2011 for choir: in three-parts

i.

I was thinking today about the ten-year talent.  As a generation, it spread through us like a virus, multiplying and developing sub-species and mutations, changing the way we spoke and interacted with language.  Words came cheap and fast, born from the tips of our thumbs.   For a decade there, we were the gods of predictive text.  Typing until our fingers became a flesh-coloured blur.  Many didn't even need to look at the key-pad: touch-type but don't think too hard.  If you over-analyse it the words fall apart.  Trust your thumbs and let communication flow across the void and onto your loved one's screen.

'Babe cant make it 2nite.  Mum cracked the shits.  Love ya heaps!'

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But that skill is dying just a decade after its inception.  Touch screens are replacing keypads and our generation's phenomenal talent is becoming antiquated: a declaration of our age and fading technological prowess.  

Its only nature.    Progress.  Evolution.  The eleven-year-olds of our world wait in the wings, ready to take our places.

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ii.

I find it difficult to pray for I know not to whom I am praying.  Like most people who think too hard and spend years at university only to immerge with an arts degree and zero employment opportunities, I am an atheist.  Or is it 'agnostic'.  I don't care enough to remember the difference.

But language hasn't caught up.  You only need a friend with terminal illness to teach you that.  'I'm thinking of you' cannot replace 'I'm praying for you'.  'Thinking' lacks the emotional maturity of prayer.  

Speak to a homeless man.  Give him money.  All the money you have in your purse.  Sympathise that winter is a shit time to be sleeping on the streets as you sit, wrapped in your jackets.  'I'll be under the bridge tonight' he says and you break inside.   'Look after yourself' cools in comparison to 'bless you' but I do not feel that I have the authority to allocate blessings.  

I pray that one day we'll be able to reclaim these words but, for the moment, we must accept that the religious own them and are better equipped when something meaningful needs to be said.   Our vocabulary has not caught up with our godless minds.

iii.

Night isn't black anymore.

It is a multi-coloured event, illuminated by signage and sponsorship.  Night is populated by men with white teeth and sunglasses, driving sleek cars and yelling obscene suggestions at the girlwomen who totter by on high heels, handbags clutched to their padded bosoms, rolling their eyes but enjoying their male counterparts mating calls.

Tonight a possum rummages through the trash out the back of a kebab store.  She is illuminated by a towering lit-up advertisement for life insurance.  She ignores the drunk trio returning to their car, ignores the engine, ignores everything until the car wheel rolls over her, breaking her back.  The Subaru stops two meters past and the three emerge.  Ridden with guilt, they stand and watch helpless as the garlic-scented creature dies.  

One girl pushes her delicate hand into her eyes and sobs twice: great staccato barks in the alley.  Her hand comes away coated in blueblack makeup.  The other girl kneels beside the little body.  She looks into its eyes and watches its panicked last breaths.   She tries to make comforting sounds but they linger somewhere in her oesophagus.  The boy stands stoic, keeping his gaze fixed on the glowing 'life insurance'.  He wonders if he should make a joke.  He feels the alcohol haze fading from his mind, leaving him cold and more intelligent than he wants to be.  
A train passes through the glowing pulsing night and the possum dies.  There is no blood.  No last gasp.  It just stops.

'Lana?  Kristy?'  His voice is croaky, as if from disuse.  'I think I'm scared of the dark.'