My Garden.
Here I sit with my world in front of me,
my regrets immediately known
and my aspirations known to be regrettably unattainable.
Distant flecks of pin-point irridescence,
create a splotchy, diseased-looking table cloth
that seems to fill my eyes, until it’s all I can see
from horizon to horizon.
I watch the frozen march of purples, greens and gold’s
and the sudden sprouting of trees and weeds of reds, blues and whites.
A single black rose grows gracefully in the middle of my motley garden,
it’s twisted and bent thorns as soft as clouds.
A small white raft bobs on the surface of a stagnant pool,
filled with the lifeless carcasses of innumerable dead growths
and life-forms,
my face grinning plastically at me
from it’s chipped and weather worn deck,
it’s oars having long ago been taken prisoner
by the ghosts of the dead
within it’s graveyard waters.
No breeze blows and my eyes flick back in my head,
to supervise that single bead of sweat
that trickles down my back, only to lose control
and let it be swallowed up by the mud brown wool of my sweater.
The gum in my mouth, having long ago lost it’s flavour,
continues to be chewed
like some mystical knowledge-giving cud,
with I as the placid, knowledge-seeking cow
that chews it in that dementedly empty-headed fashion.
Leaning forward I try and blow away the niggling little ants
that crawl all over my cracked, stone sundial,
their little black bodies blocking it from heaven’s light.
I squash a few by lowering my left, boot-shod foot onto them
and wonder that to die in such a manner would probably be like
having the sky dropped on you,
while wearing a suit of full, plate-mail armour.
Fiddling with the silver snake around my neck,
I wonder if such a thing as
‘escaping to the world within’
is really possible.
What if there IS no world within?
What if there is no WITHIN?
Stumbling over a pretty marble tile that has cracked and heaved upwards,
due to the incessant push of life beneath,
I pause to reminisce.
The sudden storm clouds that boil overhead warn me
and I pick myself up,
dust myself down,
open my eyes
and...
