Faulty Escape Plan No.1, 652

There you stand in

your grey shirt

and your Sports Direct shoes

tired little writer

with nothing to lose

but the love that

you’ve found and

the books you have left

and the intimate

knowledge of a wallet

bereft

and you squint

and your scrutinise

this thing you’ve become

wearing those shoes

as though you’re

wanting to run

and run more and

keep running

and not once ever stop

lying to yourself

that you won’t ever

be caught

whilst you’re waving

your grey shirt

in bungled surrender

and Jackson Browne-alike

singing

pray for the pretender

as you know all

the while that even here

on the edge

it’s a long way down

from your oubliette ledge

it’s a long long way

from your dreams

to the floor

so don’t quit this

not yet

but still don’t shut the door. 

'...who cares what picture we see?'

No smoker’s breath passes up across the projector lens, is carried down the tiered rows to ghostdance on the silver screen. No fan rattle invades the ears of those in the back row.

Dust motes – no longer hand-drawn animated fairies, demons, pixies – swim up through the light-stream in silence.

A cough, perhaps.

A sneeze.

A stifled belch, and the crunching, grinding, swallowing of popcorn or cheese-soggy nachos.

Adverts. People making use of the time allotted to such shitty salesmanship to have a last-gasp dick around on their mobile phones before the feature starts. Texting someone or other. Updating a status, a location, mapping their whereabouts and whispering, affectless, look where I am.

Smartphones going to blackout, mostly, like fireflies or dry lightning dying. Caught splat against the windscreen of a car as it races into that wide-open vagueness direct after dusk. No particular destination in mind.

Waiting for the trailers. Rattling by on the highway beside them. Haulage company names on the side. Sloganeering for this or that way of life. Fitting so carefully into one lane or another.

Occasional voices.

Nobody really paying attention.

This, the point between awake and sleeping, hasn’t really altered. Not anything like as important as the dream will be, when it comes.

And, when it comes, it unfolds in such a way as to keep all eyes fixated, flitting, open. Not necessarily entertained, or enlightened, but diverted from anything else they might not want to see.

Light does still come out through that little square hole near the ceiling, and does still make its way to the screen. But that screen seems more and more like the inside of a blindfold, less and less like a canvas rigged and tricked-out to do magic, show motion, make art.  

A lot of these hi-def dreams, they don’t seem to have morals or meanings. No real interpretation is required or rewarded. Eyes watch, but what they see seldom makes it back to the critical faculties. If it did, maybe the eyes would go into lockdown.

A lot of these hi-def dreams are things that can’t be fully recalled or described after waking. The house lights go on, and that lone, muted torchbeam is consumed, garbled within them.

Some people rush faster for the exit than others.

They can smoke outside.

And, besides, there’s always somewhere else to be. Maybe some workplace to visit, succumb to.

And a TV back home. Or a laptop, or a tablet PC, or their phone. Watching videos on the train with no headphones. Fellow passengers get tinny sound but no pictures.

Nobody focuses much through the windows. Blur-blend of grey into green and back again. More trailers.

Some people simply sit tight til the end of the credits.

Not reading the names, they just don’t want to leave.  

Nature's Own

I understood the whys for lightning coming. Well, most of them. From science books and from those How it All Happens shows on that thing my grandfather calls the idiot box. Called it. Whenever he used that term, it made me doubt the things it taught me, and so maybe I wasn't really too sure about lightning, not until I stood and watched it, outside. Not just measuring its closeness to the house by the brightness of the flash through drawn curtains, by the speed and loudness of the thunder that followed it around.

The thunder, I thought I understood that as well. When I was even younger, it was the sound of clouds exploding as the lightning split right through. A little older, and I just understood it as the sound of the lightning fizzing, crackling in the air.

But never as the sound of a thousand bulbs - a long string, a chain of them, like snow-white Christmas lights - all shattering in sequence. Not until I found myself between a tree's branches in the middle of a storm. I wasn't supposed to be there, I know. They're nature's own lightning rods. Another thing my grandfather said.

I had to climb those branches, though, as soon as the bulb-smashing sounds started. Because there was no rain. I hadn't heard of dry lightning then, and had known those flashes and those bangs only when accompanied by the kind of rainfall that leads to flooding if it carries on for long enough. The rare-times I watched those split-second glare parades with curtains open, I used to get distracted by the movement of the raindrops on the glass.

No glass outside, though, and no raindrops that day either, and so I slowly came to see the lightning for exactly what it was. And, because it started so high up with all the clouds, I felt I must get higher too. And the highest things around were trees. Oaks and sycamores and elms, and ash, I think. And a clump, a ragged little copse of silver birches, with bark that brought to mind dalmatian spots.

It was an oak I climbed. It was spring, and I remember acorns snapping off beneath my scared but hungry fingergrasps and rubber soles. Some of the branches further up were close to rotten, and gave off dry wheezes, short phlegmless coughs, as I used them as handholds then footholds to reach ever airier places. If I'd have been considering that, and paid attention to my grandfather's words, I'd have known that I was scaling nothing but a hefty chunk of kindling, but, as it was, I just sat there, three branches down from the top of that tall oak and let the lightning leave those temporary greenblack slashes down my vision. Let the shattering noise come at me and rattle hard against my jaw. Like the punches that Bruce Lee threw in kung-fu films, and I took in schoolyards during fights. Took from softer lads than me, it turned out.

None of them were outside, treeclimbing as something tripped the fuses and blew a thousand lightbulbs all at once. None of them were swaying in the canopy, closing their eyes and absorbing the storm as a series of inky blue sparks. None of them chased me up there. 

When the storm stopped, the air filled, faintly, with the memory of fire. I don't remember if my grandfather had said it would or not. It was quiet, and the wind was calmer. I kept my eyes closed until the patterns scratched across them faded. Trod tenderly on my way back down, going slowly; fearful, so I told myself, that I might fall if a branch were to break.