The previous night had all been a low rise motorway service stations with a mysterious enemy jet flaring NASA sized nostrils as they skimmed the terrain and away.
Even realer than actual games footage, especially the war one, they were both unbelievable.
They were both unbelievable because there was nothing to be believed other than sleep.
Actual games footage it was, clearly, not.
The hedgehog, though dead for hours,
stammered rigor mortis limbs,
life swam back across its berry peepers.
There were so many questions and too many visuals and no-one to ask, not even a named person to.
To ask.
Am I a war and if so which one? The cod wars with Iceland or the Cold War in cigar fugged Havana?
Is my finger still hovering over the button? Is there a button?
Whose side am I on?
A perverted animal, so dead, yet so alive, like fruit, but fresher and with prickles and a hairy hovercraft fringe which rippled once the creature had yawned back to here and now or there and then.
Just as I think it is over, it starts again, napalm dipped armadillos spiral ground-wards without the need of a safety net or The Hague Convention,
ouch that's got to sting.
If only I had a camera to capture myself running away from danger towards danger.
The sun is bright when I do wake up from day two's doze, a peroxide scowl of woman delivering threats in a most un-Christian way.
Or even like I want to win, finishing will do.
Breaking the tape, hours late, in a sweat pool of Daffy Duck dress up would do,
It would more than do.
As it is, they do the drugs tests first and the running at the end, you can only cheat during the race and even then you might be spiked by some sour faced Zola Budd, flag of convenience flapping the track like a 1.5 tog sleeping bag.
Water gushes, from my eyes and bill and my orange webbed spats glower as I regain my breath by not being a running duck.
I lie, it was a walking duck, a duck that quacked an arrogant quackery on the start line but was not even halfway before feeling crispy and terribly aromatic.
Fuck a duck, is this about what I think it's about?
Oranges,
the NASA flares, the red planet,
the orange glow of Fidel's cigar in the dark. Glooped a million
years in amber or ready steady with my feet in the blocks.
They found me in brambles I said, they found me in the public toilets they said, only then would they ventilate me, just to be sure I wasn't sick of myself, even though they knew there was a war going on, a race to be run, roadkill to re-animate and ducks to fuck.
Then they have the cheek cowl me in foil and usher me off to a gazebo for my vital,signs to be checked.
No entry. No exit. Animals in road.
Like a serpent curling into an immense darkness.
Or snakes on a plane with a power crazy pilot.
What became of the porous boy running legless fast across the park?
He stopped like we all do.
Heroic and a bucket of crabs all at once.
No keepers there.
Like just when the moment turned perfect and just had to be hum and drum and all that help.
Michael Scott is possessed by a diminutive cinema usherette who doesn't exist. Her tiny red torch flares full beam – always.
