They live lives that might as well have been granted
by some fairy tale ring
Unlimited riches
impunity from the law
immortality
Yet instead of gratitude
generosity
any hint of joy
All they seem to feel is misery
and resentment
in the bitter petty emptiness
of their infinitely withered hearts
__________
Notes:
1. Written on January 30th, 2025
Tonight I know I’ll be unable to sleep
because tomorrow I have to get up early
___________
Notes:
1. Written on January 19th, 2025
1.
The town, the town.
2.
All around us it coils, away from us it spreads. It is the air which we breathe, the waters in which we swim.
3.
Unseen ever in its entirety, too immense for us to know completely.
4.
And yet we know it.
5.
Can never hope to leave it behind.
*****
6.
In pictures on the internet, when seen from above , the town looks lifeless, silent, alone, reduced by distance and perspective to little more than an outline on a page.
7.
A tracing of a gravestone.
8.
A ghost
of a memory.
9.
But the town is not a ghost.
10.
It lives.
It breathes.
It sleeps.
It dreams.
*****
11.
And it’s important to remember that the town, that any town, isn’t a town at all.
12.
It is hundreds of towns, thousands of towns, millions of them, all at once.
13.
One for each of us alone.
14.
All of them overlapping with the others, boundaries almost identical, but never quite the same, never fully collapsing into one shared world.
15.
Even the closest people have their secrets from each other, whether they mean to or not, whether they know it, or don’t.
*****
16.
Does the town remember
or does it forget?
17.
Flowers still tied to the railings at the scene of a crash
the names on the memorial cards
faded down to nothing.
18.
Even the names we carve in stone are worn away in time.
19.
And on the memorial benches in the park those of us who aren’t allowed to die
sit down here and lose our minds as the days continue to pass us by.
*****
20.
The town is the river, the sea, the lakes and canals.
21.
Natural or artificial, it makes no difference now. Field, forest, garden, park. It’s all the same.
22.
Once the town has claimed you there is no escape. No return to what you were before.
23.
Even that which isn’t transfigured
Is subsumed.
*****
24.
The town is the paths we walk.
25.
The routes we choose through unchanging streets.
26.
The quickest, the safest. the scenic, the circuitous.
27.
The possible configurations we can choose from as numerous as the reasons we choose them.
*****
28.
But equally the town is the paths we forgot.
29.
Alleys between houses, behind gardens.
30.
Cycle routes through abandoned industrial estates. Footpaths across dead farms.
31.
The town is the empty car parks behind rotting pubs. The town is the empty squares of unused garages on the edges of housing estates.
32.
Relics of the times when cars were kept indoors at night to keep them safe from the rain. Cars don’t rust anymore, but the garage doors still do, victims of gentle neglect, decades now of decay. Obscure artworks occupying forgotten galleries.
*****
33.
The town resists change.
34.
Yet the town is change.
35.
It doesn’t care for the futures we dream, just rolls inexorably on into the futures we make.
36.
Or the futures circumstances make for us.
37.
The town following paths of growth and decline unpredictable in nature.
38.
Inevitable in hindsight.
39.
History as fate.
*****
40.
Who lives in the town?
41.
Casts of characters too big for us to ever get to truly know.
42.
And who is it for?
43.
You don’t have to live here for the town to count you among its denizens.
44.
To take you to its heart and claim you as its own.
45.
Travellers and tourists. Shoppers and sailors. The workers and the weekenders.
The drunk, the disorderly.
46.
The lost.
47.
The lonely.
*****
48.
Even then, we think of it as ours. Built for us, bought by us, in and out of the town we move. Replaceable parts within semi permanent structures.
49.
But the town doesn’t discriminate or differentiate. It welcomes the domesticated and domiciled, the transient, the lost, the wild.
50.
Human life no more important to its sense of self than any other.
51.
Cats, dogs,
birds, beetles
ants in their billions
microbes in their uncountable trillions.
52.
Hedgehogs hibernating through the winter. Cicadas sleeping in holes for seventeen years. Leviathans lurking in the lakes for so long they’ve been forgotten by science, become myths even to themselves.
