The following are extracts from blogs that I have encountered. Dear God, this is why I was worried about the loneliness of the long - distance blogger. It really is the worst kind of sixth-form poetry, a strong example of a muddle as opposed to a mystery, with a well thumbed thesaurus by the deskside. Shoot me if I should display such symptoms of rabid poeticising. Got to be a joke.
******************************************
Extract 1: Of Venice
They say there is a place between Heaven and Earth.
I have seen none of it.
I sit by the water; I see the laughter from below. God smiles upon us, drawing us closer to him, while we seek the depths of our soul, ever-steeped into tangents, our salvation bending, as if we were a branch, and the beast of relativism with his relentless fangs and his labyrinthine smile, crushes us, snapping our backs, as if we were only lacquer to be coated to his divine fur.
However, this place brings patience and consequence. In the far heavens, a rain cloud gathers and drops herself on a corner of the sea. The boatmen, like all boatmen, talk amongst themselves, in the way only boatmen can. There is a little breeze, a jovial pint of sea salt with a touch of a mandolin. Longs shadows pontificate on their existence, rising and falling with the coming dusk.
Extract 2: Of China
The streets are quiet, hushed. Like a patter of rain, the sounds of rolling wheels and a light breeze through the trees. The clack-clack of keyboards, the random sick cough, and the squeal of an old bus coming to a stop, the doors rattling open, and the sound of a paint chip falling to the ground.
The memories pass - across the mind, a wave of nausia at first, and then a song. In the memories, the sky is clear like glass, the sun and clouds above the thin sheet separating reality from fiction - and an old man with a cane totters beside a community park. He is wearing a blue hat, and he turns up from the ground and stares hard into my face. He is a wrinkled man, with cheeks burned by the fires of history and eyes that have tasted the grime of the earth. In my memory, I smile at him - a folded smile, as if it were a toll I had to pay, and his mouth opens into teeth and a broad grin. As I walk past him, his figure blurs into mist, and when I turn back I can still feel his happiness, as if it were a spirit hovering while the body has disappeared.
I see bikes outside the window. Wagon-bikes, sport bikes, motor bikes, garbage bikes, speed bikes, dirt bikes, police bikes, silver and black and red, smudged by spots of dry mud; they lean against curbsides, old bricks, white tiled walls, and lightpoles. The people walk by, the mother with one small bag of groceries, the man carrying a white sack of grapes, the pair of girls holding hands, and the older woman across the street selling socks, shoe fillings, and toy trinkets. I forget the memory, reclaim it, but decide that more will come and release it.