Tag Archives: inspiration

Dancing with the reptiles of fear

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This is a story about reptiles. Actually it’s a story about reptiles and dancing, or rather dancing with reptiles. Yes, dancing with reptiles.

David Icke is right; there are reptiles everywhere. Reptiles of fear standing ten feet tall with a tail half as long again; insidious, invisible reptiles riding a black Cerberus across our shoulders while they whisper a siren song into our ear; thousands of reptiles looking just like us as they pass by on the street, sneering with conservative disgust; friendly reptiles celebrating mediocrity and handing another bottle of self destruct. There are reptiles everywhere, with endless different guises, all with an identical desire to keep a boot on the throat of life. If you don’t stand too tall, if you stay in your box, no rage against the dying of light, no kicking against the pricks they’ll let you be. Anything else, dare to dare, and they will smite you down with scaly green anger and a terrible, tail wielding fury.

But who wants to stay in a box? That way lays existential bad faith, chained by conformity to Plato’s cave.

You can rise up and fight, but it would be foolhardy to face them in all out assault. You might well win the fight, but there are so many of them you’ll have to pour everything into it just to survive; and then you’re not even going to have the energy to stand in victory, foot atop your pile of reptile carcasses with bicep flexed. No, there’s more to the game than the defeat of reptiles. It’s about succeeding in whatever they’re trying to stop you doing, avoiding the boot and breathing life. Escape and evade, subterfuge and subtlety, think of Odysseus not Heracles. Lull them, trick them, misdirect them; this is the dance. Pirouette away or hold them close and waltz them out of your present. Like a reptilian manifestation of McGoohan’s ball, they will always be there but they don’t always have to be here!

It’s the Kobayashi Maru; you win by cheating the game to suit your reality. Enjoy the ensemble piece; playing their game by your rules. Embrace the solo, this is your time to shine and break out of the cave screaming your incandescent insights. You don’t win by fighting until they concede, you win by pointing them in one direction while you run off in the other and do whatever the hell you want. You run the race, you write the book, you carve your reality into this life.

Don’t let the slimy bastards grind you down.

A haiku drifting in the wind

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A funeral shroud mist hung heavy on a morning dying before it was granted even the chance to live. As he walked against the endless flow of traffic he couldn’t help but notice the Rorschach forms of the melting frost on the bonnet of every car; their engines not yet sufficiently warmed to melt the fingerprints of cold. They tugged on his personal psychology, teased his unconscious. Was he nearly there?

The threads of memory drifted in the storm of his mind. He had long since given up trying to pull them together into a coherent tapestry, he could get close to a finished piece, history on the edge of cognition but then some unseen, un-felt force would snatch away the revelations of his primitive weavings. Giving up was easy, he wasn’t sure he wanted to remember anyway. What was worse: the horror of the past or the frustration of nothingness?

It didn’t matter. He could still remember what was important.

The liquid passion of her eyes: simultaneous molten steel and arctic ice, the flutter of the eyelash pulled you, helpless, into the chaos. A smile played across his face, a fragment of a memory; they said a butterfly fluttering its wings could cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. Chaos theory reflected in the turmoil of the eyelash of a solitary muse. She was simplicity and depth, a haiku drifting in the wind. He found her in a rare moment of stillness. Or had she found him?

He could no longer recall.

He could still see her on that first day: in the café, sitting beside, not at, her table. One foot hitched up on the chair opposite giving an added air of nonchalance to her lithe slouch, the biker jacket hung away from her body and the t-shirt crept up just enough to expose a flash of stomach. Her face was beautiful with razor blade cheekbones, a delicate nose with the poise of, ballet dancer and subtly tempting lips. Her skin was pale but far from porcelain, there was strength to every part of her but it emanated from her face. It spoke of a life lived. And then those eyes: a siren song of passion and excitement to lull the world-weary. All this framed by an untameable sea of raven black hair. His soul had spoken and the heavens sent his saviour. Oil and water.  Darkness and light.

 He had not realised he stopped until she cocked her head in his direction and he saw the fire dance across her eyes for the first time. In that instant it began.

He shook the reverie from his head and, not for the first time, cursed why he could not forget that memory. A meeting that ultimately sent him down the spiral leading to this endless soliloquy. Once more a smile began its play across his face as he admitted to himself he would rather die than forget that moment of chance. He quashed the smile’s play and continued his solitary trudge.