Architects of Tomorrow by Dean George

If there is hope, it lies in the proles. I am a proud prole with no hope of hope. I am outnumbered by the hopeless. There they are; the architects of tomorrow’s world. They’re pinning fake moustaches and swigging bright blue alcohol in a dimly lit club. I’m an architect of tomorrow and I’m standing in a dimly lit thumping and throbbing coloured night club watching them stagger out onto the floor. I’d rather be with them. Anything than accept my own fate with every slow swig of this American lager I’m holding. There’s some art lost in the way the females dance like strippers and the males dance like badly animated cartoon characters on a damaged roll of film. An art not lost on me as I watch them go at it like small toads struggling to leave a pond. They are stereotypically nothing yet so recognizable. I wish I could stop watching them.

I am just a lizard crawling under a rock in the warm dust. Rising breezes and winds blink my eyes and twitch my neck. I am a ghastly brown green hidden from helicopters and other birds of prey. Girls’ names are flowing through my mouth but I cannot speak. I can only offer a sharp protruding sinfully forked tongue followed by its shorter retreat. From this I can taste everything I want without thought. Taste is a horrible sense. It is internal. I can only taste once it is in my mouth as a human. As a lizard, taste can be outside my cage. Like smell. Like vision. I am a master of the senses. Cold blooded, unafraid and hatched from eggs. I scuttle with my walnut brain and think not of the king of tyrants that came before, but of the next meal, mate or match. Vindaloo and kebabs and that girl in the white skirt. Are Arsenal playing Manchester United again?

I am not a lizard; I am a thinking hat – empty vessel for which thoughts can enter without the thick penetrative interrogation that the lizard skin gives. I feel like a frozen puddle that’s beginning to thaw. The crust is moving like tectonic plates on cold dirty hydrogen and oxygen. Dead molecules. The puddle will join the clouds in the sky like the rest of the water that was given time on Earth during the rain. I’m not going anywhere. I’m stuck thawing but never really melting or freezing. Just thawing. I don’t want to get stoned with the other hairy men. I want to read about people on the brink of their existence, drinking spirits from dirty crystal glasses in their four million dollar mansions reduced to a slum. Here’s one such spirit held up high to the plastic cowboy hats and catalogue jewellery. Here’s to the rise of a new culture. The working class become the classless. Controlled by the elite eyes of our Atlas men.

Dean George was born on a grey day in Wales, UK and has been there ever since. He started writing by himself as a child by watching cars outside and writing down their number plates. Since then he’s been writing and directing short films, documentaries and music videos, writing plays for local theatres and trying his hand at prose here and there. He also attempted a brief stint at stand up comedy. Oh, and in the time he has in between sitting down; he is a student at Cardiff University.