So it proceeded in text. It is a strange notion that ‘distance’
separates. In many cases, like the train pulled away, the space suddenly
expands, whereas people are meant to be ‘close’ when they stagger and gaggle
around supermarkets with plastic bags strung on their arms.
He watched the train move off, slide round the slight bend
and out of the town, like the brightly
coloured capsules he attempted to force down his throat every morning. There was
still the taste of acid in his mouth and a flickering under the skin as if it had
been sewn with a series of weights. It was 8.30pm. She had left him with a
lingering kind of ultimatum, flavoured with uncertainty, desperation. She hadn’t
trusted her tongue and instead stood biting her lips and locking her nails into
her palms. He remembered the strange clicking convulsions as she then moved her
hands over her face, as if jointed like a mannequin.
But the body is the mechanised, the mind can be even crushed
into being mechanical. The mechanism told him
to scratch an seethe and seep
with anger; bubbling in his blood as he headed home. In reality, it was grief which
grew on the keyboard, alternately stabbing
and caressing the computer keys . Working upon the mechanical like a resuscitation
for revenge.
She had caught the train, just aster 8pm, as expected. ‘Caught’
seems a strange phrase to apply, in hindsight – for she had no control, no
dominance. She herself was caught, caught in the routine referred to as a ‘commute’,
a respect for what was sensible. Caught like a rabbit strung and kicking on a
barbed wire fence, metal grating against the flesh. He could see it flickering back into her eyes
as she stepped from platform to carriage, the impression of her skull still stinging
against his sternum – in that way they had been reduced to bone.
The page when he reached home was like bone – a white so typically dirtied by flesh.
It stung his eyes as he stared at the computer screen in those moments before
going to type.
This was what made him write.
Why do we say goodnight
Is it an announcement or assurance
That someone will count
Ourselves in their thoughts
Although fruitless.
Can we ever bear
The common unconsciousness?
Replaced with farmyard animals, pills, and computers
We sleep now in overcrowded cafes
And the days excuses,
Night offers the truth
We conventionality hide
And wonder which part, will be there design
