Whisper

Photo by Kai Fi’ain. The Mollusc Dimension in a blue check suit and white plastic brooch by Phillip Raymond Left hand behind head. Right arm stretched out towards the camera.

Photo by Kai Fi’ain. The Mollusc Dimension in a blue check suit and white plastic brooch by Phillip Raymond Left hand behind head. Right arm stretched out towards the camera.

I must be wicked cos there’s no rest for me. Before birth I was conducting choirs and marking theory papers. By the age of five my body pretended not to be an outcast. I sang my imaginary baby brother to sleep at the V & A. Then it was piano all the way to the big mountain of water. Oh the winter was sorrow, alone in an icy block with my absent friend’s wooden cats and her tantric sex books (spines carefully turned in to the wall). The sky saw me make a line in the snow, and when something startled a goose, the other three turned their heads at the same time. It was probably the only time I smiled that year. There was a couple in the block. Their bright origami animals filled the kitchen window, and I knew which block to return to. 


I am not a poet and I am not a singer and I am not a lover. I am only a pianist. I am a drawer of flames, arms of earth and my words are all fighting each other to get to you. I won’t let them get to you. Not all at once. I won’t fight you to listen. Will I?


Once, we cooked and I swore in my girlfriend’s language. To impress her. To make her laugh. But of course it was a bad idea. Offended, her eyes went cold coal on me, and she called me an English girl. Which I guess to her I was. And I deserved it, to be called English. 


I wonder what I can do to assemble the lonely me’s. They were all about loneliness. The winter. The mountain. Outsider work. Even when inside. We are about loneliness. In rest, what if there is the discovery of deep sadness. In work I am the winter, I am the mountain. I am work. But have I forgotten even in my most destructive moments... winter and mountain you hold me. Together we rest. 


I am holding the earth in my sensitive fibres and memory is a muscle, and stories will be whispered and sung. (Whisper me to a song.)

 
writing, storytelling, photography, creativityThe Mollusc Dimensionintersectional feminism, queer, LGBTIQ+, piano