Prose

Fourteen

Other, Prose

So I’m working on a kind of collection at the moment. I’ll start leaking bits on here so we have content again, mostly poetry but I’m slowly trying to ease back into a little prose, a few dialogue stories. Actually, how do you feel about dialogue stories? Literally stories composed entirely of dialogue. Impossible? Impossibly boring? Very sensible?

I did one as a creative writing exercise a while back and I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s a lot like poetry – carefully selecting words to create the context, the feeling, the implications you need your reader to understand, if vaguely. I admit though, I prefer to have my stories mostly as opposed to entirely composed of dialogue. It’s based on screenwriting I guess – you still need a few directions, setting descriptions.

Anyway, here’s some prose for you; from a few years back now, but I like it.

Boxes

Dave stands alone in the murky attic, staring at the splitting rays of sunlight blasting through the single window. In the midday heat, he’s somewhere else. There’s a persistent and noisy creaking of wood, then Steve’s head bobs up through the access trap.
“Carpenter” he says.
Dave doesn’t move.
“David Carpenter” comes Steve, dragging himself up through the trap.
Dave turns.
“Why is it so damn hot in here?” he pauses “Why is it so damn dark?”
“I don’t know, Carpenter. Maybe it has something to do with the sun being in the sky.”
Dave looks at him, doesn’t reply.
“Well seeing as you’re not doing anything useful, help me lug some of these boxes downstairs.”
Dave thinks.
“Why is it so damn dark, Holden?”
“I don’t know, David.”
He picks up an average sized box.
“C’mon.”
Dave stares at the boxes.
“It’s cooler downstairs, Carpenter.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Dave drops down and starts examining one of the boxes. Steve looks, raises an eyebrow, and starts to walk downstairs. He struggles.
“Where’s my red box?”
“What was that, David?” Steve’s still struggling on the small steps.
“Where’s my red box.”
“Probably in the corner somewhere.” Steve jerks down through the trap.
Dave trains his eyes on the different box-filled corners of the room, squinting occasionally in attempt to pierce through the grey mass of paraphernalia and make out a streak of red. Eventually, he picks a corner and starts digging. He’s doing this until creaks herald the return of Steve. Steve Holden’s now wearing a pair of heavy-duty gloves and looks at Dave in the corner. “What are you doing, David?”
He’s answered with the ruffle of cardboard and paper. Picks up another box.
“Stop acting stupid Carpenter. Help me out here.”
“Don’t call me that.”
The sound of cutlery clashing against cutlery.
“Carpenter!”
Dave stops.
“Fuck you Holden. Where’s my box?”
“Help me clear out this place and you’ll find it, doofus.”
There’s silence. Dave is sitting on the floor, covered in a thin film of grey. Steve struggles and jerks down the stairs again. Then the same. Third time, Dave picks up a box and walks it down too. The attic is quiet for a moment. Flecks of dust are buzzing around the shafts of sun like daytime fireflies. The two men return. Steve picks up a box. Dave watches him.
“Hurt your hand? You oughtta take your time more, Holden.”
“Job needs doing. I’m just being careful.”
“Careful? You could wear those gloves in Hell and you wouldn’t get burned.”
“When you’ve moved 48 of these and you’ve found your red box, then we’ll see whose hands burn in Hell, Carpenter.”
“Shut the fuck up Holden.”
Steve picks up a box. Then he’s going down the trap. Struggling again. Dave cradles a box.
“Watch your feet.” he says, and follows.
The stairs leading through the trap are narrow, well worn wood. So old they’re starting to look more beige than brown. The men go along a dusty carpet and down through the house. The odd grunt announces that they’ve hit the ground floor.
“Well done you men” comes a female voice from some other room. Holden shuffles his hands around the box.
“Pfft. Men.”
“What was that David?”
“Nothing Holden, you go clunk your way outside.”
“And you tippy-toe along now Carpenter.”
The door is lit like a gate to another world as they leave. The blazing sun burns the eyes. The neighbourhood is beige. The big car is dull silver. They load up the boxes. Maggie appears at the door, squinting as they huff back along the drive.
“I hope you’re being nice to our neighbour, Davie.”
“Neighbour no more, sweet thighs. Ain’t that right Holden?”
“Still friends Carpenter, still friends.”
“Fuck you very much, friend.”
Maggie’s eyes glare at him under the shade of her palm.
“David! Don’t say that in front of the kid.”
“Look, Maggie, I know Holden ain’t the brightest but…”
Holden sort of slaps him and he giggles.
Maggie scowls as the men go inside and disappear up the stairs. She bathes in the sun for a moment. Walks over to the car. Brushes it with her finger which comes back covered in dust. Spies a bit of yellow by a wheel, bends over and picks out a child’s train, a toy, all in bright colours, and the body in a red that’s very red. She takes it back inside, calling for someone.

