On Friendship & Distance

You may not be surprised, dear reader, to know that in the gap between this and the most recent update to the blog I have been writing. If this is not a surprise to you, you'll certainly neither be surprised to hear that I have been writing, and that finishing a piece is still the hardest part of the process for me. Fortunately, an idea occurred as I was lying down this evening; one of those which I felt I needed to get down before it escaped my grasp. I quite like how it's turned out, but I'll still be compelled to obsess over its minutiae, so don't be surprised if the piece has changed (possibly beyond recognition) between you reading it here and me performing it. Either way I like how it stands enough that I thought it worth sharing:

On Friendship & Distance

People are a great source of my fear.

It's not so much the people on the street,

It's possibly privilege, but I've yet to meet

The confrontation which can't be ended 

By saying "I'm terribly sorry, I didn't know"

Or upping the pace, leaving here, and heading for home.

It's that people matter. Humans are great.

This may be a point that you may've already heard me make,

But either way, it's true.

The people you know can always see through you.

They can cut you if you're not careful.

Beware full disclosure at the first meeting.

First impressions are fleeting,

but friendship takes time to be earned.

So, I worry, "Will this be the time that they learn

That I'm not good enough?"

It's tough to always be on high alert

Against one's perception of one's own inconsistencies.

That's nothing to the mystery of why they've stayed.

We've played with ideas in jest

For too long for this to be anything but the best sort of friendship,

But I worry, at what point would you end this?

Which text would be the one that I miss

Which makes you say,

"Man, fucking fuck this shit".

So I wonder,

Was that it?

Has my fear of cocking up social interaction

Finally come across as a motion to abandon

The game which we both had a nearly winning hand in?

Is this the bit where we go our separate ways?

Is this the end of those days in which I update you

Out of the blue,

And ask, with genuine interest, "What are you up to?"

I don't know where the line is,

but what I'm increasingly finding is 

No matter how much the time is since our last meeting in-or-decreases,

I miss you, man,

And I wish you were here to hear me read this.

One hopes you're well,

yrs,

ADWoodward

Poetry: A Poem

Hello. I have written a thing which I'd like to share with you. It's quite possibly an exercise in self-indulgent, navel-gazing, masturbatory nonsense because it is a poem about poetry. It's called, fittingly enough, "Poetry: A Poem" and it goes thusly:

Poetry: A Poem

A poem,

Said the dead and ancient Greek

Whom I'd read into life once more,

Is a made thing.

An act of creation.

Life with ink in its veins.

I do not wish to bleed,

But if life and my all too human brain

Do conspire against me

With sharpened, moonlit knives

I will let it scab upon the page.

I will trap it where it can be safely observed.

I will steal laughter and tears from my audience,

And into the silence that's left behind

I will shout my thoughts.

I will scream into this world the maelstrom

Whose nocturnal rages trap me in unwilling consciousness.

I will pray

With every part of my grubby, battered soul

That this time -

Please, O spiteful, capricious deities -

That this one time

Something will echo back at me which I understand.

And then I will have a pint,

Calm myself down, y'know.

Take the edge off, sort of thing.

It's bad enough that I make myself memorise this shit,

And need to recite it to anyone who'll listen,

But it really wouldn't do to pretend that poetry is magic.

And a double gin as well, I think,

With bitter lemon if you have it,

Or lime and soda if not.

I do genuinely love those moments

When two people, separated by time, or distance,

Or the breadth of the darkness behind two sets of eyes,

Meet across a crowded line of verse.

I know, then, that I am not alone,

And nor are you.

Oh, and a bag of pork scratchings, please,

It does you good to treat yourself.

It makes you feel alive.

