ten spiders
Lights seek intensity to frazzle as heightened past shines bright. Purge. Close your eyes and count backwards from ten. The room is semi lit. Streaks of sun punctuate the dark from a low-lying firebreather hiding between blades of blinds. Slowly sinking, as we do on such days. Sink further.
Closed? Eyes closed? Held tighter than you’d hold a dream?
We’re there. We’re where I was, when I left it all behind and started running. Seeing the spiders lined up, ready to scuttle up the walls and weave webwires in callous corners.
Ten.
A run to the end of the country to find animals in places never thought possible. Tamed and hidden under treebranch hideouts, buried their anxiety for a second, and left the most ferocious foes behind. All gone. They don’t recognise any more, they don’t recognise who people are. Faces which used to mean. Through and through again as the arctic winds whip waves westward, standing at the end of the pier. Halfway into the ocean. Don’t look back. Don’t look forward. Just be, then and there. Let your saltspring wash away with the streams thrown from sea air to spittle.
Nine.
Tell me you are as confused as I am. Just to confirm. Confirm it, punctuate it, tell me that sense means random events joined together by wiggly lines joining pinpricks on the outside of a cardboard box; tell me that meaning has been lost and that every action can be a struggle. Form delicate words in your mind and let them whisper out from your lips to the secrets borne on the air. Let your thoughts - no matter how unrelated or incognito they may be - skim stones on the glassy swathe. Free to pause once momentum is lost, to stop and perforate and be enveloped by the green. A casting away to shores where waves will crunch and tumble. But save those stones. Call them back home. They can be fired and burned on the pyre when we torch touchpapers and wood on the beach.
Eight.
You’ll look and not like what you see. Too much. Too little. A glance again. Something immaterial becomes difficult to focus on. It disappears. Eyes blink. Can’t keep viewing like this. Wishing and willing to turn upside-down and inside-out to find that lost item missing all these years hiding between the satin lining and the outer skin. Maybe we lose things so readily and quickly because we forget their existence. Please, let your worldly posessions slip through snapped fingers, but hold tightly onto your memories no matter how well they would ignite. In a second the world could change one night. If you look too hard you might miss the ascending flight.
Seven.
Maybe he’ll never know. Maybe that is a secret best kept quietly in a locked box away from civilisation. Maybe he already knows, but has folded secrets and locked the box, and chooses to display this on a dusty shelf just out of eyesight. Maybe everyone keeps their secrets in papers and trinkets and letters on similar hidden shelves, the pressure akin to hundredweight tons ready to snap matchstick bone china in pursuit of the truth.
Six.
Left with a number in the mind, shakingly jumping, bending, plying into every aspect. Doubled and twisted til too many more dawned in the same way. Up, up and away. A hasty exit. A there and then gone and then back to what you know. A leaf imprint in mud after the living mulch has long rotted. It talks sometime, of seasons, of time, of movement. Russet golden. Glisten, and shine once more.
Five.
A dream, a meaning. Two inspirations. A multitude of interpretation. Intertwining stories, characters, roles. Seethrough people walk on reflecting streets, opaquing only at the point of contact to become tangible for a second then fade away in sand coloured overcoats and a confident stride. Take the red hulked hunch through the city one stop further against the construction and constriction of snicketted alleyways. Just when it was safe to be lost, it’s best to be found.
Four.
Was this meant to be correct or are lives best lived derelict? Stepping on dry concrete grounds, echoing empty in space around. Coats over shoulders, a bite to the air. Can’t find Lady Luck anywhere. She skipped the tops of streetlights, to experience the highs of London nights, but left in a hybrid haughty huff at the slightest hint of hot enough.
Three.
One more than too right, one less than two wrong. The hands of time mould and shape but lest we forget their sculptures of regret…
Two.
Swift paced steps heard in daydreams the world over, walking patteringly down the patchwork quilt as the land lies from up here. It’s just as you’d want to see, perched through a peek in parting. A glorious concoction of woven yarns spun away. A wondrous position and aspect. Look. This is your world, you created all the dots and dashes and pebblestones, the mountain ridges, the sea chasms. All from one word of five letters. This is all there is. This is all there has been. Who knows what there could be?
One.
As ever, gone.
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