 

Thirteen

Poetry, Prose

The lights that show us through the dark are burning away our days

In crowds of black&white commuters, stark against the background sound quiet, glaring on, petty mumblings, headphone pendants, votive coffee cups left in temple alcoves

Or

Shellshocked private school boys in red scarves and brown wool overcoats the colour of dead leaves in Winter shining gold to be embezzled

Dulux charts of navy swimming in that grounded sky blue perpetual in the night and

Listed buildings stand testament to our strange obsession with memorials of the damned&angelic

Global Corporate Golgotha

All the tombstones have personal names that mean hotels, finance, property, alcoholics, pharmaceuticals like the way we give God a personal pronoun: Lloyds will handle it, Marks will handle it; He will handle it

Violent partially-erect sexual aids consume our city finances

Smoking&fire&loss&alarm&prevention&free paper are red

Security cameras are blue because they are comfortingly sad, or grey because they are not there

The harsh butcher lamps in shops saying come&buy&leave, in homes saying come&sleep&leave, in hospitals saying come&die&leave

The city heaves great lumps of dripping profit

Streetlamps making you drive & closed parks

The ant-hill windows burning on condemned estates

Then a thousand artists iridescent in pointless silver running onto railway tracks

To report on suspicious citizens & see it & say it & sorted.

Twelve

Other, Prose

I think I need a bit of a creative diary here. Some help to go over the process and piece things together.

Right now we’re on a little break after that storm of poetry earlier. Poetry can take a lot out of you, man. Or at the very least I find too much in a short few days and you start repeating yourself. Favourite words, favourite techniques. My sibilance is off the charts. I reckon we need a pause so look forward to some more prose, hopefully a short story at some point (but I’m a bit out of practice) and plenty of metaphysical meandering. I used to have a section called that on an old blog from my university days. I dropped out by the way. Go figure.

What do you think of my poetry though? I really prefer to do formless in a very formatic way. That’s not a word incidentally, but it could be. Yes, the formatic of only a vague glass wall at the end of each line. Well, more of an escalator or a teleporter. I like to use line breaks as punctuation is what I’m saying. Mysterious punctuation that somehow still works. I feel like there’s something very important about the experience of reading poetry, becoming familiar with it. I think standard punctuation is too obvious, gives you part of the reward too early and tempts you to forget about the rest of that pot of gold further down the figurative rainbow. Remember kids, it’s all about the journey.

Let’s take an example:

I can smell your flat Shandy Bass
Crazy fresh open window Streathamings despite 4x4s
Maybe the orange
Lube seal guardian
The prickle of Sainsbury’s soave
Demented cartoon solipsism
And no questions
Some kind of pure morning sun feeling
Histories now seemingly too similar to be counted
Vague attempts at siphoning
The hairy butterfly embrace catches
In oesophageal anticipation
Exhausted Tadcaster blur moaning
Like Pink Floyd behind the eyes
The drowned sugar between sheets
Invader Zim acceptance
And white emperor armour self-inflicted orange somehow unjust
Like discarded lines sweat-patched
And lonely perfumed shower soap irritating unknown orgasm
A world set above the world
Your shiny glass skull self-reflecting or alien crystal
Talking fish singing penitent
Discarded shirt tie lissom French letters
Vapor boots neatly stacked with wine glass columns
Your epic poetic resounding sweet chill pizza
I could have laid the whole mourning through
No cold in the exhausted breeze cradling

N.B. I just found a lone comma after “columns” and expunged it from the historical records. Remember to proof properly ya douche.

