It's ingrained.
It's under my skin.
It comes from my education.
We were open to the parish.
The local witch comes to tea.
We had witch biscuits and scones and jam.
A week goes by.
Monday comes.
She is found hanging from a tree.
How do you make sense of this?
Local alcoholic comes for respite from the bottle.
He will never hit his wife that one time too many.
He loves the kids so.
He love the kids so.
He loves the bottle more.
He hates himself.
He sobs.
How will they make sense of this?
Grieving family comes to bury their differences.
Troubled souls share their distress.
Dead Papa drums his thumbs on the kitchen table, the time of the evening dinner.
Mama shivers, kiddies shake, won't Papa be at peace yet?
Be silent, be still, be gone, please be gone.
How will they make sense of this?
Lost, infirm, insane, abusers, addicts, losers. rusers, terminally ill all.
We come to find counselling.
We come to mark our births.
Another page turns.
I am born.
I sat on the stairs at the age of four tapping my feet and waiting for the bloody hymn-singers to go home.
Won't they go home now?
"Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty."
I felt wholly not at home.
I didn't swear when I was four.
I would have done, if I could have done.
Those bloody hymn-singers.
Won't they go home now?
How to make sense of this?
Lighted windows rush by, the time of a train journey, to school.
I feel the cold window, pain on my cheek, condensation streams down
Lives flash by.
Lives flash by.
What sense do I make of this?
I have no home.
Little homes, little people, big dreams little means, short lives, sadness and joy,
They fly past, too fast to know, slow enough to reflect some home I miss.
They will miss those little lights when they are far, I think.
"I love working with people," my father said.
"I love working with people," I say to my father now.
He is long gone.
He is dead.
He is here by my side.
We are at peace.
How do I make sense of this?
So here we are.
So here we are now.
We are here together.
What lies behind your smile, your tears, that grin, that bravado, that triumph, that despair?
I feel for you.
I feel for us.
I believe in kindness.
Throw that stone at the monster.
Will it hurt?
Will it scream?
How shall we make sense of it?
Don't you recognise yourself?
It is you, that monster.
Deny, deride, delete.
Go on. Go on. Go on now.
I drum my fingers on the kitchen table.
It shall haunt you yet.
"I was taunted and sneered at so that I would not go home to my meals, and used to stay in the streets with an hungry belly rather than return for anything to eat, what few half-meals I did have, I was taunted with the remark—'That's more than you have earned.'"
"The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick
Joseph Merrick.
