WINDOWS IN THE WEST - Avril Paton
(Milgram's experiment)
The telephone rings,
I don't answer.
It won't be
the voice of God.
Only another
breather trying
to articulate
important information
regarding practical reality.
I have not slept
peacefully
for days.
l have no affection
for battles.
I have been poisoned
by ennui. The hair
on my neck grows
like the hair of
a wolf but I'm a hermit
in winter not a wolf.
Those who exist above
the cities and their scaffolding,
live outside the entire game
of spectacular society.
How lucky these
types are like
single roses
on a plateau.
and maybe there are no easy answers.
Only a mountain track
where few dare to climb.
The phone persists,
and each airraid,
knives my sleep.
Exhuasted,
waiting only for
the mercy
of summer.
Slowly I wake
without ambition
lurch from my bed
pull the phone
from the plug.
Three pit bulls with razor wire barks scream at me, like starved prisoners, behind an iron fence frothing at the meat of me as I pass. I only want to deliver the post, get through without trial, or some yapper priming for my fingers, gnashing at my heels.
The owner of the dogs is a large building of a man, strong lean, with scar and muscle, a face haggard with rage and alcohol. 'Awright...' He sits with his dogs in his garden, looks at me smiles is content. 'Not bad, some weather we're having. Murder hiking up all these closes, in this heat. Somebody's definitely left the oven on!' I reply while eyeing the dogs and move on.
I strain into the sun walking through its heat into another close. On the second floor there sits in the middle of the stair a bucket kit for smoking hash. I move on up the stairs delivering then I walk back down; a group of five young approach the bucket, begin to stone their minds inhaling large potent lungfuls. I watch their pliable minds, play dough for the drug, sooner or later burning into dust.
Back into the heat, I shift my large post bag, stretch my arms up into the space of the sky, with its weight pulling me down, I close my eyes, moan in prayer to the sun. 'I fucking hate stairs: all 1467 of them.' I'm like a woman in distress carrying a filing cabinet on my back, but the job must be done. It's rational, insanely rational, to post the mail, juggling letters like an idiot clown in a circus prelude to hell.
Monkey’s every last one of us, burning in the sun, sagging in the brain department utterly happy splashing in the dregs of ourselves. I'm roasting. Somebody offers me a bottle of chilled water, and they are a miracle. A non-descript unasked gift of a moment. Thank you, Mrs Anonymous someone. I guzzle the chill down the desert of my camel throat. It is a snow ball of ice to me; I finish it off, rapidly.
I march with my steel toe caps and think of Sisyphus. Carrying his rock like it was the meaning of the thing, or a punishment stubborn and convinced, like a man who has finally grasped something of his own dull recurring suffering. An idiot man sitting inside the workings of a clock, with which he is baffled by.
God. I'm delirious with this labyrinth of steps and stairs, and the turmoil of dark closes, the reek of damp dog hair. The presence of the day. I cannot wait to end this mountain. Only to begin again and again climbing this dragon.
