My bedroom is bathed in timid pale moonlight. I lie in its silence and watch a star beyond my window, solitary and bright. I cannot tell if it is rising, or be sure it’s not a planet or clumsy manmade satellite. I stare at it, consider it, try and work out what it is, denying myself unearned sleep and rooted uselessly to this ever-spinning rock. I can do nothing but lie and watch it and the man-made birds able to soar so easily between myself and that light.

Very well then, so I shall go mad. I will hold my breath until my toes turn blue. I will talk to ghosts and falling leaves and laugh when it rains. Again. I will peek behind time – a twitch of the net curtain that you’re not supposed to go behind. Then I will break into Peace and dig up a grave or two to ask the past what it thought about not being alive anymore, and if it came as a terribly big surprise. YOU COULD SEE IT COMING YOU STUPID FUCKING CORPSE. Couldn’t you? COULDN’T YOU? WHY DIDN’T YOU… Forget that. That’s a metaphor. I wouldn’t ever bother a dead person. How would you feel if your ancestors invited themselves to dinner and told you that you’re a big disappointment? Know your places and get there or stay there. Don’t intrude. I will run and run and run from this field of death until I am out of breath. I will talk myself into a stupor to others, stupid stupidity, because I’m making sense to myself. Yup, to be that mad old man on the bench again, somewhere between a granddad and a scary drunk. Tramps are either wise or stupid. Like people. Tramps are just like people. Tramps must be people too. Astounding. So if a tramp is a person and people like tramps can be just as insightful as a falling leaf, then does everything really make sense? Nonsense! Where art thou? Why does everything seem too sensible? With Out You. Why does everything seem so ancient? Why do I have no fear? Of any of it. I’m not afraid of anything here because I know that none of it matters. I’m staring at a blank wall and wondering why it doesn’t frighten me. Would it frighten you? I only ask because I get so trapped in your stupidly sensible words. You have this wonderful way of saying everything so simply, without the clumsiness of music, meaning or magic. Cage, clenched fist – whatever. You have building-brick logic. You keep a study without mouseholes. You tidy everything up and throw away the things that you don’t need until everything is so orderly in its sterility and interchangeable uniformity of authorised singularity. Singularity. That’s another name for a black hole you know. This big incredible thing – this hungry mouth sucking up anything and everything, gravity and light itself. And there’s not even only one. There’s a universe of them. An infinite amount. The hungry underside has many mouths, and Hell has been bought by a larger company and mass produced at half the cost. Hommo. Odgeyness. Some big space-faring dick-shaped vacuum cleaner poked itself into this corner of the cosmos and switched itself into reverse to piss away all the real meaning and real sense and real logic a long time ago leaving just dead sodden skin. All hail the second cumming of The Great Dick Shaped Vacuum Cleaner. I’ll give you £50 for your faith. First there was paradise, then came the fall. Then there was the war. Now there is nothing. Dead skin and silent chaos and rocks and damp carcasses litter little battlefields still years afterwards. Victory to the rain. Not even the wind. So this is Peace. This silence. This place where the purple ribboned empire rots unheard like meat plucked clean from where it lived like happy flesh in plasma, left in a fridge. Pointless. Stop this. End. Plastic packaged dreams have no value because they never degrade.

i’m listening to the wind beyond the unconventional crack in my window. it sounds like the sea, so terribly violent. it’s like the world is shouting something but it knows i’ve stopped listening and have only been pretending to for years. to be honest, i haven’t heard the wind in years, haven’t seen a sea in a century, and yet now when i do, i don’t know what noise it makes. i’m wondering if the wind is as strong over there on the coast, where…
work tomorrow. i don’t want to think about it. i don’t care about thinking about it. it’s all about putting on a costume and letting the fibres mesh with your skin for the day.
i could be somewhere else. this place is like custard. custard. my brain lives and wallows in custard. comfort is so transitory. so deceptive. everything is so difficult here that i do not trust it, no longer care. you see, i can’t even write this properly. this is all about wasting time. about paying lip service to something that once seemed to matter. i no longer even have that faith that seems afforded to everyone i can’t bear to look at as i pass them with haughty exasperation on the street. it’s just a series of moments and sounds strung together. there is something wrong, and like the worst kind of surgeon i am groping at the knee for a pulse. i no longer fear what will become of me, because i no longer fear. i have done so much wrong and yet nothing out of order. let’s go to sleep, and see what colour the world is in the morning.
you will wake up of course, oh yes. another day, as usual, as ever.
that’s your curse.

