Six forty-eight sixteen degrees sunny intervals

I just went to see if the pair of cooing, lovesick pigeons who have been renting space on my balcony were up with the lark. As I am. When did I start envying birds that so many consider to be little more than troublesome vermin, riddled with disease and pestilence?

I just went to see if life was still twitching its feathers outside my particular goldfish bowl - the glass sphere that I find myself carrying with increasing carelessness, so much so that the water is slopping, splashing and spilling over the sides. Evidently, I kill harmless fish in the same way that I murder harmless plants. The natural world is my unnatural home, it seems.

I am not a violent person. No, not a violent intent or a violent bone in my body. And yet. As each sixty second spurt passes, I want to take that minute by the scruff of its neck, dig my pudgy fingers into its creeping, sweaty, heat-stung skin, grasp and twist a handful of scraggy hair, and then smash its head clean into the table top until it bleeds. I want to render it immobile, leaving it juddering its last gasps on the unswept tiles. I harbour an insane desire to kick it in the chest for good measure. Are you winded yet? Do you relent? Do you give in? Plead for mercy, you poor fucker. Plead for fucking mercy.

I am not a sensible person. I am not a rational person. I am not a breathing person. I am a mere grain of existence, a momentary aberration on the tired face of this long and ‘will it ever end?’ day. I have turned this infernal egg-timer on its axis, and am waiting to slip through its tight gullet. I live in hope, I breathe in potential lost, even if potential found eludes me.

You never know. You never know if the way back into your imagination - our imagination, my imagination - into that yearned-for pause for thought, might linger and gleam in the sandy peaks and troughs that are slowly gathering below. So far below. Not too far below. Not so far now, not so far.

Down, down, let me fall down and out. Through and gone. Merged and emerged. It’s just deadness to you, maybe. It looks like nothing but dust to the unbelievers who circle me during my waking hours, as I wrench my eyes open with an endless supply of matchsticks. But to these weird, feared and blurry eyes, each grain of passing sand holds all the promise of life hereafter.