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tv

from nightmarish dreams, drunken and debauched he had awoken to his final day off, a day of rest drinking and feast, to a dark and cluttered room, onto which he set his frame, to a hardened couch of respite, and clicked on the television, after cracking open the first but not last beer of the night. it’s going hard and fast, he thought, something i can’t replete or submerge, something i cannot dilute, or repulse. after the first sip, his drunk was caught, from the previous night, like an eye socket on a fly fishing line, and ripped from the socket, tossed into vision and incongressable madness. after the first sip, he sighed, deeply and long, and opened his eyes to see the television, which had been switched off, to actually be on, but with seemingly painted images on the surface of the screen, flittering before his eyes. and what did he see? through the eyes of another, a man tottering forward, through the cluttered streets, ambling forth, drunken, through his eyes, forward and downcast, clutching in his hands a broom handle sharpened crudely into a spear, glancing down at it intermittently, all the while moving forward, and fascinated he was at this spectacle that seemed to paint the television screen that at the time was switched off. he lights the first cigarette of the day and closes his eyes for a brief interlude loosing himself in the tottering flourish of drunken madness, spinning forthwith and back again with only a few seconds to laugh at his own humiliation, himself an audience to his own abasement. he takes a deep drag and opens his eyes, opens his eyes. to the television, to see the man moving forward, clutching the spear in bloodshot hands and moving forward down the street passing shocked pedestrians, homeless, nameless street grotesques. finally the man on the television makes the connexion with two eyes on the street, and with inhuman strength, takes the spear and drives it into a passing woman’s forehead collapsing her skull like a melon. she shrieks like some subhuman entity being ground in the gears of a fruitless machination of industry and collapses to the earth, violently thrashing about, the character on the television quivers and the watcher of the television remains transfixed at the queerness of his theatre. the images seem to be painted onto the front of the screen as opposed to flashing within it. the watcher looks at his hands, at his beer, then up at the magnificent sky! then down to his bloodied spear sitting at his feet! then to his victim, laying by his side, mangled and bloodied. staring at his blood coated hands his face contorts, and he stumbles forward down the street for several blocks, then into the concierge’s hands, and handcuffed, taken to the local precinct.

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