bad trip/mind fuck...

Sometimes I am strangled by sleep, as if I prefer the world of my own imagination more than the world of coffee and cigarettes and staring out of the windows of trains.

Last night I slept for 16 hours, and when I woke up, everything had changed. My dreams moved me and shook me and made me understand what he said to me about his dream, and now I too know the black moth of doom that flutters in his ribcage.

And the absolute, secret mess I have made inside my head, and the happy ending that is only possible with my eyes closed and the world gone

his guilt an endless velvet noose that kills them both in different ways...

yet still she knows her place. the warmth of an empty night, a substitute that will do in distraction. a body inbetween. a hand to hold when senses are corrupted, a regret that burns in the light of day. a lonely ghost that will obey, that on its own is without weight and means less than nothing. a broken face.

she wears you like a glove and clings for dear life. she dares herself to feel but she is neutron cold and at fission fell down. she retreats to the lonely cold palace of bone she lately calls home and pulls out the pins.

she sits at the kitchen table and smokes and smokes. toke after wretched toke. she downs wine, she upends glass after glass, she breaks silences with her own voice, speaking into the dark to ears that cannot possibly hear, a voodoo mantra to the lost.
and on TV they bomb the moon but it is still your face she sees in that lunar blue wilderness. there is a hole where your smile used to be, and the flag of sorrow has claimed you both.

and in dreams she descends like breath and writes her name in the dust beneath your bed. an incantation to that crumple of empty sheet, that lie of closed eye. the palm of her hand a roadmap of the future, a tomorrow of the same. she is in love with an analogue past. she knows it like her own veins, pale at her wrist, and which life still limps through. she imagines a tree, and a ribbon, and a yellow goodbye in a bow around her neck.

they lie like the dead, perfectly embalmed and mortuary cold. the distance between them is carefully measured and they do not touch at all.
she begs for sleep and the maze of dreams in which she can do anything, even feel, but she can hear the others through the paper wall. she can hear what real people sound like. their voices are low and she can't make out their words but she doesn't want to hear them anyway. she knows what comes next, and slowly they start. she puts a pillow over her head but it is not enough and as they move together she hears every squeak and moan. a symphony of pure torture, because she can remember being wanted, being touched. it's there in her mind like a hunger, or a dark cancer, a black sun.
she swims alone into the Yenne Velt, formless and without being, still whole, still real, but dead to the pleasures of the living. somewhere on the edge of nothing, Lilith, the first Eve, laughs and her sacral chakra implodes into dust.
at last the dam breaks and she is Niagara, falling into the dark.

nothing has changed, except everything. her bad black heart still races to her throat and she hopes the direction of her gaze will not betray her. she understands the language of invisible gestures, impossible to control, and clings to the wall lest she fly like iron-filings to his magnetic north. her body, it speaks a secret alphabet and he is turning like a daisy toward the sun. someone has torn off his petals, completely. another mistake is pinned to his sleeve like a tattered flag, an army of fluttering regrets surrounding his defeated heart. he now knows the chaos of the void, those haunted, hungry, empty eyes have seen skies turn black and glass has rained around him: everywhere he looks another girl reflects, sewing shut eyes and lips and legs. but even now her bad black heart is soft and weak; when he looks at her, she looks back. a second is too long in that half-forgotten gaze and somewhere in a past life, the ghost of her just aches and aches.

your stolen shadow rages in my pocket. i take it out and look at it and it writhes with the blue-black agony of dyed hair against too-pale skin. i wonder if you have missed it, wonder if you have felt hollow, or as transparent as a knot of cobwebs, trailing from the ceiling.

i have many shadows, but yours is the best. no matter how many times i crush it, it never breaks. i hold it up to the light and it bursts with tiny rainbows; it has the opaque haze of washing-up liquid bubbles, or petrol. i try to burn it but it just smokes, try to drown it but still it floats. it is pure liquid coal and i hide it in the black of my eye.

after 2012 came and went, he was disappointed. nothing much happened. he turned on the tv and it was still the same old war, life was still the same old gameshow with slightly different actors repeating the same old lines.

he sat on the morning train and looked at peoples faces and they seemed as asleep as ever. their eyes were open but they didn't seem alive. he listened to them speak and they all sounded like robots, programmed with the same story, the same 2.2 beta version of interaction. he started to make notes. he studied them.

at night, when he had removed his rather expensive striped silk noose and hung it on the back of the door next to his suit jacket, he would examine his notebook, read the snippets of conversation he had overheard and recorded.

the first thing he noticed was that people liked to talk about what they had seen on tv. they would speak so fondly of people who didn't exist, as if they were real. they would analyze every pretend situation and give their verdict as if it were a matter of life and death. this, he soon realised, was the only time people ever really seemed to come alive, when they were talking about these imaginary worlds and these imaginary places and these imaginary people.

alot of the time, people would repeat things they had read in a magazine or a newspaper. he heard the same story over and over again, like a pointless, stupid echo. even peoples lives seemed the same. every day a different face beside him on the train would recount the similar tale of the day before, meaningless anecdotes detailing some random child, or some random boyfriend, or some random car/holiday/house they had bought. it was like listening to the drone of a million and one ants, the pulse of the hive mind sweeping them from day to identical day.

he didn't know what to make of it all. he put on his tv and on every channel, people were dressing in the same clothes, trying to copy each other, people were going to plastic surgeons and demanding they be changed to look the same as someone else. people were all driving the same car, drinking the same cola, smoking the same cigarettes. they were all giving their children the same few names, all parting their hair in the same direction, all listening to the same music, all dying of the same diseases.

and he looked up from his notebook, and stared at the tie hanging on the back of the door. even that was the same. the same three diagonal stripes. and he looked at his shoes, and he thought, impossible! those were the same shoes a million other tired feet had worn before him.

and he got out his wallet and looked at his identity card. that grey, shocked, badly lit face didn't look anything like him. that name, printed underneath, that didn't capture the essence of who he was. how could it? he started to repeat his own name, over and over. it just sounded like noise, not like real words. it sounded no different to the squeak of a monkey in a zoo, or the squeak of any monkey, anywhere.

his ape heart beat furiously and he needed air.

he went outside and looked around. there was still enough light to see, so he lit a cigarette and started paying attention. he sat cross legged on the lawn, which he had trimmed to the same length as everyone else in his street, and looked at the grass. the more he looked, the more he noticed how no two blades were the same. they weren't even close.

he looked at the sky, at the clouds, and there was no symmetry. he went to bed feeling very confused.

the next morning on the train, he didn't make any notes, he just looked. he looked at the sea of faces in the same way he had looked at the grass but nothing stood out. it was just the same bland face over and over again, like some kind of repeating hologram.

some of the faces were male, and some were female, and some were old and some were fat and some were incredibly ugly, but when it came down to it it was just the same old face, repeating forever, a self-replicating fractal of identical skulls, to infinity. their lips moved and their eyes opened and closed but the more he looked, the more he could see that they were like animations in a perpetual loop. they never thought anything new, or expressed an opinion that was entirely their own, they were all stuck in one monotone vinyl groove, repeating themselves forever.

and he watched them disconnecting from the world, plugging themselves into music players so they wouldn't have to listen, texting each other so they wouldn't have to speak, and he thought, what the hell is this?

whenever one of them approached him at the water-cooler now, he didn't know what to say. he would just stare at their lips and hope he looked like he was listening. he lost all interest in girls, because eventually, no matter how pretty or different she appeared at first, all he could see was the dull grey face of his boss, writhing beneath him, and he would have to makes his apologies and leave.

