Conversation clusters.

In the supermarket where we buy our words*, I idly stroll wondering how much money I can afford to spend and what is the best value**. I mean I worked hard to be able to spend so I want to carefully select the words I am going to use for the next while. Making my way through the aisles alphabetically I notice a flashing sign proclaiming a new product 'Take part in any conversation' it reads. Intrigued I make my way into a new aisle where laid out before me is packages of words grouped together termed 'Conversation Clusters'. A shop assistant bursts out of nowhere. 

-Hello how are you?' she inquires 

-I'm not sure' I stammer in surprise. 

She breaks into a peal of laughter. 

- I have just the thing for you she replies and motions at a particular pile of 'Conversation clusters' with the titles 'Small talk', 'Idle chit chat' and 'Passing pleasantries and casual greetings'. 

Together they take up the most shelf space in the aisle. 

-Our new conversation clusters save money and time, instead of wasting time actually thinking about considering and choosing your words, you can select your words for the coming week in one or two neat packages, She replies while beaming at me. 

-What's the difference between these particular clusters? I ask.

She looks slightly flustered before composing herself.

-These clusters will all essentially say the same thing but with different words that depend on the context.

- If they all say the same thing, then how am I meant to choose between them?

- Well your not choosing at all, its not about what you want to say, its about what situation you may find yourself in, in the future, so you save loads of time browsing because instead you can predict to whom and how much you may run into certain types of people. We also have clusters based on common personality types so you can equip yourself with the words appropriate if you are prepared to run into such a person in the next week or so. 

- But what if I want to respond to something I didn't expect? 

- We have a high success rate and our clusters especially these types are selling extremely well, we find that people partaking in a cluster such as 'Small talk' are rarely faced with anything unexpected that they have to respond to. 

- Do you provide clusters for 'Perspective altering discussion' or 'Inspiring dialogue'? 

- We do not deal in this nature of conversation. You will have to spend more money and time selecting your words from the shelves if you wish to undertake this type of conversation. 

- But what if I'm extremely anxious about the nature of time because of my over-bearing awareness of my own mortality in combination with.... 

Interrupting me the shop assistant now visibly frustrated snapped 

- I don't know how to deal with this, I only buy clusters, I don't browse the aisles.   

*The supermarket is a metaphor for your mind. 

**Spending money is a metaphor for learning. 

Flash Fiction

The art closet is always locked at lunch but one day they find it open. They spill the glitter from tubs onto pages. It’s an avalanche, scree from magical mountains.  They blow it off the tops of their thumbs and watch it mushroom, suspended temporarily; it drifts through the air as if there was fairy warfare. They spread it out on the page and drag their fingers through it until it’s a whorl, the thumb print of a giant. Their teacher calls. Panicked, stumbling into the closet. So this is how it feels to be in a snow globe.

There’s not a lot of places to go in this town. There’s an industrial estate, warehouses blotting the horizon.  We went drinking there as teenagers, joked about climbing the cranes. During the day it held none of the same appeal. During the day it was just ugly, not dangerous. Dangerous. I can’t go back. Danger used to excite me, not frighten me, not remind me. We always drank too much. My mam wheels me by on the foot path, we can’t avoid going by that way as there’s not a lot of places to go in this town.

You sewed a button onto your coat, one which didn't match the others. I imagine you could have imagined a button falling off when it didn't. Maybe a button had fallen off another coat and you forgot which one. We laughed at first. It was funny, nothing to worry about. Then you tried to boil milk in the kettle, you picked up the remote control like the telephone, you went into the Garda station to buy your bread.  A soft grey round button among shiny black ones, you pull at it now as if it reminds you of something. 

She Lied To You

She lied to you.

I was fourteen when she first when into hospital. It’s funny how you can normalize what is initially so shocking just with time. As if by sheer virtue of things going on long enough, they develop outside the bounds of your own mind and become something else entirely.