53.
All of these the town calls its own.
*****
54.
The town is fractal in other scales too. Like life, it exists in all dimensions, occupies all available niches at every end of every scale.
55.
And thus, the town is unmappable.
56.
And yet endless mapped.
57.
The town has existed for:
ten thousand years (unofficially)
two thousand years (officially)
58.
And in that time, the town has moved, merged, shrunk, split, grown, remerged, stretched, sprawled.
59.
Like patches of mold on bathroom tiles.
60.
Like oil spilt on a pristine sea.
61.
Like blood seeping out of an untreated wound.
62.
And we try to pin it down in so many ways, reduce the town down so it’s small enough to fit in our heads, in our hands.
63.
But still big enough to seed our dreams.
64.
We name the streets, number the houses, register the cars.
65.
Road maps, bus routes, railway timetables. Cable networks, drainage schematics.
66.
A million overlapping circulatory systems sketched out and recorded, each one distinct, discrete, and incomplete.
67.
Even at the edges there is no certainty as to the town’s extent. Boundaries differ depending on who you ask. Borough councils, county councils, constituency spread.
68.
Borders differing along lines historic or bureaucratic.
69.
Personal, nostalgic.
70.
Real. Imagined.
*****
71.
And the town extends not just outwards but upwards.
72.
Not quite infinitely, but further than you’d think.
73.
The paths of birds and butterflies. The formation points of clouds, rain, snow.
74.
Dust and dirt and fumes and smoke
75.
Endless waves of heat radiating out of our homes, out of tarmac, out of stone laid down over what once was garden or grass verge or uncut patches of unclaimed borders.
*****
76.
The town is a history of horror
77.
Death and disease
violence, rape, murder.
78.
And worse.
79.
War
genocide
slavery
80.
Mobs and gangs in their anger and their glee
tearing apart their kith and kin.
81.
The town a necropolis built on the bones and ash of the uncounted and uncared for.
82.
Buried in the dirt of history.
*****
83.
And the town is another necropolis.
84.
This one built in memory of the bones that we count, and care for and celebrate.
85.
In cemetery stones
and statues.
86.
In street names
song titles.
87.
To honour a past we venerate.
88.
And create.
89.
And remake.
90.
Endlessly.
91.
To assuage our guilt.
92.
To bolster our sense of self.
93.
To unify the ununifiable.
*****
94.
The town is love
and memories of love.
95.
The hope of love.
96.
Love yearned for.
97.
And even love earned.
98.
Eventually.
99.
At times.
*****
100.
The town is every aspect of every one of us that has lived or worked or walked within its walls.
101.
The town is nothing
and no one.
102.
The town is the silence of the night.
103.
And the silence of the morning.
104.
And the silence of grief.
*****
105.
The town is a faded sign
that welcomes you in.
106.
As long as you’re driving carefully.
107.
And yet the town doesn’t ever say goodbye.
108.
Doesn’t care who lives or leaves.
109.
Who stays.
110.
Who dies.
*****
111.
The town extends below the town we know.
112.
Past the deepest tunnel.
113.
Further than the oldest stone
from the oldest hearth.
114.
As far as the most persistent seepage
of oil, chemicals
waste.
115.
Staining the soil almost as black and as dead as the coal beneath even that.
116.
Coal so deep we haven’t even had time yet to find it.
117.
To dig it up.
118.
And burn it.
*****
119.
The town is the town only seen in dreams.
120.
Extended.
121.
Or condensed.
122.
Into whatever purified, rarified, anxiety induced nightmares
we let plague our nights.
*****
123.
The town is the town as featured in films and tv.
124.
Location shots that separate the actual
from the fact
125.
The town transposed to different places
different times.
126.
Rearranged into configurations it never once was
127.
Nor will ever be.
128.
Permanent records of its history.
129.
As unreliable and persistent
as memory.
*****
130.
The town is a prison to be escaped.
131.
And ignored.
132.
Forgotten as best we can.
*****
133.
The town is a utopia to be retired to.
134.
And embraced.
135.
