Soulnasium

Soulnasium, or “Out in the Universe”

Part One: Resistance

The end of the affair is a ravene of tears. Salt-washed skin. The wound that draws the blood. Loud hurt confirming beyond doubt how life courses in swift rivers through an entity you call you. A sharp jab or a duller, searing ache that opens like a cold air pocket embedded and encoded to expand and pronounce a resilience steelier than late autumn skies. A thumping shudder beating in drums. Packing ice where heart was.

Far away from here, along taut-strung lines of clumsy weather-worn times, or sooner, you realise its ownership of you is no more. There’s no wave goodbye. No point of closure. Just you, but less. Nothing so rounded for the mind to process.

Growth is birth. The price of birth is death. And the cost? You cannot know the cost, yet.

I’m not talking about the loss to me of other people. Just me letting go of me.

How to resist me and my image of me and my perception of my needs and desires and my skills, flaws and voices and my earnest contributions, pleasures and entitlements and the way that being me is the only seat I can conceive of. My body. The space it moves through. My name. How it weaves across the sound spectrum and hangs, tagged like a cloakroom badge. The core of my identity. My reputation. To remove the “my”s and "I"s from all such sentences. What the hell is left?

If I am not behind the wheel, who navigates?

To summon the courage to defer to my blindspot. Who is the one that summons?

To conjure up an image, in this grasping, needy world of fame, of a blank canvas in a frameless frame.

Ah. I am putting this all wrong. I am making it sound like the big task at hand is to resist the ego. To walk from temptation - which suggests the stern determination by which a spurned lover, the echo of hurtful words still ringing, storms out into the brisk enveloping night wrapped tight in a proud defiance, away from four homely square cubes of yellow-green light. The meeting house where the final impasse trod the measure of its dance. A truth as cold as winter. Love’s last stance.

Real endings harbour no tact.

But it’s the other way round, in fact.

Your worldly desires and the carefully sculptured identities you have constructed and nurtured and fed are not to be resisted. That would be pointless. That’s just holding your breath. Sooner or later you’ll be coming up for air.

Beyond game theory, the real work is to detach from resistance. To intuit that the goals and the dreams and the mountains of stuff of your clutching, nesty mindset of endless acquisition (more, more more!) and all the names, images, noises and busyness you generate is but your thinly veiled resistance from the underlying bedrock truth of who you really are.

You’re not building anything. Broken down car.

And who you always were.

Never him. Never her.

And who you always will be, out even beyond this human embodiment.

Revolving emptiness. Fuller than the sum total of all your earthly clutter.

An immense velvet box of silence, megaphonic in revelation. Deep as old memories. The uniform point-blank inversion out of whence you came and from where you’ll continue after this sensational seasonal stint.

You are an illusion. You cannot even make a dint.

Your life’s work has been to cover this up. To run from that. A futile, childish tapestry of distraction. Seamless and cheap.

Pipe down. Your conveyor belt of spend and save is stealing away the tune. The words from your lips form a shallow stutter of denial. A resounding deletion. Further down, in the gaps between your thoughts and the piazzas of your princely courts lay an old, boundless non-state of pure completion.

You’ll never find it.

The soul makes a bid for self correction. Its dreams nudge at you while you sleep. But you’re not listening.

All your dreams are wish fulfilment. Not the gold that’s glistening.

And anyway. A wish that you could what?

Part Two: Cardio

Alone in the bright afternoon. Laying in bed. I become my heartbeat.

Beyond its classic territory of diaphragm it neatly claims the wieldy outer corners of me. A pulse eviscerates my shoulders and neck. Twitches in each arm and leg align. Behind my closed eyes the waning arc of daylight pulsates in waves and coloured lines jump from the blackness like the steeple peaks on an ECG or polygraph screen.

All to the rhythmic beat.

Nomenclature is misleading. For the source of the beat is not my heart. It arrives, for me, through that organ.

But it originates out in the universe. It is the beat of the planet as she orbits her sun, which in turn is the vibrational energy resounding through fathoms.

The bliss void runs through me. My wooden framed house.

And yours.

We are that.

….

gK

A Separate Peace

I am inland now

Far from the coast

The language of this city is brutal

Hard-edged

Engines and drills

Hammers and shrills

In the dead mans pose, I come to rest

My posture matches the towering office blocks and residential apartments

They arise in the near and mid-distance 

And land in a splash across the broad sweep of my windows

A light smog rises up from the streets below

Traffic fumes and incinerators

Above me, rain clouds bear down through a yellow strain of light

I am the fumes and the light

I breathe in and out

I return to the coast

I follow my breath like the ocean waves

I am the lion purring

I am water in the simmering pan

Out of the brazen chaos of this salt city orchestra

My air-drawn dagger

My silence

Cushions an old peace into my bones

gK

Protest Names

She propelled me for years. Anger. Gave me purpose. In my perception of a cold unforgiving world where I lay exposed, anger was the warm bubble of belonging I could always rely on. I knew her. And she knew me. My hard-wired other. We belonged. We were made for each other. This new sister I did discover.

