More from "14 Cages"

Skull to skull dialogue.

Desperation was the imprimatur, it was your means of breaking through from one reality to the next. Perhaps a moment of divine madness; William S Burroughs in one ear and Frankie Howerd in the other, fighting for space in the pre-frontal cortex. Perhaps inspired art installation as nervous breakdown, a manifestation of the fast-twitch hyper-kinesis of the febrile Now. You lie on the floor,
holding onto to what seemed like a spinning globe as all stimuli was overloading itself into a tightly packed analogue. Your tired 4 square inches of consciousness. The synapses misfiring. You capitulate to the madness then awake to a blank sheet. The sun seeped through grey glass as you raise yourself to your feet. Too many days spent in the hyper-real. The room empty of the TV, radio and laptop is now a place of sanctuary, peace, silence. The chasm you have stepped into is one that was entirely necessary. Desperation is the agent of change. You mouth this as you open the windows to the combustion of traffic and the omnipresent deliveries to the supermarket next door. The conveyer belt of commerce never sleeps. Your reality remains behind the double glaze as curtains are hastily closed and ears blocked with foam capsules. You allow the gloom to swallow you; conscious thought a string of remembered playing cards and the tarot deck of fatalism. Other people's coping stategies becoming your credo. The silence envelopes. And the desperation begins to tear the thin membrane between you and the purely imagined. Desperation becomes the orison. Muscle memory strikes the keys and you compose a difficult doxology. 508AM. Life lived outwith the text is worthless, you decide as the flickering VDU illuminates all that is required. It's only then that you notice the headline: “Actor dies onstage: the gods of drama have their sport” Mocking. You now realise that this is the limbo they spoke of. No Hell in capitation. Only purgatory in marginal lower case. Holding onto that skull was a case in point. But in any case you have broken through to the next reality and it appears that is varies not too greatly from the last. You continue to compose, write and fret over each line. Your hands the soft hands of the indoor life. The pale alabaster of the scribe. You smile as you get used to being dead in one sense and alive in another. This business is a strange one right enough...You neatly tap a tattoo, a small sonnet and a miniscule haiku, you are pleased that the words continue to flow even after the heart has ceased its rhythm. The brain is still active. Your new nether corpus continues to sing:

I chant anew, another day;
More of the same in the afterlife,
Adventures in purgatory?
Limbo seems no different,
I still see the sun come up,
But no longer have to place shades,
On tired eyes,
No longer does the migrane knife
Twist in the skull.
The new being is much the same,
I still get easily bored and frustrated,
But no one hears my words,
Only I see them,
Wraith presence in my infernal machine.

You sense a smiling at the sonnet, the haiku writes itself:

You seem to have defeated,
The space 'tween here and the Other,
And in so doing: Persist!