LIFE-CRUMBS

My friend, he who does not cheat, steal, lie, shall fall to the ground in short, and worms shall devour his flesh and bones. He's in the shadows, and waits for years, days, months, for a benefit, a raise, a pension correction. And yet he lives a piece of his life paralysed, with a walking stick and sick, forced to hope.

Like a rope-dancer on a drying-rope, the minimum of existence, pushed into uncertainty, swings on a drying-rope; Time and memory spin dried potatoes and pale, vestigial onion-skins. The latest five-year draft! Life is now a superficial pretence-game, a sparring cat-and-mouse struggle, like the round-faced moonbeam in its twisted muck. All is but coming and going and soon departing, like girlfriends, wives, sweethearts.

One was taken to hospital with a bleeding ulcer, another with cirrhosis of the liver, a third has his brain incessantly gnawed by a tiny tumour-worm underneath, and when he is put into the MRI machine, the secret Morse signal of X-rays transmits disease to the depths of the wounded soul. Foolishly mistaken, if you think you'll have friends and acquaintances and those you've loved!

Everybody is going after their selfish, stubborn, corruptible brainwashed heads these days; what kind of damaging, killer cyclone has done this?! I'm a little ashamed of myself for you, that you still believe in fake, honeyed words. Or hast thou forgotten how thou hast been humiliated by thy faithful sweetheart's firing, that thou didst not touch the vile mud-land?!

Verily I say to thee, old friend! We've been living like this for decades, and one or other of us falls between the tracks in the subway, has a heart attack on the sidewalk of a bus stop, or merely stumbles with his two legs, the ambulance is always forty minutes late, while the brain's secret gears are getting tired: they've worked enough in X years!