10/07/2009

You take my hand - want to take me

Away from all this.

A holiday in the cool, clear night.

One night of life.

One night of innocence.

Please, just one, you whisper.

And I'm caught on the tail of your comet,

Running, flying,

Past the river, the waterwheel,

The damn fairground that has haunted me

(Not for tonight, forget it, forget it)

'Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches,'

Then stop.

Panting.

Holding hands.

The wood is beyond us, just beyond.

The other dreamers laugh and sing,

Each with their dream companion.

The bonfire crackles and glows.

We smell of smoke, of rain and leaves and of the night,

You and I.

Childlike in half-sleep I think,

If you were real, we would be friends like this.

(From the sublime to the ridiculous...)

One dwarf says, 'I say, I say, I say. When's Snow White not Snow White?'

The other dwarf says, 'I don't know. When is Snow White not Snow White?'

The first dwarf says, 'After we're through with her.'

I saw it on the news. Heard it whispered on the lips of the wounded and the coughing and the beggars that thronged at the hospital. EPIDEMIC, they said. First your values disintegrate, then your mind. Your body follows. Your paint starts to peel away and underneath you'll find you're all Dorian Gray. I fled the hospital and the plantlike, creeping fingers of the infected and the too-down-to-care that clawed at my clothes.

In the green-tinted streets, people lolled, in embraces, in fights, lazily dangerous. More parasite than predator. They looked wrong.

I felt wrong.

Drunk with something.

Perhaps this is the beginning.

I lurched into a house whose doors swung wide on their hinges. Two green-faced sisters lay abed in the stinking slough of rubbish strewing the floor. They beckoned me with stubby fingers and toothless smiles. Then their mother came by with a black sack for the rubbish.

I went in there instead.

You've had her a long time.

Longer than me.

I can't say I admire her mind.

But you say she's just an escape, anyway.

Her silence, perhaps,

Is half her charm.

It's the one thing she can do that I can't

(Except for bending her knees backwards,

But why would I want to do that?

- Oh. I see.)

You know what?

If you love her, I love her.

Let's have her round for tea

And perhaps come to some arrangement,

You, she, and me.