A Burning Foot

  When the smiling couple left the young boy with a crumpled hundred-rupee note in his hand, he swore under my breath in English, and then in Nepalese cursed a rain of rabid monkeys upon them.  Nothing happened, not one of the scraggly, golden furred louts made a single malicious move towards the young lovers.  They just continued to laze in the sun, licking their testicles and eating the scraps thrown to them by the people who saw this country as one huge zoo.  Today’s exhibit, Swayanabath: known for the plague of monkeys who maraud around it like false deities.  The boy had once seen a fat man feed an entire chocolate bar to one of them; its eyes had been bloodshot and bulging.  It had looked mangy in its faltering, decimated coat.  It was easy to see that the monkey was going be dead from disease by the morning, but that wouldn’t have shown in the photo taken by the fat mans fat wife, sweating and smiling in the high humidity of Nepal.  That chocolate bar had been three times the value of the dirty note the boy now clutched. 

Derek

Derek thought he could fly, he truly believed that if he was completely committed, both mentally to the act and physically to the action then he would be able to fly.  There could be no doubt.  Frequent failed attempts from trees and walls and lower storey windows had left Derek with bruises, sprains and the occasional broken bones.  These failures did not however discourage him from his self created destiny; to achieve naturally (mentally if not physically) propelled aviation.  While his actions may suggest otherwise Derek was not a stupid character, he was not merely a crazy person throwing himself from differing heights in the vain hope that some miracle would take place.  He was in fact acting under the calculated certainty of belief.  His failures thus far were merely demonstrations of a flaw in that belief, a flaw which he intended to fix so he could subsequently explore the dizzying heights which, for him: master of the skies, would know no bounds.

 

Futures Thoughts

I look at the world and think;

Do I want to turn the wheel,

Or plough and work the soil,

Or simply sit and hammer steel,

I could fight or flee or toil,

Yet all I think to do is think.

But why do I fill my mind?

Why do I blister my hand?

Where is The answer I can never find?

Then consider the folly of thinking,

We are caught in a system,

I’m trapped and I’m sinking,

That wheel is being turned,

I can hear the steel clinking.

My mind has grown roots

In the very soil that I have dug,

Security, comfort, warmth,

Daily grind is a welcome hug.

I need to break free,

To step into the torrent,

To open my eyes and see.

I know I could fall,

But I could climb so high,

I won’t be dead and buried,

Before the day I die.

So I look at my life and think,

The steel will always clink,

The wheel will always turn,

But the fire that is my life,

Will someday cease to burn.

 

I want to live and love and learn and lust,

I want to toil and turn and teach and trust.

 

All this because I think,

And so I must.

The Strength of Africa

Dedicated to Joanne Mackin

Daisy’s heart belonged to Africa.  Rayn had it on loan and was holding tight for the time being but deep down he knew her heart belonged to Africa.  Africa called to her, there was no love nor compassion, not in the way he felt love and compassion.  There was just a deep conviction that she had shared her body with a person of its land, had opened her mind to its rhythm  and therefore had claim to her heart.  Her body, her life, her love belonged to Africa and she was punished in her absence.

*

So much mist swirling around the mountainside, parting only to expose the mass of trees which clung confidently to the slopes.  Surely, with such conditions, there must be gorillas.  If not I am shocked and vow to travel to Africa and inform the hairy inhabitants of countries to the North with better economies and less disease.  They would have to bring their own bananas but small sacrifice, I would tell them, for the grandeur of an Alpine life.  I suppose I would have to first consult the cows I have seen grazing on the lower slopes.  I am sure they wouldn’t mind.

The cows contradict me, telling me I am foolish.  That I can offer all the benefits in the world, replicate the conditions to perfection and still it would never be Africa.

I fear they are right.

Spiders in the Coffee

Spiders in the Coffee

Message in the apathy

Feed it to the inlaws

Gonna get her pregnant

Child labour chores

Clean the fucking spiders

Where’s the coffee bean?

Tainted by the spiders

Dirty thieving bastards

Stealing all the money

Need to feed my children

Spiders in the coffee.

The Wolf and I

I try so hard to think like a Wolf, to live for the here and now, to let the repercussions of the future waft past my mind as I feel the wind flow through my hair, my fur.  As I run in the forest, I pant misty breath, I breathe passion.  I am free.  But I am not a Wolf, I feel guilt, I feel illicit desire.  I dream.  I dream of the sparks and play with naked fire.  This means I am not a Wolf and this means that life is not simple.  I love a woman, this is normal, what is not normal is the way in which my life somehow resembles the phoney articles found on the problem pages of tacky magazines.  There are two concerns to this chaotic life; one is the guilt I feel over the dark ignorance in which I keep her.  I claim to love her and yet I steel her autonomy for the sole and selfish reason that I know where her self determination would take her if she knew the truth, if she knew where the Wolf in me had been running.  The second and important issue is that while I can deal with this guilt the respective co-existing cause can not.  She makes a triangle in which we are all friends and lovers, what prevents the completion of this trilogy is a final thread of physical bi-sexual love.  I do not know if it would be any easier if this final link existed, neither do I desire it.  So while she is happy to love and live a sordid life in which we share the breath of passion besides the moonlit pool, when this moon returns to its cosmic darkness our lies transform, our lives reform and we live the false existence of reality.  The chaotic tangle of confused emotions and self deception, the crystal clarity of my Wolf is lost and therefore so am I, I am trapped between Wolf and man, I am trapped in the reality of what is and can be.  I empathise with the myth and howl for his begotten soul.

*

Taking a Taxi

A small man arrived, I use small as a base description for his arms defied this, one could see his hands, slightly curled, hanging somewhere by his knees in orangutan mimicry.  He seemed cheerful enough.  We clambered into his 1978 Toyota Carolla and watched, enthralled, as he slouched with infinite ease behind the drivers wheel.  He had to hunch his head, not so that he would fit, for as I have already mentioned he was a short man.  No, I think it was merely to enable his shoulders to rise, like a counterbalance, into action.

He steered with his forearms.  Hands, beyond the reach of the padded wheel, hanging with bent fingers.  In my mind I could hear them crying for a banana from their silent clutch, so strong was this feeling that I wanted to call stop and purchase him one from a local stall, just so I could see those dexterous fingers peel away, with primate precision, the sturdy yellow skin.  I could not however imagine how, with the standard amount of joints, he would present his mouth with the pale fruit inside.

In a pondering fashion he drove and I thought.

We crashed and I was not surprised, but even if I had been it would not have lasted long for I lost consciousness, and therefore thought, as I lay on the road.  My last vision was the slowly dulling eyes of a large cow; we were sprawled like lovers on black sheets and I remember thinking,

“We are both victims in this. I of my careless long armed driver and you of God; what pray is the point of being sacred if you die so needlessly.  Surely a degree of divine protection is owed?”

“Rest easy”, I breathed and blacked out.

*

GUM

I have a higher connectivity with my body than most; a greater sense of what it needs; how it works; and how mind and body can mutually benefit each other.  This doesn’t make me a better person in a righteous sense but as a human exhibit I exist on a higher level.  Examples include rapid self healing (occasionally through mind control), enhanced awareness of  bodily needs and a greater ability to exist in extreme environments.

All this meant and means nothing when it comes to my genitals – no amount of mind-mastery has helped establish any degree of control over my penis and while this may be an issue of sex (in every sense) it was and is a crack in my self-belief.