Fiona

(February 14th 19?? - October 14th 2009)

When the news sank in along with the ship,

as 9:05am reached its eternity

in the slow swing of the gauntlet;

when I reached for my heart and eyes

and throat, squeezing for the Hallelujahs

that were in trouble,

(a choir of joys, loves and sorrows);

when I wished to mourn and found the stink of my body

distant & unwashed, unlike the newborn smile of your still-born flesh:

it was then that I saw the apathy of unbroken sky

turn to a flooded tear that sweltered, fizzed,

rocketed from the glass,

smiling in fragile arcs like that

of our very own lives—

and they drowned my feet with Love.

I heard the silence of my throat,

moaned to myself for the embrace of song

(that which was eternally coming as if it had never left)

& Cohen sang his—our—Anthem,

for You,

into

the distant thunder.

I wrote my nails into fabric—

I etched my eyes for the memory to bestow—

I raked in my gut for a semblance of a Gift to adorn your grave—

I lost myself to the frenzy of my meaningless bow . . .

finding that my heart did it then,

did it proud,

beating then as it is now, and will;

for You, like the flash of remembrance,

the very glee of your Life & Death

the triumphant troubles,

the troubled triumphs,

the Old Dreams lining the throne of God

and all the angels & demons & poets & artists & children

living there, sleeping there, framing your

wide laugh that salutes the canvas and brush

like the locked forms of selfless coitus. . . .

which brings me to imagine you whole,

at final completion,

the sheets painted, stained, in your final fling of life,

your love there uncorrupted and Absolute,

everything else fading away,

your singularity in death a pure Idea;

the transcendence now no matter for theory, or mind, but the heart—

the physical now no irritation for the senses, or body, but total disillusionment—

an embrace,

a frantic Roar,

the volcano of the Creative depths.

Peace for You,

Love for You,

knowing that the cards were finally turned,

the dice suddenly rolled fair,

Eternity now an empty threat

(you swallowed it whole)

and our whimpers are surely nothing but

your

Loving Victory March.

October 14^th 2009,

Sacramento.

Nevada; in memory of Dean Moriarty

(. . . When I left work last night, with a full tank of gas, I had driven seven miles from the gas pump, home from school, and then to work. When I got home at 11:30am, I had driven 440 miles from the original gas pump, and filled up twice . . . )

At midnight Katrina and I hit the road, bouncing along California Highway 50 amongst hysteric laughter and bouts of serious talk, with some sort of half-baked, jokingly coughed up plan to go see the desert. You have to understand that literature has a peculiar affect on me, as if I not only live through the characters and minds that I read of, but they also begin to live through me (if to a softened degree) after the pages have ended. It's not hard to configure the effects of Kerouac's On The Road and my final, and much awaited, leap into the notion of doing what I have wanted to do since the moment I had a car in American: to explore it as thoroughly as I could; to breeze through state borders without a care; to watch the stars mingle as if they really were a fabric sheet behind the stage of earth, not as reminders of our infinitesimal size; to smoke a cigarette in the hustling wind of highway speeds, Tom Waits at the metaphoric, musical wheel. It's a need to experience (and at the same time express) a form of the American existence that runs concurrently, almost at the base, of everything else that is “American”: when American Ideology and the way of life has become a little too much to bear, it was a spiritual base to its people, place, and history that I had to see . . .

And so Highway 50 soon became the mountains of the Sierra, their peaks we later realised still covered in snow, but at night, parked at a lay-by, all I could hear was the rustling of water as I pissed on over the precipice, watching the next car coming up the same trail we had, on the other side of the gorge. Ahead, Tahoe glared with its bright lights, its lake, its tucked-away nature amongst the scents of wild trees, the feeling of being held by glittering leaves, the noise of water and air as if the very white-noise lullaby of Mother Nature to her most confused of children. I began to loosen up to the idea of Her, something that was the Universal Nature but more specifically American. The border, the desert, none of it was a joke anymore, nor a childish plan: we just kept on going.

Tahoe sickened me. When you hit it on 50 it is nothing but a tourist strip, with various restaurants, bars, motels, lodges, shops etc. lining the straight edge of the road, silently rebelling against me and my feelings. My brief escape had turned into the same thing that I had just left, from one store to the next, from one building of infertile commodity to the next. I wanted out. Gas, taquitos, water, and the likes were bought and chucked in the car, and South Lake Tahoe was so soon to be gone, replaced by a sudden burst of the Nevada state line, that ridiculous thing that explodes in colours and casino lights, as if all the repressed urges of the Californian land had been unable to wait until they had reached further into the Nevada turf, sitting instead on the imagined boundary, blinking, flashing, offering free money to the poor-of-mind who sought it from across the globe . . .

Then there's the drop, the death of the mountains, the ridiculous release of gravity's pull down into the flatter lands of the desert. Firing now, the car whistled on through the curves, its light beaming ahead on the road, or over the edge into an empty space it failed to illuminate (as with light in all dead spaces). I teased the breaks, kept things at a slower pace, watched as the next grand city screamed below, the mountains now failing to hold any strength against a baron, black, flat-land. They seemed to wail in their deaths, the rivers of water now ceasing, noises of nature now coming to what was an abrupt end, a Real sound of nature: the unanswering silence, that terrifying counterpart to the human condition.

Carson City, another strip, another sickening line of buildings, casinos, etc. nothing worth noting or describing. But it was a sign, an end of the abrupt descent, a beginning to a land that promised desert, sand, quiet peaks amongst the split houses, a hush-hush that you faltered to speak within. And soon the trees thinned, left-completely, and all that could be seen on the side of the road in the peripheral vision of the head lights was an ever-growing density of yellows and browns, dry shrubs that seemed only to hold the colour green in pretence, buildings way off in the distance, and the heavy feeling of a need for sleep, and finally to see the desert, that illusive landscape I had never experienced.

