I bring my own order to chaos.
Never underestimate the motivational power of an ordered, tidy room. Dig doggedly enough through the detritus of mundane living and you find something made of silver – a talisman shining old-fashioned smiles from beneath the receipts and pennies. Beauty within the dirt. Buried treasure. Follow the map back to the tale of extremes – raw chaos, ability, of beasts of the field grazing in fields of emotion.
Twist something rare from the weeds, the mud and the splinters.
Everything now is Potential – the garlic crusts baking in the oven beside the cheap Merlot, gulping tobacco’d air in unspluttered breaths; the fat pumpkin waiting to be mashed, gingered, chilied and made Autumn soup; the pretty blond things bewilderingly queuing up like a box of assorted courtisans, their words all warm and sweet like the husks of baked honeycombs. The future is a great big wide open cliché of a road, leading to the promise of adventure for someone who never learnt to drive manmade machines, who prefers the crunch of granite and leaves beneath tattered shoes, who wants to inhale the world itself as he’s walking through its many perfumes, always moving towards somewhere where there’s ocean, towards any great big sprawling unconquerable chaos.
That’s what life is. Not this city. Not this existence. This is just a war.
Its dirge of benefits, overdrafts and allowances gives way to shameless indulgences in innocence – the desire to live life itself. Moods are polar by nature, humans are creatures of mood. The world spins ungrudgingly on its axis – night, day, Spring, Autumn – flesh reigns and smothers the spirit before spirit emerges and carries flesh away like a sail. Imagination and belief defy human science. It will out. Always.
The last charges of the war rage outside – the dying cracks and thuds of Bonfire Night. A distant flash, a boom. The smell of gunpowder like a constant yeoman. The war ends, tonight.
Death’s cloak has a silver lining.
There’s no shame in indulging in innocence, if that’s what this moment requires. Did the war really end on Saturday night, though? You make me feel hopeful.
The children in my neighborhood have other ideas…