he began to find he couldn't tell people apart anymore. his own face in the mirror every morning was the only thing that seemed real. all around him were programmed people following sub-routines he no longer understood. they went to work and came home and watched tv and went to sleep, then got up and went to work again, over and over again, as if they were sleep-walking, as if they had never fully been awake.

he was pretty sure he was awake. he turned the lights on and off in his room every now and then, because he was sure he had read that in dreams, this was impossible. he couldn't remember why.

he got out his notebooks again, tried to find an answer, or at least some meaning, anything. but it made no sense, and he cried with frustration.

and suddenly he remembered being a child, knocking on peoples doors and running away, scrambling behind the nearest bush and having to choke back laughter as a confused face would appear, staring blankly at their empty doorstep, looking this way and that, shaking their heads silently and going back inside.

he put on his trainers and went into the street. he knocked on his neighbours door. noone came. so he tried the next, and the next, and the next. he didn't bother running away. he knocked more and more furiously, shouting hello. he peered through windows. in each house, people were huddled around their tvs, while cold plasma light streamed the same images onto their empty eyeballs. in each house, people just sat and stared, barely noticing each other, or his face, pressed against the glass.

he went home and closed the door. this had to be a dream. a dream within a dream, with no waking. he got into bed and closed his eyes.

and as he slept, the meat robots did not once break their gaze, did not lift their hollow eyes from the screen. they watched every second of his dreaming. the last free human, his soul just a film, his mind their entertainment.

and they sat around, plugged directly in, chasing every last synaptic wave, every last abstract, confused, hyper-real thought, absorbing every memory, until all that was left was a tiny spark, feeding them with liquid light, and he was just a spot, fading into darkness on the screen.

i lie in my tamba and listen to the jungle. she whispers like a green ghost, a solar wind. i hear leaves uncurl, i hear silver fronds unfolding. i am motionless, eyes cast deep into the forest floor, searching for the plant spirit. and through the dense, still air, i see a tiny bush begin to move, the radial leaves shake and tingle.

with jaguar grace i am on my feet and moving, i run with the silence of the hunt, over sinew of vine, over creeping fern, through mud, through shallow stagnant pools that smell of the deepest forest, not once disturbing the gentle hum of a thousand tiny canopy birds singing at the sun.

and in the distance, a purple flash and silver sparks, and i break through into a clearing and kneel at the bed of a shallow stream, and i splash my face with water. i wait.

i hear a voice; it comes like the rasping of reeds, an old woman's voice, as ancient as the giant vines and thicker than a thousand men. and in my heart, an icaros, and i start to sing.

and with every line, i am back on my feet and moving, slower this time, my body pushing forward in waves, as if am a puppet to the words. she sings me on. each step of this insane dance brings me closer and somehow i am back in my tamba, nestled in my pile of leaves, eyes shut, her voice receeding back towards the sky, lost above the canopy.

and from out of the blackness comes the face of a white man, floating above the forest in a metal boat with the wings of a great bird. and i look into his eyes, the empty pale eyes of a skull, seeing nothing, dead at heart, and i see his dream. and his dream is of blackened skies, and desert wastes, and poisoned water, and the jungle is gone. and i see a billion tiny faces staring at a billion tiny glowing screens, and they are watching their dreams! and these are more like nightmares, and demons rise up through these boxes, and these people, they just sit and invite them into their heads, this flow of visions straight through their eyes, and they are watching each other die in so many terrible ways. and they can shape-shift too, but they don't use the plants. they go to sleep and others crowd round and take knives to their faces and cut their skin like sun-dried hide and re-arrange it and when they wake up they are someone else, forever. like making masks.

and i remember my father, spearing fish in the waterfall, and my mother, chewing manioc and spitting it into an old clay jug, and i see the faces of a thousand ancestors swim before me as trees fall and the ground shakes.

i leap from my tamba and run into the wall of green, and every step burns like an ant-bite, and my icaros has become a scream, and my jaguar howl pierces everything. and then i am in the clearing, and above me roars an angry silver bird, a wreathe of spear-tips revolving at its head. it is louder than a waterfall. i am stung in the face by sand and fallen forest dirt as it breathes its terrible breath from above.

and from within it's head, which catches the sun like a pool, lightning flash, again and again. and it just hovers above me, moving in slow circles, flash flash flash.

and i pick up a handful of stones, and start throwing them into the air, over and over, and i realise i am still screaming. and the surface of the pool boils and waves underneath the bird, and the grass is blown flat and my hair is pulled back from my face. so i run into the water, and look straight up at the bird, and i bring my palms down flat against the water again and again, and i command it in the darkest words of the brujo to retreat.

i duck down under the water and when i emerge, the bird is circling, and then away. all i can hear, as those violent wings beat upward, is my own heart, and my own breath, and the ripples of the red water, meeting the edges of the pool.

and i know of a world, a broken, empty world where nothing has any meaning, and see that it lies just beyond the edge of the green. i see the shiny locusts of oblivion cutting swathes through the trees, shaving the land. i see these white ghosts at the edge of our village, each embrace bringing a sickness so otherwordly no plant has been dreamed yet to cure.

so i find the oldest, thickest trueno caapi vine, and cut a piece the size of my forearm. i fill my cloth bag with chacruna leaves and i take them back to my tamba, and start a fire. i collect water from the pool and fill my cooking pot. i layer shredded sections of vine and then cover them with leaves. i watch the pot boil, and stare into the flames, and amongst the smoke and steam, the words of my intention are almost visible.

and i throw in white flowers shaped like bells, and i murmur " toe' " over and over and this centres me. i keep on calling her forth, and i hear the spirit of datura stirring in the darkness, choosing her form. and i know that when that silver bird returns, with it's white-faced men, empty-souls filled with dead-knowledge, trying to swap our land for clothes and flat shiny beads that can be exchanged for anything, even love, i will be ready. i will intoxicate them with my dreams, i will make them see.

it's always underwear, then socks. Skittles must be eaten in the correct order; purple, red, orange, yellow, green. i can't watch other people eat cereal, and seeing a used bowl with stray, flaccid cornflakes drowning in a sad grey pond of milk actually makes me vomit. i can't stand the sight of empty baked-bean skins. the best thing to do is not to eat them at all.

i hate it when things are bigger than they are meant to be; like life-size chess pieces, or peoples faces on billboards, eyes the size of doors. or people on stilts. i hate those massive shoes that clowns wear, and i also hate clowns.

i hate it when there are too many small things as well; like frog-spawn, or swarms of insects, or nests of baby vultures with their obscene, open beaks and featherless, terrible heads.

sometimes when i'm in the supermarket, or on the bus, or waiting in a queue, i worry that i will spontaneously develop tourettes syndrome, and start shouting out the kind of words that make my skin-crawl, like "moist", and "preggers" and "panties" and "vulva". sometimes, on the underground, i worry that i will throw myself onto the tracks, and i have to stand, muscles tensed, completely motionless until the train stops and the doors open.

i can't go outside when it's raining because i hate it when the pavement has earth-worms on it, wriggling through puddles, contracting and expanding, and you never know which end is the head. i also hate to see those dehydrated, grey-brown coils of worm shit in the grass, because why is it coiled? surely a worm shit should just look like a worm?

and i worry that i may become morbidly obsese, one of those people you see on TV being removed from their house by a crane, inert for years in some dirty bed filled with crumbs, a pool of spreading flesh, remote-controls sinking forver into the folds of a carelessly draped arm, just a big fat osmoting human puddle, sucking things in. that horrifies me.

