Ghosts

Nothing can twist your heart and mess with your mind more, nothing can slice through your soul with more ease like a hot knife through butter.  Chills tingle down the spine, goose bumps pop with a shivering touch, a face from whenever and more.

Does your memory scare you, does it pick those perfect moments to whisper a name or  flash a thought that sinks your heart?  Do you find a revery in solitude but sob at the loss of something you can’t quite touch?

As you sift through your life, events build, time gathers more than dust.  The bitter with the sweet, the warmth with the chill, the ecstacy with the depths of despair.  Your time here is mixed and melted and ground and salted with tears.

You are alone in a vast seething crowd, you are a speck on the beach, a single mind in a sea of thought.  But even when calm, even when the softness of love holds you close, then is the time.  Beware the ghosts.

Open Plan

My current role has me sat in a crumbling prefab building with archaic air conditioning recycling the germs of the incumbents.  It’s not too bad and in many ways far better than being sat in the car park, though I could do without some of the witty banter that floats around unceasingly from the bitter lips of some seasoned contractors.

There is an ever constant negativity, a barating of unseen colleagues with a twisting sarcastic flavoured barb and a wry chuckle.  Many days I think I’m Bill Murray locked in the same day…

I just caught myself there; in lambasting these poor overpaid people I fell into the same trap, about to throw myself head long into a torrent of clever put-downs.  In many ways is the only thing that separates me from them my lack of verbal dexterity?

On reflection I much prefer my own space though let me add I do have some good company in the office so it is not all bad.  Amidst the cacophony there is a small island of sanity, but the tide is coming in fast.

Being Exiled in St Helens

I’ve been writing  in this little piece of literary heaven for five years now but the last two have been whilst in exile.  My adopted town of Stoke-on-Trent didn’t provide me with a job and a salary so I set forth into the foreign fields of Lancashire and the surrounding lands, to work my time first in the Wigan health culture and then in the water meadows of Warrington.

I’m still here, with a night time base in the glass land of St Helens, sharing a local religious leader’s old home with some fellow (but rather more rowdy) travellers.

Gentle readers I really should write more, as my evenings just seem to drip away like water through cracks in the pavement.  And so a pledge: I promise to write at least once a week, to build up once more my connection with you and to work ever more solidly at my return to the land of pottery.