A while out of Carson City there was Dayton, with its casinos and brothels, almost embodying a more organic place of immorality, without the glamour of the over-done and over-bearing advertising, simply silent and still, with letters that said Casino or hinted at the feminine contents of its walls: and I thought of all the girls asleep, some happy with their jobs, some stuck in a fall unstoppable, the men winding in with their pockets of money, picking the finest with their sticky fingers, beady eyes; and I was there amongst them for a second, like an innocent day-dreaming child, for a simple touch . . .

Then it faded away finally, out into the shrubs of small homes, far from the road, and finally I parked, turned the car out into the sand and sprang out to see the rising summits of rock in the distance, the moon turning the earth grey in its light, the dead stillness of life (and it was life, in all its contradictions, a stronger one than in the cities before it). The silence strung down like a blanket, making all speech and over-kill, as if there was something watching over with its index finger pressed to my mouth: hush, hush, hush little child.

I wanted to stay there forever.

I also wanted to stay for the sunrise, and my body had grown weary. So I convinced Katrina that a sleeping for three hours in the car was the correct method, the right choice (and by convince I mean that I told her). It was two-thirty in th emorning and I presumed the sun to be coming out at five-thirty, allowing for a three hour respite from the physical reality of wear and tear. So we slept, slowly coming to terms with the unprotected cold of desert, tucked away into the uncomfortable sleep of a car interior.

I had been right. At five-thirty the horizon burned red, blossoming with potential. I cleaned my now irritable contact-lens, sat back in the driver's seat, and kept driving east, along the straight highway, directly into the sun's nest, postponing the turn around until it came burning above us, bright like an awaited punch of recognition. The morning traffic surged, the foreign faces moved in a blur, and suddenly the red-burst-hidden was just the other side of a hill, the car reached its summit, the horizon was finished, the edge of the world lay in sight—and what was there? nothing but the blinding light of the father, my squinting eyes now fighting to find a spot to turn around in, an opportunity to finally head back.

When the sun was to our backs, we had travelled just over 150 miles, I made the prediction that we would get home with the grand total of 300 on-the-clock. And we would have, if I hadn't had missed a turn. . . .

***

The road wound long and hard, passing Carson City once again. The signs read: Sacramento 147. And then suddenly they failed to mention it. It began to be replaced with Bishop 191, a place that I didn't care to go to, nor did I know where it was. The sun rose, the road stretched, and I began to wonder if I had really driven through this much of Nevada the night before, the sun now finding its way to my left, wastelands stretching, turning a little greener, the trees coming back up in chunks, civilisation strangely lost now to the wilderness . . . As if in double take I uttered a previous observation: “The sun was to our left,” which brought me to a complete standstill, a wondrous confusion: why in the hell were we headed south, deep along an unknown road, the mountains far to our right, home not even a place marked on the road-signs? But surely, there wasn't much to be feared, correct? there was the California state border, there was the place of Oranges, terrible blondes, Mexicans, hippy-revolutions . . . but no mountain climb, no rise, no West-bound trail, but an oddly placed border patrol check-point. We were waved through without a care in the world. But this was not the California I had envisioned in my memories, nor the road up to the Sierras, to Lake Tahoe, nor any place I was sure of.

California Highway 395 runs directly south from Carson City (I had missed the Highway 50 exit some fifty miles before hand) and eventually leads back into California but with a complete and utter refusal to brace the paths over the mountains. To follow it south would lead us into the deep reaches of Southern California with a long trek back up north. To turn around would have been the smartest thing, but luckily enough for me, I'm not the smartest person. So we wound our way southward, misreading the map and assuming that 395 turned into Highway 89, a West-bound road over the mountain, eventually leading back to that much needed Highway 50. This was mistake number two, and half-an-hour later I was asking myself why the sun was still to my left, and at parts directly in-front of me . . . Of course, we had zoomed right on by 89, and gone even further off-track. The mileage now spoke of 280 miles, and we were nowhere near home.

So why not Highway 108, a pass over the mountains, back west like we wanted? The gas gauge was getting dangerously close to a quarter, and turning back was beginning to seem the likeliest choice; but still, the first sign for 108 sang: open! And we roared on, the sun now parking its way high in the sky, snow in the distance on the peaks of a broad mountain that blocked our path, speaking of nothing but discomfort and spiritual vandalism, a complete refusal to disavow limitations—it was the greatest limitation of them all.

The second sign said: pass closed.

A Marine barracks loomed; red signs declared, stronger than usual: No Stopping At Any Time.

The man said we had to turn back. The quickest way was back up North to Carson City and then back onto fifty. For these locals lost in the empty sprawl of nature such a trek seemed like nothing. He was working on the road, blocking it off, reporting to us that the pass was scheduled to be open on Friday, two distant days. He seemed lonely, chit-chattering as we fought with sleep and a slowly creeping sensation of fear against the limitation. I felt sorry for my car. The nearest gas station was thirty miles up the road in Walker, the last sign of civilisation we had seen.

I felt brutally raped of any opportunity, and wondered how such a fragile soul would cope with a fiercer, realer threat? After getting gas I vowed to strengthen my resolve. I thought of Dean Moriarty, Alexander Masters' Stuart, all the lonely souls . . .

. . . Walker is pleasant: all the men are real men; the gas station opens at 6am for the majority of the week; the attendant just smiles at the stupidity of lost children, his dog Digger, a rottweiler with a beauty-pageant's fleece, sleeps quietly amongst the over-priced food; everything is expensive because there's nothing else in a hundred mile radius (although there are no signs to tell you this); the silence is only pock-marked with the tweeter of little birds . . .

With a full tank of gas the car and myself felt rejuvenated. Katrina drove, I tried to doze. I made the decision to try 89 again, even though the man had failed to mention it, saying the quickest way was further north. But the map, the map, showed a fast cut across, skipping Tahoe altogether, venturing up northwards to the beauty of Highway 50, through the mountains, past the ski-resorts, close close close to the snow and the rocks and raging trees. Of course, maps fail to give you detailed analyses of terrain, elevation, starvation—Katrina turned onto Highway 89 to find that there wasn't so much a road but a manual escalator, a steep climb into the stars with a car on your back. The Ford Focus fought the roads, only a few SUVs, Jeeps, trucks and the sort driving by, their wheels blending into the road with the heavy descent, the way down—we were the only ones fighting our way up. That new found sense of adventure cut back into anxiety. I began to hate myself a little.

