Ben Welsher | Writings

Belgo Centraal, 50 Earlham Street London 10/09/2016 The noise rattled, reverberated through my cranium. It pressed the infinite planes of its fingers onto...not my skull that was bypassed but onto my conscious thoughts. It compressed the airy spaces of my meditation and chased my reason down collapsing synaptic corridors. A single question is a cattle prod to my mind and they were as a swarm of bees, which beer out of a thousand? Are you having a starter? Wanna share? Which moules out of.... since when did choices go beyond white wine sauce? And all in what is essentially a dungeon. 3/5

It gasps me, what is that sound? Its not a thud, once a thud, now a hollow resound, a drum beat for nothing. The surpringly vast chamber of my heart reverberates with echoes of feelings disavowed yet near fresh as the day they were born. Into which wind were they thrown? The wind of my time? Her time? The time bearing us all...boats beating ceaselessly? Too often it seems to me in the hopeless squalor of my perpetually drunken mind, the relentless selfishness of my abashed need, that I have lost. It seems to me the simplest sadness, not hateful sadness, not vengeful, no fuel for a fire to outburn the burning desire to be loved. Only absence describes the cavity in my heart and the caving through my soul. But the absense of word and meaning desolates me, I pick through the bleached landscape of dessicated rock and I'm in another world. But I know this place, I spent some time here, summers and winters, half a lifetime, spring and autumn if you seek completeness, dry but the pattern

Love draws us inexorably towards it. Towards the flames of creation, the fire of destruction. We should dance by its light ... not be sweated by its heat. For it is the twinkling star in the blackest of nights, the glint in a diamond's heart. It whispers to us and screams at us. It is the echo in the vast cavern of time, a teardrop on the face of eternity. It is 1000 ships, 205 miles, 12 years , utterly unquantifiable. All we are we give to its pursuit, our heart speeds then slows - every thump a punch. Love gilds us, girds us and wraps us in its beauty. It wracks us and scars us, it is a needle through gossamer. Frivolous and vital it is corrosive in its absence. We arm another with the means to destroy us and everyday must pray they do not. You too, never be casual with your love or neglectful with your affection, you carry another's hopes and fears . Love is no mean feat. It is not one thing, sometimes the big bang, sometimes slow evolution, never tidy. It is