Tomorrow

The time is now, or perhaps it is yesterday, or possibly even tomorrow. No. Not tomorrow. For I promised myself I would feel better tomorrow, but at the moment I feel nothing at all. I remember when I was young the first time I incurred anger. But I do not remember the second or third or even the seventieth. They have all rolled into one cantankerous memory that swells inside my brain with shallow pride – refusing to be forgotten. How soon we flee from childhood. How soon we lose a treasured innocence and learn the art of hatred and revenge, sacrificing love for bitterness. The games we play, hitting one another’s feelings like a tennis ball from player to player. But things will change tomorrow.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror but couldn’t return the stare. I doubt I ever will again. Too much pain lies behind the familiar eyes that look more strangely on me day by day. Layers of dust have settled throughout the house like snow. Every moment causes choking clouds of bad housekeeping and womanly neglect. Dust is but the carpet of the poor. But tomorrow I shall be rich.

It is getting late. The gentle heartbeat of the clock reminds me of the seconds that are passing, the minutes that are lost, the years that have been wasted. It chimes. Another hour is reached.

And then comes night -  a creeping sort of darkness that drifts aimlessly into every nook and cranny. A darkness filled with dreams and thoughts of love. I dreamt of love when I was young and thought that love would last forever. Nothing kills your childhood fantasies so heartlessly as life.

And mirrors do not reflect, but expand. The enlarge the world we live in, send image after image of glassy reality as far as the eye can see – if the eye can see at all. We do not live by hope, we live by mirrors, always seeing more than we can ever touch. Then someone takes the hope away and no one’s there to pick the pieces up. But tomorrow I shall not hunger for the realms of life that I can never know.

The bloodless pain of life still drips in my mind. It is not clouded by dust nor hidden by night. It is always there, life, ceaselessly festering in the gutters of the earth; breeding multiplying, growing, oozing out of drains and into air that once was pure. Life – spreading it s ugly black cloud over all that is beautiful, poisoning the good that may once have existed, as a parasite to death. And life – finally – to consume itself within the evil flames of bitterness that it exudes, and screams curses at the world with stolen breath.

Life shall be no more with time. The time is tomorrow. Time that drags the weary life out of us all, and the song still plays though the record’s stopped turning.

And soon dawn will crack the impenetrable darkness of the night with spears of sun. And run to hold the vision, throw yourself in one last bid from freedom from the world’s dizzy heights to land in the cradle of dawn, the arms of death, the caress of tomorrow.