i think that's why i also hate anything inflatable. even worse, something inflatable, deflating. all the air coming out. i hate it when people blow up balloons and just let them go. as a child, i cried at a birthday party because i sat on a balloon and it popped. that terrible squeaky-squeak you hear when someone is trying to make animals out of them, or hats, and always the fear that with one wrong twist, it will explode in their face. i hate seeing old ones, still pinned to the wall days after some celebration, turning into over-sized raisins. or ones that have popped, just an empty rubber skin, and the fact that the ends of them always look like arseholes, or belly-buttons. somewhere in my head, i can see myself lying on a bouncy castle as the air is let out, that disappointing slow-fart hiss, the walls collapsing around me and i struggle to breathe. turned into some kind of parcel. and don't even get me started on blow-up dolls, and their horrible, vulgar mouths.

i am nauseated by the smell and look of babies, and the way they always stare at you, like they are plotting something. i hate how they are so stupid, because i don't remember being that stupid. they are useless. i can't see why anyone would want one. they don't do anything.

and i don't like them when they grow up, i don't like people, they just take up space.

other people smell funny, and fart and burp and their skin flakes and they leave stains on the toilet bowl, or the seat. other people's hairs, in your soap or blocking the drain, all grey slime and matter. i can't go near the sea, because it is filled with other peoples shit and piss, other peoples tampons and johnnies and sick. the smell of other peoples spit. other peoples tongues, in your mouth. imagine that. or used cotton-buds with ear-wax on them, or when elastoplasts drop off and float in swimming pools.

there are so many horrible things. and sometimes i try to think of the nice things, to try and calm down when breathing into a brown paper bag isn't helping. so i think of clean white towels and daisies and the blue sky and a basket of kittens. or milkshakes, pinecones, starfish. or in my head i make up a song, or i count to a million. or i try to invent new words, and then think about what they mean. i have made 426 new words, but i can't tell you what they are because hearing someone else say them would spoil them. they are just for me. and i say them to myself over and over, and eventually i stop shaking and i can breathe again, and never underestimate the potential of your shirt-buttons to make 26 seconds in a lift with someone seem like 26,000 years of absolute hell.

the saddest part is, every ten years i have to start again. ten years feels like ten minutes, when you're as old as me. i can't even remember when i was born. all i can remember is that at some point, i was a child, back in the days before mirrors, staring at the backs of knees, stung in the face by long grass. before the hunger set in.

and i can look back across centuries, maybe even millenia. oceans of time. i am as constant as breath and keep on going. those endless faces, they change so rapidly that they all blur into one. just voiceless ghosts. but every now and then, there is an original. an old-soul. you remember them from dreams, maybe, or from the black worlds of anti-matter before you were born. they look into your eyes, void-deep, and it burns straight through. like a sunspot that never fades. or a hole in your soul, if you have one.

and so you seek them out, you run through countless seasons, chasing shadows, your heart an insane and empty compass, navigating wildly. they become magnetic north, your everlasting attachment. but you will be denied until the end of time.

so anyway, i start again. i can never grow old, but those faces around me, they sag and they crease, the hair thins and turns grey. so on i go. or else my cover is blown. and him, he's always one step ahead. hunted like prey over space and time.

and sometimes you forget, you become so immersed, you succumb to the illusion of the present, and you feel so weak that all you can do is go home, and put on your best dress, and HUNT.

and later on, when you've left them sleeping, you look in the mirror and that sunspot is still a sorry silver coal in the hollow of your eye, and you blink away the tears, and his voice starts whispering. and he repeats those words over and over again, from that millisecond when he loved you, and you know you can never stop.

so you're chasing him down. and one year you're kissing GIs and waiting for the bomb, another you're tuning in and dropping out, another still you're handing out fruit in a warehouse in Brixton, while a tiny white pill dissolves on your tongue. love-heart. and you get more and more out of your head but with every blink you see his face and you crash into another decade, leaving friends and lovers behind, starting again and again and again. and friends children and grand-children, one face replacing the next, and still you go on.

and eventually you evolve, and you learn to feed on thoughts instead, so you target the weak, and now it is into your office these fragile prey troop, and as they explain their miasma of pains, you grow fat and strong and your battle-scars heal and you feel READY. you'll find him. soon you will be able to shape-shift too. and overhead, the sunspot tumours the sky.

so as you're fucking, the music is violent, and all this feels like a smack in the face, but when that flash comes you are ready, and you breathe his energy into you and you know you just added another ten years, you've bought a little more time. and this makes you smile and bless him, he thinks it was him. and you're putting on your underwear and your eyes are empty and you don't hear a word he says. and you don't look back, and you don't see him close the door.

and you see the movies, and you read the books, and you know what they say. but they're wrong. noone knows what it's like, not really. and all these soulless people, these paper stars, they struggle for immortality through TV, and yours is like a punishment, the prison of the hyper-real. here you are, serving a million lifetimes, sucking out peoples souls with unbelievable clarity; the victims, they never forget your face, and are haunted until the end of time by that stellar cold in your eye. and The Logos starts to speak and it's your voice they hear but by then you are lightyears away. you are caught by the lip on his terrible fish-hook and you fear you will never smile again.

and so you execute precisely. just a little bit of life-force, here and there. you steal soul and memories and leave an empty space that borders on stupidity. you create vacant lots, zealots, followers. bastard children, who think of nothing but you. everything is framed by you. and you just don't give a shit. they are beneath you. your eye is trained on the sun. on him.

and you have so much time to sit and think. you ignore the letters, the phone-calls, the knocks on the door. you've taken all you need from them. and maybe it's like they say, a vampire creates others of it's kind, so these people are desperate and hollow inside, hungry for you. you've taken their very core away and they don't even realise, they don't understand how it works, the art of feeding. but you've taken away their pain as well as everything else. it's a kindness, really. and you sit in the dark and smoke and you put on records, but they are all spoiled now, they hold too many memories. you're absolutely choked with other peoples emotions, but yours still float on the top, like terrible foam.

and sometimes you just get on the train and spend hours going nowhere, all the world a green bruise, and you let yourself listen to those songs and you have to blink into the sun to hide your tears. and so you chose another victim right there on the platform and you're just biding your time but you know no matter how many lives you swallow, no matter how many years you gain, it will never be enough. even living forever. imagining an everlasting k-hole of time: your heart like an ice-berg before a child with a single match. it all just seems impossible. if only you could forget!

and of course, you have your ways of trying; lines of white powder, wine-glasses murky with pink liquid, small bitter pills; but none match that first high, that pure, clean, natural buzz. happiness? it's all just a matter of chemistry to you now anyway. you've thought about it often enough to know it was a clash of hormones and endorphins and pheremones. you could almost write an equation for it, that's how textbook-pure biology it all was. it amuses you to devalue it like this, to make it seem insignificant, or at the very least, as inevitable as matter. just rocks in space. a dead comet in endless free-fall, blackened and burned and dead. like you, from the neck up.

and you wish it was all just as easy as a stake through the heart, but yours is diamond-hard. yours is coal. and it has been broken and crushed and as sharp as windscreen glass for years now, and yet here you are. the living dead. you curse the one who gave you this hunger and took away even the promise of the grave, and how he knew exactly what he was doing. but one day, one day, maybe you'll find him, and with a single kiss you will pour into him all the sorrows of the world. it will choke him completely.

and oh yeah, this was about me, but i'm just saying. it's how it would be for you too.

