Young Writers Society

This was one of my majors last year, and it got good marks, but in retrospect its embarrasingly amatuerish. Makes me nauseous how crap it is. The concept was okay, my aim was to create a story with only one man with no other stimulus. Yes, I failed my concept, but the plum description at the end is only partially vile.

***************************************************************

A4 White

Perhaps they wouldn't have killed me if I had said I didn't mean it. The word 'mean' is arcane, elusive. The etymological chameleon. Mean is a condiment, the pretence of strong flavour but, in essence, the borrowing of other sensations. The phrase 'Did you mean it?' could imply any number of things. I know what they wanted now. A story: a beginning, a middle, an ending. A noble savage. A psychopathic villain. The subordinate of some crime ring or cult. Anything to stop them looking at me and seeing themselves and wondering if they could be capable of becoming me.

I didn't want to give them that.

Not despite them, I wanted them to question themselves. I wanted them to look at my portrait upside down, to see a reflection in the colour, texture, expression, something of their own in the paint daubs of infamy.

Sometimes it's only the question that stops them from becoming me.

Define morality in relief, in reverse, and they will become me, even as they rail against me. It is, because it is, because I am, because you're not. Faith means never having to say you don't know.

It is no answer, but the doubting choir of questions of the mind. That is our salvation. The different, the damned, are the virtuosi mourning the lost, the vanishing spun sugar, the hope.

Nemesis works both ways.

This is what I thought.

What I think I thought.

Maybe.

Maybe that's what I was thinking.

Maybe that's why they killed me.

Maybe not.

I wake, propped against the wall. I don't remember propping myself up. Propping is an action remembered, it takes conscious- I need my shoes, where are my shoes? Clunky, black, leather, 'sensible shoes' mothers buy for sons. I've worn the inside flat, and its splodged, leprous leopard skin moults because I'm too broke to buy anything but that cheap plastic shoe polish, even though it smells like burnt car upholstery-how do you spell upholstery, apollstry, maybe it's like appaul- forget it, yes it has that neat little three syllable syncopation, but you haven't a snowball's in rhyming it- Where are my shoes?- a call free, a small fee, a- forget it, you're just not going to get there, Whatsisname will think you're being- My shoes are gone. They aren't here.

I amble on all fours. Rear up, off balance. Primal. A bear tensing his nose. The honey or the bee-sting. Don't make me choose things. I fall back against the wall.

Three things occur to me. 1) I should get new shoes

2) I should keep track of the newly purchased shoes

3) I am dead

There's a cold cruel metal tool curling its serpent limbs about the melon wetness of my brain - Caffeine withdrawals, I'll wager. Coffee, substance abuse for the masses, with free cookie upon purchase.

I shift my weight. “Ah! Sss...” I drop back to the floor. The dog leg's jaunt of my big toe of my right foot sears hot-cold fire. Side to side, my braced finger cajoles healing into the joint. Arches falling. Refer to 1)New shoes. Shut up. Pain is my mother, guilt clothed in 'told-you-so's, exasperated sweat and cleaning fluid. Bone, ridged pad, jolting veined hollow, the tendon tracks of toe to heel. Frost and elderly stiff. The toes are numb. Dried corn beads in half set gelatine. They bend too obediently to my touch in each direction. Something says: Obedience is not love. A lyric, maybe, the motto of a new age yoga-for-your-canine-companion class for rich- And besides what use is there for toes? Why five? Why individual appendages when you- Come to think of it, why do we stand on two legs anyway? What's the point of it?

I shouldn't have to be expected to stand on two legs like this, when I've just woken up, and lost my shoes, and I'm dead.

I yawn. Late nights. Late mornings. I could walk to the café, bleed out a verse, the chorus to that 'it's not me, it's you' song, a letter, a letter demanding a letter from someone mimicking my lapses in correspondence. It's probably too noisy. The idea of writing there is a lot more inviting then actually being there, sitting with the wall in my back, cornered, the generic waitresses ambushing me, closing in to snatch back the menu in their gristled teeth, hackles trembling at my table six incursion in their-

Dead? What do you mean, dead?

****

Flash of a girl

Laughing in a coat

Reeled back

Impossibly angled

Coat: Green of premature spring

Crowned in fatal ice.

Faint faded fragrance

Of cherry blossom

ripped from buds

with tender sadism

anointed in nymph sap/blood

coat-hanger caught

from Primavera's womb

toothpaste and gingerbread

adorning the tomb.

And a gentleman consequentially in a white room.

****

I jolt back, touching a live wire.

Yes. Dead. Third time it hit home. Three times a charm.

Execute. You execute plans. As I have been executed, I must also be a plan. There is a right and wrong to me. Abort. Success. Black and white mugshot.

I remember: 1) the needle. (When I was a child, I thought they shot the needle into your body and it rattled around in your veins, stabbing you forever)

2) the crowd. (The huddle about the idea of my grave)

3) they asked me if the straps were too tight. (they were, but it didn't matter to me. It seemed to matter to them, so I said 'Fine')

4) thinking: I'm young, but not good, so maybe I'll live forever.

5) smiling at 4)

6) Feeling guilty for 4) and 5) (I was supposed to be in mourning for myself)

This is not my house. This is- well it's a room, isn't it? A white room.

