Visit

Many times it had been like that and I don’t know why. I’m munching around the outskirts and these various indentations that keep tripping me up. No it was not always that way for it to go. Because least-ways first the foot ways and it not leaning no other way, went a way forward and not exactly stopping but I met a bench. I sat down. Comfort. It was comfortable ‘gainst my back, head against the board. I could afford to lean back and out there in the sunshine it was nobody’s business but mine and nobody’s in particular so I lay down. Head against the board. And I stayed there. And creatures twinkling before my eyes. And I had to turn the other cheek. But I didn’t mind. No not at all. And the next day I came back, and again and again.

It kept existing there for me. I can’t tell why. It’s maybe something to do with the perambulator where shovel loads of dirt kept arriving and what could I do? I had to keep on sorting. To remove the dust from the rubble, the dirt from the straw. The tiny filaments of glass rubbed into a powder in the water-glands between the crinkling of my fingers making some kind of a delicious soup. So that was my job. And I did it well. At least that is what I am told by the bright-eyed passengers that cajole a lift off me and have a bowl or two. In the oven it came out fine and all warmed up whenever it got to be made even earlier in the day. So we bit into the soup and ground down too what had not already gone that way.

Because processes of heat make for leisure time. So we just stir, stir, stir and yes it all seemed to kind of mush together. But don’t take your eyes off of it. No don’t do that. Because the encrustations arrive from underneath and then you’re in trouble. So I could stir, stir, stir see and it was a torpedo of an exhibition rightly placed for me and the others who became the helpers that if truth be told offered me the helping hand that I could not have done it all alone.

Going home was a drag after the mixing up of all the stuff of the coming together. So we hung around and burnt stuff scorching the grass like the bald patch on so many people these days so that it got to be like the right kind of thing to do to even up the space between ground and sky.

Afterwards there were plenty nails that fell out the wood once it crinkled to powder itself from the very extent of that heat, chasing away the rain. And bouncing it back up into a sizzle. The nails that dropped out were rusty and brown stuff met with the finger when I rubbed it. I licked my finger and that was another kind of ingredient that I discovered. Can you imagine the surprise when it got dark?

And the mist making the rust had gone by the morning. Instead there was a fence maybe taller than you on top of me but it was not wobbling down. Never to fall that way because of the sticks made of metal were plunged deep into the earth. And thinking about it there had arrived many holes before. We had lost things in the holes, even got legs stuck and twisted in these holes. But the holes didn’t give in. They had been made by some serious minded people and they meant a business which then arrived in the form of the metal sticks.

Simply put and simply this way we were on the wrong side. We had parted the area in which they had put the sticks up under cover of darkness and there was no going back. I looked back through to where it was still that place and maybe some of the rusting nails that we had put there in the middle of the scorched earth were still there. We had forgotten to utilize everything to the best of our ability because we thought we had the time. But there was none left. It was not on our side. And we had given up and the fence was put up. And there was no more meetings and conversations and they said the fence was the final word. And we never went back, well I did go back but there was nothing much to see except for more greenery poking out between the sticks tickling my nostrils. And the bench was only partially visible in the middle of all that. And that is when it happened; and I sneezed. And I heard footsteps running, yes I did. And I ran.