("i'm scared of being born again... if it's in this form again....")

you still hear the dogs bark at night. without the hum of your own blood, you can hear everything. every milk-scented babies breath, every drop of dew exploding against a bare footprint of trampled grass. but such black nothingness! and you can hear these things, these primordial buzzes, so loud that you can almost feel, almost see, falling empires and the faces of the lost, but you are just MIND, so on the edge of almost you must stay.

just waiting. you're not even a soul, you're just a radio. and you keep forgetting you haven't got a body anymore but you've found this way, if you screw one imaginary eye tight up, of hearing other peoples thoughts. and so you tune in. mind-hack. you can't stop listening. because the voices never stop, you hear the lot. it passes the time.

and you're waiting for something. and you're nothing, yet you just ARE. rebirth? you can't remember your life so well anymore. all these flashes of light. sometimes it's like watching celluloid melt; you see her face and her lips move but the words are meaningless. she says them over and over.

and you try to tune in, and if you had a face and there was someone to see, you'd look ridiculous, but you squint just right into the black and all these verbs smack you like heavy rain through the ears you no longer possess. and she is saying secret things in a forgotten language and oh how your sorry heart aches.

and if you had hands and there was a pen you would write them down, onto yourself because what the fuck is paper anyway? and you would start some kind of library of the lost and spend these next empty five million years memorizing every line you ever saw bloom like everlasting ivy from the edge of her liquid eye...

but you can't, so all you can do is shift like tv snow against white-noise, praying violently with no words to a half-remembered god who never existed that you don't come back. not again. not in human form.

("You're such a cliche,")

because you can still see her, she's like a shadow against the sun, she's like a cloud of sorrow hanging in your empty air, she's river and sky and trees, she's leaves. and eternally rooted, now her thoughts have stained your mind and turned your veins to mud. she's in your blood.

and you pray for some water form, a sea-horse in the brine. things would be different then. how you'd float.

but in this blackness, you're just a mote.

it started off small. a tiny project. a gift. it was a gesture of love, it was showing how completely and utterly i gave myself to you.

i used to love painting you; these walls are lined with a million different versions of your face, your body, your hair. i couldn't help it; every time i looked at you it was like looking at a masterpiece. and we would be sitting outside some pavement cafe, drinking coffee, watching people go by and i would look up at you in your cloud of sun, with your perfect prism of bones, and i wouldn't be able to stop myself from sketching you. anything would do; a paper napkin, a bus ticket, the palm of my hand.

and in those days when we were apart, i would disconnect from the world and smoke myself stupid. i would be high on paint fumes and the image of you, and i would stay up for nights on end just painting, my fingertips sore and skinned from rubbing against the canvas. i would touch you into being. these hands that had known your body could recreate you from the ether and pin you like a butterfly.

it felt like stealing your soul, but you were stealing mine. for every drop of my blood, sweat and tears that mixed with the paint, bringing you to second life, the more you infiltrated my every cell and molecule. i was adam creating you from my rib, but forever more the hollow space would echo and ache.

see, you were a complicated sculpture, an impossible puzzle of melting angles, just a blur beneath me, a snow-angel against the sheets. the impression where you lay became the holiest of shrouds.

this is what i think now, your face everywhere i look. even going to the fridge for milk, your face, your face, your face, tiny little sketches, each corner skewered in place with a magnet. a stamp collection shrine to the queen of my world.

and it is all i have, this crowd of you, this sea of eyes, always watching. those eyes that have seen me curse and cry and fall to my knees and carve your name on my arm over and over. those eyes have seen me punch the walls, or lie like the dead for days, completely out of it, knowing nothing, drifting slowly towards the ceiling in a haze of shimmering light. and they have seen me crash back to earth, seen my body become too big for me, seen me buckle under its weight and crawl under the covers to cry myself blind.

and they can see me now, and my masterpiece. it's called, "All of Me". i have mixed cuttings of my own hair into the paint. real tears, real sweat, real saliva. and as i lean back against the canvas, a real, blasted, bloody hole blooms like a sick rose as the shot-gun shell tears through the empty space where my heart used to be.

this is the revenge of an unlived life. treading water.

i can't explain how i discovered it, parallel universe TV. the million alternate endings. i could spend the rest of my life as a spectator, consumed with regret, just watching the different versions of my life unfold. endlessly, forever.

i couldn't tear my eyes away from the screen that first day i found it, the channel of me. technicolour, MTV, reality, me. from death to birth and back again, over and over, limitless potentials, endless permutations.

my coffee went cold in the cup. my morning cigarette became a column of ash between two frozen fingers. i was just so completely gone that i forgot to breathe. the universe had contracted and painted itself across my unblinking iris. it was like dreaming in 3D.

and the first thing i saw, when i turned on the tv, was myself aged 4; my hair still gold on the ends, sitting cross-legged, my skin a milky white against too-long summer grass from which daisies spread like tiny bruised whirlwinds. and i was blowing bubbles through a small blue plastic wand, and in the centre of each one of these smoky, rotating spheres, a minature film of my life was playing at light speed.

as soon as i clicked on the first one, i was hooked. each time, the bubble would expand until it filled the screen, then pop; the bad-trip carnival would begin, like watching a soap-opera in the reflection on the back of your breakfast spoon. imagine the impossible variations that could suck you in as your cereal dissolved in the bowl. ridiculous.

but the things i saw, there are no words to describe. and imagine forgetting everything you ever knew, and watching everything you ever experienced being replayed through the glazed fish-eye of your own imagination, every black thought and apocalyptic mood giving its own version of events, til you no longer know what to believe. til you forget the real you, the you composed of all those memories stacked end over end in the dark chambers of your mind, the you that felt those feelings, the you that held that hand, kissed those lips, knew that overflowing heart completely inside out, no matter how briefly...

well, you tell me you wouldn't do the same, just sit and watch and try to commit those different endings to memory, try to reconstruct from the ashes a story of something that was not doomed from the start. tell me you wouldn't, i won't believe you.

i watch our wedding day, our child being born. i see us lying in a field, making daisy chains, crowning a small blonde child who just laughs and laughs, i see you reading her a bed-time story, i see you well up with pride as you watch her in her nativity play. i see us grey haired and old, holding hands on a park bench, i see our dentures in matching glasses by the bed, i see me throwing earth onto your casket as they lower your body into the ground. in yet another version, i am looking up into your face as the life seeps away from me, tears drip from your cheeks onto mine, and the screen turns black as i die in your arms.

and the more i lie here and waste away, glued to the image of you and me, the less i care. the truth doesn't hurt so much anymore. far better to die watching these possibilities than live forever trapped knowing we never were, we never will. there are millions of endings, and i am going to watch them all. all of these lives, all of these lifetimes, all of them mine. my own world receeding, my own life becoming fiction. chasing your ghost across time and space while the white noise in my head just builds and builds and i drift off, lost in a sea of images.

