Given that for most people, sight is the predominant sense, it's perhaps not surprising that this week's theme of footsteps has evoked primarily a visual response, with the metaphorical a close second. But I'm much more intrigued by the audible possibilities inherent in the idea, especially as we are now entering the season of mists and mellow spookiness, and my local supermarket is already well stocked with pumpkins and pumpkin-carving kits, ghoul masks, festoons of spiders-web and tubs of trick-or-treat sweets. (Oh, capitalism! Don't we love you.)
Isn't the sound of footsteps way more intriguing as a stimulus to the imagination than the mere sight of them?
Close your eyes. What do you hear? Whose footsteps could they be? What are they like? Where are they coming from? Where are they going to? Why have they stopped? And what do they want with you?
With the scene suitably set, it's straight to the poem after this busy Saturday (and Blackpool were absolutely rubbish away at Mansfield by the way). Are you sitting uncomfortably? I don't know what this is about., a distempered sort of piece, definitely league three stuff. I may revise it absolutely or scrap it entirely, but for now...
Beneath My WindowOutside my dirty Soho window, winter fogcurls and slides like a stealthy fox, pausespeering in, whiskering at the half-inch gap
I always leave no matter what as I lie awake past one, in muffled dark with curtains open, feeling it play over my face, just listening.
Old Eliot surely would have understood,even older Dickens too, who liked to tapalong our homely thoroughfares following
at distance the hobble of clogs on cobbles,keenly observing this nocturnal lowlifein its habitat, but never in such a peasouper.
I hear stilettos stab unsteadily up the street,they pause beneath my window. D'you wonderif I'm lying lonely up here, holding a torch
for you. hoping you'll ring the bell? To hellwith you, dipsy Demoiselle. Stumble onif you will. Go piss in someone else's porch.
...and did I say that Blackpool were rubbish today? (That's not part of the poem, just a gripe,.) Onwards.
Thanks for reading, S ;-)
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