Hopelessness IX

IX

For going to sleep by your side is too dangerous to live for, when both the eyes are closed and all the tube is left exposed; the nozzle that has made my pain is flapping like a gorgeous mouth to taunt my mystic shadow in the meadow, gleaming empty. No for I will not again beholden pure to loss getting out
and going back and getting out again, the clot that walks me back along the slowness of the tube as if you shudder back to life beneath the wirey soil pressed back in and go back to begin again as if it never happened making up the movement from the underground refinery, cause to cause to edge of loss and death you lick back up again, once proud inside the meadow going to die there by yourself. My practice, officer, could best be described as moving slowly, then very quickly, then very slowly backwards down the tube away from my body.

“Don’t trust me. Never fully trust me.”
“How will I know?”
“If you go to my house and go to the bedroom and if you find there a small grey solid thing, it is a wedge of limescale, slightly coloured with brick red, and it has an imprint in the shape of an “o” and either a “v” or an “n”. It is 3.7 inches furthest end to end. If you were to, for example, find something like that, there on the windowsill, then you’d know that you couldn’t trust me.”
“You keep it by the window?”
“If indeed I have it, and by the  bedroom window… yes.”
“Why?”
“Suppose I found it in their kettle, took it, and kept it. Set it down on the windowsill one day, for want of anywhere else.”
“Can I trust you on this?”
“You’ll have to check for yourself.”
“Then I can trust you.”
“If it is there.”
“Then I can.”
“Then you can trust me.”
Oh quiet and horrible life, tighten your belt etc. A thudding of the air, a wiry fuckup. We would wince at our thoughts. Were told we were collateral, nothing new to report but in new voice, and as attuned we were remained the same. Keep still but don’t. Move but stay.
“Naturally!”
“Naturally…”

Naturally, a natural union between a man and a woman in the sweet meadow. They go face to face. “So tired.”
“You’ll pick up”
“What shall we eat?”
“Zovirax.”
“Again?”
“Again and again.”
“How will I trust you?”
“See for yourself”
“I do.”
“I know.”.

Hopelessness

And forgotten as the pressing logics that astrict the voice in the situation; the ones that are wrong to do: What is the function of the bank to a human customer struggling? A level of underlying panic is deliberately played into the life of somebody not in a position to make “good decisions”, asked again and again when making “bad decisions” if they think they are making good or bad decisions; this is consent. The low panic is the incentive not to be in it, and until the trap door closes up you can hover just above iy, ducking under, being the most profitable you, only working to pay the bank in daily charges, loan repayments and charges for going over which happens several times a month; it is maintained in text alerts which come just at the right time of the morning, which you are afraid to stop for want of losing more, but which builds in you an energy of panic not indistinct from the energy needed to move through the day, not at all indistinct, so whatever must be done to absolve them and you is almost impossible to do, so that when you make the call your voice clogs up like a choking budgie, just enough to stutter out the meanings of the transfers, they look you up and down, your expenditure, every little thing under the eyes of somebody at work. Someone who is managing to be not where you are. You’ve known these people, three of them. One was a Christian who routinely sneered at the friends you kept and your drinking (so you thought) and the other two are two of the kindest people in the world. Kind people operating slow death switches, which in turn jettison themselves, and the kindness you have felt, not ever wanting to ask again, going back and back slowly then quickly; yards down the tube, away from your body which swings in the havoc lighting of the office as somebody at work leafs kindly through your expenditure and makes decisions according to the maintenance of slow, chronic and often terminal panic at the other end of the line, at the very bottom, meanwhile António Horta Osório makes £4000 an hour which Stephanie Bon, who works for the bank at a low level on £7 an hour raises alarms about on social media and is summarily sacked, and somewhere along this chain of false returns a terrible zeitgeist future flashes bleak red: A blog somewhere, a tiny one, with a tiny readership. It flags up the story of the sacking you are panicked to death in your chair ignoring it still the terrible havoc light flashes gentle as songbirds. The link is made to a Jesuit background, then friends in Israel. The panic is expertly levitated to a broken surface. You glare back at it, the stupid fonts and wallpaper. The glue in your throat on the phone. The tube spinning madly in the distance, unable to be attached now the experts have left the building, fumbling glue fingers after it. You tear on your high vis and screech into the street. Death until the empty meadow seethes in chronic calm. Let me die in pieces.