It was late in the spring of my 32-year that I realised that I was waiting for a change that would not come.

Lacking courage, I pretended to myself that I was not yet ready to begin; half satisfied the craving for adventure that I felt with little steps on the way. Had the years dulled me so much already? How could my heart be happy with that when it yearned to beat with passion again?

All that time living by the coast, knowing that sooner or later they would find me there. Or she would tell them where to find me.

You must understand I do not know the whole of it. I do not who you are or how these words will come to you. I have passed into a nowhere land, sitting in a gap between the worlds; the space between the earth and the sky; between the daytime and the nighttime. Many voices sing to me here but I do not trust them all.

***

They say that when I was younger, before we so fooled the world, I was ambushed on the journey down from London, attacked and wounded almost to death by a hail of arrows. An arrow pierced me close to the heart and another pierced me through the back of my hand.

They say that as I slowly bled my life into the dust I took hold of the arrow and holding it like a pen I wrote the Songs for Michael in blood upon the earth.
I can tell you now, I did write some of the songs there. Some words came and I felt possessed for a while. I wrote them with a pen though. It was a silver Parker pen and the ink was blue.

***

I first met Juliet when I was barely ten years old. She was visiting Hope Farm with her uncles and brothers. A peace mission they called it. It was a tense time for even then Michael could see the unfolding years descending into war.

I played in the orchard regardless and sometimes she would join me, wary at first but as she grew

to know me her air of command deepened till I was another pawn in her garden games, hopelessly, unashamedly in love with her.

One day that spring I came into the kitchen, flushed from running in the fresh still cold air to hear a flurry of feathers, see the bright yellow beak of a blackbird taking shelter amongst the cold coal in the fire grate.

From the kitchen table a large black cat regarded it, silently waiting for it to make its next move. At that young age I did not know or care for balance, for the natural struggle of being on being that turns the wheel of this material world. I chose live for the bird and chased the cat from the room. I nursed it for a while and it lived a few hours more, its breath sounding in quicker gasps, its lungs punctured with tiny claw marks.
Juliet would have chosen for the cat and that is why she became Juliet the Killer, Queen of the Merchants and I became her poet.

END OF PART ONE