2a

A bald, emaciated caterpillar strains at something not quite reachable, totters semi-transfixed within an endless nanosecond of confused belief. Then falls, forever.

I too was once a coiled spring of pregnant possibility, my outward form contorted into a shape suggestive of supplication, horror or surrender. I crawled inside an empty, disused drainpipe that had somehow been provided, or forgotten, and was thus enabled to escape the kind of scrutiny we all must sometimes face, if only in our half-remembered dreams.

In mine there was a girl whose hair might fleetingly caress my naked skin if only I forgot to understand, if only I was innocent.

But too much comprehension made me penitential, and so I haplessly emerged to accept my sentence.

Suffocated into disfunction then by terrors too incoherent and frenzied to be named, I sat examining that same bare skin in the feeble hope that I might somehow miraculously transcend it. I wished, with silent earnestness, for another life, another me, outside the constant cycle of confused regret, beyond the omnipresent disarray of my desires, ambitions and beliefs.

Sometimes, summoned up from deep within, another me in fact does emerge, intent on a spurious kind of resistance or self-protection, and I am forced to stand back in dumb acquiescence, complicit in a different type of fatalism to that which normally constrains me. Were I to intervene, the whole house of cards would tumble irretrievably down, and even the last vestiges of my sanity and solace would be lost.

And so, instead, I merely sit, and try to watch, a victim as much as an agent of my bemused, importunate rememberings.