As It Was

 

Begin.

When this began, I walked with my eyes closed.  My toes, edging, traced the form of a land I didn’t believe in. Tentative, sighing, I was half lost and off the map. 

Begin.

At dawn, a spot before my eyes. A distant dancing blur fringed with grey rainbow, a wind whipped, damp and restless sky, a fog, a path at hide and seek, and steps, and sand, a lump of land, leaden and prone, beside a sea unrelenting. Eyes blink open, walk.

Walking, walking. Walk or sleep/die.  Stagger, stumble, fall aloft. 

Miles away from what I run from, to hide in misty catacombs and bury me under days and ages. And hope, hope to shrug away this detached embrace. This caress that rebukes past tenderness.  To take a million steps or more from the shadow of memory,  and scuff along this place of mine and with rain and spray, wash sourness and soreness away. 

Begin.

The rain was with me at the start, I walked those early days through streets and lanes made slick and shadowed, while terraces steamed and TV screens glittered through netted windows. The land was grey as the sky and the water I walked alongside, the Dee, outpaced me easily, opaque with mud as it was. I navigated fields that could have been back gardens, pushing through long grasses that had soaked themselves to capacity to dump on me. Through smokers’ alleys, past belching chimneys, along crumbling walls and skips, sodden prams and cars on bricks, and roads. Roads, and bus stops I passed, walking on, and still it rained, and weary and sore, laden down and soaking, I reached Holywell, where I stopped and finished my day, and hoped for a dry tomorrow and the sea.