Perched here above life
Looking out on the fake majestic game
Manchester's pride and shame
I think bigger
And learn now a wider version of my world
How all interactions tilt into a grand design
Newly angled
Everything disentangled yet bound up
Not hopelessly bound up
Rather, hopefully intertwined
The shapes, curves and colours
Musically aligned
And for my ears
A power drill, three sirens, two cat calls,
That dense fascinating symphony of
A hundred car tyres rolling on tarmac
The robotic beep stutter of a vehicle reversing
The bustle of a million lives moving out
Dispersing
Factory sounds, school kids, the whirl flutter of a passing helicopter
Fragile bursts of song and spontaneous joy-strapped laughter cut short
At once shrill and drowning under new sounds ever after
And a thousand un-named dancing things
All meshed into a new collective and sent up to me
On arrival, so charged by urban fervour
You could cut through with a knife
You could cut through with a knife
That distant radio of life
Was that Colin knocking on my door or oil men fracking thirty miles off ?
Long-wave sounds ricochet the subtlest of echoes
In this way I decipher the provenance of audio
And the night rain
Falling through the air in deep sweeping sighs
Not the sound of rain landing
But the hurl of its descent through the skies
Shy of contact
Unfettered and pure
Free as a bird
Not like rain you ever heard
