Summer lanes

Sometimes I feel if I am just me, I can reach out and find the person who is like me, and then the world will shrink to him and me and I will be free of needing to be me because I will have the friend who will release me.

Sometimes I feel we gather dust, accrete misery, until we are hidden in shells so crusted and old we can never break out and be real.



We live in deserts, trying to build shelters from the world we know is cruel, but it is only you and I playing mean games with each other. There is no world but us if we want no other world.

But I never spoke a language you understood and you weren't listening anyway.

I never spoke a word to you, just spoke in tongues that someone else built for us, never found the song my soul sings in the quiet of night as I feel we did not waste our lives but only tasted, just for a short time, what we could find in them.



When we were kids, we spent summer days in the hedgerow in a camp that no one but us knew was a place to live. We jumped out of the dusty lane and disappeared from all of it.

I was a polite boy with a crooked tooth; you wouldn't remember me the next day if you spoke to me. But I had a good heart, I am sure of it.

When we were kids, we ran across the towans, the gentle wind in our faces, forgetting what the days would be, forgetting that we even would have lives other than this, to run and be.



I kissed her at the northern soul disco. I kissed her and soon we would never meet again. My hair grew curlier, my heart colder. I danced without fear. I didn't know what there was to be afraid of.

We cycled through the summer lanes of a childhood of jam sandwiches and squash. We cycled through our dreams of leaving life behind.

I do not know you any more.

It is the saddest thing I know. I wrapped myself in a ball and you ceased to be. I never asked more than for you to be with me and I never judged you.

I feel like you only know love when there is no question to be asked.



But sometimes I hear a person talking and I know love is real. I don't care that we are nothing at all. I know we are conduits for something we do not understand.

I know it is an illusion but somehow the ghosts know they are ghosts; somehow they feel they can touch each other, and reach out. And even if we cannot touch, even if we are never able to precisely be where each other is, we feel we can.



 I never spoke a word to you. If I knew the language your soul sings in when the night is quiet, I would harmonise, if I could sing it too.

But you don't know what I'm talking about. And if you did, even for a brief moment, you would not let me know. You want me to spin in a cage in the wind, rotting, a cold star whose core you fear will burn if you touch it.

Yet here it is.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:18 pm