QUIET, TOO QUIET

Flickr photo share South Coast NSW Looking Towards Werri Beach

There's an election on but you would nver know it; things have gone so quiet. There is no passion, it's quiet, too quiet. A phrase often used by an old party animal in Islington, London, in the days when Richard was still alive, in the days when the world was full of promise and our lives were only half lived. These times, now, were different in the dark, so cold, so lacking in life, that when sequences came by there could be no other; and the haunting he had received, gone now, as things wasted away into oblivion and there would be no hope. Crushed into a meadow. Fragments of films everywhere. And then nothng, nothing at all.

These will always be the times we wished for; the spaces in between. As if there could be no calm anywhere else. But the excitement was gone. There wasn't anything worth saying. The two party leaders had their say, back and forth, and the Weekend papers declared Kevin Rudd to be campaigning poorly; and falling behind. We were here or we were there, flickered past a hundred things. Taken time, taken a life. While they continued to thrive in their subterranean world, heart broken. Buffalo, buffalo. The spaces in between. If he could but muster, if he could but die. There were too many gaps. He rolled over, belly to the sun.

It was the quietness in between that was the most terrifying, the places when there weren't avalanches of thought, when seedy men in seedy bars made no advances, when the gaps in communication had eaten everything alive, and all that could be done, their wastage, was in another place. He was staunch. He was saddened by what had happened. He was angry at himself and others; flickering, because there was no point. An insane gesture. A triumph of love. A triumph of stupidity more like. Friutless, pointless; he still heard the murmurs, "perhaps he's not as well connected as we thought", and then he shrugged. He had spent too long playing to the tune of invisible taunters. If he couldn't see his way clear, it was a momentary thing. Others would take their place. Demons would play. Circuses would perform. 

And an ancient Christ, an invisible amalgam, would curl and dance. And more would be revealed. And lightning quake. And the fact that there were gaps in the fabric of things would come to seem unimportant, and in a thousand ways, in a thousand days, in all these brightly coloured places, there would come some kind of denouement, some passing of the guard, of one kind into another, of one fleeting pass on a football field into another life. No longer hunted, he no longer wanted to settle. He just wanted a base and a place, and that was it. No time like the present. No place he wanted to face. It was quiet, too quiet; and he remembered the sunny, mischievous face of the one who used to say it.

And they laughed. Quiet, too quiet.