& i am just an analogue signal, fading like stolen fire. a tiny birthday candle, burned down to the cake. and when they find me, cold and gone, my eyes blasted away, i will have a smile on my face.

when everyone disappeared, at first i was glad. when overnight the world emptied & i awoke alone as if from some terrible dream, i simply lit a cigarette and stared at the sky. things would be easier now there was just me.

it did not particularly matter where everyone had gone, or why. i liked the empty streets, the silence, the freedom to walk into other peoples houses, to sleep in their beds, wear their clothes, eat their food. i spent hours reading diaries, reconstructing ghosts from those scribbled words and photographs; i watched home movies and felt close to these strangers who did not exist anymore. i filled my days with other peoples memories, wandering from house to house, opening drawers, taking souvenirs.

i had never been able to drive, but that didn't matter now. the world was filled with abandoned cars; if i crashed one, i simply took another. i raced against invisible traffic, mounting pavements, doing wild u-turns until the petrol ran out. in the rearview mirror, my eyes were blasted and empty. and suddenly i thought of you, and floored that fucker til i was crashing through your gate, spinning to a stand-still in the middle of your lawn.

and inside your house, i felt afraid as i climbed the stairs. i kicked off the shoes of some long gone girl and continued barefoot, barely able to breathe.

opening your bedroom door, i became a tiny flower in the middle of a tidal wave. i could do nothing under the weight of those memories but sink to my knees and dissolve into brine. i was a mermaid turned to foam once again.

i crawled into your bed, and was drowned all over again by the scent of you, and i lay there and cried for days, turning your pillow black. and i put on one of your t-shirts and i listened to your music and i read your books and i slept in the hollow where your body once lay and i cursed god in every conceivable language.

and i realised i was like Argus, lying patiently at the gates of Ithaca, waiting for you. an abandoned and forgotten pet, dreaming of your touch. it did not matter that everyone else was gone, because for me the world had ended with your goodbye and everything else apart from your return was meaningless.

and then i realised that i was the ghost, waiting for you on the other side, but that you would never come, because you had the whole world and a whole lifetime to fill and all i had was the bitter memory of what i had thrown away, and every time i closed my eyes those final, pathetic seconds would flash before my eyes, a sea of red expanding from each wrist, a tide of valentines roses congealed against a worn old carpet. and my own eyes, empty as the lights went out, forever fixed on the shadow of you, out of reach until the end of time.

And to him I was complicated and cold. Sometimes the voice that spoke was not my own but an echo of things read and remembered. Where did he go?

We bought surfboards and rocked in the sea and our rugs and hallways became jewelled with sand. Every morning grit in the old enamel bath as days were washed away. We ate fish and chips and watched the sea, hair still damp and skin salted and clean. We smoked cigarettes and drank coffee from a cheap red flask while the sun went down over the water and then drove slowly home, describing our waves and our wipe-outs. Every day hoping for swell and the arms of the ocean. And going out just to float, paddling through waves that crashed and curled to sway beyond the breakers , staring at the shore or at the point where sky and sea meet in an infinite line. Catching a wave back in and carving it up, claiming it as totally as each other. Then later in bed, still feeling the ghost-waves rock us toward sleep.

Weekends when we set the alarm before sunrise and drove to the beach in the dark to be the first in the water. Stoned talk about the possibility of surfing a tidal wave. Shivering out of wetsuits by the car, then driving into town to buy breakfast. Forcing the neoprene back on again in the afternoon , still wet and rough with sand, and staying out till exhaustion caught us.

And when winter came, framing our summer photo’s and dreaming of holidays we would never have, planning the bikini and the board shorts and the stamps in the passports we never owned; Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, Bali.

We bought a house by the sea, right on the front, and decorated it with sea-shells and driftwood and pebbles from the beach. I would spend days alone painting the sea, abstracted swirls of blue and white. We bought old storm lanterns in an antique shop, and an old fishing net to hang on the wall with a three-bowl smoked glass buoy in the middle. We bought expensive rugs shaped like surfboards from an Australian website and laid them on the bare wood floors in front of the patio doors, which opened onto a small strip of grass merging into sand. When the summer came, we put down sea grass mats and barbecued meat, watching the horizon for good sets. We took photographs of sunsets and waves and blew them up like posters and hung them on the walls in the living room. We threw out the TV and spent the flat days reading or listening to music, or making Paella from ingredients bought at the seafood deli down the street. He started shaping boards in the basement, and I painted designs into the raw fibre-glass. The small thrill of seeing those boards finished and leaning in the window of the local Surf shop and even better the sight of them floating in the line-up. We were self-sufficient.

Local surf bums came and smoked grass in our kitchen and talked about their travels and brought us primitive-looking woolly haired carvings of surfers from Indonesia, or wall hangings or beads in rainbow colours. People stored their boards in our hallway and paid us in weed. The days came and went and made a pattern of their own. On Saturday nights we lit candles, dozens of little tea-lights across the bleached wood mantle above the hearth, and burned incense cones in tiny silver cups. The kittens skidded and swerved across the polished floors, chasing pine cones and carrying stolen socks in their mouths behind the sofa to kill them.

We drank wine from gold-patterned Moroccan glasses and talked about the state of the world, which would be better if we were in charge of it. We would fall asleep in our chairs, propped up with silk pillows that bore the battle-scars of careless smoking, and wake with cats in our lap, only a few candles still twinkling above the fireplace, in which the embers merely glowed. The sun would be rubbing the horizon red and the gulls would be crying and circling above the fishing boats heading back to harbour.

I would leave him sleeping and feed the cats, and make hazelnut coffee in the machine, and pour it into over-sized teacups and carry it on a tray with warm croissants. I would stoke up the fire and open the glass doors a crack and let the morning air invade our senses.
We’d eat breakfast and listen to the radio and read the Sunday papers. And walk to the shops to buy cigarettes and hold hands on the way back. And then we’d lock the door and fuck each others brains out.

A human is a jigsaw of memories. A cinema reel of images: mind projecting against the closed eyelid the minutiae of living until the lights go down and there is no more.

you're not the first thing he thinks of every morning.
it's not your name he breathes onto a bus window on the way to work.
it's not the thought of you that can bring him to tears.
it's not your face that rises up like a terrible mist and forms behind the closed lids of sleep.
it's not the scent of you that haunts his every waking moment.
it's not the memory of lying in your arms that crushes his heart completely.
it's not your eyes he sees when he looks at the sky and prays for rain.
it's not you that makes him deny a thousand lifetimes and seek a cruel and final oblivion.
it's not you he thinks of when he turns over his wrist, not your voice that whispers as his blood runs cold.

it's not, it's not, it never was.

you bloom black bouquets of fevered lightning.

you are a universe unravelling toward a single point.
you are a full-stop, a grammatical error.
you are endless silence, you are the echo inbetween.

and you are completely transparent, yet give nothing away.

so you drift and you disconnect.
you learn the art of smoke-screen and digression, you become master of auto-puppetry.

yet you look just like the real thing.

you are the most complicated bomb, you won't be defused.

you are sunglasses at night, you are the worlds smallest secret disaster, sometimes a volcano of words, sometimes a singularity amidst a galaxy of pointless thoughts.

and you make me relearn the lost language of the void til i am overcome with meaning. silent centuries pass between us and all that is born is dust.

nothing kills me so slowly as this, flying too close to the sun on imaginary wings.

no torture at all like worshipping a distant star out on the periphery of being. no torture as infinite as your unintended enchantment.

i wait with a traitors heart for the miracle that will never come, a secret disciple forever bound to roll back the rock and find an empty space.

you will elude me until the end of time.

and in all my dreams, you end up as a supernova, and are revealed as the source of all gravity.

and every morning i awake, and am bruised by a million falling apples.

i'm going to kill my sister.

i've thought about it properly, i'm not just making some snap decision that i'll regret.

i hate her, she's so pathetic and needy. she sucks the life out of me. she's the black hole at the centre of the universe, pulling every mote of light in.

and she's always following me around like a fucking shadow, ruining my life, always there with some stupid comment if i meet a man i like, fucking it up.

