I’m walking up a trail in Arrochar and the first snow has just dusted the peaks, their great grey teeth sticking up from this martian-terrain I pick through in my colossal boots, my waterproof gear whistling as I walk, just as a great bellow of wind shouts through the dimpled land. This land, this land, like a big empty slab of Mars, purple and red and grey and white, slick with ice in places now as I climb those final hurdles.
I remember a place like this in my dreaming. I dream of great lands like oceans- some open space clean and brave, a freshly peeled sticker with the underside blank- birds like planes, angel of serenity coming to find me. The chain of knowing is unbroken, each petal crushed underfoot is the soft down of my dream-planet. My dream planet is my reality, white-blue blind sky, it expands from my chest and all the rest of this endlessness is just a rolling marble in my mind.
Snow like tar on the underside of the fingers… there’s a photo I took of Neil with his hands plunged into the long grass. He’s skinny, self effacing, black eyes of nothing knowing, and in his curls rests a chain of daisies, I loved him so dearly I watched him hurl pink spit into the road. Now only phosphenes like the curve of his pale spine remain, and the pebble dust of Brighton beach in the wintertime, bodies like hailstones in the black of Neil’s cellar as I drank his mother’s wine, that soft secluded place.
When I rock against the terrible land I know I never have to come to that city again. His black eyes on a hot summers day turn away. Strange friend, pink spit on pale snow, you could never hold through, I don’t want you to, I love you anyway. That house so ochre with my head against the wall and the door chain straining I knew then there was no possible way to wash that stain away. Strange friend with your spine like a sickle, cut the long grass let me see all of you, not these phosphenes like snow dripping down my wrists!