She Clocks Time

The chipped glass is my favourite one to drink from. I come home and make a bee-line for that particular glass to quench my thirst after the commuter train home. It’s the last one I may take for the foreseeable future. Is life made up of hellos and goodbyes do you think? People you see every day-in every day-out and then when time’s up you leave with a gracious step out of their respective front doors. The same way you came in. The weekend is again upon us and I can see the familiar trails of ticker-tape left straggling along some underground station and there’ll always be a hen-do, or two. Men douse themselves with eau-de-cologne and the women present themselves immaculately, by the wee hours of the night make up has been expelled with a frivolous attitude toward drink and dance. A farce. What is everyone up to these days? It’s a good modern wholesome world we inhabit and traipse around in, quite a lot of the time. Making fun, playing games, acting everything out before a non-paying audience. You think you want peace and quiet but then again you jump - you jumped right then! It’s infuriating your energy, will you stop jumping for a minute and come down to my level of lethargy? Nobodies’ got time for hugs. Sloths hug trees for hours. Don’t leave us out here in the cold too long or we might go stale and our stares may become impenetrable. I’m shivering at the thought. The chipped glass now empty beckons me to make a decision. Last night I saw a film, the director is so dishy, and the cinema felt like a decadent cavern. Well-to-do sort of types putting their feet up on plush leather armchairs supping white wine, it was nice, it felt how can I say, grown-up and maybe what life is going to be made up of from now, that is, snippets of “real nice moments” you can recollect in the drearier seasons of which there will be many. Take the good with the bad, roll with the punches, swoon off the scale when you have the option to. It really ain’t that bad.

(inexplicable)

I bet this hasn’t happened to you for years;

maybe your bits have dropped off. I felt the excitement mount me today. I was sat cross-legged on the floor and suddenly I wanted to 

Kick my feet and jump up in a flurry and shout a little. 

                Yelp

make a funny face and laugh. 

It was the excitement alright, maybe what adults used to call hysteria in girls and children. 

oh it was great - it still is

feeling youthful regardless of age. I thought of someone you see, 

a person 

a new person 

Who makes me happy. 

                                    Inexplicably. 

I’m not sure what it is but he has a way with words that fills them up with lightful air. 

He gives a smile on to my lips. 

                                    We kiss. 

It’s resounding and though not structurally stable it is what life is made up of: little morsels. 

It’s the feeling when you were born. 

Wonderment at the lustful proclivities of the earth’s spin. 

What is it (?) when the Autumn leaves rustle like a towel being muffled around your head by a 

First 

Love

Sunlight that’s from a summer’s lazy day in. 

Don't Look Back in Anger

There is Jimmy at the centre of it all making the world revolve around him. He is the axis and the two women are the pole opposites which are in fact the same, and they propel around him in orbit pulled tightly together inwards by Jimmy’s force. The two women shall go unnamed because that’s how they seem to me, a mere device to hone in a point; the other male also performs the same function but as a brother. A relative to Jimmy, someone from his heritage but also not him, a weaker more diluted version. For as ghastly as it is Jimmy is the hero. A horrific horrendous hero. He detests living but that is all that he can do, and what a mighty effort he makes of it. That’s what’s heroic, never is Jimmy pathetic. Forever heroic.

That is a facet of an hero isn’t it? That they fight and strive on for a cause, an idea, an ideology perhaps, one thing that is as unobtainable as truth and these heroes don’t care if they die in the course of attaining it. Salvation would hark the Christians, peace would chant the Hindus. However, what about heroines or just heroes that are women. Do they exist out there as eternal godly mortal bodies, washed up to shore by the tides of time and the Fates? Men can be forlorn yet majestic, pathetic and pure; but women can they seem the same? As it is all to do with seemingness not actual being isn’t it? These stories are passed on to us the audience to interpret. You can’t place all the blame on Aesychylus or Osborne or the author who penned such characters can you? 

Shakespeare told that the trade of the players was to ‘hold as it were a mirror up to Nature.’ What else is happening on stage than a devised piece about our lives, the things we see and believe in everyday. Why is it that we interpret male heroes as heroes and female ones as a phenomenon, or dare I say it, a mystery.

Why is it that women can be witches men can be divine mortals? Why is it that when a man does something silly for love, like slaughter his own family, they say he was bewitched or possessed or spell-bound? Why is it that when women commit a crime they must repent or otherwise be condemned as evil? 

I want to see a play where the Jimmy is a Jane. The Jane of humanity, yes the modern world but Osborne wrote that in 1956, so what I mean is as modern as that.