and just as he leans in to kiss me, he sees her and his face drops, then a look of panic, and you can see him mapping out an exit route, rehearsing some lame excuse in his head. he'll be trying to keep his face neutral but the pure horror in his eyes, he can't hide that. a mixture of pity and disgust. oh yes, the moment will be gone!

and then he'll look at his watch, or check his phone and pretend to have an urgent text. and he'll say, "well, it was lovely to have met you, er, both!" and he'll be off, looking back over his shoulder with an expression of utter relief.

and you know, later on, safe in a bar with his friends, he'll start to tell them about this hot girl he met, and her terrible sister, and his lucky escape, and his friends will shout, "no fucking way, man!" and he'll get good mileage out of the story and noone will think he was cruel or judgemental, because ultimately people are all just fucking shits. this includes me.

so i feel like a permanent cinderella, sweeping the floor while that whiny little bitch hovers around, saying things.

fuck this walt-disney apple-pie "it's so great being a twin!" shit.

you don't know what it's like.

we're conjoined. we're technically one person. she's like this little shrivelled stumpen thing, hanging off my back. she talks constantly. and she refuses to sign the separation papers, so i'm stuck with her, like a hideous fucking dolly back-pack, looking over my shoulder. if i stand straight on, and she's asleep, you would never know she was there. i grew my hair long to try and blank her out. It almost works. I'll stand in front of the mirror late at night and just stare at myself, imagining what it must be like to be just one person, instead of one and a half. one and a chicken wing. one and a fucking biscuit crumb.

but then at the last minute she'll wake up and all you'll see is these nasty little arms and legs flailing, with those disgusting pink slippers she likes to wear hanging off her feet, screaming in her evil munchkin voice,

"what time is it? what time is it? i'm really fucking tired, you know, what are you even doing, anyway? can't you be more considerate?"

and then the illusion is shattered. and i'll want to punch her, but you can't really punch yourself in the back, can you?

so i'll just light a cigarette and smoke it deliberately slow, to piss her off. she hates me smoking. if she says anything, i just say, "fuck off, they're my lungs."

don't get me wrong, i wasn't always such a bitch. when we were kids it was almost a novelty, a party piece. but i know my parent's always loved her best, the little helpless one, the little dangling tiny- tears doll. the little miracle. and according to them, god made us this way, so that simple operation was out of the question.

"it's a matter of faith," my father used to say, "who are we to say that the Lord's creation is not as perfect as all his others?"

well, god's a fucking cunt, and so is she. and i hate to break it to you, mam and dad, resting in pieces, but it's survival of the fittest, and that is me. all i have to do is turn onto my back in my "sleep" and just stay like that until she's as blue as a smurf. the rest is easy after that.

"oh my god, doctor, what have i done? how will i ever live without her?"

and i look great in black, and i'll wear waterproof mascara at the funeral, and i'll be ever so brave, and maybe i'll swoon and faint and someone will have to hold me up, and then when the stitches come out and the skin-graft has healed, we can fuck on the rug in front of the fire, while she sits in a dusty little pot on the mantlepiece. oh, she'll have pride of place. we'll drink a toast to her, and to me, not so much a butterfly emerging as a moth, greedy for the light.

and what a tragic tale. enough to secure a thousand mercy fucks with just the right tilt of the head, just the merest glimmer of a tear at the corner of my eye. the perfect little virgin, every time.

and think of it, a passport with just me on it. my ticket to life. i'll be able to lie on a beach without her moaning about getting sand in her face. i'll be able to go to the cinema and not have to sit sideways. i'll be able to watch the rest of my life unfold like my own private movie, no audience, no shrunken spectator giving a running commentary throughout.

people will see me, not us, not this walking, talking, human zoo, not this riddle of flesh. kids won't point and stare and say things that embarrass their parents in the supermarket, old ladies with walking sticks won't offer me their seat on the bus. men won't recoil.

it's not even murder, it's a redemption. i'll be saving me.

i'm not entirely without mercy, though. she'll get one last chance.

i try again over breakfast. i'm standing next to the kitchen bar, eating a bowl of cereal. she's eating toast, propped against my back as usual with her legs over a stool.

"will you ever change your mind?" i say. she knows exactly what i'm talking about, because for the last few years, there has only been one real topic of conversation.

"not again," she says, "we've done this one to death. it's against god, we can't, and anyway, what would mam and dad think?"

i slam my bowl down and turn around. her legs slide off the stool and she drops her toast. i feel her small, dwarfen fist dig my ribs in anger.

"they're fucking dead, so they won't be thinking all that much, and fuck your fucking god!"

"i'm not going to even bother talking to you if you're going to be like this," she says, and at this point, if we were ordinary sisters, she would flounce off and slam the door, but as it is, she just hangs there, breathing through her nose.

i light a cigarette and go out into the garden, making sure i'm standing close enough to the nettles to sting the tips of her toes.

she starts complaining but i'm really good at ignoring her, and anyway, i'm staring at the sky, planning a semi-suicide. my very own near death experience, because what else do you call the murder of something that is part of you?

what else is there to do, when you have a talking cabbage-patch hump on your back, a fucking religious zealot dropping toast crumbs down the back of your pyjamas?

when you have a real life, pink-wearing, dwarven parachute on your back, refusing to pull the rip cord, while life rushes by so fast that eventually the ground smacks you in the face and it's all over?

and even then, limping into nothingness, on your side in your extra-wide coffin, with two names on the head-stone? and only when the flesh begins to rot do you eventually come apart, become one person?

you're a fucking liar if you say you wouldn't do it.

i'm making her hot chocolate in her stupid pink plastic mug, and i'm crumbling in temazepam. don't worry, we have a prescription. we have trouble sleeping. and anyway, she's got her legs over the stool and is watching the news on TV. i put in extra sugar.

she drinks it, and doesn't notice a thing. i ask her if she needs a sleeping pill tonight, and she says "yes," so i give her two more and i don't feel guilty.

and now i'm lying in bed, waiting for the snoring to start. counting the flowers on the wallpaper. too fucking many. and then, no snoring, but i know she's asleep. i hope it's quick, i'm not a cruel person, not really. i start swallowing the same small pills except i down mine with little sips of vodka.

and then i lie there for a while, thinking about it, or trying to, but i'm too fucked and i can't concentrate properly, and perhaps there's nothing to think about anyway. she won't be able to struggle, or leave bruises on my back, not on all those benzo's. and i'll wake up in the morning and she'll be a sad blue angel wing, folded against the back of my best nightgown. and i'll just have time to shave my legs before the ambulance men arrive.

the shaman's eyes are black.

they are distant voids that have seen universes born and die in a single blink.

he holds out a small bowl, like a sanded, pristine stone, a hairless half coconut shell. he offers it, and the thick red liquid inside ripples. i think of diabolical custard, and take it and drink.
he takes a long drag of tobacco, rolled inside a green leaf, and blows the smoke into my face. he shakes a bunch of leaves over me, then places his hand on the top of my head and gently palms me into a seating position. he moves on.

i nestle on the palm-strewn floor, arrange my blanket around myself and wait. i trace the weave and pattern of the textile with the pad of my thumb. zig-zags. up and down, like breath.

i begin to hiccup, and my guts churn, the brew that tasted like riverbeds and burnt grass forcing its way around my insides. i am gulping back panic.

my eyes close, and i see a pulse of purple light. something has switched on. my ears buzz with electricity. primordial hum. i strain to see, out into the blackness behind my eyelids. and then; a small red upright lizard, a dinosaur really, looking left and right, but not at me. it scurries off into the black. and then nothing.