Eventually we hit a summit, and then we shuddered as the roads gave way to a free-fall, the scenic-route the hell-route, leaving nothing but the brakes between us and a ninety mile-an-hour ride amongst the cliffs. The brakes began to burn so we stopped for a while.

The stream was silent in its white-lighting streaks of movement. I thought: it was a nice place to die.

I drove the rest, and as if God was favouring me, the roads widened, softened, camp sites opened up, cyclists went by as if to say: there ain't no steep inclines here, don't worry. The car smiled. I relaxed and let the sense of madness and adventure overrun me again. In the place of the frantic need to get home, the trembling feeling of the hour beforehand, was the frantic need to burn the new tank of gas, to venture back into some unknown corner, to push against some other limitation until something finally broke . . . was this Freud's Death Drive? or was it just a need to escape the monotony of the capitalistic regime, the great over-powering Big Other that watched me day-in day-out, a sort of self-imposed judgement that I was trying to rectify?

I left it for another day.

An hour later it was California Highway 50. Adventure, fear, otherworldliness was corrupted by familiarity. I pissed in the snow; I watched it capsize. I slept the last hour as Katrina drove against the common traffic. The people of Citrus Heights, Orangevale, Sacramento, Antelope; they all looked different, bland, tired, pathetic, meaningless . . . my bed had never felt softer . . . I had never felt more malleable, fresh, awakened, branching out away from “home” into a bigger room. Kerouac was wrong to think of Moriarty in the darkness, in the night—he was there more in the day, in the death of common-place doings, in the stares of the MILF in the SUV, in the kids caught in circles, the police men with nothing to do but quota, business signs and unjustified urges; he was there more in the decadent, the sick, the pseudo-American; he was there underneath it all as a reminder that insanity was purer than conformity; he was there lurking, waiting for any crazy excuse to hit the roads again, to explore the Real, to delve into the destructive habits against the code like some childish and rebellious overgrown child . . . he was there in the real America, a true American, a giant middle-finger growing slowly out of the desert, pointed now at all of us: conformed, stuck, dead, aching for money . . .

Phallus (a short story)

What are we doing here?” she asks; behind which he can hear the slight bark of bitterness, something to disrupt the tender bite of love. A moral dagger urges him to defeat the fears that tremble in her throat. But instead of encouraging her, instead of invalidating the heavy weight of the coming end within her, he pushes her head down into his chest, running his fingers through the brittle, post-coitus hair of his beloved. The length of her curling, brown face's-frame sits atop of her like an asymmetrical bird's nest waiting for sublime and treasured thoughts to roost again (the dreams of fairy tale perfections and ends with no means) . . .

There is nothing but silence.

He had asked the same question in his own thoughts, the night before, as he had watched her undress like the king who has conquered, the brutish force of victory setting out to the seas—but he had preferred to phrase it more directly: “why are we doing this again?”

Peace was a long time gone. The romantic candles that once burnt in the middle of the table now turned themselves to a crisp and recycled their uses into the same room, into the same moment. It was this same moment in time that repeated itself, eternally, like the heavy brick of inevitability that pulled them down to the bottom of the river—lovers entangled, begrudgingly, sinking under some unbearable, omniscient force. And that was how they saw it, wasn't it? Not of their own wills, not the free-thoughts of the liberal new era but the predestined paths of the mechanised parts, pawns to the eternal play. As if they could see the very strings attached to their wrists and heads they watched to the heavens for the next bloody blow.

Five now; five times (against the grain of ignorance) they had come back to each other, always with the taste of the last sore break-up upon their skins (once they had fallen back into the sheets whilst the residual proof of his violence still faded away from the purple vitality of her face). Each time they woke to find themselves watching the moving shadows of the celling as if the animated bars of some cruel prison. Each time she was the first to question the absurdity of the situation, and each time he supported her silently, almost condescendingly, as if to say: well of course, what else do you expect?

It is strange though, now, waking up in the early morning, the eerie sing-song of the birds stringing in visible flecks of quavers, demi-quavers and crotchets above the atonal hum of existence. The sunlight hits the wall in brief and rushing clusters, sneaking in every time the blinds swing out in the breeze. And even for this fresh air the stench of sweat and sex idles, lingering like a phantom of guilt on touching skin, wrinkled sheets, stained lips, aching appendages . . . The world begins to breathe, coming out of the stifling quiet of stopped-time (for it hadn't moved all night) as the ticking clocks came back louder than ever, an alarm in the distance (a neighbour's) chiming with urgent discharge against repose. Come, the world said, it is time to relinquish that which you have.

Yet something would not leave him. As he lay in the bed, her weight turning from a light reflex to the dull and heavy push of her dead sleep, he found himself stuck in the previous place, the world of dreams, or more specifically a dream. There was no recollection, there was no form of figure, but it existed like the estranged memory that resided with obvious presence but refused to be seen until called upon, affirmed in its existence by the detrimental natures of faith before it was truly to come into empirical existence.

What was it?

What was the taste that he found on his lips, dried, and laying still in the back of his throat like a bad thought threatening to burst the social bubble with sound? The dream in thought refused to come, no matter how he forced it, but all of its conclusions, its effects (the sweat, the emotional race of his heart, the rising of his penis like the clichéd pitching of the tent . . . the taste) showed themselves of their own accord, like the final philosophical evidence against cause and effect—things in themselves without a cause before, reasons in themselves (causa sui). What will was this, what great desire confused him now, concealing itself in the rush of the dramatic day?

“Sweetheart?”

But she does nothing but wrestle with her position, fighting the panicked rise and drop of his chest.

And it becomes him. The moment. It fails its alienation, its distance with no counterpart—here it finalises itself in complete realisation, as if catching up to him after a lifetime of his attempts to flee, coming to him now, dancing across the ground like a chained and noisy ghost, swinging its existence into the foreground out of a blinded, thin air . . .

