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Steve Page Jan 2020
Big Art: The art of collaboration.

Big bouncing, cushioning,
resonating, in-phasing.

Small piece-by-piece-making,

patch-working, ingredienting,
combining, conjoining,
absorbing,

- collaborating.
Rifting off a phrase heard on the radio.
Steve Page Jan 2020
These days we
last long enough to grow old
live long enough to reflect
but don't grow up enough
to bother.
Lord, save us from ourselves.
This is new - medicine gives us time, but we dont know how to use it.
Steve Page Jan 2020
While smoking my mother's ashes
in my father's stale pipe
I felt a curious high, which was strange
- the rest of the batch had been expectedly bland

and homely. I walked the aroma through her discarded bungalow,
into the kitchen, out into the bare garden following the line

of the absent washing over the sunken stepping stones,
ending in the cul-de-sac of her rock garden of heather and herbs.

I sat on the concrete steps of the dismantled green house
letting the hit of the ash fill my lungs, holding it there

until it filled my head, before very slowly
breathing out the deep memory
of mum and dad, shouting and laughing and l allowed myself

to float above the colour of the border plants, up out of reach
of the childhood sprawl until I was back in her smoke filled room,
full of her emptiness - chin raised in silent prayer for one last breath.

And still gripping the warm bowl of my high, I sang her songs,
knees-up with the best of them and with mum on both arms, chin raised high

with a chorus of belief in family and friends and neighbourhood
and how this was never going to end well,

but meanwhile we'll have a party
making sure the whole street knows they're welcome
- and all the more if they have grief to smoke and memories to sing
- surely this is a life worth living.

Put another record on,
there's tea on the ***, ashes in our pipes
and songs to sing.
I was given the first line in a workshop and was surprised where that took me.
Steve Page Dec 2019
She took the crisp offered
- not for the flavour, but for the high offer
of a connection across the tallest table,
balanced on tall stools, with tall tales
that fired unfettered, unfiltered
from her so much taller son,
each word spittled with snorted laughter
as they floated in their isolation,
cushioned by a child's unhesitate honesty,
silky and cloud-light and nothing like her fears
which had continued to hover and to threaten
to sink her float and fade her laughter
and to let the dank win.
Instead she stayed afloat,
tethered only to her son's fingers
as they drew her further into his world,
pushing away her lost years,
floating her free to explore this genesis
of something like a second chance.
Observed encounter in Pret on London's South Bank.
Steve Page Dec 2019
Kindness is not nice.

Nice is soft and inoffensive.
Nice is easy and effects no change, it's cotton wool - not stuffed tight, but just resting on the surface ready to be blown away or trodden into a muddy disinterest. Nice is a damp whisper, a mouse cowering in the corner, taking up as little space as possible, lest it be noticed, lest it presume too much and cause a whisker of offence.

Kindness isn't like that -

Kindness pushes in, claws out, quick and heavy, uninvited, unexpected, taking pleasure in disturbance, in leaving nothing unsaid and little undone in its pursuit of creating a disruption of difference. Kindness counts everyone a target, anybody a likely candidate for a three act matinee and evening performance of loud Kindness. Surprise is its currency, smiles its language, common humankindness its passport to lands yet to be explored, to vast red territories with drumbeats of gratefulness for the opportunity to march in with regiments of compassion and to leave a signature devastation of brutal Kindness.

Kindness is not 'nice'.
Kindness is loving awe-ful.
I'm grateful for the fierce kindness I've received from friends.  
Be kind. No matter what it takes.
Titus 3:4
4 But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us....
Steve Page Dec 2019
I hold with care the value of the Wait
with a backdrop of the intrusion of the Immediate;
I relish the Not Yet,
not looking for an untimely rush into the unfinished;
I anticipate the delicious Hope,
ignoring the clamour of dissent;
and not taking anything for granted, I do all I can to clear space,
to listen with intent
and to then herald the Promise of the Soon,
the ready-coming-King,
and I embrace the God-With-Us
Now.
The Christmas preposition is 'with'. God with us.
Steve Page Dec 2019
History snores at the back, too tired to notice the present company, and
Maths figgits nervously, his mind overwhelmed by possibilities and permutations, while
Geography let's her mind wander, dreaming of paths yet travelled and regarding this classroom as just another staging post, but
English mutters disapprovingly at the thought of so much hassle and any proposition that might disrupt his carefully balanced timetable.
French sighs and shrugs, unconcerned, but can't help but be curious about the
German sitting so self-composed and self-contained across the aisle, somehow managing to ignore
Science as he argues with himself and apparently agrees another working hypothesis. And at the door
Divinity wonders and ponders what brought us here today and says a brief prayer for forgiveness.
Memories of a grammar school.
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