A DROP IN THE POND PRODUCES A RIPPLE!

The desolation of loneliness can dog you even as a child and follow you mangy and forlorn into adulthood. A bedraggled cur that slinks behind you – dirty, rain-soaked and unworthy, while you spend your life trying to prove you are friendsome and laudable. Rejection is still the bitterest pill on earth to swallow. Everybody waits like Dante’s understudy for their ‘fifteen’ minutes and if that moment stalls, the resultant backwater will smudge your sharpest features, stifle your creativity and maybe shatter your personality, like a suicide bomber with a smuggled device hidden in his back-passage that detonated prematurely. The ability to muffle explosives is not one known to advance you anywhere in life, excepting perhaps Newspaper front-pages, there to garner column inches where obituary and events often merge.

As a child, I managed to stay ahead of the lonely monster most of the time, until my father left home without a goodbye or an explanation that is. Before that, I had often heard that lonely monster following me with the sound of a repetitive rhythm close behind me as I walked. It was the sound of a deathly metal steam-train with a cattle guard trundling over wooden tracks, getting closer and closer until I could stand it no longer and I would turn suddenly whilst walking, to bravely face the ‘lonely monster’, who always was not there.

Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the lonely monster dogged me through my under-10’s and into my early-teens before I learned to effectively dispel the notion that an empty train might actually be following me. That nightmare-train eventually disappeared, to be replaced by sudden attacks of deep despair in my mid-to-late teens when an adolescent alcoholism found me drunk 5 nights out of 7 and carrying a bottle of whiskey around in my inside coat pocket at the age of eighteen. This drunken-despair would often reduce me to bouts of almost inconsolable, emotional distress and crying with my loyal friend Ian, while often fantasising and confessing to scenarios as equally loathsome and dis-loyal as I counted my father’s rejection of my mother and myself but more especially, to be honest, myself. Imagined and articulated wrongs that I had apparently succumbed to, although never actually did, caused me greater distress than the deeds surely would have if they had been real and not imagined.

The rage that burned within my turbulent history surfaced during my adolescence intermittently. It flared like an exhausted bonfire when fuelled by gusts of life and emotional experience. It flared, but never ‘caught’ to violence, not an external violence at any rate. Rejection is a wound, a tear within. It’s a rupture, a hernia, whereby raw feeling and sensibilities are exposed and extruded through an emotional hole that will not heal naturally.

The temper of life abated and I entered my adult years partly healed and certainly more grounded by a personal and spiritual awakening that gave me new hope and a set of inner convictions that I learned neither firsthand or by observation. The absence of a father figure did not seem as debilitating whilst I myself translated the inner uncertainties of my youth by learning to father myself through a kind of transferred osmosis. Being a father I found – was greatness itself!

Children carry their own joy, vitality and innate life-force and provide a transfusion of energy that benefits those around them, wholesale. Parenting, while almost manual labour, harnessed to vigorous emotional trial, provides the steepest learning curve on earth and yet a ladder to a realm of unimagined experience that is both exciting and full of curiosity and potential. That universal privilege, dubiously afforded unequivocably to humans roaming this planet, requires that that same emotional torment will continue to circumnavigate the lives of sons and daughters from Botswana to Ghent! Loneliness and rejection, the twin-legacy bequeathed by so many to so many is an unfair side-order that accompanies far too many horny males extinguished pay-loads.

Is this perhaps the true reason why males in their mid-twenties are especially vulnerable to the suggestion they find in their brains or somewhere, that curtailing this repetitive strain by ending their short-lived stories is an option they should follow. Their ‘cry for help’ unheard by the finality of their choosing and the ignorance of a generation robbed of the chance to know a real Daddy.

..

writtenbyedenbraycompleted28.09.2018

..

~ in memory of Ben Dawes – 1993 ~ 2018 ~

DAVID LYNCH DOES NOT LIVE HERE ANYMORE …

Barry lit the fire with a match, stepped back and began to comb his ash-grey hair as the small pile of logs and tinder caught, began to crackle and spit and the flames climbed up the hearth into the chimney, lighting the walls of the room and creating dark shadows within an eerie, oscillating light. The white room danced to the rhythm of the flames and he felt his mood changing. He thought he heard the music of a classical guitar but it was only the jangle of the wind chimes that hung outside, under the extended porch. Outside, where the wind was now gusting at it’s fiercest.

