This Night

I am lost in this world
without you-
but just this.

My others are quenched
with salt water,
repeat prescriptions.
It is neither folly nor pain,
just two hands on the face,
I cannot replace.
I cannot replace.

You may be eclipsed
tonight thus far.
A kingdom of cloud thickens our page.
An empire of thunder
sits under my age,
whilst those hands
dance dainty plans
on the land of our love.

____
I am forgotten.
Or, at least, soon to be
if not just a rotten taste
in your wild jaws.

Oh wolf,
you stalk less like me,
but more like she
with her wrinkly eyes
and those constant flies
that flood her perfect personality.

A wittled witch,
living on a chicken leg,
she prays even on the mantis,
held tight.

I saw a fox tonight
through the looking glass.
Not a wolf, nor the moon,
and it wasn’t you in disguise
trying to pass through my door.

I have dreams of you
sitting on the step whilst I am awake.
In tears you pull the fears
from your cap
like a dead white rabbit.

You say
“We could have it,”
and I let you in to my room
thick with gloom,
amongst cartons and my wicker bed
alight with flames of blue and red.

But, what if it’s dead?
(that timeless catch you had)
I always said that I could lower the gate
making way for plastic hate (melt)
and squashed, barbaric customs.

I doubt that day shall ever come
when I can say, highly strung,
that I have nothing left for you.

You have forever ended my heart.
Its valves are dry,
alone they cry for blood soaked love.

DESPISE, LOVE, HE TRIES.

When will a fresh leaf
turn in to brown,
autumn tasting memories?
You leave me bludgeoned,
my wires snapped,
my skin, torn at it’s golden mouldy seams.

This season is acrid,
I smell a storm ahead-
Mildew blasts through your halo
made of wool, wire and string.
I am eating away at my own memories;
too scared to stop. Too alive to drink.

Friction heats my anger,
a longing of tear upon tear.
For a mere hour when we could---
Gravy skin and upturned funghi
move like ships through tainted gates.
Examine me closer, magnify me!

It becomes clear, like those
orange flames, that I must
despise you, oh -

THE NIGHT WOLF

Oh. Dear wolf, you seem to have come back to me through a fiery haze of blue. Your officers have eaten half of the moon. It appears to me with overflowing light; a blur on the sky line of London.
I heard a bat earlier, was it you? The vampire you are, come and suck my blood once more, twice, thrice - make it last forever. Bite me again, drink me dry, consume my person and be as one. We can be one tree, one autumn leaf, one frightening prospect of love.

Enter in to my dreams, wipe out my father’s face. Withdraw the boy from my night vision, crouched in the corner giggling like a simple man with red, wet lips. Make my dreams colour.

Be with me, be mine and inhale my heart, inhale my taste, my smell, my last dying vampiric breath.

We can and we will love. I have heard that we do love. I will be yours, honestly true to the laws of Victorian streets and tree lined alleys. Push me against the brick, pull at my hair and lift me high against the wall.
Drop me to the floor, pull me to your side and lay there, panting dear wolf. Your hairless back tells stories of original aboriginal art. It shows a secret deadly pathway to love. If only I could line these up, tie string to them and crawl through a labyrinth of skin like a spider, then I should know how to serve you.

I think I love you. I can still taste you on my breath.

Dear wolf, you metamorphasise. I love. I hate. Your back wet with sweat brings rain to the labyrinth web. Oh but to love; this strange pain in my heart, a constant ball of rubbery ice sticks clear to the bones of my ribs. I would pluck these for you, pledging them, yielding them like the vacant trophies of a cluttered summer corpse.

I light my candle of love. It is black, not red - I know the colours aren’t right, but this is my black candle of love for you, one of darkness, of creatures at night, wolves, foxes and bats. I call them to me. I ask for energy from them, from you dear wolf.

PROMISE ME A TRILOGY

The heat becomes intolerable;
an indescript umbrella saturated
with anxieties, breath, blindness.

Open my smashed window,
the spirit releases thus.
Close the missing door,
promise me a trilogy!

The cauldron boils bats,
the kettle boils relaxation.
Empty their scaly preconceptions.

If this be travel,
my book must be
that blackboard shopping list.
An overgrown, white elephant.

I have become tired
in Pandora’s empty box
of forever. It stings

my scarlet eyes, dripping
with your reflection in
her mirror, ornately decorated
with leafy poison ivy.

MY SEPTEMBER ISSUE

Why bruise a fresh fruit
if rotten pears fall alongside?
A sleeping alpine, ablaze, breathes
smoke into a new bloom.

