For the happy man! - Collected writings DEPRESSION: Ed Atkins

A tsunami of mice breaking cover into a clearing, fleeing a forest
fire, the grass of the clearing seething.
The mice maggots, the grass the flank of a long-ago fallen horse.
The mice blow-flies, the grass your own sullen scalp, magnified
20x.
The mice sepia flames in soft-focus, the grass a microcosm of
the forest that’s being devoured by flames some half a mile behind
the fleeing mice.
The mice an army of red ants attending to an unseen queen, the
grass the perpetually decomposing forest floor.
The mice a shower of summer rain, the grass some intricate
Venetian-esque blind, part-drawn across one panel of the glass
roof of your conservatory.
The mice your fingers moving through and parting the hair of
[...], the grass.
The mice a landslide or an avalanche, watched in awe and safety
from the banked cockpit of a helicopter, a thousand feet up;
the grass, the devastated village below.
Etc.
And now I’m squinting through a prism of tears, crystallised
at the corners into sedimentary glue to wake up with – to lie
with, blind but awake for a few terrified years, eyes and eyelids
in a loving, desperate clinch after a sordid night transformed
into objects embedded in your rock-like skull. Sorry, my rock-