Celia still naked, lay on the floor, perched on their thick, woolen rug. Her long, auburn hair draped across the rug and cascaded onto the polished, larch-timber flooring. Her arms were slender and tanned and arched behind her like a trestle-table and in such a way that made her look a little awkward and uncomfortable.  He noticed how her position thrust her breasts forward in a provocative manner and provided a pleasing, silhouette. Their pressed, pear-shape reflected the shimmering light from the open fire which grew relentlessly and flickered shamelessly. 

This was ‘serendipity’ Barry considered, that had brought about such a moment after his cold, tense day and the endless, night-time drive through the dense, pine forest and he determined in his mind, to mine the ore from the event to the uttermost.

“Would you like a drink?” he announced suddenly, as he finally tore himself from gazing at the lengthening flames, turned sharply from the fire and walked slowly toward her. 

“Yes, a Marguerita” Celia replied, a little off-hand and impatiently,

 …                                                                                                      writtenbyedenbray08.09.2018

..

 

david lynch

I ACCEPT YOU AS YOU ARE …

…

…

The avenue of true reconciliation is lined with olive trees …

The oil of gladness is an anointing for the soul upon your head …

My peace is caught up inside you when you smile because I am happy …

I trace the corners of your mouth and feel good when you are there …

I dream of you and in dreaming I sleep long, well, deep and soundly …

When I speak your name it reminds me there is beauty in the world …

When I hear your laugh there are angels in attendance around me …

The rain that falls when you walk by, falls lightly inside my heart …

When I am troubled I speak your name and I feel calm and consoled …

The dragons murmur when you are around them and hold no fear …

If I can skip it is when I know I am going to meet you and to see you …

The rainbow in my heart was born the day I met you and it remains …

If a soft bird flies or sings or whistles it is never as sweet as your kiss …

.. .

writtenbyedenbray07.09.2018

 

RUNNING TO RUNNYMEDE!

There was hardly time to gather sorbet moments

Nor harness the power of life’s general circumstance

I had spent my whole life crisscrossing rail-tracks

Stumbled blind upon the important & the tall  

Like a cryptic tale, you cannot solve or censor

Where legions pause wan, to remember and sigh

The severed limbs, the loss of love, the spreading graves 

They build a bridge oft’ to carry humanities squalor

When great men’s minds meet to barter not surrender

Not fell the beauty, nor deceive the blindest emperor

In Paternoster’s palace  invention embraces charity

Where need, a relentless torrent, meets a steel-cold sea

The vicissitudes that chronicle history’s swollen journey

Barb and often unnecessary, ascend like the green-gas

Poison youthful memory, draw marks of doubt in the sky

O’ King John, now and many like you, writing in their sand

Wet with sweat their sand to glisten, their troth to listen

To turn their words to stone at least if not edged yet in gold

This, the refuge warm that I fast run to, renewed in vision

Bound with hope’s garlands, drenched in the dew of Eos

Laden with the three huge, golden apples of Hesperides

I thunder and snort, bay and cavort, I’m grizzled for sport

Owens n’ Bannister, Nijinski n’ Clay all devour their prey

Look up to see a lemon sun, streaming tails of a ringmaster

Where the assembly meet  to honour living souls not dying

And to the honest taste of Jacometti’s own graphite dread

The line, the pause, the brevity of space, encased in lead

And drawn from this, this detail, I see democracy’s mother

Lies replete, spread on a linen sheet, set in urban concrete

..

writtenbyedenbray01.09.2018

 

WHEN THE DATE RAN OUT IN THE MORNING RAIN …

..

..

I can’t believe that the date ran out in the morning rain

The page had slipped, the sail had shipped, the needle skipped, the kipper flipped

and the date ran out in the mornin’ rain

..

I had kept that mothers’ details in a book I wrote

A diary book to save me hassle, with a thin gold ribbon and a bronzed tassel

but the date had run out in some morning rain

..

I’d forgotten the warning that comes with the package

Written in sans serif – it warned me ‘Don’t shoot that deputy or the sheriff’

but the date had run out in the morning rain

..

And I’ll never forget that awesome pain, the blame

Or the cold-hearted shame and the sound of the horn on that high-speed train

when the date ran out in the mornin’ rain

..

She’d never said hello and she never said goodbye

She didn’t bat an eyelid, flinch or sigh, never gave me a chance to bow my head or cry

when the date ran out in the Autumn rain

..

I looked to see if her mascara had run, if she’d lost her fun

If the birds had flown with the summer sun or if she’d found another one!

when my time had run out in the morning rain

..

It left a wound like an awkward stain, a sad refrain

And try as I may to rid that tattooed mark, it’s joined to me like a tree to it’s bark

when the date ran out in the morning rain

..

writtenbyedenbray03.07.2018

WILD HORSES

..        