A weekend away.
136.
To revitalise our soul.
*****
137.
The town is sick.
138.
Yet never dies.
139.
No matter how rundown the streets.
140.
No matter how derelict the houses.
141.
No matter the how boarded up the storefronts, how long abandoned the factories.
*****
142.
And even dead towns still live.
143.
As monuments.
144.
As memories.
145.
Revealed in the contours of newly ploughed fields.
146.
Or left lurking beneath the waters of a flooded lake.
147.
As hollowed out ghosts by the sides of the road.
148.
Haunted corridors through which we can not only drive but see some faded old glamour as we pass.
149.
Like a heat mirage we can almost touch.
150.
But never hold.
*****
151.
There are places in this town where you could just sit down and stop.
152.
Places no one would ever find you.
153.
Routes so unused they’re essentially your own personal paths.
154.
And there are places in this town where you can’t even pause.
155.
Not for a second.
156.
Not to get your bearings.
Not to check your phone.
Not to tie your shoelaces.
157.
Not simply even to look at something.
158.
At anything.
159.
That might have fleetingly interested you,
caught your eye.
160.
Paths of constant motion, rivers of people.
161.
Everyone demanding you move forward at their pace.
162.
Without impediment.
163.
To the necessities of their progress.
*****
164.
There are places in this town bathed in constant light.
165.
There are places in this town that haven’t seen the sun in years.
166.
If ever.
167.
There are places in this town so quiet all you can hear is yourself.
168.
The workings of our body.
169.
The whispering of your own mind.
*****
170.
And there are places in this town so loud not even screams carry far.
171.
Exuberant or exultant
Furious
Fearful
172.
All of it lost in the noise.
173.
Of existence.
*****
174.
There is graffiti in this town so old it predates the language we speak.
175.
Maybe, in places, even predates written language itself.
176.
And there’s graffiti in this town so new the paint has yet to dry, the words still wet on the walls.
177.
Unseen by any eyes except those that wrote them.
178.
That are writing them still.
179.
Will always be writing them.
180.
Somewhere, somewhen.
*****
181.
The town is an edifice, a castle built of concrete.
182.
Of stone.
183.
Of metal and of glass.
184.
Illusions of permanence.
185.
To quell our fear of transience.
186.
Yet the town is never even given enough time to rust and decay.
187.
The whole facade torn down and replaced as fast as we can.
188.
On the whims and desires of those who think of nothing
beyond their own reward.
*****
189.
And the town is an edifice, a castle built on sand.
190.
Sheds and caravans.
191.
Greenhouses,
old ponds.
192.
Fences, gate posts, stiles
Washing lines
fairy lights.
193.
Plastic chairs
on cracked patios.
194.
Sitting there forgotten in plain view.
195.
Outliving their own use
and our entire lives.
196.
You’ll miss them when they’re gone
197.
Without ever
knowing
that
you
do
198.
Like inkstains on old desks.
199.
Like footsteps in snow.
*****
200.
The town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is the town is
___________
Notes:
1. Written between November 2024 and January 2025
On half a day’s charge you can fly a drone
maybe a mile or so
Fill a seagull up with discarded chips
stolen sandwich crusts
and the uneaten ends of ice cream cones
And it’ll be able to fly a quarter of the way round the world
just to scream at you
for more
___________
Notes:
1. Written on January 8th, 2025
It was perhaps an hour after midnight on the night before Christmas when the discussion amongst those of us still present turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there (an outcome that most of us acknowledged, due to the realities of the worlds of business and politics we inhabited, was for each of us a distinct possibility, though not yet, we hoped, an inevitability).
There were only seven of us left by then. Earlier in the evening it had been announced that a storm was approaching, a surprise given the meteorological forecast, and most of the members of our small but exclusive society left upon this pronouncement so as to miss the worst of it. For those like me, however, where the journey home was not a practical one to make at so late an hour, the decision to see out the storm in the comfort of our favourite armchairs was quickly made, and we settled in for the night.
