To be adrift can bear-grip and manhandle a man and cause his every natural being to bounce – bounce and bounce some more til but an uncomfortably downtrodden version of yesteryear’s version
Misplaced, misshapen and flung rather far-stretched and unasked-for askew, ’twas indeed the few and far between who truly knew him
The metallic, dented behemoth kettle is getting itself ready to working again and no-one is home – least of all him
All it will ever need is the distanced touch of a tobacco-enthused, depressed right forefinger coaxed enough to fall atop its starting-point
The hidden, hollow house with screaming windows, built two centuries back and out by the scattered ash of generations of screaming people, has remained as eerily and unfathomably silent as one such house could ever naturally let itself become
As eerily un-visited as their headstones have been
And the children are all away – all of them, of course, being far older versions of themselves now – and getting to doing their own thing, equipping themselves as best they can to use their very own magnificent minds in managing to make it make a kind of constant and meaningfully meandered sense, which their father, it forever appears, never could manage to make his crumpled mind do
Not for long enough to keep it all at lucrative and noteworthy bay
One whole town knows all about him, his publicised pitfalls, and he wishes to Christ that they knew nothing of any sort, keep it to themselves, please… if they want to… have to be asked
He is sitting where he opts upon sitting himself down, welcomed unwillingly to another monotonous paragraph of utter idleness, holding a recurring rolled-up at crazy pace cigarette and watching all of nothing – he’s been sitting right here for going on two whole decades of deceit now, all of it incredibly, unspeakably tasteless for its lonely worth alone
And alone, alone, alone, he has sensed to let himself be
Writing himself into the next big eulogy and he feels it
The water has boiled itself to within a scalding inch and he lifts his lethargic, heavily arthritic legs and tries for the kitchen one more time – a kitchen that spends half of its time in his presence and vice-versa and it is a quiet tedium for all intents
The boredom renders him questionably sane – an entertainer to the ghastly slaughter
And the usual suspects come into distraction and arise to catch theatrical play again – red and white striped mug, his favourite in a world where, really, there are no favourites, just less despised items than the other, stained and oft over-used herbal-opinionated teabag, and a little once upon a silver stirring spoon
The warring heat of the tea might help maybe in fending off his pledged, knee-deep demons for a moment, the very same deadlocked demons who have been snaking their way in and around, causing what many now inevitably disappeared people once considered to be the great thinker of his time to think himself into an early grave of sorts
And he has been waiting for that tip on his left shoulder to come
For those black shadows in the backyard to walk his way
To call and end to his creatively unjust shift – ‘Course he has…
How could he not have been doing such an excitable thing?
When excitement breathes a fond, fond fondness for farewell
He will still dream, within his realm of screaming words, of having been Everything
