A lowly wooden bench lent itself to a lonesome aged narrow man in a common garden in the smallest hour of the day’s beginning. In the thick haze of the summer’s waking light the common is thinly met with the company of others. Just an old man and his acquainted bench who came to give his eyes sight to the grass and trees, and to rid himself of thought.
He and the bench creak as he sits back; clutching at the satchel veiled among his dull drudged garb that bleeds into his pallid slack and cracked skin.
The wiry hairs bushed around his nostrils recoil to the deep inhale before the sigh, his yawning blue eyes sliding behind a milky glaze follow a bushy tailed rodent hurry into the confidence of a tree.
Through all nonchalance a pair of hobgoblin lugs under a brown woollen hat slides up the flanks of his head to outlying drowned tones of laddish laughs and lewd levity, an unseen clutch of kids filling the common’s spread with their foolish louting prances. Intimidating the preferred and performed with their innocuous idiocies; a mere asocial array of follies without the thought of good manner.
The thoughts of the old man are only briefly drawn; his ears leave the sounds of reckless recreation and back to the hushing song of the swaying grass, the rustling shake of the seasoned leaves on gorged and drooping branches. To his own wilted waning heart, the tremors, quiver and shivers within his own cage, his thoughts turned to his own temporal passage and to the re-joining of his love, of whom no longer lays her head on his shoulder, whom no longer wraps herself around his arm on the lowly park bench.
His lowest lip gives to an emotive tremble as he heaves himself over to the hem of the seat, his hands without any other part to play; frenetically tickle one another with frail kinked fingers.
With what little his body has left to give the eyes well to the upmost point of a tear, as he feels the weight of his wallet in his side trouser pocket against the rough of his skin. Where there within lays an image of a most loved face in a prized time, so that it may be remembered so it may fetch ease to a remittent floundering morsel of a man who could justly with the dead.
The photograph within his keeping need not be looked upon from under the shine of a laminated holding; it needs only to be there, only to be known that it is there.
The satchel was undid and fetched from within the clutter came an elderly notebook now held in his hands. A phlegmy husk of something said breeches his gummy chops, and he spits as he spat shouting out at the still of the garden.
“You should always write more than you do,” she would say, “you are better for it when you do and it lifts me as it does you, when you do.”
The old man reads from the notebook with a weak hate for the world.
“Am I for the worms yet? Am I to be from this rock?
Am I not yet too mad for this mad maddening world?
Four corners of an empty house, a homeless place of curling wallpaper and aloneness for company.
A room in a vagrant house with no light to fill it with a decrepit fool for a keeper
His stink stinks the walls for days as the blow flies form a speckled haze as they feast in filth of his unnoticed demise
With no manner of intention and for relation or friend, there is no cause and no mention for any to attend
He will rot with the house and his memory with it, with his memory does his love die and together they are ghosts in a world where ghosts do not exist.”
The old man pauses as he forcibly triggers one finger to his temple and ***** in his lips. His empty cries fall to a mumble as his hands tremble with his dear notebook in their grasp.
“Take me now cruel are the fates, take me now and rid me
The worms will welcome me, my flesh for an endless night
My life for a world without this life, for a life without his world
I would hold with a brim smile if it was not for my memory of her, if she was not to be lost at the close of this stint
I know not or want knowledge; I seek not of a design and not of meaning
Just a cure for this affliction for my must to her who brings me so much sorrow
Through blissful ages I can no longer hold, and can barely recall
We are all just people who will soon be once living, to be unlived and to forget is a conflict in myself
I have no answer as I have no question, you can have no answer to a question you do not seek nor ask
I dare not speak but I have no end for this, I have no solace and I have no end.”
The old man; the poor old man began to close his dear aged notebook and find the need to bring a smile, perhaps a moment of lunacy to calm the tightening knot beneath his breast.
He pulled a scratching cackle from the pit, wild and uncooked wiping the drool from the crook of his maw with the back of his blotched, mottled hand.
The old man found some seconds of a stoic amenity as his wild eyes grew gallant for those mere moments before the grey metal heft of his sullen vesture fell to his shoulders, he became heavy once more as the world retook him and cloaked again in the present - the light ebbed from him as swiftly as it came. The old man reproached his satchel to humbly return his dear old notebook.
There was a crack like a pick to ice with a hollow thud like a boot to wood as an immediately dissipating claret mist fizzed above his head. The make shift found-about cosh still swinging through the air and over his crown, the old man’s wilted body twisted and slumped to the floor face first. The concrete path before him tearing at the skin of his chin, his frail bones cracked as the meagre weight of his body forced itself into his neck. Laying perverse and unnatural the life was soaked up into his woollen hat and out across the concrete, to the grass – to the worms that writhed below the muck. His eyes were as lifeless as they were when he lived.
They did not wait for the gentle hiss of the spray or the bubbles that popped in the pool that surrounded the old man. They had snatched the satchel and ran off into the spread of the common until they were nothing but outlying drowned tones of laddish laughs and lewd levity.
Crazy old *******.
A lowly wooden bench has lent itself to a lonesome aged narrow man in a common garden in the smallest hour of the day’s beginning. In the thick haze of the summer’s waking light the common is thinly met with the company of others. Just an old man and his acquainted bench who came to give his eyes sight to the grass and trees, and to rid himself of thought.
I wanted to look at the people we never notice or avoid and there potential differences, whether it be an old crazy man on a bench or a group of youths in hoods. I wanted to follow the man though and his reason for him to be sitting in the bench a momentary peak into his life. I also tried to paint a scene with a little detail as I could. I only hope it all worked.