Concrete Dreams

Sometimes it feels like life is going nowhere. Sometimes it feels like it is all some kind of parody of a melancholy groundhog day. And sometimes it feels like nothing will ever change, for better or worse, in any version of a foreseeable future. I see my life as a cyclic affair; I make continuous efforts to break the chains of my mortal jail but the bars are too strong and the walls too thick for any kind of real breakthrough, for any kind of change to occur. This jail has a small window and I see the world outside mock me- glimpses of stories of success and futures filled to the brim of riches and promise. I see picturesque nuclear families in their humble homes aside their perfect occupations, the doctors and company executives, they laugh hysterically at seemingly nothing- perhaps they laugh at me, at us, perhaps they‘re simply always that happy. But these merry portrayals are obscured by the rains of reality as they cascade over the outer breaches of the building and down into the weed-ridden clay. Cultures of mould encroach about the recessive corners of the jail- gang green, bullet black, shades of a bitter blue- but I can’t particularly identify why. At times I see the mould as the thoughts like those I have now, thoughts that the jail isn’t enough and I need to break free- contaminating my mind, spreading and diseasing it part by part- in this sense I see my aspiration as a carcinogen to a terminal illness I refer to as failure. At other times I see the mould as quite the opposite. At times I see it as a physical emphasis on my need to escape the prison before I’m completely infected and I no longer have the ambition to attempt my great escape.

You probably guessed as much that the guards in the jail aren’t the Ghandis and Mandellas of the world- imagine David Cameron in a navy blue suit, a neat little black hat encrusted with silverware and spit-polished, brown school principal standard shoes- hi. Professional to say the least. The buttons of his trim, polyester shirt are fastened up to the top about his collar and are tucked away neatly by a silky, satin tie which hangs about a foot down his abdomen. From what I can see the trousers are tailor made, rounded nicely about each muscle and frame of his legs- a comfortable amount of slack about the bottom and finishing at a perfect length above the ground to maintain a ‘’my job certainly is important ‘’ standard image. His face is shaved clean to avoid confusion about being a usual citizen and his hair is slicked back on the brim of his crown as to fascinate people about his open nature. In his pocket I can see the keys to my prison- but I also see many more things- thousands of keys in fact, thousands of letters, thousands of soldiers’ families sat in churchyards in the rain of reality, thousands of pounds- all in the wrong hands, thousands of lies, thousands of educated young peoples wading outside of university in desperation, thousands of crimes, thousands of reasons I wish I could have been born 50 years earlier. Thousands of the ruinations of capitalist government in one neat little pocket called the Conservative pay cheque.