henrybrook.com

bar two panels where the geometry needs to be fixed. The room takes its shape. Freud’s Uncanny turned up today, I’ll fix my armchair on the floating screed, garden-stare and roll the pages.

all’s forgiven. A flurry backlit by the morning sun. A day standing open to lay stores in and write.

if you spend your whole life dreaming of making it, and when you do it leaves you more puzzled than ever? Things you long for take their own form and shape when real.

at the mouth of the alleyway, entranced by the streetlight upglow into the yellow leaf undercrown, bewitched by a roadwork stop/go light in the pounding rain. The pasteboard masks and backdrops pass behind the moving faces and chit-chat encounters of my everyday. If it’s worthless why am I drawn to hop off and snap it? I might be moth to candle and cat to string? But always that hidden sense that something’s coming, that you could find it around the next corner and let it change a living part of you.

of Boz about the town, street props, a bit of fog and whiskered cheeks. He’s further back than Holmes, before science and steel blew away all the cobwebs. But he’s lurking yet in our modern poverty.

out on the grey roads, fields only a few miles from town. It feels good to pick up speed, I might even break orbit from the ceaseless radio patter of the can’t stay/can’t leave commentariat, with their touted best outcomes of isolation oblivion or a return to what half the nation rejected. I’m not certain there’s any going back after 18 months of torment. We’ve chained the past and mastered the present, but that only serves to make the unshackled future more terrifying.

my Yucateco on scrambled eggs, Fred Wesley, on loud, black coffee with a cinnamon stick and a drop of vanilla, a bagel and honey for second breakfast, lines of text running away wild pony style across the page, sorry, Hank.

part hidden under the bridge, puffing on a roll-up. He doesn’t mind me nosing around, long as I don’t spook the fish. I’ve come to see how they size the water.

that’s living, that’s what agency is. We grow and we’re alive and when you kick out the space falls away to nothing again. And most of us want more space to occupy so we grub around and hustle and fight for that land. That’s the business of living. I’m getting obsessed with measuring things, I walk around with my pockets full of tapes, calipers, scales and gauges. As though knowing the size of things is all that matters. The space they fill.

came in hard no warning, was on us in a biting swirl, a war party of shrieking grit. We still had the windscreen down and the canopy rolled up in the back, had to brake and fall out with hands cupped over our mouths and eyes. The dirt got in, burning anywhere it touched. I stumbled along the doors, got the canopy untied, had to keep my eyes pinched shut, dragged it over the seats. I got one side up and began working the clips around the jeep, scraped my knees open on the steel floor as I clambered in. Thomson had the screen up and I hooked the clamps over the glass, pushed the rods open to form the roof. And then we were both inside the flapping, screaming tent, running our fingers around the canvas to lock it in place, stuffing clothes and paper into any gap. When it was done we sat back in the gloom and listened to the storm. It blew so hard I thought the glass would etch white, a desert frost.