Milk. The taste of milk was on his lips, suffocating, disgusting, utterly volatile as he throws the girl's body from his own and trips to the bathroom, his toes juxtaposed against the mental balance of motion's need.

Milk. Being washed away now, the water of the tap like the trickling wonder of affirmative bliss. Ignorance now, the day fading in. Forgetting, forgetting . . . .

“Darling? ” she whispers.

Coffee. Louise had left for work, prying from him the promise of another night together before they contemplated the serious implications. He tried to face himself up to the truth of it all, and he tried to break his desire from the now strangled momentum of his past morals, but he still smiled instead, raising his elbows to the white, metallic lace of the café table. The waitress twisted by, filling his cup to the brim, herself brimming with the need for acknowledgement—but none came.

Above the sun raged angrily with Californian reality. The summer had come with its loving oppressions, barricading many indoors into the unreal turmoil of air-conditioning and domestic disputes. The heat had the affect of changing moods; it did turn the quiet to the violent, the loud into sweaty lumps of rigid stubbornness; it did turn the clean into the dirty, the dirty into the mud-house nature of the third-world . . . but for today it did nothing but frame a general feeling of peace, like the burning fire beneath an apathetic and living pig, the spittle nothing but the sparkling rush of life itself, the burning stench of flesh and death nothing but the affirmative action of the Big Other, the peering audience, unable to disturb the great force of history, of his heart . . .

Which was bullshit. He knew that. It was a moment of fantasy undeciphered, allowing him to escape out of it all for a moment—to live an ideal snapshot in which the rest could be relegated to meaningless squander. To lavish himself (generously) with the drama of romantic grandeur clouded him from the earlier images: the puppet strings, the two (forced) lovers sinking to the bottom of the ocean with their limbs willingly and unwillingly tied to each other's . . . Before they hit the airless bottom, and before death has its chance to steal the fashionable pearl from the bed: they have already grown tired, frantically, pathetically pushing away from each other in bondaged futility; they have turned the pretension of love into a dark and trembling tragedy of human desires—opposed desires.

In coming to the common feeling that he wished to elude (the thought, that ridiculous question: why had it gone this way . . . ? along with all the images of the past, the perfect portraits of moments clearly felt behind the dreamy blur of visual effect) he forced himself to think of the trivial, the everyday, the tomorrow: work, literature, film, politics—yet none of it succeeded to evade the driving strain of complete and romantic futility.

The way she let him eat M&Ms off her stomach in the midnight hours. . .

Looking around he felt weary, dizzy, his nervous centre falling slowly into an imaginary downward place. The gravity of spirit was suddenly evident, the heat in loss of any love, simply depressive and oppressive. The walls towered, the coffee sickened, black and thick . . . the Taste overwhelmed him again, turning his stomach into itself, a knot of thirst and disgust.

He felt his fist clench.

A passer-by on the opposite side of the street noticed him, and watched in shock, dismay, perversion. As voyeur she watched him . . . drop his coffee to the table (a faint rattle), his hands trembling and face paling (the spider crawling over the skin), his mouth agape and tortured in a subtle gasp (his tongue stained black and flickering against the inside of his teeth) . . . but had no concept of what occurred but of the abstract absurdity that gives way to a somehow righteous and sublime truth.

She watched.

He stared into time with his mouth open wide, the second hand refusing to take leave, overstaying its welcome, the air singing by in a white and unsettling noise, like the screaming waves of sound crushed into stillness, constipated of their normal path (like babies slowly compressed along with the trash—the blood from their ears. . . ) . . .

Eventually the second passed and the eyes on the other side were no longer inconspicuous in their standing still. She passed too, leaving the world back to its normal and horse-blinded walk, and the strange man to his burdened thoughts.

As the light took leave, a solitary cloud wishing itself true across the sky, the last ray of sun ran across the face of the street's buildings, a swift left to right motion, catching all objects in a last farewell before the coming of darkness. The warmth was felt with glee in the knowledge of the cool that was to follow. In the last passing moment of light, something flickered: a ring, a few tables away, caught on the third-finger of a young child (she barely looked eighteen), her long fingers nestling their way into the hands of her (supposed) fiancée's grip, her smile ringing out and upwards, in a slow motion sinking of her neck that stank of old-time cinema . . .

Youth is shattered. And in its destruction comes the escape of maturity.

“Are you sure I can't offer you a drink?” she questioned with a subtle sign of warm friendship beneath the outward frigidity of her professional attire and character. The pin-stripe jacket and legs stood seemingly direct in their horizontal rise, the point in which they (and she) met the ground obviously at a well-calculated right angle. It was a façade, a character that he sometimes felt promised a tender centre, a different nudity beneath the clothing, a different love behind the exterior of hateful class-wars, manicured nails, pruned lawns—but the leap from her actuality to the tender kernel of her existence was an unfathomable dream, a contemplation disallowed in the midst of their public and financial discourse. And it wasn't like he necessarily cared.

“We're going to need you to run through the guest bathroom this week. Make sure it's spotless,” and with this she pointed her finger, “because my husband and I will be having a guest in the morning. His daughter will be coming to stay with us,” the smile filtered through a stressful tensing of the flesh, “and I want everything to be just perfect for her.”

The last emphasis, the misplaced and cat-like indiscretion of her voice, sent a shiver through his spine.

In the distance, outside by the untarnished shine of the silver Mercedes, her husband called: “Sally!”

“Hold on Frank.”

“Sally!”

She caught herself rolling her eyes, and quickly brought them back to the subject at hand. Her hands fidgeted slightly with the top button of her jacket: “And the rest as usual, okay? I just need that doing extra well, good impression and all,” (her fingers ran around the edge of the button, it faltered, opened . . .), “and I've left you a little extra on the table as incentive.” With this her index finger distractedly slipped under her jacket, surrendering itself into her heaving cleavage (in came a gulp of air, violently as if with a passionate or fearful reaction). He couldn't help but linger there, his eyes stuck with a silent optimism, the familiar stir in his pants, the silent panic of desire somehow reaching a moment of fulfilment, a clarification as to what, exactly, it was. But it was nothing but the flirtatious act of nature itself, leading to the calamity of final pause, the finality of disappointment as Sally found her senses, pulled her hand to her side like a robotic declaration against the human strain of mistake, slipping tongues of the Freudian subconscious . . . With a rush she said her farewell and darted away from him into the slipping gloom of evening.

