Aoife's Blog: An evening at Camden Archives
March 9, 2011
On February 15, I hosted a poetry event at the Camden Local Studies and Archives centre. Participants read poems inspired by the archives as well as Camden and Adelaide Road. I read part of the poem I've written about the Charlie Ratchford Centre and my Prologue for Adelaide Road. Many thanks to Tudor Allen, senior archivist, for organising such an entertaining and inspiring evening! If you have any poems or stories about Camden or its history, please send them to me at aoife.mannix@rsc.org.uk or paste them as a comment below.
Here's another piece I'm working on –
Seventh Heaven
By Aoife Mannix
JOE:
I used to live up there. I know what you're thinking; it's a long way to fall. But how close can you really get to the tent of blue Oscar Wilde used to call the sky on a day when the clouds press down with all the metallic gloom of the prison bars you thought you'd left behind?
The trouble with some kinds of hunger is that their shadows growl in your stomach long after you've eaten. And even when you finally get your little launch pad as close to the stars as is humanely possible, you discover you haven't the nerve to spread your wings and fly. So you drink the years instead. A much slower but equally effective form of suicide.
When you came here first, you thought the city would be your rocket ship. All those bullets for trains whipping by night after night. Their lights shimmering, pulsing, retreating and returning, like tiny super novas. Till you felt that energy flowing through your muscles, electrifying your bones. Young and strong and not afraid of hard work. The hard work you thought would let you build yourself brick by brick into the shiny towers sprouting up from the concrete of a strange city.
Strange how many homes have been built by the future homeless. The exiles whose sweat stains the foundations but find themselves dismantled. Mere scaffolding for those good citizens who actually belong.
Strange how you never foresaw the day when the brutal sky would be your own ceiling, dripping scorn on all your dreams of engineering any kind of truth.
You wrote to her to follow you but she never was pointed in the right direction. She said you lived with your head in the clouds. And didn't reply when you promised you'd carve her a tiny piece of seventh heaven from your out of this world view on the seventy seventh floor. Like I said, it 's a long way to fall.
by Aoife Mannix
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