I see Jane living life as soulfully and truly as she possibly can. She is committed to no one and she expects no commitment back. All she has to steady her is the cause that she believes is right, and that is if she does her bit (and everyone else ends up doing a bit more their bit) the world will be stiller. Less forceful, less amorous, less spicy and more loving. Like a placid sea. Or like open water when one gets far out enough to sea, far out in to the Pacific or the Indian Ocean; when the fish shoals will mingled with the plankton and the nothing particles and the liquid and the salt and everything will move and dissolve as one. When loud clatter is drowned out almost immediately as it is made, where no accidents are accidents and time and space are the same thing. 

The heroine will reach out to this ideal and grasp whispy bits of thin air and lace and petals that fall silently like Christmas snow. Men will fall for her, swoon, place bets, tear her apart and make her feel pain but nothing will compare to the eternal sorrow she endures knowing that the ideal is so close at hand but can never be touched. There will be two polar opposite men who will swivel when she swivels and a woman who belongs to her and loves her like a mother, sister and a whore. The world will be against her. Morals will not be kept by her. But she will be free from this mess, this tempting little mess.

Sunday Night Out

Only the odd misfits of society come out on a Sunday night out. Handsome dapper suckling boys who are darling to their heiresses’; Dominatrix girls in knee high leather strap in boots and tattooed breasts. The perfumed types, the all frills but no knickers types, the jaunty angled hat types. The looters and the drug abusers sit in waiting on a Sunday night, they don’t anticipate tomorrow that’s why they are odd. The Sunday night go outers must be those who don’t hold down a steady job that is the 9 to 5 weekly grind with 5 days on and 2 days off. They may be freelancers. But in any case they either don’t work alongside those who depend on their work on a 9 to 5 basis or they can’t care too much. No career path to speak of. How hard is that? To not have to disappoint anyone but yourself. Who loses out on the wasting of your own time apart from you. I miss the fighting spirit, we all do, of course we do because without it life is dull. A dull thud from the bed to the floor when you wake up dead.

Tumblr

I have made rimimonster.tumblr.com

The Fear Appendix

Stage direction: Enter in to an empty home. This is an amplified absurd dialogue between a Person and a Thing.

T: Why are you so worried little hen? What’s the matter.

P: The worry is here because I’ve got the fear from not writing enough. I took a hiatus. I hitched a ride to finish this play.

T: And did you finish?

P: Yay.

T: Hurrah!

P: True… but what to do with this fear? I can’t seem to get back in the habit. The swing of things. It’s because of the job.

T: No it isn’t.

P: You're right it isn’t.

[contemplative pause]

T: Why do you look so worried?

P: Because the bin is about to explode / and I don’t have the tin of tomatoes to make the sauce I got the aubergine for / and the lid of my lunch box has broken and / and I need to hand wash two woollen jumpers / and

T: Take a deep breath. 1, 2, 3. What are you really worried about?

P: Putting things off. The world being too much.

T: The world is not too much. Regain slowly some perspective and let’s see where you’re left. Where are you left?

[deep intakes of breath]

[sorrow]

T: Have you tried thinking of other people? Or are you filling up your thoughts with little craplings and not paying attention to what’s really going on?

P: And what’s that?

T: Everything is in the moment so you’ve got nothing to lose. The more time you sit there worrying / the more time you’ll be sat there worrying / and then all you’ll be is sitting and worrying. Do something! Make something with your hands. Have a conversation. Think outside of yourself.

P: But I’m too worried.

T: Your paralysis of anxiety is to do with the world and all the things that can’t be set right in it. Am I right? But you have to approach things one by one and soon the knot in the noose will unravel.

P: Then all the dead bodies will fall to the floor!?

T: Yes or maybe you could see it as the measured fixing of relativity.

P: What?

T: To be free.

P: To be pronounced dead?

T: You’re unusually preoccupied with death today.

[anguished look]

P: It is because I’m being melodramatic.

T: You need to have a bite to eat, take a bath, sing some songs and then get on with the writing.

P: What if they take the house away?

T: Who are they?

P: People. I don’t know. Bad people.

T: Shut up. Stop procrastinating. Get up. Wash yourself. Do something worthy with your time. Stop hassling me by being in the same room. Tidy this room! Empty the bin. Leave the house and walk 3 minutes to get the tin of tomatoes. Live like a functioning human being.

P: Yes. You're right. Thank you [insert name of object here e.g. box of tissues] I will. I will rise to the occasion.

[flourish]

[fanfare]