All about the Pear Tree…

*

…One of the things they taught me at High Furrow was that love has gone out of fashion.

‘Love, is passé,’ they said.

In fact, so outmoded a concept was love that the people there could not even bring themselves to say the word.

In order to put love in its place they changed its spelling and pronunciation.

They called it ‘lurve’.

Now this is a terrible thing.

The day love dies is the day the world ends.

*

But I am the last person to speak for love.

To see me struggling about the gaff would be to assume I had slung the woes of the world across my shoulders and that nothing could possibly shift them, ever.

Most of the time now all I can see before me is a grisly end, while the past…

The past looks like a bombed shack.

It is just a mess of dusty bricks and twisted piping which even when standing never really amounted to anything very much.

But when the sky rained down fire and hail it merely put an end to a miserable edifice.

Hell!

Who am I trying to kid?

The sky never rained down hail and fire.

It was a beautiful sunny morning.

The sky was cloudless.

Dead calm.

A halcyon day…

A stench ridden old derelict shuffled bleakly passed my castle.

A grim looking character: he had been eating beans and baps down at the local hand-me-out.

He let rip good and proper as he passed…

And that was all it took.

*

There is no way around it.

You have to love more than a performance.

You have to love more than that which you recognise as yourself in others…

*

Yet, for all that, I still love.

It sweeps over me in waves like a wind-storm.

It is sudden and complete as a flash-flood or a bush-fire.

It exhausts me utterly with joy.

It affects me bodily.

My limbs ache from it.

My brow fevers with it

And my stomach… wrenches in turns.

*

…Such cruelty carries the mark of true genius.

It reveals a spark of divinity in the heart of my soul and unfurls a radiant flower in the middle of my forehead.

I have a whirling fire stick for a third eye.

A spark is all it takes…

*

…The outer reaches of our universe are very beautiful, spectacular.

From a distance the galaxies look like they contain paradisiacal gardens…

But the black space between them is cold and lonely.

Simply breathing puts you in a spin.

Out there, I was in constant truck with other stars.

And I missed the earth.

Call it home-sickness if you will.

I had plenty of time to mull things over on the way back down…

*

It was the ocean who told my soul where to look for love.

Love is a song and dance.

Love is a song when the spirit hungers.

Love is a dance when the body yearns.

Love, is a biological function of the cosmos.

Love is the unconsumed energy of an impending calamity: it is a merely a crisis in time, the future, borrowed and ready to torch, in a past yearning to burn.

Love is simply the name of the chemical process which forms stars.

*