it feels like autumn
it's summer
I've never done a handstand, I've never been able to.... I've never done a cartwheel, I've never been able too......... never did a black-flip, guess what, I've never been able too....... if I did them now I'd likely snap something, break in two, come off worse, black and probably blue..... not the blue of the sky, nor the blue of water, though water isn't blue it's clear, colourless, see-through, unless it's a pond or a lake or a sea or an ocean when it's green or brown or black or grey, sometimes it's silver except when it's waves, when it's waves its white, molten and glass..... it's just what the sea throws away, excreting one wave after another until drained and lies flat as a tundra which isn't blue but might sometimes be found under blue.........
one ant.... one solitary ant........ wandering lostly over my step where once there was an ants nest, a colony, hundreds and more milling about being ants doing things that only ants do but it had to be there, there on my step, on my step by the door, just where they've shouldn't have been.... ants have a place but not on my step, not knocking on my door, not slipping through floors and through skirting, not into my house, not oozing like puss form my walls........ so they had to go......
at first I tried to dissuade them but that didn't work, you know you can't reason with ants, so I had to you see, you do understand, I had too, I had too...... put down the powder....
most of them died, maybe not all, but they never came back except one, just the one, one solitary ant........ it looked lost.... it'd lost its home, its family, all of its friends, it looked in each hole to find nothing...... gone....... left all alone....... where do solitary ants go when they're left all alone...........
sometimes it's crap having a conscience.........
© robert greig 2017
all our hero wanted to do was to curl up and stop this lumpen ball of mud from turning and see it fall from the sky..... why doesn't the earth fall out of the sky?... he wondered........ maybe we are hanging off the moon, like a pendulum, swinging and spinning in desperate, perpetual, circular motion....... dangling from a fine thread side to side and round and round....... could explain why we are so dizzy all the time and falling over, bumping into things, sometimes don't know our left from our right........ all our hero wanted to do was to wake up in his house of books with him on the inside and the world well and truly out........... but then voices from beyond the speakers crept into his space with 'opinions' and 'points of view' from the mouths of those who perhaps shouldn't be allowed to have them........ it's a free world, so he's told, apparently you can say and be what you want..............
..... he hears himself laugh, "free"?.........
.......... he sometimes craves to have the simplistic one-track brain of most voxpoppers, lower life-forms that hang from microphones needy for their 15 seconds of bile and spite (could be a pub name! down at the ol' 'Bile & Spite')........ those same people who probably never wash their hands after using the toilet, you see them every day, and if they do they only manage one hand half-heartedly splashed under a tap while the other's been glued to a phone to their ear from the moment they walked in to the moment they leave on a call that quite frankly on overhearing could've waited..... oh what lovely germs must coat that phone.......... voxpops are set up to fail by design, their over-simplistic wording echoes the simplistic minds who they capture in their web of conceit....... listen to any about Brexit and it becomes worryingly clear despite that it's not 'brexit' itself that's the problem, it's the division, bitterness and racism it engenders........
........ just when we thought we were tearing walls down, ponders our hero, even more are going up........
© robert greig 2017
"wind's picking up again"
"aye"
"might be in for some weather"
"aye, weather, there's always weather"
"aye"
"is that a cloud?"
"aye, 'appen as maybe"
"yup, definitely some weather coming"
"aye"
"when did it last rain?"
"hmm, a few couple or so days or three back?"
"more than that surely..."
"aye, probably, a few couple or so weeks back?..."
"bound to be rain then...."
"aye"
"it always rains"
"aye..... except when it doesn't"
"you're not wrong there"
"aye"
"you know a lot about this weather lark"
"aye"
"... aye"
© robert greig 2017
