Disenchanted

The rainbow turns pale, colourless, a greyblue, and merges with the distant sky. The sun comes out tired and weary. Ugly, defeated, the clouds go away.
Window curtains flap in an unseen, unfelt breeze in the cold sunlight.
Someone has left a song, words in the air, near the crumpled balls of paper in the tall grass in a park. A wheel spins noiselessly as a bicycle lies on its side.
Pain is strewn about on the ground, glamorous and worshipped. The embers of a bonfire remain, a few half-burnt thankyous still smoldering.
Echoes bounce back and forth till they run headlong into rocks, cliffs, mountains of stone, are crushed to pieces and silenced forever.
Water stands still; reflective, impermeable, solid; bitter, honest and cold like a mirror.
Memories, clean as new slates (so new that even colours couldn’t be differentiated by them) hang from the edges of tree leaves like raindrops, and fall down into a multitude that fell before, so that noone can tell which fell first, or find the one just seen falling.
On the roadsides, trampled upon and yet untouched, grow sad little flowers that no one has seen.
Silence flies by. Above, below and inside, a vacuum grows stealthily, without a sound.

-31st January, 2003