like us all,
awaits the sun.
The sun also rises.
Donde esta la fiesta Ernesto?
The sun also rises. It rises on a new day, in a new way, earlier than yesterday and later than tomorrow, when the sun also rises.
The sun also rises in a cloak of washed pink, when the blue finally lets go and after the black has given up the ghost. Eventually it will shine a light on the eastern-facing peaks 5,000 feet above my right shoulder as I sit.
The sun also rises on new hopes and old fears. Hopes are always new, even if they’re the same hopes you had yesterday, last week or even last year. Hopes are renewable, and like solar power, and are renewed with the coming sun.
The sun also rises on the birds that sing in the new day. Each voice different, discernible from the others. If I was a cat I’d be at my wits end figuring ways to go and catch one. A swift bite to the neck and it would sing no more. But I’m no more cat than I am prehistoric Auroch, and the birds fill me with pleasure. I can leave them to their song. What do they sing anyway?
The sun also rises on a short night of discarded dreams. Dreams, and drugs to make you sleep, but don’t. The sun also rises on tiredness, which I fight with everything I have to hand; my 2H pencil and notebook. I write.
Puerto La Savina is a happy place
in the early morning.
It’s not a miserable place filled
with the miserable grey shouts
and whistles of a city port.
It thrums; it thrums with
sound of boat engines.
It is happy,
basking in the sun.
Brooms sweep the pavement
and early morning walkers walk.
A thicket of masts wave
with the sigh of the sea.
It is a happy place.
Spring morning, spring dawning.
Sparrow, starling, blackbird
in unison calling,
out their names, and
singing loud their songs.
What is the language
of the birds that I hear?
As my love sleeps,
a sleep content
and undisturbed.
Whilst I, I alone
sit with eyes and ears open,
to the coming of the dawn,
as the birds greet the morn
and each other.
“Good morning to you too,”
I say, as I open the window
and breathe in the air,
as yet untouched
by the waking of man
of cars and vans.
Enjoy the moment
though in silence
it not be.
As the break of day
not far away,
has been announced to me.