The fire had originally been lit more for its atmospherics than its heat, and now the flames and the smoke provided us with a suitable ambience for our heretical discussions, amplified these last few hours by the periodic flashes of lightning that pierced through the curtains as surely as they would have through our eyelids, should any of our number have wished to rest their eyes and doze through the evening’s confinement.
And if the lightning was not enough to keep us from our slumbers, then the roar of thunder that accompanied each flash, and the ceaseless beating of the rains, which hammered like the fists and the feet of the mob against the window panes and the roofing tiles of the annex in which we were seated, undoubtedly were.
The seven of us there that night were: The venerable Mr Eden, longstanding patron of our club and the man, it must be acknowledged, in whose shadow all of us still stand; Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence, retired now but both still much admired for how they dealt with the mutineers in their day; Mr Bourke, a visiting professor emeritus from Dublin whom I had never previously met; Mr Baring, my great friend and long-time companion, and on whose account I had journeyed to the city earlier that day; myself, being as I am a gentleman, as you know, of no particular renown; and Mr Curzon, a taciturn fellow only recently inducted into our circle, who had, I believe, made his fortune in shipping, and at the very least had a reputation for being well-travelled and knowledgeable even by the standards of the rest of us fellows.
The evening’s conversation initially concerned little more than the traditional greetings and homilies of the season, such as each of us have said and heard on untold occasions before. There is a circularity to Christmas which makes the present feel somewhat indistinguishable from the past, and it’s insistence on both public and private cheer brings its own difficulties, shall we say, even at the best of times. And so there was an undercurrent of irritation in much of what was said, as there always is in the slightly hollow exhortations to peace and goodwill that are customary at this time of year, though of course gentlemen such as ourselves try our damnedest to hide it.
Soon the subject of our politely expressed displeasure turned to the vagaries of the weather, and the various complications and alterations to our plans this unexpected storm would likely cause us, and then, too, of course, the insipid company and ungrateful nature of many of our distant family members upon which we were expected to play host in the days to come.
But luckily the season lends itself well to tales of a more unpleasant nature as well, and quickly we gave up any pretence of civility and good manners, Mr Baring relating to us with evident relish the latest news concerning a series of unsolved murders in one of the neighbouring counties, the particulars of which had been kept quiet by the local press at the behest of the region’s police force.
Yet Mr Baring, through his contacts within the constabulary (which proved so beneficial to his commercial interests), had been informed of some of the more garish details of the crimes, and was taking great pleasure in describing to us the monstrous and macabre violations to which the victims had been subjected.
“The perpetrators of such crimes may evade the law of our lands,” said Mr Eden into the silence that followed Mr Baring’s evocations. “But upon their own death, justice shall prevail. There are some judgements from which none are spared.”
It was this comment that turned the conversation towards the theological. Mr Eden, a man of the law in his youth, inevitably saw hell in the simplistic terms of his profession, envisioning it as some great and flawless penal colony, where every judgement would be ineluctably correct, each sentence eternal, and the punishments robust and inescapable.
Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence here agreed with Eden, the pair still playing, after so many years, the dutiful proteges. But disagreement soon came in the form of Mr Bourke’s contention that if hell was little more than a divinely administered prison, its very scope for inflicting pain and torment upon the soul would be limited. Indeed, it was his opinion that any system of hell that revealed itself openly to those it had captured would be resisted, and therefore rendered, eventually, ineffective.
“One would settle in for eternity,” he said, his voice carrying with it the authority of a lifetime of lectures upon, I suspected, this very subject. “For as we know, in war the daily horrors inflicted upon the flesh are steadily countered by a growing numbness to pain, and in famine increasing psychic detachment from reality inhibits the terrors of the mind from flowering into full bloom.”
Further, he explained, hell would need to operate without the fear of death (for how can there be death in an infinite system), while also foregoing the fear borne of concern for those we loved, for in the eyes of God each of us are judged for our own crimes only, and not for those of others, and so, no matter what our infernal captors could threaten us with, we would know the still-living were beyond the scope of their powers. Within these limitations the ability to truly strike effectively at the heart of man would be nullified and rendered void, he contended.
