Do Not
Delude Yourself!
Do not delude you yourself that the person you love is the same
Person as the person you will wake up with tomorrow, lying by
Your side in such
a familiar manner. They are not,
although, to
Be fair, they’re a pretty reasonable facsimile, but then again, so
Are you – at least one night later. Less
so a week later, but
Nothing stays the same, all is change. As she sleeps, and as you
Sleep, the Mad
Filing Clerk gets to work on your memories of
The day, and that impacts on the
memories of the day before,
And that memory you had as a child when you wondered
if the
Horn on the clown’s car was actually the clowns farting and the
Grownups
didn’t see the joke, and so it goes, association after
Mad, tenuous
association. His/Her filing system is
known only
To the Mad Filing Clerk, though if you have a shrink they’ll
Try to
tell you that they have him sussed.
Rubbish! One
Hundred percent,
gold-plated, smoking doggie excrement.
He
Is yours, and yours alone, for richer, for poorer, for better for
Worse, in sickness and in health, he’ll be organising your files,
Sneakily
during your waking hours, but not so when you are
Asleep. They like to call it REM sleep so it sounds
like they
Know what’s going on and you’re in charge, you know, just
Doing an
innocent bit of uncomplicated, symbolically sequenced
And perfectly
straightforward dreaming. Ha! Not so.
The Mad
Filing Clerk is wildly busy, whole-heartedly, with the frenzied
Rustling of papers being thrown hither and thither and the
Banging and
clattering of your filing cabinet drawers being
Flung open, closed, cross
referenced, shuffled and generally
Trifled with in the most extraordinary and
individual manner, all
By this Mad Filing Clerk who is an absolute tyrant,
answerable
Only to himself ... no, wait, not quite. He, too, is under the
Inexorable regulation
of the Nasty Bacon Slicer Man, though I
Suppose it is possible he is sort of in
cahoots with him at first,
And when the Nasty Bacon Slicer Man slices a tiny
piece from
Your mind, as surely as you breath, and it flies to wherever tiny
Little slices of your mind fly when they are sliced off …
Maybe into a another
form of filing run by the Mad Filing Clerk,
Or maybe he has a boss? … but
anyway, the Nasty Bacon Slicer
Man works away, sort of slowly at first, and the
Mad Filing
Clerk then gets a reassuring heads up from the Nasty Bacon
Slicer
man and has time to keep up, and keeps things pretty neat
And tidy, as far as
he’s concerned – apart from those locked
Filing cabinets which growl at him
when he approaches them,
And make him glad he threw away those keys - but as
the
Slicing speeds up, then he has to try to reorganise more of the
Files that
were associated with those which were sliced off and
Went to we know not where,
and so it goes, slice after slice,
Filing cabinet reorganisation after filing
cabinet reorganisation,
Until the day, the dread day, when the Nasty Bacon
Slicer Man
Is slicing so fast that the Mad Filing Clerk can’t keep up, or
Even
pretend to keep up, anymore, and then when you wake up
One fine sunny morning,
not only is the one you love a stranger,
Though perhaps not at first a total
stranger because she reminds
You of somebody but you can’t quite remember who,
but the
Name’s on the tip of your tongue, and then little bits of fluff
Seem to
stand between one synapse and another and she is just a
Person, whatever a
person is, and then, after more and more
Inexorable slices you are a stranger
to yourself, the poor, sad,
Mad Filing Clerk having pulled out so many drawers
and thrown
Them up into the air in a cacophony of chaos that the Nasty
Bacon Slicer Man smiles a grim smile, a winners smile, and
Slows to slicing at his own
easy pace, because the outcome has
Been decided, the job done, and nothing
matters anymore
Except the long, dark descent into grey meaninglessness, the