Don't be afraid, I think. But I'm not. If to be recalcitrant or pre-emptive to whatever voice of reason, I don't know.

It's like...

It's like when I had to get a needle, as a child, I used to wish I was a tree in Antarctica. Because nothing can hurt a tree in Antarctica. Not snakes, spiders, kidnappers, or giants. All that exists is cold, white. Snow, in Winter, hugging my roots. Rain, to kiss my leaves, to freeze and shimmer green reflections upon penguins. There would be no dark all summer long. I didn't like the dark. Aurora Australis, a flaming cloak to ward off ghosts and vampires with dentures.

I heard of reincarnation, and wanted to die so I could be a tree in Antarctica. I was so afraid, all the time, of everything. Praying, let me die, so I can become a tree, so I can be safe.

Foot against wall. Back easing into invisible wall grooves. Pause. Think. Propping requires conscious balanced consideration. Right foot out. Pressure up: ankle... calf... thigh... DOWN. My foot shudders as if I've missed a step, forgotten how to stand, to walk.

Ignorance is embarrassing.

My socks are like nothing-they are nothing- I have bare feet! How did that happen. I'm naked.

It surprises me. To be naked. More, to not notice nakedness. The fundamental knowledge, lost. It's unnerving, suggestive of some Other, some vacuous self lurking in the subconscious that allows me to exist ignorant of exposure. Children going to school in their pyjamas, or without underwear.

It's not natural. I'm not cold. You never notice your naked in naked-dreams until there's someone or a lot of someones. It should be being watched and naked. But I am naked, ashamed, unable to hide in the artist's croon of 'nude. 'Shame' is written in the flushing capillaries of my ears. Hide your shame. Hoard it like some voluptuous secret, like a flesh-foil wrapped confection. Aching with inadequacy, bundled it up in designer jeans. You'll never live up to the hype, but there are always empty layers in the pass-the-parcel, it's expected. Maybe unwrapping my skins will be enough for this gloss-magazine hypothetical lover.

Both the bones of my bottom, the blushing word 'bottom', grind against the toilet-seat tepid expanse. My body is self-chiselled and chipped. It no longer accommodates itself. Floating enmity. Bodily functions. Body odour. Body hair. Existence as a euphemism.

Two things occur to me: 1) the dead are believed to be departed from the body, which I'm clearly not. (Barring hypothetical round-a-bouts. Which I am eager to avoid, making it the less possible, procrastination being a quality generally limited to the living)

2) There are no doors or windows.

No doors? Short of materialising or cloning, they must have built the room around me. A wall, or the low ceiling perhaps, something must be able to give, once gave way, remembers. I press my hands along the length of the wall, like a sculptor seeking the marble a maiden can be made in. I push harder. The wall is rudely padded rock, or brick, or it is my finger yielding. These hands have to see something my eyes have missed in their hazy squint. The light is everywhere, winter midday on long stretches of concrete, burning my lenses, my retina. A throb in my mind of a Fred Hollows documentary. Cataract surgery summons a siege of hypochondriac panic. What if I do get cataracts? This light. My eyes. They could blur even now, how would I ever know? There's just smooth white, there's no detail to focus on, and even if there were it could happen by slow degrees so soon I would forget I could see I had fingernails, and then I'd only know they were there from their smoothness from the rough sponginess of my hands. I'd feel them at the end of my fingers and I'd have no idea what they were or what they were for and what are they even for anyway, now I don't even know, I can't even remember what they-

Stop.

Humans are fluid

Delicately bulging above the glass rim.

Don't tip yourself out of the glass.

Not trapped.

Listen to me.

You. Are. Not. Trapped.

Contai- Not quarantine contained

Safe.

You are a tree in Antarctica.

I am a tree, a tree in Antarctica.

Tall. Stretch. Trunk segments succession. Upright. Open. Sweating water and oxygen from photosynthesis, into the proud hanging ice. Cold is good. Robert Frost said cold is good for trees. Frost is an advocate for cold, however. Frost, the name cannot be trusted to be objective. A writer. Someone who writes upon my entrails, upon the entrails of trees. But not Antarctican trees. Nobody logs Antarctican trees. Maybe they would if they knew we existed, we trees. Burn our bones to warm their own.

I can... hide.

I am rather good at hiding in my fortress I made from sheets on the trampoline. Sun came through, lived all around, in the threads of dry frost, in the walls. The wind blew the light down. I am lost. Choking in the swathes.

You're losing it. Here. Now. Think of now. Something leading away from here.

Shut away.

Not helping.

Shut up. Shutter bug. Say cheese. Cheese. In Canada they have orange marbled with beige cheese in cans because of the carotene because of the sun and cold. I wonder if Antarctican trees need carotene? Would you put a hunk of the cheese in a hollow, or tie it to a branch, or grate it and-

Stop. Stop it. Logic is a dangerous thing. You can argue anything with it. You can drive yourself to dark places. My eloquence phrases my own demise. Red wax letters. Keep away. Keep passing the open windows.

I am here. Now. Incarcerated. Which is a word to describe the Jaws of Life. In car; serrated.

You know what happened. You feel it. In the deep marrow of your ribs. Even now.

Yes.

