April is the cruellest month and it isn't even March yet...

Waking in the still-warm dark beneath thick blankets of jumbled memory, interleaved with dream, I tangle myself, the beach with each heavy step giving way to the walls of childhood houses, placing another’s pictures on another’s walls, their significance fleeting, the smiles, the far-off looks that glance over your shoulder to avoid meeting the eyeless gaze of a head, bereft of teeth or decency, that never quite sits at the height it occupies in waking life. Now that the painted wood panels, chipped plaster board and neat white wallpaper that rose from the shiftless shingle are becoming a box, then I find the door easy enough but in the knowledge that it will prove useless, obstinate to my entreating it to open or at most it will lead to another space as closed as this last, airless, windowless cupboard where my mouth is stuck open in half thought, my words tumbling from me, heard by all but with no audible sound. Then the light fades and when the world rears up, becomes real, it is no comfort, instead matching the dark that closed in as the wanderings of my sleep collapsed. Here is blackout night, the sudden realisation each morning that like all the dark I have known through life, this is inevitable, a shadow that shortens with each breath, death is coming, death is coming, death is coming and whilst a nice metaphor is all well and good and the thoughts which suck at the edges of how that sounds like a train rattling down the tracks will please me in the light of full morning, for now it is just the taste of steel and drifting steam in the black, pushed from molar to incisor by an absent-minded tongue questing for relief from the abiding halitosis of mortality’s stain and I am offered no distraction from that fact, except to rise, to fully wake, to throw off the weight of my covers and write this. It won’t end here of course, a simple circle, too neat. Life is a straight track, whichever sidesteps we may try and make. I endeavour to hold it still a moment, but my fingers will inevitably find the keys and type, this time, how long ago, in a lost land by the sea, a small child would sit in the dark, blanketed in warm dread, feeling like there must be something much worse blowing slowly towards him, a light breeze that with each year has slowly grown to a roiling gale, and… it is gone, dust, the cliché worming its way into the apple that itself is old and musty, and, for a moment, in hating what I’ve written, I pass into the warmth of waking dream, forget that one day decay must find us all.