Bits and Pieces

Two separate prose pieces, written in response to that poneme project I referred to earlier, Text 000:

Pain is the pleasure. It is the principle of the sting, the prince of lightness and the prince’s pal. Don’t horse with me, p … But then we could go on, and I do, it wasn’t the same back then, is it now. The stern look afore court, the skills of criticism mixed with the cut and thrust of large family life, remembering forms, glancing passes. Unformed in uniform, the daily parade before the prepubescent eyes of ignorant love, the hasty hands and jumping film stock, lolly kisses and burnt frames. When you’ve got nothing to say, sing it … ‘April love – it slips right through your fingers – so if she’s the one, don’t let her get away’ … It’s a bakelite prediction on the Craven A Top Ten, sister in matador pants, brother in black priest outfit – training for their future, slewed by the past. ‘I’m seeing the real you at last …’


°

I begin again. I take up the clay and start the wheel. My legs are tired from my last try, but now I lose myself again in her shadows. She is whole and she is rounded by my hands, the water running down my arms to drip off my elbows onto the floor, the clay wobbly but in place. It is all that isn’t there that shapes her. I take away the roots of the trees of the forests, I transplant the shade of an old tree in the sunshine. ‘She is good to me / There’s nothing she doesn’t see / She knows where I’d like to be / But it doesn’t matter’. I hold her to make her, I run my hands up and down, I rib her as I rub her, my body the body that builds her body of clay and water and shadow, I breath into the rhythmic rounds of the wheel, a thigh a breast a momentum of Mother Earth …


The quotes are from Pat Boone's 'April Love' (a song of my teenagehood), and two Dylan songs.