I was listening to a sad song on the radio and my mind began wandering...
I think I must go further now into this where my eyes become dark as I stare into where my heroes died their deaths being what they were, long ago, in amongst the countless swaying branches of their lives as they lived them, and died them, and in every final moment to put forward their best, to say, this is as far as we got to, you take it on from here.
I tried to make a sword out of that unknown then, to pursue it into all the drunken moments that came to rumble along the tracks and lend influence to my indifference where credence was not an issue, and maybe poke it in the eye.
Yeah, you guessed it, naive, with a touch of claustrophobia, and a little bit of devil tucked away like, for when the times get tough.
I just had to turn on the radio to hear the alternative views on all this, when I heard music coming from somewhere else, and so said to the crew: dance.
They picked up their feet pretty quick and gave a lively performance until their beards grew long, and then off they went to do something else. So much for the crew, I thought.
I was kind of, still here, with all those things a modern nomad has to live with.
Don’t worry, there’s a cure for that, said the voice of the little man.
When I looked around to see who’d said this I saw no one at all, and wondered out loud: are you god?
No, I’m just the other side of your mind, it said.
Well then, I would be enlightened to hear it, I said.
Close your eyes.
But they’ve been closed for a very long time already.
Then, open them.
Oh please do make up your mind; which is it to be, open my eyes, or close them?
The door is always open; it is up to you how much you walk through it.
I was eleven quarters out of it by then and far from the door when the voice called me back more than I was willing to listen to; I tell you, there are times when I can’t stand it anymore; and so pulling the pillow over my head I tried to block it all out.
No we cannot forward our deaths this way on to anything that’s not our parallel of where we are, said the voice that my mind made into the shape of a little man. And this is my card, an ace in the hole, he said, read it and have a care: Nobody goes thru the tunnel of death without falling out the other side to land in a strange place if they haven’t first thought it in their mind.
And whose fault it that? I asked.
It’s no one’s fault; and disappointed, he disappeared back through his hole that was always two feet away from where he stood.
Oh yes it is, I said, I’ve seen them; down back of the old cemetery, doing something, but god knows what I can only imagine.
I can recommend ball-room dancing as a great way to get out of the house more, said the TV man in the advert making pains to be known and putting his penny’s worth into the equation.
And then the wife came back and asked me if I was going to move any time soon from where I’d sunk. I pulled out a biscuit and munched on it, and through a mouth full of crumbs I said: I’m okay for now, but do ask again later and maybe things will have changed.
I was thinking also that I didn’t have a wife, so where had she come from?
Who knows; maybe it was the waitress lacing my tea with brandy or something and dressing up like a wife; or maybe it was the clowns from next door having a party, either way I couldn’t make up my mind which side I was on, which is always too hard to think about when you get right down to it.
As I looked around for something to break, thinking I was no longer invisible, and feeling stronger than anything that could stand in my way I bumped into the open door that gave me a jolt to the system. So I went and had another biscuit to get it all off my mind and wondered if there was a loophole I could plunge into that wasn’t made of lead.
Come up here, said the little man from the top of a very large toadstool.
I knew then that I was in the desert of my mind and so ordered a huge bag of assorted broken biscuits to be delivered soon as possible to see me through the long night, or at least until the shilling ran out in the meter and all went dark.
It’s the sad songs that get to me every time, like rain falling into the desert of my soul.
Image from Pixabay
