night time – an accumulation of things

There was a woman who lived in the woods. She sat by the fire on that long winter’s night, her young son cradled in her lap. She sang him songs and told him stories and said don’t be afraid, until he fell asleep and she sang no more.

Outside, under the fullness of the moon, in the deepness of the snow, the boy’s father gibbered and howled and screamed and begged and battered his bloody fists against the door.

She looked at the boy, his sleeping face angelic in the flickering fire’s light, and she looked at the door, and imagined what snarled beyond. She wondered if this was all there was; violence, now, and in her son, yet-to-be. She wondered what use was love. All this love.

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Notes:

1. From August 2014
2. Inspired by one of the verses in The Sounds Are Always Begging by Bonnie Prince Billy And The Cairo Gang, from the album The Wonder Show Of The World (2010)

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I woke up in the middle of the night and there was this skeleton outside, tapping at my window, tapping and tapping incessantly with its long bony finger while the rest of its entirely improbable being just stood there motionless, its feet in mother’s fuschias, each bone held perfectly in place by whatever force it is that maintains their coherence, the whole spectre stained red as blood under the streetlights’ glare.

I tapped back and it tapped back and then it tapped some more and then some more and went on tapping for quite some time.

It was fairly annoying.

It was 3 am.

I tapped back again to see if it would stop but it didn’t stop and I wondered if it was all some Poe-esque torture designed to make me collapse to me knees and confess my sins, but in the end I decided it probably wasn’t, and that it was more likely that, considering the skeleton had no eyes or eardrums or even a brain, it simply hadn’t heard me or seen me or perceived my existence in any way at all. Or at least not in anyway I could understand.

Also I didn’t have any sins to confess, except I suppose for the sin of gluttony, but I’m not sure that’s even really considered a sin anymore, rather than the necessary duty of every citizen, for if we don’t do all we can to maintain the steady expansion of the capitalist balloon on and on for ever and ever without end until even the infinite has been consumed then where would be? In some arid post-apocalyptic tesco-less waste land, no doubt, like I’d always dreamt about, like I’d always wanted, staggering about all alone under a wan unblemished sky.

Maybe that is my sin.

Maybe this is my confession.

The skeleton tapped on and on. I went back to bed and dreamt of clocks and death.

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Notes:

1. This was written on the 26th June, 2018
2. It’s been hot this week and I cannot sleep

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