Sillyness Occupies!
(8') - 2025 - trumpet, speaker, piano, cello
Written for the Lumina Trio in May 2025.
About a sleepover.
Performed by myself (vocals), Polina Savicka (piano), Morgan Key (cello) and Iris Rushbrooke (trumpet).
Words:
I’m on your bed, ready to sleep. And there’s a brachiosaurus lying next
to me, there’s Totoro on a chest of plastic drawers and Ganesha is
watching over from atop your plywood wardrobe. There is a love and a
sadness here, unquantifiable. It gleams off the face of trinkets and
teddies like they’re all well-cleaned chrome. As sillyness occupies our
every waking moment, something flocks through that frail permeable
dot-line between sleep and sinking. A place where repetition is blaringly
inconsistent and deviance is blurringly absent.
Your pain is punctuated in Punjabi with torn pictures of me from your
wall. Milk Hotels, Adriannes, Elliots, lots-of-plants, men-with-guitars,
Tarot Cards, Cats, Trees, Moons and Stars. Your posters still up there.
Your old guitar rusts under dust and neglect, you’re scared when the
window’s open the wind will catch its strings and fling Oasis on its frets.
Peering from the pier this morning the seabirds shivered, the wind was
here. Your mum had made me tea before, and toast. The news was on
about eightieth anniversaries, people returning to their crumpled flats.
The cars bunged up through the roadways like my noseways were
sniffled full of snots.
You came up this morning from the sofa and lay with me, us scrumpling
into the prism of a single bed. I wrapped your sleeping sick body with my
arms as your words of response became grunts became breaths. I
kissed your poor cheeks to a little smile from beyond the stupored land.
Before I left to brush my teeth, we exchanged a squeezing of our hands.
And now, going home, I’m the water swaying Barking Riverside pier.
Sillyness has occupied almost everything that’s here.