markbousfield

Imprimatur (Def: official permission or approval, to give one's approval)

by Mark Bousfield

So there it was that I awoke, the daze gripped my head as though I was dreaming once again that I was pushing my fingers through my skull, then there was Theo. A man I had barely met lying prostrate in a pool of sweat and blood at the nub of my bedstead, thinking was a problem, I told her that, I was going fine, I always had, a smile, a kiss, peachy - today I awoke having killed a man, God knows why I dragged him here, perhaps it was for the company? He had insisted, in that stricken goofy smile all stretched in mortis across that pretty face, he was a pretty boy I had to admit, but sometimes the ache in the head, the full dull thump of reality and all mundane existence gets the better of me and well I seek a companion.

I dressed and slid on a pair of corduroys that had long since given up their slice of life, I thought I'd go and see Thom, good old Thomas, an accountant by all accounts and a very nice man, sometimes I fear that his turtle neck sweater will incubate upon him and grow some really sharp teeth culminating in it devouring his head, sophisticated lumps of visceral decay falling into the penne, 'Sorry dear, didn't want to give so much of myself in this dinner, please excuse my spatter.' She always would, Rachel that is. In fact she lived for his spatter, she craved it like a lunatic, always trying to extract it and place it unto her baby tray. Hungry for nurture, blaspheming and cock-sucking in the hope that a little reciprocation wouldn't be too much to ask. The zipper broke off the pants, I ripped it off actually. I let my modesty get the best of me and I waxed the floor carefully so as not to disturb sleeping Theo, God, should he wake up I would have a lot of explaining to do!

Heading out the door I realise why I never go out, I hate this place, a fungus of such a nauseating capacity that the cockroaches look glumly to their mother as they hatch, 'Not this shit-hole, PLEASE!' they say as she blushes with the shame, the washed out necrophilic streets feeding the living at all hours, grey and neon, even the whores look like apple pie, a pie so old and dishevelled that the crusty bits hold the most taste, if you hold your nose.

I got on the bus, the pint of milk in my paws, gotta get the calcium right, my mum always says I'd drop like a bag of jelly without it, I know she was humouring me but what if she was right? Can I really take that risk? If it happened, could I ever walk again? In this world of medical marvels (me included) could they re-insert my collapsed bones back into my body? Rebuild my brittle skeleton in a laboratory? Quality of life would go down the shitter, no best to be safe than sorry, drink the milk, stay not like jelly.

So I decided to get off and hang around for a bit, some how the fetid back streets suited me, a stench as homely as N19 ever was, I hung with a cool guy who I shall call Saul, I don't know his real name but I thought it sounded portentous and mysterious, befitting of his street sinew life status. His hair was slick and dark, Irish blood in his brood I'm sure. He had sour eyes, tight and fisted by many a humiliation. The scar on his lip fascinated me, even though he had never willingly spoken to me I supposed a lot from his body language (that of a limpet) and that scar. That beautiful mark of trauma, a personal miasma so great that it left a pathway to its origins forever on his forlorn skin. A tragedy so great that he lost the ability to speak in anything other than mono-syllabic grunts of abuse and hostility. I loved him. It was so fitting that he had become my Soho friend so to speak, whilst no longer cruising the back alleys of bistros for a fuck, a ferry to sail briefly to the esoterics of humanity we were comfortable here in our mutual hatred.

I danced in a stage play, the street theatre, mature adolescent escapism into a euphoric state of aphorisms, escape from the pandemonium, I felt the need to jest - a sinking feeling of darkness, emptiness formed when the precious beings of life are enveloped in mystery, the desire to love but in such naivety that success is all but prohibited. To yearn so much for touch and talk, Saul was not the epitome, but it was solitude of his company I adored. I wish he would speak, he is smalled in enmity for the brisk wind and ambling truth of existence formulated in the absence of anything else. The thought that, well, this is all there is, that I'm dying a second at a time, let me out, set me free, cut me adrift from this.

I got to Thom's about a quarter to three, the red knocker insisted on being situated on the left no matter what I suggested (damn thing drives me nuts just thinking about it). So, Thom was wiring this plug, very Sunday afternoon, but it was Tuesday and I was confused. 'Sorry my friend' he said, always the patronising bastard, can't but hope that turtle neck swallows him whole, damn I bet he gets head off Rachel whilst he sucks the cock of the world. She's that kind of chick, he's a misogynistic twat and always has been for as long as I've known him. It seems his only point in being right now is to gain and lose sperm, seems a pretty finely worked out transaction for the man-whore, give her the baby she craves, what? You're not ready? Maybe the damage is already done, when he's good and ready Disgrace will finger you aimlessly.

