Someone downstairs is drilling into the wall. I lie back on the mattress and try not to imagine it’s my head being bored into, the shrill scream of metal on plaster resonating through bone and wood alike. This is a Tuesday. Who am I today? I have a become Tuesday. Remember, not all calls will be successful but every call will be charged. Uncertainty flares again upon my belly and I tear off another few layers of skin without a second thought. Suddenly, with the call of an unseen bird commander from the other side of the window, the drill ceases, and the burning stops. The world inside the prison falls entirely silent, and even the leaves beyond the glass cease their slow bobbing dance out of respect for everything that remains trapped within - clawed at, bored at, but never breaking the thinnest of barriers.
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.
i’m finding it hard to eat. vegetables taste like they’re rotten. meat doubly so. i can feel the mashed up remains of putrefying flesh turning and gurgling in my stomach and i have to fght the uge to be sick. my throat burns. surely it’s the remnants of my soul i can taste on fire. i am jsut a shadow of what i used to be. i miseed an opportunity a long time ago - i see that - a fundamental and yet incconspicuous chance to take my life where it should have gone. whther that was success or death i now no longer know. i now no logner have the energy to care. i could end my life now but i lack even the interest in doing that. i am not a coward because i no longer even know what courage is. i live every day, increasingly, without feeling anything. wasting -that is all this is. wasting flesh, wasting time, wasting away. this. is. not. life. and yet i lack the will or interest to make any of this better. why is nothign better. why am i cocooned, embamed, buried alive in my own body, in my own mind? why does having lived no time at all feel like i have lived too much. can i even make you understand? can i make you care? can i make myself care? you see, i can’t even write this. i can’t write anything anymore. it once used to come so easily, and with such great certainty. now it’s all guesswork. all done with mirrors and tricks of the light and the smile of a conman. i’m just reading out the words i found in something like a magician’s book once. i have no idea what they mean. i can’t put them all together. i do not crave death. i do not. i simply hate my life. i smply can’t stop believing that there must be something else. something more or something less - i don’t care, just something different. something that surely makes sense. this urge to be sick again. the sickly sloppy pizza left half eaten on the plate. just looking at the charred flesh and the watery pineapples sends bile pooling at the back of my throat. wasted food. wasted money. you have to make the best of everything. you have to make the best of decay. right now i know where i could go and what i could let happen. i could just go there, right now, and all of this could end. and i know it would, and i know i could do it. so why don’t i? why don’t i? do i want to live, is that it? do i secretly enjoy the squalour? am i just a coward through and through - not afraid of endings but simply scared of action? i don’t have anyone to talk to. i don’t have anyone who understands. everyone’s too afraid to admit they know nothing. they’re all too afraid to admit they don’t care. i wouldn’t care. why should anyone else? why can’t someone else? i’d rather the honesty thn the saccharine. i’d rather the truthful indifference than the constant well meaning gawp of the uncomprehending. if my mother can’t hug me and tell me everything will be okay - if i have no lover’s arms to lose myself in and take a breath from the world, then how can polite concern possibly save me? i lost my spark and it’s gone, forever. how can anyone else truly know what that feels like? how can anyone else know what it feels like to live like a corpse and feel yourself achieve nothing but rot, all around you - the stench of yourself and the sight of even the food you must eat turning your very stomach? i am going to make myself sick and get this rotting flesh out of the acid burning inside of me. then i will go to that place and stare it in its absent face. i will imagine myself there and see if that thought brings me any comfort, any peace. no. will i do any of this? i will not. i will just stay here. i will just resign myself to inaction. i do not fear death because i died a long time ago.
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.
this morning i woke up on the wrong side of bed and didn’t get out of it until my body had already left the house.
“This is a difficult time for us. Your reception to things is going to get a little odd. “
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll find out.”
i hardly blinked on the tube today because my head was so full of thoughts. i only knew this when a tear welled and fell from my eye. i didn’t even even feel it sting at first. isn’t that just the way it always goes though? i’m doing weird things again, like pretending i’m drunk when i’m not because it absolves me of responsibility - no one expects anything of you. no one asks what’s wrong, or asks questions you don’t want to answer and then storms off declaring with a look that you’re being difficult. no one gives you that insufferable face of tireless sympathy because they want to help. it’s much better being stupid. infinitely so. the bruises come before the blow. i looked at your face this morning and it occurred to me how much you look like the person i used to know. and then i thought about the conversation i had with another sort of you, the one where, yet again, i got kicked around the room with the best of intentions - stabbed with a smile and punched with a hug. the broken tart with a broken heart slipped through the earth and i barely noticed, until i found myself reaching out for him - clutching hold of him, half conscious of what was happening. as for the flesh that sprouted through the earth in the first place, i couldn’t care less. i have no history here. they are all dreams made real. why do dreams hurt? why are the most savage weapons intangible? mirrors and cycles, and the spinning apes who stare into themselves, the nature of what it is to be human. I am sick of it. I am become flesh. what is there in this dizzying spinning ball of neuroses and self-obsession, clinging to the nearest ball of light in an endless place of darkness and cold? what is there here that is real?
