Chutniiieeee! Tomato and Apple….. agonisingly, ecstatically yum! first time i’ve ever made it! the secret ingredient ginger (not so secret now blabbermouth) toms from the garden, a bag of apples from up the hill… the rest of the ingredients all from rummaging deep within the pantry bung EVERYTHING in the pan and gently hubble and trouble boil away… eventually all was reduced to a state of primordial gloop… that wot the first amoeba clambered out from? its texture sticky to the finger, colour kinda brown but with lashings of radioactive vermilion as you can gather i’m proud of it… it also required great poise to achieve a selfie balancing an apple on my head (William ‘kiss and’ Tell) anyway had intended to give up on facebook… horribly last decade… at least i’ve spared you my poetry… but you know. CHUTNEY! a Hindii word originally ‘to lick, or eat with appetite’… indeed!
a dollop of golden honey smeared across the horizon, heatwave, early morning, down by the sea later it will be batten the hatches. bludgeoned. furnace stale air yet for now, the gentle lap lap as the sea tip toes closer… Grandmother’s Footsteps…. ‘Whats the time Mr Wolf?’ Cliff mirrored in the stillness of tide pool, the reflection has something of the wobble of water Brighton and wind turbines lurk further, distant through the haze Sea birds their sound: clatter and clamour, gobble or chunder… the gulls call has a rhythmic insistency, the throb and urgency of a police siren so different to the melodic warble tweet of woodland birds… this cry, far flung, out across the emptiness of the ocean, else harking back thru profound time to the days of dinosaurs
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chalk there is scribbleage a game of hopscotch etched out on the path… who could ever resist? toss the stone… hop jump, hop jump, hop jump, stoop, pick stone, turn, then hop jump again… a patterning of effort and limbs somebody has written ‘chalk’ in chalk from the chalk cliffs, the recursive nature pleases my programmers mind an environment you can write about with the substance of itself we too are the instruments of our own saying? ‘Chloe loves Jack’ Chloe, or Jack, for that matter, thought it worth articulating a possessive specificity? this cri de coeur… love walks the chalk? I have never written ‘I love insert name here‘ in chalk! my Romantic soul somewhat aghast forever a caveat, a complexity? yet written in chalk a cheerful ephemera, perfect for youths tender blooms of love
from the cliff flint falls… its clatter
I think of the mountains of Slovenia, Shiv and I setting out along the Triglav trail, the lush beauty of spring, we climbed higher and higher amongst a host of golden butterflies two nights camping along the shore of a snow melt lake, distant peaks lotering, crowding the valley sides nobody, nobody but us you’d think that, unobserved, nature would be silence, stillness? but each evening we sat serene in the red light of our campfire, listening to rocks, rattling down the hillside like shooting stars, turned to stone, turned to sound world creaks
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smelling salts, mind revivified by the ammonia tinged stench of seaweed
next i play with the light, shadow summoning a loch ness monster dapple, stipple these words with memories shadows … away walking up at devil’s dyke when the kids were young… daughter perched high on my shoulders… a low sunset light… Yawn stretch of shadow away over the valley and the villages clustered below Fi Fi fo fum with this thumb, this omnipotence, I obliterate Poynings! turn, reach further out with arm, vastmess ‘Now the shadow falls upon Fulking!’ chortles from up top, she too raises arms, dabbling with this power two heads are better than one
