Life Under the Rule of a Mad King

This is inspired -in part anyway- by Fernando Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet'. Each of the entries below were originally written in a notebook, at various places over the past month.
I have resisted the urge to revise.

This is what I wrote in April. I'll try and update this project once a month,

1.
The sun is making everything unreal. The pale-blue, almost white of the water. Distant boats are scattered on the calm. They look like equations, non-Euclidean trinagles drifting on an isosceles ocean. Quiet here, but the beach is not empty. Voices are muted -but for the birds on the old pier, engaged in their choruses of ruin.

2.
Dreans I can't remember. Vague flashes. Things like memory. This morning with a summer silence. I must not count down until the end. Zeno's paradox. The end never reached. Forever is to be incomplete.

3.
Half past one in the afternoon. What does it mean? Once this would have been early, a time of rain and cigarettes. In these lonely days, it seems more a mountain, or a courtyard in a desert country.

4.
I think the glasses I wear make my face look sad.

5.
Unsafe Sunday afternoons. I sleep and dream of sadness, and of an old cat called Tiger who has been dead these 19 years. Empty and hungover I wait for the kettle to boil. I cannot bear to draw back the curtains. These are empty days, the sunny Sunday curse.

6.
It is like living in a land ruled by a mad king. Often he sleeps, though his dreams may still reach me. I become afraid when he wakes. Even when he is quiet he disquiets me, and his rages are terrifying; civil wars and rioting, executions and starvations... I spend my days walking the roads where he may not see me. But even here... It is the mad king's rages I fear the most.

7.
8pm on the twilight horizon. Still light out there. These spring days that taste of summer. Inside is not safe. That old refrain; home is where the darkness is. The implacable melancholy of these afternoons. Dreams still resonate. A disturbing echo whose language I cannot translate.

8.
Let me sleep and dream of falling in love, for when I wake, I find the mad king is already here.

9.
To lose oneself in the factory, to find a righted mirror in amnesia and euphoria in mechanics. This may be nepenthe, or just a forgotten thing.

10.
Railway station heat. Summer, air, metal and arrival. Bright shadows on the ground. A pale and dusty day.

11.
...and the trees are dusty too. The breeze brings up birdsong from the valley, a deep map of bird cries. Star burning skin. A fragmnent of a cricket match, Italianate church, a line of cottages, miners and millers. Avalanche history on the horizon. The sky hazing into the land, eating the distance and the triangles of roofs and what they shelter, hidden by trees. No leaves yet. Sleeping in the sun, but the breeze is both of black hills and August dreams.

12.
The blue shadow leaking down the platform. In the railway station shade, by timetables and emptiness.

13.
I notice a heavy sleep and the unfamiliar language of jazz prodding me to remember. Sun, bricks and summer holiday deeps. lost in woods and drunk in half-erotic air, only sleep providing consummation.

14.
On rainy days in the country, on long afternoons by unexplored woods. Autumn light makes love to sleep.

15.
I feel myself falling, a liquid shadow plunging through leaves. I have lost the ground. I feel the shadow of 40 years on me. I should not be here. I chose to stay only accidentally.

16.
An exhaustion around my eyes. These days are hot and dusty and everything is strange and empty. Walking through someone elses carnival. The fairground is closed. Only broken machines remain.

17.
And if I spoke to her, how much would it be of her emptiness and how much of mine? -Would it matter anyway?

18.
This is the price that is paid. This price or another, and the cost is always high. Less a transaction and more a pyrrhic bargaining. A sacrifice for something I cannot recognise.

19.
Spring has been passed. A fever of summers glut my skin. A nostalgia for winter, for that white lamp in the rain.

20.
You were beautiful for a moment last night. I glimpsed who you might have been through the haze, and when I looked again, you were tangled and lost, and the poison in my hand was slipping through my fingers. I could not bear this draught.

21.
My life is full of devices that break down.

22.
I live in a box. These walls are not mine. I try to drown this strangers air with songs and it does not work. I must descend two landings to reach the air.

23.
37 summers have released entropy. My body slows, an ugly braking into bones and memory. I shall not be the eight words before amnesia. I shall be lost. A blank.

24.
The black hour before dawn. I can hear birds singing. Ghost song. I have never known this house of strangers to be so quiet.

25.
Grey fog park. Fecund spring haze. The breeze brings reminders of what I can't remember. White light over dogs and pigeons. A cup of tea from the park cafe on the bench beside me.

26.
The tiredness that comes only after waking before dawn and not sleeping until it is light.

27.
(...)

28.
The daylight moon is pale, barely there. The wind silences me, bringing me from the tides the smell of seaweed, fish, mussels, cockles, sand-locked coves no-one knows. The sky knows me, its deep blue. The old jewel of the sun, swansong light wet on stones.
An old autumn, an old September. I can almost taste her voice, the songs I cannot bear to hear any more.
I lock my eyes on the horizon. The cold comforts me and I slip into an ecstasy of falling. A remembering of things I cannot touch.

30.
The sun, the shadow of my hand, the pen.

31.
I feel a flicker on the air
I know that summers here.

32.
The streets are empty with dust. The dwarves of old seasons have come back. Each breath is thick with roses drawing me down.

33.
Watching the flies in the mud above the flowerbed. I think there was rain when I slept. A girl who lay sleeping on the bench has woken and talks into her phone. Crow-croak to my left. Late afternoon sun.

34.
The remnants of the afternoon by the closed up cafe.