This one has ants in it...
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
SOMETHING ABOUT ANTS.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes, were ants, one, two, three going up and down her clothes. She just lay there watching them, black little things on white. Eventually she got up and, later, after breakfast, she noticed more of them on the carpet, on the desk, the walls, it was too much. She didn’t mind two or three on her clothes but not everywhere, so she clobbered them for hours; she just stomped and squashed.
Night came and she got tired, they were still there, crawling, multiplying; she went out for a break, but she couldn’t stop thinking about them until she found this poet, whose breathing was obscure, yet not unfamiliar, who came from a far colony of emptiness with a voice she had lost years ago, talking with words that tripped over themselves to get out, but in the end, a few passing pictures were left, about ecstasy and dis-possessed and have to go. So they went together. Days later she looked around at all the young people with feelings of wanting more as she rearranged the flowers on the table and tried to pacify the debt she owed to herself from all the times she’d denied her true belief whenever she had seen it.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Time for home again, back to the ants, but she felt so far behind and left out of it. Getting old I suppose, she thought.
Home, killing ants, with faces she’d met rolling through her head and thinking about a vision, a young girl who held out a light for a while as a horn blower sent her somewhere else. She had to stop and rest, an ant crawled across her shore.
She decided to go wash the dishes, put the radio on; heat-wave in the city; ah, what’s it all coming to? All the thoughts, all the dishes, all the ants. ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to know any more.’
She dreamed of ants as she went sleep walking up a red carpeted stairs crushing them underfoot, reaching for the stars. She woke up in a police station; they told her she had got locked out of her house, had to take her somewhere safe until she woke up.
Home again, thinking about going on holiday away from the ants and thoughts and dishes.
Ten days later, back from holiday, she opened the door and mail slid out, ants surf-boarding it, she cried, then said, what the hell, what are a few lodgers, and went to make a cup of tea.
Her pantry had been invaded, soldiers footprints everywhere, honey pots changed colour, columns of the little buggers marching in ecstasy from her sweets to their dark hole; it has gone too far, it’s war now, she said.
‘Chemical annihilation,’ said the chemist, put it in their path, kill them all, the nest as well. So she did.
Then she was back living on her own, but she felt like a mass murderer. The ants had gone, but she wanted them so to come back in the place she wandered looking for a sign of life.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Lying on her bed days later looking at flies buzzing around the light bulb, wondering how she could be so heartless to kill them all, the whole family, everything seemed so empty again without them. So she went for a walk out to where the city burned, she blew a bubble at an empty hotel; it cast its desolation back at her. She walked past it. Later, stiffness absorbed her being, part memory but mostly disturbing in its nothingness.
I was afraid to call out to her; there was only the night’s blackness; I tried to call out but it was no use. I was captured by an amorphous feeling of desolation; I walked on through the years, through the headlights of all the dead nights trying to re-capture some spell over my soul so profound and full of longing. I crept through the days where I wanted so much but couldn’t find anything, and drank coffee so thick in foreign places I was lost in and alone, passing by myself, not even catching up to the dream I’d forecast, riding through on a metal monster.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
Some man penetrated me, cast his monstrous spear into my heart, caught me, perpetrating me, pinned me on a wall of his making, scratched my eyes on a blackboard named desire, confounded my passion, then walked off, left me dripping with his dark dank soulless wetness I couldn’t wash from my soul for days, for weeks. Years went by; I crept through myself looking for something he hadn’t stolen, something he’d missed, found a place no-one could touch, something perfect; settled there for a while waiting for someone to come back; fingers walked through my dreams filled with Déjà vu and dinosaurs and a feeling broken I wanted to run from. There was a woman burnt, a player I couldn’t reach anymore. Somewhere a profoundness carroted my inspiration; I dived deep came up empty full of promises.
How could I know it wasn’t real? Fooling myself, maya’d, illusioned, duality; I was creaking full of words I couldn’t understand nor ever bargain for in the purity of all my aspirations plundering anything any aspersion I was or could be. I was alone, until I found Teresa and came to know her.
The post before this one: https://steemit.com/powerhousecreatives/@wales/the-end-of-zen-s-place
Images from Pixabay
