Pissing and scratching

Pillow

There is so much elsewhere

When I etched at the surface I occupied this place with all of you, my hand jogged with your breakfast and butted up against your confusions and deceptions. I shaded as you wailed and I rubbed out as you smiled and alone, you catered to your pleasures as I carefully focused on this line or another for emphasis. My distance from you is calibrated at the edges.

On our bellies and backs

The scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic; they are inefectual close up, and have to be viewed from a distance if they are to seem beautiful. That is why to attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and why, though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim (Of earning one's living) and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely that in expectation of which they lived. - Arthur Schopenhauer, On the suffering of the world

Loved

Not much of a life, a slap of an existence even for a wee matter born of he and she in a desolation; a peace of a kind. From the book of pain.

...---...

The sun always rises

When I was a lad, when I was small enough to fit like a puppy on the palm of an idealised patriarchs hand; a mythical figure with whom I might kick a ball around even though football was far from interesting, I found my inner Monkey. He would keep me company, swinging with me on a rope ladder whilst we watched the sun turn the old sky orange as I would intermittently plead with my mother for a few more minutes before bed.

Still he is with me betraying my need for order and peace. For him the sun will always rise but for me, when it falls I will have had my day. I struggle with the sheets at night and stare at a starless ceiling, a tabula rasa. I forget as an adult how I once saw stars and wild animals up there in the plaster, but then I'm reminded by a small enclave of wonderous faces in an unsheeted quilt that nothing has been lost. I know that I still swing from that old ladder and that I don't want to come down. I want to stay up there watching the sun go down forever.

Muntjac roadkill

I was cycling in Cambridge when I came across a small corpse by the side of the road. At first I thought it was a dog but when I cycled back I saw my first Muntjac deer, an unfortunate introduction. Anyway I painted what I could remember of the poor creature. Two days later the body had been removed.

The Reeves Muntjac (Muntiacus reevesi) or "Barking Deer" are doing very well in the U.K. and are fast becoming the countries most prominant feral deer. These small ruminants are about fifteen to thirty-five million years old with their remains found amongst Miocene deposits in France and Germany. That they have survived so long is a testimony to their remarkable resilience and tenacity. It's an uncomfortable shame that our evolutionary abruptness greets these elders with the disharmony of a four by four.
www.deer-uk.com/muntjac_deer.htm

Catharsis

Some short time before destruction occurs.

The others

The crazy people,
they always smile at me.
I can spot them.
It's an overall thing.
We have an instinct to spot them quickly
but some of us are numb.
Big beaming smiles of knowing recognition,
large, lolloping, jolting, body knowing contact.
I realise of course that they might think I'm one of them,
when they're smiling,
passing me they think,
the crazy people, they always smile at me.