Two O’ Clock On A Saturday Afternoon

At two o’ clock on a Saturday afternoon the world is alive with activity.  People are out: thriving, creating, learning, building; relishing life, forming relationships and refining talents.

But not me.  Here in my bedroom at two o’ clock on a Saturday afternoon I lie in my bed.  My body is healthy.  It works perfectly.  And oh how I hate it’s good working order.  For my mind is a sullied wasteland; a pitiful, putrefying clutter of dead thoughts.  My soul, or whatever you want to call it, is covered with slime and I lay still as the last pocket of air leaves my sagging lungs.  A dull white light from the grey, leaden sky causes all the colours in my room to fade and a drabness pervades everything my tired rolling eyes survey.  My body begins to decay at rapid pace.  First yellow then swathes of brilliant green, rotting flesh.  I am a corpse, stiff and brittle, but my dead thoughts are awake and lumber through the graveyard of my mind like stalking zombies.  If only they too, like my body, could rot away into thoughtlessness that I might finally perish–then perhaps these lines might lead somewhere…

Outside the world is ripe and the people of the world are possessed with a spirit of industry; of energy; of eager busyness.  Husbands and wives, parents and children, the young and the old are pulsing with a living beat.  But not I, no not me.  Not at two o’ clock on a Saturday afternoon.

 

The Bastard Child

I am the bastard child of better thoughts.  Hunted for my skin I am fair game.  Slow.  Wallowing.  Unwieldy in my dreary fatness.

There burns ahead that wretched, stinking pile that were all of my ideas.  The algorithm of my failure.

Destined.  Codified to be forever dwarfed by others … of whom, like indistinguishable droplets of water there are too many and countless more.  Legions in whose hands are fashioned things of such great beauty that I can hardly stand to breathe with them the same air or share with them the name human.  They who by their greatness make themselves like gods over men like me.

Damned to never think a thought not already crystallized in other minds superior and supple.  Those with whom I run a race of which I am not least the last but never once the winner.

 

Modern Man

Foaming with self-belief, feverish with optimism … of such is modern man.  Champion of delusion, nauseous around pessimism, worshiper of untruths, fly-tipper of recycled imagination – he sets his own bar lower than his nightmares dare to dream … pickpocketer of lazy thoughts from lazy thinkers, numb to suffering, sensitive to offence, ready to protest now and learn later – demagogue of fun, harbinger of good news, swimmer of shallow pools, vanguard of mediocrity, endlessly parroting lines of no meaning, merciless in competition, gushing over the right kind of injustice, the “injustice of the week”, easily disgusted, insulted by logic, indifferent to evidence, caretaker of fantasy, and President of Death.

 

Notes

I claim no authorship or ownership of the picture above