So of course she visited the hospital regularly then after, she lost her hair and she got free make up from support groups, which made her laugh because she never wore make up. “

“A scarf or a wig or does it matter?”

“Be a blonde for a while” I said.

“They’re meant to have more fun or something right?”

“Cut the crusts off the bread, I read it in a health magazine in the waiting room, this smooth rock, I got in the holistic shop, rub it every now and then its meant to have healing properties”

“You can fuck off, if a two euro rock and not eating bread crusts cured you, I wouldn’t be here in the first place”

We both laughed, I was so young, I looked at every option then and then one day I didn’t have to, one day it was all over, one day we said the ‘C’ word out loud, we said it ‘Cured’. I was fifteen.

“It won’t come back will it?” I said.

“Not if I have anything to do with it”

She lied to you. 

I grew up. It seems strange to say that. Past tense. Part of me still feels like I’ll always be a teenager, like teenager is attached to me after all my teenage self made the self who is writing this. My teenage self is as attached to myself as if it were part of my physical make up, as if it were a tumour.

One thing we loved her for was that ability to weave a story, everything could be anything and anything could be everything in her mind, of course generally these stories was to raise herself in higher esteem or to terrify us into doing what we were told but there were other types of stories, the ones that thrilled and tingled at what seemed like the very inside of our imaginations. Circuses under mushroom heads and fairies following the ventricles of the leaves like maps. Now they seemed marred, blemished. They were lies too.

She lied to you.

She had to keep going to hospital regularly of course like I said so regularly it was normalized so one day when she came back she looked a little more worn, a little more tired than usual but she smiled a weak smile and made a joke that she didn’t want to make dinner so much that night, she would rather eat my brother’s food, we laughed. I was twenty-one, I had just graduated, the next day I booked my tickets, globe trotting for a year, working in between, my dream in life, at my fingertips on my keyboard, I smiled to myself.

That night she came into my room like I was child to say goodnight except she said something else.

“You should do what your able to, what you want when you can”

“Are you alright ma?”

“Bitta food poisoning due to your brothers shit but nothing a good rest won’t cure”

We laughed.

An hour to go until the plane leaves. Bags packed, I sit alone with the nervous reminders of my mother at security echoing in my head. Did I have this, did I have that? It was her nerves that left me sitting in the airport with an hour to spare and nothing to do. I wondered about waiting, the space between now and then. I hated it, time emptied of occurrence. Empty time. I wondered if I could gather up all the time spent waiting, spent without happening and just allocate it to something else. If I could I would give that time to my ma. If I could do that, I would be on that plane now, if I could do that, I would not be thinking about time, I would not feel overcome with guilt, the guilt of leaving someone dying. If I did that, she would live longer.

Eighteen months the doctor had said.

“Are you alright ma?”

She lied to you.

Some photos in a cafe.

In art class, you learn how to draw, you learn about perspective, composition, shading, the color wheel etc etc. They are things you need but its not actually what really matters because what matters and speaks the word art is that which is new and not mere skill or technical capability but something else entirely. Not something which is only admired but something which also makes you question why you admire it.

It's like sitting in a cafe (where I was when I wrote this) and wondering who the people in the photographs are but not wondering who the people sitting around you are (exactly what I was doing). As if the people in the photos are somehow more important because they will be there after you leave. As if for some unjustifiable reason, permanence dictates more gravitas. As if what matters does not have the capacity to die, as if beauty does not move or change but sits atop a pedestal simply waiting to be admired. Pedestals do nothing for beauty, art and culture should grant accessibility and speak to us not above us. Culture should be a dialogue not a set of instructions.

Maybe that which is truly important is that which has the potential to surprise us and maybe ultimately to change rather than remain a permanent feature, to drink coffee and leave and let new people (aka; ideas) sit down. This shouldn't be confined to the idea of art, why is the same freedom not bestowed upon thought?

