I'm an amethyst diamond, a zen proverb in the now, a doctor in the disturbance field...I like rusty metal, rustic and blue,
blue as the ocean...
I’ve lost the belief in what I’m doing and it is too hot to think as I wait for the rains to come to cool me down, any disturbance is welcome in the hours that stretch out.
All my bags are packed as I wait for the bus to come and I take a cigarette in the shadows where it seems I have lived for so long while words drift around me and mean nothing. I know they can read my thoughts so I have to be careful.
I see a girl on the steps going up. She says not a word to her chocolate milk as she drinks it and I think: ‘now there’s a good conversation,” but the dress on her body says other things, but women are women and that’s how they are.
I hear there’s a heat-wave all over the world and so if the sky catches fire we must be prepared. When it comes to it I will dive into my ice bath and lay back and smoke and read a novel; but I have also heard that a great fear is about the Earth and attention spans are at an all time low.
I think it is the toothpaste everyone uses, it must have some juju ingredient in it that destroys the pathways in the brain so there is no longer any straight thinking where one thought is hardly held to another; and who will guide us if we have become such unintelligent sheep and chewing the cud we are led to?
If memory is classed as intelligence then god help us all and maybe we had better switch from IQ to EQ, but even that is flawed and sparking dementedly as they pump us full of hormones and such.
Fire up the rockets boys we’re moving to mars.
Where is the guiding light out of all this? There seems to be an assault on humanity worldwide, and it’s not because people are bad. I’ve travelled the world over and I find we are all the same, that we are all connected and we all want to live in peace and thrive.
And then my masterpiece was finished and I was ready to show it to the world, but I couldn’t find where the world was to give it to; what a strange thing.
My life is made up of a little room with a door and the world is on the other side of that, but when I walk through it I see only walls.
So I clutched my manuscript to me and went in search. I walked far and wide looking into many windows, staring into people’s eyes to see just one to approach, for just one clue, some iota of direction to head towards where I could show my manuscript to someone who would be interested.
Eventually I became exhausted and went home, the manuscript ten times as heavy as when I had started. I put it in a drawer and forgot about it, and I think it’s still there now gathering dust.
Now and again I would take a stroll through the machine and moon around for fun. Some bright spark did a thesis on what he saw and even had it published but he was laughed out of his academic community and so with his head hanging low he was accepted into the fields of the other side, the conspiracy theorists who welcomed him with open arms and read his book through and through until it wore right out with only a faded picture left of me mooning.
I’ve been meaning to ask him where he got his book published but the poor fellow doesn’t speak anymore, just stays in his room staring at the walls; but he will be alright in time after his pain has reduced him to the size of a saint and he can walk without absorbing other’s beliefs. It does one good to stir a little in the cauldron that burns away the ego.
Just lately there have been a lot of petitions to the machine to bring back Elvis and after a long wait the official reply was: request denied.
I have a young secretary called Miss Julia and she is very busy for some reason, always rushing around, but we stop now and again to have coffee together and shoot the breeze so to speak.
One day we went on holiday together and we spent our time on the beach where she would paddle in the warm sea and watch the sundown and be mesmerised.
On the last night the full moon came up over the mountains and she lay on the sand and watched it go across the sky and told me she would be leaving and going back to school to learn about the stars.
When the morning came she was still on the sand sitting cross-legged and joined as one to all.
After breakfast I asked her if she wanted to stay or come with me. She took my hand and said: thank you. I looked into her eyes and saw only the stars of creation. And then the taxi came and off I went leaving Miss Julia on the beach to go her own way.
The ghost was on my trail so I had to keep moving if I wanted to stay ahead of it. I’d decided not to go back but to make a run for it and so I made my way to the border.
Every day I grew more tired and as I came closer to the border I began to wonder if I’d make it.
The machine watches over us all from the skies, nothing goes unnoticed, but there are ways to throw it off such as changing my profile so my outline is different and I become one more entity in the moving crowd; or staying under cover in cars or buses; and joining in with others to become part of a group.
Eventually the algorithms of the machine would figure it out and they’d send someone for me but I had a good head start and I had a plan of sorts. But the ghost worried me; that, I hadn’t planned for, and once the ghost gets on your trail there’s no escaping it.
The border was set by a wide slow moving river and like all borders was a place of constant change which suited me just fine.
I wasn’t planning to cross it because if they tracked me to it they’d figure I’d try to get across, so my plan was to find somewhere to hole up and wait it out, and for a while that worked, until the ghost came.
The ghost isn’t real, but it’s real enough to cause a problem. It’s a construct, a bio-metric matching to your fears that happens to every employee that joins the company of the machine, and is held in stasis until something or someone goes wrong and then it’s released and comes for you.
It’s what they use to keep you under control, no one wants to be driven mad by their own fears and so it’s effective, for the most part. I’d had one encounter with it when I’d tried to escape before and had only just kept my sanity; and so was brought back to carry on working.
Nobody gets away for long, all are brought back, but I just couldn’t lose the naive hope I’d be the first, but it was not to be.
The ghost comes in many forms but usually begins by insinuating itself into your thoughts.
“Daddio, where are you?” I could hear on the edge of my consciousness; and this is how it begins.
“We are the many, friends all, surely. Take up no sword against us. Come back now and forget that ache in your spirit that sets you apart. No, don’t go that way, it leads to nothing. Listen to us; have we not served you well? Listen to us...come back...
And when you get back all becomes normal and there is no ghost or machine...it’s all imagination, just something that was dreamed up and time now to be normal again and to go back to work and join all the others and forget about running away, and after all, there’s nowhere to run, everywhere is the same, so be good now and settle down and work hard and be obedient and you will be provided with all you need to exist. We will take care of you, haven’t we always done so?
But I just wanted out and knew if they got me back again I’d just forget and maybe never wake up again.
Image from Pixabay
