Walking at Night

We had to write a poem at today's tutorial. This is what I came up with.

When your Mum says don't walk home by yourself - listen!

Walking at Night

My footsteps echo off the green-slimed walls,

and bounce right back to ears that are alert

for followers. Count footfalls, one, two three.

Too many! So I stop and they stop too.

The only sound is breathing, harsh and fast.

I turn, my back against the wall that drips

cold fingers down my back. Stench of decay,

mosses and rotting things. Nothing to see

amongst the shadows cast by distant lights

of cars . They cannot help me now. Owl hoots.

Then silence and I wait. I am the prey

of someone waiting, silent, near at hand.

Fairy Tale

A long time ago in a far-away place lived an elf and a waif and a pudding. They lived in a tree made of canvas and clays and worked out in the branches. The elf was a shoemaker, as the story tells. He made shoes for leprechauns. Most of the shoes were green but on Fridays he would only make red shoes. The waif was a remnant of the Old World when Humans still existed. When the badgers rose up and silenced the guns only the waif survived, hiding in a puff dragon till the smoke dispersed. The waif was old. Infinitely, degeneratively old. She so wanted to be fat but who can be fat on mushrooms and drains? She still wore the clothes of her childhood but always had beautiful shoes. Red shoes, made on a Friday. The pudding was made of figs and honey and bark and candyfloss. It was shaped like an elephant but tiny. Fig puddings are bad for you and this pudding so wanted to be loved. It would sit at the door of the canvas tree and wail its distress at being puddingy until the elf and the waif huggled up and stroked its figgy paws and told it that they loved it. O lovely pudding, o pudding my love. At the end of the day they would wend their weary ways into the bowels of the tree and dance to the old songs until one by one they pirouetted into sleep.

Red.

This is a different sort of freewrite. I think it reached a level I don't deliberately access, I thought I'd post it because it is about depression and self loathing. I don't want to go back there. 

Red. Anger. Red mist. Blood. Roses.Red devil. Red arrows. Strawberries. Raspberries. Hips and haws. Autumnal colours. Better red than dead. Communist. Commune. Commune with nature. Life blood. Periods. Red river. Read head. Readlands.

What would happen if we were red not pink. If other races were green not black. If the Chinese were truly yellow. If we were primary colours rather than shades of flesh. Would the primary colours still be dominant? Primary. Orange would be a lesser being at it was mixed colour. Red and Yellow. Would we all end up that sludge brown. Would we have red supremacy? Red Ken. How did Socialist become red? What is the significance. Wars of the Roses. Red rose of Lancashire. White rose of Yorkshire. Purity against blood lust. Vikings. Back to the red mist. Wanting to kill. Wanting to destroy, cleave, hack apart. Knowing that sanity is within reach but choosing not to step back into it. Wanting to hurt. Rip apart. Knowing that you cannot mend it, cannot go back but not caring. The mist isn’t red, it’s black. It’s like a curtain that muffles everything except the beating of the anger. The drum beat that drives you forward, tongue lashing, aiming for the heart to belittle and destroy. To wound and maim. To make you feel as badly as I feel. The blackness the curtain when it closes when it descends muffles all feeling except the need to hurt to lash out then it closes completely and you are locked into the darkness and everything is muffled and there is no point lashing out the only one to hurt is you so you sit wrapped in the curtain of your misery and rip into your own flesh and feelings and tear yourself apart because  you obviously don’t deserve anything better. And you rock. And the voices are distant and you need to drag yourself from the velvet drugged box drag yourself up towards the sound that is disembodied coming from so far away and you drag your self towards it and focus so you can hear then the treacle of your understanding as time is slow and you take what you hear and you turn it round and round in the treacle in the slowness in the slurry until you can see what it was that was said so long ago and so far away and you consider and think is not the right word because think is and active process and the treacle slows that down and you consider what a response might consist of because finding a response is beyond you at the right newness of the moment and finally you find something to say and you find your voice locked down in the more of your being and you drag it up and open your mouth and lip the answer to the question that came so long ago then you let go and sink back down to the waiting place. And you don’t care if there’s a response or a reaction because it’s too far away and too long ago and everything is muffled and if you can’t feel how you feel how can you care how they feel or know if they feel because you know you won’t until the blanket lifts, until the curtain opens until the treacle thins until the light comes in until the sludge of your being finally warms and stirs and slither out towards the warmth and you’re never really depressed because even though you can’t see it and even if you can’t reach it and even if you don’t care if it’s there or not you know that spring will come one day you know at the heart of you that the light still exists that it’s not all darkness so you know you’re not dead even if you want to be so you’re not really depressed you’re just punishing yourself and everyone else. That’ll show them that’ll teach them not to hurt you you’ll just make them do without you for a while and be too frightened to send you back to the dark place.

Free-ranting.

I have deviated from the free-write technique and am developing one I call 'free-rant'. This is my first try at it. I don't think I have quite got the full flavour of it yet. Once I have, I will copyright it and make my fortune selling books on free-ranting to OU students embarking on their creative writing careers. I ranted so hard I had to do this in two sections! That is quite a rant.  

