Stormin'

Hello Folks,

First off, a warm welcome to new subscribers. Thank you. It all makes a huge difference.

I thought I’d share another poem this time, again with a prose accompaniment. The poem ‘No Raincoat in the Blue Black’ is just published in the recently launched Ambient Receiver magazine. I’m still to effectively manage my submission strategy and although not the most conscientious submissive, I did manage to get this off and I’m truly grateful for its publication in what is shaping up to be an excellent and tenderly beautiful addition to the field. Delight yourself with it here. Many thanks to you dear reader or listener for taking time with me on this path

Stormin’

   My new neighbour upstairs was readying himself for work. I had been sitting, as I often do, after my morning meditation practice, drinking coffee and staring out of the kitchen window. Out across the rooves, sun was on the rise behind a shaggy, wooded ridge that falls from the sheep fields and runs down Claypits Lane into the Golden Valley. With a pocket notebook on the table next to me, I slowly emerge into the material of another day, enjoying the heat and bittersweet of the coffee and scratching down any revelations or insights, regarding being here, that I’ve been left with after my return.

  I had woken an hour or so later than usual. I’d had a late night compering a community storytelling event I’ve just started at a local pub. So by the time I was at the table by the window, a usually quiet moment I have with the neighbourhood, before the first engines start up and the rush begins in earnest; time I have alone with the flavour of the sky, the shade of weather in which the fresh day finds itself, its atmosphere, it was getting on and my neighbour was already on the move.

  And with his disgruntled footfall on the floorboards above, was the soundtrack to his first minutes from sleep, the Today news programme on BBC Radio 4. The previous night, I found myself mistakenly listening to the news and there was an item that left me standing in a stunned silence. I’ll come back to that, but what is staying with me is my neighbours brisk, petulant pre-work steps and the muffled tones of his radio coming through my kitchen ceiling. 

I couldn’t hear the content of the bad news items and general terror he was starting his day with, along with millions of others, before giving another day to the trade-off. I could only hear the sound shape of the commentary. I found myself listening to a particular melody in the propaganda, in the air of entitled certainty being played by the highly paid client journalists.

‘This is what you need to know, this is what you need to hear!’

  As I listened to the soundscape permeating my ceiling and an otherwise beautiful Autumn morning, I began to realise that it was a sort of tone channel that has run through my life. As a child in London, Radio 4 always seemed to be on somewhere in the house. Usually, in the tiny galley kitchen that kept the six of us fed, or from my grandmother’s room nearby or her sewing room upstairs where the endless chatter rattled along with her treadle Singer machine as she made a living as a dressmaker.

  But the tone channel I was listening to, as it loaded the insurmountable troubles onto my neighbour’s shoulders before he left for another day of toil and travail, felt like I was witnessing a theft. And I remembered everyone who’s being stolen from like this and wondered when it will be enough to refuse the game.

  Then I was reminded of the previous evening where, as I mentioned earlier, I accidentally caught an hourly bulletin. Nestled between the genocide and its ongoing denial and the numbers of people drowning in the English Channel trying to get here, was a report of a statement by the UN General Secretary that the carbon emissions ‘safe target’ of 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels was almost dead in the water and that our current trajectory is more like 3.1 degrees, that we were on a ‘knife edge’ before full scale ‘climate disaster’.

  Before!?

  I was stopped in my tracks, standing in the middle of my kitchen, staring out into the darkness beyond the windowpanes for I’m not sure how long until I came to. What I do remember though is that when I did, I felt the core of my heart aching, filling me with that all too familiar grief, my face flushing and the tears welling up. And then, it passed, as it has to in this time we spend with the daily truth of the predicament we find ourselves living through, that we were gifted this life to know.

  The grievous circumstances of my own biography have taught me much, not least that it is an intrinsic layer of everyone’s life. In a way, it made me. More crucially though, and how it serves in these times of uncertain navigation, it’s taught me how to hold it close, to live with it well and to carry it with grace. And it’s in this grace that I have found myself relieved of a punishing burden that has increasingly transfigured itself into an ever-deepening joy. And I truly hope in my heart that it helps me live through this.

  Anyway, I got a little off trail there but yes, distractive measures, yes, which brings me back to world events. When I’d come to that evening, standing in my kitchen with the reality of 3.1 degrees and all that will bring to bear, I wanted to listen to some sense and some of its making, so I sat down at the elm topped desk, turned on my computer and dived into Substack. I came across a recording from Ellie Robins, who I really rate and highly recommend. I love how a scholar like Ellie, whose language remains accessible, helps me to articulate what I’m seeing and feeling in my field of vision.

  The vocal clip I’m thinking of is somewhere I don’t seem able to find now, maybe I was imagining it or, more likely because, for all intents and purposes, I currently remain a bit of a techno numpty. But in my memory, she referred to the potential ‘storm’ coming to the world on November 5th.

  When you say ‘the Fifth of November’, what comes to mind, what images and feelings does it trigger, immediately?

  I live in England. For the last ten years, until his passing, I think about our Lurcher, Ember, curled and shaking in his bed or by my side as hundreds of explosive charges ignite above us. I have wondered often, whilst holding our dog, how our PTSD riven soldiers cope on Guy Fawkes night. In recent years though, I also think about Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’, the rise of Anonymous and daydream of millions surrounding Parliament, in silent vigil, welcoming this game to an end.

  But then, I realised that it was the forthcoming election in North America that Ellie was referring to. And as I wondered on that, I saw another unfolding play in the theatre of the death machine cult, a symptom of our dis-ease in its unstoppable path, on its certain trajectory. I thought about standing under a grand old tree in a hooley of a storm, fixated on a twig at the end of a whirring branch, twisting manically on its last strings of sapwood and not noticing the root plate, slowly lifting out of the ground, right in front of me, as the tree began to fall.

I remembered 3.1 degrees and found myself, again, staring out into the night, into the neighbourhood where I live. A few cars slicked by on the wet street, people passed, eerily uplit, heads bowed to their devices and then, there was an altogether other kind of quiet.

No Raincoat in the Blue-Black

‘If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.’ The New Leviathans, John Gray.

Deep into the blue-black field, the storm begins its crowding over.

In the front draft, mist skin is sense surrounded

by the pressure drop, feel the approaching as it lurches

off horizon and tilts its shoulder over the hedgerows.

Shelter then, in the lee of an oak, in the ditch below

blackthorn and pray against lightning crack

surging you to ground and finishing the job.

All to do is leave behind coat and clothes, caught on thorns

and walk out of the ditch into the blue-black field. Toes curl

for animal purchase with her soil, her rot and rock grain.

The wind rain, pushed in front of storm’s sole pressure

whips through skin to clear aching chill points

on the higher ground; thighs, hip bones, cock, nipples, scalp.

Water smears across the drench skin, peeling it open

in frayed troughs, back to bone, till the edges of each meet

in entries that see clear through, emptied of the matter

and the storm, the storm.

All to do is to be, reached out and torn open wide,

arms as branches or booms, sails or wings. In this embrace,

we are all at once, tree and longboat, eagle, lark, all held fast

in the charge, until our debris’ disappeared and we’ve become

ever more of her remains. Rags blowing in a hedge, sodden splinters

mulching into a ditch, a few fledged feathers catching in the grass.

Thanks so much for being here.

Until next time. Go well. With Love from here.