We stood here drenched in history surrounded by our kin. Our feet so deep among the layers of time, our canopy a constellation. We were your lungs.

We were the perches where the blackbird sung, where gossamer sparkled on days of mist. Where you laid beneath our shelter and bathed in emerald light.

We felt you when you tried. When you gathered beneath us and touched our hearts. We wept with you, but man has no use for heart and soul.

Last night they came. The spoils of a one sided battle are all that remain. Yet buds still form on splintered limbs like a sign of hope amongst the chaos.

If we could bleed would you still cut?

This time, this pause, estranged adrift. Floating on an ocean of inclement rhyme. I recall a feeling of drowning, tangled up in the footfall of progress and the insurgence of unnecessary.

They tell us that the time is ours, but are we just accumulations of till receipts and plastic wrap. Of all the things we needed more than life itself. We talk of satisfaction and await the approval of strangers, quick fix, short lived, but forever filling the void.

What will we leave behind that isn’t replaceable, a list of favourite things sold to us from the suitcases of dreams. Weightless souls and guiding lights, irretrievable quantities of everything we didn’t know and couldn’t find the time to understand.

I used to love social media. Before Twitter became the venomous echo chamber, the verified monsters mouthpiece. Before the very system that funds it turned forward thinking into a humongous nodding dog, I apologise to the dogs for that, because in truth dogs are never as viscous as a petulant human let loose on a keyboard.

Having been amongst it for several years it’s easy to see its mechanics, how it ticks and how that tightly sprung mechanism will eventually explode / implode. And we are it’s driving force, the worker bees. ‘Hive-mind’ a phrase that could have been thought up to explain this very phenomenon.

It’s an addiction, but because we refuse to see how it affects rational thought it’ll be several decades before people will get to grips with the reality of that addiction.

That said, I miss being able to connect with certain people there, not everyone has an agenda and many continue to educate and inspire.

What I don’t miss is the vitriol, the one-upmanship, “look at me” mentality that’s taken over actual life. The celebrities who think that their opinions hold as much weight as their ridiculous earnings. Some are truly vile, and that’s the beauty of twitters lack of an edit button.

The evidence of how messed up Twitter is laid bare right in front of our eyes, but a quick refresh and the bad just disappears, except it doesn’t disappear does it.

It makes me angry just writing about it if I’m honest. The persecution I’ve witnessed is astounding. Idiots retweeting idiots without a care if what they’re agreeing with comes from fact or fiction, just as long as their target is hit. Outrage that runs the length of the news cycle isn’t outrage at all. Complaining about propaganda whilst peddling lies is the same beast.

“Where’s Jeremy Corbyn?” Well he’s definitely not marching beside a war criminal or someone who sanctioned the most vulnerable in our society is he. Moral compasses are useless when the rose tint takes on “a funny tinge” don’t you think……

To see beyond statistics is foresight at its best, the outcome skims the very surface of what is. We are locked in an invisible cage, cause and effect of limited desire to understand or care about what happens around us and why.

Disorder ripples through our existence like Chinese whispers in a crowded room. Gain first and claim afterthought your reasoning when catastrophe shows you in the starkest light. Neighbouring disasters remain our neighbours problem…..right?

We will continue to watch glaciers melt and species fade, because change needs movement and the chains of apathy remain steadfast. A donation will ease the guilt, the click of a link, the self redeemed. Gasp in horror then turn away.

What happens when we do nothing? What happens is now. We grip to notions that polls are anything more than a snippet, a graph. Our insular insistence that we are never at fault is our failure..

In the cove, rock pools reflect fast moving skies until the rising tide blankets their light. Moods are fleeting here, like a storyteller’s thoughts they fade with each chapter of the day. Slow streams of visitors pass gleeful eyes as low tide exposes golden sand and tiny explorers find joy in disappearing footprints at the waters edge.

Come sunset the peace returns, the downtrodden heather and clover shake off that weight. This feeling is a feeling shared throughout the seasons here. The day tripper’s scars remain, but with their departure freedom reigns again.

