I Recapture The Castle

Something didn’t drop down out of the gaily heavens 
All cotton-bud creasy and perfumed with angels and wrapped up swell: just for me
It was more heavy-laden and started like a guilty thing 
Peppering my soles with old heat from the dark hearths of Hell that bequeath the city street 
Consuming the ground beneath my feet
It was eerily aligned and personally designed 
With a bin chute of malice intention
From this height things look half alright 
At cloud level even the dodgy parts of Broughton are a cute jumble of orange triangle roofs with eaves 
Can I hear horses hooves?
Those leaves
And garden fences snuck into a dense green belt of tall English trees 
Swaying in an evergreen breeze 
Elevated elegant seas
You can’t see the street level state 
It’s all tree tops and slate 
And the upshot is a tidy sideline in the reverse calumny of a calm that doesn’t exist 
Yet I’m looking at it 
From here, open-handed 
Down there, a clenched fist 
It only makes sense when the colours all run: it’s sewn into the storm-blown sun 
You’re drilled like a tool
A copycat fool 
We all are 
We hardly ever write hard onto the pad or type deep into the screen devoid of the sheen of fear and the hum-drumming relentless concern to do well
What is that? 
What if it were to just go straight to the tyre swings in the forthcoming dell or the Hell that came up at the start?
What happens when we ditch the cart and ride on? 
Well, for one you won’t be bleaching your heart with societal acquiescence 
Cheap addicts 
Easily bought 
Loyalty persisting 
So caught up in the need to impress that we don’t catch on to the fact we are caught 
Talk about perishing the thought or, heaven forbid, the untaught unsaught adjunct thought that we should not have been bought like we ought 
Just keep your voice down and solemnly raise your cup
At this rate we’ll wake ourselves up
Quiet writers 
Crite and righteous 
Not quite riotous
Disconcertingly difficult to assemble more than eleven of us eating into any one space at one pace 
The low darting dog is chasing its neverwhere tail 
And the yellow cross box painted wide and large across the tarmac collecting rush-hour queuing cars under racks of pulsing tricolour lights is where I start and you end and my mind is a place I can point to and all curves bend 
Hackneyed on the A to Z 
Malfunction Junction
Once, I captured the castle
I’d lay flat-bellied above the main gatehouse and listen through the murder holes for portcullis gossip
I’d swim the moat after dark without drawing the bridge before counting the stars in the silky grey Milky Way ridge by slow-strolling the south-facing battlements
I’d sing love songs up the garderobe to make the closet smell of rose-petals
And I’d steal father’s loudest rock n roll amp to blast pops and jazzes and ragtimes and heavy metals
All down the motte from the base of the bailey
Hardly ever when I was writing
But when guests were present and usually in the days leading up to a full moon, daily
Since those distant lessons in love, I learnt something about purpose 
If it’s gone you can’t go get it back: you have to go get it forth
Even if until recently you lived with a focus and direction and intuitively creative connection of a qualitative depth and breadth that had hitherto set you and everything you touch alight 
Ablaze 
Huxley’s antic hays 
And Phil’s long lion days that start with white haze 
It’s OK
It’s just the laws of base alchemy
It’s Chilean pine valley nature and her monkey puzzle ways 
You cannot rekindle the fire 
You have to go back to the wire 
Sometimes with purpose, you have to go get a new one 
The old one’s not taking a time-out 
It’s gone 
It’s not coming back and it’s not for rehire 
It doesn't matter what your purpose is 
It matters that you have it 
It doesn’t matter if you achieve the targets and goals that are set out within the terms of your purpose
Failure to achieve is succeeding as long as you walk the path that, looking back from the end point and only much later, you will call failure – that you do so walking tall, clip-heeled and spring-stepping and decked out in the decadent velvet garments of authentic objective, bellows-proud values and real freewheeling feeling
Mission-fuelled 
Walking toward something 
Buildings for canvas 
Michelangelo perched under the ceiling
I didn’t paint the thing because I needed to, wanted to or had to 
I only painted it because I tried, he cried 
But to run around just going through the motions when things don’t make sense anymore
When the exact same fruit that gave your life so much contentment and fulfilment at root is not enough anymore
To put up with that and just hope that things get back on track? 
That’s not even dreaming
That’s demeaning
Times are when an old purpose shuffles surreptitiously aside 
Still breathing just needing a companion, or needing leading
Bowing from mainstage and falling into the wings
Commanding you to take charge of things
Your job now is to apply rich viscous brush-strokes of bright gloss over what formerly depicted the finished matt ceiling of the Sistine but now functions as the regulation beige undercoat in an SME reception area with an OUT OF ORDER vending machine on an industrial park brownfield site off a B road somewhere just outside Swindon
A primer 
Reinjecting purpose with colour to make it fuller by giving it cohorts 
And demoting what once was brightest to duller
What task could be finer?
I broke out of my thoughts
I locked myself away for five days and nights 
I wasn’t depressed or down 
More like a marathon meditation
A mission
Staying home to get out of the town of my looping cognition
I’d sleep from about midnight to midday and on the Tuesday I didn’t get out of bed until 4pm 
I’d been awake since mid-morning with all the windows yawning wide open enjoying the biggest pulmonary vertical tower summer barnstorming bars of rolling blue thunder and bolts of electric lightning and deep-rinse fingering sheets of rain 
Laying in bed looking up at the low sepia-print ceiling which is so sepia-thin-ply you can hear birds walking on the roof of this old sepia highrise tower that stands on a creepier hill that felt creepier still and the hill and the tower even higher in the pneumatic shrill of the acquatic drill that fell finer than millstone flour with Newton’s gravity downpour power 
Now my castle had shaken awake to more than a gentle merrily-down-the-stream row-your-boat swaying like a ship going around the Horn in a sightless forlorn type of scorn
Right at the top 
Twenty-four floors and I’m king of the castle and in the firing line of the lightning bolts that now come through my windows horizontally 
Angry gods with twitchy purple laser guns
I loved every second of it
And after the storm, an empty rectangular box of off-white calm, radio-tuned and long-wave frequenting a dial-in beguilance;
 