As the idiot. As the perpetual victim. When the fog of shame descended. And I mean real shame. The kind you can smell. The kind that declares itself as fact. Queue-jumper. Like grief. "I'm here and you will deal with me now." I had this one beautiful retreat.

Secret as dens. Resilient as beggars. Continuous as the Byker Wall.

With her I was whole. I made sense. All of my instincts aligned. Everything was happening. Everything was illuminated. This is true purpose and meaning and value. Never trash anger if she hasn't really held you. As logic goes, you only get it if you got it.

You're too young. I get it. But when I was, like, your son's age now, there used to be this advert on TV. For breakfast cereal. Ready Brek. And on cold suburban streets children were running around in a sheen of orange. A blanketed glow. You know. A metaphoric warmth. Like psychological but actual. Protection and all.

Anger as home. Pop-up. You get creative when the one made of bricks is unsafe.

I know: pathos. The vanilla staple of bad poets. What do you want, Milton?

...

Later, as an adult, I would learn a substitute cereal, that too many adults got a hold of. And never enough.

There was no bottom. There was never an off switch. There can't be an off switch when you've always been on. It would defy the definition of itself. And just because you never knew this didn't make it untrue. Doesn't make it unyou. It makes the corners of the truth shiny sharp because we were in plain sight but all potential saviours were hidden by their own values and their own stories and their own shit. The dying and the rescuers all standing together. None of them seeing the other. Giddy as a stage of clowns.

I recall ordering two more Smirnoff Black Ice in The Sovereign on Preston Street. That straight steep street. The English Channel glistening black at one end. Traffic on the Western Road at the other. Oh those Brighton summers!

And Dave came around my side of the bar and put his arm around me. I was sat reading The Times. Suited up. Calm on the inside. Enjoying the economics section. And he held my arm up as would a nurse checking for a pulse. Just to see I wasn't shaking. But his head was shaking. He couldn't get it. I'd cleaned off twenty-seven bottles inside three hours and he was clean out. And I wasn't even drunk. Just warm and kind on the inside. Stillness. Finally. Calm as a pond. Just disputing Dave's maths. But he was right. Like I said: you only get it if you got it.

So under the cover of darkness in old churches we'd gather. Alone together. Sugar, milk and tea urns. Old school chairs in a circle. What you hear here. Who you see here. All you learn here. Let it stay here. Hi my name is Gary.

Hello Gary.

It was when people started really dying that things shifted. And even then not quick. Even then it was slow, for me. Like I was watching from behind a screen. The sound muted. My ability to gather myself in a normal sense not so much deprived. It had just never developed. Not yet. I wasn't alive. I was just breathing.

That circle of chairs with a new gap in it every single week. Or every second week. That often. I kid you not. Who was sat there? Between Jessica and Mike. What happened to Alison? Is she stuck in traffic or working late. Has she gone north up to London like last time? She never misses Fridays at St John The Baptist. She loves this one. The candle-lit one of Hove's Palmeira Square. Anyone give her a call?

But you just knew. We all knew. That empty chair had plenty to say. And none of us could shut the damn thing up.

I'm in a circle that's shrinking fast. There's a hops fermented bullet in the barrel and it's Russian Roulette. Who's next? Sure as hell ain't no one. Somebody's always up next. Spin that wheel. The cold steel against my temple. The grip of a yeasty finger on the trigger. The weight of it exerting a downward pressure on my skull. Heavy as bodies. Rooted in earth like headstones. Clamping me. Too late now. The whizz-click of the wheel gun vibrating behind my eyes in kaleidoscope fires like the last known truth I'll ever get. Click. The slinky sub thud of an empty chamber. Phew! See you next week. Apart from the poor soul who got left standing when the music stopped.

Why the fuck are we playing Russian Roulette? I mean, now that we know it's this. Why the fuck are we doing this?

It's a story as old as time. It's not always our fault. It is always our problem. Lots of us took a well-meaning wrong turn. Don't get me wrong. Plenty of us are rum fuckers. All of us are in the boat, though. All of us are rocking at sea. I see-saw it as my fault. And I cleaned the thing up. Some of us just do it.

...

Do you know where you are yet? You know that no one gets out alive. But that you presume everyone starts off alive is on you. It's all on you. I can't help you here.

...

