12/07/2009

Can't you see my house is falling down?
The cracks in the corner that grew into a chasm?
I filled it with glass but the storm pounds the panes.
It scares me.
It scares me to see the people walk by,
Just their feet tapping a tattoo on the wet pavement
In the dark.

11/07/2009

The myth of the bird-men begins with a death.

He lay there, lovely even in his final sleep, his lashes dark against pale cheeks. His curls trailed over the pillow, the sweet tendrils of chestnut hair making him seem already an angel. The mourners filled the room. He had been much-loved - more than he knew, for he had had no idea of what he was. The last of the innocents.

Meanwhile, far from the innocent's deathbed, another man wandered out in the world. He was desolate. Nothing held any colour or joy for him anymore. He kicked at a can, watched it skitter into a corner, then walked on with his hands in his pockets, crying. He had loved that boy. He had loved him more than life but never once told him. Now it was too late. He had fled when the boy fell out of the sky. Nothing left for him there but to torture himself by looking at his friend's face.

The man was so blind with sorrow that he didn't notice a great bird, vast as an airship, flying overhead. The bird's grim claws caught at his back, tangling into his clothes and scoring long red lines down his skin. It soared with him. His glasses slipped and fell from his face, God knows where. He breathed in the high, thin, rushing air and cried, 'Soon I'll be with you - '

- But he was not to die that day. Dropped, yes, an endless fall that should have killed him, but Fate had other ideas. He landed in a gorse bush that clawed and cut. Alive.

On his deathbed the innocent gasped and coughed, sat up and looked at the whispering mourners. He must have been dreaming, for they were beasts and half-beasts, angels, monsters and hazy ghosts. They stared at him, awed. He didn't want them. He called the name of his friend.

You may have been wondering what authority I have to tell you all this. Well, I do have a little. It was I, you see, who was enlisted to find the friend that the innocent had called for in his hour of resurrection. I found him standing on the pavement, looking dully at his feet as though trying to decide whether it was worthwhile to muster the effort to cross the road. I took his hand and he went with me, just as easy as that.

He saw the boy he had loved, alive and well among the otherworldly mourners. The boy saw him. I was forgotten, of course. They embraced and wept and wouldn't let go. 'I love you,' was whispered, and they left hand in hand.

The rest is all story, but I've heard tell that the instant the sun fell on them they turned, as though they had always been so, into birds. They flew away together into the sun, and nobody ever saw them again.

And if they haven't landed, they're flying still.

10/07/2009

You take my hand - want to take me

Away from all this.

A holiday in the cool, clear night.

One night of life.

One night of innocence.

Please, just one, you whisper.

And I'm caught on the tail of your comet,

Running, flying,

Past the river, the waterwheel,

The damn fairground that has haunted me

(Not for tonight, forget it, forget it)

'Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,'

Then stop.

Panting.

Holding hands.

The wood is beyond us, just beyond.

The other dreamers laugh and sing,

Each with their dream companion.

The bonfire crackles and glows.

We smell of smoke, of rain and leaves and of the night,

You and I.

Childlike in half-sleep I think,

If you were real, we would be friends like this.

(From the sublime to the ridiculous...)

One dwarf says, 'I say, I say, I say. When's Snow White not Snow White?'

The other dwarf says, 'I don't know. When is Snow White not Snow White?'

The first dwarf says, 'After we're through with her.'

I saw it on the news. Heard it whispered on the lips of the wounded and the coughing and the beggars that thronged at the hospital. EPIDEMIC, they said. First your values disintegrate, then your mind. Your body follows. Your paint starts to peel away and underneath you'll find you're all Dorian Gray. I fled the hospital and the plantlike, creeping fingers of the infected and the too-down-to-care that clawed at my clothes.

In the green-tinted streets, people lolled, in embraces, in fights, lazily dangerous. More parasite than predator. They looked wrong.

I felt wrong.

Drunk with something.

Perhaps this is the beginning.

I lurched into a house whose doors swung wide on their hinges. Two green-faced sisters lay abed in the stinking slough of rubbish strewing the floor. They beckoned me with stubby fingers and toothless smiles. Then their mother came by with a black sack for the rubbish.

I went in there instead.

You've had her a long time.

Longer than me.

I can't say I admire her mind.

But you say she's just an escape, anyway.

Her silence, perhaps,

Is half her charm.

It's the one thing she can do that I can't

(Except for bending her knees backwards,

But why would I want to do that?

- Oh. I see.)

You know what?

If you love her, I love her.

Let's have her round for tea

And perhaps come to some arrangement,

You, she, and me.

09/07/2009

The darkness tilts,
Turns and rolls
Drunkenly in overheated haze,
Caught in a box-room -
A lizard lolling
And I, on the Remington,
Wordlessly tapping.


He sits easy,
Unaware, alone,
Eating his lunch in the comfortable wilderness.
How can he know
That the painting on the wall
Is a secret window
And that I, as I fall past it,
Seasick and drowning,
Am slowly mapping him in mistyped prose?


It's better that no one knows.

When you wake and the same heat-haze rolls over that scorched the edges of your dream, you'd think you'd know you were still dreaming.

When you wake in a bed you have never slept in, a fake bed, the wrong bed, all out of proportion and drowning the room in a patchy eiderdown, you'd think you'd know.


When you can't breathe and your stumbling steps lead you somehow instantly from the patchwork bedroom to a kitchen plucked from your childhood, you'd think you'd realise and wake.

And yet, for all your bluster, you never managed lucidity, did you? Slave to your mind for a few more moments, you look down at your chest. Ribcage all twisted. Stupid, stupid, slept wrong in the night, slept on your front and now look at you, gone all wrong, hurt the baby inside you and all. Your. Fault.

Wake. Cry. Glass of water. Comfort the baby who knows nothing but floats, dreamless and unmade, in serene silence.

I remember it like it was only last night, oh my brothers, oh my sisters. The caravan had stopped and we all got off and blinked at the sun and rain and rainbows. The mud was good and solid and real under our feet. And it felt like the gods were healing us, though what needed healing was long forgotten. Then we stood and talked, all of us refugees come home, among the tents, in the late August sunlight. I was the oldest man among them, old as old, but with the sun on my bones and the mist of cool rain on my face, I felt like a child again. A little black boy spoke - said something so simple and so profound that I cried.





The words got lost. They ran like hourglass sand through my fingers. But the feeling remained.

Welcome to Chrissy Derbyshire's Dreamtime

Welcome to the Dreamtime.

My name is Chrissy Derbyshire, and I am a writer. Perhaps you've never heard of me. Perhaps you came across this blog because you enjoyed my first book, Mysteries. Either way, I hope you'll stay for coffee, conversation and a little light enchantment.

Primarily, this blog is intended to be a series of short creative pieces, poetry or prose (or...other?) depending on the subject, based upon whatever I have dreamt about the night before. Dreams are doorways into weird lands that we cannot control. As such, I have no idea what challenges this project will bring. I guess that it will be by turns beautiful, frightening, inane and bizarre, as dreams are. But I invite you to follow.

As well as daily(-ish) creative input, this blog will feature any news of my continuing career as a writer.

Thank you for your time,

Chrissy