Bleeding Heart Yard

I stood on the corner of Bleeding Heart Yard and Charles Street with a head beating hard and eyes the colour of the stinging sleet, and while old men drank themselves to sleep, I pissed in a beggar’s cup and wept, while he painted me colourful epithets; and thus redressed, out I stepped and joined a crowd of protestants filling the alleys and the streets, headed for the temples and the courts.

Feeling out of sorts, how quickly I became caught up in the fervour, the growing murmur of ills and discontent. We protest like it were business, against jesters and clowns, the sharp suited, well paid entertainers of our generation. They have letters and laws and talents and claws, while we, wings clipped, double dipped in boiling oil, USD$XXX a barrel, quarrel over distraction. Oh look, a puppy! A woman in office! A gay marriage! A drug bust! A snow storm! At the first sign of offence we raise signs, they a fence. We do battle on the fields of evidence, but it’s rhetoric that always wins out in the end. Winds of change that stay the same course. What’s in a name? What’s the game?

So I wander off by myself into the broken suburbs and distortion, lose myself in alcohol and action movies, pimped up chicks and dive bars. I bequeath myself a stage name and from underneath a thin veneer I act out the life prescribed me, presumably into eternity. There goes our hero into the sunset, week after week, searching always for that elusive alternate ending. Will he ever find it? Tune in next time!

To be continued…

April 2014 Derek Wilson

~ by Derek Wilson on April 14, 2014.