Hey! Mr Thingmebob! What are you?
Oh I’m similar to you Miss Thingmejig, that is… you are my only clue.
That’s nice! but not useful, I need to know more!
Ok, you’re something forgotten that somebody left before.
Soothing… how charming that I fill that void, really though, i’m less than buoyed!
Listen, we’re something! stick with me, in our confusion… we’ll both be happy!
I notice that you’re a dreamer
That you continue to stand there,
With Sir Polar Bear;
Engulfed in its colossal shadow,
And I can see that you know,
That I know
That you know this too.
It seems you can be forever surrounded,
By an endless sea of molten metals
Your mysterious lands;
Crumbling,
Decomposing with rust;
Endlessly being anchored –
By your hidden flamboyance
Always to be taken –
By complex science
To a certain past
And a future lost.
While some of us are thinking about it, some are actually doing it, and those who are doing it are usually telling me all about it. By all accounts, there great at it too! And feeling greater about it, every… single… day!
Honestly, I’m over the moon for you, I truly am… warms my cockles… no end. But, In my thinking… and trust me I’ve had the time too (about what it is you’re great at doing), I have got to say, that I’ve decided I would be so much… much, better than you! Even if I wanted to do it, but I don’t even need to, (I’m actually laughing in my mind), I haven’t even thought to try it… unbelievable!
So, just in case you’re thinking about telling me all about it… again! Don’t bother because I won’t be listening from now on, I’ll just be… thinking about… me! Maybe not trying it, deciding not to do it… again!
Thanks for listening.
Daphne’s rain was immense and abnormal; weather so adverse that individual drops of water (the size of one of her own fists) exploded mercilessly upon contact with her petite frame; her shoulders sharp; set to be coat-hanging for a lifetime.
Then at a moment; when her dry humour was her only shelter, she decided she would stand, waiting, slowly drying in her new rain; showing loyalty even beyond her understanding.
The stick, without a doubt, was unique, magical, no longer was it lost amongst the woodlands fallen, a delightfully crooked stick had tickled my fancy, held my attention without ceremony.
Waiting for me to notice it, call it to my hand; to grasp it, hold it aloft my busy dome, with childish influence.
The stick imprinted its distress and aged decay onto the palm of my soft, puffy hand; in the colours of the earth and leaf.
This staff, or a wand, some kind of weapon of my calling, or just an old warped walking stick, was to defend myself against the unknown, in shadow, as I sometimes danced staccato through woods and hedge way.
Unscathed, my unspectacular home door, now unlocked, into my actual security. I leave the stick outside, importantly, in the back garden, propping up the garage of course.
Now, somehow, my stick has gone, from too much time being forgotten, time stretched so thin, washed out, into an unnecessarily detailed painting of an adult realm, crumbled into invisibility, to earth, maybe it has travelled back to its place where I first owned it… maybe.
Earlier, you found yourself at an edge of woodland; you stood at its beginning or its end, you couldn’t begin to tell.
Impatiently, the trees blurred together, all around you, trees branches holding others that spun ever wilder, entwining into an eye-shattering carousel.
In the loop, you do not know or fear the time it takes for the motion to slow, winding down, tired, the branches let go, clumsily flicking leaves at each other, like young children; engaged in dance, then distracted, but always pure and in play.
You, look around you with your peripheral vision desensitised, you were somewhere else, just left of wherever’s’ centre; you could breathe deeply, consistently as one; with a carpet of mimicking leaves.
Now, feeling so spongy underfoot, you’re subtly falling and rising, falling and rising in exact time with your steady pulse; you were now at the heart of everything.
I cannot speak in this room, my tongue is sewn to my inner mouth like an old rolled up, tatty, old gym mat, left tied in a locked and forgotten storage room. I am now reduced to a baby regarding my quality of speech, no-one, not even myself will understand my dialect now.
Subsequently, my eyes are like CCTV cameras, tirelessly scanning people I will never know. Such resources require feeding before I again starve myself from predictable individual markets of specialised code. Right now I do not want to buy into anything, other than some much need for some personal inanimate objects, or Mother Nature’s pleasantries.
Then, surprisingly, a section of room clears, I notice someone familiar to me; they sit directly opposite as if waiting in a crowded underground station for a train that will never arrive.
Immediately, faces and limbs move blurrily around them like a meaty aura, descaling time, they somehow cut a somewhat dominant figure with a slouching posture; sitting in an otherwise frenetic sequence of scribbled picture flick images.
All the while, a hideous wallpaper pastes the background; unnaturally large and repetitive design of supposedly beautiful coloured flowers. Seemingly this Rorschach of entangled petals also emits a pungent scent from hells garden, choking our airways ever so slowly. Or, a ladies offensive perfume that loiters excessively as she struts passed on death-defying stilts with a cocktail.
Slowly the wallpapers flowers grow, entwine and weave, swallowing all that stands near it, suffocating the lost and forgotten drones that are top-heavy while on the edge of walls made from verbalised, exhaled breath; an endless wordy fever swells the room into sickness.
Then a sudden refreshingly pure breeze blows playfully, it caresses my moist cheek, my unacquainted companion acknowledges the very same, welcomed oxygen. As I raise my right hand to my drying face, I notice at precisely the same moment they do the very same, it is as unnerving as it is welcoming.
It is then we leave the room together.
The half-life – existing in Ordinary Street. In a home that’s regressing, decaying at your own apprehensive feet. The curtains, undrawn, mournful in unique shades of burnt. I continuously prolong to stand; outside, be curious, where nothing can be learnt.
All that remains is allergic and weathered, bleached by an encompassing light, a colourless nothing fading from every passers sight. The welcome gate has long since gone, dissolved by powers of apathy, crumbling everything, no longer strong.
Carried on a gust, is a child’s drawing of their favourite haunted house, daring you to walk up the path like that famous miming mouse. Someone is sealed inside their novelty box. Merely do they exist, inert, in one of their cellblocks.
This was this once the warmest family home. Mum and dad, the kids, each sitting on their styled floral throne, around the television like decent and normal folk, laughing like gas leaks at dad’s latest bad joke.
If you care too much now, then you are very strange. You can’t spare the spare time and so creeps something random, unimportant, and you’ll be fine, so walk on regardless in your very British sunshine.
Dry twinkling grains
Soft sucking imprints
Moulding
Swallowing spaces
Between your toes
Temporary still
Of someone’s moment
Until erased
By unempathetic sea
A liquid giant
Sand pushing machine
Of Its own arcade
No coin-op
I Eat Let.ers 