Return by Malcolm Lewis

Here is the soldier home from the War,
sailing into Cardiff. He’s startled after Palestine
by the colours on the ridge,
dead bracken, glossy, like wet army cottons,
purple coppice he can’t identify,
the mossy green of fir trees that weren’t there
when he volunteered.

The cold cuts through the suit
bought from the tallest of the Lascars,
the cuffs, inches short of his wrists,
expose his skin, now as dark as theirs,
but collier-white before he went. He looks
like them, but Christ, he’d hardly kept up.
Only pennies rub in his pocket –
the captain had skint him, the Scotch bastard.

Posted missing back at Easter,
he’d not written, couldn’t risk
the censor checking on his letter.
He’ll stay on board till it’s dark,
jump the wall, thread the back streets north,
then – the freedom of the frozen tracks –
up and over the top, past the hill farms’ yowling sentries,
down to the town where ghosts parade.

by Malcolm Lewis

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A Dream of Horses by Gillian Clarke

I dreamed a gallop across sand

in and out the scallop of the tide

on a colourless horse as cold as a seal.

 

My hair and the mane of the horse

are the long white manes of the sea.

Every breath is a gulp of salt.

 

Now we are ocean. His hoof-prints

are pools, his quivering skin

the silk in the trough of the wave.

 

His muscular ellipses are

the sinuous long water of the sea

and I swim with the waves in my arms.

 

by Gillian Clarke

from New Poems

The Cool Night Air

Once more spring has passed and it is now summer. A cool breeze drifts past the window.
I think of childhood and how the days of summer did not end back then.
Now, when the light begins to fail, I want to go for a walk in the cool night air.

Where to? I do not know.
Until what time? I do not care.
If I left I would not return. What is there to return to?

People have dreams and make memories in the dark hours. Especially during the summer when the darkness is a soothing comfort not a sign of insensitive death.

As a child you think adults have freedom while you yourself have routines and people to answer to.
You answer to your parents, your teachers, you community.
When you are an adult you still have chains but now they are invisible.

The barbed wire of etiquette twisted around you harming you every time you allow others to treat you as an inferior for decorum’s sake.
The razor blades of financial worries giving you the death of a thousand cuts.
The pressure of self-inflicted moral restraints contorting who you were, are and will be.

Existentialism poses the question asking what exactly is stopping you from dropping everything and walking away. These tethers we bind ourselves with are not real, physical, things. But they are there all the same.
An adult answers to their employer, to their family, to their peers and to the government that cannot see them as anything other than a statistic to be checked off the page.

The night air soothes the skin. Caresses it like a woman placating the injured thinking this tactile moment of amity, invading the solitude of suffering, will ease the tormented and assure their soul.

I will walk away from the lights of mankind’s pointless struggle against the beautiful night but in the end, no matter what direction I walk in, eventually I will return to it.
The only other choice is to blindly walk off a cliff into the awaiting pitch black sea who will claim me for her own. A phone will ring at the chapel down the bottom of the slope and the Samaritans will be told it was too late but they will go home in the end and sleep peacefully.

I cannot go because I will not return. There is nowhere to go. I am ensnared by responsibilities others have foisted on me because of the choices I made and the indecisions I allowed. I am in a gilded cage of my own creation and soon the night will past. I will wait. Wait until it returns once again. The cycle will continue until autumn kills it once more, dressing the floor with its golden red entrails and we bow our heads during the winter songs where the world is washed away to muddied grey and white tones.

The air is stale in here. I can breathe – but only with a heavy heart. I will embrace the night and sleep. I know when I awake the light wll have been victorious over the night and the cycle of maturity will repeat once more.

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I have the past few evenings wanted to go for a walk. I have not though. I don’t know where I would go. There is nowhere but to the town with its glittering lights and dirty covered paving. To sit in a bar and drink until the ring of the bell for last orders and the long, lonely, walk back home. Tomorrow is another day – a day like any other day.

Unplanned piece. Flawed but then it fills the blog until the next entry.

Like, Comment, Follow – Any of these are welcome.

Happiness Week: Review

So they say if you behave happy then you will become happy. Did it work?

…No not really but then it is something you have to do continuously for a long time until it becomes second, then first, nature so it should come as no spurise a single week had minimal effect.

The cat is named. It sits over my shoulder as I type this watching the flicking lights of the screen.

My knuckles have calloused over. The skin is finally healing progressively without the threat of splitting and bleeding as it had done.

The inevitable things happened where they had to happen. I saw the headstrong laid low by their frail flesh. The strong cower due to weak wills that led them to commit to no action. Those who consider life a game to have revealed their strategies and those who wished for eternal balance discovering for themselves what an ephemeral thing it is, requiring unending attendance at every moment, to maintain.

I have things to do but I put them off because the consequences are definitive and lifelong effecting.More minor things I have attended to instead when there was no need. Procrastination…

And I also did this quiz. Idealism and pessimism are but two sides of the same coin. One seeing all as good while the other sees it all as bad. At my core I am an idealist however but I do wish I could temper it with logic. I see things logically but my heart often overrules my mind in personal matters.

http://www.playbuzz.com/josephinemayfield10/which-keirsey-personality-type-are-you

You’re an Idealist! Idealists are abstract and compassionate day dreamers, activists, writers, diplomats, counsellors and healers. You’re the magician or medicine man of all the personality types. You’re a deeply emotional and abstract thinker with cooperative and communitarian goals. You long for deep, meaningful relationships and you constantly contemplate how you can help the common good. You’re guided by strong personal ethics, and you often have an ideology, cause, or way of viewing the world that you take very seriously. You’re easy going until someone challenges your values, at which point you can be the fiercest of opponents. At heart, you’re a natural healer with a great depth of empathy for those around you. As an Idealist, you’re in impressive company! Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Princess Diana, and Oprah are all famous examples of Idealists!

