Tuesday 26 June 2007

On being an aging bum



Where has it all gone, my je n’ai sais quoi?

The mind rages down some lyrical alley like a drunken bum spoiling for a fight, he's got nothing left except the anger that brought him to where he is. Nowhere. A dead end street in a town full of nobodies, and what he found when he got there was nothing. No wonder he is pissed.

Lost too. He forgot a long time ago where he was headed or why.
His good looks slapped off his face by the gnarled hands of time, and the wet acid-like piss of struggle has stripped the colour out of his hair.

He is just a husk. He may as well be dead. Most wish he was. Overweight, snarling, incomprehensible, ugly. He scares them, they fear him, fear the ugliness in their own soul that reflects back at them off his tattered, stinking cloth. His personality not much better.

'Look at that loser!' they say. Perfect people, with perfect lives, living perfectly well. Probably in a town called Perfect. It would be typical wouldn’t it.

'Fuck off you caaants!' He drawls back and stumbles into a pile of rubbish, going down, his face into discarded cabbage, rice and rats urine, though from its taste he suspects it is cat.

He pushes himself up from the wall. Dark red dust crumbling from the gaps between the bricks as his dirty nails try to get a grip and raise his rotund, grotesque carcass back upright. It's a struggle but he makes it. He grins to himself, like finally he achieved something in this shit hole of a town.

He pushes on into the night, the street silent now except for the echo of his slow shuffle, a slight limp in his right leg; an old wound that never healed.

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