Tangled Up In Ed
The small man sat as if in fear
That someone else would see him here
Among the darkened figures that
Lurked and watched him in his flat;
That smirked and joked if ever he
Dared to even think to leave
And see the world he knew was there
Just out the door and down the stair.
It might be in his cereal,
Prone-to-fire material,
Falling bricks, a haemorrhage,
Killer bees, an exploding fridge,
Riotous youths, STDs,
Death through lack of expertise,
Terrorists or spider bite,
Aneurysm late one night,
Bubonic plague could strike, but when?
It came round once - it could again!
You see he had this awful question
Feasting on his whole attention:
“What if…?”
Ed came home from work not long ago. He drifted through my room to the kitchen (I squat in the lounge like a penguin on a warm rock) and went immediately to his pet car battery, which yapped in excitement at his approach. I was sitting on my bed in my underwear getting quite involved in some Queens of the Stone Age and it was only after a while that I noticed Ed had begun to effervesce.
Now, Ed doesn’t do this very often. Infrequently, I’d say. But there he was, doing it, and with, seemingly, not a care in the world. He gravitated then over to me, having wiped some kryptonite onto a slice of bread (kryptonite toasts bread naturally, rendering toasters a thing of the past for those who like their low-fat spreads to be green), and chatted me about his day. All the while, of course, he was iridescent, a shimmering godfigure perched on my Bart Simpson duvet, a glittering and psychedelic manifestation of what I always imagined Chernobyl’s inhabitants to look like. Before the hair loss, obviously. Ed’s blessed with a lovely head of hair.
Then he simply got up, reached into the fifth dimension, and replaced a pen he’d borrowed from a bureaucratic demi-god. As Ed then hovered - still radiating light like your basic thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei - up the stairs, I could hear him humming, just gently evoking the clear melody of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
He still hadn’t washed up, though.