Why do not learn to think and reason first and treat it like a craft? The basis of any craft is a firm foundation in the basic principles. If you are going to start to learn any craft, you learn *how* first, then you ask *what* as in what you will create. Except few ask *what* because no one knows *how* to ask *what* in the first place. Instead we are taught *what* first and only, what happened, what is happening, what will happen... So when someone decides to ask what *should* happen, no one knows *how* to answer it. It's like deciding to paint without knowing what a brush is for. If we don't have the freedom of thought to ask what should happen, if we treat knowledge like something that is only to be known instead of to be used, if we keep seeing it as something to be only read, to be only listened to, then who will do the writing, who will do the *doing*?

We need more freedom of thought, we need to see that, that what matters not only does change but should change. Culture should be recycled, be re-newed, and ultimately burst forth with the new, not be re-used and re-used and re-used until it is worn and dies. Knowledge should be recognized with the same capacity of creation and birth that we give to art and culture. Creativity lies not only in our ability to make beauty but to make change. To think *is* an art and it needs to be admired in the same way as a type of beauty and an ideal. 

Internal Landscape

I want a great perhaps

but instead I feel in this time lapse

In my internal landscape I lost the maps

Everything is perfect before existence,

No flaws without execution

I imagine songs never sung

Stories never spun

A spark never lit

I’ll create the most beautiful dream in the world and then never fulfil it

I see it sometimes

See it in things that matter

See it in paint splatter

See it in music, it moves

I can’t see it in this air,

Can’t see it in the eyes of leaders who can not lead and people who do not care

You think I’m slow, there’s a whole universe in here you know,

Planets and stars and places nothing like earth

Black holes that sap self-worth

Mountains that are mood, forests that are feeling

The sights you would see, would have you reeling

Out there in space the words they spin, my words

But when I speak, if I speak

If I muster that courage, it’s a mere leak

No cascading waterfall, more like a drip through a stonewall

I want to construct palaces to the miracle that is languages

Instead there are only shadows of monuments built inside.

And they say it’s easy, well they lied.

Each word a brick carefully laid,

Plaster carefully made

Conversation is a bridge I can’t cross,

Small talk a world where I get lost.

Words must first struggle through fog

Fearless travelers wading through bog

Intrepid adventurers struggling through the elements

No welcome return but a reception of nonsense.

Inching closer and closer till they reach me

Even then like a blinkered carthorse I can’t see properly

Hear the words, hear the sounds

But it’s a mere collection of consonants and vowels.

I want to scream and shout, I want someone to know about

Know about what? Know about what?

That I listen but sometimes it doesn’t make sense

This existence, this present tense.

I just don’t know

And yet I don’t give much credit to the known,

It is a path walked when it could have been flown

More for the could be, the should be.

I don’t care about the real I care about the beautiful

What can be touched can be broken,

What can be thought can’t always be spoken.

It's more than that.

It’s more than that

Or something else entirely

Beyond the reaches of language

Its skims the surface between mind and all else

Its sends ripples expanding

Outwards like a pond

Lapping the shores of reality

Like my thoughts are touching the outside world

Slender fingers, extra sensory, stroking

The fine hair point tips of emotion

Like the crests and peaks of waves

Rising and falling

Every now and then for less than one moment

They barely gently slightly alight

On the edges of all

And then they slip back,

A residue of everything clinging to them,

A speck of all balancing on their corners

And it settles and flows through me

Thoughts rise and fall

And even then words evade me.

Because its more than that. 

My voice

 

I want to give you my voice,

Words crafted

In a meticulous fashion

Somehow simultaneously spontaneous

To give you the urgency of purpose

Do not deny purpose its urgency

It makes it

I want to give you words,

Words not yet invented

If the perfection needed for the intent is absent

Words that encompass intention

That can not but be meant for anything

Than what they are meant

This is my voice

Words in your head

I want to give you my voice

I want it to surpass a mere collection of letters interpreted into sound

This is my voice, can you hear it?