It was long ago – longer now than it seems. It started with a smokeless cigarette lost in the eden of a foggy night. Ignorance is bliss, or so people say – ignorant people who know nothing else. The same people who say life is hard and you can only reap what you sew. There are liars in this world who may try and force this belief on you, but life? Life is easy and complete. Life is nothing more than an adaptation of randomicity in which the randomers are begotten by strangers, the believers by the non-believers and the truth by a lie so thick and solid shit couldn't stir it.
A smokeless cigarette hung out of the slack jawed mouth of the believer as he hit me with roll after roll of quarters, he bought my poetry and he sang me songs. He slept near enough that i could feel him stir in the night – yet far enough to allow him another cliché of the modern world. - looking back to find humour in depression, beauty in disaster and love in times of loneliness. Time heals all apparently.
My story – if it can so be called is not one of regrets and one on which time's healing hand has yet to caress. Timeless clichés be the plot, liars and thieves the personages – one of those stories in which nothing happens but casual observations on the modern world. One of those tales that despite the nothings and the nevers, the neithers, nors and ne'er do wells serves to captivate and intrigue. It is the all apilicable story of life and love in the Foggy Dew.
it is the never ending circle of lies forever circling, here, there and everywhere – floating and dreaming.
We slept side by side and the smoke filled by lungs as unuttered threats span around my head. I heard him stir in the night and i felt him shudder with storm-sounds making the air reverberate. The Believer had fallen from the Grace of God and landed on the cardboaard beside me. As my story is one of nothing, his was one of everything-lost. A story of riches and women, chalets an champagne, openings, closings, and regenerations. He had had it all, seen it too. He had the picture-perfect wife, two kids, the postcard villa in Spain, everything money could buy – solid gold dancing girls, puple orange juice and a soft spot for space-tourism. But alas ignorance became his downfall. So often is it hard for two emotions to co-exist, so often had he turned a blind-eye, pretended not to see the signs and so as the ignorance grew so too did the love diminish.
The now loveless Believer, believed not in his family. He traded his children's names for another glass of brandy. He forgot his wife's face. Too many parties had left in a state of numbness from which he could not easily escape. Blinded to the problems, hiding eyes from hacking coughs.
His wife is on a hospital bed. He watches her life-blood drip daily, slowly fade away. The believer unshaven and a mess is anywhere but by her side. So he returns once more to his core belief, the redeeming effects of money. Love comes in the form of flowers, and he sends all the health and happiness he can in a mug of random sea tea.
All in vain. She dies alone, he weeps alone.
The Believer stirs again beside me, in his hands grasped is a cigarette packet empty. A poem penned and a picture footed is all I see. A gathering of some sort, people mourning, and in the distance a huddled shell of a man – flameless cigarette ablaze. The poem read.
As i looked out across the bay,
not a thing did my eyes delight to see.
A lone red rose on her bare graveside
and the stump of an old oak tree.
Dressed in black they mourned and wept,
while beneath the earth my angel slept
golden sun glowing
raindrop tears flowing.
I watch undisturbed – unknowing.
While the believer boasts a host of characters, my tale is mine and mine alone. I am the be all and end all of my world. These people come and go, they give me pieces, the half-truths of belief. And yet they flock to me – the forgotten generations of loneliness searching for something new and unseen. I am the man you see, the man you humiliate with shrapnel in a paper cup – don't look at him children. I wear my coat of darkness to keep elements from my back, i wear this hood and cap so you don't see me staring back. I have been too often avoided, too often have children been shielded from my life, but to what avail? Join me in Eden wont you? If I'm lucky you may bounce a coin my way, no nod of recognition. I am here, I have arrived. Your generous donations get squandered, squandered on the casual neccesity of cans.
He is better than me though, belief can do so much for a man. He is one step up on the proverbial ladder. He knows you people from another life, of summer sun and strawberry girls. He knows your customs, your witty anecdotes yet you refuse him. On passing you dip your hat, you cross the road or simply play the fool. Ignorance is bliss.
The Believer is gone now. To where, who knows? Perhaps he found his Rushmore, or another dancing-girl. When I awoke he was gone. He comes to me now and then, in dreams. He tells me not to fear the world, tells me his story over and over. I still feel his presence even now that he is so long gone, i see him in a laughing child, or the young mother struggling to smile. And so i keep one now, just in case, one cigarette forever flamess awaits him on his triumphant return to the life of a randomer.
And when we are reunited, we will live together in our Random City. We will await newcomers to our world and we will show them the how-tos and the whos, we will mould them. The kind and the gentle will be the new Believer and the bitter and violent will take my place when I am gone. These will be the new peoples of The City, they will be awash with new-birth lost in a mug of random sea tea. They will be beautiful and they will be ours.
They will join our forces and as i drift into death they will live. We wish you well and ask you kindly to wipe your feet – this is something new and never-experienced. This is our life, in its truest form – where the lovers are begotten by the rapists, the flames begotten by blooded and the lies begotten by stone-solid belief.