It was June and we were walking - a spring in our steps - through the barley fields above Little Gomersal. The cows were out and Mum was giving them a wide berth. I wasn't. The land dropped like a bomb gullet and we trod Cleckheaton and Luddite Way - where Yorkshiremen before me had signed their protest names on the face of technological intention. Somebody else trying to screw us. Not just London or a wayward parent.

The sun beat down hard and silence rose up loud. Louder than pins on glass. Shrill heat ringing. Wiley old witch. The taste of her alarm like lullabies in metal to my fervent tongue.

Jeez! The thirst of me.

We were walking the barley fields and I got it. I got it all. The anger. The energy. The need of it. The insecurity. The lonely, scrambling child. The sheerness of the fear. The all-encompassing urgency. The deeply embedded instinct. The innocent kernel of my guilt. The weird speed I could run. How I always came first in the grammar school one hundred and four by one hundred. Chariots of Fire, they called me.

I looked at Mum. She had just turned seventy-two. I was midway through my forty-sixth lap. Going around again. Attuned to the familiar momentum. Riddled in seasons and clock-time and behavioural obligations. The correct things to say and do. Reputation. Reputation. Reputation. Acceptance. Approval. Belonging. Alright.

Says who?

And she looked at me. She always looked at me. She could always do that. But for the very first time I was really looking at her.

And it all came at once and I got it. I got it whole. Like Phil's ambulances. Permanent and blank and true.

What an anti-climax!

Don't expect wisdom to add. It subtracts. It strips away and pulls off and nibbles down and oooh how cold that can feel! Is this it? Is this sudden steely nakedness the trove I so fervently sought?

Flashes of non-merriment: I'm knee-deep in fresh soil holding out skulls. Where is my money now? My jibes. My gambles. Who can I call? Who loves me? Would I find a way out of this? Just for a minute? Say something. Anything. For God's sake I can read you. I know that look.

Where's Mum? I need to speak to her.

...

And then, as if piped through a distant stone, her voice works through me. Knowing. Constant. Owning me. Waving me like a flag. Her star-striped runcible flag.

Is this a mockery?

Eh, no. That voice is hers but I'm doing it. That voice is mine. Everything until now was a show. A TV show. Made by me for me, featuring her.

The TV is off now. Silence is not the stillness they made out. It wobbles my vision. The walls move in and out. This haunted swing.

Ah! Wisdom. The full-bodied solitude of emptiness. The eternal sugar-spun echo of all the things I used to be scared of. Re-engineered. The prison break. Me in the middle. No edges.

You should have said.






gK

Midnight At The Lost & Found



Something simple

Real old-fashioned

Something quaint and unbroke

Something turbo-boost impassioned

Some fires ready to stoke


Like the lust that I called chemistry

Like my angels above

Like the teeth of my defenestry

Like the need I call love


I say “safe” for insecurity

My desires fuel greed

I talk trust but I get surety

I say “love” to mean need


All the crimes of my mendacity!

I never heeded my foe

I call sated “half-capacity”

I don’t know I don’t know


Like the urge I try to satisfy

All the pleasures I yearn

Like the beauty I go blindly by

Hard-way lessons I learn


Like the world my head goes living in

Houses that I call home

Vane as a wide-screen TV

Computerised as my phone


Like the dream world that I patronise

Like the gift-horse I missed

The escape hatch when I fantasise

Like the first time we kissed


Like the ache when I curl up at night

Like the distance I go

Like the loneliness of morning light

Like the devil I know


Like old cares that I don’t care about

Like I’m really not here

Like the screams that I don’t dare let out

Like I’m scared of the fear


Like the glimmer fading from my eyes

Like my heart just resigned

Hellfire worlds my soul to demonise

Like the darkness I find


I feign strength to mask my impotence

I never counted the cost

Hopelessness; my rising incidence

Turn the lights out

I’m lost


Like my box-fresh new identity

Like the path that I choose

Wipe the debts of my indemnity

Now I’ve nothing to lose!


Like my eyes are open once again

Like emerging from sea

Like recalling why I’m valuable

Like re-finding the key


Like the honour of a bird released

Like discovering sun

Like my pulse got newly undeceased

All of my dreams in one


Like my safe haven came back to me

Like my purpose returned

Like the cruel boss left the factory

Like my problems got burned


Like the vision of my periphery

Came back into my reach

Like my game of soul midwifery

Taught me something to teach


Like a smile re-learnt my face again

Like my angels are near

Not fenced in by time and space again

Like I’ve nothing to fear


Like I’m informed and engaged again

Like I’m back on my game

Like I’ll never be encaged again

Like an end to all pain


Like the heat of appetite

Reflecting over my thirst

Like my hand of friendship out

To all the things I do worst


Like the sparkle in the morning light

Like beauty with no end

Like the distant dapple-drawn call

Of hankerings I transcend


Like the laughter I call “happiness”

Like the dance I call “life”

I feel pain but I don’t suffer it

I know goodness is rife


Strings of now are all the future is

I say “no” to mean no

I own trust

I know my heart’s alive

Think you’re fast?

