21 Reasons To Know Where You Live

21 Reasons To Know Where You Live

by aiP / c.2000


The houses are rosy-red, proud and significant. They tremble, afraid of not being recognised, especially on the most peculiar Wednesday of each month.

The tree lice move in theory, under silent orders, killing the tree in practice.

A virus runs through it. Fear makes us dry and idle.

Plums meet us yearning for more at the fence, pushing our neighbours further into the fence, until they stand in the road for advice.

Drinking their wine from cartons, we find new parking spaces. Our local knowledge is a source of great joy.

Our disinfected vital signs are exquisitely subtle. Our shifts in behaviour are well documented, and sometimes we wave. We would never expect a reply.

Always wide enough for a car but too narrow for a man or its woman headed husband. There is however just enough room to point with little significance that lone finger staring down that cul-de-sac barrel, pointing at that house with its finger on its trigger.

The woman stares moaning for the glass to lift, for you to hear her shadow trying again. Waiting for her in the present is the difference between yesterday and the cost of yesterday thirty years ago.

School children operate in this area; outside their mothers they change the order of things around them, adding variety and colour.

We fall over in the road, thrown out by a yellow crisp packet. When we ask whether or not they are Quavers, we get no reply. But when we see it in the rose bed, the re-positioned bottle of vigour affecting us all with its bright label and performance, we call the council, the photographer; we call the name of the name and then refer to this name in the letter.

We steer clear of the rocks and lie down on the very tarmac that took our children. The car has been looked after, the backseat vacuumed, until one of our rubbish is missing.

If one of our rubbish is missing, a committee will form and voices will be thrown over voices and the street will echo with time lost to administration in, for, of and around the house.

Nevertheless, the children must away to school in her bubble; must be at school to be away, somewhere where it does not matter - anywhere, away from the danger of others.

Those others who wait in their black bubbles, in the hearse, have you there already. You are taking away or eating in, wrapped or open. Wrapped and sealed, rolled and fired into the holes between spaces, spinning around, clothing and housing, that layer upon this.

Wrapping, unpacking, stuff left behind, is the name of the brain - the arsehole of the mind - sift through the rubble - a whole heap of trouble is all that you find. So legalise trouble. Who’s going to mind?

Legalise trouble. Let it roll, let it roll.

Let it begin with separate drifters, with fixtures and fitters, attention span shifters, quick-witted splitters, hairy among them, let them roll, let them roll. Let them in.

Polarity seekers, let them roll, so much of this is this but only this, none of that that upsets us so, only the hours long gone their echo remaining fixed forever.

It’s time to forget we ever existed. This I understand. Dead to the money, I understand I cannot bend so low for these midgets to pat me on the head.

I understand I cannot yield to the higher perplexes of hysteria, delusion, of absolute distraction - I cannot be so entertained. I cannot be your idiot - so perfectly dumb. I cannot be undone.

The lice and mites inside the tree who are the bricks and mortar that hold you together and keep you fixed and stiff as bricks and mortar, kill the tree in practice.