It’s Friday.
In Belfast.
You’re tired.
And angry.
A horrible day.
Fury clogs your blood channels: towards customers, workers, voters. They’ve
added acid to your future’s skeleton.
You await the bus. Workers drive past, sardining the road. They
suffocate in homemade gloom. Your glower burns holes in all directions.
Aboard the bus, you glare at the Hope Wall with renewed irony.
You feel agitation, ceasing to be settled, leaking from your core.
Sweat and slurs surround you, but nothing is present to soothe you.
You must override this issue from within.
Arriving home, you address the abrogation, with euphoric exercise.
Soon, you’re tumbling down the towpath, anger spewing onto tarmac. But
the asphalt hits back, delivering sickening blows which scintillate up your legs.
You run past a Mother, ignorant to her son’s pleas for freedom to
explore. He is parried back into the pram.
You run into The Cure: The Park.
Omniscient oaks will absorb your acrimony. Wisdom will shower down, as
you run under ancient ashes. You hope.
You pass a personal trainer, implementing identical exertions to identical
clients. Clients paying for the orgasmic authority of the trainer’s control.
More families pass by, commencing their weekend with a potter in the
park.
Content with their luxurious leisure.
Content with good grants and wages.
Irrespective to how it was achieved.
Turning towards the trails, you
ascend the hill. From its peak, the Parliamentary home of agreements, treaties
and welfare condescends down on you. Growing gradients greaten gravity’s grip
on your efforts. Kicking your steps into the bark, you return the earth’s past
punches, with inflated valour. Fresh bark nourishes your nostrils, for your hard
work, reminding you of childhood:
Of a satisfying slide, carpeted by a comparable husk.
Of a time, free of festering thoughts.
Of a time, when Unions where eminent.
Continuing the summit, you surpass the back of the building of bills. Heaving,
wheezing, but pulsing; you rid yourself of the weight of frustration and
contempt.
Conquering to the crest, you stop on the bridge, cohesively connecting
the two regions of the park’s valley. A river flows beneath. You stare from
each side:
Upstream is a bleak outlook. Murky browns colour stagnant water, coating
a sandy, barren riverbed. Foliage shies away from the stream.
Downstream is more volatile. Green corpses block the water’s course: a pine,
felled years ago, splays itself across the waterway. Weeds shoot up from age-old,
rotting wounds. Ragged rocks befoul the scene further.
A small watery trickle, filters its way through the carnage.
The brook still babbles. There is
hope.
You leave the aquaplaning bridge, refreshed.
Hurtling down the hill, the forest applauds you home, congratulating your
enlightenment.
‘Thrift is the Gleaner Behind All
Human Effort’, reads a monument’s etchings, as you exit the park. You nod
in agreement, as your strides speed up with every kilometre closer to home.
It doesn’t last long.
A suited snob, blares his horn as you leave the park with your
loving-kindness. Swiftly snatching your optimism, a snide snub condemns your
immediate existence.
Reality sets in, and alleviations are abandoned. Exercise has done
little to extinguish your anguish, as your fire returns to its roots. You sulk
home to find a place to hide.
Sheltered, you soon acknowledge acceptance.
Acceptance of your fight over flight:
Fighting for knowledge.
Fighting for recognition.
Fighting for power.
But these things don’t need to be fought for.
Thrift betters fight.
17,410,742 British Gleaners must grasp this.
What’s done is democracy, an outcome to be unchanged.
We must face the future together.
With thrift not fight.
@DanBikeStewart #EURef