Light and light inverse pressed together. Flickering on my eyelids. A burning film.

****

It involved a girl

They said many

But it was her

her, always her.

****

I can't.

Stop.

I lie hunched up on my side and there is an angular space in the midst of me. A wonky semicircle, thighs, the diameter boundary. Something, someone, somewhere in existence can fit in my semicircle, when its relaxed enough that the jagged vertebra bumps don't show, through my back muscles. I feel hollow. I feel like a green, opaque, glass bottle to be recycled, howling, lidless, in the wind.

I was once a desert.

I was once a wind.

I was fine and infinite.

They clenched me in a trained box of blazing

Till I rang out Martian gold luminescence

Now I am heavy.

Hard.

One.

The wind doesn't recognise me;

my own rascally steeds

and they brush me over, how's-your-father

I howl serenades

But it leaves me

Chases the white autumn clouds

Goosing them recklessly.

I trace my name in the wall in slow rounded letters. The wall swallows it. In my tongue I feel past night air swallowing name-spelling sparkler sparks, how it sighs back the smoke as quivering memory, the inverse moment of creation.

Erased. I have been erased. My name rotting into strawberry patch roots, and juicy refuse. Vowels become moth-eaten. A number blinks to the spin of my pulse somewhere. Identity upgraded.

The full wave of it hits me. I want to cry, but that might aggravate the cataracts and anyway, guys don't cry. I would not only be erased, but not-a-man, and to be not-a-man is worse, I think.

Be a man. Women don't have to be-a-woman, only big girls.

Which is different.

I try not to be different and damned, by sitting obediently in the corner, not thinking about whose instructions I am obeying, nor what purpose they ultimately serve. I know not to embarrass myself. The smallest movement can obliterate the rest of the world. But here? Now? What can I ever do that would have any effect upon anyone? I can be wild.

Wild. What is wild, exactly?

Who would be wild? Would it be me, or them removing my societal expectations? Am I conforming by doubting? Have I been so well trained?

Now I have whiteness, the purity of confusion, the self of yore and liberty seems collared and possessed to me. I have always belonged to someone else. Chameleon, condiment of character. Head down. Hunched in the crowd.

I am in a white room. A white nobody.

I sit up and- what? I Somethinged. There's a word... you only ever read it. No one says or does it. It may as well be a punctuation mark. That word.

WHOOPED!

I have whooped. The word is whooped. Now emancipated from its cage of fiction.

I stand. Jump. Feet. Sticky thump. Thump. Thump. I'm going to burst the walls, burst the world with my thump.

I WANT TO BE AN ACTION HERO!

I need a weapon. A cool weapon. Nothing plastic with excluded batteries. What do I have. Come on.

I tear my excess nail from my toes by slow degrees, skimming the quick Pull out hair. Ow. Two tugs. my scalp tingles. It's worth it. The hair and nails slip under my fingers. Clever fingers, fattened albino spiders, weave on, phalanges clacking sharp rickety stabs of an antique typewriter. It is the war machine of da Vinci, the sword hewing unrighteous flesh, the smiting hand of God, it is... It is digging mines in mangrove tree roots. It is a bow, from a stolen hair-tie and flaking stick, that bites your knuckles with its metal hair-tie bit when it fires. It is fighting a war in picture books.

It is not a thorny sword.

It is toenails, tied with hair.

I breath out, slowly, my eyes fold shut

Defeated by my own delusions of grandeur, the Emperor's New Clothes.

I throw it. It makes a pitiful scattered sound on the wall. Like old dried rice, some single grains, some clumped together from a prolonged incarceration on jars.

There are no trees in Antarctica.

I am propped against the wall. Maybe I never left. maybe I let myself think I left so I wouldn't actually leave, so I wouldn't embarrass myself.

I want to sleep.

to dream.

to lie here and not hurt anyone.

Can't sleep.

Perhaps I won't let myself.

Flagellation.

Depriving myself of what I don't deserve.

A luxury for the virtuous.

The milk-salt taste daubs my throat. The suction breathing. Where I have shaved it burns acidic. Salt in the wound. A low equine shudder rumbles through me. I am an overflowing wheat field, spilling in the wind, mimicking the sweeping sigh of scythe and sinew. I crush myself into a pod, elbows, knees, a clip lock. Tepid and watercolour wet, I lie.

I am a cello, my body trembling involuntarily, those long vibrato notes pulled from my gut in surgical succession.

The breath swells in me. It sucks my lungs out like an iron lung. I feel my body returning from the euphemistic limbo and possessing me. I watch myself like a sleeping animal. Perhaps, were I asleep, I would probably endear myself better. Bound together with laces of venerability. My chest swells, falls. Undulating paddocks rise and fall at night like oceans, lion-skinned.

The breath holds in me. I stand on my toes, press my palms against the ceiling hard. I think in whispered urgency. Above the room- is an ocean- and a blue- whale- the whale- singing- the walls- my body [part of the walls now]- sing with them under the pressure. I am not a cello but the whale's reed, humming in its cheeks, my toes gripping the licking roughness of the brine fattened tongue. The room is dying. It cries and the sea darkens its crying. It bulges, bug-eyed under the sea, the whale. I'm calm and understand. I am to hold up the room. It's my purpose. We won't last, the room and I, but it feels good to hold us up. Just a little longer. I want to tell the room it's alright, that the two of us are in the right place that the blue whale above, to feel, to know something that big, beautiful, breathing. It want it to feel the trembling fear and most of all, to be in awe, to feel this awe in the singing lengths giving way beneath bigger things. I want it to know the blue whale and think, it's okay: I am so small anyway. My heart is small. I am nothing. I am the air. The whale breathes me, and I am glad.

