The haughty fan stares at the bed from below dusty eyebrows as it tries to flush away the stink that clings to the window sill; the stink that refuses to run along with the murmuring, rusty gutter which travels along the fence, seeking its way to some stream, in some place.
There are worms in the water; red worms like little flowers, bobbing and dancing between the fast flowing limbs of the dusty brown stream. There are biscuit wrappers, egg shells, the sour stains of old soup and burnt rice clinging to the lips of the gutter’s chipped concrete walls.
In the fan’s sight, the bed is unmade and each rumpled line is like a dune rolling in the deceptive, heated silence of the desert, like a wave cresting the horizon, kissing the feet of the reluctant shore. Several worker ants journeying across the length of the rumpled sheet, across the story written with sweat and old perfume stains, pick crumbs of biscuits, rice and frozen toothpaste globs.
A cracked chair limping on three legs mocks the effort of the straining fan and seats itself some few meters away from the forced breeze. Some fingerprints decorate the wall; cheap attempts at art and ugly too. Charcoal, sweat, soup, and grimy muddy prints slap old peeling paint that fails to hide the trail of old water drinking into the walls, drawing green and black lines like maps of another country, another world.
A pile of unwashed clothes hang from the lips of the tired laundry basket, in a refusal to join with the debris at the bottom. I scratch my crotch, my ink stain hands leaving prints on my soup and semen stained boxer shorts.
The fan hiss to a stop and power flees, then the gutter giggles as the stink floods in and settle like a cloud within the dirt and the poetry that my soiled mind seeks to flower into a garden, into a song, into something beautiful.
