Ephemeral Keen.
The window is turning blue as the bed rises to meet me, a voice not my own, awakens, I sleep. The rain, it beats an amber torpor on the rust tin roof, through a pair of courting streetlamps. A mating call of beating moths pairing cries of slipping tyres on distant tarmacced road. Nothing, nothing in this room, not thought nor inclination.
Arise, a few unmuffled murmered yawns, a longing for right-sided walls now painted in much hazed hues. Lanky lovers spent of light, on blanket grass of misted sweat and cloudless sky, now hollow stared in murky, grey-glassed eyes.
I peel my feet and meeting back, wit all now frozen roads, other flowers dawn, with work in mind, like friends, unlike in kind.
''Good morning!'', a sleeping faceless head calls out into the world.
''It's a fine one, all good, I say'', I release the words with perfect feint.
The sun flickers between the branches, imprisoned by uniform trees, superior and anchored low. That too familiar building pushes towards the sky, all windows and doors. Swallowed by the wooden teeth of a concrete monster. Reloined with all the other morsels. The manager, a beaming grin in legs of breeches, with anger in hidden and unseen measure.
A clock, I exchange my name for numbers, and hours for currency. All speech here is false, and thought is truth corrupted. A library of glowing boxes, humming fans, darkened brows and silent heartbeats. A thousand dancing cockroaches scuttle across a plastic floor, all tic-tac motion.
Redressed through beating fans tastes like something dry and dead. Mirrors wearing shirts and trousers, mimics with new shining shoes. A short bell rings and with such form we move as if our feet had made the sound and now we must consume.
The lunch room, a broadway show slowed down to stopping and all the perfect players. The boss, pre-emptive, already sitting and now is almost done, to get back now and ring the bell that would torture all but one. The solemn shuffle is not enough like sleep to satisfy well-rested, tired minds. Everything is fixed in place, unmoving. Here, we are things making things, we are the gods of drumming, dreadful boredom, the fools that follow fools who beat the breast of long-dead repeating charters. This is what must be done for doing sake to breathe and feel the warmth of night, earning paper not fit for burning nor recording life.
Return, a place that might be home, comfort is a book I could only read if I were there. The wind, it seems, is cousined rain, and only night reunion. Teasing leaves now taste the rain like mouthless tongues and swaying. Trees and soil embrace, and torn away, but briefly, by lowing, screeching gales. Sweeping headlights burn the raindrops as they rendezvous with painted steel. The fire plays a bedouin dance, yet it suffuse no room of mine.
The outside glazing of the window was broken through by a perfect stone. The space between now wombed with bright cocoons, luckless broken butterflies. To awaken exercising wings, only to be trapped by them. To think new freedom handicapped the wearer. If liberty is the leaving of a warm embrace, then mother, I have known you. These ephemeral keen creatures...I will release you in the morning.
A poem written like a short story is all.(did anyone see the white stripes reference?)