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WATCHTOWER

I am only half there in the dark room, as the light strobes on the patio. I just heard the doorbell, strong and startling, in the middle of the night. There was nobody there but the living room lights were on as though someone had just passed through moments before.

 

A tarpaulin rattles on the building site next door. A shed rests precariously by the side of a giant muddy hole. A space for a building that never materialises. Instead it’s sucking other buildings into it, including my own, to compensate for a lack perhaps.

 

A half filled glass of water hasn’t moved from its spot all week,

This is true stagnation. Words are meaningless amongst this quiet inertia. 

 

So if not words

 

then let's try some other form of communication that moves in some unknowable sacred manner, simultaneously inside and outside through all flesh and matter, through dense forestry and urban detritus, through the thick night and back into the ordinary day. 

 

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat

 

I have no dominion over this land. Its citizens move around unseen with great ease and incredible lightness, while I remain solidly and stoically in one place.

 

And yet everything around me is vibrating at all times with varying degrees of perceptibility.

 

Amongst the stillness,

there are terrestrial feelings of longing so forceful, so physical, that they drill deep into the earth’s crust, boring through bone and fossil.

My eyes avoid the ground’s deceptively smooth surface,

Tectonic plates shift imperceptibly,

Doors open simultaneously on opposite sides of the world, but no-one ever knows.

Thoughts billow outwards beyond the watchtower walls but flesh remains.


 

Water has risen up to my knees.

A half glimpsed face at the bottom of a well.

Bones in boxes hung from trees,

Where God hides in the wilderness

 

A marsh of mirrors spreads out for miles

Involuntary movements

They staged a fire in the woods as a decoy

Whilst we were blindfolded

Descending the spiral staircase, 

We had no way of knowing how far it went down.

 

No-one has watched from the forest watchtower for years, but, if they did they might find something interesting.

 

Mainly a jumbled scattering of parts strewn around the forest, that if collected and collated would form an astonishing whole. 

 

Smooth, shiny and elegant, free from rust and decay, no visible joints or bolts. It would be a  gleaming beacon in the darkness, seen from miles away that draws things and people to it with an unimaginable ease.

It would stand firm and tall and never falter, even as wildlife mauls it and the wind whips round its facade

 

Static radio can be heard faintly on the breeze.

A gap appears in the trees and I creep beyond this forest into yours, alive with heavy rain  

A frog chorus guides us through the thick canopy of trees, 

until we come upon the wreckage of some ancient accident.

 

I find a ladies high heel shoe in the debris.

You take it from me and cradle it in both hands and we make a unspoken agreement

To together preserve all that can be salvaged from this glorious, gargantuan heap.

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