Now, the effect I’m looking for is that you’ll be a little confused on first reading, but eventually your mind and your inner voice will force a certain kind of order into things, as it always does. And I want to try and influence that subtly. More interaction that way, more oneness between author and reader perhaps. So, the positioning of words, the line breaks, the assonance, the placement of particular images just so…these force you to impose what will hopefully be a peculiar kind of rhythm that matches the one I heard in writing. Cute, huh? Oh and peculiar used to mean particular. I like it like that.

Sometimes I wonder about just using grammar but really I’m doing this in the first place because of grammar – it’s little functions and directors have multiple interpretations. Hyphens and colons, semi-colons, square brackets and styles of speech mark all have specific meanings, but they’re still interpreted differently by different people. Misunderstood or properly understood. I might be using them wrong, thinking it helps, when really I’m not. I decide it’s best just to try and do it without them. Make the words feel like they have some of that stuff there necessarily. Naturally. Maybe it’s like hanging a picture. If you nail it into the wall, or bluetack it, or tape it, there’s all these weird bits distracting you from the picture itself. Sometimes, with some pictures, it’s better just to lean them on the side. Leave gravity be. Use it to help, even. Know what I mean?

I’m also very much into romance at the moment, which is troublesome. It’s often so messy and confusing and for me that’s a huge amount of the appeal. To turn madness into a poem that’s had a surprising amount of structure go into it is quite weird. I’ve done nature poems before. Thinking I might try and go back to that for a bit, or at least inject a bit more pagan wonder into what I’m doing now. Also there’s this strange compulsion to analyse past loves and process them by putting them into poetry. I’m running with it but…mainly happily confused about doing so. Maybe it sells well? I don’t know.

I’m not necessarily expecting anyone to answer (except in your own head a bit dear reader) but how do you feel about writing? Guessing most of you are wordpressers, so you have some kind of regular relationship with the technique. Is it something you don’t have to think about so you can just diarise for fun and profit? Is it a fine art you sometimes get tired of and have to rest? Is it an uncomfortable need, a part of you shouting out, demanding a fairly fair hearing? Does structure help you? Like, other peoples’ pre-ordained structures? Because there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m part copying Allen Ginsburg, John Cooper Clarke, lyricists like Alex Turner and various others. I mean they’re at least huge influences.

Let’s end on originality:

Pretty much everything’s already been done one way. It’s up to you to do the same thing, differently. Lots of different ways to do the same thing, which hopefully makes you realise, it’s all in the details. Like even if I directly copied Chickentown and performed it, and didn’t sound like JCC, that would still be an original performance. Because I could never sound like that guy at that time. Even he can’t sound exactly like himself the night before, or the minute before. And suddenly, everything seems original. If not substantially so, still technically…if not legally, still technically…and it’s all the little technical originalities that make up a brilliant big one. Big originality doesn’t just appear from nothing after all, it’s forged, consciously or not, from everything you do. Think on it.

The Curly Auburn DJ

Poetry, Prose

My nostalgia for you

Particularly, hugging me at work when you’re tired
Sharing sandwiches and mugs
Because you don’t like too much cheese
Being okay with my saliva
Dirty fingers from polishing your shoes sometimes
Because I want to
Sonorific MTV memories
And your little unexpected gifts
Always

Especially, innocent shameless on tired weekday evenings
Warm, rainy nights behind open doors
Lonely blue guitar rockstar singalongs
And romantic pointings beloved of Elvis
Lookalikes of lookalikes
Staggering
Striding through streets
And being alone with our lagers, hands

Specifically, kissing me with your hat on
At home, in private, with no-one to see and the windows open to the night
With moonshine and lamplight on the sill
The felt catching on my forehead but sliding over, not down
Silently looking into your eyes
Feeling your body, privately, for the first time
Through softened wool or cotton and layers
You watching as I hold you and touch you
You would want to understand
And you would
A little, or more

To your quiet music

Ten

Other, Prose

On Gender, Sexuality, Identity, Mental Health

If you ever get the chance to sit on the bench at the top of Pump Hill in Loughton, Essex, you’re going to see something interesting: you’re going to see humanity spread out over miles running from forest through hamlet through town, finishing up in the bright lights and tall towers of London, the spires of Crystal Palace, the dome we now call the O2. Human society is a surprisingly complicated mesh of contrasting attitudes and cultures, and that’s what you’ll see looking out over the spread from Essex into London. So many different details all acting more or less coherently as part of one societal web. It’s mad good.