Withered, a petal falls,
engulfed by brilliant arson.
The mountains are testing,
breaking open metal bonds.

Ambushed, I stagger, blindly
like a fool, grinning with red wet lips.
Heart abeating, love and grease
pump through a solid, molten core.

EXQUISITE TORTURE

This, unknown to me
has crippled the glass.
A shard, benign in texture,
soft to the lips,
has embedded it’s smell
on black brushed fur.

Oh, this dull ache,
rich with puzzled steam,
releases a haze, an image of you.
Screaming to be true,
he struggles through suits
and frozen images.

Send me your smell,
pocket it, envelope it and
lick the neck of a picture postcard.
You seem so shy, by and by,
writhing with fools
happy again, playing by Canadian rules.

To taste your skin,
akin to the skier’s pillow
is all the eye can muster,
all seeing, all sleeping, all weeping.
Eat away at the moon dear wolf,
bring me a brooch of moon rock.

I cannot beg Captain,
instead, I shall suffer the voice
of a mute. Acute senses
fresh but dead grow through
cracked, white plaster.
An Eton Mess.

It be better that you
rush upon this blade,
than enter the circle with
fear in your heart.
How do you enter?
With perfect love, and perfect trust.

Autumn Begins

I've been out of action for a long while.
I've been busy learning for my work. Not just learning things, but emotions and I think they've really helped, even though they've really hurt.
- Apart from that, I've been internet free since moving to London and felt practically destitute without it. So, here I am, back again with reams of writing to upload.
X

The Cove - a work still in progress

The local news came on. Grumbling, Heather emptied her Mother’s ashtray and lit a new cigarette. She began to day dream about her enemies at college, and how, exactly, she could break them. Before thinking about swapping the water in the drinking fountain for bleach, she had coffee heart just by imagining pushing Rachel Hunt and her purged stick legs down the old Victorian stairs. The overly made up, dead eyed news reporter began to read the auto cue.
“Another diver has gone missing in Stoney Cove. French businessman Martin Fox, Twenty Seven, came to the world renowned cove to dive and explore the many sunken objects and vehicles. Could this be the start of another group of divers disappearing in the water, similar to the Sunken Seekers of 1943 where seven men...”
The report trailed off in Heather’s mind as her Mother slapped an egg on a plate and pushed it in front of her. Heather pushed her fork against the chicken abortion, and raw, urine coloured eggwhite came pouring out. She threw the plate in the bin, picked up her bag and stubbed her cigarette out in the sink. Heather became an empty sarcophagus.

Slinking around the back of the new Geography block, Heather pulled out a cigarette and lit it. She breathed in and felt relaxed.

Sleep, on your bed of needles.

I take immense pleasure from other people's pain. Pain, it would appear has become my drug. Not pure, physical pain but emotional eating away pain, something that grows like a brick in the stomach of innocent, breaking characters. My prose really gives very little away, simply a ball of pain painted on to paper.
I get excited by failure, by risks and by fear. Perhaps, my fear of the wind blowing and a late night robbery is less horrid if this happens to another person, a friend.
Oh what a smothered echo I have become.

THINGS ARE GETTING STRANGE

Things are getting strange and beginning to heat up around here.
They have come and gone, mostly gone, and now evaporated in to little but angel dust.
A new idea for a short story is keeping me occupied. The Cove is the centre, the light flashing to reveal a hidden secret. But of what? I must keep racking my brain.
My Father has become little but a blue pause in his clattered box of selfish tools.
My thoughts after finishing are always so strange - so animal.

the pounding rain is echoing
my inner thoughts of rancid breath
and ribbon tied hair, lost
and hung like a naked child
in the tree of the dead.

in the island of souls that
glimpse nothing of the sun but learn
only of rain from their birth comes the
holy child, the delinquent.
His first steps mirror that of the dead

legs, crawling like alien tentacles
who's suckers grab on to his dark
fluid, brown eyes. He can see
no mountain moving for this pain;
it's grip firmly lodged in a caramel coated glaze.

he has had his fill of keys on hearts.