Not allowed. This is just something that happens. But where is it? I don’t know what to do with myself. Cheese. Fields. sunflowers with blue horizons that stretch on and on over the golden corn - rainclouds mustering breath at their apex and a moisture that you can only taste and not smell. world, spinning and breathing. breath, everywhere, but not here. this is a still room, this is a living tomb that is a tomb for the living, this is the place where dreams come to rest, and oversleep and not bother waking up when they find they’ve missed their place in the text. turn to dust. i don’t like the polished floors and the walls are too bland - give me colour, something garish, something blue, something red. give me dirt and darkness. give me a fucking mcdonalds oozing clots and fatjuice and staining these very important sheets of paper. give me that cow tortured till death and buried stuffed in a dry bun and i’ll eat it without the sqeamishness in my right big toe. i can feel the rain, can taste that moisture. it’s torture. can feel the unclenching grip of my fist on my sword that isn’t there as i don’t swing it round and round above my head as i don’t slice the air. what does one do with these fragments that come out - this exercise, this sweating? can you knit a sweater out of them? can you eat them, regurgitated so? hunger. oh yes. hunger. i haven’t felt like eating in days.
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loneliness is a physical pain that hurts all over. loneliness is a physical pain that hurts all over. brain heavy with nothing. these moments come less often than before, but they still come. you can keep something in a cage you know. but it has to get out and does sometimes. these are the moments when i’m at my most honest, my most deceptive, my most profound and my most trite. and when i fit most with the world man made for himself, because i am at my most meaningless. meaningless. without meaning or purpose. we find our own purpose. this is a blessing and a curse i think. there’s too much space in the universe, and yet not enough on earth, so we end up doing nothing. drifting. drifting. sometimes i think i have no soul because it always starts with the absence to feel. why is it the happiness doesn’t seem real and the pain does? i used to have an answer for this once but i think i’ve forgotten it. i find it very hard to connect with people you know. really connect. i have to stop doing things like smoking and sleeping with people i’ll never see again because they say its bad for the physical aspect of my frame - bad for what everyone else insists is my temple, but i think should just be a car. isn’t it strange how there are so many ways to die, and yet so few ways to suffer? what does this mean? i don’t know. what does any of this mean? what does anything mean? this is me sitting in the universe - big universe, head either exploding with the weight of it all as it spins, or having the endless void and nothingness poured into it until it doesn’t swell. i feel really tired. bad joke - that isn’t funny. it’s gone on too long. you need to keep stuff like that short and to the point for it to work. i do feel really tired but going to sleep will give me guilt. i think my head is spinning and that’s why i’m tired. i’m hungry, but the last thing i feel like doing is eating. or drinking. or doing anything really. it’s as if anything there is to do isn’t worth doing. there must be something worth doing. there must be something worth. there must be something. there must be. time to collapse and close my eyes. if you think this is tedious you should see it all from where i’m standing. but i’m lying. if you think this is madness then you should see the awful stagnant sanity of the world and tell me that that’s what really makes sense. [INSERT LAUGH HERE - UPROARIOUS CANNED LAUGHTER THAT LASTS FOR TWENTY SIX YEARS. DOT DOT DOT]
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Worse things happen at sea you know. Just sit back and watch it - watch its currents, clashing against each other, making waves.
woke up this morning, scent of stale cerebral hypoxia stillborn in the room. i sleep with a teddy now. i look and see my arm is tight around his neck. had he been a child, as UnGod intended, i would have killed him in my sleep. imagine that, even a child murdering the thing he loves with a loving embrace. moan moan moan. blah blah blah. wail wail wail. hello wall, what do you think of my predicament? wind, hold still while i tack this onto you. who am i angry at here? you or me? are these words my own? who’s talking? not her, constantly interrupting me while I try and make sense of this. not him with his tacit promise of chastisement for half explained instructions - “the hamster spins the wheel with a push.” prattle. plastic. paper - who cares? who cares?! this is life and death here people! ha ha ha! people. people. i can’t love people. i’m sorry, you know i tried. i can’t love people. i hate people. people get in my way, with their slow bumbling thoughtless movements, with their clumsy plodding predictable thoughts. and yes i know it’s me. i know i’m the one who is wrong and doesn’t fit. believe me, i know that. this is what is cold. alone tastes like that. funny - isn’t death meant to be the antithesis of life? will death be about warmth and feeling connected, feeling needed, feeling important? i’ve tried, you know i’ve tried, but i don’t fit anywhere. i’ve tried but i can’t connect with anyone. not anymore. you say you never have the time to write, but i see you sitting there, everyday, like broken clockwork, your silence a carotid reflex, watching me through your window on the world, watching me dress, bathe, cry, shout, laugh, sing, drink and vomit. you just watch and never take part, never get involved, never condone or console. is this what i am to you now - an exhibition? this still life, warts and all, now something for you to look at and think “ahhh, nostalgia is nice”? i have never once loved anyone who truly loved me, so go figure.
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.
