Beds and Birdsongs

the village of reason

Moving images

In a face-on collision, the head lights are the first to go.

Something clumsy and indefinite throwing its shadow,

which goes tripping over tangled shoelaces and legends, or lies.

Blunt memories slide off a cassette ribbon. A birthday surprise.

Some things should never be said out loud, ever, even if they are true,

and the scripted lines you need to learn aren’t always spoken to you.

and growing pains and hunger pains can often be confused.

Bedside songs from an open mouth, open door, shiny and black,

and matching shoes, and matching shoes. 

Talking Cure

The truth hits, after several years of ‘the talking cure’ that requires one to take oneself very seriously and ruminate on very long-ago events that are, of course, unchangeable and all the potential reasons why you seem to be intent on, and increasingly good at, ruining things that are good in your own life- all the people you could blame, all the ‘whys’ behind all your ‘issues’, all the theories concerning the possible antecedents in your past that could pose as explanations for your present day behaviour that has, for whatever reason, been evaluated as misguided, or maladaptive, or malicious, or masochistic- after all of this furrowing and finger-pointing and finding that your life has been full of reasons for you to be a fuck-up, and that knowing this doesn’t do anything to fix you or fulfill you, eventually, the truth hits. The truth is that there could be a real reason why there is a problem- why you are a problem- or there could be thousands of potential causes for these problems, but there could also be absolutely no reason at all. Either way, it doesn’t matter. The truth is that you can talk for hours about your past but that any ‘breakthroughs’ in therapy, where you confront (by talking about) the ghosts of your past that seem to still be haunting you, can’t mend anything. The talking cure can’t clean up the messes that you’ve made. Sure, you can get some things off your chest. If you’re walking around with a secret that’s eating away at you because you haven’t shared it, it’s healthy to talk about it. Or if talking is what it takes for you to finally give voice to things about yourself you’d rather not admit, it’s beneficial to say those things aloud so that you can fully realise them, because it’s only in realising them that you can see to change them. The problem, and the sad truth about talking therapies, is that no one is going to push you to say the words you really need to say. If there is some self-knowledge that you don’t have, if you are not ready to know it because it’s not what you want to know, or you’re not brave enough to see it because it’s ugly, then you won’t gain it, and all the talking in the world isn’t going to help you acquire it. It seems that all the theorising and re-thinking and re-living and finding fault that is accomplished in talking therapy sessions is to identify what was wrong, or who else might have done you wrong, and how that made you feel, how it still does make you feel. That would be a great thing if those things or those people could suddenly cease to have ever existed. Because that’s not possible, and because you can’t wipe your slate clean and if you haven’t realised it yet then you soon will realise that you don’t want anything wiped because your past is also responsible for whatever is good in your life and for whatever is good about you, all that you have gained and everything that you love, and have loved- you stumble upon the understanding that whatever meaning you think you have found is worth nothing to you. You are still exactly the same person as you were before the talking began. Your life looks the same, feels the same, and the problem remains. Being armed with reasons to explain why there’s a problem does nothing to protect you. The truth is that no one cares. Your therapist doesn’t care. You are their workload. They say that talk is cheap. In talking therapy, talk is worthless.

Snow Owls

Until recently (two years after the second millennium was welcomed by humankind holding its breath) the snowy owl was thought to be the solo member of Nyctea scandiaca, a distinct genus that set them apart from all other owls. But when the millennium came, as the owls saw it, humans came newly equipped with smaller syringes and swabs, more wires that connected more machines, and yet the machines took up less space. The machines had ideas, and these ideas were what took up the space. Things could happen without collective human input, the owls noticed. Trees were coming down and no one knew who was deciding it, and the world over, these machines made humans less able to see further afield, and more desirous to be somewhere they couldn't even visualise. They had come and done tests and snowy owls were soon declared to be related, by genetic make-up, to the horned owls. Nyctae scandiaca was no longer special, suddenly a snowy owl was just another Bubo. The snowy owls mostly stay in their summer home, north of the point of latitude at 60 degrees north. Their nests are built in the northernmost reaches of the Arctic tundra- Alaska, Canada and parts of Eurasia. But renegade families have stayed south or else flown back down, as far as the American gulf states, Russia's deepest south, and then places not so far south but off the regular map for any snowy owl- remote regions among the outer hebrides where the British Isles lie. All the snowy owls moving in arctic circles caught wind of what happened to one of their kind who, flying in isolation, landed tragically in the tangles of a big ship with Ulunda written on its vast flanks, spitting steam. The owl had made it to Nova Scotia but couldn't come back to tell the tale (though none of the owls claimed to be missing a mate or family member, so none were sure who this lost owl would escape back home to). The lost owl was captured and later stuffed, filled up with human chemicals so it would linger on the brink of decomposition, and remains trapped in a suspended state of living death behind a sheet of glass in a place where humans can come just to stare through the pane. (This story is told in such a tone to warn young snowy owls from going rogue during migration periods or even migrating when no other owls were migrating). Ten and one years after the second millennium, or maybe ten and two years after (some of the stretch in between) there was a migration of snowy owls that winter, which went down in history. It was a mass migration, and thousands disappeared. They made new homes for themselves in an array of new places scattered across the American States. This was a shock to many, but it seemed to have started a new feeling, a new zeitgeist for spontaneous exploration in the place of regimented migration. There didn't have to be a reason anymore, and they didn't have to share the same destination goal. A year and another winter on, another even larger mass migration happened. Some snowy owls even got to Florida. There are theories among the snowy owls that this new attitude grew as a result of being stripped of their individual identity and broken out of their insular circle, made to be seen and evaluated not as snowy but as horned. And even if they were still being valued by humans for being snowy, they were written in human law books in the same category, with the same value, as the horned owls. Some snowy owls believe that the destruction of their special grouping, with all its specialness, led to the destruction of their long-standing grouping behaviours. Rituals no longer adhered to. Standard routes no longer taken. Snowy owls moving south, away from arctic places, finding new uncharted grounds to make their nests. Dreams about places such as Florida became more commonplace for the snowy owl. The new millennium had meant the start of upheavals, turnarounds, rapid changes, exceptions rather than rules, and the accelerating rate of change. It was a crescendo, an exponential curve. More changes, more quickly, and no time to try and prepare, no space in the mind to conceive of how to prepare for new circumstances yet to be thought of, but surely soon to become realised.

A quick poem

It is a swimming pool lit up at night that your eyes remind me of,

or maybe a glass-bottomed boat, the underneath being

an adventure, rather than the measured depth of fear.

There was a time when my eyes were haunted, I am told

in retrospect. In truth, I was only hungry.

In mirrors I saw them as the inside of a snow globe. 

Whatever it was that was stuck inside my head 

for so many winters, falling to bits like the fake snow

inside that snow globe that was unmentionably large

and at the same time very small and soft.

Here i am, trying to undo what I’ve done by doing better,

and imagining the eyes that flit away from me

as jewels, turning into berries, turning into marbles,

turning into dwarf stars, 

turning into all the ways I wanted to leave.