Inside

The Slide

A kid slid

No lie, he did.

Inside the slide, he hit his head and died

"He's dead!" I said, then cried

The slide was not as wide 

as he'd been lead to think

By Ed, the playground shrink

There was ample room for ego

But no leeway for the id

In days to come, Ed would confide

His focus wavered from the slide

To mood swings and the climbing mindframes and the tell me roundabout your mother

New guidelines, to which Ed complied,

Require that he be qualified

And not just a man who owns a COUCH

In accordance with the dead kid's dead dad's wishes, 

The dead kid's dead-ass ashes 

Were scattered on the low end of the see-saw

There the remains remain

All except his enormous skull, which was in a skip in the crematorium car park

***

It's difficult to be a poet when you have a short attention span. Things like metre and stanzas and rhyme scheme, and coherence, are hard to maintain. Sometimes, you try too hard to tick all of the boxes, and end up dabbing each of them with a spot of ink, invisible to the naked eye.

It's August. This is the last non-depressing month of the year, which is pretty depressing, I can tell you. I need to squeeze all of my barbecues and water fights into the next thirty-one days. You best not try any of that shit in September.

August is like your thirties. There's too much pressure to achieve things before the leaves and hair change colour.

This year, I might opt out. I bought flip-flops this year, and have used them on multiple occasions. That's my summer fun quota fulfilled. I can afford to spend the rest of the month under a blanket, with the curtains closed, can't I? Why should the calendar dictate my behaviour? Just because it knows more about holy feast days than I do? That's not right.

I just can't shake the feeling that I might be exactly the same as everyone else.

That's all I see when I'm in a crowd of people: dozens of exact replicas of myself.

They all dress the same as me, they all have the same stupid fluffy beard. And I know - I just know - that they're thinking exactly the same thing.

It's hard living in a world where everyone shares your values, tastes, fears, shoe size and postcode.

I've always been an insider. Even as a young child, I suspected that I fit in. I'd see my peers engaged in some activity, and I'd think "I'm also doing that".

There's no point in doing observational comedy anymore. I get on stage, and can immediately see that everyone has noticed the same things I have. I don't even talk. I just nod into the mic, and the audience nods back.

Everyone suspects that they are the only non-pariah in the world, and they're all correct.

What is "normal"? It's the thing that everyone is. Especially me.

Someone has definitely already written an identical blog post to this one, which is comforting. Being comforted makes me feel uneasy. Being uneasy makes me just like everyone else.

I'm not on the outside, looking in. I'm on the inside. But I'm not looking out. Who wants to look out?

I'm on the inside looking in. Like everyone, I'm perpetually aware of my place in the world. At night, I lie asleep thinking, worrying about being unable to get awake.

But you know how it is...