interrupted-transmission

I find myself menaced by owls in the bright garden.
There are three owls. Three pairs of round yellow eyes.
Their eyes are very large and very round. Their gaze is penetrating and direct. It is both calm and intense.
Their eyes do not blink.
They stare right at me without blinking. There is no escaping from their gaze.
It is the fixity of their gaze and the largeness of their eyes which perturbs me. One cannot tell lies to eyes such as these.
You are naked. There is nowhere to hide your secrets. There is no nook nor any cranny they cannot see into.
Watched, I back into a corner of the garden, darkened by the old elm tree..

Flowers wink in the easy sunlight. They have nothing to hide. The grass is a supernatural shade of green.

The garden is full of brightly coloured birds, arranged in flocks, according to species.
Only the buzzard is alone. The buzzard is stern and aloof. I cannot hold his gaze. The straightness of his posture and the intensity of his gaze makes me painfully aware of my own weakness.
Desperately I look around for a potential ally but find none.
I have trespassed. I should not be here, in this garden of the innocent.
No sinner shall find sanctuary here.
The three owls keep hopping towards me. Their movements are slow, but their large round eyes threaten me.

Sharkshead nebulae-
Swoops down and engulfs me
Caught,A shrew in a buzzard’s talons
Embryo in the amniotic fluid
Liquid colour, like oil spilled in a puddle,A woozy kind of warmth.I become weightless in its clutch. I feel lightheaded. Colours surround me, merging into one another. Red becomes orange becomes yellow. Green becomes blue becomes purple.
Devoid of any personality I change with the colours.
Green is spring.
Red and yellow is summer.
Orange and brown is autumn.
Blue is winter. Black and white also. Black for the night, and white for the snow.
The whole experience is pleasantly disorientating.

I receive a series of text messages. Erotic, taunting.-Lick me out. U do know how 2 eat a girl out don’t u?-

I feel like a small boy.

The electric glow of a big city.
The joyless noise. The constant, hammering noise of machines inside a factory.
The grim, business like movements and motions. Movements without grace or spontaneity. Cars driving round a circuit. Trains traveling round a circuit. The repetitious movements of machine parts.
The lights turn red. The cars stop. The lights turn green. The cars move.

The advantage of such regularity is this, one need not be a person at all. Every action becomes automatic. There is no need to think, no need to feel, no choices to be made. This at least is comforting.Trains pass. Cars pass. Planes fly overhead.

Dishwater sky. Drizzle.Looking out the window of a bus I begin to hallucinate holiday resorts.
Violent sunlight on white apartment blocks, blue swimming pools and endless green golf courses. Dogmatic sunlight, light which allows no shadow, no nuance, no ambiguity.
Everything is precisely what it is, no more and no less. Nothing is hidden.

Blood and vomit on the promenade.
Sunburnt, shouting girls baring fat, wobbly breasts. Boys in shorts whoop their approval.Fights break out.
Cigarette ash, spilt beer and chips on the floor of an amusement arcade.
Holiday reps, good looking in a featureless sort of way, organize drinking games, award prizes for projectile vomiting.

Switch back to cash and carrys, grey pavements, women in saris, boys in hoods, traffic jams…
People queuing for the ATM, queuing in the supermarkets and fast food restaurants, outside doctors surgeries and at the traffic lights.
Lines of people waiting.
They get to the front of one queue then rush to join another.
What can we do but wait? Life is waiting to die, how can it be otherwise?
‘Hey, you, don’t jump the queue!’

I try to coax affection from a wooden marionette. Don’t ask why, I’m feeling sentimental.