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The Person Who Has Lost Everything, Is Your Deadly Enemy
The person who has lost everything cannot be defeated for they no longer fear loss. The person who has lost everything knows that there is nowhere to run. They know that there is no safe haven. For me it's as if I've always got to live my life on edge, which is how the animals and children live. In this city there is no puppyhood or childhood. Those who think they have it safe are deluded. There was this bedraggled kitten in the Lost And Found Home who looked a bit odd. When I reached my hand in to touch and comfort him. But instead of warming to me fingers he bit into me, to make sure that I was still awake. The small odd eyes spoke to me. 'My world is shattered and disturbed. It is not so easily cured by your compassion.' I withdrew my fingers shrugging my shoulders. I was hurt. So I will try harder next time, I stubbornly thought. The moose carving from the dump has become my sacred animal. It is sitting beside me on the tissue paper, as if it were an animal I had rescued born from that paper. Its back is to me by the night light. It's like Gabby the black labrador would have sat had they been here. But they are not. Its position comforts me. It never changes. The worker of the moose, has almost worked it as good as life could have worked a moose. This moose art is an animal I will never have to rescue. We will not ask anything of one another. Since it is not living I will die before it. It will not hurt the same as the thought of leaving the animals in distress behind. The presence of the moose has triggered my greatest fear. The fear is not of death, but the powerlessness in leaving those behind that need my help. I was dreaming of my movement through an apocalyptic landscape. I was loaded up with backpacks of puppies and kittens. Tremendous and violent murky oceans were flooding the shopping malls. Smashed glass was strewn through the car parks, of swinging electric wiring and fallen telegraph poles. Subway tunnels were filled with rubble and flickering light globes. Stopped cars were piled up on the big freeways. I wake up in the morning, not to find out that it had all just been a bad dream, but to find out that it was real. Reality follows me down my sacred path to sleep, if I don't turn around and throw it off in time. So I turn like a wizard with a staff on a forest path. 'Back off arsehole! This is my space!' I name the world 'arsehole.' I do not want it to follow me into sleep. I want to go into my dreams alone, and once there to wake up and say, 'It was all just a bad reality.' |
