December 2nd
It was our houses that were the aliens
we became the invasions
and I am no less guilty
needing these things as much
as any man if not more
lest the cold get to my troubled heart
the birds sing of things we couldn’t
we’re animals lost in communication
in which we still have no translation
1st December
In the woods
grounded in rugged boots
stripped from our alienation
we stand
in communion with the others
their tails waving and teeth chattering
and beaks opening trailing out winters breath
Bills drilling, tongues rolling
snapping up a woodpeckers delight
nothing is quite the same
once you realise
even dead trees are teeming with life
No one is free I thought
the wings of truth split
into papers
cogs in the engine
shredding that to which we bear witness
turning what we knew
into something shiny and new
to fill this emptiness
Sunday morning lie-ins
our only day in which we don’t have to strive
and I thought this, this is the price
people think they have to pay
for freedom
and so I ask
What is freedom anyway?
But some elusive dream we’re free to chase?
Shh…
Wipe over the dissonance in turquoise
to rid us of this tension
Shh…
Release us from this and into Eden
stay easy with your breath now
No one is the one
but one part of the whole
Shh…
Silence speaks volumes
our alienation seeking absence
The roots of us holding onto this earth
seeking solace in natures theme of rebirth
From a distance, it looked like a forest but upon closer inspection, you came to rows and rows of houses that became known as the tree houses not because they were the old traditional treehouses of old, but for their mimicry with their green pointed roofs.
Some people claimed the place is beautiful but I have to politely disagree. Though politeness may get me nowhere when the truth was so ugly.
Perhaps I should have pushed harder, derailed them from their illusions of utopia.
The roofs were plastic green and not a bird was in sight, the water that surrounded these damnable houses did not contain fish. There was no wildlife to be seen, and the doors of the house opened up like the mouths of monsters consuming all tenants who moved into them.
Many a house was haunted, not with the imagined ghosts but with the debris of collected psyches. The human form of the tenants may have left the houses but they were never the same, the houses had consumed them from within. The houses were tyrants and no one left them upon their own whim, they could only leave when the houses spat them out.
In one such house, an empty chair rocked, animated by a previous tenants anxieties.
Pictures hung in jaunty angles on the walls and the eyes of previous paranoid tenants peered through from behind the frame, though those men had left, their eyes never would.
The stairs creaked as you stumbled up them, or so it seemed. But that creaking sound was not the faux wooden floorboards, it was the sound of a madman. His essence, his humanity had been absorbed into the walls and his many cries and voices spoke for the house.
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My breath trailed out before me as light as a feather
and a breeze blew through the enchanted forest
and spread the richness of autumns gold
like a clue enlightening desire paths
scented with that nutty earth aroma of a seasons transition
in which storms are brewed
just a stone’s throw away
from empty streets
and bounties becoming few
A teacup awaiting winters brew
There was an orange glow beyond the pier, not a sunset but the apocalyptic glow of a world on fire.
The sea was fierce with the guts of humanities creative psyche, a plastic bottle rolling on the waves as if it was meant for the sea as much as the fishes swimming beneath it.
And with that thought, I swam up to the sky and as a God, I looked down and on closer inspection, I saw a fish in the bottle frantically thrashing. The bottle went along with the tide, and the fish swished and thrashed the water inside the bottle into a froth before it died of exhaustion and suffocation.
And then came up a whale with a gigantic splash creating its own menacing tide and gobbling up the plastic waste with the fish rotting and decaying inside.
I jumped down from the clouds and back onto the pier, jumping from the pier, I landed on a wooden post, balancing as if I was surfing a tidal wave before jumping to the post in front of it and then the next post till I reached the one that only just breached the surface of the ocean. My feet submerged under the blue.
Darkness descending but the orange glow in the distance remained and I was alone but for the plastic swimming in the tide.
From here it seemed I and the plastic tide were the only vestiges left of the great ape the Homosapien.
Stepping off the post into the deep, I swam and swam deeper and deeper into the sea until a gigantic plastic bottle jumped out of the water as if a whale and swallowed me whole.
My hands up against the transparent plastic, I prodded, thumped and I screamed till another even bigger bottle consumed the bottle and I and slowly as each bottle consumed one another the transparency waned till I could see nothing but the plastic that contained me.
I thrashed and thrashed and splashed and splashed just as the fish did, my body frantically hitting the sides of the plastic.
The water frothed at the storm I had raged, and then my exhausted body curled and resigned itself to its fate.
The final thing I heard was the plastic carrier bag rustle as it entombed the plastic bottles and I.
They laughed me out of my own body
they laughed me out of my mind
they pecked and pecked
and gobbled up all the parts of me
that left myself behind
They lit up and smoked me down
the butt of jokes fizzled out in ashtrays
poured down the drain
and through all this they bonded
a pack of wolves with their prey
tearing me apart piece by piece
and now the people stare at me
‘why can’t he be more like me?’
Because I am the decay
the left overs
from a feast
the skeleton of prey
I can’t bend into the shapes
the machine wants me to be
and I’m always coming back to this place
a conclusion
I am not strong enough
for the world, I am in
All the equations add up to this
ever trapped in what and who I am
and between what the world wants to see
the things reflected back to me
the reflections of all the types of men
I ought to be
Meditation teaches us to breathe and be
but breathing is the least of your worries
when you’re feeling like me
and I can only really breathe
when I’m safe from change and stress
so really I learn nothing
and all of this is just a waste of breath
I often wonder what relief it would have been
to have been left to die when I was a baby
instead of still learning how to fucking breathe.
I see the world ahead of me
and I don’t want to be a part of it
but the machine wants me
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