stardust

i'm off to the shops today to get some happy shopper milk and honey, I live on the 11th floor of a 13,000 floor mansion house in the centre of a huge amusement park that contains little amusement and where you'll get your car clamped if you park. when the sun's shining you can almost convince yourself that the world is pretty but it's the grey illusion of misery that cloaks this building most days. well the sun is burning down like an angry spotlight today making the rubbish strewn alleyways look like partytime bunting, a thousand flags of discarded consumer products decorating this antimall of broken hopes. i shut the door and double-triple-lock it shut, glancing carefully over my shoulder to check the wandering eyes of opportunist petty burgulars haven't clocked my exit, or i might have to pretend and shout to mr nobody 'i'll see you in a minute!'... the stairwells reek of the unsavoury tang of uninvited internal fluids, they crawl into your nostrils like infected worms, you don't want them in you so you breathe shallowly, hoping to stay their progress into your lungs by holding your breath over the stained patches that are the modernist paintings of the unempowered and lost souls. I never managed to walk up the 13,000 floors to the top of the stairwell but there are rumours abounding that babies are made up there from sprinkled stardust, we see angels walking downwards, their wings growing progressively shabbier with each step, the lights dwindling in their eyes, their dawn bright halos dwindling into tobacco stain yellows and smeared dubious brown smudges, by the time they get to my floor most of them look lioke thewy have forgotten their stardust ancestry, they merely exist in a low energy gloom, breathing just to annoy people. further down the stairs they lie in pools of their own excretia, torn designer gear hooked off of skips and the tumbleweed piles of detritus that roam the streets. they might offer to sell you a broken toaster, to beg a light that becomes a ciggarette that becomes a quid that becomes a life story you really wish you didn't have to carry with you that day. the life stories accumulate like sticky paper on your shoulders till you bear the weight of a thousand tattered lives, dragging their pain around like a snail. i pass an angel, his eyes are darkened, like empty holes, he's left his soul on an upper level during his descent, his wings just vestigal stumps that display a few thinning feathers like a mockery of the glory that his peackock display used to illumine the sky with. he lies there, barely daring to remember the fresh faced child full of hope that used to dream of riding the wild pegasus across the steeples of fairy castles, the tinkling bells of crystal laughter that ran like fresh spring water across the lawns of endless parklands, the warmth of his mothers milky smell and the total trust of the newborn that the world is not a scary place but like a huge endless hug that welcomes the earth's sons and daughters into it's bosom of love. but now, he's forgotten, as if he is forgotten, as if he is invisible and no longer useful or wanted by the spirit that permeates these walls, like the light is switched off and all he can see is the grey fogthat makes everything asttain the same level of shittyness. as his eyes scan me without feeling he makes a quick judgemet to see if it's worth scamming me for cash, for sympathy that never arrives, for someone to take the burden of his story away. but then he sees that i'm already a mule for a thousand fools, that my shoulders are already full, that i have no more room for another story, that my pockets are empty, so he gives me the puppydog look questioningly, then the tired eyes cloud over like curtains being drawn over his hopelessness and he nestles into his dirty corner and nurses his unsated hunger again like a dead baby. every once in a while you meet an angel going up, a rare event but worth it for the look of peeled back terror and racing excitement that pulls their glowing cheeks back into gnashing toothed smiles, gurning like cherubs chewing tobacco and chillie peppers, the light streaming out of the holes in their tattered shirts, their wings burning the eyes with teir brightness, their eyes fixed on the upper stairwells as they head towards the stardust. sometimes i might take the lift, like a funfair ride that makes your heart lurch, playing lucky dip as the doors slide open, you might find a gurgling baby, the stardust still brightly littering it's moist newformed skin, laughing to see another being, or an old tired man whose face creaks audibly as it attempts to remember the muscular contortions required to form a long forgotten smile, but with eyes that no longer sparkle the smile ends up looking like a parody of happyness, like a skull grinning from the tomb, sometimes the lift is empty but this is worse, as the doors slide shut on your silence the souls of tormented jukies that died alone in this block flock round you like hungy moths, urgent for your freshness and life, lost and frightened, endlessly reliving their last moments in loops of tangled thoughts, settling on your stomach like icy porridge. at last the ground floor rises to meet you, passing the empty poetry of the unhinged illiterate and innexpressive scrawlings that decorate the sarcophagus of the atrium, hyeroglyphs of unfocussed anger and lust, flashermac thoughts that expose themselves in all their animal gracelessness. the door beeps it's low whine as you step out and another couple of crack inebriates sidle through the cracks hoping to pass unobserved absurdly in their awkward crab shuffles. now the day is brightly reflected off the stained paving slabs that the djinn caress with artful dances of rubbish, the pretty plastic packaging that once was pristine on the shelves of supermarkets, displaying our right to buy our lifestyle choices, we won't be buying food unless it is illustrated, branded and decorated, and we forget that the perfect golden orbs that glisten with plasticised eveness were once living fruit that grew on trees, where lazy bees carved endless figures in the air around them and all you could hear above the distant traffic was the lowing of mournful sheep, bred beyond their inner natures that once saw them proudly leaping chasms across the tinkling laughter of mountain streams, but now trudge mindlessly munching the dirty grass by thundering rush hour conduits, awaiting their inevitable demise, sacrificial lambs that have had even their natures removed for our endlessly empty bellies. but all that is a distant dream as i cross the stream of traffic past the hopeless 'allright mate's of the vagabond tribes that drift like windblown litter.. searching for the next topup to remove their pains, eternally hungover or withdrawal cramps tickling and pinching their gritty insides. the shop is called lifestyle, which always makes me laugh, it's llike a parody of advert land, where everything we do is aimed at earning ourselves a lifestyle, that we pawn our days away to earn the right to define ourselves through the consumables we buy as if they have the magic power to inbue us with that heady glow that clothes the airbrushed models on the billboard advertisements, we want that halo for ourselves, as a palliative to help us forget the real halo we lost when we forgot we were angels. i look at the children, they are the only ones that have anything left to teach us, they are the only ones who are not yet corrupted wholly by the tv screens lure, but even they are now sporting the advert tshirts that say they need to partake in the carnival, that even they need to pester their parents for the consumables that mock us with their empty satisfaction. the shop is like a trial, quickly judging who's eyes to catch and who's to avoid, some peopel are not worth tangling with, the staff are weary, they've seen it all, they may muster the ghost of a service smile if you are lucky but it's never real. milk and honey is cheap, but tastes of nothing, not like it ever saw a bee or cow, but the packaging proudly displays the rolling hills of a yesteryear rural dream england, where farmers chewed straws in smocks. so i buy the dream, but my mouth tastes like straw. but i love the worlld so much, it just stings like sand in your eyes if you look too closely.. and i miss the tickle of stardust in my belly.. it's running out of steam.. winding flat.. leaking it's life uselessly.. but the tv will fill our empty souls, take the pain away.. and our lives will pass us by without too much pain. we need love so much but we need to look with our own eyes to see it is knitted into every atom of all we are, even the piss stains on the walls glow with all the beauty of creation, just take off you filters, your glasses of culture and look right in front of your nose.. not tomorrow but this moment.. don't just see.. look!with lovemikex