Cannot determine location.

It's all fuzzy and heat waved here. Back by the sea, walking with 7 nation's escapees, breaking waves and trying to drown the last 2 years. It's all shimmering away, that other half-life, now far and unfocussed. From under the water, all I see is a white mirror above, pulling me back, forcing a surfacing, push left, push right, push random. These invisible forces live here too. On Flatland I'm pulling in heavy air to a music of cricket-radar and evaporation. Nothing seems possible, no plans, no destinations. It's all an overwhelming futility, a halfhearted push against the hard heavy labour of immovable weights. Uphill in 60 centigrade. Nothing seems possible between the splashes and the dives, the gravity and the expectation. But this nothingness is just someone else's Tuesday.

Caretaking.

A pendulum fan of water. 18 piss streams of life, over weed and sod, stone and wood. Water arcs, fake-raining my garden. It's a green sodden roof to a mile of darkness. Soil and clay, rock and root, strata of worms and mystery, decomposition and history. The water seeps down with a relentless blind curiosity. Into every pore and tunnel, down past the bottles, the dead seeds, the picnic crumbs of 1940 and the ravaged triceratops. What pushes up? Old roots, hacked tree trunks, the things left unfinished, jagged anger nails unspoken. I lay claim to this microacre of green riot, its stories and sediments, its broken symmetry and earthen honesty. I'll water the depths, let it soak down and in. Burrow and flood, quench and drown, make treasure for new roots to bind. I'll caretake and tend up here, until it's my time to be welcomed, incorporated, under there.

Linseed and leather.

Here on the field, the fly balls are arcing, punching leather, scaring gulls, white pixel tangents in a blue sky. The only trigonometry I understood. My first stirrups, all tucked in and tight. Ready to play, suited up and breathing the linseed. Breathe in earth, feel the silence and hush draw deep. The ball lands in the pocket, smack-perfect. Bat to ball, wood to grain, the numb echo of a perfect hit. Tsk-whack-tsk went the sprinklers in the outfield. Before the locusts, before the deadlines, back when our exhaustion was earned. Tonight, over to the side, an arc of cricketers catch and jump, diving, lunging, reflexing old arms and knees. Memories of an Dharamsala dusk, red leather all shined up on the left, picked seams ready to spin and confound. Ghosts of empires fighting under a ceiling of glory blue and white. I'm pacing in my 21 steps, winding up, surfacing to reach for the sky. Lawson, Lillee, Thompson, where are you now, my heroes?

Use your words.

Furrowing through the dictionary, fingerwalking down columns, studying the nouns of disappointment, the uns and dis. All the familiar sensations between the foreign etymologies. My professional bible, this whispering wall holds back a reservoir. Words bloom into being, surfacing from some depth, faint before focus, suddenly real. The faint satisfactory click of the perfect word sliding into place, finishing, completing, activating the sentence. I feel the music of vowel and consonant, the pitter patter drip drop inevitability of thought expressed. Let's set out then, with bible and faith, to an unknown place. Something after 'z', somewhere unmapped, unspoken, disavowed. I'll find the words, if you find the time.

Tractor work.

The roots raise the road, unsettling, making stumbles, taunting civility, reshaping our small plans. These same roots dig deep, blindly hunting water through the black moss, worming new tunnels under tractor treads, under mining, soil breathing. A firmament above, honest souls beside and below, a land of blunt gravity and truth. Leaving all this, this familiar terrain, these contours of hope and disappointment all neuropatterned and predicted, I'll follow to where the roots don't win, to where history is a spreadsheet, and fingerwork is the new heroic. But I'll follow the tread, stumbling down hills to towns with plans. I'll bring the game, up elevator boxes, out swinging and grinning, armoured and all faked up. Here's a blue idea, here's a new shade, here's a syllable collection crafted just for you. Tractor work done, I'll tread twin contrails through the debris, uprooted, soul trodden, muddied up to the arse. "Never again", he says mistakenly.

You and I and us and we.

Redemption at midnight, the clarity of moonlight, beside roaring streets and jostles of flesh. All random inside, all on the verge of the rest of my life. These e-moments, these pivots of invisible consequences, they bring a special stillness. A vacuum hiding in a starfield, a something made out of nothing, an anomoly miracle. Nothing because there's potential for anything, nothing because it's a future not pre-tangled. That's when I knew you for real, that's when I saw us for the first time. That time, back when we started together, you and I and us and we.

Our shared geometry.