Watch me go


Like a baby joyful in surprise

Like I’m back on the ground

Like places my soul could harmonise

Light the torches

I’m found.


gK

Fairground Attraction

Proud on the top of Roberttown village, levelling the common, the road fell off in a jagged step to the right, becoming the peat bogs where nature said Hartshead moor began in earnest. Though you'd have to scramble past the old mill and swing a sharp right at Haigh's farm shop for the drystone stile that had Huddersfield 5 miles Welcome to Hartshead etched an inch deep into the face of the old coping topstone. Blackened in age. Bevelled by mould’s fingering corrosion. Some of the corners of the lettering now rounded by a hundred years of bleak northern weather making a nonsense of most vowels. And N's of H's.

Beef flanks. Half horseshoes of ham. Barn eggs. Fresh daily.

That sign had been there since I was a lad. Next to it Bee Honey Homemade was scrubbed out.

In the lee of the special needs home the garden centre car park gave onto the copse part of Slipper Lane that was now sealed off from the bulk of it. For traffic control. Old beech and elm made a high avenue of lush leaf green where in the richness of summer nights golden light filtered through the canopy to make a city of stars on the flagstone paving.

As loud brash teens chasing adulthood we'd pass this way, hand in hand, headed to the Swan at Mirfield. The one near the lock keepers cottage that got demolished some time since. I only noticed when, thirty years on, newly returned, I was jogging back from the Town ground and, caught out by exhaustion, made a right at the Three Nuns to head south of the quarry sooner than tackle it's ramp.


And where the Swan used to be. A chasm. A nothing. Like it had been blown down in a storm or stamped on by giants. A brazen erasure. Everything else exactly as it ever was. Looking back at me like faces that quiz when you smile. Like butter wouldn't melt.

In the mid to late nineteen eighties we'd put Duran or Billy Idol on our transistors and saunter across the valley from Oliver's mum's. We were allowed to join the pub quiz on condition we didn't swear or try and buy alcohol. Everyone looking at me for answers. Anthony's dad trying to keep an eye on us without us knowing. The disco ball beam bouncing off his massive glasses each time he turned. Subtle as fox lampers. We pretended not to see. Lisa Mumpton hip-flasking her dad's best whiskey into our cordial tumblers.

What were the Italians getting ready to bomb?

Easy. Mount Etna. Knapton you freak. Shut up dunce.

Little Taylor Hall Lane wound up from Alcock's gaff and came out by Teale's farm on the hill crest where most days after mist cleared you could see Castle Hill and behind it's black tower slabs the mighty climb up to Rishworth and Saddleworth. The Emley Moor TV mast winking red. Higher than Eiffel. The definitive placeholder.

Years ago when it wasn't concrete and was held up by cables that snapped in winter it fell over and cut the local church in half. The vicar survived. Like everyone else, he'd been watching Corrie. Everyone round here missed the bit where Albert Tatlock got mugged. The Yorkshire Post did a picture board. The first ever TV catch-up, that.

The Gray Ox and all that deep dale stretch of Hartshead village up School Lane and out towards Hightown where my granddad is buried. Right down to The Armytage at Clifton. That, for me, is still coloured in my memory as the beginning of stuff. Anticipation. Everything larger than life. Even standard information arriving on my retinas and through to my brain in a head-rush flurry. The acid trip of a natural high. For we were young adults with second hand cars, sex lives, tickets for the match and A Level passes brewing. Newly formed bodies to go with the music in Woolies. Rinsed in potential. All headed to different poly’s and uni's. All thinking we'd keep in touch. But secretly not minding if we never.

I sometimes wonder if some of these low slung dwellings are the hideouts of old names from that murky fluorescent world. But it's just a fantasy wonder. Not like real. The past is a sleeping dog. Some things are best off left where entropy put them. Memories are like what Dana, Kim and the netball girls used to shout over when we caught them smoking in the pavilion after school. Dana in hot pants. Kim and Mickie under fresh layers of loud make-up. You can look but you can't touch.

Serving tennis at Tim's. Playing curby across Damien's pool. Road racing Matthew Scott over the Peak District and back in the double-free period between Economics and English. Me the only returner. Him smashing his dad's car up on Union Road by the old fair ground. Straight into the back of a learner.

And one balmy summer night in '89 leaning slowly into leggy Dana Cookson in the back of a taxi by the sweet shop on Norristhorpe hill. Just out of sight of her parents front room window. Wide eyed as babies. Nervous as March hares.

The first of a million kisses.

gK