Mandala

September 22, 2008 at 9:42 am (poetry)
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Been thinking a lot about Kalideva this week. This is her age, after all…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So a painted man once told me

I was born under a dark sign;

And that those of us ripped from succour

In the gaze of lofty gorgons

Would soon devour our kin.

 

This many-armed mother, he said,

Sanctifies with two hands,

But holds the dripping heads of

Men, and hungry scimitars

In the other. Arterial red and jet

 

Soon absorbed my limbs, as

My lolling tongue and stamping soles

Dragged a path back through

My earliest years, my eyes wide

With morbid fascination, a memory

 

Of twisted swan-death

At the estuary. Thick clay pushed

Between my shattered feet

As I stood enraptured

By the swallowing of snow.

 

My swollen, flaking leg-skin

Pushed into plaster, bound

In fresco, wet paint for

Teenage boys to kick out

While I waited on my back.

 

Each face at the foot

Of my bed, each kernel

Laid side by side creates

A pattern after all these years;

Spirals of sand, heavy with retrospect.

 

And perhaps when each piece

Of mind rests

One grain against another,

We can step back and glimpse

A mother who is I, and you

 

And they, and we.

This mandala can absolve,

And take the point of purity now

Made obvious when carried

By the water we breathed in birth.

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Yolanda’s Song

September 18, 2008 at 8:26 am (poetry)
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We sit and wait in reeds,

Thigh-high grasses and spindle

Scratches on old palms which clutch

Sprigs of seer’s heather,

Waiting for the laughing

River to wash our soles.

Somewhere, there is a tent

And fragrant smoke from silk

Flags which rip around the breath,

Heavy with sand, a singular crusade.

The horses will continue pounding

East. Somewhere in an old walled town

The morning call to prayer breaks

The heavy heads of faith again.

The cardomon cracks my lips

And I shout out two words across

The spinning dust, unheard to you

Dancing at the city gates.

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Saga

September 16, 2008 at 12:53 pm (flash fiction)
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They found her on the wednesday after she had first vanished, encased in the ice at the entrance to the fjord. She was gesticulating with treacle-slowness behind the frozen glass, her lips moving silently, mouthing words nobody could hear.

She had gone for a walk almost a week before, after arguing noisily with Eric about puffins and oil, about cheap gold bracelets and the rising petrol prices on the island. She had put on her scarfs and gloves, tied the ribbons into her hair and filled her hipflask with bacardi breezer, the watermelon flavour evaporating off of her chilled lips. She marched off over the moors, knee-deep in gorse and black mud, not looking back.

A young goat-herd had stopped her, he said, on the first night. He had shown her his moped, shared his pack of twenty lamberts and kissed her for hours under the midnight sun. He was the last person to have seen her.

The people gathered around the body in the ice, watching her move in underwater motion, every blonde hair on her head floating above her like kelp in a calm, pale ocean. She would be there for centuries, like those trapped around her, miming her last seconds of freedom at the pace of the glacier’s heartbeat, watching the transcience of the land around her, watching youth, and age, and youth again, until attrition itself releases her, until erosion loosens the long embrace.

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Haiku Morning.

September 13, 2008 at 2:05 pm (Uncategorized)

Now, it seems to me

That England is suffering

From a lack of grace.

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Sevakund

September 12, 2008 at 9:19 am (flash fiction)
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 Still no keyboard at home, unfortunately, hence the lack of new posts coming out of my car park vantage point. I thought I’d try my hand at ‘flash fiction’ today.

Tanya was having a divine day. Chris had risen early and left her glowing in bed after a night of delicious closeness, mentholated cigarettes, kisses and more. As she rolled over in the muslin sheets Chris had brought back from a business trip abroad, she noticed with a slight shock that her hands were bleeding, not heavily, just a couple of little scratches on each palm. She reached onto her bedside table and pulled a couple of wet-wipes out of their plastic casing, and in doing so, accidentally smeared a streak of blood down her left side, just underneath her ribs. It only took a couple of seconds to clean herself up; she was a woman, not uncomfortable with the sight of her own blood, and far too sated to be particularly disturbed by such a small oddity.

