stained
Stand.
Stand up.
Go on, you know you want to.
Stand up and step out, breaking free of the constraints and chains of this horrid regime. Stand up and be counted - make your way through this parade ground, this marching field, only to be told you’re marching in the face of nothing across an abandoned supermarket car park under an industrial steel grey sky.
Kick at the dust. Take out your weirds and worries, wholes and half truths and scatter their dessicated floral remains onto its leaps and bounds boundaries. Ground round down. Gather its pieces of peace into your pockets, bags, wallets and hands. Anything to hold, to constrain and contain. Push it all in, flattening the grains of dirt into a compounded muck flecked with petals and prickles and stems, until the baggage becomes just too much to carry. Seams bulging. Walk, waddle, run. Bumble along. Get gone. Get away somehow. Pick it up and start again.
Once off the waste land and onto the tarmac, back toward a familiar hidinghouse, the tearing rain splotches down into materials solid, soft and squalid. Slowly sopping and slopping away, each further step a plunge. Icy acrid acid water splattering off achingly pink stinging skin; cheekbones cutting choicely through the atmosphere. Pounding feet. Pounding flesh. Gaze down. Keep low. All you stood for has now gone. It has turned into the sodden contents of those pockets, bags and wallets, soaked in sweat and toil and rain and tears…whetting the cloying clay soil into a river of mud ebbing away.
The rain soaks through tissues, membranes, fabrics. Pockets leak mulchy gravy, splattering dank soil stains through the heavy beige ochred fabrics. Soon all is slathered in this sludge of what could have been, but never was.
We stain ourselves in order to wash ourselves clean.
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