GRAVEL PANTS

He put on his gravel pants but they seemed to be preying on him. All he'd wanted was to create reality through dressing solidly. If one was to be attacked by trousers formed purely of bland little rocks, what might other articles of clothing be capable of? And the pants were tight. There wasn't any sort of dance he could do in them. Off they had to come! Over there his coffin hat huddled like a wallflower to its hook. After some consideration he didn't think he could put it on while he was wearing no pants.





SLIGHT MONKEY
     for Inky

The monkey is too slight. Maybe it is only the edge of a monkey. Or a monkey where most has passed into another dimension. You can't even see the ears. The monkey is such a diminished thing that the banana has nowhere to go. The banana is like a freight train that once peeled slips along the tracks of the universe. It could be used for committing suicide because the monkey is so slight.





SCHOOL OF LAND & FOOD

Once you have learned the rock, landscape leaves the land. You scavenge for fiction. Fossick in a reflective pool for reality's pebble. In your mouth you put the best-tasting bits of the earth. Otherwise, you spit. You are taught to cleave, scorch, flatten, emulsify and litter. The lesson culminates in a burnt tree in a desert. Stepping back from the tree and the desert you cock the stone of your head and squint, unabashedly well-schooled. That through this 'display' the scene maintains a poetic quality is food for thought.





THE ORIGINAL PARENTS

These are big. Making enquiries about bigness even before they became big. They are both ends of what came to be in the middle. They keep filling the sea. You know that sea that never becomes full. The big original parents get in it and displace the lot. They are likely not even to blink. Creatures causing creatures. Freighted with causation and being big.





THE EARTH

Nothing eventful happens. Occasionally the appearance of a flower. And, once, a child is born who grows to adulthood without disturbing anything. During, and for the length of, this life, the whole universe stops and takes notice.


        © MTC Cronin 2006