One hopes you're well,
Yrs,
ADWoodward

Edges

Hello. I've written a thing. I think. I mean I think it's a thing, and - depending on quite how much conscious intent you think is needed before "I" becomes relevant - it might have been written by me. Until its real parents come along, I suppose I'll have to take care of it, anyway. A few days ago I couldn't concentrate, sat at a keyboard for a bit with this as the result, and then went back to whatever it was I was doing. Eating crisps, probably. I've reread it a few times, and have got two things out of the effort. The first is that I need to read it again in a different tone, and the second is that it refuses to be edited. So, fuck it, have a read and see what you think. Until something better suggests itself, I'm calling it "Edges", and it goes thusly:

Edges

Look to the edges. Look to those places where one thing seems to stop and another begins, or continues after a lengthy pause. Look at the spaces. The cracks / The joins. Is that mortar or dust accumulated between the stones? See the red mark on the white sheet. Stain or dye? The one should be smaller, should mar the beauty less. The other should be repeated; haphazard patterns allowed to shift with a moving eye. Make them into pictures with a stranger's imagination. What do you see? Broken fragments or pieces put together? The tumbled pebble gets wedged and refuses to budge. A tile, cut and carefully placed, strains to escape its newly mortared home. Ruined or returned to nature? Restrictions released or order removed? Pause. Continue. Stop. Repeat. Rebuild. Reduce. Reduplicate. Which? All or none? Yes, no, maybe? I'm terribly sorry I've forgotten the question? Was there one? Will there be one soon? Do you mind if I wait and see? I think I might be on the edge of something important here.

One hopes you're well,
yrs,
ADWoodward

End of Series

Hello. I've been on holiday recently. It was lovely, thank you for asking. This meant I spent a week looking at a sunlit sea, occasionally wandering to get another drink. I wrote a few things, the first of which I'd like to share with today. I'll put the others up as and when I get bored with editing them. You see, I also read a fair bit on holiday. One of the things I read was last couple of novel's of Raymond E. Feist's epic fantasy known as The Riftwar Cycle. Magician the first book, was one of the things that made me decide "Oh, I actually do like reading." Finishing it, and leaving the world's of Midkemia and Kelewan behind felt weird. Now, you humans can - I'm told- experience feelings without resorting to scribbling doggerel. I choose not to. So this poem is called "End of Series", and it goes thusly:

End of Series

The last page is turned,

The last chapter finished.

We leave our friends

Whose text-forged lives we've cherished

To continue on without us.

Other victories wait them.

Other loves through which to sing.

Other armies to command.

Other regimes to safeguard 

Against the demon legion.

We've loved our times together,

We cheered them through their darkest hours,

But now the pen is still,

The bardic voices silent,

And now they must carry on

Without their paperbacked cheerleaders.

Thirty years the printed word has praised them,

Ten lifetimes more they'll have my adoration.

But no more the press will know them,

No more will ink on metal sing their tales.

These characters who led me from my adolescence

Through goblin strife and elven grace

Continue on to blissful summers

Without my reading eyes to share their laughter and their tears.

I'll re-read their wins and their losses,

But the first time has been and gone.

A rediscovery is not the same

As the first time you turned that first fantastic page.

One hopes you're well,

yrs,

ADWoodward

Wet Paint

Hello. I've written a thing which I'd like to share with you. I half wrote it walking back to mine one evening and then finished and polished it when I remembered it again. It's called "Wet Paint" and goes thusly:

Wet Paint

Paint never dries.

It's always soft and slightly tacky

Like a paperback teenage romance.

It's just sticky enough to pick up dead bugs,

Bits of fluff and other grime;

The sort which can hide it for a time,

But can be wiped off

By one glass of carelessly poured wine.

As the walls age the colours fade

But there's still enough of the original tone

To remind you of the vibrant shade you'd once known.

It can be covered with another colour, bright and new,

But there's that spot in the corner the brush can't reach

And what you've tried to hide peeks it's way through,

Contrasting with what is now meant to be on show,

Giving the lesson it's trying to teach.

You can scrape off the old paint

With abrasives and caustic solutions,

But in that confusion of effort and sweat

What can't be forgotten is the fact you're trying to forget.

