Scrunched

If you pulled it out and ironed it flat, well first you'd be dead, but also amazed at how much can fit in that bony cave...

like a sleeping bag, walked for miles in its pouch over muddy hills and cropped fields, where the sun drizzles your face, and the sheep blat, and the crows scream, 'til you huddle down flat under the stars and the stretching dome above...

or when you were seven and a half, and you bolted yourself in the loo just to see how far the toilet paper stretched, and you unravelled it around your feet until you got scared and gathered it up and put it all in the bath, so the bath looked like the sky from an aeroplane, and you imagined tiny people beneath the clouds, fizzing through cities like electrons, working the land and maybe, just maybe, unravelling toilet paper in a loo somewhere to see how far it really stretched...

and you think of the thousands and thousands of thoughts moving through the spongey tubes, like light, or the shadows that play on the roof of your tent, which you feel you can almost tell what they are but you still can't grasp at what they mean...

Scrunched

and the scarf you're knitting for your mother's birthday - how it's only fifteen stitches per row but is now two hundred plus rows long, and how it reaches round your neck two times and down past your shoulders, and you think about knitting on, through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, maybe on through the complete box set of Friends, through work meetings and dinners, in the shower, in your sleep, then stuffing it all in a goldfish bowl to see if it magically comes to life...

and if it did what would it eat - would you spend every evening trawling barbed fences for bits of fluff from itchy ewes, and how would you feed it, and would it grow, and would you need to keep upgrading to bigger and bigger bowls like a plant re-potted, and what conversations would you two have, and would you read it like a crystal ball, or build it a mouth and a set of lungs with which to speak words, or make it a set of fingers to type?

and you get scared again, like you're back in the loo, even though you're a grown up now...and you donate your wool to charity, and sell your iron, and give up camping, and study facts and block out feelings, so that when the time comes you'll have no fear when the brains around you come to life and start asking about your childhood, and where you camp, and if that scarf is finished yet, and isn't it maybe time to cast off...?