birth

All words are dust. You are dust. I am dust. You see – it’s simple really, a pile of particles, nothingness. So I thought about you and these words came alive. They were birthed, some easily, naturally, some with intense pain. Some were welcomed, gladly, parties were held in their honour. Others were begrudged, I tried, guilty, to erase them, but their life was too strong and they fought their way onto the page of my book. Powerful little beggars. Once there they wouldn’t give me a damned break. They screamed at me through the green and yellow cover with the Orla Kiely print. Some were polite about it (especially the ones conceived in Café Nero on Ken High St). Others swore – filthy, abhorrent combinations of innocent letters grating through my skull. I had no choice, no option remained but to listen and ask them what to do. You see, I brought them into this book, their world, and now they were banging on about literary rights and treaties and freedom of expression and air space… I couldn’t ignore them, the cacophony was deafening, so eventually I resisted, and one by one, clause by clause, sentence by sentence, I let them out. The precious ones I allowed to be typed, finger by finger onto the screen, where white characters reverse out of black, titles in bold lime green. They are happy now, you see. Their destinies fulfilled. I’m sorry though. Had I know when I began writing about you that the words would fight their way out of the book onto the screen of public glare, I would have warned you… been more careful. But as I always say, such is life and life’s too short to invest in obscure notebooks with shiny covers.