Humanising

For God’s sake, put something human there;
Add the I-word or rub in some personality;
Otherwise words only follow words,
Sense and nonsense in apparent order
Or none at all.

Like a landscape carefully observed,
Its image gathered up,
Brought to life on page or canvas…

     I rebel and obliterate it with a scrawl.

Like music so perfect, so soulful,
A symphony rising, note by note,
Lifting the heart on violins…

     I hate its recorded deadness and 
     End it in a scratch; erase all memory.

Like a story, meticulously composed,
Believable and real, full of people…

      I throw my pen down,
     Crumple the page and bin it.
     How can truth be so frail?

Stories within stories; a thick weft of threads;
The intertwined strands of living:
People in impossible moments
Day-to-day people wrestling with a world
So few ever come to understand.

And no-one sees the landscape
Across whose blankness no-one creeps.

No music comes from silence: hands
Stroke strings, lungs inflate and breathe sound
Hammering hearts beat time.

No tale is told by rote; the predictable arc
Builds brick walls around its characters; weakness
Adds jeopardy; a wrecking ball crushes everything:
Some endless set piece runs the truth to ground.

     I can no longer be like this: a cipher for a face,
     A grimace, a keystroke and a download,
     A dim reflection on a screen. Fiction flickers.

 I strike out and pixels scatter in the data cloud,
 I know nothing in the darkness that falls
 Except that I am in it.

© BH, 2016

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Clearing out my folders, this fragment, started in 2015, deserved a polish. So here it is. It’s probably about the stories we tell ourselves now, passively parked before our various tubes. Cathode Ray is gone but You lives on. In our ever-shrinking attention spans everything is brief and derivative. Nothing new under the sun, of course. Now more than ever.