Intoxication Fornication Regret

Intoxication

Snowdrops smell like all the best shower gel commercials from your childhood when you crush them with mad abandon in a provincial churchyard.   

Sam tries to convince me that she is human as a bulky wren crash-lands against a background of anemone-shaped clouds.

When I am forty-three feet high (and keen to dance on well-kept lawns and kick at koi ponds till the fish make squawking sounds midflight) I sometimes wonder how my massive form will be dissolved by this quaint land.   

A field of concrete barley. Four cannons positioned at each corner of the field bombard a quadriplegic scarecrow with neon flares. Knots of overhead powerlines writhe like tethered snakes.

My iphone chases sticks in a sundrenched valley.              

Fornication

The separated ears of a hare. Those last few erratic rotations of a spinning top. Stained tarmac. A Nissan’s blue-grey belch. 

To the mystery of a lit cottage ten miles from anything as dusk enfolds the hay and there are five shiny cars on the drive and red faces at the window.

I tell Sam that sometimes when I look into her eyes I see a montage of war atrocities that last 57 minutes and features a voiceover by Kenneth Branagh.

Regret

Water slips as if captured with an achingly slow shutter speed. Floating leaves quiver with lost ants. Bramble trellises add a malevolent colouration to the proceedings.  

And now Sam the metallurgist from Fife is expatiating on her theory that patched gaps in hedges – the motorist’s inebriated folly – are portals to the only true regret in the universe.      

An old man’s olive green jacket hobbles past the post office. The sleeves get caught by a falling manhole cover. Nobody helps it get free. Civilizations rise and fall.