We sip the flood that drowns us, inevitably

We sip the flood that drowns us, inevitably.

Stepping on stones that are no longer there. The choice creations we have actively creatively compared. I first drew a duck on the back of an brylcreemed primary school photograph with a thick pencil.

I remember sitting locked in the bathroom reading Robinson Crusoe all day. One of the few presents I got. All with thorns. I remember Walter De la Mare and quinqeremes from Nineveh in an old maids classroom. We have all the time in the world. To caress and cross our bravery and meet our makers. Locked tight in huge families of cotton and cold coal.

And onward to study the remains of this year of days locked again repeating as parrots with no understanding. To education that no one could see the value of but me and the old man down the road. Getting a world of trouble because I could not cut a straight line. And later...

Loving too much to break down for ever with a syringe in the base of a spineless spine. Only one moment in forever. Please my helplessness hit me so I may focus. I don't want to feel this way forever. A lost month of wishes not wanting to cry any more. Don't, continued the Doctor, read that, read this. A choice between Joyce and the x-ray specs in the back of Superman.

And everybody has got to learn this in this way as the mellotron played. Strike the chords and wonder if you will get home from self imposed exile in your France.

The green woodpeckers of the gypsies and the black potatoes and mint they fed us. A single chord on a church organ shines frosted coloured through the window dedicated to St Michael. A Gauguin Christ lowered in yellow fields. Straw hat drunk in the marshes of the south. The crows of San Remy in homage painted later in loved colours. A woman singing in a bedroom above the street.

The same woman in a Loire scullery stripped and asking if I liked in flawless English. Of course I did. Oh I did, it was forgetting that was the problem. Yes was way and "Ampereheure bien, je vous connais maintenant", was all you said at the end.