Fox Fur

I do not know what to make of you and your broken, shaking hands. Your eyes make me cry. Your eyes make me alien. My tea needs sugar Mother. I jump in to cold, blue water, black beetles swim around and a shark’s fin hangs above my head in the farm. I wonder what secrets the fox fur stole used to know. It terrified me so. It used to hang in my wardrobe covered in white glossy paint where I used to lay down and push my bare feet down against the door to the floor, making it scream. The fox hanged itself along with a few of her other old, contaminated clothes probably from other husbands and sometimes, it would lean out and touch me. It smelt of old things, dead creepy things. Mother used to wear the animal a lot when she was younger; it had small, glass eyes that tinkered when your nail touched them and a tiny hinge on its mouth so that you could make it talk, and even though I’ve tried many a time, it never speaks. I now wear a black fox fur stole in the winter.

Topaz

Twenty years. Ten years of dismembered memories.
I wonder who this woman is, this mask of wood and golden nails. One day I’ll remove this mask and find the wood decomposed, the nails rusted.

Perfection is obsolete. Your mask hides reality, reality that I will never know. I do not know who you are, who you were, who we are. I cannot find the words to write about you.

You are ambiguous, an amphibian, an unpolished topaz. I am pulverised by this latest thing.

A work in progress...

I am a wall of eyes.
Asleep on a mattress of
horse hair and needles,
you prod and poke your
penis nose.

Jealousy is liquid.
A dead ancient portrait of
the stone and the tree.
Tonight is enough,
curtains close.

Chapter 3

Are Fairy Tales fantastically moralistic, promising an unconventional, potentially inappropriate and fantastic illusory lifestyle?

MANNEQUIN

The empty silence is biting my lip.
Down hard I bit
right below at the tip

Black and grey pigeons and puppies might scream
as they talk of
my mannequin alien being.

The blackened window has broken my head.
Shards in the lead
as I crawl from this bed.

For Sasha

Exit.
The rain will stop falling,
the bitter descend of cold
polluted water will dry,
become steam...
- and close the lid on the kettle.

Twinkle.
Like you forever do,
Let the electricity run and
switch the light on.
For it is you,
who we all listen to.

Smile.
Monique Le Soleil will
forecast sunshine soon.
You may wonder,
if it is still winter,
but spring is here.

Enter.

A Silhouette for Anna

You spin on that
Victorian street,
a thaumatrope. Yet, here
there are no birds in cages.
The air is barren.

The two people forge.
But spin and laugh!
Obtuse. Look, for the mirror
produces the truth,
your necklace reversed.

I will paint you
a black silhouette of sorrow, Anna.
Seeing the pain in the statue
breaks the crystal of my eye
but the other stays open.
Why do you still not cry?

The Gytrash

The Gytrash seeks out the empty novels. Their covers lie abandoned upon the moors of West Yorkshire. Pages scattered and walked in to the mud and manure.
At night, the Gytrash with his yellow eyes and black, furry padded feet, creeps about the paths and hills of the Yorkshire moors, waiting; an unsuspecting man, of Victorian eligance complies to his demands and sits beneath the oak and writes him a fable. The Gytrash reads this, then sleeps in a small cave, his black fur brushing lightly from the wind.

Saturday.

The staff of life has been
edited to resemble little but
a broken fruit tree.

Dzien Dobry, Mother.

Dzien dobry, Mother.
I fell through that thick quivering
bankrupt void of flesh.
Coated in mouldy, overly blubbery conserve.
A copious seal, beached upon a blanket.

I still wear your witches scarf.
Poêm,
Gags me, like your future. The moth-eaten fox
hanged in the cupboard, hanged in darkness
did not file away your secrets in its matted grass of fur.
Secrets of Sharnford Lodge
where you became---

“Ladies and Gentleman!
Baba Jaga!”
Polish face and sharp, English tongue
Manipulator of Society! You speak-
“Beckon forth Mr. Inebriation.”

Re clothe yourself in the purple bruise.
Change your scales for
the next woman, the latest disguise.
Disappear in the mountains,
Blen Cathra. I do.

You do? Thank goodness
for the treasure that you cannot touch.
Remaining padlocked
until blackness and division descends.
That blackness is you, Mother.

Manipulator, Comedienne,
Ex-Smoker, Future Widow,
Artist of influence and
Master of ripping the hair from her scalp.
I remember.

Adjust this storm in my brain
with your family of barometers.
Your negligence Mother is simply a grin,
a grin on your face with that Lion’s mane.
Your sister’s eyes, knowing. Kaziameira. Petrified.

Your pedestal, cracked, lit by torches
just like the Baba Jaga in her Polish Salem village.
But you shall be silent.
Quiet Mother.
Watch the photos and my antique table burn.

Parent. Mother. Mum?
You have aged, but you still command guilt.
You have shaking hands like the host.
I have finally figured you out,
Yet, I have nothing more to say.