Tanya knew her room perfectly. It was her sanctuary, her place of tranquility. From the Madonna posters on the walls to her collection of bonsai trees by the door, she loved this space, and loved the warmth of her bed which lately seemed to constantly have the shape of Chris’ head imprinted into the cushions next to her, his scent filling her senses like a nectar. She reached blindly to the makeup box sitting next to the mirror on her right, and picked out the pot of gold bronzing powder she had been using lately in what even she would admit was probably copious amounts. A few quick applications - her slender fingers sliding over her pale cheeks - and she was sparkling against the pure whiteness of her pillow. Every day, her overeagerness with the irridescent powder left a ring of gold around her dark hair on the pale fabric, and she lay still for a few more minutes, enjoying the sweet fragrance of jasmine cosmetics falling around her eyes.

She could hear Chris pottering around in the kitchen downstairs, preparing a breakfast of pitta bread and fruit, and Tanya lifted herself off of her mattress and sat up naked in bed. As soon as she heard footsteps on the stairs outside her door, she pulled her sheets around her, like a shroud, and took seven paces towards the bathroom where she would wait for Chris to join her in the shower. As she looked over her shoulder, she saw a flower bloom on the carpet for every step she had just taken, and felt petals pushing through the carpet underneath her bare soles. She heard Chris washing his hands in the sink down the hall, and as the radio alarm flicked on, the newsreader’s deadpan voice was talking about yet more floods. The rain certainly was starting to fall down hard. It wouldn’t be long before all of Tewkesbury would be underwater again, she thought.

Chris seemed to be taking ages; it always took him several hours to wake up properly in the mornings, hence why they liked to shower together, the cold air from the window on their wet skin shocking them into alertness. At least he didn’t have all that hair anymore; Tanya had literally begged him to get it cut, and she had delightedly noticed a change in him since he adopted his new look; a softer, even slightly more feminine persona.

Bending down to pick up the breakfast tray that Chris had left outside the door whilst he went about his ablutions, Tanya decided to start without him and so crawled back into bed as she began applying the honey she kept in an adorable lion shaped ceramin pot onto the unleavened, wholemeal bread. She wished, for a moment, that it was Chris’s body she was nibbling on, and then poured herself a cup of tea and happily listened to the rain outside.

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The Zenith – A Story For Jonny

September 5, 2008 at 12:34 pm (Fiction, Uncategorized)
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I am very happy with this short story. Very happy indeed. I hope you all find it as enjoyably macabre as I do, as I really enjoyed writing this for the sole reason it is nothing like anything I have written before. Please take a bit of time out to read it! This story is for Jonny Perfect, in exchange for a song. Keep your fingers, kids. Benjiva xx

The Zenith, By Benjamin Jiva Dasa Norris

 

He’d spent almost a whole year on the painting, and had finished it several times. However; each time he thought he’d finished, he would spend perhaps an hour basking in the glow of his success before noticing that mustard yellow streak clashed unpleasantly with that green in the corner of the canvas, or that the texture wasn’t sickening enough, or that the whole thing was subtly, unfairly, quietly wrong. It was an almost impossible thing to put his finger on, this wrongness, this sense of incompletion and imperfection. One of the main reasons for this was that recently his fingers had started falling off. Every time he laid down his brushes and palette knives with a sense of finality, or kicked aside the wax coated wine bottles and shards of willow charcoal from around his feet, or picked the hardened paint from his greasy, matted beard, he’d move too quickly, and he would hear a noise –  ‘click’ – coming from his hands. Each time this happened, he would look closely at the source of the noise, always a finger, and watch it wrinkle like salted mollusc, turn grey, or brown, or black, and fall to the floor. The process was painless and fast, leaving a dry, flaky, self-cauterised stump behind, as if it was the result of an injury received as a child; an accident with a hammer, a birth defect, a mauling from the family dog.

It was late September, and the leaves were starting to dry and curl on the branches that tapped on the window of the studio. Summer was already starting to seem like a memory of a half-dream, held for a few seconds on awakening, and seen with perfect clarity before quickly being lost to garbled, mossy symbolisms and abstract word association. He sat on his stool, flecked white with paint and looked at his old hands. Only three fingers remained; his first finger on his left hand, pressed hard against his thumb, and the middle and smallest fingers on his right hand, looping around a palette knife encrusted with black, glutinous mulch. Every seven minutes or so, he would raise his right hand up to his painting - now several inches thick from the months of pigment plastered upon the frame, a physical, swollen calendar of frustrations - and scratch the edge of the knife through the top layer of paint to expose a sliver of April, a scar of spring.

