That place

I was just doing a bit of scribbling, long time since, and I wondered that what I’m doing is poetry, because I’m making a fictional world out of fact. I’m not ‘making things up’. I’m not into fabrication, fake worlds, dreamy realities, alternative outcomes, I’m into here now me, I’m doing this and it is affecting me, now, here, and I’m not making things up, and this is where the passion and ache lies, and I want you to see it the way I don't even know yet.

It comes from somewhere I can't even fathom. It lies in the same place that she riffed from, with a jazz backing, making my sore itchy-ill hands clap like they had no shame, shouting from the back with praise that I wanted to be heard but kind of not too as she was a little fearful. I listened to her lyrical virtuosity, ploughing at speed through personal and historical reference with an honest delicacy and burning yearning. She's digging to that unknown that I love, her own, and it chimes and calls out to mine.

Within minutes of this gig, if you can call it that, I wasn't so ill anymore. I had laughs and smiles. It glowed, what’s missing when I'm ill? Humour, rhythm, base emotions that makes an animal a human, things that attach the body and the mind and hold the soul up. These unknown crucialities that keep us sane, that when we stifle them, think we can command them, stop listening to the Sage or whatever, double-back and poison us.

When she had said about the brain being a a cool function, when Ruby Wax was talking about neuroscience, I made the mistake of thinking that understanding the functionality made it comprehensible. Er, no. It doesn't work this way. You'll never know the root of everything, the where what why is this happening, so just get on with discovering the unknown. It is timely to reflect on what you know to be right for you, and what is on offer. It's not about risks, but like an explorer setting off with a map, plans and knowledge. Go.