Stale

They are stale. Stale as the jokes always made, stale as every cliched place: the singing valley of singing a thousand singing hills the dung floor hard-slept the faint smell of tar from terraced wooden houses the quaint cobbled lanes that lead … nowhere. Known before (incense burned twice). Stale, these ideas that float in the oceans of our minds; words that sink, drown, float pale bellied towards the surface, wash to the drifting dirty shore, recede, return, sink, rise, return. Only the constant beating of the stubborn muscle’s flesh is new. What is felt is always felt first. We smart because our nervesouls have no memory - brains remember, but pain is always fresh. No comfort in philosophy hung up to dry. Impetuously, inevitably, we cry, expecting nothing but why, and no answer following. The mouth is paralysed, trapped between the weary squeaking merry-go-rounds in our heads and the naïve too-tender pulp that bursts below: a rollercoaster forever falling from its tracks forgetting - it has done all this before.

 

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