Paul Joyce's Words

Geology time.

2012-02-17T02:12:43Z

Down to earth from a different place. All culture shocked and awed. Trembling, buzzing still, a stomachfull of that other world's supper. Overhead reminders soar on, contrails and pirouettes. Down here, reality creeps in, the heavy cloak of familiar ruts, calendar items and expectations. And yet, an airy remembrance lingers, patient sheep, an infinite loop of craic, timeless stone and hedge, where kisses were stole by thorn and berry, when God was king. Geology time this is, where we're the blink in an ache slow world of change, a gracious degradation, a sloth history of harvest strife and spreadsheet errors. Waking up on the other side of the bed, on the other side of the world, the familiar feels foreign, feels weightless. Numb again, cloughering.

Unscrubbable.

2012-02-05T06:03:28Z

A good man, out of Derry, a childhood roughshod and ransacked, searched and chased, now wine dining on a hill in the country. Two loops, two journeys converging, side by side, knife to fork, elbows creaking on a grandmother's table. It's moved 17 metres in 65 years, a nargun of the scullery. The texture of our lives, the ruts, the bumps, scars and tracings...these sediments are the story-strata that become our fossil record. A vellum overlay would reveal contours echoing, darker overlaps, the deviations fading. We're all the same at this scrubbed table, story-soaked and worry-worn. Underneath, my thumb runs silent over the familiar knots, tracing grain, remembering, not finding youth.

Contagion.

2012-01-29T11:16:21Z

In the big room, an aga burned. The gravel scratch of heavy cast iron portholes, lifted and moved, revealing the furnace inside. Mystery doors, clanged open and shut, the sparkling hard black chalk of coal chunks, thrown in. Years later, a window in New York stopped me cold. There it was again, only this time a gleaming red beast, all polished up and ready for overnight delivery. All set to be wasted and unearned in the Hamptons, it'll never see a pot of spuds like ours, never be as vital, never be the only heat to raise eight in the winter's long dark. A coal dust square marks the footings now, a black bruise cornered off from scullery to sitting room, front steps to armchair. An air square rises, a fillintheblank ghost of days when everything was bigger and further away. The insides wrenched and scattered, the hard used spoils, to IKEA cupboards up and down the hill. Knives dulled on soda and rashers, gilt-edged china worn bare by a thousand lips. Busy, whisper, clink and sigh. Sip worry sip. Different devils, familiar fears. All met in the end, risen above, grandfather. In your place now, the seeds sprout. One becomes six on this fertile soil, shown how to follow, walking on your feet to be taller, starting down their own lanes. Blue eyes, milk skin, your fire carried on, a wonder virus, sparkling in the coal dust.

Cold comfort.

2012-01-29T11:00:25Z

My first gun, waiting lean-to behind the scullery door. Or was it the pantry, that cold, quiet room of bright refrigerators and delights. Double barreled and worn, casual dangerous amid the soft cooling soda bread and Christmas cakes. "Just in case the fox comes again" you'd said. But I'd imagined more. Those were the days of sudden helicopters and dark night checkpoints. Snipers in the hedges, armour over the wheels, bad men whispering about empires.

Turf, drying slow.

2012-01-28T05:18:43Z

Descending through clouds, into the rain, into the fog protecting the past. And there it is, a landing strip to ground something long aloft. Here's truth, unconditional, here's baggage claim, unguarded. A rainbow guided us through a patchwork of wee walls and overgrowth. Fresh, bright, unmistakable. Up the lane, hedge-bordered and rutted, past the whitewash, jagged gates and sheep dots...one-way, hammer-away before the tractor comes. Later, in the thick of it, a turf fire sizzled in the background, all embers and sass. Once moss cut, quartered and stacked low to dry, a field of these crumbling thatch pyramids stretched before me, an impossible sight, geometry meeting livelihood, some ancient brickworks cleaved and cleared. Through a hedgehole, we stole into someone's field, sidestepping paddies, looking for bulls. The potato trenches were newly filled and ploughed over, seed envelopes, waiting for the rain. We were waiting for the tea then, out there, mid-nowhere, a ploughman's lunch came swinging with floury baps soft folded in a towel. Never better, and I'm back.

Transatlantic.

