The Skies Over Clifton

Something's in the way of the heavens over here, over England.  Clouds at all levels.  And a low sun, even at midday so that there's always a wonderful light shining through.  It's never an empty sky in the winter, and I think that's what makes all the difference, what set it apart from the other seasons.  Things happen in the winter.  It's alight and sometimes frightful to look at.  It's not calm, and it isn't boring, and because of all that I think it's difficult to tackle.  I guess the same could be said about life really.  It's not a far off comparison, life and that dreadful season.  A real life anyways.  Not some fucking fairy tale played out on the TV realities.  What a fucking thing to tackle, life, in the breadth of a single season.  The darkest.  The wettest.  The weirdest.  The most restless one to live through, or at the very least I could say it's the one my mind's most attuned to.

The sky's mostly gray through the days, but when the setting of the sun does come, it's that most beautiful of things each twilight that only comes once the same way each lifetime.  You never see the same one twice.  Not in the winter anyways.

That's what's running through my head on the highway back from John's.  He'd given my arm a nervous pinch at our good-bye and I smiled, squeezed his shoulder light, and in his beady little eyes I said, "good-bye."

And Derrick raced us off into the painted countryside, back down to Derby (pronounced dar-by), that hell-man, on the side of the road I'm not used to.

Merry Old Englands

There's a certain charm to this place, there is.  It's a biting cold outside on the edge of Sherwood Forest.  But here in an ancient pub from Robin Hood time, Ye Old Trip To Jerusalem, there's a warmth brewing from behind the bar and rising up the skinny creaking wood steps to the only room with free tables.  Everyone's conversation sounds so proper.  So matter-of-fact.  It's Jolly.  Something of a kingdom feel, where everyone knows their place ad revels in it.  It's chipper 'round the holidays.  It's "you's" and "lovelies" forever.

Nottingham Castle is set atop a thick block of cavernous sandstone that shoots up a hundred feet.  A solid base for such a faint castle.  Nothing grandiose.  It's a small cosy castle, Nottingham.  Green grounds, numerous iron and wood doors in the cliff-face, assumed tunnels and mischievous dealings. The accent's a bit more pronounced than in London.  And the laughter's more flowing.  Like I said, jolly.  'Tis a wonderful place for a drink and a write, this old pub at the foot of Nottingham Castle, carved into the cliff.  It's a stone's throw from Lord Byron's old house.

Don't mind the window.  Or the cursed galleon (that sparks a story I wrote in childhood).

So You Think You Design

[it's desperation]

ENDLESS WINTER

What a title

What kind of a man does it breed?

There's nothing broken in me.

Only the sense of thick roots,

battered bark,

a deep ancient core of patience for the sun.

Winter Is

An English accent on the train.  A silent goose, British temperament, dry humor, wet feet and the rain.   Winter is not a structured verse.  It's a pile-up.  Things stacked one on top of the other.  Over and over again.  Little things over time.  Things thrown in the morning, sugar-coated.  Things learned, things yearned for.  Idyllic dreams of bi-planes, ocean-cliff houses, skating and scalability, and climbing up to reach an end.  It's funny how much of a dream one can retain when writing it down.  It always starts poetic.

Though when one comes to think, really think on it, it's random.  It's madness.  It's a firework show of subconscious synapses.  It's a winter storm.  Coming down from the mountains and the redwood, coming across the sea.  Blankets of rain, storm surges, laid waste tidal falls, piling up on a naked soul.  There's never any money in the winter.  I'm just beginning to realize that.  It's a season of dependency.  When one discovers what one really needs, and what one can do without.  It's heavy on the shoulder, winter.  It either breaks a man, or it makes a man stronger.  But it comes every year.  Sometimes twice, depending on the hemisphere and the timing of travel.  This was a two winter year.

A Swiss Lecture In The Winter

Matty and I got high before making the trek up to the lecture halls above the co-op.  We biked up to the base of campus and caught the shuttle to the top of Science Hill.  We strolled in through the back side entrance, not the front, two minutes late and thoroughly stoned.

The old Swiss economist had already started his lecture, but only just so.  He was still introducing himself, and I saw his eyes flick to us high up in the back row as we stumbled across to the center.  We wanted good seats.  Hell, I didn't give a damn what he thought about it anyways.  I wasn't even in school anymore.  I just came up to campus two or three times a week to sneak into the dining hall for free food.  And to write.

And apparently I came up to watch Swiss economists talk for an hour as well.  Matty dragged me, I remember.  This was his idea.  The economist told us a story of the end of a global American empire. He sounded hopeful though.  It was fucking fascinating.

Winter Breeds A Cold Blood

A stiff lip that's dried on the outside.
It's a thing one looks to the end of
and not the beginning.
Those months are trials of a man.

They'll break a man.
They'll take a man
if he's not careful.

It's a precarious season, this winter.
Most men with any salt
or a good idea of the long con
the what's to come
baton down with a woman
see things through, at least to the spring.

Not me.
I had other ideas
not to call them better or worse.
Just different
they were.