i wait. then my head is filled with worm-song, high pitched squeaks and clicks and buzzing noises and rapid-fire words that have no meaning. i see endless root sytems, expanding into the earth. tiny filaments, tiny hairs, moving and undulating, then thickening and hardening. roots. i am existing as a tree. i see water and nutrients being passed up these purple tentacles, i see my wavering underground limbs reaching further and further into the soil, claiming territory.

my mind has simultaneously split; there is a part of me that is observing, a part still human with ego and memories and a part that is experiencing life as a world of stalks and stems, a mass of vegetable wires. in this plant world, the mind seems to exist in the soil rather than the trunk and leaves and branches. that which is above ground is little more than hair, blowing in the breeze. it's like fingernails or hardened skin; i have little awareness of anything other than the dark soil and the tangling of roots.

and then a woman's voice, soft and resonant:

"the world of pavements and concrete is the seed of it's own destruction. what can save a world turned to stone?"

my stomach reacts. i vomit as if i am going to die. i puke dissolved human empires, images and archetypes of destruction; seas of red, dust, bones, broken glass, fallen towers. i hear wailing and weeping, i see nothingness, i see a barren rock in space.

i open my eyes.

the shaman approaches. he looks into my eyes for a long time. then he shakes his head sadly, and almost whispers,

"so. you have seen. pachamama has spoken. you will return to your people but they will not believe in your vision, real as it is, because they are consumed by greed and they cannot be woken from their dream. they cannot hear the weeping of the earth."

he pats my shoulder and moves on.

i open my hand and in the palm is a small seed, brown and almond-like. i push it into the soil beneath me.

and then i cry like a child.

i cry for the hollowed earth and the dried rivers and the felled trees. i cry for the dirty air and the land-fills and the roadkill.

i cry because we have sold a cow for beans and the metal and glass monuments that reach up into the sky are filled with dead souls, hamsters on wheels, empty shells. gathering the dust of money. no concept of roots.

i cry because this seed of destruction, this tiny shrivelled incendiary, is a blessing in disguise. we have snuck like thieves into a giants den and claimed a terrible treasure and in the distance i can hear the angry roar of a robbed god, climbing down the beanstalk.

this time, there is no axe.

she's chosen to starve.

this seems fitting, because she feels starved. why even bother trying to feed the famine of the heart? she's not jesus. her kind of miracles are limited to disappearing acts, sudden vanishings. she quite likes the idea of breathing out a plume of smoke and becoming a mushroom cloud instead.

she checks for the bones emerging, ice-bergs of collar and hip. they are beacons of calcium, guiding her toward calm.

she radiates joy, it's getting her high. her eyes have that hollow, blasted look. like atropine eye-drops, she thinks.

she's already invisible, she knows this. she doesn't count anymore. as familiar as a football shirt or a can of lager. she's an extra, she is scenery. so this is like a demonstration, this is the opposite of passive resistance. it's quiet violence. it's a civil war.

yes, the lines are drawn. she's chosen her weapon. smallpox blanket. internal incendiary. tick tock, tick tock.

she cuts her breakfast apple in half. the seeds are arranged in a five point star. so this is witchcraft, she thinks, i am eating enchantment. so she carves his name into it and buries it in the garden instead.

she wonders if a tree might grow. she imagines spring blossom raining like confetti. she imagines forbidden fruit. but even as Eve she has failed and fallen, every secret offering is rotten and ruined.

and god has high moral standards, so she is kicked out of the garden.

she knows he makes up the rules to suit himself. she won't pray to him anymore. he can have his rib back.

You're walking home in the rain and you're soaked to the skin. And even though it's raining, the sun is shining, so it's impossible to see, but you start thinking of how when you were a kid the little girls used to call it a "Monkeys Wedding".
Thinking of girls pisses you off so you fumble in your pocket and fish out your cigarettes but your lighter won't work and your cigarettes get wet so you end up crushing the box in your palm and flinging it into the gutter.
It's 7am and it's Sunday so the streets are empty, like your blown mind, which is racing and crashing at the same time and you can feel your heart start to pound and you catch your breath and think maybe you took too much, you took too much.
So you stop right there on the pavement and put your hand to your chest and you listen to your breathing but all you can hear is your brain screaming and the anger building. You kick the lamp-post but it just hurts your foot because your trainers are old and shit and this makes you even more angry. You feel stupid, stupid, and you really just want to lie face down in the wet grass and sob like a sad child but you're on a mission so you go on anyway.
Must get home, must get home, you think and you quicken your pace and wonder if you still run like a fat girl and you realise you probably do so you slow down again and wish you hadn't fucked your cigarettes. Actually, you wish a lot of things but mainly that you could just grow some balls or maybe think straight but this is no good, no point thinking about it, just don't think about it.
But secretly you're probably a masochist so you turn the whole fucked up situation over and over in your head, a different permutation with every step. And all you can see is her face, and she's laughing and it makes you want to cry, so you do but it doesn't help and you feel like a prick.
You're almost home but suddenly that space doesn't seem safe and you stop and stare at the sky as if you expect some kind of sign. Your brain just keeps on squirming and you wonder what the fuck you're doing but you make it through the gate and crash through the door and the stairs are just a blur and then you're in your room and you just stand there. You need to smoke something so now you're pulling out every drawer, kicking clothes aside like leaves, but there's nothing so you dissect the contents of the ashtray and suck up every last horrible toke.
Now you can't really remember who or what you are but somehow this doesn't really matter. You see a pen and you remember writing so you write something on the leg of your jeans but you don't know what it means anymore or why you wrote it. You think it's a name but it's not yours. Her name.
And then you just think, fuck it, and you're heading for the bathroom and opening the cabinet and you're swallowing small blue pills and then you're just a final tear, raging towards the waterfall.

I open my hand.

Written on the palm, in red pen, it says “your mind will turn to dust”.

God won’t stop whispering somewhere in my head and he is saying: “you made me”.

And I crawl toward the window and the explosion of light but I feel hands and there’s nowhere to go and I am stabbed and then it’s just

The void of sleep.

A rain of images:

a small child, a girl, is holding a beautiful white flower with yellow tips and she shakes the flower and it becomes a bell and the sound is the sound of a hiccup in reverse

Words are sticking in my throat but I say her name and she vomits a universe of tiny golden letters and symbols and infinity looks like alphabetti-spaghetti arranged on a plate

And then words take shape and it’s one after another but I couldn’t tell you what any of them mean

“haloperidol”

And then I’m sitting in a chair and it’s almost dark and I wonder about the window.

See; this voice is telling it like it is. It says, “just wait, just wait.” so I wait and then I hear screaming and footsteps and a door-handle turning so I shut my eyes and nothing happens.

And somehow I am waking up again and I look at my palm but it’s just my hand and I can smell bacon and coffee and someone is coming into my room and their lips move but all I hear is “vrrrmmm”, and it’s my blood I can hear and I’m handed a small plastic cup and surely it’s a dolls cup? and in the cup is a thick, clear liquid but I drink it anyway.

And then I’m dissolving and time is dilating and I hear the sound of the universe being ripped apart and I cower and shake and close my eyes and

I see my hands tying knot after knot into a strand of red, braided thread. 7,8,9 and I stop

And I am falling at his feet and he is kicking me away

“Risperidone”

A beautiful woman with red hair is looking at me and she is saying “John?” but my name isn’t John so I look away.

If I close my eyes, centuries pass. It works both ways. It’s time travel.