I wait, beneath the weight, and it is good, smooth against my hands.

I let it go.

Before the dumper crushes you upon the forehead of the sand, it lifts you. You breathe salt, seaweed, toddler's urine washing out to China, but the power of the wave is not the force and the blow but that its centrifugal theft of gravity. There is no up. Everything human, being adaptive, is reliant upon external forces. For an instant, you are dying because you are free.

My body is crushed, burst in the water and my hand is a rip and my leg is a tide and current.

Tossed. Crumpled. Stretched. Broken.

I look up from the floor, the flotsam and jetsam clouds against a white sky. My face drifts through the water, pickled, preserved. The water settles.

My eyes glaze, fall still, but for the sliding of softer ties.

I'm awake. I'm dry.

I touch my face. It's dried. The callous shell of dried tears. My skin is winter-sun dried sheets.

The room is unaltered.

I am mad, I think.

Time, my succubus lover,

shall you heal me with the years in me you've took?

Tell me against my skin, tell me I can be right?

Tell me you're mine and only mine

The dead poor fools forsook

You're mad. You're mad, old man. At least madness is jovial.

My mouth tastes like amnesia.

I drift.

***

Her body is the corners of my mind. They jab me. I'm supposed to feel guilty for ever. It is not the jabbing I mind. It's that if I think of her, I won't feel guilt, but love. Lust. I won't be able to fool myself into thinking I'm a victim of circumstance.

The body survives. The mind is a part of the body, and it is geared to survival, like the liver, or the spleen. So I don't think about it. About her.

****

My skin is a shell of goosebumps against the eggshell of the wall, and the wall is porous like an eggshell. My flesh hardens itself against it. I feel lumpy, hard, like a gallstone, like a pearl in the softness of a clam. Dangerous and precious. The Locked-Up is either precious or dangerous. Perhaps the two things are interchangeable.

I find my hands in my hair. Slowly I bring them down, along the lines of my skull. Jawbone. Sandpaper stubble. I'm not good at shaving. I think of myself as one of those old men in cartoon jails, with long white beards. I smile. I am a young man, and therefore can make jokes about the elderly and bedpans.

I curl up in the corner. Lie flat on my back on the floor. Half draped. Half stretching. Spin until dizzy. Run. Slam against the wall.

People pay money for sensory deprivation. I would need a fortune to do this were I not precious/dangerous.

What am I that's precious/dangerous though? A lyricist? But it wasn't precious, it was a lot of blank days of mumbling to myself and scribbling on napkins. Until-

****

Corner. Jab.

****

Now. Think about now. Now is important.

Listen. I always said there was music in everything. Find the music. What is the music of this room? I press my ear to the wall. Too close, I just hear the ocean, pressure in my eardrum. Tune it, tune the space.

I sit.

Low, breathless drone, almost a human tenor. Above sporadic scratching like a moth chewing.

I sit.

Harmonics between. Diminished sevenths.

I sit.

Rasping percussion of spoken voice, abrasive against the smooth organic sounds.

Voices, they're speaking. They're watching me. Holes. There are holes. In the wall. I just thought that walls were porous. No. They have a purpose, holes. Holes are for things coming and going. Coming or going? What is there to go? What would be coming? the goosebumps on my skin recede. I freeze. Gas. They're filling this room with a gas. A warmer gas. It changes the room temperature by half a degree so my goosebumps recede. Slowly, the lining of my lungs dissolves to a bubbled pus not entirely unlike cleaning fluid with ammonia. My heart chokes on the oxygenless concrete, the cold, blue slurry, that was once my blood. I yell but my motor neurons are cracked, my spinal fluid burns up and my bones lie immobilised and rattling while my insides rise up against me.

Stop it. You're paranoid. You're losing it. Think of the tree.

I try to move the last bone of my left little finger, alone. Tendons down the fingers length rise, or are enveloped by my pads of linear skin. Other fingers twitch in sympathy. The shape of my forearm, shoulder, body, world, victims to its tides. Toy boats ravaged by maternally irate water-birds, for brushing against the smallest of fate's spawn of pawns.

Concentrate on the now. What is real? Your body. The walls. The ceiling. No delusions, no gingerbread fantasies.

I stretch my hands, character to character. Rounded Renaissance. Square, goat-like. Flat, like a moulting wing. Mechanics of the wrists with it conglomeration of hard bones it takes to make soft movement. Practical pulleys and scaffolds of the forearm. Knotted shoulders, cliffs by the sea, worn, wet, woven life and lace-holed shell-bones. Spiked, knobbly, defensive curves of the spine, the vertebra's façade for an armour of eggshell. The hip-bone's jutting chins at either side. The legs trying to distinguish themselves from their twin arms, blunted, round knees to conceal their elbow's blade. Feet, raw, unshelled shellfish, anaemic, too tender.

