The bourgeoisie king paints his citadel, and the rain begins. The clouds blitzes in from wherever all sudden things stay. The puddles smell of petrol and rainbow.
The king falls asleep waiting for a better weather, watching the flash news. A little over 1,500 dies every year from flash floods and some 400 from landslides.
Dreams become a nightmare; the nightmare splits, and morphs itself into a lone white shark and an elephant swimming together and towards my rooftop.
They utter something as one and in chorus. I tell them, I don't want to be late for my lecture on the importance of being dishonest about climate change.
The trouble with the nightmare is as soon as its abominable taste wanes, you forget the reason behind seeing it. You will abhor the ephemera if you want to complete painting your house. Today is scheduled for facelifting its appearance, and the king cannot dwell on the thoughts, "I invest in concrete and plaster, and paints and realignment of the electric lines, and all may go waste if the mother nature goes West."
We are the bourgeoisie king. I tend to dull my acknowledgement regarding the facts my skin gathers about the weather, and how it charts the unknown territories of temperature zones. Air conditioners have become a necessity. My father no longer resists it as a luxury. Ironically the same machine tools more adverse changes in the climate.
I may turn my back to the nightmare, hellishly hot and flooded with murky water, but it returns from the back of my mind, and from the black depth of my realisation. Any dreamcatcher is a fistful of chicken feathers in front of such a dream.
Again I sleep. This time a nighttime volcano erupts. This time the clouds shower pesticides and bodies of the dead beetles. In my dream, I teach obscenity about the Earth. I say, "Human is the supreme. Our own civilization is the conglomeration of all goodness, heaven and verity."
As the sleep fades, the hooves of the riders of the apocalypse recede into some stable, and however unstable I may feel, I browse through the colour charts, chosen for the walls and the ceilings. The bourgeoisie king house painting. What will you pick for the walls of the Pompeii?
I put on Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.
Even if we knew a date for the end of the days, we shall dream of a clean and cheery house and breakfast on some extinct flesh cooked in some heart-choking lard on a fossil-fuelled oven.
Did we plant our quota of seeds? Perhaps. How many of those did we rear to their utmost possibility? None. Did we binge-watch our mobiles? Yes. Did we love the bees? Only in the cartoons.
The soliloquy of the king trots on the nightmares across the meadow of his house painting day. We domesticate the premonition. Live the way our society taught us to live.
