Big-Night Man

Artificial tears. They dropped inside his lower lids and he blinked. His vision blurred for a minute, then settled. He could feel the run-off travelling his lashes. He blinked a few more times, half-trying to shake it off, half-testing to see if the grittiness had gone. The lightbulb seemed too light. He reached over, flicked it off. Put the TV on for background glow and background noise.

Just adverts. Dog food or cat food or some such shit. He knocked the volume down a few notches. A few notches more.

He tilted his head back, looked at the blank beige ceiling, gone grey like old age with the lights low. The voiceover man’s voice was saying words he couldn’t make out, and the bright colours coming from the screen shimmied and twisted in a thing line just above his lower lids. The still-fresh wetness there caused it to fragment, go all crystalline. He looked back down, watched a car driving along a deserted road as the voiceover man relayed some heavy-duty nothing poem over the top. He blinked and missed the manufacturer’s badge at the end. Could have been any, to him. Wasn’t a petrolhead, really, at least not for any cars they were making now. 60’s stuff, maybe. 70’s stuff. Jensons, maybe some American cars, muscle cars, big tyre-shredding, lane-filling muthas. He couldn’t say that word out loud – muthas – or anything like that. He never would, anyway. Not in company. In good company. Never been his thing, talking the way he didn’t talk naturally. Couldn’t think of the reason why he’d do it in his head, but he did.

Something else he didn’t care for, and then the channel logo, and then something started he hadn’t known was going to be on. A Springsteen gig, from years ago. ’75.

Eleven years before his time started, technically, though it felt like 20 after. 18, even. He lost 6 years, just like that, with his eyes drying, and his hand on the remote, turning it up, turning it up. First smile for three nights, and a big one at that. He patted at the empty seat beside him, reaching for another cushion, hugging it to him, leaning forward, squinting, all he ever seemed to do these days, watching things that had already happened happening again, watching them close whilst his eyes got tired and his brain got dreamy.

First song, harmonica, piano, slow-jam version of ‘Thunder Road’, and he knew it, closed his eyes for a minute of it, trying to make-believe he was actually there, in the audience swaying, maybe high on something, probably just drunk. Hands raised and clapping and him roaring with joy as it came to a close, lining up for the next one. Hugging the cushion to him tighter, almost up on his feet and holding it out in front of him, like he was just about ready to do the twist, or one of those funkier steps he’d never known the name for. He wanted to spin round with that cushion loose, but thought he might hit a vase or something in the dark. Not my place, he remembered. Not my cushion.

nightingales

No nightingales find me here,

No shadows fall, because,

quite simply,

No light shines

and I sit,

undefined,

and shapeless, even,

but strong and

given to stronger

words and dreams of

the kind they once

built empires over,

and on top of, and,

perhaps - though

I can think of no

examples now -

beneath,

those dreams like some

overhanging marble temple

roof,

Acropolis,

before those marbles

got waylaid or

calmly liberated

someplace else in

which they find

no more praise

than can exist within

the stapled glossy guide

of some museum

or other

and I sit in the

dark and the silence

and smile, and

try to tally the number of

those before me who've done the same

and held the same thoughts and

sought the same

night-bird song,

before I give

that up and

just plain enjoy the

moment, and accept

beyond those further

calculations

that it is mine alone,

and claim it, eagerly,

just by fitting it in

Sunday-night-best words.

Precious Time

I stole a great treasure today. A gem.

You should have seen me. I came to it through the shadows. Through the tiled halls, my felt-soled boots soundless as a wild beast killed and hollowed into a rug. Through a crenellation in the battlements. Up the walls, climbing so fast and so surely you’d have believed my body was made for only that art. But, in the shadows, that’s where my real work was done. I waited there the longest short time I ever knew, crouched and pressed in against a wall, listening to the footfalls of a patrolling guard die down to raindrop sounds. Then, deft and mute as a light breeze shifting through a cornfield, I shimmied up a curtain rope, made my way along a roof beam, balancing with ease, and then hung down above the gleaming gem, pillowed in velvet upon a pedestal in the chamber’s centre, took it in my gloved right hand.