These are not my feet. My feet are coarse at the heel, sandal marks burned into them from long meanderings in the late afternoon. nails too long, and a stony pink-yellow big toe. The feet beneath me are soft, curled, newborn. These are not my feet.

When I blink, they move the walls. They carve callous from flesh. They cut my hair and shave me. They clean me. They pipe in coarse air that makes me sleepy, but makes my eyes itch so I can't sleep. There must be thousands of pipes around the room. Pipes for temperature, pipes for airflow, pipes for light and humidity. How hard it must be to keep one man in a room. Four scientists scrape their hands on their pressed lab coats, like too little butter on burnt toast.

A human being is a very messy thing. They exhale dirt, dirt that doesn't go away. They are awkward, like sticky tape when bitten. The air here tastes like sticky tape. Water, the epitome of neutrality, has a greasy metallic after taste. Or did it?

The gas, I taste it. Or not. I taste my tongue becoming accustomed to it.

I cover my mouth and nose with my hand. Calm. Calm. The slower the breathing the slower the gas works. The slower- why do I want it to be slow? It could be slow anyway, like the cataracts-

Oh God, listen to me.

Close off. Close down. Close up.

I close my eyes, make dark with my hands over my eyes. It's like hiding in a closet. Closets are reassuring places. Remember the closet.

I am a sponge to the memory

which is (from distance) wrought in Biblical notation

I had once such luxury,

gorging on sensation

Even my tongue

was callous too long

A deaf man who sang unsung

an unheard song

Even memory sears my skin

Every shucked feature, at the brush of She,

blasted, scorched by jet exhaust

I suckle at the sugared milk of my sin

and the grotesque in lambskin is forced

to whisper sublime, it was a love story, to me

Stop it. Go back. Don't think of it. Banish it. Back to the numbness. Come back from the window. There's nothing but your reflection. You can't change that.

Memory itches. A thousand blunted needle's feet pitter-pattering, purposed insects though my veins. The synapses in my brain fray into fibrousness, tendrils curled around recollections, their verdant venerability curled and sprouting fly-trap sweetness. Do not think of a green door. Do not read the word, say the colour of the word. Forget how to read.

****

I was in all respects, quite mundane, which was a boon as a lyricist. Lyrics are about the collective. General pet-names that seem intimately personal. I would sleep a lot on the couch without the lid on my fountain pen, and it leaked. Long striped animals, drooling down the 'V' of first finger and thumb. Days flickering on my eyelids. I would wake up, hairy and thin and tender. My skin would be pale, dry, rubbery as a manta-ray mouth.

In my profession it was necessary to force myself to fall in love. All artists of all kinds are love-purgists, forcing it out, there's always some fictional purpose-made soul-mate pulled out and blown up. The centrefold character. Some of us find real muses, but people are not poetic. We're not supposed to be. We're a series of scars, tender and fresh, old and calloused. Art creates buffers between the raw ugliness. Artists look up. To expect anyone real to be gods and goddesses whom fiction creates is a soul destroying thing.

Artists should never be in love. It makes out work sentimental, specific, shoddy. We write best of longing.

I am a man, sitting in a room, thinking of a girl.

Omar Khayyam. William Shakespeare. Giacomo Casanova.

Men, sitting in rooms, thinking of girls.

Something affords us infinite potential, something within the action of being a man, sitting in a room, thinking of a girl. Is the catalyst the girl or the man? Which failed and which succeeded in me?

There was...

There was a....

Rat-cage crowd, bunched, hunched

From the pocket of the coat

Falls sleek silk ribbon

By touch, I know it bears

Synthetic flavoured hairs

Bathed in the mass produced magic of a scantily clad slow-motion automaton

Is the concealed palate-teaser of female pheromone

Someone says birthday, old man, out, with jocular verbs and winking pronouns in between, the ghosts of prepositions shimmering behind. House trained inferno drips candy-cane pastel on the cacao-related slurry. My eyes are wild and trapped, shimmying down my blanched cheeks for drainpipes to freedom. People laugh too loud, too hungrily. I cover my flesh, burrow into clothes too baggy, too hot for summer. It is summer. Or not. The clothes are not.

I have to get out.

She'll be here.

She'll be watching.

Laughing.

Staring without staring.

Excuse yourself.

You have to be polite, they are trying.

Very trying.

Stop it.

Head for the front door.

Someone's coming.

The Closet, now.

Closets are reassuring places. Remember the closet. Remember the edge of torn lace against the arm, the gruesome fur coat with the morbid attraction. The dark. The warm. The still. The calm. A green coat, long and skinny, thick. It's winter. The coat has paint on the hem, it's mended with the wrong coloured thread, even with some dento tape under the arm, you can tell because of the sticky saccharine spearmint and cinnamon scent. I don't see the corner.

It repulses me, this coat. It takes hold of me, in its repulsion. It is provocative. Naked. Eyes half closed. Lips protruding. Hips jaunting. I bury my face in it, this revulsion, and half of me says I want to know it so it can be avoided, half wants to devour it like a God is devoured, to soak, disgusted, in its exquisiteness. The peppermint and cinnamon dance and reel with my eyes in ecstasy. Beneath is a rich smell. Hungry snuffly smell. Smell to bite down upon.

