Well...I got into numerology at a very young age,
took the stairs three at a time,
became obsessed with the number nine.
I thought I had a camera in my head,
my eyes were the lenses,
and dead people, ghosts or whatever,
they forced me to look at certain things,
for their benefit not mine.
I would play with the other kids,
but I would see me with them,
from an elevated and remote angle,
like an out of body thing,
never told anyone that I did it,
sort of my secret.

I used to wonder about dying,
I thought if I stopped stealing sweets,
stopped playing with my hoochie-coochie man every night,
and almost managed to stop lying,
I might just get to heaven.
But once you get to the promised land,
is there another stage after that?
I always thought of death as like an elevator,
going up
in a multi-storey block of flats.
Except it would be nicer,
like without the pissy smells and scuttle-bellied rats.

I would ponder on reincarnation,
and the rebirth of the soul.
But it always ended in frustrated resignation.
I realised you can't change channels in this life,
we lack the remote control.
I never understood life insurance,
my mother said it was a financial game of chance.
So why worry about dying
when you've paid for it in advance?
If I come back in another life,
I want to be a forest pig, hunting truffles.
Not a piece of meat multiplying in a laboratory,
genetically anonymous, and scientifically muffled.

I used to think Russia was another planet.
That they came here on rockets
and put down sickle-shaped anchors.
I used to see the Vietnam war reports on tv news,
and I wanted to do stuff like that,
flame throwers and helicopters and shit,
I thought it was all terribly romantic.
My father said these things were for real men,
and later I realised
he was being sarcastic, not pedantic.

And I would fall asleep dreaming about zombies,
and what exactly went on in the world
as the sun sank behind the shadowy mountains?
And the roar of the belching refuse truck
would slowly wake me up,
as the sun slid into another raving morning.
And I would see people hurrying by
to add their sweat and toil to the social economies,
and I would yawn,
and be forced by dead people to film them,
with my head camera and eye lens thing.
And I would think again about zombies.

I mean...this all happened when I was ooh
about nine years old.
I used to keep all this stuff locked up,
like in a dusty box inside my little head.
These things have never been told before.
The only ones who know,
are the ones who control me,
the ones who make me look at things,
the spirits,
the dead.

And just to finish off...speaking of heaven again...
I once had this very lucid thought
that heaven was another planet,
somewhere way out there,
beyond the realms of religion,
in another solar system,
and the people who live there,
they actually invented us,
and control us,
in some intergalactic mind game,
like scrabble for super beings,
but we don't really get it,
I mean we have abstract ideas,
but we don't know exactly what to do,
and these super beings are toying with us,
occasionally toss us scraps of evidence,
little bits of clues.
But the danger is that if we get too near the truth,
they will just step on us,
snuff us out,
because to them it's no big deal,
and they have infinite patience.
We think we are the intelligent species,
but really we are just the play things,
and they have nothing better to do.