I am made from junk

I am made from junk. I come from junk. I live in junk. I am destined to junk. My head is a burst football, given up for a dog’s chew-toy. My hands are the remains of the wiring inside a computer. My legs are loosely made up of an old cricket bat, broken in the centre; a discarded crutch from a run-down hospital where people come out sicker than they go in; battered chair legs, fistfuls of mud, all bound together with old cassette tape. My hair is a dusting of rusty nails, falling over my sour grape eyes. My ears, only outlines, mug handles stuck on with chewing gum. My spine is a broken telescope. My heart is an old radio, scratching out the tunes of whichever waves it can pick up.

I live in a junk yard. My home is a muddle of unwanted things, bicycles with broken wheels, dead cars, stinking matter. I moved like an eel, slipping in and out of the junk with an elegant awkwardness. I do not breathe. I have nothing to breathe and nothing to breathe with. I hear nothing but the scraping of insects. They infest the ground beneath my plated feet, scuttle across the corrugated iron above me, crawl inside my open wounds. The Earth’s heartbeat is a foreign sound and drives me scared into the dusty corners of my cloud-darkened world.

I see only what I want to see within this disused space. A home. A place to rest. A bed. A table with food, a roof for shelter. These things I see become bitter when reality sets in, as the sun comes up and shows the comforts for junk. All junk.

The people I know are but wisps of smoke through barbed wire. Their sharp words cut me but I cannot feel it. I have no feelings. I am numb from the neck up, a self-inflicted comfort halting all sensations. It makes life much easier. My family are junk, mannequins lifeless and stiff, lying prostrate on the hardened mud and stones. Their eyes are stones and they have no thoughts in their heads but where their next blood meal will come from. I feed them with my own blood, engine oil, but they spit it back at me, into my stomach, and I lie destitute, waiting for the flies to lay their maggots inside my rotting brain.

Where I come from I do not know. I do not know where I am going. With the wind blowing through my veins I drift from one corner of the scrap heap to the next, leaving agony and dry heat in my wake. Rats flee at my approach, but the insects remain. My only friends. I hate them, and their indifference burns my tough hide, through to the inky black within, revealing it to the world.