Thread and Spindle

I think time gets caught on the air, scent on the breeze from somewhere else, a cobweb-tangle of childhoods, your own and other peoples, and childhoods that have never been, lost lovers, lost dreams, lost afternoons, lost ships, a fragment of a fever, of rain on the panes of glass in a tiny room, December blackberries tapping at the window, a walk to buy cigarettes down autumn paths, an unopened cupboard, a locked drawer, and that delicious feeling of being followed down summery lanes.
A suddenly unexpected walk home tonight, as I called in at Dave's Comics first to buy (another) expensive book reproducing 1950s horror comics. Walk up the hill, call in at Brighton Station to use the loo, up, up, up, and into Seven Dials, glance down Buckingham Street, splinter of an old studio flat, run into Greg, walking home. He tells me of his 50th birthday. As it turned midnight he was onstage playing guitar for his band Paradise 9. Down Cromwell Road - oh this old road, breathe in, and taste those petrol station spring-times, Andy's house for a coffee before the afternoon shifts, CD skipping in the walkman, and suddenly - recovering from a mild childhood illness in 1982 - I can taste that Burnside time - Pot Noodles and the Beano, the leafy shadows of the living room, Adam and the Ants and Peter Davidson still the Doctor, cub scouts on Monday, and the trees in wind-waving in the breeze on the path to school. Now we're back in the midsummer - the exact midsummer of 2006. Hazel down, and I had shaved my hair. Skinhead Stuart,and Opeth on my MP3, Blackwater Park, and everything green and early early morning and shimmery, and, ah, yes 2007, the yellow May, crammed with the euphoria of moving into Wilbury Crescent - and here, oh yes, I remember, back from New Zealand and my first early shift at work, deep smell of the trees that cluster above the wall of the old peoples home, black November, unbelievably cold, autumn 2003, and I had only just moved into that flat on Buckingham Street.
We're caught on that air too, observers of these endless pasts, these labyrinthine entwining mysteries, reaching for the air, swim up through these waters laced with stars, and a coolness as clear as a night scene delineated only in black ink and those spaces between black ink.
Sat in the living room, a purple shirt fallen from where it was drying to the floor, Smallville season one boxset, spilling discs under a copy of the Guardian from Saturday, a wine glass on the table next to the laptop, a shallow rim of slightly inky water (I used it to clean a brush yesterday).
Through the glass, the distorted cover of 'The Great Shadow' by Mario de Sa-Carneiro
I am full of salad and fat-free turkey yoghurt.
This is now.
I feel it getting caught on the air already.
Thread and spindle, nostalgia and drift.