For the briefest moment not so long ago, for one golden second, he could see the piece as finished. As he pulled his arm away from the canvas, trembling with elation, he was sure that this was it; that the one cut he had just made through the heavy globules of arterial red had completed his year’s work. It just required one tiny extension, another inch of dragged marbling through the layers and… and… it was gone. That extra inch wasn’t repairable; he had reached a zenith and then toppled clumsily, having completely changed the dynamic between the washes in the bottom-right corner and the sharpness of the veins stretching around the side. Tears of frustration ran into his beard and the artist stomped around studio like a chastised toddler, throwing his portfolio against the filthy windows, scattering praise and high reviews from many years ago, shouting at the papers and glossy uselessness that floated down over dead candles and a year of scratchings. His feet crashed through mirrors and kicked all in sight; the skeletal remains of a mummified aspidistra scattered into dust-motes and moth wings, and the acrid cloud produced a wracking, dry, rasping cough from the cracked old lips of the giant, wrinkled child. The artist fell into a wretched heap on the oily rug that covered most of the floor, and lay still, bare chest heaving, his liver spots rising and falling on pigeon bones, their erratic rhythms moving cog-like on his heartbeat.

‘Click’.

His head banged against the thin fabric with a hollow thud as he brought his hand to his face to watch the little finger twist and curl inwards like a dying spider, like a sleeping fern, atrophying quickly like a sped-up film of pestilence. It twitched twice spasmodically before turning the colour of London loam and hanging for a moment on a thread of papyrus-skin before dropping onto his stomach. His gut wrenched with as the appendage rolled onto the ground near his chin, the droplets of hope and impetus drying up inside him like so many grains of sand slipping through a distorted hourglass. Only two fingers now remained on his ravaged hands, ashen stumps forming involuntary fists hung on the end of his arms like chicken gristle. Soon, he thought, soon he would be useless, sterile, impotent and surely unemployed. He did not find the idea of mouth or foot painting at all attractive, and so what would happen if this wasting disease spread to whatever part of his body he used for his art? Would his lips suffer the same fate? His feet? His head? The idea wasn’t so unbelievable.

He had not stepped out of his studio for so, so long. His windows let in the occasional polymer of daylight, hanging limp and sticky, photons like dead spermatozoa coughed out over his cluttered desk with its smashed glass veneer. Nobody had seen any of the work he had produced for almost fifteen years now; the exhibition he was planning on putting together was going to be crowned by this final painting, this unfinished, unfinishable virus that would complete the retrospective. He did not know what had happened to his family, his critics, his customers and investors. It had been too long.

The artist walked over snapped pencils and crushed cans, stood next to his window and scraped at the mildew, scraped again at the months and years that had gathered on the glass. Outside looked different to how he remembered it; the trees, which before were all he could see through the filth, now stood in front of tall buildings which seemed to stretch away into the distance. A thousand identical houses rolled down the hill to the left of his parched garden, and enormous cars were pulled in and out of a thousand tarmac driveways, like flotsam on a Perspex tide. A look of determination crossed the artist’s face, and he sat at the desk and scrabbled for some paper, a pen, his inkpot and an envelope. A letter would be written to his old agent (or the agent’s successor), the address was one he had never forgotten, burned into his memory when he was young, a darling of the town at the initial abstract expressionist renaissance, an ancient, forgotten movement remembered only by himself and the dustsheets behind gallery walls. A letter announcing the completion of the retrospective, the apex of all of his work to date was written slowly and clumsily, in green ink on the old, stained paper. His remaining two fingers held the pen pincer-like, and the process was arduous, but determination drove it to completion. The old man was almost panting with excitement, a year of tears and struggles, a year with hardly any food or water and with nothing to stare at but the same canvas, a mocking year: almost completed! Unwilling to step outside at this crucial time, the artist forced open the window and flung the envelope out onto the pavement, several feet away, to wait for a neighbour to pick it up, to deliver it for him. They would. He was sure of it.

The artist stepped into the centre of his studio and looked hard at the canvas. He picked up the pots of paint, held them close to his chest in the crook of his wrist, and poured their entire contents over his naked body. When he was completely doused in every pigment he owned (even the tiny pot of silver metallic paint he bought for a futurist project that never materialised), he took a deep breath, bent his old legs and laughing, leapt at the canvas, knocking it off the easel and smearing it with the deep brown, sickly, heady concoction that covered and clung to every grey, wiry hair. He floundered around on the floor, feeling months of dried paint scratching and cutting his neck, his chest, his leathery thighs, plastering his beard to his clavicle. He caressed and attacked it, made love to and murdered it, prussian blues ejaculating over burnt siennas. He lay still, spent, panting in the knowledge that his work was complete. A smile crept to his dark blue lips that were flecked with paler cyan when he heard the sound: ‘Click’. The noise echoed once around the room, inside his head and off glass domes filled with old skin and moss. ‘Click’.

