James Daniel Brough

I judged meticulously.
I served in every jury.
I soaked the footprints into my socks.
I wiped my soles and left
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Conformity
Milgrim Experiment
Day job
450 volts
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She's on the horizon
Don't lose perspective

Keep busy
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I’m a Cancerian
A chess player on ecstasy
A romance with the middle pages missing
I forget how the pieces move
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A movement within a movement
One motion disguised by another
One obscures the other
It's the perfect balance
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You always held the cards.
I did my best. Persevered.
I stared at the backs of them trying to read your eyes through a thousand wires and connections.
But the result was always fixed and pre-determined.
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In the club the people find music EVERYWHERE
They find it hiding in a pretty girl’s hair. They find it by rubbing against the grain of the wood of the bar, or congealed in the tread of their shoes. They find it hiding under candles and in people’s bags.
It’s caught sleeping on top of the CD surfaces.
It’s everywhere.
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Some days I feel like a pilot in a remote control plane, being flown by a little boy who often forgets to charge the batteries let alone bother to fly it properly.
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Older Colder Stronger
Emotionally Shorted
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I'm looking out to sea tonight like there's something to discover, something to find out. I want to send a VR drone out as far as it'll go. But I imagine eventually it'd just happen upon a new coast, with someone staring back out. There are no answers to be found here, only the insistent endless throbbing of this expanse at the shore, pushing enquiry to the nervous system. Precise neutrality and assurance; it has seen it all. A thousand men tried and a thousand men failed. There is no hope, no beautiful despair. It is overwhelming and it outlives your every moment. It grows and swells and we sleep. A thousand men try and a thousand men fail.
It is relentless. It's seagulls, like disciples, show an understanding; cruel confident perfunctory automatons. They understand simply and completely. It can be taken, and it can be taken back. You are not important, they are not important. It can't be consumed. They are complete within their actions. The eyes settled for the face, nothing else; they just do what they do. The mouth is calm. Suffering is just a thing. A thing in amongst other things. Not to be dwelled on.
The sea is the real part of the earth.
The shore is where truth meets the land.
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A lonely dream set at some guided tour of a museum. I struggle with concentration and it's just facts to fill your head anyway. I'm just goofing around playfully, feeling I'm making an impression and even creating some casual bond with people perhaps; offering an expression of who I am when I'm happy. But it's hard work to keep it up. We end up on our way down some metal spiral stairs outside, it feels like things are ending, and I am walking behind the party leader, an old friend local to me that I lost touch with in waking life. I say to them as we are walking that everyone seems flat. She looks round and says with a slightly cold tone 'but if you listen to the content of what they're saying'. I am shocked and feel misunderstood and like she has disagreed with me just for sake of it. I didn't have the spirit energy left to think about this cold logical-style response, which somehow cut into me, and I snap straight back 'OK well I'm off, see Ya' to hasten the parting rather than dragging out the process. I try and lift my voice at the end to try and hide the anger but it just betrays misery. One person behind me disinterestedly says bye. I realise as I walk down the drive towards the gate that I've a fool's nose left and I'm about to face another period at home alone; a familiar sense of being abandoned. I need to go back and ask why no connection, why am I not cared about and what do I have to do to be part of things, waddling like a penguin. There's a slope to the drive that the party seemed to have ambled up and gone over the top almost out of sight. It starts to seem so hard to climb. The drive becomes a thin green carpet, rucking and getting pulled up at the sides and sliding down the slope under my feet. I start to try to use it like a rope to haul myself, just to catch them back up and establish I'm ashamed, desperately chasing why nobody cares. I'd settle for causing a scene if I had to, any amount of them. I suspect they've broke up and gone their separate ways. Pride is not relevant. I need to be helped yes, to understand how social activities like this never seem to lead to anything more permanent, never unlocks a door into something comforting or containing; just a designated compartment of time which always ends. I'm climbing, holding a side rail, a banister really with my left hand now as well as the carpet floor in my right which is waist height in front of me while I'm treading on it. It's hopeless. I fall on my back with madness, the unbelievable frustration of every object designed to assist turned into a hateful obstruction. I scream 'Just kill me now' at the sky. I mean it. I finally get to the top, over the brow and nobody is there, just a soulless high street and a bus stop. I grab a pole, shrink to the floor and give in to sobbing, hoping somebody I know in the group finds me somehow to see what I'm really like, who I am.

Later on that waking day I'm on a public footpath off a park near a canal, an obscure part of the city I'd not been and I pass an elderly couple chatting and pointing out flowers in a strong regional accent. I see a footpath off to the side, clearly hardly used. I'm pushing through overgrowth in an enthusiastic bid to explore, to move further away and hide from life with expectation and yet I have the repeated urge to cry. I realise I might be wrong but maybe this kind of loneliness can only be run towards.
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