Let the colours mix and meld.

Plain black or white are both - truth to tell -

Dull and uninspiring. So paint your walls a riot

And let the scattered patterns lead you to a more organic quiet.

One hopes you're well,
Yrs,
ADWoodward

Masks, Goblins, & Sentinels

Hello. I finally finished writing a thing! The thing took a while to write both because of the common-or-garden procrastination and because of thoughts. Also, it's longer than most of my other things; but maybe bigger breakdown needs a bigger book. Either way, it's done, and as is my habit it's going on the blog. It's mean to create a written thing and not let it be read. The thing is called "Masks, Goblins & Sentinels" and goes thusly:

Masks, Goblins & Sentinels

I wear an armored mask painted with a grin. Its beauty isn't skin-deep, it's less than paper-thin. It squats in an ornate box whose hinges make it hiss, one which is carved to outlast eternity. A voice which growls internally whispers "You'll always need this."

You knock on my door. I move fast - more - at such a pace that I'm easy to miss as I rush to bring the cold steel up to latch onto my face with a kiss. I whisk open the door. You pause and glance away. Perhaps the straps are too loosely interlaced, because the mask is sat askance and there's something less-than-human standing in my place. We exchange pleasantries and we go our separate ways and I lament once more in this endless, abyssal list of days that I've fucked up so hard and let myself end up this way.

I don't want to stay and I don't want to go: to remain in this crowd scares me into myself until I'm painfully alone, to depart leaves me open to these ghosts in my heart which cut deep into the bone. It hurts to keep these agonies covered but I'm terrified of them being discovered. I'm scared someone will lean in near, peer at these things I fear to be true and after a quick review, having seen them in the light, agree with them and announce "Yes, this seems to me to be right."

I feel pounced on, put upon, trapped tight between a rock and a mental place so hard it's like a wall of storms excluding all the light. I know it's not right. I know thinking I'm not worthy of love is flying in the face of friendship's evidence. It's trite and adolescent. But you're not there to see it scribed in granite-hard incandescence above my bed. You're not here in my head to hear the ceaseless sepulchral litany. You can't feel the blackened, gnawed-at nails of the goblin who sits in my brain as he picks at me. He plucks on my last nerve like a tuneless violin.I hide my head under a pillow, but he feeds my every peccadillo until it grows in my mind's eye, blocks out the sky, and stands a full-fledged, devil-armored sin.

Feeling haggard and thin, I'm re-learning a core concept. Taking it slow, with deep breaths and baby-steps, I'm trying to accept what others internally know. It's a fact which is only hard because it's so rock-solid:

I am the dog's bollocks.

This thought lollops through my mind in a rare moment of mental sunshine. It's not just remembering the time I drunkenly strolled through 4am Vienna without any trousers, though I am inordinately proud of that - on that trip if one of one's chums said "man-test" it was a gentleman's duty to acquiesce to the request . It's not just that when I storm a stage my performance carries strong and loud to the back, so my character's villainy can elicit a cheerful "Boo!" and the joyous sound of an audience's hands percussively pressed . Nor is it just that I, a Classicist trained to bask in Latin poetry by the mound and the stack, am still broad enough in my approach to life to love Science - DNA, quantum mechanics, and all the rest. I don't really understand most of it, but I feel you should get points for trying - bunsen burners are like puppies in that they're nonjudgmental friends, whatever the season. I am an excellent human not merely because of any of these reasons nor the sum of their parts; but I'd be lying from my to your heart if I let you believe that there really wasn't a test.

The best method I know to ascertain the truth is to use empiricism: to remain calm and let my brain be a fountain of logical criticism. The key is to acknowledge ALL of the data and not give unnecessary weight to one fact just because it happens to fit a pre-existing, comfortably tragic narrative.

