Written on the edge of sleep

So it proceeded in text. It is a strange notion that ‘distance’ separates. In many cases, like the train pulled away, the space suddenly expands, whereas people are meant to be ‘close’ when they stagger and gaggle around supermarkets with plastic bags strung on their arms.

He watched the train move off, slide round the slight bend and out of the town, like  the brightly coloured capsules he attempted to force down his throat every morning. There was still the taste of acid in his mouth and a flickering under the skin as if it had been sewn with a series of weights. It was 8.30pm. She had left him with a lingering kind of ultimatum, flavoured with uncertainty, desperation. She hadn’t trusted her tongue and instead stood biting her lips and locking her nails into her palms. He remembered the strange clicking convulsions as she then moved her hands over her face, as if jointed like a mannequin.

But the body is the mechanised, the mind can be even crushed into being mechanical. The mechanism told him  to scratch an seethe and  seep with anger; bubbling in his blood as he headed home. In reality, it was grief which grew on the keyboard,  alternately stabbing and caressing the computer keys . Working upon the mechanical like a resuscitation for revenge.

She had caught the train, just aster 8pm, as expected. ‘Caught’ seems a strange phrase to apply, in hindsight – for she had no control, no dominance. She herself was caught, caught in the routine referred to as a ‘commute’, a respect for what was sensible. Caught like a rabbit strung and kicking on a barbed wire fence, metal grating against the flesh.  He could see it flickering back into her eyes as she stepped from platform to carriage, the impression of her skull  still  stinging against his sternum – in that way they had been reduced to bone.

The page when he reached home was like  bone – a white so typically dirtied by flesh. It stung his eyes as he stared at the computer screen in those moments before going to type.

This was what made him write.

Why do we say goodnight

Is it an announcement or assurance

That someone will count

Ourselves in their thoughts

Although fruitless.

Can we ever bear

The common unconsciousness?

Replaced with farmyard animals, pills,  and computers

We sleep now in overcrowded cafes

And the days excuses,

Night offers the truth

We conventionality hide

And wonder which part, will be there design