Doomsday - An Update!

Some days, meaning comes looking for us, roaming the streets like a lost dog hoping for a possible home.

Some days, it is we who go wandering, to see if we still know how to see.

Yesterday both things were happening, as I cycled out around the streets of this all too familiar city where I lived for so long, wondering what I might find, or what might possibly find me.

I didn’t expect it to be Doomsday.

An old abandoned railway carriage, rusted, already painted the colour of dried blood.

Already decorated with messages and Morning Glory - flowering briefly in the almost evasive sun.

Up above a storm cloud was building, cold welding colours and different shades of light.

And now the day felt rippled with reflection, purpled with purpose, and I knew that this was why I had come.

For all things now held meaning and everything I saw was interconnected, simply by being there, revealed through texture, through scent, through the overwhelming power of my overloaded sight.

Even Fedex - defeated by default - could never have delivered this.

I took their photo anyway, laughing madly, and cycled on.

Out on those Saturday streets so empty of people but flooded with significance I was bursting to share it, but there was no-one I could tell this to.

On a factory wall I found an Emergency Information Container - and it certainly felt like an emergency, but the container was far too small to contain all the information I now felt I knew.

Besides it was locked, and I thought - maybe it’s already full of someone else’s meaning.

The streets were teaming with pigeons, picking fallen grain from the road to the dockside silos or washing in puddles, then lifting, patterning the air with another message, transformed through the kinetic alphabet of flight.

Under a palm tree, by the industrial oasis of the railway yard, a battered camper van huddled shyly, afraid to be seen, muddied and dusted, still trying hard to be white.

In the back a single man - late 60’s maybe - unshaven, sleeping, door open for air, full of all his own and unknown meaning, seeming as if waiting, dreaming…

Hoping to awaken to a better day perhaps, but for me today was already perfect, as every day must be while we are in it - for that is our doom, to live while we can - and I cycled on through this my doomsday with all I had seen and every place I have ever been or known sloshing around inside me like love, like laughter, like the unheard sound of the invisible dog now bounding beside me, driving me on, barking silently, taking me home…..

Note: We are away from our riverside home and in the city for a while, but home is where you make it, so this is home too.