i watch the cars come and go. there isn’t much else to do – the nightlife of the street, people walking back from work at the usual times. some of them are with friends, lovers. some walk alone, huddling their coats about them against this persistent bitter cold. i’ve been on my own now for a lot longer than the seven hours i’ve kept the flat in darkness. i was excused from the life i can no longer lead – a brief reprieve from having to smile. smiling. ridiculous. it’s like putting lipstick on a corpse. i’m haemorrhaging friends. with each drip from the wounds self inflicted on this repugnant living cadaver of a life i lose a little more warmth. soon certainty sluices into the pool, trickling out in this bitter cocktail to disappear somewhere – wasted. i got it wrong. i got it all so wrong. perhaps this is poetic justice for a bad poet – it certainly seems so. perhaps this is what my customary arbitrary indifference feels like to others. what goes around. but i never thought he would be so cruel. i wasn’t going to look and see what i somehow suspected – knew before i even had the thought of giving in – “what else have i got to lose?” the threat i made, hysterical and clutching at the most frayed straws left of my baleful self-respect, carried out. upon me. my own words made law – made nothing. i am gone, like so many other stillborn memories that i thought could have been, enough times i am sure they already happened. this is hell. this IS hell. write they say, write. if you have nothing else, you have your words. so i’m just writing. i’m putting down everything in my head like a ready steady cook and finding there’s barely a snack in the cupboard. there’s a heaviness in my chest. my heart is beating so heavily, so slowly, so loudly in my ears i can almost hear it echoing round this dark empty flat. is this what is coming? is this what i have done? is this what i have brought upon myself? i have made my own home my gallows. no, this is not a threat. i’m better than that, i’m not so crass or clichéd to scrawl a suicide note into the blogosphere. but don’t get me wrong. right now, i long for it, like i long for so many other things i can never have – that i just can’t do. everything changes, constantly, and everything remains a changing constant. i am not brave because i keep going. i am a coward. it’s easier to just drift and complain than to actually do anything about it – to end it all. and there is so much pain. loneliness is a heaviness that sits upon your chest, its knees pushed deep into your ribs, squashing your lungs and twisting your heart. where is everyone i have ever loved? i am trying not to turn around and see that horrific thing in the false window behind me – that demon, that monster, that corpse – squatting over the pale light of his laptop in the dark and lifeless tomb of his latest arbitrary home, pouring words into an empty space just because the dim light it makes even briefly fills the darkness. help me. please, someone help me. help me as a human being who is so completely alone and afraid.

A scent of dust – a burning taste of fluff as an old heater’s turned on too quickly after being left off for far too long. that is the first thing i smell when i imagine being in your house. it’s winter, trees outside cut faces and nitrogen alike with cold wind-whipping scratches, but it’s warm inside your home. your mother is in the kitchen, humming, slicing pumpkins and listening to an opera – to a debate on radio 4. your father is in his office, dark and flanked in a tiny labyrinth of strange books and doing something i don’t understand that doesn’t grab me. your cheeks are cold, frostbitten when you come in, heavy woolen coat but no scarf. i want to have bought you a scarf, something snug about your warm constant pulse as it pounds a steady rythmn into the world, something to snag the scent of your living body as it moves through the nitrogen, through the scent of cooking, through the world. something to smell when you’re not looking, to bury my face in and inhale a hundred memories, and thousands more unborn. memories stitching together to form a life – events that didn’t happen in the past, could happen in the future, thoughts that knit into images in the present. i bury my face in the scarf i never bought you like an infant cub in the ruff of its mother’s warmth and pulse, a mother cradling the warm pulse of her animal infant. everything intertwined like woolen threads. i want to be a part of your world. i want to have been in your home from when i was a boy, scratched knees and muddy shins, to the age we are now, cuts healed into unseen scars. i want to come from a background, rather than a nowhere. i want to be part of the world. i hate people. i love people. i want to be a person because i am a nothing. i must be a nothing. i came from nothing – somewhere barren and breathless out there in the cold. i defined myself – patched together like a ragged scarf or patchwork coat, stitched with favourite snapshots of other people’s lives as i passed through them like cold unscented nitrogen. today i have painted myself with your sound of your mother’s colours. i feel the killer in me, restrained. there is that urge to taste, pounding at my molars, making me lick the bare bone of bared canines, involuntarily. i want to taste your life, your childhood, your mind. i want to taste you. i want to devour you, consume you, fill myself up with you and become a person through your genius, fat on kindred ideas that keep me lithe and young, constantly running.

