Bad Luck

I’m reaching critical mass. I may implode, explode or expire. All that’s pent up within is spilling from my lips in a language I don’t understand – all the wrong words in the right order. I blurt, I spurt – my negativity appalls me. I wish I could stop, but I’m playing out the reel and can’t change the script. There are explanations for my plight; a lifetime of suppressing my emotions so that I occasionally blow a fuse and spill my guts. The curse of manic depression crosses the wires in my head causing emotional overload. I put it down to bad luck. It’s bad luck I have the curse.

I believe in bad luck. There is no justice in this world – only good and bad luck. The people experiencing good luck are far outweighed by the people experiencing bad luck. Bad luck is ubiquitous and it’ll find you out sooner or later. Destiny is a concept we are willing to accept if we are fortunate, but we call it injustice when we are not. We regard good luck as a right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.

Some say we make our own luck and to some extent that must be true. Poor decisions and bad luck are bed partners. However, the universe is a big place and it’s chaotic. It’s only natural that chaos touches us sometimes. There are unhappy situations that cannot be attributed to any logical theory of causation – we call them bad luck.

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Mortality

 

“Life is for the living.
Death is for the dead.
Let life be like music.
And death a note unsaid.”
― Langston Hughes

 

They say cats actually purr as death takes them. That seems a healthy attitude to have. Me, I get apprehensive just thinking about my own mortality. I can’t imagine non existence any more than I can imagine some noncorporeal existence, or reincarnation. I can’t even imagine my final moments, but I’m sure I won’t be purring.

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Rain

prisoners of the rain
bearers of bad tidings
trudge into the east
two stops beyond Eden
where dark beasts are born
within the hearts of the loveless
and false witnesses deny the dawn
and are forced to live in the dark
they pack empty suitcases
and run in diminished circles
like blind men hitching rides
to any other place devoid of light
the lies they spread infect the ear
and flourish like cancer
in the minds of the uncaring
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Tapeworm

The worm in my gut tells me when, and who, to eat. I know he’s crazy, but he’s insistent. I draw the line at Methodists – too dry – too organised. Now they have that see see TV so you have to watch who you pick up and where. A guy can’t get away with a thing. Used to be that these dark winter nights covered a plethora of covert activity, but nowadays they have cameras that fit into your colon. 

The tapeworm writhes in disgust at the thought of that kind of exposure. He likes the dark seclusion of the bowel and its squishy warmth. My gut is home to numerous infestations and hunches. I feel things with my gut the way you might feel with your fingertips or your love pump. My worm keeps me well informed – though he suffers a right wing bias I have to filter out through my spleen. I can ignore his more extreme fear fuelled demands – until he lays on the brain pulse and cripples my membrane with the hurt. Then I have to go do something drastic which will inevitably humiliate and embarrass me. Such is the frailty of human nature – we are often in the squishy dark groping for comprehension in the shit and slime. We are often thinking with the gut instead of with the mind.

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Lazarus

Don’t dig me up.

I’ve resigned myself to the inevitable and I just don’t give a fuck. I have heavy blood. I’m sorry the fighting ended, but glad that the struggle is over. I’m going to lie here and die by degrees – unnoticed and unloved. My sheets carry the aroma of soured dreams and my head is full of snakes.

Why can’t I just breathe? Open up to the possibility of resurrection. Get myself a shovel and dig. Wave the ju ju stick – toss those bones and divine a new day with my name on it. I could leave this place and never look back. I could start again in a new town, with a new identity.

Why don’t you dance for me? Give me a pirouette, a pasodoble. Go on - give us a twirl. The worst things in life are free and misery abhors company, but you are never alone with your memories.

I’m a puppet to my memories. I peer dimly through second-hand daylight at my empire of dust and I don’t care – I’m going nowhere – I’m in too deep to resuscitate.