Her hair aflame in the open window current
She longs for a childhood without weight
She watches him in profile
He’s older than he looks
She pretends, just for a while
That she has the courage to engage
She longs for a life without wait
Her hair aflame in the open window current
I press my hands between my knees, for fear my thoughts fly free; describing heartbeat’s rise and fall; paint my name upon the wall.
On knees I rest bisected chin, smile a smile, a cheapskate grin. My life could press between these pages – open, fold, cardboard stages.
I free my hands 'tween porcelain thighs; canvas stretched to expose details - a touch-up job on azure skies.
Ill adept and pistol-whipped, I rushed toward the prize, scratching itch and war-wound glitch, the walls imbed with nails.
I fly my hand across my face to break the tension surface, hoping yet to taste the wind, the flowers that unearth us.
I dip into the great divide between the day and the daylight; while up above the tree-line sky where needle threads the camel’s eye, wings the thought that no-one bought: I am cyclops sans an eye.
The moon is the fulcrum
About which I revolve
One constant landmark
In the night bus window view
My words without receipt
Emit no music
They are:
- No carrier for a moral
- No words to the wise
But intent on the cockle
Of your waiting ear
A virus to spread
The sun is the pivot
About which we all swing
The seasons rearrange
The yesterdays we idly consign
To pixels on an electronic page
Dependant on so small a thought: It’s working now unnoticed Why should it stop working?
I am the centre of what I know
A seemingly stable atom
In an unstable concept
I am dust on the face of time
Shouting as loud as I can
The title for this piece of mindfuck is spoken by the Cherokee lift/elevator attendant to Albert Einstein (who has just had the general theory of relativity explained to him by Marilyn Monroe) in Nicolas Roeg's "Insignificance"
Einstein responds by professing his understanding of the Cherokee belief that wherever you are, there too is the centre of the universe
Iskandor watched me constantly; her eyes black pebbles in the dark of her face; catching my every movement like a cat.
But she was purposefully gentle; not soft in any way.
Her features, while human in essence, were slightly off the norm; not quite like anyone I’d ever seen. Despite this, she was human; human to the extent that I did not even question my assertion that she was a woman.
You have to ask yourself what the odds are of two species evolving separately to such a similar result? Granted, she had an extra finger on each hand but, in the infinite variety of options, that hardly constitutes variety.
Periodically she would talk to me, her brow creased by my inability to respond to what it was she was saying, the words clicked from her mouth and echoed in the creek, spent capsules of useless information - I imagined that her questions ran the gambit from “What are you?” to “Where the fuck did you come from?”
I’ll admit that the thought crossed my mind once or twice that I may appear to be some sort of god to her; perhaps some prophecy fulfilled – that could have been an interesting trip – unfortunately it appears that the truth was, as it often is, contrary to popular belief.
I sit at the bottom of the garden with the cat circling my ankles and enticing me to pay her attention. A pair of robins let out a steady stream of clicking calls from positions on either side of me; perhaps warning all around of our presence. The cat keeps an eye on them (and me), rolling in the dirt exposed by the attempts of Sagittarius and I to return the garden to some sort of natural state (or at least a state pleasing to the eye).
I was struck by the relationships between us; robins, cat and I; trying to avoid imagining some sort of hierarchy; trying to see the world from the perspective of the robins. The cat eyes me again, then climbs the tree to eye the robins out.
Life is a dangerous experience, dependant on specialist skills to stay ahead of the tooth and claw.
For the robins those skills are, for the most part, defensive: a ultra-high heart rate and a short life; for the cat, predatory psychopathy and a fine-tuned body; for us (the dominant species) our abilities to construct weapons.
Killing weapons yes, but also weapons of mass domestication: cows and cats and dogs and horses…
weapons of control and of creative energy; weapons of persuasion and weapons of placation.
We make ourselves safe.
Look how safe we are; safe from the few wild animals we have not killed; safe from…
Safe from dying on the motorway?
Safe from the dangers of the natural world?
The robins change positions between trees and fence, keeping on opposite sides of cat and I. The cat, not hungry, gives up on a lost cause. I return to the safety of the house.