And Engret, writing in the sand, wiping a tear from the corner of a bloodshot eye

With the sound of waves crashing, like his heart pounding, relentless and broken

The Arabian stallion, muzzled, silenced, tamed by the woman he always desired

A Russian tale, of prince’s, damsels, Duchess’s and Zsars, Snegurochka the snow maiden

Is she lost, forlorn, is she heartbroken or is she simply unfeeling, a young Scarlett O’Hara?

Why does the torn lover always desire what he cannot have? Juliet dying, mourn Romeo?

..

And the gates of thunder open wide on a windswept night in Bala, as lovers never knotted

Wrestle with their loss, Equus and Mammis thwarted, wild horses stalled are kept apart

Diana breathed on Phaedra who still yearns for her Hippolytus though calculated and cruel

Whom the Gods decide we love, not our choice, the task is only to unravel and requite

Separation purely squanders the trailed line that Engret wrote, not words of love in prose 

And so tonight fair maiden, sleep as though dust has grown between us, a dust that blows away

writtenbyedenbray29.07.2018

 

 

 

 

THE WRITING PROCESS

‘The Day I Redrew Myself in Mine Own Eyes’

– an Essay

..

I am a writer. I am concerned only with the writing experience. First and foremost I am not unduly worried about how you, the reader, may respond. It is not my primary concern. I wish to get my side of the arrangement correct. Obviously, I would like you to enjoy what I write but that is not my first consideration. 

I started to write creatively in 1966. I was fifteen years old and I found writing unburdening. It released me. At fifteen you are full of angst, self-doubt, adolescent frustrations, unfulfilled ideas, anxieties about your future, anger about your past. You crave acceptance while often hiding your true self and your real feelings from others in the hope that you might convince them of your worth. When I wrote things down I could bypass that particular illusion and rid myself of pretense. Fortunately, I never saw the point in pretending to myself and at least, when writing, that pretense did not seem important to me. In this way, writing was always liberating to me and generally, it always has been. The more I write, the more focused, defined, articulate and confident about myself I become. I found myself kind of confirmed, qualified, much like the title of my first creative essay which I entitled – ‘The day I redrew myself in mine own eyes’. Very adolescent, very immediate, very self-conscious, you might say even self-indulgent but also dynamic, heartfelt, optimistic and certainly genuine.

In many ways that first essay I wrote in 1966 was the finest piece of writing I ever accomplished due to its honesty, it’s clarity and it’s timing. Unfortunately later in my life, due to religious indoctrination and what I can only describe as a certain zealous fanaticism I had imbibed at an impressionable age, I felt it necessary to destroy that piece of work along with numerous photographs, books and some other serious pieces of writing. My regret at destroying these written pieces is offset by my ability to remember their significance, poetry and meaning. Maybe not word for word but certainly I can remember clearly, the main gist of what I wrote and I have been able to rewrite some of those pieces quite effectively.

Everything I write is important to me and therefore memorable to me. Recently I have been taking the trouble to archive my earlier written work in the hope that after my demise, whenever that might be, that certain people and especially my family, might like to read what I have written and maybe glean some wisdom or perception that comforts them, helps them or inspires them. I think I am a good writer. I am proud of and comfortable with what I have written and I intend to write a lot more.

I believe I am an intellectual. I’m not sure intellectuals are considered something to look up to or aspire to, in this 2,018th year AD but they certainly are to me. I can think of no better entertainment or way to spend an evening than sitting around a solid wood table with a few fellow ‘minds’, 2/3 bottles of good quality red wine, maybe a bottle of single malt or a jug of clean water and discussing, well into the wee small hours, any issue you care to mention from law to politics, to sex, to philosophy, to art, to writing, to religion, to natural science, to history, to modern geography, to art, to existentialism, to FIFA, to comedy, to alcohol and of course to love.

We may shout, we may argue, we may laugh and we may even agree but we will be friends by one rule alone ~ that we share a belief that we are free individuals who are committed, in spite of our personal beliefs to keeping an ‘open mind’. We are not daunted by, or afraid of change or of personal revolution and we are not contaminated by the constant need for orthodoxy, heterodoxy, or democracy. We must believe in and honour a respect for each other and generally all life but that is as far as it goes.

I don’t want to meet with blinkered radicals, biased, lightweight thinkers or bigoted idealists. I don’t initially want to know what you are against or what you don’t believe in but I do want to hear about what makes you live, thrive and keep you alive, for these are the very reasons I write.

