The Thoughts Of The Mad

Condition you ear to interpret

A rhythmic romance.

Feel your way blindly through,

A myriad melody

Brush wisdom with raw heart.

A considered course.

Embrace it and fall into a pool

Shimmering with obsidian ripples

An aquatic paradise gingerly survives

Dark fiends deprived of melancholy.

Wish upon it . Dream upon it . Become it.

A boy drives in a car and as he does, his mind flitters all over the place. It recalls memories, moments, happiness and sadness. The boy retrospectively considers his world a large story gifted to him over his life's experience to date. Comparatively speaking he thinks ... experience richer than most his age, but then that could be arrogance.

He gets home.

In a moment of clarity he pours this experience onto a page, forty-eight pages to be exact. His mind screams release as the outpour liberates his head space and fills his page. He uses the words of his youth, naive and stripped of hindsight. He uses her words, a ghost's words.

Like it started it stops - sudden and without the hint of winding down. It is like a cancer - this unfinished work haunts him. However he loves it. This is a piece of writing he understands and connects with and it's journey has only just begun.

He needs the ghost to nod, to approve for both a sense of legitimacy and to ensure he's not wrong, that this endeavour isn't a lie.

He sits down, sick and nervous and very early. The sandwich is flavourless, the juice a lesser liquid forgotten in a moment. She is late. She is not coming. She has in all reasonable consideration changed her mind. It's colder and more deflating when the realisation hits.

But then she is there.

She is thin & gangly, taller than him with stray, unkept hair blonde-grey tossed this way and that. She looks as she once did, a spark unmistakably hers. Briefly it all disappears, the time lapsed since they last spoke. Then like a nervous jolt it propels itself to the present and into the stiff air that hangs between their initial glances at each other.

The corner of the cafe becomes their safety. Initially it's awkward, these two people should have closed their book a long time ago and ironically here it is in front of them, forty-eight pages and unfinished. For two hours he talks to the ghost, she is resilient in comparison to him, mere moments pass and his eyes already water and his words already choke. He goes through the familiar pattern of despising these emotions then embracing them. He cannot to this day work out if his constant love is empowering or debilitating to his character. At first their conversation blunders through strange territory, they speak of their lives now as if the other has comprehension.

They speak of another boy, they friend that died unfairly and suddenly. This is the first time they've done this. All the while they avoid the premise of their meeting. Their story, littered with ghosts, their ghostly selves, their ghostly art, their ghostly acquaintances. He broaches the subject and hands across his words scared she'll hate it because she has worked so hard to distance herself.

In that moment, it again becomes real and emotional and the girl from the past bursts into a place of relevance. Less of the ghost she has been for years now a solid, physical representation of his story.

A Poem

And if your conned, lift your chin

Don't look for her, don't ask for him

And if your scorned, love your sin

Take the long and make it trim.

And if you run out of the room

Run back in and sing your tune

From a muddy ditch to a bloody womb

It only matters now or soon.

Disconnect from the past

Live in moments yet to pass

Have no worry if they last

Time for you to accept the farce'

Try to hard and try to little

You'll find a balance in the middle

In defence garner an acquittal

No one can solve the rubix riddle

It's all about the extra time

Never fall down and say goodbye

If you do, hide your crime

Hide it well and learn to lie.

FIN