We Have Always Lived With the Castle
From Christmas Eve till Boxing Day the castle looks on in this way, and I cannot help but feel I am inside a poem. Like everything we live through has some emblematic subtext, a feeling no doubt heightened by my background; visiting this country, and this coastline in particular, does feel like an overdue correction. A way of saying to the people in my line, total strangers to whom I owe my life, here I am against all odds, back in a place, or near a place, you once called home. Which is to say, my thoughts about the castle were never going to be neutral.
On Holding the Flux
Having missed the welcome sunny spell of early April, my body was bamboozled by the cold. As I walked through the well-loved but all-too-familiar postcode of BS5, waving to the boozehounds skinning up outside the bookies, smiling at the DnB blaring from a hatchback, I felt the sensory markers of Ghana recede like a dream into the morning, growing steadily harder to distinguish beneath an overcoat of Same Old.
On the Company of Creatures
What the hell is it like to be a moth-eating frog? Or to grow a mango from your boughs? Or to spin a web from your body? Or be the thing that’s spun? Considering all the different sensory experiences happening in tandem is as humbling as it is incomprehensible, and also reassuring: attention renders loneliness an illusion ― everything belongs.