The Invigilator

He whispers. He whispers all day, and even when his watch is over, he whispers his greetings to you in the open air.

The day is hot. He stands, arms behind his back, upside down on comfortable shoes, swaying through the balance of perfect balance, his eyes fixed on archery targets etched in chalk against the invisible wall.

His sight. No barrel-eyed cross-circle of a hunters gun, nor the tense thread and hum of a bow slinging arrows. His sight rests between the vibrating of high wires and sinews, and is pitcher sound and tissue colour - an invisible form, trespassing across the savannah of what is not there.

Advances in digital photography may one day hook the fish and net the shoal of swimming phantoms lightly held between his thoughts and actions -and all untold will upload as graffiti's ugly charm to be scrutinised and then abandoned on a fly-by highway wall. Abandoned willingly, because it was nothing, no gift cloaked in bows and wrapping, just sometimes packaged and presented with two hands - like a fossil opening.

His conscience has had a billion scars but rejuvenates daily, moment by ticking second. He could lock each fleeting picture in a zillion shadowy tombs, cry crocodiles upon a drowning page, but his vigilante heart would not renew so fast, fixing mystery in a frame.

Appreciated and criticised, he leaves art and craft in the swaddling hands of new parents; and so, from a new artist and a new dream, something will be created. It came from nowhere, was nothing and is now created by another, these scenes of immeasurable wonder - the scenes he will see in the resounding hum of bows, and in the sport of flown arrows with no point at all.

At lunch, he picks a blade from the earth to sharpen, not for Cupid, Athena or any in the Garden. He picks a blade to sharpen the beak that eats the endless buffet that is his conscience. Later, he may be located in that invisible wall, hanging with Prometheus or spinning like a father's revolving thoughts, or sacrificed like a man or horse on someone else's calculated abacus – and he doesn't mind – he doesn’t mind at all.