It’s in their nature to be hedonists. You can’t blame them. Not when you find them in the autumn dry and stiff in the corner of the windowsill, behind a book you need to read, pressed flat in a dictionary between ephedrine and ephod. Not when you sweep up a single sycamore leaf wing full of fracture lines like kicked-in glass.

Out of the water, they take what they can. They mate and die in the same moment. Having no mouths they drink through their eyes, and don’t care what gets them drunk. The moon. A television screen. The strip-light in the gents. The headlight of a taxi waiting at the crossroads.

Tonight, with this powercut, they are knocking back the light from the only candle I could find – a blunt chisel of wax embedded with Christmas glitter.

One of them comes closer to perform its strange drunk scuttle of legs and tails that tangle like ampersands. The window is full of conjunctions. With this infant syntax it will tell the story of its one day alive.

And this. And that. And then.

 

© Andrew Michael Hurley  2009