Twilight of the Idle

I have never in my life felt more naked and emotionally and spiritually fragile, than on my first day at school.

Dragged out of the 'relatively' rustic bubble of the parental home in the wilds of Shropshire, to find myself marooned in a concrete, lino floored factory shed with the 'townies' - threatens to still my aged heart almost seven decades later!

What a despicable thing to inflict on a nature loving, carefree, naive, open minded, poetic soul such as myself. But then again, don't all children start out as sensitive, receptive little engines of wonder and amazement, born to run and jump and explore what we as 'grown-ups' call childishness, trivia and superficiality.

It is only when we realise we have lost the great game of life, when we are confronted by the sadistic grinning face of THE ETERNAL ADVERSARY, THE OPPONENT, we smile sadly at the 'putting away' of childish things. The child was mine and your true humanity and possibility for transcendental freedom. A poetic and true organic contact with REAL LIFE.

Those burnished plastic corridors, chattering halls and towering bureaucratic sentinels of paternal oppression called 'teachers', represent our first violent baptism into the big IT of something called 'society'.

'Hello' they bark with frozen smiles, forget those simple pleasures and honest wonder. Forget your curiosity, your beautiful oblivion from clocked time and channeled thought; your spontaneity and fear of the dark, because we will always have the lights on bare and stark. I have learned to love the irrationality of Morpheus, the 'long suicide oceans of the night'. I yearn with teenage love-longing for the creature under the bed again.

Death is human enlightenment, cold, white and unforgiving. Life is warm and relenting, and always glimpsed in the twilight purples and golds of the vast oncoming tidal night.

Schools out forever and ever amen.

Goodnight dear reader. To bed at last.