Every face is family, I can see it under your skin. Our shared geometry, ears and nose, chin and cheek, skin mirrors, the keys to comfort. I am you and you are me. Even the new ones are tribe. The girl Hughes, married to that fellow Scullion, or is it Scullen - another graveyard slip. That one's got some land near the swans, there's a big house going up if the money comes through. In other kitchens, an ivy of stories, looping, tangling and teasing me closer, filling every corner, flowering and joining lives, twine binding. The plip plop of spuds, the screech and tinkle of a dainty drinks trolley, long pours and a gentle smile from the royalty of Bellaghy. The only urgency a kettle. The fire spitting red life and history in the corner, illuminating, pulling in and pushing away, tides of heat and memory, amber glow and fade, everyone's silhouette is sepia in front of a fire. 

Unvarnished simplicity and a plain spoken town of quiet black streets. The cold is never far, a room away, or a wall. The heat, a soft, silent trickle on the wall. Empty cold to touch hot in minutes. Outside, tanks and chimneys, sheds and hedges. All trim and berry-speckled. No background hiss and hum here, no far drone of a thousand tyres over ribbed asphalt. Just wind and thorn, interplaying a soundtrack. Then this one spot, hedge-edge, up at the kill, where two stood once, hands under coats, "where we came to smoke and read books". 

There's a space here to breathe. An echo of we know what comes. The sky matters less than the land, flower less than seed, mind less than muscle. Roots shorn after sorting. Through streaky wet windows, I'm watching green smear into stone, a brilliant sky turning basalt into jewellery, past row houses planted stout and tall together, past spatters of whitewash blossoming like spores on sidewalk. A diesel belch of home, and hello Magherafelt, hello Castledawson, hello Ballyscullion, you far wonder. Take me home, settle me, refill me.

Every fiction becomes a friction.

In this artificial word ring, we're all broken. Tentative, almost-squeezes, as boxers between lunges. Quicksmile reflexes. Bruised, some set hard and deep. A permafrost of distance and privacy. This playground of plastic niceness, predictable verses and already-tired questions is worn with rote opinions and timed laughter. We're harnessed tight into this trapeze of talk, with plenty of net to protect our fall. This artful game of parry and segue is long lost to me. We're too smart for this idle time of society posturing. Nothing has changed, except everything. The moss grows wild over order, reclaiming chaos, through cracks newly widened by ice. Everything erodes, every fiction becomes a friction. We're broken and we're tearing each other further apart. Thaw, friends, thaw. 

The law of inevitability.

The trees sway, silent at first, majestic and ominous and free spirited. Pushed and nudged by a breeze of sweetmeats and summer, they fling birds at the sky. It's an aria of light, not golden enough to be dawn, not pure enough for home, just splinters of impossible gradients. Life pixels, supreme, gaussian but obeying the law of inevitability. The foreboding of evening, hanging as a deadline, felt from years ago just like now. I should be doing something. Should be back there thinking, stretching, pens then and fingertips now. Straightening a wavering line of thought, putting it down to erase and rejumble it. That special dread of darkness and burden, trying to tease out a flinch of clarity, nothing more. Those gemstone facets, sliver-sparks, hard certainties so uncertain, so elusive in that grim light of evening. Standing under a sky open sky, all endless red purple streaks, a mournful choir of grasshoppers and sprinklers, knowing too soon that it was all ending, watching the eucalyptus sway.

The gravity of debt.

The plastic doors in the bhangamobile are vibrating to MIA. Beatshimmering, music pistons. Tinted and mysterious, sunglassed and autostylish. Here comes the perfume of summer. Beside the SUVs, bull mastiffs and bug cars, in the maze of slots and snakes, backwards and underneath, slow dripping freon pee collects. We gather here too, around this rectangular temple-barn, exchanging bits for atoms, slipping backwards and down, imperceptible, incremental, with the gravity of debt. A new Raj crumbling to a dulled new soundtrack.

Empty calories.

A hundred iron fishees waddle forlorn around the parking lot, belching caviar blossoms, denting and swerving, carrying empty trunks and seatbelts. Horsepowered and hungry, hurry scurry heartbeat half-breath. Under halogen skies we rotate into our little slots, all lined up and careful. Orderly now, list it, check it. Here comes dinner for one, there's a trolley for six. Plan, prepare, imagine the future, no cupboard bare. I'm boxed in by suburban metal, Volvos and such, everyone furtive, listmaking by thumb and memory. "Is the chicken fresh?", "Get the 4 ply", there a squeeze, here a probe, sniff and judge and never look into their eyes. That's no potato, that's no meal: designed in California, ethylened in Brooklyn, carted in Woodbridge. These little boxes of pharmaceutical nutrition are singing "pick me" lullabies, foursquare and dust-topped, seven deep at $4.89. But let's venture in, unbuckled, and caffeinated. Hoist some beef, manhandle a cabbage, sniff like I know better. 

Geology time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pivoting on gravity.

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".