Autodidact

I went to the bottle; I went to the mirror – the bottle reflected while the mirror just stared.
The bottle remarked on how good I was looking
“What you looking at?” I asked the mirror thus encouraged
“I could ask you the same question” replied the mirror quicksilver fleet.
“Questions, questions, what am I to believe when nobody answers my questions?”
See, that’s the problem with this paradise: you don’t get to ask questions; you’re handed a robe and expected to dance.
So I danced and I danced, danced myself into a coma, a coda, into a trance, now my strings are all twisted and my robe tattered and torn, in attempts to reach beyond the puppeteer’s dream, a sinister silhouette behind silicone screen.
I skipped the joint – out past bouncer Pete joint in hand and landing firmly on my feet, I wobbled off home down Atheist Street.
So here is a list of implements and impediments; poses and parentheses the better to prepare your imminent escape:

• Lock picks constructed from hair and bone (self absorption means you’re never alone) fiddling the tumblers and tapping the phone.
• Hook handed haloes to stitch and unstitch the seams of your palms; lower the presses your fingers to print.
• Tank-top tiaras with high velocity tirades of trailer trash taunts tantalisingly trite.
• Tongue-tied shoes all laced with stitch kisses, like lines from the book of reason and guttural rhyme.
• Thirty nine lashes on the eyelid of dawn, the better to filter the rage and the scorn.
• The last match from a box of arranged marriages, eaten in a desperate attempt to ignite.
• The first noun in the dictionary of dangerous words.
• A bar of soap-opera morality with which to wash out your filthy mouth.
• Black hole sunbeams for the tan of a lifetime; skin peeled back to reveal all your teeth to the slaver; to curve your spine for a carnivorous cadaver.
• Eye teeth glasses to magnify that extra bite of the cherry-picked cheese-cake, pickled in pockets of porcelain pride.
• The eye of the beholder through the keyhole of time – warped and deluded into towing the line.

The mirror obscures with a veil of mist from the spluttering tap tip-topping the sink, and the bottle bemoans itself a dead marine, calling out simper fi ! to its brothers in arms that lurk in the fridge all fickle and foam – a reflection indeed of the road back home.

The photo above is a visual tribute to Leonard Cohen, referencing the cover of his Greatest Hits album.
Sagittarius took this photo of me (looking less elegant than Mr Cohen) in the lobby of the Copthorne Hotel in Wellington, New Zealand last year.