Away Is Towards Poem by James Daniel Brough

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.