Then another. And another, until his entire body was crackling and popping and spitting with clicks like an untuned television set. The artist’s eyes closed as his body shrunk like an autumn leaf, dried and discoloured beneath the mess of wet paint. His body contorted once, twice, and then broke into tiny pieces, which settled like dust on the canvas, and waited for the curators to collect him.

 

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Within Weeks, They’ll Be Re-opening The Shipyards

September 4, 2008 at 2:28 pm (Uncategorized)
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I like this. I hope you like it too. Its not quite a poem, and that’s how it will stay. It’s just a rumour that was spread around town, and a response to a post on http://theviscosityproject.wordpress.com

 

They knew it wasn’t going to be easy when

The men decided to build their homes

From the inside out; starting with running

Children, carpets spreading outwards, around them hopping

Over a single red stool; shouts of

‘No, it’s my turn’, ‘Grow up!’ ‘Stop!’

 

Once the coffee tables and the occasional

Broken pots were set in place, legs growing

Tree-like from the bases of veneers that were not

There just a moment ago,

The plastic wrapping seeped its way out of the

Sofa skin, shiny, keeping dirt trapped

 

On the inside, away from shaved legs and

The pins that buried themselves, unfettered,

Deep into the corner of the room.

The gas was breathed out of waxy leaves

And trapped beneath the oven.

That sinking feeling, driven home.

 

All that was left was to raise the walls,

And they pulled the stones all the way

From South Wales, you know. Nobody

Seems to know quite how, or why,

When the lorry runs on rolling logs

And reconstituted seashells.

 

So mum and dad and the two

New arrivals sit around the alter stone

Running red with iron ore, trapped

With double glazing while the

Telegraph pole outside falls silently into

The yawning earth, just like last time

 

And the time before. The pater familias

Makes a mental note to not forget

To stab the sun with mistletoe,

To keep up with the Jones’s,

Lest they have to build their house again

Or re-consecrate the patio set.

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Escape From The Lonely Planet ™

September 4, 2008 at 11:29 am (Uncategorized)

Quick set of imaginary holiday photos. Sorry for the slightly half-arsed entry today(another ‘you…you…you…’ poem when I’m not entirely sure who ‘you’ are), I have been reading a mixture of Rumi and Larkin, which seems to fit this quite well. You could see this as a sort of follow up to yesterday’s post – the view that if you go out with goals, you’ll miss the importance of the journey, the faces on the train and the things you can learn from those who feel compelled to interrupt your crusade. People write expletives on toilet walls for the same reasons people sit on top of poles.

 

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You scaled a dozen wailing walls

And screamed along with chariots.

You placed the leaves upon your tongue

And scraped the incense from your nails.

 

You spent a yearning winter

In a sanctuary filled with twisting

Hands and sores and grinding hope;

Something for the C.V.

 

You kneeled in mock pretending prayer

Watching dust climb up rough silks.

You fed the dome-headed child again, his

Nails scraping your white palms.

 

You washed your laddered tights

In rivers churned with backbones that

Rose up from the wetter faith

And dried there, on the baking sand.

 

You rinsed your travel razor

At lotus feet, transfigured stone.

Dragging over aching calves

Lest the tea man comes this way again.

 

(I wracked my soles in frankincense, even

Crushed petals on my chin,

Piled golden earth upon my face to

Claim I did not know you.)

 

You returned with photographs

And a well-padded resumé.

I returned with prospects that I

May one day go alone.

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Rope Trick

September 3, 2008 at 3:47 pm (Uncategorized)
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Second Attempt at writing this short story. Thanks to Matt for a tiny detail of one who may well have succeeded (but may well have failed), on top of a gas tower in London.

Daniel had been sat on top of his eighteen foot pole for eighteen hours and thirty-two minutes, when he began to suspect that this particular method wasn’t going to work either.

