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| Amier ~ Jacek Malczewski |
To leave this all behind; a fantasy braised in my heart’s cast furnace; a dream of a bucolic existence on one of Kent’s Communal farms; the experience of freedom in its purest form; a dream, a fantasy, a lie.
Her memory clings to me, stains my clothing black and saturates my mind with the stank of history.
She, my closest companion in the last days of protest. We stood side by side against the occupation of Palestine; the imprisonment of the few that could legitimately be called journalists; the implementation of anti-gathering laws and in the end, we, and the thousands like us, burned every trace of the old order from Beckenham and Bromley to the cancerous Knot of Lewisham police station.
She, my partner in crime – indeed if overthrowing of the system was a crime – she, latterly my fellow gatekeeper and toll collector for traffic on the artery that bleeds a steady trickle of refugees from the shithole that was (and still is) London.
In the small hours, which tradition declares good for nothing but the brutality of lost minds, she wakes me to consume my fears and panic driven carnal thoughts.
I rise eventually when the hurt returns, rise with the sense of dread that will drive me through the day.
They pass in fewer numbers these days; I’m not sure if the tsunami has passed completely yet, not sure how many are left back there; but they must present their tokens at my ludicrous gate… meek as sheep.
They must pass through this, the only crossing of the Medway worth taking if you still value your what’s left of your life.
Crossing is on foot only since what remains after the battle of Medway is one lane of the westbound bridge, the eastbound and the rail bridge having being reduced to rubble by the charges placed there. They must now share the crossing with the westbound stream of lorries bound for Lewisham Market.
At one time thousands crossed here every day but these days only a trickle of refugees board the steam train that waits, emptied of produce, to carry them off to the Kent Downs.
Sometimes reading these old entries from memory makes me nostalgic for those days, fraught as they were with apocalyptic anxiety. It helps that they are only in text form, some years before syn-haptic became the norm; don’t think I’d want to immerse myself in all that again.
But time passes as do all fears of surpassing the clichés that we are, and time doesn’t really give a shit what it passes - and since time will cease to exist with the demise of this horrible species - why should it?
It’s all the same to time as long as it continues to pass.
As for me, here at the cliff edge of my life:
I am the gatekeeper; what passes beyond this portal is at my discretion.
Her memory clings to me, stains my clothing black and saturates my mind with the stank of history.
She, my closest companion in the last days of protest. We stood side by side against the occupation of Palestine; the imprisonment of the few that could legitimately be called journalists; the implementation of anti-gathering laws and in the end, we, and the thousands like us, burned every trace of the old order from Beckenham and Bromley to the cancerous Knot of Lewisham police station.
She, my partner in crime – indeed if overthrowing of the system was a crime – she, latterly my fellow gatekeeper and toll collector for traffic on the artery that bleeds a steady trickle of refugees from the shithole that was (and still is) London.
In the small hours, which tradition declares good for nothing but the brutality of lost minds, she wakes me to consume my fears and panic driven carnal thoughts.
I rise eventually when the hurt returns, rise with the sense of dread that will drive me through the day.
They pass in fewer numbers these days; I’m not sure if the tsunami has passed completely yet, not sure how many are left back there; but they must present their tokens at my ludicrous gate… meek as sheep.
They must pass through this, the only crossing of the Medway worth taking if you still value your what’s left of your life.
Crossing is on foot only since what remains after the battle of Medway is one lane of the westbound bridge, the eastbound and the rail bridge having being reduced to rubble by the charges placed there. They must now share the crossing with the westbound stream of lorries bound for Lewisham Market.
At one time thousands crossed here every day but these days only a trickle of refugees board the steam train that waits, emptied of produce, to carry them off to the Kent Downs.
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Idiot’s Diary 03.11.2020 Went out on the bike today after a break of a few days due do furniture-building backache. Pedalling through the suburbs and the anxiety begins to abate. Crossing the mass of traffic on the A206 en route to the Thames Barrier it seemed that things have just about returned to normal (on the surface anyway) and now we’re going into lockdown again on Thursday. A month of lockdown and this time I’m not working from home; I’m not working. These fuckers are sucking the country dry while we are cowering in fear of a virus that has a recovery rate of between 97 and 99.75%. Anger is harder to quell than anxiety. While the left tears itself to pieces trying to see its own arse, squabbling over masks and statistics instead of actively resisting, instead of being the 99% they claim to represent they align themselves with the 1% by complying with the con game designed to keep us all from getting together and overthrowing this gang of criminals that has taken control of the machine. At the aggregates wharf a cargo ship – German or Dutch - is loading up with sand at the western conveyor; on other days a dredger brings its cargo from the bed of The English Channel and unloads it at the eastern conveyor to be processed. The building industry needs sand. Rounding the Greenwich peninsula and facing Canary Wharf as I have many times before I thought how benign the buildings look, no clues besides the banks’ logos to the crimes that are taking place within those buildings; everything just looks normal. At Lewisham, the hoardings surrounding the corporate construction of the towering apartments, once graffitied with ‘FUCK BORIS’ and ‘FREE ASSANGE’, are now adorned with gentrified Graffiti Art and the legend ‘THANK YOU BALFOUR BEATTY’ followed by the tags of the ‘graffiti artists’. I kid you not. A newer addition on the concrete wall facing the station read YCL followed by the hammer & sickle and didn’t last a week before being painted over in institutional grey. We’re fucked.   |
Sometimes reading these old entries from memory makes me nostalgic for those days, fraught as they were with apocalyptic anxiety. It helps that they are only in text form, some years before syn-haptic became the norm; don’t think I’d want to immerse myself in all that again.
But time passes as do all fears of surpassing the clichés that we are, and time doesn’t really give a shit what it passes - and since time will cease to exist with the demise of this horrible species - why should it?
It’s all the same to time as long as it continues to pass.
As for me, here at the cliff edge of my life:
I am the gatekeeper; what passes beyond this portal is at my discretion.
2 comments:
I've gotta go - but I have to read the last post. I wish you had the attention and acclaim you deserve. You'd no doubt be miserable in any word of fame, but your genius is in your words.
Hey Letitia, thanks for the comments (and flattery), much appreciated.
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