The Purple Cloud

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. Tonight, I see the moon cradled in their cotton glove - it holds it from the dark wood’s birch trees that seek to steal its silver.

I can't help thinking that, before the Gas, a sight like this would make most poets burst into flames on the spot, but when almost all forms of creative exertion are finished, I accept that it is a moot point. Accidental immolation by my own muse; I'm not sure that anyone cares that much about self-expression.

Am I bitter and disagreeable? Do I have an acidic mind? Maybe. No matter. In a world so loved-up, anything I think for myself is a mere drop of vinegar in a metric truckful of doughnuts.

I must not slip into poetry out loud. But inside here, in my own mind I am safe. Alone in the dark wood, swimming in the vinegar.

The world went nuts the moment that the Gas insinuated itself into the city. My own network of minds as closed and alone as my own - they tell me the gas is piped to the city from subsurface storage tanks, buried beneath a range of cartoon hills in the countryside somewhere; a network of comedy buxom hummocks that nobody can remember the name of.

Nobody can name anything, anyway. And, even if they cared enough to remember, they can only dream of saying it.

I see, from my window seat, sealed safe against the Gas, how it seeps from cast-iron drain covers, louvred air-con outlets and subway ventilation shafts. I see people stumble slightly then recover, their faces wiped clean of concern, suddenly relaxed, abruptly happy, profoundly and irretrievably cock-a-hoop.

I watch as the Gas exhales poisonous sighs from pipes that ventilate secret bunkers and war rooms. I witness the puffed-up colonels leaving the basement dens as the mayhem of unearned joy uncoils out of control. Such serious men - and mostly men, yes - to abandon all despair for inescapable joy. War might be over but, frankly, all this peace is beginning to get on my nerves.

There’s something in the Gas that not only turns the air a blush of mauve, but also makes people - most people at least - confident, blase, smug and horrifically self-centred. I see it with my own eyes, though it will not pass my lips, of course. Solace and sorrow are solitary. Happy and hedonistic loves a crowd. Unrestrained, unreasonable joy has moved in and, well, there goes the neighbourhood.

In my second, silent stanza, laced with sirens and blue lights ill-equipped to make any difference in our brave mauve world, what's that? Could that be the sound of a poet going kaboom or was it only the Walmart? Shattered shop fronts line the avenues downtown as the looters arrive with viridescent desire at odds with the air around them. Where is beauty found in games consoles, cell phones and tellies held aloft like Olympic medals? The price of one hundred, one thousand dollar sneakers is only a sprint from the Friday night disco lights and the cops who swerve from one side of the street to the other attempting to police joy itself. The beauty is still scattered in islands of unhappiness, the solid, hard land in the Gas.

The third and final stanza stinks and blooms, but is still only in my mind. There is no law any longer, but surely, nobody could take away my thoughts, or could they? Don't call me Shirley, I laugh accidentally to myself. Serious face. It's hard to picture a yellow flower as stinky as my teen daughter's Eau d Haribeau. Sweet and sickly, like the faces of the happy violent mob that surge outside.

Invading my perceptions synesthetically like Parma Violets or Lapsang Souchong tea needling into my nose, pounding my eyes with purple, staining my skin with the tattoos of a remembered, unremarkable lover. Infuse my heart with anaesthetising love, then leave before I finish thinking of you. The violet violence of unearned happiness.

Every night I watch at midnight for the purple clouds that dance with the blushing sky. One day the looters will steal my discontent, still my mind with easy content, offer me gold and take my silver. Make me happy when I've no right to be.