Protecting them, their protective wall. No regrets. It was there he found his father, waiting for him on the shoreline, as if they’d never been apart. He would write from Auckland. She called in her soul to come and see. There is something to be said for the quicker death. That’s where you’re headed, he told them, that’s the way out of this hole. Mrs God rolled her eyes, taking her identical sandwich and pickles back indoors where the afternoon stretched like a cat between naps. – all sleeping the deep deep sleep of England from which I sometimes fear we will never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. Night and day. This is our place. It fucking better be. He loved Big Brother. And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a gallant gentleman. In such an hour one stands up and speaks to the ages, to history, and all creation. Allow me. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden. Experimentalists perhaps, do after all stand out from the normal mass of human error. Just like playing boules. Excuse me. Shoot, create situations. Sorry. – everything I know is gone, and all that remains is the call of gulls and the slow insistent motion of the waters, slow and far away and barely audible, turning on the shore and on my mind. Farewell. Perhaps by the very end of his life, in 1880, he had come to believe that a people, a nation, do not create itself according to its best ideas, but is shaped by other forces, of which it has little knowledge. My mother. Bless you. Brushing against each other, they both knew that they should do that only once or twice, and only when no one was watching them. No, you go first. Jesus isn’t real. And he will not know it happened long ago, and had merely been waiting patiently for him to notice. Can I get past. That it’d all be fine. But he did not move a muscle, not until the objects around him, that had so far been merely listening, started up a nervous conversation (the sideboard gave a creak, a saucepan rattled, a china plate slid back into the rack) at which point… the desire of the moth for the star: the innocence, the virginity, the graves not opened yet for gold, the mine not broken with sledges. “It was delicious.” Could you excuse me. And the last sound we hear is of the Folly Brook, chuckling on past the Old Oak Pool, as it has done for a thousand, thousand cuckoo years, on its long journey to the distant sea. Bye, bye, you say goodbye, no you, I did, hang up then, no you hang up, no you, bye, bye.
This piece is (mostly) made up of the last lines of random books piled high on a low table in my south facing living room.
SANDERLINGS 