Too Many Eyes

Gloriously intoxicated by the richly nutritious substances that I had so recklessly imbibed, I grew too many eyes. Festooned with eyes, encrusted with eyes, bedecked with ocular organs of every description, I stumbled out of my own private darkness and walked headfirst into trouble with a capital ‘T’.

 

Did you ever get the feeling that your soul was under attack? That it was in danger of being eaten? It’s not as if you can tell anyone about this, or go and make a statement in your local police station. People continue to talk all around me, unconcerned with anything of a darker nature. They talk and they gesticulate and they drink their coffees and lattes in the bright May sunshine. They act as if nothing were happening. It’s the done thing to talk about something else. Everything’s done on the quiet – the less said the better because there’s no sense in mentioning it. Darkness nibbles at me from all quarters, hemming me in, but we’ll pretend that everything’s OK. New customers walk into the café, take their seats and immerse themselves in the hum of conversation. Other customers leave, meander off down the street, leaving their tables in disarray. I can tell from their expressions that they are pleasantly satiated – for the time being, at least! I suspect that they will be back…

 

I have too many eyes and everything I see hurts me. I want to crawl back to wherever I came from. I want to crawl back into my hole, only that isn’t possible anymore. I have eyes in odd places, places I didn’t know existed. Everywhere is an odd place. Normal isn’t a place anymore. You can’t go there. There are no places that aren’t odd and there is nothing that I can see that doesn’t hurt me. The oddness hurts me. The oddness is relentless – it assaults me from all sides. It assaults me from sides I didn’t even know I had.

 

I am a garden shrub but instead of leaves I have eyes. Many eyes. I am an eye-tree. I have eyes on stalks, stalks that wind unceasingly around each other as they reach for the light. As they wind around each other they sprout new stalks. Eye-stalks are sprouting everywhere in silent profusion. It’s the law of the jungle – see or be seen. Nowhere to hide – it’s too late for hiding now. I am a nation of eyes. There is too much to see and too many eyes to see it with. You could hear a pin drop in this dense corpuscular silence but you never will. It’ll never make it to the floor – the intensity of that scrutiny is too great. Nothing can get past this wall of vision. I have grown all these eyes and now I cannot ungrow them…

 

 

 

 

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