The Untree

6:51am. The early minutes after a turbulent few hours of those introspective nights, when one tumbles and turns and pretends to sleep, unconsciously conscious of the changing shades of dawn, clamped away from stupor by delusions of self-absorbed paranoia spawned by imaginary turntables and Marcel Duchamp inside Magritte's non-pipe.

Yesterday I had bought myself a set of watercolours and spent some time making an uninteresting picture of a badly drawn tree. Leafless, it sucks earth from the ground, as though the two were a single peculiar entity, protruding from the brown soil like a pimple or a nipple, or a rotting cauliflower. Among the inexplicable hues there are infinitesimal hints of red and green. The branches are black, and the trunk is of sandy sienna – hence its resemblance to the dirt below. The sky remains unpainted. In my mind it blends with the leaves -the ones that have fallen- and earth and firmament are one; the moon exclaims "Bismillah!" and the tree remains but that, standing passive in the centre and gaping back at me.

So, despite the pretentiousness of baptism, it is now called "the Untree," homage to the silhouette of a Danish madman reflected in the shadows of a cave. It is my tricolour flag of brown, browner and yellow screaming chants of revolution, and the fifty stars that are not there represent all of mankind's sins: sleepiness, insomnia, unruly hair, boils in the mouth. And then, when the bell rings seven times, one will suddenly remember that the sky lingers unpainted and that suddenly it's time for breakfast and that the tree that stands so tall and flat in grainy paper is not, and never was, a tree.