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"I have grown tired of confederacies I strive to sculpt by rote. I have grown secular as a dung beetle." - ib

After a long, sleepless night the sky was the sweetest of blues, candyfloss, dusted with sugar from a tuppenny wrap.
    An unused toilet roll stretched loosely about the heavens.
    While he waited for the kettle to boil he read several lines from a newly published anthology of poems. Penned by an old acquaintance.
    The imagery was crystalline. The thrust of it not remotely obfuscated as he had led himself to expect. A change of tack. He found himself reflecting on familiar patterns. Terrains. Cellular structures.
    He thought he recognised in it something of his own. A trick of the light.
    Though it was far from cold where he sat near the window, he slammed shut the jacket of the book as if escaping a draft, and moved his fingers to the buttons on his cardigan.
    His hands shook. A marionette's on a trembling wire. This acquaintance was old, but in years a virtual youth still. The issue of a younger island. A Caribbean jewel once the playground of tricorn hats.
     Hushed admonitions thundered overhead. Accordions wheezed. His feet jostled to move him to throw up in the kitchen sink.
     He went out to the veranda instead and sat with his morning coffee.
     He had long fallen out of love with burning flakes of tobacco, but the craving still arose from time to time like a fluttering in his throat.
     The woman was at her habitual spot in the window across the street. Her neighbour sat on the stoop just above the concrete stairs. One ear cocked. Listening to children squabbling on their way to school.
     He raised his cup and in the act of it broke wind. None too cacaphonous, but loud nonetheless.
     His fart had an elegant mellifluousness to it, he felt, trumpeting on the accent, faintly whistling as it tailed.
     Reverberating through close to break as waves against brick walls.
     The scribe was unbowed. He had committed many wrongs in his life, certainly, but always he resisted that old testament notion of original sin.
     One by one, his audience, if that is what they amounted to, calmly shuffled to their feet and stole away.