This is not so much a free-write as a free-rant. We went to B&Q today to get some paint for the bedroom. I knew what I wanted, A sea green a bit deeper than the quilt cover that we love so much and which would be slightly better without the dog paws on. So – no challenge. In; pick up the paint; get some painting equipment and home. Half an hour tops. Or so you thought. The first challenge was the paint area. They’ve changed it. Now, I find that rude, frankly. It worked for me before. I knew where stuff was and I could choose a colour, get it mixed and be out of there with no issues. The only minor problem was sometimes finding a woman to do the mixing but Rob was good at that. He knows my tolerance levels and would say ‘You stay there a minute.’ He’d be back in next to no time with a woman in tow (that’s my Rob) and we’d be mixed and at the check out waiting for some pleasant pensioner working the till to finish their pleasant conversation with some other pleasant pensioners before you could shake a mixing stick at it. But, as I say, they’ve changed it. There is a now a whole area dedicated to their own paint. Let’s hope it is as good as they suggest because I have five litres of the stuff. It was a slight concern that they feel the need to sell a combined primer and paint for ten pounds a pot more expensive and actually ask you if you’d prefer that, but I work on the theory that they wouldn’t sell you paint that isn’t up to the job, would they. It would be a poor selling ploy to sell you paint that has the covering power of thin custard just to get you to go back and buy the better quality stuff. Wouldn’t it? Anyway, we fooled them, we didn’t fall for the ruse. But I am so far ahead of myself. I am talking as if buying paint was simple. The first problem was working out how the system worked. We went to the wall of colours and looked at it blankly. There were hundreds, thousands of little tags with colours on. I knew the exact colour I want but it just wasn’t that simple. Trying to isolate it from the twenty other shades that were so nearly the same was difficult without taking into account that the lighting was so awful. Bright and artificial, even in a world of artificial lighting. Luckily they had three – I say again three – light boxes where you could insert your colour tag and check how it would look in such an environment.

Rant, continued.

Where did I get to? Not the counter, that’s for sure. For all the advertising, there were two tills, four people waiting and one woman serving. This would not have been as bad if two of the people waiting were not on a mission to paint their fucking bathroom the exact shade of beige that was in their nasty, cheap padded lino. It is probably called something a bit more technical (I suspect ‘nasty’ and ‘cheap’ are not actually in the name of the product). They had brought a roll of it with them so they could get the exact shade they wanted. Now, this lino was patterned with shapes and each shape was like the colour chart in ‘paint’ – lots of different shades of the particular colour palette. In this case, cream through beige to brown. Sort of streaks and spots of colour, or, in this case, lack of colour. And the woman wanted the exact shade of that bit there. No there. That little tiny bit that I have to point to with my little finger because my bigger finger is too big and would obliterate it. Never mind that all around that tiny little bit of the exact colour were little bits of colours that were really similar and if they weren’t similar they were pretty damned near or went with it beautifully because they were from the same palette. Give or take a micro-smidgeon or whatever the term is for colour difference. And they were beige. It wasn’t like she was trying not to clash. You can’t actually clash with beige because what it does best is bland. Have you remembered that one entire wall of the warehouse was covered with very small paper samples of every colour in the universe and a few they’d made up to fill the gaps? Did she take her bit of lino over there and see which colour sample looked best, using the three light boxes so considerately provided? No. She did not. She asked the sales girl to do a colour match using a scanner and computer. The scanner was not like a supermarket barcode scanner, or a webcam, either of which would have been, in my opinion, perfectly good enough. No, it was a great box of a thing and you had to insert the item you wanted colour matched into it. The roll of lino wouldn’t fit in so they had to sort of lodge a corner of it in then scan it. It took forever. Not literally, as I am home now and I assume she is too, but it took forever, if you get my meaning. She wasn’t impressed with the result as it the great block of backlit beige on the computer screen didn’t look like the infinitesimally small sample she’d provided, and so they had to do it again. And again. Then they went over to the rack of colour samples to see if the colour was there. If she’d looked before she came to the counter to hold us all up, she’d have either found it or known it wasn’t there. Though how you can not find the colour of beige you want when there are about 150 shades of beige in the beige box, I don’t know. Luckily by this time  them woman who had been mixing paint out the back came over to give the tin of paint she’d mixed to one of the people in front of us and went off to mix some paint for the other man in front of us. I started to get excited. You know what making mayonnaise is like? One drip at a time for a long time, stopping to make sure it mixes properly? Well, I think that is the method they were using. Even the woman mixing said – when it was finally our turn – that it was slow. It was slow. I took to going and finding other colour samples at this point. I’d picked the colour for the bedroom in about two and a half minutes because I knew what colour I wanted and it didn’t have to match with anything! We do clash and blend. And it’s the bedroom. It’s dark when we’re in there so I started picking colours for the kitchen. I brought them back a couple at a time, showing them to Rob and remarking how colourful the colours were. How many colours there were. I got quite smitten with the names of the samples. Mimi’s kimono. I’d have liked that one except I didn’t like the colour. But I didn’t let that hold up the whole queue. I didn’t like Mimi’s kimono in my own time. I wanted the one for the bedroom that was called Spent Passion or some such but decided on Zen for several reasons. The main one being that it was the colour I’d decided on before I came out. I also found Stratford on Avon for the kitchen and when Rob queried why it was called that I told him it was the because it was the same colour as the swans there. As it was a lovely turmeric yellow, the beige woman actually stopped whittering on momentarily but it was momentarily. I think all the serving staff had hidden and were sniggering behind the colour stands as the one poor sales girl who hadn’t move fast enough, to be honest. Once the beige lino woman and her husband, who had hair like a sheep (grey, curly and it didn’t move) had gone, they all came out of the woodwork. I bet her bath and sink are white – although avocado would be a lovely contrast to the beige lino and beige walls. End of rant. Signing out.