Thirty Thousand Mornings

this is morning: you're a fugitive hidden in the urban sprawl with a sore back and axle grease on your arms. your lover is asleep in bed and you're awake and stunned by fluorescence,  still trying to find a real voice down in the basement in the electromagnetic screen limbo
trying to stir the energy, like Schauberger building spiral flumes down an infinite river in his dreams, then waking up again broke and giggling in America. just trying to catch a big wave in your mind and body and ride it the rest of your life. like all those friends who took you to parties and strange brown rooms in strange cities and got you high and got you wrong and finally watched you walk out of their lives again into some other future

this is morning: on a train that rocks on silver tracks through foggy churchgrounds and pastures into a tunnel to the centre of the earth. some people like to drink and fight and pass out. some people like to fuck and forget, like starting fires in your own garden and then running away as a joke. you like to look out the windows of the nightmare bus at the raindrops and contrails, or try to meditate squeezed tight between the woman with her walkman at max volume and the young guys smoking cigarettes and talking about death. they don't realize they're talking about death but you can hear it behind their voices. you once wanted to change and now you can't ever stop. it all went too far and now you're going to be sliding for the rest of your life. and if they love you they're coming with you. would they want that? most people refuse. you only need one.

in the evening when the kids have stopped cycling around the concrete paths of the estate and the horizon is dark aquamarine and the air smells like the air of a country you can't quite remember, you can't tell if the house feels empty or full. you feel both empty and full. you write to remind yourself who you are in ten years in case you forget. you write things no one will ever understand, not even you. especially not you. the eye can see everything except itself.

this is morning: 5 years old again reading by the light of the landing and listening to your parents' voices as they connect. you want to connect too. the phone is always where you can reach it. your voice smothered in a void as you call the names of friends, family, strangers. join us up, please, we're like islands in a grey sea, we have no one to tell us what to do and that's how we wanted it but when there's no sound except rain water in the drainpipe then we feel lonely and suddenly nothing fucking matters at all

pretty soon they'll bomb us where we stand, shred our skin and smear our insides across the walls of the places we lived all our lives. they'll shell the libraries and the schools and hide the dead children in the walls of the churches, burn the oil fields for a hundred years and fill the mines with sulphur. they'll poison the water and release viruses into the air, and for anyone left alive, shaking and singing in the ruins of their homes, they will save their worst: they will tell them that there is no life but this one.

this is morning: locked in a white cell, masked and gagged and running on a bone treadmill, surrounded by electricity, staggering, starting to howl, as the lights flicker and the walls tremble and the machinery starts to speak - and the machinery in your mind translates - DON'T TURN US OFF. you wish you were a fish in a tank, bobbing in the bubble column and hiding under the rocks, a fish tank in a happy restaurant, where the lights would go out after midnight and you'd float in the dark without a name, without understanding the concept of a name, without even understanding what a life is. just you, floating in the cold water, dancing in the cooklights, the wok flames reflecting in the glass

sleep is like a hand around your head. the void winks in and out of existence and your voice comes and goes and you're still trying to tune yourself in through the noise of obsessive phrases, song lyrics, lines of traffic blinking in and out of existence in familiar patterns. one day you'd like to open up your head and tip out everything you don't need. maybe that already happened and you were too crazy to notice. this is morning: nothing to report. no comment. nothing to see here. we wasted the night thinking and now the light has turned us into angels.

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