Quartz
Say you take a piece of quartz found on a building site on the side of a road and you put it on a sheet of paper on the windowsill on a sunny morning during the Holidays. Not yours, theirs. Say There’s Nothing to Do. They say that not you. Say it’s warm because of the sun yet cold in spite of it. Say your own soul is dark like the coal in the hod. Or like the soot at the foot of the coal bunker the soul no one sees but the disappointed shovel. Okay say the coal man knows but he never dwells he has raised his status where you retained yours. Say you take the magnifying glass and look through it at the quartz and say you see it shine and say it blinds the soul that bothers you pulls at your hem. Say it is a spotlight onto your good side. Say it warms your cockles and mussels and makes you put them in a barrow. Wheel them like babes by the light-filled river and sing them away. Say you’re a this, say you’re a that. Say the light dazzles distracts you from your own complications. Shines or blinds the self out of itself like cauterising a wound. Say cauterize. Say sear. Say Hot. Iron. Pleasing for it do be old-fashioned. Today a blood blister. Tomorrow I eat from your spoon. What next, if we already share spit and injury? Say Blame. Say Hope. Say it in the cold dark of day so that your breath crystalises and I can pluck it and wear it as a Brooch. Say it: No one wears Brooches anymore.
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