I went to a chat last night about John Perceval, son of the only assassinated British Prime Minister. John was notable for ending up in a lunatic asylum claiming he was a prophet from God. After he was eventually released from the asylum, he campaigned to improve conditions for all like patients across the country. This was a time when women could be declared mad for thinking, anyone could be declared mad for talking about democracy, and the equivalent of psychiatry was conducted by sadistic quacks more mentally deranged than many of their patients. It was a time of radicalism and unrest across Britain, some would say reaching a peak in the death of Spencer Perceval, PM. Anyway the author holding the chat was Robin Holton, and he had this pretty perceptive comment to make on mental health: that it’s not so much a problem within one individual as it is a problem between individuals. The common theme among many mentally ill people is a form of loneliness or isolation, either literally, or in their lack of empathy, even despite a kind of gregariousness or charisma.

And that just seemed to link up mental illness to identity generally – the sense that it’s something defined by relationships with others. I mention it because so much of what is now largely termed “identity politics” is actually a fundamental element of our existence: interactions with others. That’s the simplistic core often deliberately ignored by critics and pundits. I don’t know about you reader, but I find that a great deal of commentary on issues of mental health, sexual orientation, gender orientation, is unselved. It’s taken away from people, from society, and turned into specific phenomena applied only when certain terms are invoked, when certain “appropriate” rituals are performed.

Oh yeah – if you’ve not already tuned out in anger – why am I linking mental illness and gender/sex? They’re all about identity. Personhood. Society. Being human. The all-uniting theme. That’s the point I want to make here before you hear the polemic incoming. That’s why a guy whose prime was around 1830 (ACE, not PM) is relevant to this. John Perceval lived in a world where much of “mental derangement” was defined quite explicitly by how other people viewed you. Today we live in a world where the basic “how other people view you” is filtered through advanced layers of supposed professionalism and entrenched political filibuster. Try to ignore all the layers of politics and assumption for a moment. Try to just think of the core person.

Here’s just my opinion on the titular topics.

Gender: your chosen take on your biology. Because, all you people who say you either have a penis or a vagina – biology also applies to the feelings and desires that lead people to homosexuality, becoming transgender or anything else. All of that is biological. It’s now commonly accepted that our understanding of the body through science is not limited to the appendages that appear on our skin. Not to try and cut you out, but, get over it. Biology is everything, not just your genitalia.

Implicit here is that there is no absolute heterosexuality or homosexuality – it’s all choice. It’s all a kind of bi or pan or whatever. You can always be your best you.

Sexuality: a social construct built from thousands of years of sex. The backdrop is early humans not having much culture beyond “good to receive penis in vagina/good to put penis in vagina”. That’s the root of modern sexuality for sure. But today we have all sorts of nuanced approaches to those basic desires rooted in chemistry and biology. I think of masculinity as sexual feelings and identification based in the old “my penis goes into your vagina” whereas femininity would be sexual feelings and identification based in “your penis goes into my vagina”. So, male or female or anything else, a person chooses which of those best suits them. Or no particular sexuality at all. You don’t need to have a penis or vagina to subscribe to one or the other. We now have, and really have always had, useable equivalents. Mouths, tongues, fingers, fists, oily sticks made of various materials, anuses. Options, basically. The option of nothing too.

But now more than ever we are aware of our options and capable of expanding them. I’m going to be straight with you, I have more of a feminine sexual identity. I think that’s fine, I don’t think it means all women have to get fucked, I don’t think it means all women have to fuck. I don’t think it means all men have to get fucked. I don’t think it means all men have to fuck. I think every individual person chooses who they are. Influenced by what happens to them sure, but they make the final decision, have the final veto. That’s sexuality. A person chooses and acts on who they want to be.

Identity: a terrifying mix of how you see yourself and how other people see you. Everything you remember as being a prominent part of yourself, and, to a large extent, everything you are seen doing, or understood to have done. It’s your professed values, your internal values, something of the values other people think you have. Your emotional composition, the things you sometimes do to change that. Your favourite clothes, music, movies. Your physical health, what you feel about your physical health. It’s all that stuff to do with you. But really, when you think about you, how can you think without considering the world around you, the people around you, and your place in it.