The front door shut and he found himself alone.

He turned to his work, the side-effects of a poor lifestyle: he pulled the cleaning supplies from under the kitchen cabinets, the mop from the basement, gloves from the garage, and smiled, revealing in himself the fragile nature of all people, convinced for a second that even the toughest cookies, the most distant of people, enemies, cardboard cut-out figures with no personal souls (even the most hated, misunderstood, or incomprehensible in his own family) were human at heart—like Sally, the job-on-the-side, who faltered into her own dream land of humanistic escape . . .

In the bathroom (the guest bathroom) he found himself wondering through the usual, and dirty, fantasies that empty homes allowed him to have. In the common course of time other lives were played out within the bounds of the home, and in the silence of the present he could capture it all like a fly in the wall, a perverse sense of pleasure and awe overriding him, sending a quick zap of joy that began to explode into the blossoming (bosom) flower of erotic semblance. He imagined the daughter (now figured with all of her step-mother's qualities, infused with youth) undressing for the bath, Sally coming in and planting a kiss on her fragile and precious forehead; he imagined the familial dinner, the dishes lined up in asymmetrical perfection, forks lying forgotten in hands that belonged more to the urge for conversation and friendship than the desperate core-need for food; he imagined the night later on, Sally and Frank laying in their bed, ignorant of any sort of sexual interaction, his own body now straying into the room . . .

The carpets, floors, walls, seats, tables, surfaces, shades, shelves etc. cleaned themselves, only borrowing his hands as his reality wandered elsewhere.

Later he picked his check off the table, shut the door, dropped the key off in the standard plant pot. He gave a customary wave to the empty house that had offered him a spell of respite. The night spat cold, a surprise in the midst of summer. He turned his other cheek, and drove off into the calling and exploding lights of the city.

“Where are you?” she whispers, her heavy breath breaking into the faculty of his desire, unlinking some unknown chain that he is following like a Pavlovian dog unawares to his own reactions. He is unsure as to where he is, or how he got there, his eyes only pregnant with a surprised passion, a fire of the greatest urgency. “Where are you?” she asks, her lips sinking gently onto his earlobe, her clitoris grinding against him as she lay atop him, breaking into a cold sweat that revealed the coming moan, the excretion of orgasm into the air like a giant ejaculation after a week long, forced, silence—“Where are you?” it comes again, her back arching back and the question reaching out to the ceiling with a majestic twist. Her body quakes, breaks itself into a further longing, her lips trembling and then spitting open into the shrillest breath, a high-pitch moan raking its way behind the heavy bass of exhalation.

With completion he finds himself pressed against her back, the semen leaking from inside of her down the contour of her thigh—dripping now, silently, back onto his own member as he pushes his nose into the brace of her jaw, sniffing at the perfection of the curved neck . . . She has forgotten her questions, and grows heavy, bewildered again by the inability to fight the course of action as the Puppet Master deals out the same cards all over again—but now she seems accepting, completely at odds with a need to liberate herself from it, almost willing to drown in this position, to finalise it all, to fall completely into unchangeable being without a moment respite into the present.

“Louise?” he whispers, prodded by that terrible moral dagger that he so oft refused.

“Yes . . .” she whispers, and he can't tell if she can really hear, if she is really awake, whether she will remember upon waking the sincerity he is about to feign.

“I'm here, I was always here . . .”

Her smile plants itself firmly upon her face, like a conqueror's flag, and he falls back upon himself, watching the ceiling as she turns and makes herself a home atop and beside him.

“Yes . . .”

But not. In the post-sex silence he has caught the chain of images that have been torturing him for all too long. The dream comes back, not in its phantom form but now accepted in its entirety—called by name, brought into a monstrous equality by his very own will to accept his own dark deeds, his own dark desire. It broods, it forms, it consumes the air in a flurry of grey smoke, like King Hamlet to his son, and rises to a column of overseeing, overwhelming force. Everything resides here, like a mirror within, an indescribable but necessary part in the system of things.

“If not here then where?”

There, in between the fingers rotating on her button; there in the accidental nursing of her breasts in his presence. The taste fights for subsistence, it brings its own existence onto the stage as if a gate-crashing has-been, something from the past that refuses to die away. It comes and takes its place on his lips like some terrible hunger, a ferocious knot that threatens to bring everything down to its bare knees if it was to be unknotted itself . . . like the central complexity that contradicted but kept everything in the works, like a rotten secret in the shadows, something that he had never said out loud:

And let us make way now; let us move away from the human core, that tragic and intolerable thing that he has revealed to himself. Let us fade ourselves away into the corners of the room, those fabricated notions of separation. We will leave him, staring at us now; turning away now; embracing her now: the woman by his side, her pin-stripe suit folded neatly on the seat to the side of the bed, her white shirt unhinged, derailed from its position with her fiddling fingers, as her breast pulls itself out from behind the scenes, a globe of weighty reality. Let us escape fast, before it happens, before we are captivated in shame; let us not linger any more, not as he turns to her, away from us, memories lost, thoughts and progress forgotten to a simple and excruciating need, a blockage in the course of: his love, his life, his everyday movement—even a blockage against the passing of death. Let us forget before we remember that her name is Sally, that Louise is now forgotten, gone, his hands delicately reaching out in fear of rejection, waiting for the slap on the back of his hand, the overwhelming beast of guilt coming to him now, along with the taste drying to his lips.

Let us make haste, let us make haste . . .