The dial-in beguiling violin silence of slighting 
Violence a heart-string 
Violet the sighting 
And soon the stinging truth doth swoon the sleuth
The vilest siren made off with the light in a sling of soothing
Stolen
Smiling
Unmoving
But then she was back in a whip-crack and all at once frightening
Lips blood-red and eyes whitening from bold cobalt blue bolts of lightning 
When the storm had gone for good, finally
Me too 
I had
It brought what was left instead of me back into the room
And the space where I had been illuminated with grace and sheen
Ever so slightly but forever
I stood on the threshold of my perception gate 
Back in the liminal space 
And I knew it at once 
There was no once 
It was askew and raw and out of time like a sing-along wartime rhyme 
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, boys, that’s the style
I was not so much somebody else as one body else entirely 
Lifted and gifted and excited with the potential of a new project 
All ready
No longer looking ruefully and sheepishly at their projects 
Your stuff
Jolted with that lick-o-paint fresh anticipation of one’s own new youth
Here now newly appointed
Name. Badge. Station 
I’d been sulking like children about not having children for about five years 
All victimised and stampy like a baby without candy 
Singularly failing to focus on the fewness of my wants in favour of the cheap extent of my possessions
Stupider still, refusing to see Cupid on the sill like a whirling dervish with her posse and their portable, potable take-away ditties of possibilities
When you receive, you are alive 
But only when you are giving: then and only then are you really living 
Five years 
Off-kilter
Refusing the possibility of love and misinterpreting have not for cannot 
A miniscule huge perspective swing 
Looking out
Neglecting in
And that’s only consciously 
Probably longer 
Maybe forever in the deeper chasms of truth that weave and embed me 
In the damp oily garage where under parking ramps they had cobbled me together 
Or the orange heat of the coals of the ovens of creation where I got baked
Not so much a problem as a slow-beat dread
It’s a first-world problem
I’m not hungry or shaking with fright or dying tonight
I solved it by recalibrating the lens 
And the best bit: the I that did it? 
I’m dead
My subtle shift of vision from the haves to the have-nots had stolen upon me some dark night and groping like a stealthy changeling had nudged my world-view out of focus, therein executing a transformational task 
The socially-distanced terrorist bomber, hands clean, safe space, no mask 
On some down-and-out mid-week slow-blues cheap booze no-news bound-along nondescript day 
My devilish muse with a ruse had etched over my blue skies with an attempt at a permanent grey
It certainly hadn’t felt like a hassle
Breezily facile 
Yet, out to the east where the yellow birds feast
And higher still, at the top of the hill, by the astle
I had lost sight of my castle
From this height things look half alright
Out north, some townships take me back
To orchard fields and cobbled streets
There, Lancashire with Yorkshire meets
Where Mossley milltown Dovestone greets
And Uppermill’s
Tame Pennine beats
I think of long-lost childhood seats
In Bagshaw dell for summer treats
Her Pollyanna browbeat bowers
We are the current of attraction
I am the emptiness
My body the vassal
And when I re-flood my soul with purpose
Which bull-horns the fuel pipe for the ignition stamp
Returning a discharged concoction of nitrogen gas to the rotating lighthouse lamp
And so projecting that dull persistent reliable stationary detectable old-fashioned flash
Of hope and a coil of long rope and a dash of dystopian brash to all the long-lost salty sailors out there on the black high seas
Who can not cope
Hitherto sinking
At them, winking
Replenishing purpose
Washing their mouths out with warm hopey water
Defying the fear they are surplus
Then even before I re-open my eyes
And with every fibre of my being unwise
Before even the very next breath I take
Or the release of the one I am holding
I am the emptiness
My body the vassal
I recapture the castle








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