Despair.

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Saturday August 18, 2012 00:23 by Perri Fowler

This is a feeling about life, or more so the absence of life.

“Goodbye my friend it’s hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky”. Terry Jacks.

Hollowness creeps through my innards. Like a once sturdy tree trunk eaten by termites and falling, rotting on the ground. The ever presence of fiscal doom looms, bills unpaid, plans not made for there is no time when sleep is the only escape. The fights, blame and tension that accompanies us on our falling down while we wait for the bank to take away our home. Social housing awaits those early enough to make claims while those later, who have suffered longer to maintain themselves will be homeless.

I wish I could walk out and away from this despair, but I can’t. I awake and know something to be wrong, like the memory of grief for someone gone. It is I who has been removed, neither dead nor away, but existing only. To feed my children and hope that they will not feel this misery, I cry. This is all I ask, to feed them with hope, food and a future and to make them happy. The rank odour of failure oozes from every pore as I try again to wash in cold water. Though the smell is not from me, it feels like it is, the bin has not been collected, again. The cars tyres flatten in the drive, this car was once a means to live, to travel and earn, it now not old but unwanted either by me or anyone. It has been advertised for sale now for a year, no calls. The bills keep coming with the occasional letter of regret from possible employers, those polite enough to even respond.

My skin feels brittle, my body old and hungers hold released not, like a death toll. Is this to be the release? Economy of eating means poor food and bad health, dying slowly and not caring. Sleeping badly and hoping to dream that life is indeed getting better. Sometimes waking day dreams that there is a light in the distance, telling me that if we keep walking we will live. Trudging through this quagmire being given false hope by leaders who lead blind lemmings to the waters edge, saying that to drown is a life choice. Leaders, laughable, not funny but we Irish are the happiest nation, we laugh in despair. We laugh at despair. Leaders, garden paths and apathy abound when anarchy comes from the top. The true leaders we have trudge endlessly trying to make sense of this madness, attempting not to justify but to correct the mistakes, we the true leaders are. Each so called leaders effort an error, each err to do justice for someone undeserving while many suffer trying each day only to eat.

Will I wake tomorrow? Do I want to? My wife cries for my failure, again, as yesterday I did for her failure. I cry for her pain, again as she once did for mine, but slowly becoming no more, the love lost, the caring crushed. There is only power for existence, all else is luxury. Austerity they say is an answer. The austere laugh loudly and ask us to suffer more while the coffers run dry having been filled to overflow, who catches the coins? Who will catch the coins tomorrow? Will these coins be of any worth when those with them can no longer carry their weight, and all of those trudging have stopped. For we will all stop when the food no longer carries us towards the drowning place to which we are being led. We will have no coins left to purchase food, there will be no-one to produce the food. Despair will win and we will all be silent, those with the coins will have victory, but at what cost. Those with the coins will have nothing to do.

“Goodbye”, the birds will inherit what’s left for they have not stopped singing, we have!