All criticism is audacious. Sometimes this audacity seems admirable and sometimes it seems foolish and outrageously naive. To pose a critique is to make a bold philosophical assertion: that all roads are forked, that we posses the capacity to influence if not dictate the terms of our existence. Criticism assumes choice, assumes agency, for it operates in a world of alternatives. But is this a world of alternatives? 

In times like this when premonitions of darkness lace my thoughts, I think it best to commit thought to paper.

I'm a bit tired of being a constant occupant of my mind, a stubborn tenant and the locus of experience. It's a drag.

I think about sleep
and air travel
and the insides of silent elevators, where you unknowingly, unfeelingly, glide up and down dark shafts.

These three things allow you to arrive at a new destination without the sense of having travelled.  They disturb the experience of time, and it's passing. They leave bits of time unattended, unaccounted for. Three hours vanish. Who knows where they went having escaped the merciless, brutal ticking of the clock.
A security lapse is a welcome breech.

Sleep is a strange thing. You are allowed to forgot the details. Who are you where are what day is it what time is it. It's a precious thing, that feeling of not knowing. And in times like this I wish I could hold on to it, prolong it, forget about remembering.

I wish I could discard hours at will. Well, the next eight hours are going to be an awful nuisance. I'll just pack them away, fold them neatly into a box. The next eight hours are dismissed. Slashed out off attendance sheets, punished for bad behaviour.

If you ask me, I think it's unfair that I have to exist all the fucking time or else not exist at all. What kind of all-or-nothing game is this? No room for negotiation. No toll free number to call and politely say - I'd like to exist Monday to mid-Wednesday and then again over the weekend. I'd like to take off the entire month of June.
One moment madam, let me transfer your call...

Social distance refers to the space between people for which no precise scale of measurement has been devised. It's the space between the waiter and the waited upon, measured not in inches but in fractions of dignity. Let's say that dignity can be measured with reference to everyday signs of acknowledgement - eye contact, subtle nods  either in agreement or disagreement, smiles and other evidence of recognition. Blowing my caappi, I realise that this canteen is different. Some kind of shrinkage has taken place as the skilled masseuse and the cleaner sit at the table next to mine enjoying their late morning break. I see the overlap in the Venn diagram of difference and inequality, an intersection in the sets sealed by a burst of laugher. 

Then, I think of the indignity of silence. 

The cold absence of eye contact. 

The enforced isolation of degraded life worlds, when bodies are invisiblised through sheer force of will.

It I don't see it, it doesn't exist - sounds like some kind of shared pathology in perception.

The hierarchy of work ensures that some people are only semi-present, as they don elaborate camouflages to erase their footprints.  This is the ultimate magic trick: labour without labourers, buildings without builders. Cleanliness without cleaners. Only sharp eyesight can detect the ghostly figures, the muted shadows that melt into the background, retreat into cubicled  spaces violently separated from those who enjoy the full benefits of being human. 

A search for belonging is a horrible thing as I’m house hunting in a city of the homeless.  I am an eternal foreigner, lost in a city of natives, making do with broken, borrowed sentences and the passing translator. I walk around observing the scenery, listening to the sound of laughter all the while asking strangers to point me to the ghetto of language orphans.

Poetry is the site of salvation

where the unquiet find their peace,

despondent insomniacs find kindred spirits

as despair and joy give way to a shared silence.

Poetry is a candlelit vigil

commemorating our damaged souls,

 giving dignity to the grotesque,

Arranging sound and image,

until a warmth settles in-between abdomen and chest.

Poetry rescues the dehydrated

With whispered words of compassion.

Daylight Saving Program

I am not done with this day, I still haven't coloured around its corners, or polished its edges.  Every night I resist this closure with a vague sense of failure. Today if anything was another unfulfilled promise. A kind of dysfunctional urgency takes grip over me. A breathlessness that makes me more anxious than anything else. I still haven't figured it out and now I have one day less. I'm painfully conscious of each grain of sand-dust dropping as my hourglass stands erect, defiant and uncontrollable. Maybe that is what it means to be at peace - to not having a desperate sense of a destination. But I'm in this tearing hurry, like that rabbit who ignored Alice as it tumbled gracelessly down the hole. 

Even writing these words, is nothing but a half hearted attempt to bargain with the relentless flow of time. Pushing against its force makes it only push back harder. I imagine that if time were a wise old woman she would smile vaguely, amused by these childish negotiations with mortality. 

My sleep deficit bothers me. The vague feeling of being in a state of ill-health jiggles and niggles in that space between skull and scalp. The sort of exhaustion that cracks your voice and makes it sound like dry gravel. The sort of exhaustion that turns limbs into liquid. A sort of thick and creamy soup, I imagine. I just want to lay down my weapons and surrender. and sleep nice and long. I give up, okay? Now let me be.

Hot eyelids burn.