A number of who were killed… But then being an idealist means not seeing the clear and present danger I suppose or being so open to accepting others that you in no way protect yourself.

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What will I write about next? A food review? Prehaps finally get around to reviewing something literary again as I haven’t done that for a long time now. Prehaps a padding ‘short movie reviews’ entry. We will have to see. Don’t pretend like you are excited as I get no feedback about any of these posts usually.

Happiness Week: Saturday

My cat was very playful. He still has no name. He now has a bald spot on his neck.

My skin is healing.

Watched a ‘let’s play’ through of ‘Life Is Strange’ published by Square Enix (with a very sad reference to their film ‘The Spirits Within’ not being a bad film but a cult classic as if they still cannot let go of how much of a major let down it was both financially and critically for them even all these years later…). It is a game in a similar adventure vein to those of TellTale Games escept you are able to see both outcomes of a decision by rewinding time immediately to see how the other outcome will come across. This actually limits its replay value ultimately as you will just choose ‘the best outcome’ in your first playthrough and not replay the rest of the game to reach these points again. You play as a college girl who has returned to her home town aftera number of years away who discovers she has the ability to rewind time with which she must solve, with the aid of her rebellious childhood friend, a missing person’s case and protect the town from a severe storm arriving in 4 days. It is episodic and only the first episode, ‘Chrysalis’, has been released so far. It has some real promise although the first episode has a number of generic elements (hopefully to be subverted in later episodes) but despite all the side activities you can do it doesn’t have the polish of TellTale Games’ recent releases so far.

I watched ‘The Wind Rises’ / 風立ちぬ / Kaze Tachinu on FilmFour. It is a Studio Ghibli film so it goes without saying it is fantastically high quality. However I understand why, on principle, many political groups took umbrage with a romanticised depiction of the life of the engineer who designed the Mitsubshi A6M Zero plane the Japanese used in World War II. However it is actually more correct to say the film is based on a short story by Tatsuo Hori, with parts of the story Hori based on Jiro Horikoshi with aspects of his own personality (for example the fictional account of Horikoshi’s wife suffering tuberculosis which Hori’s wife actually did suffer from and his chain smoking when Horikoshi was a lifelong non-smoker) amalgamated into a single character as the fictional Horikoshi’s of the film. An excellent film tinged with an awkwardness as you can’t escape that in realising his dream the character ultimately saw his realised dream used for war. The film tries to address this with his dreams where Giovanni Battista Caproni addresses him as a spirit guide but it falls flat due to the real world implications and for once sadly cannot be chalked up as simply ‘cultural differences’ as is the excuse often used when certain aspects of films are viewed unfavourably in different markets worldwide.

‘Forest of Drizzling Rain’ – Another ‘let’s play’ through but of an RPGmaker horror game. It was okay and had an interesting concept but ultimately the story was not well implemented and so failed on it’s potential with some very weak endings and not enough character development.

‘Prinny, Can I Be The Hero?’ – Yet another Let’s Play I watched. An action platforming PS Vita game spin of the Disgaea strategy RPG series. I still have very fond memories of playing the Playstation 2 games in the series but as I never got a PS3 or PS Vita I never kept up with the later entries. The humour is still there but this spin off seems far lighter fare gameplay wise compared to the main series. It looks fun but also quite short if you are not into purchasing download extras.

The Voice – A 16 year old mother from Bridgend. Her mother is in a Wheelchair ticking the sad background that these sort of talent shoes feel the need to shoehorn into their constructed narratives as part of an ‘overcoming adversity’ storyline. It demeans the individuals concerned and makes them figures to be pitied instead of respected in publicising their circumstances and makes it harder for an audience member to be unbiased in their assessment of the performer’s talent. Unfortunately their accents made them sound far duller than… it made them sound dull. And so Bridgend is not only the ‘suicide ring’ town of South Wales but also of tattooed underage mothers. Tidy…

National Lottery game show – I forgot what the name of it was but there was a Welsh couple on it. The guy reminded me of someone I know. They seemed really affectionate and to get on well unlike some of the more nervous couples in previous weeks. It was nice to see though it was clear the wife was the one who wore the trousers in the relationship as she was quite ‘don’t be so self-deprecating’. Also one of the things they were trying to win were proper wedding rings as theirs were from Swansea market. There’s nothing wrong with that just… you just know someone is judging them for it somewhere and thinking the Welsh, as a nation, are poor… which is sadly true as we are paid less for the equivalent work when it is done in England.

Nice relaxing day.

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HAPPINESS WEEK IS OVER!

Normal services will resume in due course… or maybe I will do a ‘Misery Week’ which would be cathartic. Or ‘Absurdism Week’ which would be fun. Or maybe I will just leave it a few days and resume the usual update every few days. Maybe even lower it to once a week. Let us see…

Did people enjoy reading this? It seemed to be just the same few points being reiterated time and time again each day over the week.

I uploaded this with mere seconds left before Sunday began. I almost forgot to post it at all. An achievement in time management which I was quite happy with.