HATCHECK GIRL
My thoughts are all birdlike, fluttering behind the eyes. I feel them in my lungs. I feel the sun on my face like a crimson ribbon. It does not make me smile, though it should. Rest the chin on the hand and reflect on what is stylish and what is not. I am a creature of fashion. Dress me up and take me to the costume ball at nightfall. I will come as an unlikely bird man, preening, seeking out the party worms hiding under blue-ribboned favours. The hatcheck girl despises me from events that happened before I went to the other side, before I adopted these feathers. She believes I’m insincere in my efforts to expunge the past, that I wallow in it. Do I look like a nostalgist? I yell at her as I leave. She says so much with a gesture it draws blood from my eyes. Tell me something, people, when you hate yourself does it feel like yourself or like someone else? The hatcheck girl offers me a feathered cap. I don it and doff it as I walk out backwards counting the steps, one, two, three …
STEEL HORSE
How I came to ride this steel horse, tell me how I came to ride it? Answers hide under rocks, behind clouds clashing in the heavens. Someone took my nose during a raid. I breathe freely now, yet feel as though I should say something to someone about it, perhaps the padre travelling with us. He would know a prayer. I impaled the head of an enemy on the end of my spear, yet as I stare at the bearded face I feel as though I know it. Could it be my long lost brother? Hey, Ruggerio, is that you? He stares at me without answering and yet I understand him completely. Ankle the steel horse and it should slow down, but this one clatters along with abandon. I smell char. The wind chills my naked feet: someone forgot to shoe me. I should be treated better than this. I fill the void of someone who would otherwise be swallowed by it, and yet I am sent into the world bare-footed. The steel horse, meanwhile, motors on without thinking of me on its back, with my back to my enemies, the roadside poppies blazing the way to the castle.
FROGGY
Froggy says I must go. Go where? I say. Anywhere else, he says. His green gaping face makes me smile. He tells me to wipe the smile off my face. I open my hand and rub it across my lips. I close my hand in a fist. Then I hold my hand to him and open it. You're still smiling, he says. You're not real, I say. As real as you, he says. His green tongue tenses. I close my hand in a fist and bring it to bear. He springs. He was there, he was there, or he was not really there.
LITTLE MACHINE
You make little machines from bits and pieces of other things. On this one I like how you used the lobster claw as a robot arm, and wooden clothespins for legs. Clever. But I cannot make sense of the body, which brings to mind a clay pot, and the hat on the creature, fashioned from a toe-claw hammerhead, makes everything in this house feel very wintry. I cannot explain the way I am when I visit you, I find that my arms swing about without raison d'etre and that my teeth ache. Maybe your magic works on the inanimate detritus of your world, but something also happens to me, and I am not a friend to it. I am asking you, in no uncertain terms, to stop it, to stop this business. And when you say it represents me, this little machine, I am not afraid of it. I'm not awed. It makes me sad.
BAA
She thought me ovine, my demeanour. And complained that the hatpin jutting from my cheek offended her. What did it mean? Something occult? Something perverse? Something fucked up? It meant nothing much except the person who stuck it there really wanted to pierce my left eye. Lucky for me only the cheekbone suffered a prick. I left the hatpin there as a memento of my persecution, I left it there to make people wonder what I was really trying to say. Let me be frank, nothing that comes out of these two lips means anything to anyone. I baa for the pleasure of baaing. I know in my heart how connected I am to the world, even though the world refuses to accept me, what I am, what I have become. In my hand I hold the key to my happiness. All I need to do is find a lock to fit it in and turn. Beyond that metaphorical door lies a future festooned with flowers and ringing with bright birdsong. Give me a green field to while away the hours and ruminate about the way I was and how wrong everyone, especially that lady, was about me.
FIFTH DAY
On the fifth day I gave up all semblance of decency. I let myself plummet into the depths of my jones. Showering incessantly, pacing, vetching, scratching. Three decades pass with a sativa patina then someone with very white teeth urges you to see the world as it is. Come on, man, let the sun shine in. But frankly, I am not feeling this thing. I am happier and more productive as an intelligent primate with a little buzz happening. No one else needs to know. Just slip on my shades and sit back. All chilled. But this, this business of gnashing teeth and rubbing the sweaty palms on your jeans and pretending you like life, is for the freaking birds.
