Ok, Zebras!

Sorry, you are not an instant winner.

A thought which occurs between syllables whilst speaking may take a thousand pages to explain.

The five fingered claw.

Someone was in the next room with a cough that blotted out the sound of the traffic and would have made an undertaker smile. Cancer ward 2001.

Wondering what pressure to use when shaking hands.

It will all end in tears.

Life has no incidental musical soundtrack.

There are no quick edits.

There is no anthematic finale.

There are;

twisted metal sounds,

voices over the top of one another,

a ribbon tearing,

the nib scratching,

the incandescent momentum

of the minuscule slidings

of the balls in innumerable

ball point pens ticking boxes

on forms that decide

who stands and who falls.

The swallowing of saliva.

Bodies breathing faintly beneath sheets

(which aren’t necessarily white cotton).

Half-formed words,

blank spaces in the vocabulary of logic,

which can be defined without

its money’s worth of proof.

At last,

I finally know

what the mirror said

in the dark.

The tension on a single strand of hair

before it points its asterisk

at breaking point.

When you die nothing changes,

it goes on slightly

altered by your absence

but will continue as if

nothing ever happened.

Then,

the Antarctic ice cap will melt

exposing a virgin continent

and the port cities

around the earth will become

submerged by the sea

like so many blocked public toilets.

But, you and I will be

anonymously sending cactuses

to everyone through the mail

accompanied by a single page

of meaningless prose

to throw an ‘inexplicable phenomena’

into their lives

for the sake of

Art, or, perhaps

because that is a far more important thing to do

than to spend hours trying to find a way to describe

the actual sand grain soft metal shape of a star

with ‘Inspected by no. 127’ stamped into the part of it

which is hidden from the night-shift astronomer’s eyes.

  “That is what then we should do.” She said, and I replied,

with a finger in each ear, that it was a 'good idea'.

That is what the famous Mexican said

to the cobalt pineapple

whilst examining a monkey

the size of a single skin cell

on the red clay of the desert ground. It’s always red.

In a house where the living room is the size of a tennis court, nine people are seated, choir-like, either on or around the tattered lounge suite. Motionless and speechless they are staring at the enclosed space inside of the television screen.

All of them are wearing identical sunglasses.

In the hallway, sunlight fills the stained

glass panes around the front door.

A man looks into the room, assesses its content and then enters.

He gingerly places the heel of his boot

on the upper left corner

of the front of the TV and with a soft, yet deliberate motion,

tilts it so that it majestically

rolls away from its center of gravity

backwards onto the floor like a wino achieving nirvana.

Giggling, he leaves the room with the TV now talking to the ceiling. It could be, but remains something of a mystery,

as to whether this is the same man

who appeared at Salamanca market wearing a placard which read,

‘Can anyone tell me what is about to happen.’

Deliberately omitting a question mark.

This man also may, or may not have had, a flat-mate

who had the constant habit of,

starting at about two in the afternoon each day,

incessantly asking him

what they were going to eat

for dinner that night.

This all stopped however, after one day, (at 3.07 pm), when the impetuous questioner was answered with the news of an upcoming dish with a name that forever pressed the question of the designated menu into a position where it was from that day forth asked just once a day, and then only very closely to the actual time that the meal was to be eaten, and that reply was:

“Leprechaun’s Hearts.”

In the back of the most haunted house on Earth

the telephone began ringing,

shadows clinging

cobweb-like here

where there was no connection to the wall socket.

It became apparent upon answering

and listening to the voice

that it was a wrong number.

The guttural muttering included this statement;

“Generalization, (generally speaking), is the conceptual enemy of liberated perception.”

In the house of the overturned TV,

the back and front doors

were always left open.

The sky that afternoon had been a fading shade of blue

like the light upon a dying man’s eye, tubercular and skewed, drained of color.

Clouds

of congestion remained

still unmoved

on high, despite the thrown bales of wind

that pushed the shrapnel of the war

between industry and the earth

into spirals of ever-increasing motion and size.

All around them who sat in there,

in faded, ragged Levi’s

momentarily having to shout

to get their sentences

through the inexplicable wind.

It had not become apparent to any of them

that the place was haunted.

The disease they suffered was one

which caused them to despise their youth

for the fact that it had to leave,

and the end result was

that they were old

in their hearts

with only ignorance

to draw on

to furnish any reasoning for action.

As a result, they sat in the backyard

amongst the scorched gray concrete slabs

and open clear space of ground,

a sad runway of rubbishy soil

raggedly threaded with dying,

or dead,

vegetables.

Among youth it has since become a plague.

Symptoms included; unnatural bouts of sleeping,

cataleptic Moon gazing with closed eyelids

and the replacement of a desire to eat

with one to only draw smoke into one’s lungs

at all times.

Additionally reasoning that 'Air is poison'.

And those clouds,

although the wind was violent enough to raise large chunks

of rubble from the ground, they still sat

like hunks of deposited fat on the interior

of a cable TV addict’s carotid artery,

lifting fistfuls

of potato products

into its food opening.

In that garden was a firmly embedded

and ancient cabbage

the leaves of which

were wooden and sinewy with age

and peppered with tiny holes

from the feasting of the snails and slugs,

like it had been doused by shotgun pellets

which were too weakly propelled to do much damage.

In 1458

five red stars

appeared circling the moon

changing color three times

and then suddenly vanishing,

according to a report.

Author's Note

I am not really here.