1.7

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 vanished.

Unfettered indulgence comes at a cost.

I cross the myopic cosmos, the platform twists into a Mobius strip along which I trundle and stagger and grumble and swagger through endless crowds. I pass the arches and shops like the hand of a clock, the shops selling sandwich packets, plastic day dreams and whistle-stop wishes that act like narcotics. 
When they get home with eyes stinging and souls stuck on freeze-frame do they let their masks slip a bit, surely they do?

They’ll be humans too, somewhere underneath.

But not here in the station, not with the day dawning, with the clocks yawning.

At one time I dared wear a mask but the truth then bled through my eyes till I was blind, so I prised the mask off and with it came my face.

A man without a face is not a pretty thing. A wasp nest smile and bull dog eyes, blood shod tongue twisting words from a toothy smile grinning like a wild man, like a child man, stuck in a never ending daydream. 
I'd been there all the time, it was the crowds about me that had changed.

Any small change please?

I smiled again, a dagger into nebulous hearts. 
They scarpered sharpish like they’d been whispered a secret containing details of their own demise. Petrified eyes tore themselves off me with a pop pop pop.

It was only a matter of time. 

Day spun into night, the seasons buckled under the pressure and my bones turned to fossils once more. 
The crusts of continents bent and folded into mountains and warped under magma currents that softened the steel of my heart.

I stood tall and scrawled my name in the stars. 

Life was a gentle breeze, tickling tree tops under purple skies scattered with delicate new beings that fluttered in the morning sun like butterflies. They had pretty orange and violet wings and each had the face of a person yearning for play.

They were busy hunting nectar and fluorescent fruits. 
One danced onto the back of my hand and she began to sing of her beginnings but all I could see was my end.

A pile-driven path of evolution polluting the future and pulling curtains across the eyes of fate.

Civilisation shrivelled under the waft of her rainbow wings, gentle flowing things, soft and pretty things. 
She joined her friends to play on the breeze until the sun kissed the horizon, then they dropped from the air into glades and meadows for the long moonless night, for the time to dream and fall into the arms of eternity.

Morning dew covered my clothes.

Please just a little small change.

It trickled into creaking folds of skin that cracked as I tried to force a smile and give way to my betters, to my more mentally stables, to the sorts I ought to have been. But the crowds avoided me like water round a rock that sits awkwardly in the middle of a stream.

This staggering life continues ad infinitum, as each day waxes and wanes, trains delayed, busy busy busy.