Earlier this year, during my Sabbatical, and between much coffee supped in Cardiff Bay, I penned a few things including several thousand words worth of short stories. They weren't particularly good but they did allow me to spill random words and images onto paper (well, onto the screen of my laptop, actually). Not knowing what to do with the stories I have finally succumbed to giving them a home on the internet. There are so many inane, banal and random words on here already I thought a few more wouldn't really make much difference!
The words probably won't mean much to many, if any, but they are there all the same. I think, in some way, they allowed me to spill some form of spirituality out (or, rather, to express one). I'm not certain what they mean or what they say or how they express anything that seems to lie inside my unconscious, semi-conscious, sub-conscious, small-brained mind but there they are. The stories seemed to take on a life of themselves and so whilst taking responsibility for everything contained within them, I also absolve myself of anything and everything they continue to say. They are their own beings with their own life and their own dimension and when I re-read them I really don't know where they came from.
If you read them please be kind to them. They are quite vulnerable beings really! They came to life between coffee cups ("I have measured out my life in coffee spoons"), written in the early morning or late at night, and so they emerged, thin eyed and blinking in the half light, not sure who they were or why there were there in the first place.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go through certain half deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh do not ask 'What is is it?'
Let us go and make a visit.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Colour of Words