The older we get, the more we are prepared to divulge, the less we care about any apparent enigma or mystery that may surround us. I look in the mirror and see myself, not someone else’s view of who I am. When I write I want to honour that person, the person I am and also respect my reader, whoever they may be, by writing hopefully in an honest, insightful and interesting way but I want to write. I must write. I need to write and by my own compass, to write well! The reader will always be the final judge of whether you have achieved that target and then they will return and read some more. eb.

writtenbyedenbrayJuly2018  

~ for my kids S x D x W x M x ~

 

YES, I’M SURE IT IS VERMILLION!

Yes, I’m Sure It Is Vermillion …

~~~

I had spent at least an hour in this hot mustard, salad-sun

While two small flies made circles around my sweaty head

The August corn waving tall and tidy, a yellow sea, swollen

When I found the end of a pencil and started to scribble

..

I lifted my arm to give blood to my shoulder throbbing

Staring at the sticky mess both khaki, crimson and the sun

Woken from a tortured dream, there flying a lost bird sightless

Braver than a pitman’s pony, it sang one note of surprising joy

..

Sound, a silent witness dressed in uniform still buttoned to the neck

The dazed expression of my dead friend who lay beside me quietly

I dreamed of thee dear Jenny as we lay, your left breast in my hand

That had been a better day when I lay inside you, I did not wear a glove

..

This paper in my closed hand is blotted now with a trail of palest red

Cold the breeze that made me shiver, whispers this soldier is not dead

In the foggy, bloody haze, a picture forming of colour, of fire and light

Beyond the battle-scarred high-ground, smeared in shit-brown sienna

..

Beyond these moments where I have lain with only dead people

For these past two hours, I open a box of paints, I select a palette

The stench of mud drying, nauseating & honest, the night air falling

Upon this brow, it says I cannot hope to see the morning or the tide turn

..

And Jenny in my thoughts, soft and warm, her flesh like life, not death

Here hidden in this cancer of man’s regret I daub the crimson patina

Upon this tunic, it lays heavy now a sodden wretch, thus portrait cold

Yes, I’m sure it is vermillion – that colour no nearer orange than to red

                                                                                               

writtenbyedenbray21.07.2018

~~~

 

~~~

edenbray’s #note: It is the Anniversary this year of the end of the 14-18 War. The most hellish War known to modern man. I wanted to write something you could step inside & experience. I have no real idea, a few of us might have some slight idea of what dying in the trenches in that God-awful war was like. This is how I chose to visit that dreadful war in 1918. Using a few words to paint a picture and kind of leave some artist marks where the picture might go. This poor boy drifting slowly into eternity’s light as the vermillion ebbs from his body. Friendless and alone among the dead and dying, he remembers some sweet moments of his life and scribbles them on a scrap of bloodstained paper with the butt of a pencil he finds in his khaki, tunic breast-pocket. He remembers the intimacy of making love to his darling Jenny and the pleasure he had in selecting colours from his paint box to paint a picture. We should always remember the best moments of our lives they may be the only consolation we have on our own deathbeds. Goodnight sweet boy with your vermillion rosy cheeks I can see you in my mind’s eye.

We remember your life and the real death of so many. Your sad, sad demise. 

written by the author 21/24-07-18 

 

THE ARTIST

          ..

  

             ..

I am the artist

  I am the window

I am the camera

  I am the cymbal

I am the mother

  I am the child

I am the cradle

  I am the birth

I am the moment

  I am the verse

I am the end of days

  I am the hearse

I am the tiger

  I am the germ

the idea ..

  I am the sun …

..

writtenbyedenbray25.06.2018

THE POET

   

Yes, the poet knows solitude

The hard side of the wood

The rough side and callow,

the bare and the rawhide

splintered, sore and fallow

..

He knows silent winters

Honest earth, bitten raw

Hooded trees cut down

Woolen mittens laid, frayed 

Fingers, french polished brown

..

Such a poisoned, stagnant tale

as cancerous solitude gnaws grim

at both the mast of the schooner

the mouth of the grey whale and

the gateway polished smoother

..

Can you ever know a thing truly?

Or choose a prize that’s fitting?

dancing with a maidens murmur

lost in revelry draped in splendour

At the dawn of that mizzen’s murder

..

Ahoy then, famed drunken traitor

carried on the silk backs of angels

authors of all that’s bright & holy

sullen yet, So tired of protecting

a nations worthy secrets of shame.

..

writtenbyedenbray25.06.2018