Otherworlds

We fell to earth, who once had soared so high So fast and far through endless stellar night From that sweet single point of bursting light And shining side by side till we drew nigh This world, this world, and its embrace was cold And made us fall, at first so close we fell Through screaming skies, and side by side we fell, Foul gravity, the turning earth took hold And parted us, made distance and I wept To be alone in so so cold a place Ignored the pain of impact, but to face A moment where your shining light was kept Away from me, away from me who’d burned With stellar flaming fire like your own That moment was a horror.  Cold, alone And buried in dark earth I cooled and yearned For soaring moments and that fragile flame That I’d once thought eternal and was gone. I cooled and darkened, dark where once I’d shone, A stone and not a star; small, cold and tame. Yet even on this distant barren shore I sense you drawing close and blaze once more

It’s not celestial music it’s the girl in the bathroom singing. You can tell. Although it’s winter the trees outside her window have grown leaves, all manner of flowers push up through the floorboards. I think – ‘what a filthy trick that is to play on me,’ I snip them with my scissors shouting ‘ I only want bona fide celestial music !’ Hearing this she stops singing. Out of her bath now the girl knocks at my door. ‘Is my singing disturbing you?’ she smiles entering, ‘did you say it was licentious or sensual? and excuse me, my bath towel’s slipping.’ A warm and blonde creature. I slam the door on her breasts shouting ‘ I only want bona fide celestial music !’ Much later on in life I wear my hearing aid. What have I done to my body, ignoring it, splitting things into pieces my hands cannot mend anything? The stars, the buggers, remained silent. Down in the bathroom now her daughter is singing. Turning my hearing-aid full volume I bend close to the floorboards hoping

   She had been holding my hand, woolly glove in woolly glove, as we stumble-shuffled our way through the crowded market.  Autumn chill was biting and the market was a treat not to miss.  Stalls crowded with toys and trinkets, cakes and biscuits, and the beautiful smell of hot spiced wine and honey buns.   We’d turned a corner in the crowd, my hand was empty now. I looked back to reach my hand for hers, but she was not there.  I looked the other side of me. Not there.  The crowd filled the space meant for her, panic punched me in the chest. Surely just a step away, a step beyond the moving mass of shoppers in their garish scarves and hats, just a step and I’d take her hand again, and she’d chide me with her only-child authority so natural and so unusual in a girl of seven.   I pushed back the way I had come, eyes raking, desperate for the sight of a red and green bobble hat a size too big.  Nothing.  I called her name heedless of dignity. I smelled hot cider.  The scent of apples

“The thing about inspiration,” Simon said, “is that it is not a tame thing.  You can’t force it, it should pounce on you unexpectedly,” “From outside?”  I was bored with his nonsense and this dire little bar.  I wanted to get home and write, but I was suffering a bad case of writer’s block “Yeah,” his eyes drifted to a woman sitting nearby, shabby and reading a paperback.  “Yeah…”  She looked up and met his gaze.  Her eyes narrowed. She strode across the room and slapped him hard across the face. “For the last time,” she said, “I am not your muse!” She stalked away.   I looked at the shocked expression on his face and at the blossoming painflower of red on his cheek. Painflower  I thought,   A garden of painflowers raising their heads towards a dying sun. “See you later,” I  told Simon, “I’m away home.”

The season finale of Doctor Who has been and gone, and I was profoundly disappointed by the entire season.     The advent of the first female Doctor Who should have been a time of glorious reinvention for the show, broadening horizons and taking the opportunity to do something utterly fantastic to demonstrate how the character we’ve grown up with is still with us but in a whole new way. Instead we got a season of simplistic contrived stories populated by forgettable characters accomplishing nothing remarkable. Since my grumbling dissatisfaction with the show is pressing down on me I’m going to vent here in the hope it will purge the boil. Three companions is too many.   In each episode there is no time to do anything meaningful with each of them which means they are reduced to cyphers with expository dialogue and one clunky emotional hook each (Graham’s loss of Grace, Ryan’s daddy issues and Yaz’s I’m not even sure what). The dialogue in general is poor.  It exists only to explain

It feels like a chapter is coming to a close at last, and I hadn’t realised I’d been in it until I got to see the blank space at the end of the page and realised the facing page had a big number on it. Back at the end of August the car I was driving was struck by an out of control driver and my car was totalled – smashed off the road into a steel barrier that caved in the passenger side of the car and with the other car stuck into my driver’s door. Since then I’ve been having a course of physiotherapy and waiting for the insurance and a car dealership to sort out a replacement vehicle. The physiotherapy was useful.  I hadn’t been badly injured but there was a lot of soft tissue damage in my neck, shoulder and lower back.   I was always amused when I visited the therapist with an optimistic “much better, thanks” at the start of the session until he took me through some range-of-movement exercises and then it dawned on me anew just how limited that had become and how much I had compe