SPACES

Guardians 

 

I stand at a door in my childhood bedroom. It is opposite a mirror. Why is it so much easier to cry at dawn? Words and letters and lyrics are around me. Rubies fall from my hips. Painkillers send me a dawn chorus. Linear time is a trick of the light. The dragons are guarding a treasure not worth stealing. 

 

Some space inside your head is holy, this room is your only safety. Relic room. What would you put there? I venture into the sediment of myself and I find glimmering quartz and blinding opal and powerful carnelian. Mountains and turrets, basements and labyrinths. 

 

I woke up to a call from a property company. The waiting list is up, an abandoned school has been cleared and ready to be moved into. Drawn towards number 21. Tessellations of potential tremble into trepidations of the spheres. I go back to sleep. The grace of the void rocked me into a deep slumber. It was the shape of my father. I am bone, I am blood, I am bile. Flesh, metamorphosis, chrysalis. Overlapping in strange ways to everything which has ever existed. 

 

I move in. There are many doors. Lost in a labyrinth. I follow the signs. “Warning: if a fault occurs this machine could be dangerous. Isolate immediately; report at once. Do not attempt to repair”. The bed is already built and there’s… a hatch above my head, and another door in my room that will not open. Ants crawl out of the bottom of the frame. 

 

The structure is built on penrose steps. Endless. I'm always heading up. Ever since that time I went to the hospital to visit a lost boy who I thought had died. He was my father. I move in time but time does not move in me. 

 

In the girls and boys’ playground, a shelter. A small bandstand. Lavender grows on the right flowerbed. Wisterias explode from the chicken coop, crawling out of the fence. Washing hangs on the line. School uniforms and bedsheets. A circle of charcoal burnt into the hopscotch. 

 

On the bottom floor, the canteen is full of lightbulbs. A pantry of shy kisses. Two broken washing machines. We move up and…there is a haunting in the middle floor. A silhouette just outside the gym where my studio is. A figure with no face creeping around the corner. The floor is lava. Upon my surrender the tocsin fractured. All the clocks broke and stayed at midnight. “This too shall pass” etched on my fight and flight. The temperature dropped. The heating is turned on, which makes it groan. The howling tells me to be careful. There is malevolence running through the currents and it cannot be stopped nor saved.

 

Splinters from this school are in my hands, from breaking open doors. We have become part of each other. The intimacy… I desire? Exclusions and timetables, detentions and smells of home. Search the colossal feeling of being human with me; please don’t make me do it alone. 

 

Amongst the alarms I move on higher, the top floor feels lighter. I met the golden ghost and the blue being, they sat around a table, I made them dinner. The spirits gathered a council and gave me a bunch of bluebelles. They told me of campfires and arsonists, shooting stars skimming the moon and parachutes. The Good Year Blimp. I wonder how the sun experiences time.

 

I knock at the door of the pottery class, as I left early before. I got out through the floorboards last time but I want to go back. I want to know why pottery brought so much to the table. I knock more. Only when I actually give up, and try a door which is open - not when I pretend to turn my back - does the door unlock. Inside a person is dressed in pantaloons with two faces and sings "London's Burning”. It turns out he was no potter or clown, but a carpenter who could build excellent, ornate doorframes. When I'm with a lover… or shape clay in my hands, I'm holding terrain. Mountains and valleys, caverns and plains.

 

There is a hatch above my room and we once all climbed through. A bird swept down and landed on the belltower after we said hello. From these icy heights we reach for starry delights and hold our moonlight goblets to the sky. I am the carver of the rooms of peace. I am a divine witness in the here and now. I am found new in the moment and yet my vessel is patterned on ideas as old as time. Bringing preconceived ideas of how the moment will play out is an act of infidelity. I have already explored the cave, the mountains, temples and towers and now I want to go to the moon.

 

Jump. 

 

I plummet from this roof covered in snow and land in an allotment, in a greenhouse, and there is growth. I am feeding through my feet as spirals of sugar run upwards and spirals of warmth meet me on my horizon, downwards, and I move and fruit and bloom and; I’m picked! And I move into soup and garnish and blend even more until I blend with another being, and my spirit runs through their veins and then I am everything; but nothing, all awaited for, by The Great Mother, at the school gate. The keeper of my pregnancy, and the little ones that were all within me, have come to greet me to take me home. I’m a girl in a purple dress adorned with little pink roses. Everyone looks so pleased to see me. My dad says that if you’re ever lost in the woods, to go through a split in a tree, a mirror, and it will send you home. We walk to the willow by the lake and we all jump. Tomato soup in our bellies, completely consumed in the moment. 

 

The bell rings at the start of term for the purgatory playground. 

 

It’s a coronation and graduation. 

 

I am rooted and crowned.