Hello Sailor [goodbye heart]

Following a number of forays over recent months where he has been found around Arnolfini in a sailor costume, Marshman will set out to saturate his life with all things sailory. A companion piece to last year’s Finding my Inner Cowboy, Tom and some new sailor friends will be taking boat trips, scrubbing the decks, recreating battles, making rum cocktails and of course getting a tattoo. Somewhere late and in the city, he will reveal his new identity especially for Mayfest.


I fall in love with someone or some place every single day, and now I’m here, back on my father land, I look out to sea and I see this cruel mistress and remember remembering the smell of the land, I peer through port halls, of memories and I try to look beyond, past the sea and yearn for another dry patch, a place to be my port in any kind of storm .........
Oh for the twenty four hours of leave, where the city is presented as a unanswered question, full of possibilities, a place to make an instant impressions, a place to fall in love with over night, a place to live and to die within the space of a single day, twenty four hours of leave.
This shifting home, these shifting sequences of detachments could not hold regrets or compassions of any kind. Just the promise of a new day as I wake up in the arms of a new town.
Now, a toast to the places and the people and the things we said, the things we did. My heart it stands still on the crest of a wave. And once again I’m thrust into an ocean of goodbyes, a sea of yesterdays lies carry me into a no-man’s land with not a glimpse of land , just the big deep blue. No strings, just the drift.
In the darkest of nights, you know where to find me, on the helm of the boat, not looking out but looking up, into the sky at night. Lying on my back, I am transported upwards I try to grasp the shiftings in atmospheres, try to acclimatise to the changes as I rise upwards into the heavens and prepare to make contact .
Looking upwards at the stars makes me feel closer to you. You are the people and the places I have travelled to and I see you once again in the brightness of the stars. The sparkling, shining, gleaming, glistening, glittering, flickering light seems to whisper hello sailor goodbye heart.