The shadow of the lamppost
I’m here at my desk. At my table, at my everything. I spent my life here. Candles are burning. Music is flowing nicely, and it gives the right amount of inspiration to the air, in this room tonight.
Burning candles… spreading the scent. So good, so classy. I am classy, way more than all of you out there.
At the window, yet another crow. Damn crows. Mocking my way of being a poet, an artist. The best novelist, after any midnight in the world.
I feel my legs hot, but I am aware I should use a more appropriate word, I shouldn’t use such an easy and banal word as ‘hot’. I would actually say they are warm. I check the heating, I got a radiator here next to me and it’s off. I don’t know, I feel my legs so warm now. Maybe it’s the electricity in this town that is burning.
Or it must be the wine I am drinking, giving that soft warmth to my body and thoughts.
I hear them again, damn crows. As soon as I look out the window they fly away. They never stop, just like my nightmares!
That was good… I know. I am a true artist, all over this shallow desert of paper souls.
A week ago I tried to kill the mayor with an electrical expedient connected to his front door but those damn crows stopped me. They were squawking and squawking, so irritating. They distracted me so I glued the wrong cable at the end of the circuit and nothing happened. The bastard is still alive.
Damn crows. Damn, damn, damn crows.
I was trying to sleep last night, I couldn’t find the right position in bed, it’s two weeks I can’t get proper sleep. It happens quite often that I close my eyes and it’s a matter of a minute or two: I feel something heavy on my chest, yet something relative lightweight, those bony paws on me, itching, and when I open my eyes I see this black beak pointing at me, close to my left or right eye. Quickly, I hit the crow and feel its body against my fist, with all those unpleasant black feathers of death. It’s like punching a dead chicken, but not cold out of our favourite supermarket shelf, ladies and gentlemen.
I hit the crow with a fist and it is there back behind the glass of my bedroom window. The demon flies away, I wonder if it is going to report back to its fucking bastard boss, organising this death sentence for me, a dirty majestic crow having a ridiculously mortal laugh at me.
So I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep during the weekend, I can’t sleep in August, I can’t sleep at Christmas, I can’t sleep at Halloween.
Yesterday I went down the road to buy some wine. It was such a long walk, and I couldn’t see the end of the road, and it got dark in the end. A lamppost was following me, it has been on the other side of the road for all that time. It made me feel like I was walking in circles, not straight. Just like I was walking around a pale red moon, because the street was actually all red of wine, rivers of blood. I had to wipe and dry my shoes with every step I was taking. The lamppost kept on projecting my shadow on a small park on my left. Those big trees, all pitch black, were my stage. My shadow, and the shadow of my devilish wings looked so big, so terrifying. I could hear the screams of some insomniacs like me, standing at their windows, on their balconies, spotting the curved and wicked profile of my body, walking in front of their houses.
