Meg Tuite

Today is pleasurably mute, infused with the stillness of the manswarm. There pervades a comforting lack of voices on a late Sunday afternoon. That point outside when darkness clings to the last strain of light before succumbing to its inevitable aloneness. Bracing itself for that shudder of solitude. Its lonely plight is without fail. The waning hours paint themselves more dismally on this day when streets call out to take refuge in their blank, silent embrace. Maybe a chorus of a million mute cries bank off the muddy puddles, endless rain taps against the panes that stare out with a frightened eye and wonder what it is they must do.Numberless cold plates sit on tabletops, scatter remains of potatoes, carrots. Endless hands hold forks in bleary kitchens as eyes stare out of icebox windows into other darkened windows. Row after row, street after street, single lit rooms trail one another until each blurs into the next, yet somehow exist apart.

A travesty of foggy dreams splay out into the damp atmosphere, multiply through the soot-ridden avenues. Anyway who dares to walk these sidewalks spirals into cacklings of empty hope. Pedestrians glut with aches of fixations–an invisible collusion links the melancholy plight like holding hands with the ruinous multitude, as though one’s own weight wasn’t enough.

Rain, winds rise like sounds of Mahler. The winding trances of woodwinds. Battling wail of flutes. Lurk of the brass surrounds.

The sinking doom of another Monday imprisons us with its rattling monotony; its migraine pace. The conspiratorial rasp of the clock snickers and the numb tread of men loop the same track with impunity.

I sit in my kitchen, fork dangling in my fingers. I look out into the dim light of a kitchen with another hunched figure who leans over his plate, who stares out a window at yet another figure. We watch for the creep of hours like the face of another life.