ABSENCE

I slip inside your hotel with a bag. It's just me but I’m stuffed with stowaways and guilt. Your advert: Imaginary Friends Stay Free. I'm overwhelmed. You see, they multiply, and never leave, so I’m faced with the problem of housing. They never stay in one place...mill about like a plague of locusts, and you’re offering us, a place of confession. I worry, about revenue going to waste through lack of imagination. The city stretches its legs, land hungry for love, anticipating sparkle, like an engagement ring on a virgin’s hand. Imagine the architect, his legs spread as he leaned over the model growing into his child, product of letting loose. The tower shoots up, brilliant, looking to fuck a goddess, always on, forever the centre of attention. I step out and a small woman, dressed in a beggar’s opera kind of way, pushes her face in front of mine and breathes a starving breath. She is dense, gives off no reflection, light...my eardrums echo with her white noise.

In conversation with a Tory: they can’t see I don’t feel any anger about refugees, even if the country is filling up, is in financial trouble…it is what it is and we all have to swim in it. War happens and we die; we’re human, or we’re not but I won’t be a battery to heat their pools, and yet I’m so invisible that my life will pass all of them by. Statistics say there would be ten people like me in every ton; we’ll be the ones working in peace willing to help other humans; I can’t offer money to beggars ‘cause I’ve got eight grandchildren three kids and their spouses...and a grandson’s ex-spouse. But, I’d never sneer at the sight of bodies swathed in cardboard and sleeping bags under a railway bridge in the middle of a city centre where the wind turns cold even in summer. This country resembles a dystopian novel, and while we watch such dramas in warm homes, most of us would wish the same for all comers.