(the sun begins to blossom again, as she sighs upwards in distraction, her breast plump behind the pink point of her singing nipple, looking elsewhere, something lacking; the blinds lay open, the sky reaching out revealing the empty truth behind the complications of his persisting existence; the trauma as a masquerade, the image of himself now fading away to a simple and insignificant spot, a fleck—accepting it now, expecting it now . . . )

. . . as he puts his mouth to her breast, and slowly falls to slumber.

crackle

cackle little boy
like a bent copper fondling
like a morn-erection to the sun
a star to sky-centre
like a moment in passing
that is always on the up
&away

workinghard at hardlyworking is your game
up the hill that feels like a downward breeze
for the girl(s) with no name but out on the tipsy curve
and straight into the heart (imagined) with an arrow (truthful yet trite)

so crackle away whilst
we wallop a new doorway with yesteryear's obsessions
for a mallet
the coil of our spoils the building
Block Clock Cock Sucking its way to a base,
The base
my thoughts are base


its a tepid sound a little lost in our vocabulary
the sort of mouse of a word that wants nothing to do with me
nothing to do with us
just a lot to do with you
like a worm in my fever
in my passion
in my raging insanity which is:
sanity-solid-form-changing
it is a tepid sound that calls you
ceaselessly
empty and craving its completion

but what sort of word calls that withNoname?

what sort of person is it that utters
emptiness
in the face of completion?

Why i-is it that I,I,I,I,I,I,
will be drunk on whine or wine
of fantasia
in Asia or out
on you in you for you therefore you

only man can conjure up such muse
such glass presence
as I shake the hands of a plant
wrestle a little with my final hours
and smile at your beaming
pussy
your crackle smile
your puppet-string hands. . . .

my empty
your full

I can't help . . .

but write love letters to you that I don't necessarily Know
these ideas of yours experienced tender-lee as that
of one that does not exist as if
it was really you

but not
in the minds of my peers but here
in mine

it is hard to resist
here where the rain hits from air
even though the sun rises outside the writing pane
my-my
sitting against a crookedcobweb only wishing on your lips
like the prison cells I only want to tenderly break into — not out of
sitting writhing as you run across the ground
the concrete stage
your body against mine with only water between us
here where clothing fails to fabricate its own prophetic
existence

I can't help but drive against the defacing of time
where the eye fails its countless drops its changing grace
its grand finale scan from top to—and oh.what.dear.have.you.there?
and your waist acts like a rounded prism
spreading my fingers from my hands like shards of different colours
that only want to embrace from head to toe
curve-rip-cloth-skin
& into
down-in-between-thighs)Where the rain keeps f-a-l-l-i-n-g-
where I keep falling too

help you see I cannot take or do nor give
when you are standing there with Cheshire cat teeth strutting around
my befuddled heart
my botched feet tap-tap-dancing against the beat of
sing-surely-sigh-sigh
and take a good long look at Mr. Death with his beady
little romance
this affair
with the au pair
that glorious little slut
that we disgrace to call our lives

to see to take to
fuck
yes, to fuck, in all those different ways
whether dark and rich
or light and sweet
or frantically swimming and stuck in the lake
losing ourselves in an attempt to reconcile the . . .
well, what?:

the wailing world
the crooked cock
(calling in the morning as wood to the fire)
the weeping widow
(that we all are)
the lost left-turn
(that was our birth)
that. . . .

and nothing much but a slipping taste for our own ag..eing skins
the cannibal's romance
the I relegated to the sidelines in a mad attempt to compute
yes
compute
your blistering smile that strikes me bare
naked
rolling around in the glowing grass
the moon's hairy nipple of a hill
trying to imagine the shackles of your pubic growth
around my wrists
around my lungs
like a suffocated child
of your loins

you see

I cannot help
but write these blinded love letters
to you I don't necessarily know
because its just the same as taking a fist full of the richest dirt
staring into the night sky
and simply saying: Yes
Yes

and then a simple whisper uncertainly from your own freed lips:

fuck

yes

A poem for The Dead & Dying

(For Fiona Popowicz)

One-legged he sits on the barstool, the mirror behind echoing the worn-wear of his shoulders, his arms ripe, hands enlisted in the slumber of the solitary against the noisy crowd; there is the definition of what was once metal on his ring finger now sitting as a white band against the dirty tan he has acquired on his untold journey, there is the rocketing thunder of the silence that stands to his side . . . a wisp of hair balanced against his nose from the overgrown strength that holds his face hostage. The parade of wealth doesn't distract him, that queer blue-look in his eyes, the tremor of movement on his lips, a cigarette still as it burns, a crack of gunpowder at-rest in his glare: here's looking at you kid.

You wonder what it is that the man is looking at, his single foot resting against the stool-leg, his foot muddied and struck with the disease of age. There is nothing threatening in the way that he watches, only a subtle invitation wrenched tighter by that nagging suspicion that you think he knows you, or he knows something.

He turns, grips the sides of his cold beer (or so you assume, the light starting to flicker a little too bright, shattering against the glass, the moths and flies a-buzzing and slapping against the sides of life, fluttering in addiction, just as you feel yourself, rotating in the crowd, a little smile, cleavage, tipsy-still, running on shoes that stay still and stuck to the ground, a plane roaring above and crying into the air. . . .). His back turns and for a moment you feel lost, as if he was grounding you there, a mirage of Life to come, some sort of tepid sea to cross by foot. . . .

Go over and talk to him.

But you won't, you will, you won't . . . . willwon'twillwon'twill.

And why do you? Sliding over what seems like a broken tumbler and the glare of an amused girl, her lips smacked red with -stick, your own shtick swivelling upright in your pants at the sight of her lowering her eyes, recoiling against the air, the thump of music, her polka-dot dress dry but drenched against her flesh, a little sweat sticking the seams of erotica together, her heels thumping against the ground unheard: your heart hears it, thump-thump-thump-thu-

Yet you don't stop, no matter for the way her breasts point at you with icicle stares, guarded hot and hard. The One-Legged-Man is there, for you, as if on request, even though you don't know him, never have, but yet you do, don't you? don't you dear friend? the one there flying over the possible strands of the future and cutting them one by one as if you were waiting for the one that would refuse to be cut . . . because why would you refuse? You almost feel as if the motion itself is the point, not to be caught up in the deceitful strands below, watching the unguarded following their paths like sheep against the slaughter, almost with the slaughter—part of it, one with it, whilst still whispering to themselves: I hate you Death.

