Number Five

I smile at the day but the whims come and blow it away. Sharp shock tactics with no-nonsense charisma. A think-tank apocalypse. Angst riddled aunties with their tie-dye hair dos and uncles that couldn't care less. It was a jolly old caravan of holiday folk that ambled to the sea side, to lonely coastal towns in perpetual decline. Twopenny slots, washed up coffee shops, salt brushed piers, wailing ghost trains and grimy pedalos that float on green water next to the flat brown sea.  Mussel shells, crab claws and fish bones scrape the shoreline and in a rock pool bobs an empty can of Fanta next to a wooden fork that comes stuck in chips. There's nothing like it. There’s nothing like childhood dreams.  They peek through the gaps of thought, filling the spaces of despondency, stuck in a meeting or in the commuter race that I trawl through each day like the tide coming back and forth, sometimes a bloody moon would cause industrial action, sometimes a si...

Chaotic and automatic, an unstoppable chain reaction set the order of new things. My life choices were foolhardy and wistful, I preferred to dwell in fields of flowers as the world turned and I sank into the mud. The rest is just a blur. Spare some change please? Somewhere along the tracks there was a fault in the signals and my life took a path that would not arrive at its chosen destination.  Instead I remained station-bound, my soul fixed underground. The information board for my departure is blank, I'm stuck in perpetual delay. The station was my home now, all tired and unwrapped.  My giftless life crowded all about me, all commuters dredging their own vestigial monkey tails to their daily grind while I take solace in my own putridity. But a man has to eat. A little change please? I watched the horror that splayed across faces, the sort of faces that were lovingly prepared for work and service to the greater good. My face had long since va...