Flatpack Dreams

"Bill heard a footfall close behind him. Then a foot fell on his head!
It must have been a Mammoth, or a Rabbit made of lead!
If he'd muttered HOCUS POCUS he would never have heard the swish
And the chuckle of a Mammoth as it hears a man go squish!"


Woke 5am unable to sleep further. Bathed dressed ate grey porridge and walked along the concrete path to my potatoes. They are white in flower this morning, apprehensive and proud. Little girls at their first communion. There is a change in the weather though. Blight is prowling. Across the blank sky clouds loiter like hoodies and the sun is an indifferent yellow presence in the east. On a scrap of washed denim a new moon has been discarded. Fingernail clipping.

The air is so damp and so heavy it hurts my arms. I feel I have an untried prosthesis screwed into me from hand to elbow, both sides. I am drained of energy; a flyhusk in a spider’s web. My safe path maze dusted with dry earth from yesterday’s gardening has been swept by a breeze in the night into a corrugated sand pattern, thin and brown. The breeze has failed by now and the earth crunches like salt under my clogs. I had intended writing but the weight of the sky weighs me down like a guilty thought. I am struggling up Everest with rocks in my backpack instead of oxygen.

Yesterday’s springy energy has left. I can hardly make it back to the cottage. Fully dressed I collapse into bed and pull the comforter up and without comfort become heavy metal. The burden of this air has flattened me. Stamped into a leaden album of dreams, I am licked, kicked, tricked, stuck down, forced to watch image after image as they cross my retina plaintively calling out to be confessed, absolved, forgotten, shouted loud in caves, muttered stealthily under the breath, farted out like thunder in polite company. Anything. Anything. Anything for some attention. And to be done with it.