The crack between the hinges of the cupboard draws a neat line thought the calcium scrawl on the sleeve.

"Fire, ice, nutshells, kingdoms,

Not a barn door's width t'will serve, t'will serve, t'will serve."

The chalk comes off on my fingertips. My skin is dark, lined with chasms against this barely palpable snow. The sterile irritation meshes the peppermint and the cinnamon, and I am glad and the strings of my organs are knotted in grief.

I thought of the girl, the girl of the coat, and graze against a torn scrap of thought left behind, vicarious intellect clinging to the threads, ice-cream stains dripped on pavement in affection's hijinx. The taste of the contrary song of the opinionated. That there is no thunder, only giants in the sky. Arguing and fighting back irrational fear with the irrational. The absurdity of ripping air played against the sound of footsteps magnified. Why fear what you cannot understand, you cannot touch? At it's worst it can kill you, and in that death, it's true face is insignificant. The abstract impalpable nature of comfort.

Awake.

My eyelids must be getting thinner, letting more than

the rationed frog-tongue snatch of day though. I let them break

I am wrapped in the skins of necessity, bundled in obscurity and solitude's

talons, bent over book and beverage.

But there she is, a snatch of Her alludes

to me with fate's mimicry, delusion's lucrative leverage

that makes horoscopes our intimate own.

A mannerism, or turn of phrase catches

against me. I'm not prone

to non-generic sentiment of patches,

but this aching pulls from the deep marrow

of my ribs, a stinging singing palpitation

ringing deep-dwelling welling

tripping flip of crystal taro

syncopated slick sensation

bore and bent me, swelling,

This is to say,

though I felt her at that party, I first saw her in a café.

I met her in her coat, that is she was in her coat, we were in a café.

'Met' is perhaps the wrong word

Met implying that I said, could say,

Could venture past absurd

Snatches of her, violent snatches that burned

in my shuttered eyes

Yet, my look grazing past it's twin, I learned of the snatches returned

So I could surmise

From hunger-smudged reconnaissance

(Now, as lust, is locked from trust

as I'm out of my mind)

Glance to glance

Parry to thrust

Ne'er to meet in kind.

She is the taste of bitter spice, of rue,

in the angle of her hair against her ear

Makeshift sweet of sheathed corn

And there was 'always' and 'never', and each true

The talon scars of fear

Concealed forlorn

and hid from scorn.

Wild and evasive nymph of wooded woe

With names that don't discriminate, like 'my lover'

for friend and foe,

And far below

The grey-eyed frieze of a wounded plover.

With 'A' embellished, gypsy-witch

familiar with an axeman's switch

Harsh and mimic in caged hum

in lips and tongue of battle cry

fat bodied-moth, of feeling grasp,

gyrating the moon's seasonal epitaphs

in brawling brigand bass

the language of the gnat and fly

bestrewing space

with dust of her wing's drum.

And while drifting though my senses,

she obliterates conviction

Opening me as a wound to my pretenses

She, severe, impalpable contradiction

I am filled with a holy dread

To know my art defunct and void

To know its hold, its fantasy knit up in me, destroyed

And clumsy is the poet's tongue

Grotesque attempt in housing-grade gingerbread

Real nymphs to woo from flesh and sun

In hope of honey-blood lust sated

throw into immortal mumbling text of antiquated

consequence, to mummify and mock the dead.

Her phone rings

She flips her hair back to give it room

She gathers her things

Generic adoration, 'To whom'

Her hands pervade the table top

above their prey they hover, hiding their eyelessness.

As she passes, she doesn't stop

to retrieve a post-it tongue, drawn to call of the skylessness

of city summer's bake, or winter's numbing

And I, lost to her flippant

digression, while all I know is made a mockery of natural subtlety

Wishing to undo her coming

My epiphany to recant

To desecrate my infatuation's sanctity.

Pandora, in my veins,

A slave to the perhaps of hope

remains

After that day I had kept the post-it note in a Bible pressed

Sought it's penned brother, in the prayer of loves confessed

On visitor books, tickets, trying to outguess fate

And always too little, too eager, too late.

"Not Thunder. Giants in sky."

Was the post-it's muted cry.

Bizarre and bought in the memory I wrote

In my birthday hiding, from her chalk scrawled coat.

Mine.

My.

A friend of mine.

My favourite.

We are taught to own

if we are affectionate

Bestow exclusive ownership

as our closet gift

my love

my own one

She was all

and none

purple and pall

Her hair was harvest gold

fine, honey straight-spun sun, below her waist.

Raven night, shimmering cold

knit in a million braids, of wooded spice to taste

Blood red cautionary fire

pungent filth, unkempt, clotted.

Herb tendrilled green, a feathered lyre

Growing toward me, deep besotted.

And none of these, and neither hue

And fluoro-brown and hazel-blue

Intense and free of compromise

And equally bizarre: her eyes,

the tint and texture of her skin

her disposition out and in

her walk, her gaze, none and any

They called her many

They called her many,

It involved a girl

They said many

But it was her

her, always her.

I was angry.

I wasn't myself.

I was used to writing as breathing.