Swiftly, I placed it in amongst my belongings. Swiftly and smoothly. I was so ecstatic my heart was racing, pounding, but I kept my self together. I made no noise. No scratches, no heavy breaths, no din. I left the same way I entered, unchecked.

It was with that gem I earned the money to buy the armour I’d been eyeing up for quite a while, from that trading post on the edge of the forest. Trying it on, waving my favourite sword around, testing my skill (though never doubting it), I felt glorious. The likely bane of all my enemies.

With such a feeling risen and rooted in my breast, I could no longer avoid the call of that beleaguered harlot trapped inside the high tower in the forest’s silky, murky, cobwebbed heart. I charged in through the trees, noting how the grass and undergrowth all shifted at my passing, as if cowed by fear and reverence for the legend I was become. A pack of goblins challenged me, leering through dark death-mask faces, offered to spare my life for half of my new-gained gold. I laughed. I roared with laughter, inside and out. They were vanquished within seconds, my sword sated with their gore.

Before long, I came to the molten lake that circled the tower, serpents clamouring for space within its turbulent, eternal flow. I did not tremble. I – thief, knight, sometime-practitioner-of-spells – did not quake with self-doubt and worry at the scene. I refused to heed the sign that bade me to Abandon hope…

Across the rope bridge I trod, slicing and severing serpents’ heads from their vermiculate forms, revelling in each heavy hiss released upon their ruins crashing back into the lava. And then, at the gate, I solved the riddle scratched into the wood, in almost no seconds flat, and the door opened before me like the promise of high Valhalla itself. I had no need for stealth now, careening up the stonework stairs like a berserker, possessed with battle-love and bloodlust, cleaving through the cursed minions of that place. You really should have seen it.

Of course, if you had been there to watch, maybe you’d have seen the next bit coming, been able to warn me to watch out for the trapdoor hidden outside the captive’s room. Of the fall, the agonising reeling of my body, end over end into the abyss.

Because then, simply, pitifully, I was dead, and I couldn’t remember where I’d last saved. Perhaps 4 hours ago. Perhaps 6. I’m staring in through the glass door of the oven now, waiting for the pizza to cook. I should eat before trying again. I really should.

Planetarium

The moon down here, it isn’t a satellite. It’s the next town over, skyscraper skyline coming up over the mountains where the people used to live, when there were too many trees on this valley floor. It has the warm life-rattle of a citadel stretching out across this country like a child waking, like a dormant god rolling at last out of bed.

The moon down here is always one of those blue moons that so many people have sung about, and have said that something special or peculiar will happen every time it is that way in the sky. As much as I sometimes don’t like to admit it, those people are right.

I listen to them talking in the small market at lunchtimes, the women of this place, milling as they do along the solitary paved road in their open-toed sandals and wide swinging skirts, and then I return to my concrete and glass tower to watch the sky and the earth in the glow of the dusk and measure, night after night, the depth of the truths they aim to be telling. Night after night I watch the moon down here, and the people down there, and I find myself losing the science, the will to test and monitor and compile results, to prepare graphs and sheet upon sheet of figures and readings and faraway photographs that show, in almost no detail, whatever other worlds the universe may yet have conjured. I find myself losing the science and the need to stand with my eye to that telescope when I can see the moon so clearly from here as it is. Craters sunken and etched, like marks on a school desk – Sun + Moon 4eva – like crow’s feet around its tired, experienced eyes. I watch two people stand between floored halos that rest beneath streetlights, hands reaching out almost in soft invitation to dance. I watch more still gathered around a long table, drinking, laughing, and the jokes almost carry on up to my spy-planeing, eavesdropping ears. I watch a young girl called home by her mother, and, child safely inside, her mother standing outside for a meditative moment, a cigarette and a smile shared with a young man who happens to be passing by. I watch some birds beginning to nest in the clutch of those rainforest-remembering trees. I watch a few others gathered on the edge of the small river, scouring its takeaway menu of various fish by the glow of the moon’s evening blue. And I think about the things that people say about something majestic or peculiar or joyous or strange happening every time the moon is set that way in the sky. I think again about how, down here, I know that those people are right.