It is 2AM and I am up to my elbows in a dumpster. Floating on the smoke of self-medication and the sour stench of stale pre-packaged salad.
Two green bullets and a little lithium, a waft of weed and an entire bottle of wine: I am feeling fine. I am feeling alive, alight: I feel so empty, so fragile and light, as if I am made of only my shoulder bones and the fabric of my outfit. It is glorious and people only exist as eyes and I don’t even mind, these people are superfluous to me, I am tracing the wires of my veins that wind beneath my paper-thin skin with the blade of my eye-line, then I am chasing the edges of shadows as they race around corners. But pinned to the tail of a tear-away idea, I am falling out the doorway and into the darkness of the street.
All at once the world is both a hallway and an alleyway: am I in bed, or am I out and out of my mind? Either way, I feel not-really awake.
A dumpster breathes before me, sweaty with the liquid of yesterdays meat and swarming with flies. Double-knotted-black-plastic-bags come undone at the bidding of my fingernails; and rifling through refuse, I refuse to leave until I find some evidence: something to make me see that everything is real, that there is a reason. Coffee grounds and mounds of mouldy bread ends, sodden chips and disintegrating sushi rolls- so tenderly assembled, almost mathematically perfect in their partitioned centres of green and brown and red: and all for nothing, for they are being thrown away, out of view to rot simply because I wasn’t there to eat them.
And I am no better than an unwanted morsel that will never touch the tip of your tongue: I am below those items that have been picked at and then pushed aside; for at least, half eaten, there is something to be said for purpose. And that seems to be the one thing that I do not possess: and it is the one thing that I cannot find in this dumpster.
Two green bullets and a little lithium, a waft of weed and an entire bottle of wine: I am feeling fine. I am feeling alive, alight: I feel so empty, so fragile and light, as if I am made of only my shoulder bones and the fabric of my outfit. It is glorious and people only exist as eyes and I don’t even mind, these people are superfluous to me, I am tracing the wires of my veins that wind beneath my paper-thin skin with the blade of my eye-line, then I am chasing the edges of shadows as they race around corners. But pinned to the tail of a tear-away idea, I am falling out the doorway and into the darkness of the street.
All at once the world is both a hallway and an alleyway: am I in bed, or am I out and out of my mind? Either way, I feel not-really awake.
A dumpster breathes before me, sweaty with the liquid of yesterdays meat and swarming with flies. Double-knotted-black-plastic-bags come undone at the bidding of my fingernails; and rifling through refuse, I refuse to leave until I find some evidence: something to make me see that everything is real, that there is a reason. Coffee grounds and mounds of mouldy bread ends, sodden chips and disintegrating sushi rolls- so tenderly assembled, almost mathematically perfect in their partitioned centres of green and brown and red: and all for nothing, for they are being thrown away, out of view to rot simply because I wasn’t there to eat them.
And I am no better than an unwanted morsel that will never touch the tip of your tongue: I am below those items that have been picked at and then pushed aside; for at least, half eaten, there is something to be said for purpose. And that seems to be the one thing that I do not possess: and it is the one thing that I cannot find in this dumpster.
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