And so the bar hits your back as you watch the dance with the drinks lined up behind you. The girl disappears into the crowd, you lose her even though her scent is still with you in your mind, her face melted away already into some sort of image that you impose on her existence . . . wherever it may be.

Over in the corner, you glance, not really startled, as if you knew it was coming, no matter how surreal, no matter how nonsensical in this stranger's town—never been here and never will again, you tell yourself: but what is that over there? my family, my friends, all that I have ever known lined up against the wall (mother, father, grandfathers & grandmothers, school-friends, lovers, people you never really knew, and people you knew better that anyone ever did, strangers from the supermarket, friends that never existed and those that may as well have not. . . .); is it a painting, or is it really them, slouching ahead of the bullets, the slam of rifle-butt against shoulder, masked killers laughing in your head as the blood shatters their faces against the walls, the soul pulverised into the presentation of blood and pulp a-a-and you can't just stand there whilst they start smashing their feet into the puddles, paint smearing through reality, the wall coming back behind them, the bodies gone, the weary eye of your mind frowning against the unreliable, the echoing drips of their blood vaporising in your chest, a mass-execution chatting inside you: see me, see me, seeme, seeme.

I hate you Death.

A flicker in the ear.

“. . . . so I cut the bastard thing off! Sat there locked away in my wife's miserable butt-fuck hut, wood-saw against the thigh. Hack! Hack! Saw! CutCutCut!”

And you have to be kidding, there is no movement next to you, the One-Legged-Man smiling strangely as you look at him, thinking that it was really him there in your head, telling his story, looking from his eyes to the stump sitting below his waist, a handkerchief dirty and a torn wrapped around its end, the blood (who's blood now?) running from your metaphorical face. You can feel the look of disgust and terror that must be stuck to your face.

“Yer got something on yer mind there stranger?” a little smile coming along with the question, complete tolerance, not even a grimace in the eye at the apparent lack of civility from his new neighbour. “Yer looks like ya'd seen a ghost, hovering over there,” and he points into your past, the memories gone, the family smeared into the wallpaper of Now, “then ya'd been looking at me as if I be wicked! And I do tell you mistur, I ain't no wick-ed one.”

“N-n-no . . .” you falter. You are not rude, so sorry, beg your pardon, standing up now and running off to the bathroom to console yourself in the mirror, her fragrance lingering a little close as you get through the crowd, knowing she's watching, your cool lost, the heat on now, some sort of chase fortified by your unsubtle movements to the bathroom, door in the face and then against the wall, your hands reaching out—

And . . . sink.

The water runs effortlessly and you wish you could do the same, watching it twist around into the drain (which way where? the equator some sort of barrier against the clockwise-anti direction). It splashes now—when did your hand throw it up?—against your face and the cold is back, not quite cool, but you can almost smile and act a little natural when an elderly man with a beer gut down past his belt comes in coughing years of smoke and dung from his lungs.

The mirror says nothing, there is simply the white noise of the water and the cackle of denim being unzipped and pulled down in the stall a few feet away.

You breathe in, then only out half the way, a little peace returning and the seas of movement and fear calming.

Farrrppp! exclaims the ass-sit-sit-shitting and you can already smell a little more of Death, pondering the age of life when it reaches such a stench: maybe there is no line between Life & Death, simply a gentle incline . . . starting now, starting now . . . a little too late to notice.

Where was that first sign, way back, five-ten years ago?

You can remember reading somewhere the sounds in the sky, the Imminent Death: was it a rocket, some sort of screaming mass of explosive power? The people below running headless and chicken.

And then death, Death, had become the obsession, love for it, hate of it: but it had always been in relation to your own existence, not Theirs, not those shot against the wall by the passing tics of the clock: you feel betrayed, cheated on, for your love affair with fatalism was meant to save them all, for only You(I) would die, only you would be meaningless whilst the rest went on living Their lives, the things that they believed in untouched by the Death and Emptiness you kept hidden underneath your sleepless bed.

Why had Death gone there? For years now scraping against your father's back, uncles and cousins and aunties lost, the generation before now left in ruins, corpses trying to speak through maggot-breath mouths beneath the dirt or burnt, left in urns, ashes to the air. . . .

Death stabs beneath the belt no matter how much you try to understand Him, care for him, console him of his misguided loneliness and tortured existence: because no one understands His struggle or purpose.

And this is how he repays. . . .

Strange though, the memory falls away for a second, and you don't bring it back up, because there isn't any need for it, even though you need all the help you can get fighting against Absurdity. Instead you think about the moon that you cannot see, and the cigarette that you can almost taste. The little things, turned to gold by the moment, slipping back into the crowd, leaving the decaying man with his turds to shit in peace.

But it's different now, rotating around, not really dancing but weaving yourself into the fabric of people, slipping into short-sightedness, a little polarisation: only a sense of the coffins that are(?) in the corner, muddled by the smile you are trying to carry on your face.

The bar.

The drink you order is milky, strong, licked against your insides so fast that you almost fall, instead you sit, putting a seat between you and the man that had at-once mystified you, the one you slapped on the face with a look that you would not dare allow another to throw upon yourself. Still, he smiles, gives you a look every now and then, the same secret there, unrealised and yet naked, revealing itself as if a stripper that tells you: look all you like but you will never feel.

Yes, that's what he is, some sort of rapist whore in your mind, blossoming ideas that you cannot hear.

Once again you apologise, as if there is a deathly silence between the two of you, realised still in the hum of night-life.

“That there's okay muh dear friend. No need to repea' yurself.”

But you want to, because that's all that you have ever done, all that anyone ever does do, repeating themselves against the strain of tonight, yesterday—tomorrow.

He says: “Well that there is mightah true, most likelah it is.”