2012-01-26T15:45:44Z

I'm trans worlds, an inbetweener. Up here in the rareosphere I'm pressurized and decompressing. Swallow popping ears and breathing fake air. Just 4 millimetres from oblivion, a silver skin stretches and twists in the jet stream. We're ripping arcs in the sky, trailing heat over bored sailors and numbed baleen. I'm coming home after 20 years, sharing a hand rest with my Dad, all soft haired and tentative. Equipped to replace memories with instagrams, see the kids all grown up now, see the reality-extinguished fire they've raked over. There'll be a clearing in the sky where the old farmhouse stood, an invisible shock and echo to draw the eye back, seeking something missing, which it is. It's all there waiting, as we race to the sunrise, eastbound, homebound, unbound.

Parts, laboured.

2012-01-02T22:15:03Z

In the dealership, where ignorance meets suspicion, frustration churns and bites. Nobody wins the arguments when there's nothing to win but pride. The walls, abused for years, brittle layers of despair, anger glued to helplessness, a bruise-grey veneer, listening, ignoring. This modern battle, once settled with outbursts of steel and weeping, now seethes silently. They stand, countered and unweaponed, squeezing ancient hilts like phantom limbs, a dark turbulence behind their eyes. There's no war here. There's no win to be scored. Just get out with your senses undulled, leave only ounces of flesh on the countertop. Escalation, escalation, the peak always a pit.

The last best time.

2011-12-20T01:17:32Z

My favourite lights nestle between needle and twine. Nervous illuminations of amber melancholy, they flicker mechanically, current to pole, faux flame and all, some mystery chemistry hand wrought. All around, a star flurry of nostalgia. Tinsel reflections bouncing off your eyes, that too-rare soft smile, a yellowredgreen silence to the room. Underneath, the boxes of dreams are all bundled, bowed, asleep. Rip-ready, they are just wishes tonight. Like you were once, like we were to each other. Up on the mantle, cardboard thoughts gather, empty book covers, a hurried scrawl or two, no match for the cursive above. Prehistoric Tweets of vacant love, an outreach obligation, sealed and thrown down a hole. This is the depth of our lives. A harried accounting of connections and histories, an embarrassment of silences. Of these pecks, no nourishment, no harvest.

We believed in all this, this story unbelievable. Sleepless and faithful, marveling at the possibility. In the morning , the purest joy of anticipation. A place achieved, despite the longest of nights. No excitement ever richer. Squinting at strange contours through the glass doors. An amber glaze the last wrapper to be slid open. Behind it, mysterious colors and curves, things new, never imagined, but instantly the best ever. A chair, a bike, a clock and a ball. The last best time.

A million little ruts.

2011-12-03T03:41:09Z

When the tactic becomes the strategy, when the idea becomes the reason, when the suit becomes a sale, then all is good as lost. Some gleanings of art may survive the cull, some atom of difference may make it through the bland, surprise via exhaustion. But these are mere emoticons of meaning, shortcuts, biopsies of a bigger truth. For years, we sweated the details, knitting our own myths of expertise, a clingy conviction, blanketing reason. But if I stretch it tight, push against the knots, I can see a light through the holes. The light shines on crumbs under a table, cracks in a wall, dents in a car door. It shows a ragged pile of bills unopened, a well worn TV remote, and a slumbering exhaustion of rags on the couch. Too tired to talk about nothings, too jaded to gossip trivialities, they half-watch the actors in the rectangle. The light shines on, over years of disappointments and misgivings, expensive sales and cheap trinkets, broken promises and numbing invisibility. There's no warmth from this light, no comfort to it's reality. Separate lives, parallel and undeviating, these million little ruts have been veneered smooth by a cacophony of promises. My pretty words are neutered here, 50% off any meaning.

Pivoting on gravity.

2011-12-03T03:21:17Z

I heard the bird. Heard it sing, heard it cry. An ice wind on small features, gray, tired. Simple stalks, foot to branch, heavied down with a day's coldblooded harvest. Is this happiness? No, just a mere biology of existance. A bird, a man, a family. Biologies woven, spliced and sequenced and blended and birthed. Paths of inevitability markered out and started down. Through the sky, currents and vacancies carry the bird, tree to fence to grass to nest. Looking down, seeing us ants, laughing as it gyroscopes free, gravity the only pivot. Climbing this volume of air, this dimensional nothing of invisible friction, feather and bone contort to pull, push and clamber up. There's a stickhome out out there somewhere, a thatch of treebones hidden as a silhouette. That's where safety waits, where biology can rest, where time can work on consciousness, where a day can be regurgitated. From here, a cry, raw-sharp and quick, taunted through the wind, "Come dark, come cold, I am of you, I do not fear".