sky dance
I start at Red. The sky here is blasted and cloudless and the ground blisters my naked feet. A man wades through the distorted air and picks me up by my collar. He screams at me: “Why is it always so hot?” Alarmed, I extricate myself and hurry off. Sweat stings my eyes.
In Orange the heat is tolerable but still unpleasant. Irritable mothers scream at babies and fan themselves with hats. Men in suits wipe their foreheads and contradict each other. Children with ear-studs kick dogs with lolling tongues. ‘Got any change?’ leers a skin-headed youth and I back away throwing coppers at him.
There are cool breezes and lush fields in Yellow. I lie on the grass beneath a soft blue sky and to the sound of zephyrs and shouting birds I drift into a comfortable sleep. When I awake a blonde woman is sitting beside me and stroking my hair. I get up, smiling, and stroll off. Everyone I see makes remarks like “Don’t you feel glad to be alive?” and “Isn’t life grand?” At first I find this attitude refreshing but after half an hour I am weary of their cheerful rhetoric and decide to move on.
It is hard to move through Green for all the trees and hedges and shrubs that grow here. I push my way through this tangle of life until I am surrounded on all sides by vegetation with no idea how to escape. I am getting ready to shout for help when a man with a machete hacks his way into view. He has earth on his face and petals in his hair. “Lost?” he asks me. I nod. “Follow me,” he says and cuts us a swathe through the dense forest.
Blue is calm and cold. People dressed in white coats sit alone and write melancholy poetry. I blow on my hands and stamp my feet and compose a sonnet entitled The Sound of Sorrow. When I re-read it I find it to be pretentious and wordy so I shuffle onwards feeling useless.
It is twilight in Indigo but the streets are still teeming. A boy steals my wallet and a woman laughs at my accent. The air is filled with police sirens and malicious gossip and the sound of people walking into each other. Girls wearing excessive amounts of make-up beckon me with scarlet fingernails and ask me if I am looking for a good time. I politely decline and scurry away.
The inhabitants of Violet are pallid and stunted with narrow gleaming eyes. I can see little but hear gunshots and screams and sobbing and screeching tyres and breaking glass. I ask a circle of hooded adolescents how to get out of this place. They crowd around me and push me forwards with excited whispers and horrible laughter. I am buoyed helplessly along stumbling on the rough ground until suddenly they leave me alone in the darkness. I take a tentative step forwards and my foot falls on empty air. For a moment I seem to hang suspended
Then I am plunging downwards
Hurtling through
Empty acres of
Nothing