For two days, Daniel had trekked over arid terrain with his custom built pole, his chest swollen with pride at the thought of the goal he was aiming for. He had travelled halfway around the world to find the perfect spot in which to receive the blessings of the ancients, to demonstrate his yogic prowess and attain the enlightenment his foolish companions back in Cambridge aimlessly strived for. He would pitch his pole on the banks of one of the world’s great rivers, at what felt like an auspicious location, and then place his raffia and rough silk cushion atop of it and sit alone, in his greatly rehearsed half-lotus position, without eating or drinking, several feet above the base level of men. He would sit, and wait for enlightenment. That was his goal.

Daniel had finished the last of his cereal bars by the time he had found the place he stop and stay, and the pockets of his tailored robes bulged with empty wrappers. He had reached his destination, and within an hour had erected his future home, scaled the height and assumed the position. To the East he could see the great river meandering over the horizon, its waters glinting opalesque, reflecting in the half-dozen mystic pendants he wore around his neck. “And so, it begins” he spoke aloud, hearing no reply but the rumble in the distance of water buffalo and the quiet screams of the wading birds, cracking their freshwater oysters at the ends of slender beaks, as their spindley legs negotiated the labyrinth of reeds. The sun was reaching its highest, and Daniel set about following his breath through his body, as he had read in a pamphlet once. Taking the humid air deep into his lungs, he closed his eyes and felt it permeate through his form, trying to push thoughts of his ex-girlfriend out of his head (whose carnal temptations were now on the other side of the world; petty, small, materialistic girl that she was. She wouldn’t be laughing at him when he returns, he thought, saint-like and possessing knowledge she could only dream of…) and concentrate on reaching self-realisation. Daniel adjusted his pose, pulling his left foot further up over his right thigh, his soft, white sole pointing upwards and beneath his palm. An hour passed in which he followed his breathing, and tried to empty his head. “How they would all suffer”, Daniel whispered to himself, “when they see what I have achieved.”

For a while, the memories of lust would not shift from Daniel’s head. He could not help but miss her, even though she was pointless, a waste of space who claimed to have been elevated to modern sainthood by a gap-year placement in a leper’s home. Every time  Daniel’s mind came close to a harmonious state, the smoothness of her thighs would creep in behind his closed eyes and threatened to ruin everything. But this was a part of the process, wasn’t it? Even the Buddha had to feel lust in order to strip it away beneath his Bodhi tree, Christ met his temptation in the desert. So it was alright to feel arousal, mingled with bitterness. It was expected. Daniel straightened his back and took another deep breath, and concentrated once more. After a further half an hour, a tune began playing in Daniel’s head. At first, this tune was barely there, a tiny seed of distraction taking root. After a few minutes, however, it was thudding inside his brain, and it took several more minutes for Daniel to identify it. This was no transcendental sound vibration, no mantra or piece of divine arrangement – it was the shrill and tinny music playing during the end credits of the shallow Arabic film he was subjected to on the flight over here. What had made the micro-cinematic experience even more intolerable was the fact that a small Arabic man who smelt strongly of rose water and carroway insisted on explaining in minute detail exactly what was happening in the film, even though his English was stilted in its earnest, over-confident pace. Somehow, the predictable, saccharine music had burned itself into Daniel’s subconsciousness, and a frustrated anger rose within him as he sat atop his lofty perch. He tried humming a single, low tone to focus his thoughts and streamline his breathing, and this helped with the distaction for a while. The song in his head would come and go like waves, indeed, an odd synchronicity began to occurr as he moved into his third hour of penance. The tinny melody would start up in his head after fifteen minutes of relieving silence, but only when the wading birds returned to collect more muddy bivalves, after flying away to feed their young. So this cycle of frustration and anger would be heralded by the squawking of curlews and the cracking of beak on shell in the distance. Not only this, but Daniel was beginning to grow hungry, and his leg was getting sore.

The hunger and rumbling of his stomach was a particular annoyance to Daniel. “This is nothing but an illusion. I am here to experience aesceticism, enlightenment. It is the illusion of attachment to sensory satisfaction that is causing this hunger” he said aloud, to nobody in particular. Daniel thought of his former friends (for he was sure he would no longer need any of them when he returns, changed beyond recognition and unable to commuincate on  their crass level) and their own petty attempts to gain what he would surely attain. He thought of Jessica, who every day would sacrifice something to the sea. He thought of poor, misguided James, who  told his dreams to strangers and thought he received the love of god by dancing in the street and pulling chariots up hills. He thought of the other young man who they had all known, who ended up on top of a gas tower writing letters to himself which claimed to fall from the sky, and he thought of this man, falling to his death onto an imaginary pile of bodies belonging to his imaginary companions. None of those friends had got it right, he thought. They hadn’t done their research. It only takes an hour of looking on wikipedia to find the great list of Sadhus, Brahmin and Saints who had revealed themselves to the divine by ostentatiously sitting on top of poles and refusing all food and water. This, he thought, was definately the way to do it.  

