inter-mortality human league
[Original Poem] Placing Conkers In The Corners of my Mind
How is it that we’re here already? So soon! One hundred posts. A century of articles, each one teetering on the edge of lucidity like a sleep paralysis demon delicately trying to balance on a single piano key for added eeriness, waiting to slam down the lid and send everyone spiralling into fits of bleary-eyed existential distress. But here we are now, and I’ve got conkers—bloody loads—and I’m not afraid to use them.
You see, the mind’s a funny thing.
It’s sometimes like a room full of drawers that open on their own and start spilling out the contents of dreams you haven’t even had yet. Like a joke about déjà-vu I once heard, I’m sure it will come back to me eventually. The drawers are just carefully collecting little bits of your life into a lever arch file in case you’re ever on the precipice of a hallucination or your dreams are getting just a little too run of the mill. But what do you do when the drawers won't stop opening? When the spiders of doubt start spinning their webs in the corners, waiting to wrap your brain up in newspaper like last night’s Fish & Chips? Well, when you peel the chip shop paper from off your cerebral cortex, sometimes it leaves a delicate imprint behind, and well, I’ve turned those echoes of thought into a string of words. I also picked up some conkers from a graveyard and put them to work to prevent it from happening again. Because sometimes you need a little magic—a little woodland voodoo—to keep the scuttling thoughts in check. The paper is particularly good for practising origami though, it has to be said.
Let me tell you, I’ve been on some strange autumn walks in my time.
Some nights when I walk home, I find myself slipping between gravestones, fingers twitching as if they’ve been cursed by a long-forgotten witch with a vendetta against calm minds & relaxed muscles, letting the thoughts shuffle-run over my fingers like an asthmatic mouse doing tricks for a slither of prime Gruyere. The air smells like damp leaves and forgotten sins, and every time I bend down to retrieve one of those shiny brown conkers, I half-expect a hand to shoot up from the earth and ask for its moody, little spider-repelling orb back. But I pocket it anyway, because let’s be honest, intrusive thoughts are far worse than cursed hands. And I control this game. Though now I’m having intrusive thoughts about cursed hands, and they are quite obviously beyond the powers of the simple conker. Maybe I don’t control this game. I sometimes still lowkey worry that if I ever got everything in my house perfectly organised, everything would suddenly drop down in one fluid movement, the board would clear, and a new game would start. Probably on a higher difficulty setting knowing my luck.
But it’s not just about keeping the spiders away. No, no. The conkers are art. Little soldiers in my mental war against the absurdity of existence. Why do they work? I have no bloody clue. But they feel like they work, and that’s enough for me. We all have our little rituals. Some people light candles. Some people meditate. For some people it’s ASMR, others it’s BDSM. Me? I’m out here like a rogue squirrel, stashing little caches of sanity away in the corners of my mind, hoping it doesn’t all come crashing down in the dead of night. The drawers might still rattle, but I hold the keys. The piano lid is also locked, for obvious reasons. And the only sound that will ever wake me now is the familiar monophonic fanfare of the Tetris theme.
Placing Conkers In The Corners of my Mind (to keep the intrusive thoughts from scuttling)
I’ve been stealing conkers
from a churchyard
on my way home this week,
to possibly keep away spiders.
One by one, so
if my house is suddenly haunted
by a restless churchyard spirit
I can easily remove the offending conker.
I didn’t dare at first
to retrieve the smaller ones
from between the tombstones,
But then the more free-range ones
were in all my house’s indoor corners.
I tentatively fingered them out
with a divot of earth, I thought first
about my finger getting caught
between the stones, and next
about a finger curling around my own,
An inter-mortality human league of hook-a-duck
Don’t you want me, baby?
I now eat my vanilla yoghurt
in peace, free from
the ever-potential threat
of a spider vaulting itself
across the carpet just outside my eyeline.
I don’t know if they actually work,
but thinking they do is enough
for my intrusive mind.
And there it is—my vague battle hymn, my anthem (yes, another one) of sepia-toned autumnal madness. A veritable fever dream in verse, where conkers aren’t just for kids and squirrels but become talismans against the ever-encroaching forces of doom, well spiders mostly, but occasionally might piss off a particularly meek woodlouse. I mean, isn’t that what we all want? (That fucking woodlouse!) Well, to live in a world where something, anything, can make the chaos stop for a second? Well, not everyone. Where you can freeze the spider-laden madness in place for a moment, mid-scuttle, with nothing more than a shiny brown ball you stole from a churchyard between you and a mental breakdown? Me thinks yes.
Look, I know conkers are supposed to be harmless little things, but tell that to the conker currently holding court in the corner of my living room, silently whispering to the creeping tendrils of dread: “Not today, mate.” It’s like I’m hosting a party for shreds of forgotten rituals, the acceptable face of scrumping for graveyard fodder, and uninvited anxieties, and the conkers are the bouncers at the door, deciding who gets in. (Spoiler: it’s no one. Not even you, existential dread. Do one.)
I half-expect to wake up one night and find the conkers having a conference on the living room table, plotting their next move. But maybe that’s what I want. Maybe the real magic isn’t in keeping the thoughts at bay—it’s in believing they can. It’s in making a deal with the universe, or your brain, or the ancient spider gods who you may or may not have inadvertently wronged many moons ago now, and saying, “Look, I’ve done my part. I did the thing. I drank the liquid. I ate the solids. I took the remedies. I moved about a bit. I went outside. I did the talking. I did the listening. I did the talking again. I’ve even collected the conkers. Now leave me to my yoghurt and my strange little habits in relative peace, thank you very much.”
Because at the end of the day, that’s what this entire journey so far has been about, hasn’t it? One hundred posts in, and I’ve pretty much come full circle—back to the strange, the absurd, the little things we do to keep the darkness from knocking too loudly at the door, getting bored, installing a jumbo-sized cat flap, and hoping for the best. That’s pretty much it, isn’t it? We’ve all created ourselves some art out of all the readily available chaos, spun gold from the cobwebs in our minds. And we’re still here, still scurrying through the shadows, stealing conkers from graves like some kind of avant-garde witchy-vibed conker-nicking child-catcher. No? Just me? Rude.
So here’s to one hundred more! One hundred more fevered, frantic, conker-laden rambles through the twisty-turny corridors of our collective minds. Let’s keep playing this absurd little game. I’ve got a few more rounds left in me. Let’s keep placing conkers in the corners of our minds and believing, against all odds, that they’ll keep the scuttling thoughts at bay a little while longer. Let’s keep laughing at the absurdity of it all and knowing that, somewhere in the madness, there’s magic. You only have to look for it. Well, that and be prepared to pop a digit between tombstones occasionally. I don’t think that’s too much to ask!
Until next time, keep placing those conkers, and may the loose chip-paper of your brain remain (mostly) free from spiders and other things that scuttle in the night.
There. That was a nice, pleasant post for a Sunday afternoon’s reading.
If you’ve enjoyed this conker poem, there’s another one out there wandering in the wilds of my previous posts. You can find it here:
You’ve now officially had 100 free posts from me to rifle through. The least you can do now is leave a comment, tell a friend to subscribe, share my post among other conker-coveting weirdos, and pop a couple of quid in the virtual cup below so I can take a coffee with me to work some mornings, leaving one hand still free, y’know, just in case.