I guess I’m saying identity is the changing nature of the place in which you put yourself, or find yourself in the world. You and your surroundings are separate and yet inseparable. Different parts of the same connected scheme. A big flowing interconnected entity. And that’s not even getting spiritual.

Mental Health: the extent to which you are publicly viewed as being normal or sane. Mass and community reactions to your behaviours and tendencies. Basically responses to your identity that my go on to form part of your identity.

Your own sense of emotional composition, stability, your ability to express or restrain yourself. The feelings that force themselves into your perception, the thoughts that repeat in your head. The sounds, smells, sights, textures you encounter through your own particular means to engage with them. It’s everything your mind does in response to what you physically, biologically, chemically encounter. And it’s the way you reason through all that, or don’t.

And, in a slightly different context, the biological integrity of your brain and sensory functions. Fewer people will have a substantially damaged brain, whereas all people have physically different brains, biologically, scientifically different brains and minds. That includes different sensory capacities, emotional tendencies. Difference on its own isn’t grounds for disability. Difference rejected by society will cause disability.

That’s one of the major misunderstandings about mental health. Depression and like disorders are built from experiences, encouraged by genetic predispositions. They aren’t mysterious imbalances of the humours (cheers Galen) they are built from profound trauma or joy or endless streams of emotional demands. And they can become accidentally entrenched in the way someone thinks about themselves in relation to the world, self-propagating, remaking beyond the point at which they’re at all healthy.

This is what I think anyway. I’m certainly no great source of knowledge on the matter. Just someone who thinks about stuff a lot. You decide whether any of this thinking helps you. And check out that bench in Loughton if you can, the view really is special. The Gardeners’ is fine too.

The Lusty Abbatoir (V1)

Poetry, Prose

In the alleyway of forgotten hotel rooms
Unserviced, we shrugged
Up to a numberless door, a key protruding
From your coat of sheer confidence

Tumbled into the breathing air and you
Showed me past the pots and on the staffroom
Carpet we cried our little hearts
At the dusty old past and that
Empty work filled into the night

Butcher lights cut our drunken daze
I considered the toilet to wash
In case the cocktails worked like in movies
Aphrodisiac in every drop of Campari, Martini

But your face was inscrutably beautiful
Mouthing me things with your sparkling eyes
The tone of your voice settling in my mind
Leaving something somewhere bound with the drinks-memory

Even crusty kitchen meat-hewn meals
Spoke notes of quiet understanding
That put me naked in that blue place
Barely a shiver before sheets enveloped

So in your bed I was back at the bar
All smiles and cards and happy stories
Yet with a grin you let yourself under your sheets
And I could feel our sweat touch cold

The lips holding daring hands when you asked
Can we kiss. The twining like misty trees
Silent shiver of blissful fear as your boxers
Were pulled away

Howard and Vince Talk About Love

Poetry, Prose

Love is animal
Being willing to beak and be beaked
To curl inside eachother, to scratch in play
To stroke and tend hairs and furs
Flying together
Sharing resting spaces
Pomp and puffiness that comes out in cute
When the other creeps nearby
Love is basic
Essential
A knot of roots that snuff and howl and laugh
Sharp and clear, soft as pig skin
Hairy as sheeps
Because human isn’t love.
Human is appreciation, the better communication
Of animal things, the better understanding and use
of those things. Human is craftiness.
An ability to avoid pain or any emotion at all.
Love is gnawing on a leash.

Seven

Other, Prose

Petty Revolutions: My Old Blogging Manifesto

“You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on.” Is a quote.*

I’ve finally got to the frame of life where I have to write. Sickened beyond capacity of the inevitable sentiment that if I don’t do art enough I’m not an artist. Fine, I’ll accept it. You can have the art. I don’t want it anyway.

There’s only so many brilliant young somethings you can read about as a disenfranchised twenty-two year old before you lose it. I want to be able to join Louise in saying I’m like forty-something. I’m experienced.

I want to make anyone with half a brain look and say I’ve had more than enough time to get performing. I want people to look at my artistic life and say I’m lazy. I want people to know, like I do, that I should’ve made a start the moment I could write. That the one national poetry competition for twelve year olds wasn’t enough. I want people to realise that every year of your life is an experience you can and should communicate to inform and entertain, like they should’ve said in an exam question somewhere. “Inform and Entertain around the subject of panda nipples”. With the internet you don’t even need to use your own experiences for performance, you can basically just hijack everyone else’s.

