David Greaves

David has so far refused to stop writing about dinosaurs. His work has appeared in the 'Verge' 2011 fiction anthology and the 'From Glasgow To Saturn' journal, and his prose-poetry pamphlet, 'Hinged', was released by the New Fire Tree Press in 2011. He is originally from the North but his accent needs work.

I start fires

I start fires -
   and watch the cold run scared, and watch the sparks insinuate themselves
   into air to dim and wait, and forget their names in grasping eagerness
   for the murmur of ash on the ground, and how easy it would be to hear
   secrets in the quiet, and build in the almost-silence a crooked
   architecture of flame whose contortions, whose spaces suspended in
   perpetual fall I have long since convinced myself mumble across one
   another truths that now shade so obvious I almost get sick, and crouch
   retching between the blistering spherical phonemes, and who knew that
   paralysis could be arson in the right light, and hold below the
   temperature at which sound burns out, and hearit all, and curl unable
   and rain as a fixed point, and this is where I try to trick myself into sleep

The Pitch

(1)

Abstract:
An island, uninhabited, isolated, unnamed, barely more than a beach that is also an ear, human, monolithic, that of a colossus who listens to the sea that it loves, the sea with which it sleeps, their messages exchanged by means of inscriptions on individual grains of sand.

Argument:
Questions posed to it as driftwood, as shoals, as storms, as the tide-born rumours of depth charges and silent dives, is there anything it could not hear.

Excerpt:
"and once when it first formed and lay asleep on night waves the grains ebbed slow but built in their cascades on and over each other each one inscribed with the same message not even a word but a sound that as it poured and buried itself in itself magnified tangled and rose until the ear could no longer ignore it could no longer sleep and somewhere volcanic the body awoke and opened its mouth"

For The Hounds

INT:
our mouths to the cold, our eyes wide as seasons, our feet as quakes, all of us in on the joke

EXT:
a stream; a light that could be the moon; the crest of a hill; branches and the point at which leaves melt into night

El Zacaton

Some days I want to wake up in Zacaton
sinking and blind not drowning
it's not like I want to die just be
unanchored but still on or under the earth
through water warm as blood or almost
at least and unknown eyes unblinking
against the sulphur I didn't say
it made sense and seeing nothing at all
turned away from the daylight
shattering the surface patched
and skinned with grass and travertine
offwhite in the forest sun
I sometimes imagine drifting
without acknowledging the flow
towards the walls of the cenote
and with my fingertips scraping
into the bacteria clutched on the stone
half-dreamt pictures of carvings
tongues trembling on thorns
clubs tipped with volcanic glass
so my imprint then would be left
but that's only sometimes
mostly I would just sink down
into warm corrosive zero; every vestige of self
discarded in the dive like an ascetic,
like an arsonist with the evidence
hanging fragrant in my clothes; and if I stayed
long enough I might coil into the water
and the rock both, another extremophile
far as Saturn from pavements,
from tired-eye screens, where I find a website
that calls it Mexico Desconocido; and I think yeah,
I think perfect, Mexico Unknown
and what might be the deepest sinkhole
in the world, a blank spot in and under
the earth, subterranean oblivion
and I think this is the perfect place to hide.

- but that's only some days because most days what I actually want is to fall
asleep on the train, look down at the bridge and in the hypnagogic breach watch
it stalk out across the sea; all impossible stone columns, arches, no I didn't
say it made sense and miles up my carriage judders and I rest my head on the
windowglass while below me ships gust out of the spray, seabirds'
chalkboard-nail shrieks fracture in the night, and with the waves I feel it lurch.

(performed at The Lit Parade, 13th June, 2012 by David Greaves - part of Glasgow West End Festival 2012)