Afternoon Blues

Everyone's thrusting their fake happiness in my face, and you'd think I'm something to be mocked, accustomed to the smiles for show, accustomed to the suffering of continuing when all I want to do is sleep off the feeling of not being worthy. I look ill wearing it. Staring at blue storms as they lighten the motionless sky obfuscating as I wash up on shores and exit monstrous seas with the same lifeless look I wore yesterday.

In a chain groove by saltboxes I hear those weather birds singing. A thrush has cracked a chestnut and a shock of colour pops from the plush stores in the retail park. I see greens and sandy browns and pavements, and I take in the vibrating drone of industrial noises, the rush of morning traffic on the motorway to my right. The key is in the ignition. The flame of life is burning away in the ocean of my heart, as if it's Jesus hanging on that tesseract, by the bay of Portlligat.

Light bursts through an oculus similar to a blistery gust or sunbeams biting a glass pyramid, and my eyes peel open at the howl of an Alaskan Malamute. Snowdrops on tenterhooks. Focused on two things at once. I left my fruit-filled brain and my cinema of memories in the anchor tenant, in the depth of those muddy waters. I had been thinking about bartenders and drug dealers, in a hotel in Paris overlooking the Tuileries Garden. I seen the ghost of Rembrandt fanning himself with a palm branch in some overgrown and enchanted woodland.

The bells of silverware, crushed English porcelain, reminded me of the skeleton of a Deco ocean liner, attached to the taste of rain, identical to biofilm of tile grout, and how my life has never been ordinary or simple or successful, but rather brimming with episodic madness, disappointment and failure. At Drumpellier or Motherwell, rotating on the corkscrew at a wild speed, bracing myself for the Immelmann turn after the first loop, at an angle. Together we are parallel hulls of equal size, having outworn the night. I'm forgetful, but I've realised all the wrong things I've done. Went around the world, Gipsy Moth. Ended up at Cardowan Moss. In aisles of Bacardi rum, in lush waters, blue tears on feather pillows. 

Mountain waterfalls are flowing south into an opening. Into a thick black mass. In Wencelas square. 'Our horizon is never quite at our elbows', I read in the chapter entitled solitude in Thoreau's Walden. It was a cold whistle breezing past, something I needed to hear. All I want to see is the celestial sphere when it's blue, but it's shiny and white with a salvo of words. I possess them in a storm. Lopsided and seldom happy. By churches and factories. I buried my pride in a trance.

The parasite of blood money is feeding from my earth, in a town of pills, eating plastic food. I don't talk about things like summer. I don't talk about things like fortune cookies. When we came face to face and everything around us was red, all the flowers were dead, I seen him as a mirror. I would go to him on that isolated hill, whenever I went to find solace, whenever I went to the lake to breathe in the freshest air, away from the pollution of the city. Ruminating about how I woke up from a dream cold in the night where I left my worries at the doorstep of your cola. 

I will ride or die. Diving into portals into inconceivable gardens. I wash myself in hydrants. Wash the hoof of the horse, wash away the gasoline. When we broke into the school where I received my primary education, after the building was scheduled to be demolished, and we were trapped by the force of the blaze, and I had to escape from the two storey complex from a broken window by sliding down a hose embedded with shards of glass - cutting my hands but not scarring them - I had never been more on the edge of life, other than those times I would visit Auchenlea, or when we would go on those long dog walks to find mushrooms in the woods at the back end of my old town. Thinking back to those tides of anxiety I can smell the petroleum resembling 70 Virginis in my mind. A portrait of youth. His persiflage, his sarcastic remarks about my fears. Steadily climbing through. On the moors, I would set fire to tussocks.

Cemented in a feeling of beginning again. All those afternoons are vanishing. The last child in me is fading. I've laughed so much my ribs hurt, and I still have the proclivity to think these absurdities. Moving around landscapes, looking for gems in them. When the sun is going down, when the mirror falls and breaks into pieces, this growing infatuation skyrockets into a tiger forest. Too far into something too good, tantamount to Heaven. I have made my own little Arcadia and I'm playing in it. Dreaming of men. 4 a.m. dreaming. 

Gel rubs against the retina and the vitreous pulls away. A quiet rolling in the air lands in the deep of the sway and tugs at my 28 inch waist. I thought it was a sylph or the Eye of Providence. Blueberries in front of me. I cleared the magazines from the table. When I have sussed out the secrets of the night according to Ali Baba, when the chariot's fire has died out and the shoe no longer fits, when I've plunged to a new low, I will rise like Pegasus. Shadows in between the orange trees. The light is ahead. Turning things around, turning myself inside out.