There’s this shoeless blues musician
Strumming his acoustic guitar beneath a street lamp,
And the swirling snow is swirling all around him,
When suddenly
Charles Dickens steps out of the fog
And into the lamplight.
He runs his fingers through his damp greying hair,
Looks up at the obscured darkness of the sky,
And smiles.
He asks the guitarist what century he’s from,
And is he familiar with Shakespeare, at all?
The blues musician smiles.
There is ice on his eyelids. He smiles.
A cough as he gathers his thoughts;
You can tell by his eyes he’s seen the Universe.
Well, he says, I’ll tell you a story.
His fingers trace the guitar strings, but
He does not play, he does not sing, he speaks
Instead.
He tells his story.
Once in the twenty-first century, he says,
I met a girl.
(Dickens leans in, taking notes like Shakespeare.)
A girl with words on her skin,
But not just on her skin,
This human had words in her mind.
And she spoke to me, and she said:
“All things sort so well”
And then she smiled, and turned away from me,
And tramped away through the mud
In the swamp of the Festival;
Now that was a Muse.
It is Dickens’ turn to smile;
He almost smirks.
He is an old man, white-bearded,
And still he smiles,
He remembers
The muses of his youth:
He grew up with them and
Watched them growing up;
Watched them flower and sometimes fade,
Saw some rise, saw some fall.
His heart held them all;
In them he was Shakespeare
Probing conditions of the heart:
Dickens has Prince and Hendrix on his iPod.
He thinks he knows it all, until
There is a tap on his shoulder.
The shoeless blues musician smiles beyond Dickens;
A new man has appeared.
He is inappropriately dressed
(As are we all).
Charles turns on the spot, and sees:
A ghostly figure,
Growing stronger,
In the forefront of his mind.
Shakespeare himself:
Shaggy-dog-haired and smelly,
Tight in hose and he’s smiling,
He laughs out loud, then speaks:
“And with a guitar-slinger and a limp-toed pigeon by her side
She stomped the streets of the early 21st century,
Unsure of herself and of
The correct colour and length for her hair.
But she heard
Words in the sky and
Words sprayed on pavements and on crumbled walls.
She saw
Herself, in the future and in the now, as art, as love.
And she inspired me.”