I am not still young. It is not okay.

You don’t need Microsoft and Adobe to write and edit. You’ve got apache and gimpshop. You don’t even need them because you can thieve a Sharpie from Morrisons and scribble on smooth public surfaces. You don’t even need that because you can walk up to someone and introduce yourself like chuggers, muggers and beggars do not.

Teenagers are bringing out the new wave of Grime.^ Some of them not even out of school and still making significant record or publicity deals. Meanwhile what the fuck am I doing? Why am I not being written about in Vice and Dazed? I mean Grime is basically fucking open mic. I mean they calls themselves MCs, what more do you want? Pretty artworks and a beatbox called Echo? Alright. I’ll get it. I’ll start mixing fucking White Stripes tunes on audacity and call it Cheesy McFlapsface. I don’t know. Art. Art is going to happen.

Seriously though look at these kids. They’re fantastic. I mean it’s not exactly my sector being as I’m basically a white suburban punk¬ of one kind or another. An aspiring anarchist. I’d call them out on accidental misogyny and proper game in equal measure but maybe that’s part of why I’m not where they are. Or haven’t been where they are. Different discourses work at different times, and there’s plenty of room in paradise folks. We can all get there if we try. Though I guess we’d all rather get there before than after death. Even this morning there was a programme on about Constable essentially saying people loved him most after he died. So many people have to face – or not face – that. Look at the 27 Club for one thing.

That must be one of the biggest issues facing down artists and radicals everywhere. What if I’m not my job, what if I can quit, but then, when I do…I’m not successful enough. What if I’m a starving artist like forever and only get famous after I die? What if the work all comes to nothing that you can see or use to make you feel better about the endless peregrinations of existence?

Well, if that, then you didn’t sell yourself hard enough. You should’ve done that pelvic thrust with a little bit more energy. Cos kids, the world is what we make it, and we can make anything.

All of our celebrities, adored stars and key societal influencers (thinking more behind the scenes there) worked fucking hard to get where they are, but as part of that they worked to ignore expectation and routine. They levelled their sights on what they really needed and started cutting away the weed and dross surrounding it, all the fucking mess we’re sold by leaders and advertisers to make shit smell like roses. It doesn’t matter how it smells. Shit is shit. It has only a select number of uses, mostly involving its being destroyed or otherwise broken up to help make something else better.

And you don’t need to be sitting out in some Brazilian jungle or up on Machu Picchu to become a Guevara or write a Stones song. You’ve got everything you need right where you are, it’s just you might occasionally need to travel one way or the other to realise it’s there. Like when you can’t find the remote because you’re sitting on it.

So forward this blog has to go, and all that follows from it. We need those photos to finally get here. Videos! A new website build! I’m gonna have to learn programming languages! Fuck. Ah well, it’s all for the art.

*I read it as a sort of title for “collection by Mark Jackson” in a Dazed&Confused back issue. Think it was number five. It had beautiful androgynous people 🙂

^http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/the-square-novelist-teenage-crew-future-of-grime

¬ “white suburban punk” epitomised for me in this song, which really deserves a post of its own https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoF_a0-7xVQ

 

Of the Winter Offensive

Poetry, Prose

As the frost settles on their broken bones
Squat in deformity the huddled pair
Clasp hands in perpetual motion
One grey cloak and one green
Both white faces tugging
Eachother’s corrupted
Fingers.
Even
The living
Dead can be beautiful
With a rosy tint to their
Empty sockets and a certain
Pink to their lack of posture that
Crumbles beautifully into fleshy moss –
Even broken bones last centuries.

Five

Poetry, Prose

She cut loose over the copse. The morning bird:
Singing into the fog of early dew, cutting the dull
Dank clouds with velvet wings, sharp as knives.
I watch her between the long, easy breaths of branches
And their leafy veils, following her flight through
A tunnel of clear dry air until all begins to soak
With morning tears while the fields and woodland
Stir, and somewhere I catch her mounted by a fairy,
Driven down underneath the roots to elven kingdoms.
I drop into my puddle of lost veils: here below,
Where the leaves are sweet with fire colours.
They stare out from their spines. They crackle
Like rotted twigs in the wind, or tiny bones.