Sparks

The crackle of words sparking blue pulse in dim pub spark down point of plastic pen down tube of ink that crackle smoke flare spark blue ignite fingernails scorch skin those sparks — scrawled blue marks on off-white page — are only outgrowths, curled flares on the seething surface of the seething sun, leaftips of thought tree thought web inside my brain, pulse electrode dark dark then spark bright web built in my brain by evolution, by culture — biology's baby — these sparse spike sensations crackle blue tick Geiger crackle uncertain arhythmic organic complexity, branching veins few freckle spark sensations that have — dear God my fierce intermittent God hate spare me from memory, disco lights the speckled purple formica top of this pub table — forget, memories fade as fast as they flare, intermittent pulse stripes our world's made of sparks, of pauses, of the void between the guttering flash of a neon sign, the offbeat of an indicator light, the fire firefly already winked out by the time our eyes have caught its stripe. Our dreaming tree, our world tree: Yucatan Cenote, roots dipped in hell and branchtips in heaven? Or North-European christmas fir, Platonic pyramid of child-drawn green — coloured pencils, crinkled brow — in some small-town square in the deepening dusk, festooned with lights with pulse erratic, unknowable, halos all the same electric harsh spark white, heaven our heaventree of thoughts is a joining of the dots, organic imprint of our orgasmic need to connect, tree of absence and not presence. There in the magnificent mythological shapes drawn by the Ancients on the night's starred scroll. The mind needs lines, shapes, faces, horses and bulls, same rock-scratched and lichen-dyed lines as on the walls of ancient caves. No-one ever touched that dreaming tree. But I still try. With a mind full of mind I strive to word the world introfactured, remake mind's mind in spark flash words points points discrete code number drawn — my drowning sink, my strange attractor — connect the whole inexpressible everything, the endless detail everywhere. I have to write everything. Impossible, the only way. Write the stooped shoulders slow gait thinning hair, bony scalp show through patchy hair rolled up white — pale blue? — cotton shirt sleeves bony strength — same vein-seamed hairy-forearmed knobble-elbowed wrist bone knuckle bone strength as that which guides this skittish pen. Same gaunt Caucasian strength as my own, my father's. Write the balding 40ish 50ish man — who may have been wearing a white sun hat or a straw hat, who may not be balding at all — write that man write the spark-lit smoke, demon firecracker gunpowder fume cloud, red beam eye smoke through truth light fast light, memory and perception, reactants glimpsed through the smoke of their reaction, firecracker flower flash vivid memory through smoke of distortion, elision and exaggeration, the smoke that spews from its own consumption. Was his shirt off-white linen, creased clean cream cool summer shirt with its cool coarse weave and the breast pocket and the cream linen sleeves rolled up over those bony elbows? Whatever it was, it was that exactly. Exactly.