On warmer days this scene is replayed and the path to the cove fills with noise, chatter and baggage. They come, sunglasses so big like a swarm of multicoloured flies to stand and complain of no signals as another selfie is queued in a back catalogue of repetitive poses. The beauty is lost on them.

To know these waters is a blessing, I feel the strength of the tide at the edge of winter and awe washes over me…..

From the window on the landing a view unfolds, lichen splattered tables bearing scars of saltwater westerlies that prevail the shortest days here. The ocean murmurs in the distance…always.

February the blank canvas of months awaits the artistry of nature’s hand, the real genius of life is to exist with awareness of what’s beneath every landscape we walk upon. We are merely tenants, caretakers and all ownership diminishes like chalk cliffs. We strive to be kings and that’s our downfall.

The roses of a summer past still cling to withered stems, no winter gale quite strong enough to break their bond. To sever ties too early is never in their design, for the rot sets in when the ice finds the freshest cut.

In spring the buds will form, new life perpetually calling, these blooms will fill vases in every room. Winter chill will be replaced by heady blousy lilacs that cascade on a warm and gentle breeze. I will not flounder here, through restoration not replacement happiness reverberates.

Through all its incarnations the house remains unchanged, like a ship repainted dripping in repair, a life lived, scars less obvious, but intact.

The staircase in part reclaimed by nature still grand. On the walls faded outlines of portraits and family trees, layers of time shedding skin.

Stories endure here, echoed scribblings from the writer’s pen, captured and encased unhindered by the present. Tenacious are the dreams that walk these halls.

Veins of melancholia climb like lianas seeking strength firmly rooted in another time.

Light still fills this space. A coloured spectre filters through stained glass to dance upon these walls at sunset before it sinks beneath the land. For now the house belongs to moonlight.

In amongst the oldest shadows of this house, on pages strewn in the ebb tide of winter the storytellers memories lie. Skeletal lines await a passing glance that they may live again.

As March approaches, thin splintered sunlight finds a pathway through the shuttered windows. Dust rises and falls, silently, not quite a whisper in this muted damp air, but spring will bring life as it will bring hope and desire.

Faded damask worn from life, like a thread erased and replaced with stories. How a thumb caressed the smooth silk pattern that meanders there still, maybe in shadows creation lingers here.

Bookshelves of a dreamer scattered spaces still to fill, trinkets of stone and bone, of feathers and seeds. Portals to an existence yet to be heard. Can a room dismissed to history narrate without words. Is death the final page of everyone.

Moonlight changes everything and lends its sparkle to the eyes, shadows lengthen and fall beyond these walls, silently they evaporate boundaries, they become pathways through the dark to the dreamer now.

The land is at rest within shallow breaths of the waters edge, ripples unfurl like the deepest sigh of a weary traveller who knows not how he came here, but is thankful for the pause in this tempestuous life.

Water takes on its darkest hue, blackest liquid to stain the night with mystery. The interloper returns through this ink filled inlet, to explore, to be enthralled.

Autumn, when the blankets of green have left, when the perfumed blooms have faded to stained parchment that hang in stasis until the blade once again stems their slow demise.

It’s now that the air we breathe is visible and all landscapes bear their scars. The long sleep awaits yet the world becomes a noisy reminder of how we shelter in the shade of seasons.

How different life feels when early birdsong clings to sunrise. When the skittish wings of the butterfly capture but a moment of a life more fleeting than a change of heart in a diary.

Now the chimneys bring a leaden hue that will blend with bonfires and petrol fumes. The chop and burn retrospective of mistakes we continue to deny as we huddle in this time..for now..

There beneath the flyway memories lay like a breath on the water in autumn air, shimmering into the fade.

Do you find that certain people have the ability to write something that not only captures your heart, but places a map inside your mind too. A map that if cast aside feels like a betrayal to the trust in which it was given.

If you could fill sails with their words all inlets would flow to oceans, faultlessly unhindered like the pages that drew lines towards the headlands.

Does the fallen petal mean the death of a flower or is it just a page finished and freed. That its colour fades is life at speed, a window of opportunity grasped like a pen in the dreamers hand.

Writer, architect, conjurer. I walk within your moods, I see through different windows, but I am drawn by your hand