Live through this
Live through thisThis is my confessional
John HegleyI have to write it to have lived it, sometimes.Wandering the streets with a wild look in my eyes. Singing, clinging to Idlewild, refusing the death their words imply. I remember the day I listened to ‘Actually It’s Darkness’ a hundred times and wonder if they knew. Comfort comes. In October I thought it could be different, but in so many ways I simply cannot leave.I won’t walk on the wicket, stepping reverently where the boundary rope should be. A rotting wooden bench cracks under my weight. The rusted roller hasn’t touched it season in, season out.I used to cry in cemeteries until Holywell provided the only peace I could find. I can’t stop, drawn by the giddy throb of amateurs’ over-enthusiastic vibrato, the halo of lights, the voices raised in hope. Immersed in words, sobered by a mourning couple’s black. Feeding on grief, I let my hands – pen in left, notebook in right – drop to my side. She smiles, but I can’t meet her eyes. (Weeping over Tynan’s grave, I read Sidney aloud, every lump in the ground a knee beneath my feet.) Instead, cock-eyed crosses like graves on a moor. John Kilbride, Lesley Anne Downey, Edward Evans. O hush, little children. Your last words rotting in a prison cell.***Usquequo, Domine? How long? O my parents’ parents, you bled Catholicism into me. Ave Maria, gracia plena; dominus tecum, benedicta tu. We sang it twice, when we were six, and the words I don’t understand have never left my mind.This is my confessional. Life imitates art, with a helpless, bitter laugh. I have to write it to have lived it, sometimes. Maybe he was right. I can’t be sous rature in human form.Will won’t marry, and I rotted in pensioner-riddled pubs while he insisted her poems were trite. Voluntary contractualism sealed in chianti that darkens like blood. Man hands on misery to man. You can see the lies dripping from mouth to mouth.***I love life, always have; it’s only humanity dragging me down. Wings of wax where I would soar on gold.I leave when I’ve lived (the collector, her dark materials); unforgivably, and for the first time. I’ve crossed a line. Inadequate, a writer, or both?
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004