167 pages, 68 colour photographs, Price $25 plus postage
Enquire at: bluepolesbooks@gmail.com
Poetry, prose, verbatim quotes, music and my photographs all contribute to this daily ‘diary’ tuning in to life pulsing around me.
Brief extracts
Day 1
They offer me blue trousers. I keep my
shorts on, have to pull them down.
Remember, keep absolutely still.’ I am a
fidget but adept at lying dead still when it’s
a matter of life or death. Arms across my
chest like a good boy scout at midnight,
mind enjoys analgesia on the shiny metal
slab some call the ‘treatment couch’. My
heart-engine throbs ready for a quick
getaway.
Day 2
Sooty Oystercatchers track the seashore, rock
is shredding waves and spitting sea-shrapnel.
The flamboyant tide is foaming, gaining ground,
washing into rockpools, slapping Neptune’s Necklace.
I catch them surfing a translucent glass vitrine, abruptly
splintered by spindrift. The lens lags, first catching
a viridescent wave and then the pod of offshore
Bottlenose Dolphins idling north, playtime ended.
Day 3
I am a fidget, but adept at lying dead still
when it’s a matter of life or death. Mind
enjoys analgesia, immobile but moving,
conscious my diaphragm is expanding
and collapsing and heart beating. Blood
is skating through my arteries, my nerves
whine waves of electrical depolarisation.
At the molecular level, my cells are
firing hundreds of thousands of chemical
messages each second. This is living
at its most elemental.
