Entering The Web

Isolation

I used to be deeply aware of our isolation in the universe; painfully conscious of our loneliness in death and the journey to this place. I was once acutely sensible of the pathos of hours of cafes playing Gary Moore and populated by the male dregs, huddling together to keep warm against the bitter spectre of life in all its despair-filled misery. (The afternoons by the TV, the take-aways, the ready-meals, the little to say about their life when required; the retreat behind the lines of illness and bed – after all, no one can help being ill, can they?)

So all this was ripe and poignant within me – but I wrote it out. Now I hurry through the after-hours wind–swept bareness of the market stalls on the way to a bright bar to meet a burning group of panther-like pals, on my phone and I'm telling of the imminent interaction of it all and not of the cold stalls that I sit on and smoke to kill some time while I try to remember what I did with that part of my soul all those years ago when I had to remove from the cold withdrawing-room of loneliness and enter the web.