Leave me now, Gringos

Put the prenuptial in with the compost.
It will never grow. Instead,
Just like our love, it will decompose
with worms and beetles, bitter words,
small moss and fleas.

Leave this lie for
when I fly to the city
Recouperation is sullen.
I would prefer it if you were silent,
please.
Yet again, I beg for silence.

Forget me and I shall
never forget you,
yet why clutch at this artery for so long
when nothingness
is palpitating through.

I shall tether my veins
our connections too.
For I do not think it is wise
to be about you.
Leave me now, Gringos.

STUDIO PHOTOSET

I am in the kitchen.
I am nine.
The kitchen, littered with coffee filters,
stark tiles, strip lights, grated cheese
Gordon's paper bags and floppy disks.

The office kitchen
Where I have summarised,
Where I have been taught to hate you,
You and your sticky salt water fish eyes.
Where I measure myself against the big, black void of the plastic bin,
Where I wait for Terri to stop delivering,
To come back and show me pictures of plastic surgery
cat brides.
Jocelyn.

The nail in her tyre,
The dog in the street, rescued.
Pig legs, flapjack.
You have to go to Impress.
But I close down and play on with the attack of the womb.

Janet -
I hear,
Is, infertile. Oh,

Perhaps this is why they surround themselves
with hundreds of fish and eggs,
their scaly water babies,
Gills drinking bucks fizz.

He is, Leo.

The green grass on the wall will not last for long.
With time the vegetation will peel off. Brown, but yellow too.
It will reseed upon the pillow, a fresh lock of hair growing whilst you sleep.
Cutting and shaving of the hair forces strong and thick regrowth.

Is this how you feel for me?

The Ringmaster tries to tame the lion upon the grass, which, is now dead underfoot.
The lion will never be tamed, he is
Leo.

Maria does not care for letters,
She burns them with her one million and one candles.
Neither does he care for these words, his letters addressed to him written on the back of her producer's face.

Produce this:
A love that is everlasting, but never beginning.
I challenge you to lay on the grass, and read the stars and their signs to become the all knowing. I have told you much about myself,
the darkness (now),
her and her shaking hands,
the beached whale.

Be quiet, sticky fish with your slimy pupils.
Reseed your own love, Ringmaster.
Breathe on those candles, for hours, and forget.
Don't make the wish, even though your day of birth beckons.
I beg of you.

The snow and I

It has snowed again.

I have now walked upon the new snow.

It was white, and bright and light
and from what I can remember was drumming against the window, lightly,
but warmed me and replaced my ego.

Please keep snowing.
If the snow stops i shall become spiritless and then
the next time it snows,
I'll be unknowing.

Since meeting the snow,
that cold night
buttered with ice
the sprinkles of grit,

I await its reply to me.

It will, stop.
it will stop snowing soon.
Low battery.

The Wishing Well

the wishing well is empty.
well, the well is not quite empty,
there are several dry leaves dancing in the bottom.

I have tried to climb the bricks many a time,
and quite often I have come halfway,
I have been at the top with the bright light,
eyes alight and mind on fire,
but always, always,
I find myself back in the dark.

Well, the well is not always empty,
it can be the skeletons of blackbirds,
their corpses rotted away.

The feathers take the longest to rot
you see a feather is almost like bone
and bones never rot. Unfortunately.

I always think about the bones,
I forget they're there and then I remember and then
well,
and then I'm at the bottom of the well again.

I think that one day, i'll have to go and see them
so that they can throw the rope down to the bottom of the wishing well and i'll be able to climb out and just have to think and be more careful of them in the future.

Black dust and Black air.

She stands there breathing her beauty
he inhales, softly, cancerous.

six foot
her face is covered in blue
gold
red
green
orange pink
silver
white purple

black

glitter.

In the black stone arched emporium,
black dust and black air,
the glitter mirrors on his face.
Her gown flutters and billows, waving like the water.

He kisses her lip, gently.
The glitter begins to blur, smudge,
It blurs and smudges, the horror ensues.

He kisses her cheek, her eyelid, the side of her neck,
but it all blurs.
Her face is now a blur, apart from her shocked eyes, staring, still.

A single tear rolls down his face as he backs away,
the black is coming now,
the black is suffocating
the black is, impalpable.

He tears the glitter off his skin in reams
whilst he stands naked in the canal covered by more stone.
Goosebumps line his thighs.
There are two old women, one shrouded in blackness, knitting, holding a ball of black wool with her feet in the water,
it soaks through and feels like a wet head of dead hair.
The other woman also dressed in black gently peels his sunburnt glitter skin.