What I need is something by way of a comparative, a control group, a second opinion whose opinion of me is independent of however I happen to feel at that moment. I need a ruthless opponent, armed with concern and all the facts, one able to argue against me in my favour. Debate against the darkest parts of me - don't let your rhetoric waver - because I desperately want the goblin to be proven eternally wrong.

I am so incredibly sorry it's taken me so long to realise that this fight inside myself is one that I can and absolutely have to win. How could I have been so dim as to ignore these friendly, arms-wide-open signs? The ones which stand with laughing eyes and a recognising grin? The wonderfully detailed signs were not simple markers disappearing in the mirror down a one-way, high-speed highway. They were and are marble sentinels holding hand-painted banners inviting me to the friendly, sunlit spots which dot the road in the opposite direction from the way I was travelling.

My mind unravelling I ignored them. You'll be pleased to hear I've turned around now and am trying to beat the speed of sound to catch up to them. You see, these diamond-hearted sentinels whose was love was unbreakable, bright, and crisp were warning me away from a Charybdis-dwarfing precipice. I ignored them before but I'm rushing back again, wishing I'd done so sooner. The reason is this. I leaned over the edge and I stared into the abyss. In that yawning moment I realised, I finally learned a Matrix-level life-hack, a platinum-plated tip. The abyss is a prick. It never gets its round in. It pulls out the plug and laughs when you still try to swim. It wakes you up at four am to steal all the Malteasers from your Celebrations tin.

So now I'm back. I feel like me again. I've got some drinks in for the Sentinels - a delightful mix of grape and grain. I've burned mask in it's ornate box and I'm dancing round the flames. Normally I don't dance, but I'm doing so anyway simply because I reckon it will irritate the goblin. I mean, seriously, fuck that guy. That Moria-dwelling cunt has once more got a fight on his hands if he want to stop me from laughing under open, if occasionally cloudy, skies.


I am well, hope you are too,
yrs,
ADWoodward

Dream Girl

Hello. Sorry not to have posted for a while, but things were distracted. I have written a thing which I'd like to share with you. it's called 'Dream Girl' and goes thusly:

Dream Girl

The other night I had a dream. On waking I scrambled for paper and a pen to record what I'd seen, in case my vision departed and never visited me again.
You see, I dreamed of a wonderful woman who had consented to seek marvels laughing by my side. I can't recall what she looked like, but that doesn't matter. When she spoke of enthusiasms which I didn't understand, I remember the way the stars scattered - the joy in her eyes was all that was needed to light up the land.
I dutifully agreed when she said she didn't snore. I could never hide my smile, though; I knew that while sleeping she snuffled and grunted Douglas Adams quotes until the day was reborn.
She got really irritated when I gave notes while she was cooking. She told me she'd end my wretched life if I told her once more "Don't do that; you'll take the edge off my knife!"
She seemed to like having some bearded arm-candy. At least that's what I read in her smile as she adjusted my tie and ran that ever-so-slow glance down me. I'd been told to suit up for some posh do at her work where I glowed with pride when she received her applause and had cause to hide my giggles with more champagne as she listed all the reasons her new boss was a berk.
She could draw marvels I could never hope to describe yet sat in wonder at what sometimes happens when my thoughts stand up straight and I take my pen for a stride.
Ensconced on a popcorn-strewn settee she reminds me that everything's going to be alright when we rewatch Toy Story 2 and once again Jessie's left by the roadside.
But as is it's habit, night fades into day, and startled by my alarm she starts to fade to grey and ill-defined memories. She's not returned to me in any subsequent sleep, but I keep this scrawl as a reminder so that if I ever find her echo in reality I'll have an even greater list of joys. I'll be gobsmacked by the banality of this dream. The tranquility of sleep is nice, but real people who can go toe-to-toe with the world's chaos and its noise and still elicit joy will always shine seven times as bright.
I'll still enjoy my dreams, but it's time to fill my life with messy, complex, indescribable life.

One hopes you're well,
yrs,
ADWoodward