Loner

06

Loner, behind the wall, curtain, veil, screen or dream - he is sitting as quiet as the furniture, quieter.

Writing now he remembers to breathe. He is negotiating the outside, the air and he inhales. He leans and smells to realise the familiar flavour of his missing world that sits also, buffeting against the shore of him. If he opens himself to the tickle of surf and the sting of salt, he would realise that the dolphin had come as far as the sea would allow. He rests, still not smiling, waiting for the play - while he smells an ocean that is not there.

As he returns inside, old Geranium songs gesture so wide he could wade in it, filling the Red Sea movie screen - that three sixty degree void of his mind. But this is not the smell of the world now, this is not the taste. Allergies of the past itch, so he must, once again, retract to extend.

He is tactile so he types. He used to have the most comfortable hands to play with and now he is pressing plastic keys, the pianist he never became, stroking the ivory keyboard like the gentle lover he was, healing the pressure point of each node. All this, when two daytime hands want to walk him along a luscious boulevard of care, full of need, want, desire, joy and pain; all this, and his next line will not wait.

Loner, Spinoza, Shaman, Savant - Taoist arms, a Child's care, a Tower of Two Hands healing the keyboard of dreams. He used to have the most comfortable hands to play with, warm and hot. Now abandoned for a bad back and cough, all for a few lines on a page, all for the freedom to roam, stray and be run down.

But he needs this and taps the plastic, knowing the need needs. He sees a hallway mirror, a kitchen table, a lonesome figure, a movie reel poem, and a woman; this woman who knows his thirst, his drink, as she drinks from the same cup. She is toasting from across the ocean to meet his eye in the crossfire touch of type. They look up and who are you and who are you does not matter much. If they decide to feed each other's lust for silence, through a veil, an amphitheatre, a mirror, from the dressing room in the tower of their invisible bodies, the lust for learning and thinking will peek safely through a chink.

He is the bravest coward she will ever know because he is practiced fear incarnate, not once or counted - He - the strongest single unit that even experts cannot measure or tame. Nobody can love him and hurt him enough again, and his trail will always lead a heart, to the same dead end of ruthless singularity. This woman, who stands resigned and marooned at the centre of her island, sends one more familiar across the savannah of space between them - she a sky dolphin - so the one at the shore of him is his, bobbing in the smiling frozen water that used to feel like skin to him, but now snips like icicled fingers ripping flesh.

If he is to take the tail again, he knows he must smile first. He knows the only way to smile is to take the tail; and in the ice, and the rip and curl of tide, see again the dreams of worlds. In the water-desert gallery and the museum of universes, old civilisations and symbolic art of the most intangible beauty waits. The world locked out, the missing world relinquished, its beauty not to be called beauty, its craft not to be known as craft, all an illusion of tastes. Yet every sense reborn this way moves him away from everything earthly real - and she is screaming, and she is screaming - and he must listen to the one who cannot swim.

She has spoken and hasn't, her voice will resound, turning mindtime's photographs to dissolving smudges or hazy ashes. Her story is ice-cold burning lava from beneath the sea. She is the loud of his quietness and her voice is the universe. She will not let him swim until he smiles - she will not let him smile until he takes the fin. Indecision is the split at the water's edge. He wants her to sit with him, hand in warm hand, not touching, watching these dolphins leap through the air and ice, playing on the mirrored surface of the ocean, raking sky beds and sea beds of mystery, while a warm hand holds his on the shore; not touching, so waiting and not waiting for his return.

This touch may take too much, and he knows it already has. But, in the spectacle of dreams, of Seers dreams and the cry of eagles and screeching of seagulls and owls, he will vanish to expire and be reborn again. The cost is in human years that will all, too soon, end. It is this precious time left which is counted and therefore must be shared.

He has flown through the nightmares of others and he has had no choice but to learn each picture by heart - but he will not connect and disconnect from tails and hands and fins and hearts without the warm hand, there and not there on the sand.

A true brother's love, a sister, like the better face of God, holds the whole of him in a heart, weightlessly, with cost and without charge. These are the hands that heat his; and this love, the magic of resting a bubble in brotherly sisterly hands, is more magic than any trip through the galaxy of oceans or spheres. The magic of loves lightest touch - so light that he must not know the cost.

A belief in God, gods, touches, and the smiling face of his dolphin, calling him to remember the eye of the needle, recalling an old sonnet of a golden fish flying through the glaze, remembering an old clam who wrote a toast to love and its rediscovery. Now his dolphin, like the 'You' outside the sonnet, stares with eyes that cannot smile and he is reflected in its impermeable skin. He is outside his own poem, wanting to play - but for the missing of a warm hand on the beach. The hand that is always there and not there, before he leaps.