Parallel

Woke inadvertently having slipped into a parallel realm.

It has no sense of humour. It is clumsy and it frowns too quick, although the day begins in bold white fractals of mist. Nothing in this time is less beautiful, yet the empathy for it is absent. Whether the change is irreversible is unknown. As a cure, time is spent outside, where the mist merges into blue sky, shiny untrammelled sun.

In the sleepy heat some semblance of normality shimmers: and the rich tang of earth turned with dung in the surrounding fields is not unfamiliar. It is the right Earth, of course, it is the person who is wrong. It is the usual kind of wrong, of course: simply overtired. Deceptively simple and infiltrative. Easier to put one's self in another dimension than admit that the idiocy has struck again. Or to say, the creative output is worth it, or even that it is tied into this delirium: but life is the most authentic creative experience: but then this is part of the experience: a strength being also a weakness.

After the house is swept and the fire stocked, the evening is absolved of further work. Tomorrow's mist settles over the river, the dog curls asleep on the sofa. There's soup in a plain bowl, chilli spiced; bread and butter on a gold side plate.

Moves mountains of dung, flattens them out to fertile fields.