Ever have those mornings where you wake and feel dazed, shuffle back into a life that seems to be a bad joke, a series of punchlines at your expense. There’s this sick feeling in your gut and an emptiness in your chest but in your head is a moving headache like a dog that can’t lie still, and an anxiety that’s kind of a high pitched whine in your ears. Everything that seemed easy a week ago is hard, your hands hurt, your eyes are not your eyes but some old gritty hand me downs from before colour was invented. Your knees ache.

The song in your heart is gone, there’s just a bucket of something unidentifiable that smells of dead herrings and an IOU from a nightingale that’s flown south. The world is empty and pointless for you, amazing things are happening out there, brilliant conversations and intelligent people making art and changing the world. It’s all beyond you. You wake into the backwaters of cultural development, the Siberia of party invitations. The world expects you to attend anyway, and sends you final demands and tweets. I’m not at home, you say, I can’t come out to play. I’m a facsimile of me, you’ll be terribly disappointed. When you open your mouth, toads and tax forms fall out. Your hands are sticks with no poetry left in them. You must have left the plug out in the bed again and it all drained away while you were sleeping.

The world takes too much out of you, needs to much courage. All these things you’re supposed to be doing weigh in on you like snowfalls on the roof, like being asked to come outdoors into the blizzard and make the world warmer. You’ve two pieces of coal left in the burner, half a packet of porridge and a soggy onion. You’re wearing socks on your hands and trying to listen to a radio that’s held together with duct tape. Keeping your world running is taking everything you have, you can’t shovel through 10 feet of snow in front of your door and do anything about the blizzard.

There’s a desert in your brain where no rain falls, no plant grows. You would hate yourself if you could find the energy. Under your arm there’s this missing rib and the gap still aches. Your eyes have seen the dust beneath the couch. Ever have those mornings?

… No, me neither.