This train-wreck civilisation

broken,

Its scraps

disseminated and the dogs

Seek their master’s  throats

Singing I lurk under a thorn tree which makes a cave around my bruised head. The cries of pursuer and pursued punctuate the horizon like the tiny cloud-puffs of far-away artillery.

Her head lies on my lap. I have eaten her eyes but her hair has its joy still, its honey-coloured dyed perfection composed on my jeans like the memory of a L’Oreal ad.

I do not know how much longer I can keep breathing. Perhaps that depends on this new sound, which reminds me of laughter but is probably the last gasp of departing sanity.  Not mine, that left on October 21st when the Catastrophe happened.  If I could extract myself from these thorns I could find out what it is. But since I arrived here they have grown all around me and as I am naked I cannot move. Only She keeps me alive. She has given herself to me. And now her revenge for my having been in her: she is in me.

There were beings once who were not hungry. Survival wasn’t a luxury then, and there was amusement, there was even laziness. There were things which were not useful, incredibly. I did things because they were pleasurable, not essential. Now everything I do is essential or at least inevitable.

Yet I sing. This is essential. It reminds me to breathe. But that even is not imperative. Perhaps I will stop soon.

Before the Beast came I was a man with some optimism, happiness, even insouciance. I watched his rise with bemused detachment. Even when he called on me for support I didn’t realize his madness. I have always rather liked his type. I have dealt with many – they are fragile inside, really. Only power gives them security, and their ability to persuade people that they have power gives them actual, real power. It is a desperate need to have their ego stroked which grows their ego. The more you stroke it, the bigger it gets. Like other things I vaguely remember.

So why do I actually like them in my peculiar way? I think it’s because I feel as if beneath the bluster, I see their weakness. I feel privileged in a way, because they actually show me their weakness before they ask me for my help. And so I help. I make lies for the media for a living – or rather, I did. Because it made them happy. And they paid me plenty. When there was media. When there were Things to read.

Shit. A thought – is this how they get power over me? Is this a strategy they use with all people who are close to them? And then, when they have used us up we get dumped under a thorn tree, naked, with only a dead wife?

That sound is getting closer. So familiar! Like the song of a dying planet.

I will sing harmony