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.
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
A meeting of words a tap of the keys our digitized selves trapped in the looking glass blue light eating our souls divulging our secrets into the systems eyes never alone but always feeling so or wishing you were trying to paint over the cracks too many years to blink away the waste lest the powers that be might sample our misery and find they like the taste
Breath was drawn leaving outlines of a life but it occurred to me as I fought my own chronology time is a murderer accumulating the lost and so I wondered why I was hurrying when he will get me anyway and so I drew another breath softer on the outline much easier to erase
I don’t need an umbrella walking through this pseudo forest as the leaves lose their leathery coating blushing red as they blunder as if embarrassed by their fall the elves of autumn cleaning the trees while the doves coo and woo and the Jays covet a squirrels cache of acorns and I, just a small part of the picture walk and tumble through pondering on the permanence of our damage done like a tattoo on the landscape while trying to find a place non human to dispose of my civility a wry smile hidden by a mane of hair as I recognise I’m so much more at peace without that polite formal mimicry.