SHADOWS

Brushing the dust from your clothes, you make your way into the town, as if it has been waiting for you all your life, but the town knows nothing of your existence, even after you have spent years wandering its streets. Footsteps clump past your tiny room each night. The same door slams shut at the end of the corridor. Someone calls your name. The voice is always behind you, no matter how many times you turn around.




ATTITUDES

We button up our collars and coats. A woman stares out from behind a curtain. Attitudes have hardened. You stutter at the crucial moment, the frame of a dead language pressed over your tongue. There is still a possibility to draw back, assume a role in order to survive. Faith steers shy, nourishes itself, like a heart, in darkness. All kinds of trivia enter the story: your cough in the empty street, a stone in your shoe as we reach the edge of the city. The tale unfolds, a far cry from what we expected.




NOT WHILE WE CARE

A man flew down the corridor. Perhaps he had something to say, but if he had, he didnít stop to say it. So runs the thread. The prodigal returns to a house smelling of stewed apples, although his mother, unknown to him, has been dead for ten years. Not all the senses meet as once designed. The process takes the form of a doorbell ringing, dots joined up on a graph, a meaning discerned for the first time where previously the pattern was invisible. Empty of resources, a new beginning is possible, no winner, no loser. A perceived end has nothing to do, finally, with us.




AND LASTLY THE BEGINNER

A sense of playfulness helped us in our industry. Helpless as a freshly peeled egg, another time you held up your hand, made obscene gestures to passers by on the wooden pavement in the little town. Still, we were made to feel welcome in each place we came to, an affection perhaps spoken too soon since no kiss was allowed to land on your sleeping face, a loving moment bent out of all proportion. No insult could last. Absent-mindedly we walked on ice. You came to believe in the importance of the moment, twisting to reach out while you still could, knots untied.




WITHOUT A WORD

A figure ran towards me in grey light. I watched you disappear into the forest, afraid, yet ready for whatever the message might contain, perhaps a whisper of waves as I wondered how I could have lived any other life, the old patterns broken, nothing yet to take their place, though the rest would return soon enough if we scared into acceptance. Small fish darted in dark spaces, trust up for grabs. A sharp cry contained all crucial elements. Footsteps drew closer. Eyes closed, we waited.


© Ian Seed 2005