All things move between beginnings and endings, or is it that we assign them beginnings and endings sowe can savour them, fetishise them and make them our own? Like elastic friction, standing in line, waiting, impressionistically holding onto a cloud of images being traded for other images over tv dinners, unsure if you’ve noticed what was happening as if quiet between the eyes, like keeping a secret.

 

The language we use to support ourselves often arrives in need at the same time as the ending, but the ending comes and goes and emulsifies, gravity carries on leaning. The verbalisation of never getting itright. The theory of staying afloat.

 

Whether or not symbolism is or isn’t a thing, these little letters stand in for your thoughts in the waythoughts stand in for things. Though it often begins with hey and ends with an x, the letter escapes thebeginning and the end, becoming something else; the memory, the replacement, the kiss, the no longer experienceable.

 

Or is it the experience made longer? Supported by a substitute. The uncollapsed branches of a treepropped under with stilts. And gravity leans continually down until the scene is peppered with props litby the heat of halogen stage lights. The windows clouded with dust. One submitting to the other.

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There are mineral deposits bridging over the small holes of the shower head while below, bodies taketheir turns to obstruct the downward pull of water. Neglect gathers at the edges. Then one day the bathfilled three quarters full exceeds the loading capacity of sodden ceiling joists and falls into the bedroombelow. The next tenant to rent the room would stare up from their bed at the bath sized scar of pinkplaster. Lying awake at night looking through the broken middle at its previous collapse and its futuredelay. The property rules.

 

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Scullcap .. .. 1⁄2 oz

Mistletoe .. .. 1⁄2 oz

Bogbean .. .. 1⁄2 oz

Gentian .. .. 1⁄2 oz

 

Yes a walk, to induce visions for the benefit of predictability, did I miss something? So infallible as to wish it and wipe away the contaminated sounds like they were worn at the elbow, we’ll cross the netting under the bridge when you would like to believe it but cannot and must grasp everything in its entirety because

 

it wasn’t an anxiety or a desire or a vision, just a realisation, scarcely needing description but it was horizontal like “white stars” yet isolated, meaning “disclosing” where grasses cut at the neck, untoothed damp grasses restless because the words don’t come straight out - a bog - but not unpleasant to taste were it only to mix or to boil, thoughslightlyacidulatedtheflow of saliva indistinguishable from nutrients. Corruption! And the slack catches under my thumb while gripping a plate meaning “a small dish, tray orplatter” some with upper and lower lips to induce giddiness and movement raking over helmets sopolished to carry the moon’s glow, how nice;

a lack of thought concentration and the shadow of anonymous silhouettes

 

in a passing window, the waiting mouths breathe back and forth your own breath at night, a deafharmony while locked open, stunting the host stood listening at the door because it sticks so tenaciouslyand free of charge. This way. Your hand held by one of my own in tongues of fire. Intense shades of bluesecreting philosophical problems of an Illyrian king listening for something resembling elliptic, assomeone who would fill a book with many pages of pure air. Eight pages glued together. But brazenlythey fail (words evaporating their oral effort)

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Loitering

Ed Haslam