“But what of corporal punishments?” asked Canning. “As all of us here know, pain is a useful tool when wielded by the hands of the righteous and the just.”
“Pain itself is not enough,” he said. “We can endure mere pain for longer than we should.”
And at this he held up his own hand, and with a quick twist with his other, removed it, holding up for all to see his mutilated wrist, and the scars that ran like lava flows down towards his elbow.
“No, there are two possible forms that hell could conceivably take,” Mr Bourke claimed, after a suitable pause for us to appreciate his theatrics. “One would be a series of nested dreams, in which, on waking from a nightmare, we would find ourselves trapped within a nightmare greater still. And from that eventually we would wake, and so on, for eternity, with each layer beneath more frightening than the last.”
“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” I murmured, recalling some quotation or other that had been taught to me in my youth.
“Very good,” the good professor said to me, with a nod of approval, before returning to his conjectures. “And the other possibility, the one that seems more likely – and, indeed, the more often I dwell upon the problem, the one that seems to me the only true possibility – is… this!””
He held his arms out wide, his truncated left arm granting an asymmetry to the gesture which rendered it somewhat disconcerting.
“The club?” asked Mr Baring, already perplexed by Bourke’s arguments and now almost completely lost as to his point.
“I speak of the world itself,” Professor Bourke said. “For a true hell would maintain the appearance of reality. It is only in the here and now, in the everyday mundanity of existence, that the corruption of the soul can retain any meaning.
“To be corrupted in hell carries with it no lasting shame. Of course we would be corrupted in hell. Of course we would be humiliated and perverted and defiled until we were a broken shell. How could we expect anything else?
“To be corrupted in life, however, to have to live with that corruption, to see the effects of our actions, and to be forced to live with what we have done, to have that gnawing fear, that dread, within your heart, knowing that at any time you may be confronted by your past misdeeds, or be forced into committing misdeeds anew. Is that not a punishment worthy of hell itself?
“To be forced, not by circumstance but by the very failings of your own soul, to behave in terrible, horrifying ways, out of nothing more than cowardice, or desire, greed, laziness…
“To live to see all the things you believed in and fought for, the better world you hoped to bring about, all those slow steps of progress undermined, hollowed out and eventually swept away by a tide that brings back to us nothing but ever increasing hate and horror. And all of it of our own doing, all our justifications for those same deeds revealed to be no more than the self-serving lies of the common criminal we here so like to judge and have without mercy condemned more times than we can ever hope to remember.
“Now that,” he said, as he began to screw his hand back into place. “That is a hell to be feared. A hell that would be worthy of its reputation.”
I again responded to this with a quote – “I began to learn to hope and what brings a more bitter despair to the heart than hope destroyed” – before Eden, in his diplomatic way (perhaps to calm the coming bluster of Canning and Lawrence), said, “Perhaps it is both. Or neither. Perhaps the passage of time itself is punishment enough. The realities of our lives and misdeeds reduced to mere footnotes in one of Professor Bourke’s many unread histories.”
“The horror,” Canning and Lawrence said, with forced jollity, and Bourke too repeated the phrase quietly as he slumped back into his chair, and then the room fell into a deep and not especially comforting silence, in which we listened to the beating of the rain and indeed to the beating of our own hearts for what seemed like an age.
Just when it seemed like the silence would continue for the rest of the night, as we all began to drift off into ruminatory slumbers, it was broken, unexpectedly, by the largely forgotten figure of Mr Curzon, who let out a dry and desperate laugh that caused us all to turn in near unison towards his chair.
He leaned forward, his face rising from the shadows and into the illumination provided by the fire, and as he turned to face us, the shadows thrown upon his skull by the flames seemed to shift and shiver around the fearful rictus of his smile, and in his careful, calm way, he began to recount to us the following tale.
“It was perhaps an hour after midnight on the night before Christmas,” he said. “When the discussion amongst those of us still present turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there…”
__________
Notes:
1. This is a reworked version of On The Nature Of Hell
2. I was asked to turn it into a Christmas ghost story
3. So I did
4. In November 2024
5. But then it wasn’t needed anyway