Mosquitoes

I am sat on the muddy, dewy green atop the low river bank. My toes grassy and my toenails too long. The feet of a domesticated beast: unhappy, sweaty and pale.

In this mud I feel alive, there are dozens of precise pungent smells sweetly clouding up my nostrils, and the toxic fumes of the river Cam lather the tree barks in bitter licks -

A mosquito hovers beside me and I feel welcome. I haven’t reconciled with the slugs yet but Know I will. Like the cuckoo’s song they remind me of my childhood, barefoot in stinking meadows, with the others, happy and jumping like half-joyous, half-frightened deer.

The muddy opening where the river sits looks delicious and the fragile current like clingfilm I want to clasp and crunch and crinkle between my fingers -

The sky, pale and frothing, is closing in over my head, cracking open my skull from which blooms tall grass, so above so below -

Every day, a return to the body, I say:

on some days I will come here again and soak my skin in the high leaves and i will sit and look and gasp

gobbling grey flies

and on others i will bury myself behind the underground metal bars and breathe my own fumes and sweat on ice-cold rubber running paths

it will be organic, too, the same

pungent swallowing

biting back at

myself

And the river will keep at its dance

I will ache and be satisfied

That’s all one wants, in the end, at the very end of the story, isn’t it ?

A mosquito bite