Shove it. Cut. Harder. Force it in deeper. Gouge and twist as you do. Like a kitten licking honey from a knife, the searing has a taste. A definitive, certain taste. Past the cranberry, on into the sickly sweet blackcurrant and on and on until you touch tar – the rotten syrup lying beneath the bland and the pink sugar. Pouring out, spooling like a slick. Sick. Poison. Stab it. Cut it out. The death, the devil, the sloth. The rot. The sickly skin that clings cancerous to bone, wrapped around the marrow like a slug’s kiss. Sickly death, sticky on bare white ivory, clotting thought like phlegm. Stick it in and keep digging. Don’t stop digging till the polluted stream runs clean, until it runs dry. Until everything long-tainted inside is drained, cleansed and emptied. Until you can see that gaping hole beneath the bland, beyond the sugar, behind the stench. The purity of something empty inside seen stripped bare. For what it really is.

the wind doesn’t whistle. the sky is grey but there’s no grit, no dust, no brick to trudge. nothing seems new or grown up any more. everything is routine. every two points seem to have a duvet stuffed between them, a duvet between synapses. everything seems a duvet’s reach away, the soft muffling fluff both pinning your arms to your sides, your eyelids to your eyes, pushing synthetic wool into your ears and muffling the sounds of life happening anywhere beyond the cocoon. i can remember when a streetlight, flickering or not, orange or white, used to move me. now a thousand candles couldn’t so much as sing me one note. when the day was long and the night was longer. both now bleed into each other, in nothing more than equal measures. what is the purpose in any of this? what is its flavour? why is it here and what does it want? how is this road – this night, this streetlight, this grit and this footprint – how is this life? how is it part of what it is to be alive, and the charge of electricity it brings you, jolting your brain with the countless, infinite possible ways you could stretch out and exist. when did i become too old or disinterested to make that little journey down the dirty road at night? when did london become my home and not my playground? when did i swap the grit and the streetlight for this duvet? this dirty duvet, matted with human hairs, sweat and the stains of yawns. how did my youth bleed into this rag and leave only cheap stains? where is the light; the night? where is the madness that i promised me?

This is automatic.

Human beings are terribly socially conscious creatures, but in a very perverse, self-orientated, and typically Freudohuman manner. They are aware of society but only in the manner of which society is aware of them.

In art, to have it received and receive popular acclaim from society, you musn’t offend anyone. You can’t pen any beliefs or opinions that aren’t already known and popularly held. You have to agree with the new flavour of the month and its fashions, and you have to disagree with the old masters. Rabbits are coprophagic. Humans are cogitophagic, but are only able to comfortably digest already digested thoughts. The unknown and unseen gives humans indigestion.

Poo to popular acclaim. Sod society.

What’s it really worth in the end? What’s it like to wake up at the end of your days and know that you never created a single thing in your life, but just bought the reactions of people – comfort, reassurance, shock, anger? Art is for people to respond to. The artist cannot exist without the world and the world cannot survive for long without the artist, but art is not about catering for people.

The day the expectations of your audience affect what you are crafting in your hands, the sooner you should hang up your pen, paintbrush or plectrum. You’re old enough to walk, unaided, without having to crawl. Don’t be a baby, and judge yourself by your own standards. Challenge yourself. Think for yourself, as your audience should think and challenge themselves, but don’t expect them to. Don’t expect anything. Don’t ever write for an audience. Just do whatever it is you are compelled to, if at all. Don’t try to shock, but don’t try to please. Don’t try at all. Do, or do not, there is no try. Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

God didn’t win any design awards for the human race, but he wasn’t looking for any either.

It was just something he had to do.

no no no i won’t take your nasty medicine. you sluiced it all. it meant nothing but still you put it in – took it out. so easy. can’t do can’t can’t do. stuttering like i was a child again. death. that was what i came here to say. death. i sat on the platform last night, on the bus. i thought about death. i held my breath and wondered how long it would take. i imagined my skin turning to leather and my eyes melting to white pulp. i haven’t thought about such things for years. another form of medication i guess. it’s insidious – if they can’t shove it into your mouth they put a stitch in your time. everyone’s so kind. everyone just wants to help. they want to help you to be just like them. people disappoint. friends can’t be there for ever and clumsy lovers always want too much or too little. love just never materialises. not anymore. but that’s okay. you have to accept the nature of the illness and move on. what is it you want of me? do you want anything of me? i can’t just be here, can i? i can’t just be existing? i cannot even feel. why can i not feel? how I can just be here to just exist but not even feel? where did my feelings go? drained in the blisters you lanced for my own good good good. because you thought they were ugly. those weren’t blisters, they were my eyes, brown like the moon isn’t and bumbling as it lies, silently, but sparkling blue from within. everyone has brown eyes you know, deep down. i am half dead already because you’re a thief. because you took it all from me. why? why did you do that to me? i don’t care. i care too much. i’m so tired all the time. nothing seems real anymore. everything seems pretend – arbitrary, meaningless, predictable. i was chasing something once. someone maybe. now i don’t remember. now i chase anything in case it might be the thing i lost. i’ve moved beyond it all. i’ve fallen so far far behind. a smiling carcass with dominant-gene-brown eyes. i’ve always hated my eyes, and the person who gawps moronically out at the beautiful hateful simple world from behind them.