A writers block coincided

And She, Them, as cause decided

She has poisoned my finest works,

my muses, carve

violently with weapons of reason, lurk

in my fingertips. For stole pretense and sentiment,

she'll have me starve

For her cinnamon-peppermint

The blank page (from which I cower)

is eternity. I have the wonder of a child

Who first learns the touch of sifted flour

And in its bland refined expanse, I've long beguiled

Duty of profession.

She spills, soaks, warps the plain,

blurs my ink to manic musing confession

Unstrained, strange, sublime stain

Drug of mangled appetites

Burns through the page width word 'sins'

I am the conqueréd of dreams

My right-hand's hand writes

fumbles at my scratchery of napkins

and newspaper seams

And every word belonged to her,

inadequate

paper-deep

superfluous and vain,

and she, deity drowning amongst them.

And in the sharp relieved this new-found 'time'

Alliteration loses it's glow,

similes sound similar, metaphors, mediocre

the pile of turgid putrid wheedling weeded adjectives grow

the rabid plot heeds not the pencil lead choker

enjambment clinging to lost rhyme

I crumple, bitter and brittle,

cracked, crumpled, coarse,

congealed chlorophyll-crusted

And she was owed me,

owed me.

Above and below me

****

Stop it.

Stop going back.

This is how it happens.

****

A nameless street

a house whose front yard is covered with sunflowers.

When I walk, half are shrivelled up, half unfurled.

Half the world is sleeping, hidden, M.I.A.

Half waking, watching.

I made popcorn.

Tastes of trapped air.

The margarine had a taste of foods past.

Condiments remember.

It's not laziness that keeps me from moving the laundry off the couch,

it is a temporal existential listlessness.

I spread,

only to gain empathy for the table clothes and sheets within it,

across the mound. The dry soft sinking snow of it.

Crinkled and grinning,

sun-dried tomatoes,

seeds removed.

It breathes me.

I'm not in love with her. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not.

I was ripe and rich, splitting my skin for her.

I am dried, pulpless, tepid, dessicated.

She forces herself in my mind.

I don't hear her.

I don't hear voices.

I feel them.

They are Braille under my fingertips,

tattooed in my skin,

in my skin's memory of her skin.

It's a lie.

I'm not playing this game.

Cover your eyes.

She can't see you.

Hide.

Touch remembers.

Touch is a condiment too.

But I do belong to her

And so she is owed me

"If only you'd come back to me,

I feel it up my side"

Numbers, friends, I consume all traces,

devour the hours she has tasted

I hunt in Morpheus' wing, the night

Not for guilt but for atmosphere, habit.

I am right. It feels right.

She is waiting for me

Playing hard to get.

She doesn't answer my calls

Pretends not to remember

Ceases to hold unchaperoned outings

contrary to her contrary character.

The soft-lipped throbbing builds in me

The swollen tongue of a drunk in me

Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.

She stole the word 'She' and gave it the precious heaviness of a name in my mouth

The weight of a tongue in love

Sinking to the tooth ridges of mandible bone

Creates chasm incarceration. Above,

Ribbed cathedral arches illustrating Jonah's cell. Alone,

In the tentative air

Lurks, lynching word's desire

This shrine, where

The name of a lover dwells, beneath the pearled sound-spire

Names hang

Rich confectioner's umber.

Surely God must as zealous be,

[I thought as I rang

her unplugged number]

In possessing us so jealously.

The beckoning of the unanswered phone

distils the thrill, I am alone

And aching in my ribbed bone

They said she was many

But it was her. Her. Always her.

Sprite, muse, vixen.

Never the same taste twice.

Masquerade in hybrid hue

The laughing blur

And fire and ice

The taste would always and never and never suffice.

And it is the hunger, not the feast

That makes the beast the beast.

The deep marrow of my ribs are pulled apart.

The aching

affection,

possession,

digression

obsession,

persuasion,

persuasion

playing hard to get

asking for it

look at what she's wearing,

she's wearing

worn

torn

tossed to St Vinnie's

the bins are the right size

will be the right size for after

****

Stop it. Stop. Just stop.

There is no stopping. You know there is no stopping.

This is how it happens. Shut it off

the sensation, glorification, lust in lamb-skin

You lick your wounds and savour the taste too long

And this is what happens.

I told you, there is no stopping now.

****

The dress-

No-

The dress

is short

small

slinky

seamed shadows

Constructed to

suggest flesh

and forbid it

barred shop windows

of a confectioner's shop

I lay my cheek

passively

No-

Passively against it.

clawed finger

opening it's skin

of paradoxes

of the toxic come-hither

Deft are my blotted clotted hands

veiled in the rationed night

rich delicious laughter boils over

Surgeon hands stealing sensation

underwear torn, too tacky and elastic

for the-

No-

For the touch Chagall pursued

For the light Jeff Buckley stole fading in his tune

For the tongued caress of Shakespearean innuendo

For the poetry of dead men

the-

No-

The words pull through me

exotic

erotic

mnemonic

the words she stole from me

rapacious

rapacious

What a most sumptuous lyrical word

a gift to me

she gave it

willingly

She's owed

she's due

she's paid

I'm okay now. It's over. That's all I wanted. Look. No more poetry. No more sugaring over. It's not like- I didn't- It's not like I enjoyed remembering. It's not like it hurt her.

