Ducks in a row

My head is being pounded and disturbed by the weird and the woeful. A man in Essex gets his nose bloodied by a frozen sausage thrown in through the window of his moving car. A pretty girl writes about being hung by a chain around her neck for 80 days of rape and torture by a Belgian paedophile. Punchable nuns. Graffiti on a wooden board in Leman Street: ‘Minty Burger’ makes me smile. Kittyhawks. A majestic fuck. Pope Schmope. Hardliner. German. I don’t care.

My heart is on a big wheel soaring up above the lights of the fair until I go over the rise again and sink slowly down into the dark of the greasy, clanging machinery.

There’s a little blue and yellow striped school tie with grubby neck elastic lying on its back in the gutter next to a broken plastic fork on Woodseer Street, near where a shiny man stopped me to find out if he was heading the right way to Brick Lane. I wanted to ask him how he got to here and where had he come from and why was he going there and when had he first thought that maybe he was lost.

Leaving work, full of muddle and grief, I heard birdsong on the staircase and I don’t know how when there are no windows and the concrete and bricks of the office are flanked by more concrete and bricks of more offices and roads thick with diesel and commuter commotion. But there it was. Tweeting and warbling. Filling out all the crushed space in my chest with primal joy and colouring the empty magnolia walls with paradise.