Another hour passed, and the hunger was growing slightly painful. Daniel was growing thirsty too, his tongue swelling like a clam inside the shell of his head. The same song was still rising and falling, despite the humming and the breathing and the array of pendants designed to aid his meditative state. For a while, well into the fourth hour atop the pole, Daniel had the hiccups. They passed after twenty minutes of distraction, after employing every technique he could remember from his childhood; holding his breath, counting to twenty, and trying to find ways to shock the convulsions away.

Finally, a moment of peace descended upon the young man. His breathing regulated, his yogic position precise and technically perfect. “Now”, he whispered to himself, “Surely now my eyes will open, and my soul shall walk free of my body”. Daniel even fancied he could hear a flute playing in the distance, as the first wash of relaxation passed over him, despite the crippling hunger in his stomach which was only just being ignored. A nutshell hit him on the back of his head. And then another one. Furiously, Daniel’s eyes flew open, and slowly, purposely he turned himself around to see what had pulled him from his divine state. Looking down, he saw two children, brothers dressed in identical yellow wrap-around garments, each carrying a stick of bamboo and staring intently at the pale youth eighteen feet above them. In the distance, a quiet lowing and the clunking of a simple bell announced the plodding arrival of a white cow that, with a strained grunt and a cloud of dust, lay down at the children’s feet. Daniel was appalled; he had carefully selected this spot to reach his goal of enlightenment and to meditate based on the fact that there were no people for miles around. The nearest settlement was thirty miles to the West, over the sandstone outcrops that leered on the horizon, and yet here were two young beggars, no doubt from a shack down the riverbank, determined to interrupt his tranquility. “What are you doing?” asked the smaller of the brothers, in his fluting voice, practising his English. Daniel turned his back to them, refusing to acknowledge their insolent presence. “My brother Bally and I, we have food and water, coconuts and rice. You are welcome to take lunch with us. Come down from up there and eat, converse with us.” Daniel closed his eyes and resumed his humming. His mind was muddled with anger. “How dare they offer me their petty charity! How dare they interrupt a holy man in the middle of his journey to spiritual awakenment!” He tried to concentrate on the nothingness that had so far eluded him, even after nearly six hours of isolation. “It is because I am a white man, they refuse to take me seriously. They think I cannot exist on meditation, that I am trapped in the material desire they are aloof to. I shall not even look at them.” Daniel squeezed his eyes tightly shut and ignored the now crippling hunger that now wracked his stomach. To add to the distraction, the wading birds half a mile away had returned to the mud bank, and with them the tune in his head struck up its unrelenting distraction. Half an hour of irritation passed before he heard the cow stand up, an awkward four-point process of hump and hoof, and the sad clunking of the bell held amidst jowls grew fainter and fainter until it was beyond earshot. Tentatively, Daniel turned around to see if the intruders still sat beneath the pole. The space was empty, exept for two coconuts and a banana leaf, on which lay rice and fruits. The boys had left him food with which to further patronise his noble efforts, and anger him even more.

The sun was growing heavy in the sky as Daniel continued to make excuses for himself and push unwanted thoughts out of his head.  The hunger had become something tangible, a thick, frayed rope weaving its way out of his solar plexus, tugging him off balance with a rasping dryness. “Any moment now, the flash of light would come”, he told himself. “Just a few more minutes to reach the goal”. He simply didn’t believe that he needed any of this, here, eighteen feet above his inferiors, sat in a sacred position he once saw in a pamphlet.  The sun dipped below the horizon, and the threat of sleep loomed around his ears. “Let us wait a few more minutes…”

Daniel had been sat on top of his eighteen foot pole for eighteen hours and thirty-two minutes, when he began to suspect that this particular method wasn’t going to work. He climbed down, felt his aching legs touch the ground and quickly gorged upon the food left behind by the boys who ruined everything for him. Putting on his custom-made sandals, and licking the wrappers of the cereal bars in his pockets, he walked back towards the road, fighting back tears, back the way he came. One day, he would show them. He would show her, and he would show them all. He was doing the right thing, he was sure of it…

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