Certain Dreams

The new day was ushered in like a keg of flies. Someone stood on the veneer looking important, their hand over the brows of their eyes, their eyes shining like a bell pepper. It was a long time since feeling afraid hadn’t been average, and a longer time since self-doubt hadn’t meant something to the somebody it was belonging to. We were angry all the time, felt the world had betrayed us and left us slaughtered before itself in the shrub wobbling work sorrels each kneeling to the wind, like everybody else the tattered backs of their eyeball-queries unnameable, unamendable and dreary from those sepia baby-bulges down to the blackened hooves.

I for one stood at work with cupped hands wearing apron strings and going out the back to smoke malnourished cigarettes in the purchase of my changing face. The face changes the more that time barters for you, until it buys you and you are one of its frames. I dusted off the great green business-grade recycling bins and pulled the blue ones into shade when the sun came so there would be no stench. The surrounding houses were all in a row, I could look in; a mantlepiece drawn by vague pencil, the rowed photographs pensively made of shadow. It was an amazing grace I lived under – and you lived under – and the world ached like a dove swilled in the blown-up cheeks of moonlight holding its breath, above carnage above peaceful constabulary above corrugated storerooms and baby-lit industrial estates. There were roads and then there were more roads, family visits and friendships, things that came and things that went; like bodies, like coral, like magnesium in the muscles when we’re bathing. It was the way that as a child I never thought it would be; mundane repetition I’d fallen to, just another life, played out like any life, that up until then – until it happened, until it was far, far behind me – I had thought would be different when it came to me.

Sometimes I went to the beach to look at the retarded water crashing, the waves pulling off and on the cornered resting of the shore. I would stand there smoking again and think of unreachable things, unsolvable things, things that didn’t need to quantify belonging; like seagulls or the way rain fell passed a person’s grave in torchlight. Everything was dated, sometimes it was named. I would not have eaten all day and for several hours there would be nothing but the taste of mint, then in some way I would fall asleep.