So I am standing at the bottom of the stairs and it’s new years day and my parents are out cold on the floor and I think, “interesting”

And it’s the first day of school and I am so scared that I wet my pants and then I cry and try to hide behind a big brown duffle coat that is hanging from a peg in the cloak room.

And then I’m fucking some girl and I don’t think this happened yet.

And then I’m looking up and someone is throwing earth over my coffin but I don’t care.

“Clozapine”

The beautiful woman hands me another cup and I take it and drink it because I have nothing better to do. It’s really funny so I start laughing and the woman comes back and she says, “John, what are you laughing at?”

And suddenly my mouth starts working again and I hear my voice saying, “if you mean me, my name’s not John and I wasn’t laughing”.

And she shakes her head, and her hair is brown, and softly she says, “John. But I heard you, John.”

So I ignore her and she goes away. I unbutton my shirt and my tits are still there so she’s clearly fucking with me.

So I sit a while longer and stare at the wall and it’s like church and I raise my hands into a prayer position and my palms feel nice together so I stay like that and just look at my thumbs.

And then an old man comes in, and the beautiful woman is there and her hair is blonde and she reaches out to me and touches my hands and tries to push them down. But I keep on praying anyway.

And my prayer is:

Please please please let me get what I want

And the old man says something that sounds like, “marked cat and tonic posture ring”. He sounds ancient and underwater and I realise he’s speaking through his gills. And I imagine ordering a cat and tonic in a bar.

And then I laugh until I fall asleep.

And then I’m on a trolley and I’m staring at the ceiling and a voice says “this won’t hurt a bit” and I am struck by lightning and my whole body shakes and fries and I think my soul is trying to escape through my forehead and then there’s nothing for a while.

“ECT”

And I wake up; I’m sitting at a table and I’m staring at a plate of toast.

Am I? I am.

And then I’m in a corridor so I wonder where to go. I try the first door and it opens and there’s a man and he’s writing on the wall with shaving foam and it says, “brain soup”.

And I start laughing and I laugh until I cry and then I feel hands on my shoulders and then I’m waking up again.

This time the first thing I see is the beautiful woman. Today her hair is black. She is leaning over me, and she is saying, “Is there anything you want to talk about, John?”

So I say, “yes,” but then I can’t think of anything to say so I just laugh.

And she says, “John, you must try to concentrate!”

But I’m time-travelling again, so I’m too busy.

I’m looking at a dead planet and it’s the earth.

I’m looking at a newspaper headline, but it’s in a language I don’t speak.

I’m looking into a mirror but there’s noone looking back.

End times.

It IS.

There’s been a shift. Half-tuned radio crackling with questions.

Everything has just stopped.

Cigarette smoke rising from my fingers in an endless coil.

“it's over…”

I try my voice and it comes softer than I had expected, like I am not sure it is really mine.

I hear the words. I disconnect.

“…the planets vast gravitational pull causing polar shift on Earth…we urge you to remain calm…”

It all seems meaningless and much too vast.

“…. the key characteristic to look for will be the reddish glow…there will be an almost total interference with radio and television transmission….”

Voices trail off into space-squeaks and fuzz.

There is nothing to do but wait.

I sit in the garden in the shade of the trees and smoke. My skin rusts and burnishes.

I drink vodka on the porch, strangely calm.

I get out old photographs and read old letters and try to remember the faces of people I don’t talk to these days. Phones ring unanswered.

There seems to be no night. The sun keeps on burning and I fall asleep on the grass, waking up peeling and sore.

“….cellular telephones will be useless…”

The streets are empty. There is no motion, not even in the air. The birds have stopped singing. The TV shows images of space and maps of our solar system and planetary alignment and I don’t take any of it in.

“rumours of what is called the 12th Planet, a giant comet. There is truth in what has been reported about violent geological changes, renting continents apart and heaving mountains high. The deluge occurred during just such a time. Pole shifts are common during these times. The Earth's crust slides over the soft molten core, the crust pulled in one direction and the core, which is more magnetically inclined, in another…”

It feels like dissolving.

I remember all the things that were said, the secret words with hidden meanings, and weep into my pillow.

I sing the same few lines like a eulogy or lament:

“Those words were birds that couldn’t fly..."

I have dream after dream of the tide coming in and never stopping.

I rise every morning & lay down every night.

“…Those who survive the massive earthquakes, which will level cities to dust, and the massive tidal waves, which will inundate coast lines for hundreds of miles inland, will be either fortunate or assisted… “

I give up meat, I give up smoking.

I try for absolution. I am stalked by my conscience.

I sit in the garden for hours, straight-backed, prone, concentrating on breathing, trying to find my neutral space. Flowers uncurl around me, dewy in the morning air. Birds take flight at the sign of a cat. A dead mouse in my shoe a loving gift.

I skin up and get blisters on my fingers and hot-rock burns on my bare thighs. I wear a blue string bikini and nobody sees.

I lay with my back to the world and think of the madness. I relive the pointless dream which came and went as glasses were upended and refilled. Just words. dot dot dot.

I stare at the sky and the moon is still low in the western sky, halved and cratered. Seagulls squawk and dive.

The clouds form faces & recall the past.

The empty hours are filled with thoughts. On my own, with two candles for light, I practise resurrection at the kitchen table. Old letters I never sent, diaries, the small tokens I kept which over time lost their meaning.

I bring it back from the dead.

A ticket stub; a tiny, hardened ball of gum, chewed in someone else’s mouth; a small twig; a beach pebble; a folded post-it note with a heart drawn on it in felt-tip; a cigarette butt; a stolen lighter.

These things, kept like treasures by the Me that existed then & which died a thousand daily deaths until none of it mattered & I was re-moulded. Now just the keeper of words and objects. Too stripped to care.

Damn my lazarus heart.

Because, I thought there was a future, once.
A potential future. An osmosis of skin. A circus of conversation. It was a maybe that came to nothing. A full stop instead of a question mark.

A future, only in my head.

Even now I hear you. Expect your atoms to reconstruct from the molecules of dust that hang in empty air.
Souvenirs. They are the most precious of all.
The memories.

I ran from them till there was no space & no comfort in the airless burning of cigarette-deadened lungs. I ran on in sleep, I ran from tidal waves that hovered in the distance like mountains. Always the sea forming a wall, always waking as if fried to the bone by invisible electrical storms.

And still I was a traitor of the highest order, victim of the three-fold law. I shook up my karma & I’m shaking it still. Small forgotten betrayals. That look, that look, that glance held too long. Knees touching. That is all there was.

I can phoenix it back and watch it burn forever. It's an interesting voodoo to kill a ghost.

So in the end, what does it matter? The ending of it all is no worse a fate than the everlasting daily snuffing that wrestles unseen. All around us people disappear, just leave, walk through invisible doors to places of light. The cruellest death of all is the asphyxiation of silent longing.

What of those lonely souls who millennia ago wandered into peat bogs or were frozen in a glacial shift? Or the mutant babies and abortions in jars and the unclaimed corpses dissected and organised into component parts? Specimens. Stripped of their basic humanity. What left that made them just pieces?

The earth will rend and break our bones, and bodies that were composed out of nothing more than a fission of cells and molecules will become dust. Tumbleweed of scattered DNA. Like the bleached, staring skulls of sheep lost to the mountains.

We live and the skeleton slowly rises to the surface, or else we shed layer after layer til it is revealed. Sand-blown and bare.

All I am is a message in a bottle, a dry desert dream in a long- gone sea.

And still I keep thinking of you, and I don't know why.