You know this is how it happens. Happened. Self pity. You are a dying man, an addict on the verge of reform. One last hit. This is how it happens, these merciful surrenders of what is human. And your own verbose indulgence, painting 'them' as 'her', 'her' as 'whore', 'whore' as 'coat', as 'dress', as 'ripe plum'.

Let me finish.

I'm done with you.

****

I roll onto my back in the white room. The light sears through me, light through a dirty bulb.

When I close my eyes, the world is red and fibrous, like plum flesh.

There was a blood plum tree outside my window. It would moan rapturously under the blissful labours of its fruitfulness. Moonlight would entangle in it's branches, and through its branches flickered the impassioned round-ripened rise and fall of tender seasonal flesh. I have always thought human beings are the most selfish of creatures, hoarding life. A plum tree has a thousand children every year. Dancing, it bestows them upon every creature. We crawling creatures gorge ourselves silly. The tree smiles, waves, showers the devourers of its children with blossom, and further sustenance. There is something inherently carnal about eating plums. It is a greedy beautiful thing. The first one to be dark blood red all the way through is treasured ceremonially in a long ritual of sense gluttony. The smell doesn't foretell the flavour, it is slightly acrid and glossy, like sealing wax, There is always a dullness to the skin, which fades to the touch, and resembles a window when breathed upon, powdery, intricate design in pinprick delicacy. You rub it off with the bottom of your shirt, where you store excess spoils tucked up in a makeshift pouch, a cannibalistic marsupial. You slowly lower your incisors into the awaiting flesh, which is tender and yielding, but not enough for saccharine wine to corrupt the fruit. There is a gentle crack-crack of skin bursting. Slowly, you sink into it. The skin is translucent. When held to light, shows all manner of rogue capillaries and spots, written in the darker blood. It is grained from top to bottom, one line from pole to pole cut into the skin, an extended dimple, lead by the woody circlet, the absence of the of the thin red strained stem. The skin is bitter, tangy, metallic, unripened, with the width and feel of tape. The flesh is like human flesh, veined, and a lightning storm interwoven among rich grains, drums of juice, like a baker's interpretation of a burns victim. Perhaps it is better described as slug flesh, slimy with tiny organs and arteries, but there is something glorious in carnivorous vampirical analogy. The juice dribbles along the edge of thumb bones, down the arm. The juice is clearer than water, kinder, less congealed honey. You tear flesh from flesh, smooth as butter. When it becomes sour at the core, you throw the fiber-and mucous-coated bone wad upon the earth about the tree with the refuse of arboreal divers, and reach out to burst another acrid skin, another too human outer core of flesh. They are sometimes winy, bug-eaten, or unripe. Waste is thrown to grow in less fallow pasture, punishment for feeding falsely on the thousand teated mother-bough who throws her young to strangers to devour. Ingrates, we say.

I am not sorry in the morning. I feel, blank. White. Drained by my succubus seductress. I see them crumpled on the floor, the coat, the dress, the textile shrines in crumpled chronology. The empty wrappers, streaked, marinated in plum flesh. I feel betrayed. Abandoned. The scent of the coat summons hunger. I pad to the kitchen on bear's feet, claws retracted.

There was lipstick on my mug, that morning, an echo from the streaks on the clothes. The blue plastic sheath for the lipstick in her handbag said 'blood-plum crimson: volume', and was empty. The tea tasted of another's smoke and too much sugar substitute. The lipstick glowed electric blood beneath the murky quartz caffeinator. I drank it, though the mug wasn't clean, the reckless charisma of the invaded mug was contagious. A voice in my mind spouted, in heated percolated bubblings, the ills of unsanitary beverage preparation. I watch the Gothic crimson coral in my mug's reef and an awkward stolen joy spills over the webbing of my ribs.

It is winter. Or it is not. Maybe both, if there is a both. It could be winter.

****

On the...Will you say no now? Hello?

It's too late to stop you. Perhaps it was always too late.

I haven't lost you?

In all of us

the assemblage of voices, a series of scars.

The questions in you

And all of us in flesh and from flesh unfurled

Louder and demure, and one or other trait

is failure.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry- it wasn't my fault. Look. Out there, temptation. I could delude myself. I walked around blinded with too much sight. Let me try. I'll fix everything. There's nothing else I can do.

Okay. I'll just.... edit it. It's all words now anyway. Nothing but words.

****

Before I was in this room...

I was without a heart

for good or ill

Lost in canopy's artificial night

learnt the nightingale's embouchure

to incinerate Despair

Cold, deft, alien pure

I chased chaste sprites who stir the leaves

who watch the mortals' folly from the creaking eaves

Their whiteness in the star's-

Stop. Stop. You feel her. Green in the woods.

I was born.

I grew too quick

for my clothes to grow worn,

yet they always had a pocket full of Egypt, in a belt loop, a stick-

Stop. It's wrong. It's all wrong. Even from there.

I was born

I was a child

I-

Stop.

I was born.

I am.

I am the space in the nothingness

Stop.

I was born

now I am nothingness

Stop.

I was born.

Stop.

I am doubt

Stop.

One thing occurs to me:

Doubt is A4 white.

Stop.

I am

Stop.

.

.

.