Vision on

Eyes strain through new glass. Thin wire frames hold a different way to blink in bi-focus. If only I could look a straight line ahead, not be so distracted by cruel, beautiful jewels of experience.

I watch the blurs between people grow; gaps, edges, the way things don’t blend into each other at all. How colours burst the heart. My head has become a camera, endlessly filming for an empty cinema of thought. Someone will edit out the cuts that don’t fit: people wearing the wrong trousers, talking to themselves, not fitting in; a figure menacingly staring at an empty can of larger. My gaze has got lost in the background story; become too attached to sketchy figures in the corner. An old woman, stooped under her load of unbearable time.

Like an out of control receiver, these glasses of mine pick up alternative channels.  Programmes that would never make the radio times:  break-up-fast; lunch hate; the sweet nothing show; scream until dawn.

What if one could reach beyond the suitcase of each person’s eyes, inside to their packed up feelings, stuffed memories? The witnessing-place of narrative exposed.  The guts of our concealed existence x-rayed out.

I hide in the supermarket from my sight, creeping wearily between shelves, squinting at serving suggestions on tins to escape from too much vision, watching lost souls executed with credit cards they didn’t come to shop for.

When I went to the opticians, the lady instructed me to look to the bottom of her right hand ear as she inspected my left eye. Manicured finger nails pointed me towards a brilliant diamond stud. I tried to stare, but its showy glisten and needy twinkle made me shift.

‘What’s wrong’, she said, ‘Can’t you focus?’

From her diamond, I could see the bottom of a mine: a mouth choking without air in the dark.