Yes, yes, and the conversation begins to blossom, as if some old friend, like you usually do find yourself doing, mingling and understanding better the old-folk, the battered ones, the misunderstood. It is striking to every other moment that has made you smile selflessly: strangers in strange places somehow ugly and beaten & yet untouched by the true decay of beauty, social crimes and narrative. Nobodies, unafraid to be exactly that.

“I saw yer we're staring at this 'ere ol' leg o' mine. Thought maybe I'd tell you a lil' storah. It involves yer, yer own person, yer heart that is . . .”

But the story doesn't really matter, not in the words he tells it, not to his person at all. A lie rarely matters (or does it say more than a non-). The only truth lies in its affect against your own effected persona, slouching strangely into the corner of the seat, nowhere to rest your back, the horror returning to your face, the scenery vanishing into the warped oil-black, only a dim light showing now from the stranger's face, and his voice changes, yes it does, by God does it change, tormenting you now with its clarity, the ugly pronunciation and drawl thrown aside by the deep echo of what must be a Shakespearean actor (and you always fucking hated those awful plays), tormenting you now, another stab, from the front this time, with and against all rules that you wish to fortify or endure. All you want to do is play chess with the bastard, even without Bergman there, crying beihnd the camera in Existential dread. . . .

IT tells of the leg, the story, narrated now in the dark, not really from a source, simply with you like an elastic spider web clinging to your face as you try to fall on forwards, hands clinging to your face with disgust. You feel alive but only because of what confronts and constricts you. The -finity of it all is what makes you, you could say.

IT tells of the gangrene that spread after the leg was amputated, severed by another man, strangled off with bare teeth and nails, with the bone finally snapped in half by shear will alone. The words spoken by the violence: you'll never beat me again.

“Of course, young knight, what my assailant didn't realise is that whilst he had saved himself from my right leg, that thing that he felt (O so naively) that I had used to beat him all his sorrysorry life, he had not, dear fellow, shinning white knight, saved the world, his retired family from the other leg—stronger now it is, in-practice, poignant as ever, better than the other!

“The child had thought that by saving his Self he would save himself from the pain of Others. Others! Yes, others! The ones he loved, the smiling faces that raised him, the rotten things that had loved him, the triumphant cries of parenthood and family! He made himself immortally finite, and thought that I would never be able to touch him again!”

And you quiver, the shiver not really manifest but strangling itself in your spine, the fear, The Fear! breaking into you with no remorse. Suddenly what he knows, the untouchable secret, that naked thing now touched: it becomes you, it is you, crumbling into sickness and vehement whelps.

You want to get away, but there is no floor to touch, no light to guide the way.

“You see, Brave Knight, the gangrene fixed itself, left me alive [sarcastic-laughter-through-the-darkness], even if it meant that I could not touch him directly. Sweet sweet mercy was not to be found in his little shell of conviction.

I took everything from him but his Life!”

And then the rust comes, sinking itself into your armour, the Knight's armour, breaking the skin, melting into impurity, the plastic sword in the sheath slipping into dust, your shield shattering against emptiness, a final sigh fitting itself nicely in your lips but not uttered.

So you come to realise that it is He you are speaking with, unvanquished Death, smile and all, understood or not, flailing against your heart, your memories, putting a lighted torch against your frontal lobe.

Where to Love?!?!?!?!

Then the thin line between it and Hate vanishes, and you are lost in your anger towards the abuse.

“It is you, sir, that was that child. But I am still here. And over yonder,” the graves and coffins here, relentless, names fixed to their heads and plaques: Father, Mother, etc. with no space to-give(in), with no ability in your grasp to return them to their rightful places in your lives. His bony finger points at the Past, things Lost, precious little things, big things, never-ever-ever-ever-ever to be seen by the naked eye again.

You turn and speak: Cancer. You are a cancer upon me.

“ I take many forms. Cancer is one of them. I do not know exactly how it is that I always come (you will know of these things better than I do, the living I mean): but I always do, I will always Come.”

And so you sink, clinging on to the life that you have, enjoying its absurdity, rolling around in the gold of what you have:

. . . . yet you watch the merciless killing, rifle against shoulder, recoil, the pulverised scalp and flesh of wet brain against the wall, the slapstick way in which the left-overs (bodies) drop to the ground against the laws of physics.

Slow-Motion.

And suddenly you are there standing yourself with the gun, the blade, the tools of Death, the bare hands of strangulation. And you cannot miss, you cannot stop, venturing as close to the heart as possible only to see your fucking connection crumble under the weight of End.

Death is in you again, as it is in the Dead and the Dying, out there, far away, where you cannot reach, you cannot calm.

So you tell them you love them, stay a little while, worship the Past without respite, pray for a miracle, whatever it may be . . . you kneel against the grave before it is filled, prepare yourself for the curtains to close, rest a little while, turn back from the gloom, the insanity of it all, the right leg growing back out of a wish to die with the Dying—back home to reality, back to the bar room, bosoms in the distance dancing, a little music in the air, a tear rolling to your lips, the salty taste a reminder that you are still here.

“You live your life, Brave Knight, no matter how rusted you become, no matter how many times I beat you, no matter how many others fall under my never-ending conquest, my Crusade. You live your life brave knight, and the cancer will eat Her, I will take her from you from the inside out, for I am Death, and you are Life. For you are Death and I am Life. And I do love you, for if I didn't feel this Love and Pity for you, I would never come, I would stay in Nothingness, in my beautiful and restful abode:

“I am for you dear friend. I am your meaning, your fulfilment. I give life as much as I take it.

“Don't be angry, don't cry, don't turn yourself away from me. Here, hold my hand, lessen the burden a little, sleep with me for a while . . .

“. . . . just a little while—that's it.”

And so, you sit there, inhale the cigarette that will likely end you too, and you venture into space, into your memory, thinking of all those gone, writing a song out of tears, breaking away from the living for those that you miss, and those that you will miss:

You conduct
You dance
You walk
& you talk:

This, for all the brave, for all the living crying, for myself for You, repeating ourselves in loops until the final cut . . . this, this, is a poem,
for the Dead
&
Dying.