The darkness yet again sets in,
the black out.

"He doesn't say much any more." She says, lighting another cigarette.
"He's dropped. His laughter is a wimper and his smile is no longer part of the moon but rigged with dental floss." He says, clearing the way for his just dessert.

Thank you for the present.
I come outside,
called by you.

You're so proud of the present.
A huge, rusted engine of a boat.
"Quickly, quickly," you say,
"Before you miss it all"

The 'sea foam' begins to disappear,
the starfish drop off and curl like burning dry leaves,
screeching, screaming in excruciation
before the ash flies upwards.

The puddles rings shake inwards.
In the puddle are potted plants in plastic bags,
waiting to go home with me.

"How am I going to take this home?" I say with a slight, hesitant laugh.
Secretly I don't want to take it home.
I have to.

I sit on the train with this engine,
taking up half a carriage like a white elephant.
People don't notice it.

"What a nice engine," says an old woman with wise eyes and a red, leather suitcase.
"Thank you," I reply.

I wish she would take it.

They Leap, Through Each Blurb

There are too many books in this room. They can't all be read.
Stacked, Piled, Skewed.
The characters are inside waiting to be read, met and breathed on by the nose of the reader.

The smoke goes in when the door is shut.
It enters the leaves and runs through the words.
Robinson Crusoe enjoys the smell, for he has not smoked for twenty eight years. 'This is not, quite, fine tobacco,' He says. Seemingly twenty eight years on a desert island has not hindered his habit.
Alice sits in the house, her arm hanging through the drapes and touching the vegetable patch. Alice does not like the smoke; she continuously wafts the netted curtains, sighing gently, her eyes watering, raw and red.
I can hear Annie Wilkes, 'You dirty bird,' she says, 'You dirty smoking bird.' Reaching for her mallet, she remembers the law of the novel. Only act as you are read.

Sometimes I imagine that they would leap, through each blurb in to the next novel, transcend and drip through the pages and slowly, steadily, Lady Audley would creep in to Dorian's room, she would sit there, waiting for his return from the Opera and greet him, hungry for his beauty and fame only to join him later in the picture. She would grow old, her skin like a turkey and her nails, dropping off one by one to leave hard dried ends on her witches pointed fingers.

I Wonder if They Will Mummify Me

Lines.
There are lines in my hands.
There are lines in my hands and they worry me.

I think of these lines,
and these thoughts tunnel,
just like the tunnels and grooves and caves on the inside of my palm.

These lines have at least trebled in quantity
since
i started back in April.
I, am a manual worker.

Perhaps these lines represent all the thoughts,
parallel,
non stop,
multiplying,
forever, forever,
endless, endless,
continuum, continuum,
never leaving but forever multiplying.

They will stay, indented
indented and grow stronger, deeper, further,
they will crack with age
they will be dirty, plagued by mud and dirt
they will be disgusting.
They will be cracked, and dirty, plagued by mud and dirt and be disgusting.

Oh.


My palms look old. Ancient.
Just like an Egyptian cat.
I wonder if they will mummify me.

At least they are not hairy.
Hairy palms are a sure sign of madness.

The Back Doors

You smoked those cigarettes.
The ones you used to smoke.

I smoked them too, you'd give me one.
Your last ones.
In the middle of the night, in the morning,
at the back doors.

The food, burnt.
The slovenly cooker: old she was,
she forgot how to cook, how to time,
how to mime.

The mime, the show. The fucking pantomime.

I miss you boy.
I don't miss you. I miss the times.

In fact,
I don't miss the times at all.

There were no times,
the times were endless
because there was no start.

It ended before it began.

You don't deserve my words

The Gulls Scream Louder Than the Pigeons

The gulls scream louder than the pigeons,
especially in the deep dark.
At night,
they creep in the sky,
flittering to the moon to visit the witch.

Invisible and loud,
their wings like forks covered in dust and dried porridge oats,
they fall in to the sink and
clatter.

They sound like screaming, tortured puppies.
Hot pokers, knives and things.
They dance through the clouds, and scream,
they scream until I wake and have to blindly urinate.

Eyes closed I hold my hand out
in the hallway hidden with ghosts trying to find the door,
I crawl back in to my warm bed,
push the duvet under my feet and sleep,
i spoon the cushion.
I'm going to have a good day today.
I'm going to have a good day today.