Worm Food and Aspirations

October opens her doors as leaves rain down like confetti or snow, though it's closer to confetti because of the spectrum of colours.

Sombre and retrospective, meditative colour spectrum that causes pause for thought. As my foot steps in a puddle and I remember September is a distant memory, a shit I flushed a few days ago.

Then the smell hits me...that smell of decomposition. There's a lot of beauty and tranquillity in October but also decomposition, with so much of its living things being consumed by the earth.

A month of transition means a month of destitution and memorialisation. As they pass onto the next life as worm food, those leaves that provided shade willingly (we don't actually know if it was willingly or not, but we presume as such or accept that the way things is is the way things is) now give their life to preserve the life of future generations.

We mourn the bees and hope the animals search for enough food to survive the harshities of winterdom once its sharp, icy burn cuts through skin if you don't put your warmer clothes on quick enough.

I find myself a nice bench in a park or a wooded area and gaze in perverse wonder at the naked trees and how their bones are on display for all to admire and perspire at the horror.

To a child the naked trees, stripped of their leafy dressage, must look like how the old and decrepit look. When you first see an older person, not long from death as October is to the death of another year, it must be the same, horrific and shocking. Kids, they say the strangest, most unabashed things.

"Grandma, why do you look like someone took a rolling pin to your neck and sucked out the fat from your body?"

"All the better to fall over and never get back up, my dear!"

(She laughs, of course, but the adults know and the child realises there's more truth in Grandma's savage reality check.)

She pulls him onto her bed to sit beside him.

(I am, of course, using poetic licence here as Grandma has long been unable to lift anything heavier than a one-pint carton of milk, and little Timmy, let's call him Timmy even if he could easily be Ginny, Gemma or Gertrude, weighs more than a one-pint milk carton.)

I'm still on the bench, so it's important to remember this is all conjecture or some junction between thought being inceptioned and manifest in reality without complicated Nolan dream physics.

Grandma cuddles Timmy or whatever his name is.

Perhaps you're considering the underside to it all. The way we dress death up to make it easier to swallow.

(Swallow the scythe with difficulty. Whether you choose handle or blades first, it's going to cut you the fuck up.)

I watch a leaf fall, dancing through the air before. I hear it whistle a tune, maybe a bit of Satchmo. I'm transfixed and entranced and beguiled and running out of adjectives.

As it lays itself on the ground, tired from its last serenade, its last chance to gain what we all want, a sense of meaning, purpose to achieve greatness, and I want it. I really do want it.

For him or her, it or they, and for me. But.

I want to stand on it more.

So

Crunch

Goodnight

And just like Timmy's Grandma, it crisps under the pressure of my sole and I feel its soul smash into soil spilled out onto the wet ground around my feet and underneath the bench.