I leaf through the yellow pages, tea runs cold, I stare blankly at it watching it gather dust, I imagine I could be a wild man, if I was capable of letting go i could do anything, what would really be the consequence? Nothing I really cared about anyway. However, I'm paralysed by God and by that I mean fear, if I held no fear I could be perhaps blazon, brazen and brave. Cod-shit, I'm all of those things now, I'm just disorganised, too much food, too much beer, wine, whiskey, tequila, TV, video, dvd, sex, no sex, dishwashers, drugs, excesses, messes, dresses, the whole shebang. I sup my tea, damn still cold.

He talks, I don't listen, why would I listen to that? I stare boldly at the pulse on his throat, watching it hump and heave the glands inside his neck, one day he will clog up and die, oh he's a clever swine and maybe soon I'll reveal why we became acquainted, and when we're all singing and finally living perhaps I'll even divulge another secret or two but right now I'm dying a slow death, my blood is settling into stagnant pools of infection in my brain, his voice plodding in my head is nothing but reverberation. His pulse quickens slightly, the lentils I dreamed I injected with poison slip guilelessly into his gullet. I can see the dark bile burning the back of his throat, the blood red splashes of his eyes twisting, convulsing with only me in the room wide-eyed taking in the spectacle, but no, there he sits, straight back, calm, iridescent, his usual charismatic self, much to my annoyance.

I jerk to life and decide to discard any of those kind of premonitions for now, how would he have put it, 'You will consume any grace you still have left with God that you consider worthy enough to waste, just to disprove His existence.' Pompous twat. And so now I'm empty and bored of it all, I get up and say my farewells, I say things in a way that will subconsciously make Rachel know that she has to fuck Thom over to be truly happy, she needs it.

The walk from the house brings a new depression, the greyness, the gloom of clouds hovering full of intent has dissipated, I'm left with the smell of rotting human cadavers baking in the sun, the sweat congesting the gasping breaths of their skin, the dry cotton of his and hers t-shirts soaked in little tobacco yellow sweat stains, lost on life. I drop into a bar, inadequate imagination forcing me to drink, I like it here though, although I don't know anyone or care for their digressions. I order a whiskey in the longest vessel I can muster with the blues starting to line my frayed edges.

I start to feel kind of woozy, all gaunt and full of dread like I just wriggled too much in a medical procedure, a split in my gut cut by a wayward scalpel, just incised deep enough for something dark and long to slither amongst gouts of blood out of the wound. Blinking I cradle my chest and order another drink, my eviscerated liver laid on a corpse platter, stretched, pretty and fleshy brown, that smile as the simile of entrails are laid bare on the floor. The grind of the working machines hum, the drum of meat pounded in the heat, the dust of blood still fresh on my clothes. I get another drink. The carpet mouth that I exhumed with me this morning is fleshing out, I'm slowly feeling human, I feel wonderfully weak and alone, selfish and free, with this thought I am filled with glee.

Automatically I gauge the sickness of those around me, the barman despise me, he gloats over my drunken ramblings, he intersects my trains of thought with suspicion and calamity, no bearing on reality can bring anything less than hatred when I flex him a smile, it's in his eyes the false glint of woe and care covering a cadaverous thirst for sadistic poisoning, steadily each drink he pours for me tastes stranger and stranger, like almonds. He is killing me one drink at a time, I call his bluff, with a shit-eating grin I knock back each bit of liquor, I will scare him with my lack of vision, a living autopsy of human sacrament.

As my head grows cloudy - me at the altar of sacrifice, the stairs emblazoned with congealed spirits and spilled wine - I decide I am crazy. The homo on the stool nearest the window gestures to the invisible homo in us all, with a middle finger and a probably ill-advised and unremembered statement from me he puts his phone down, with inaudible disdain for technology and for confrontation I career out of this den and hide back in the swathes of people that are inhabiting my current siesta from sanity.

So I decide to head home, Theo has probably missed me by now, I hope that bastard hasn't wrecked the place. I realise that I am no longer hearing the sounds of the world around me, it's passing me by like a huge cavity of dense silence, like the instant before Armageddon, I guess it's my job to maintain and hold onto the barrier when the waves are breaking high, no one else will do it for me. I'm sick, the shadows over my heart spread to my lungs, a growth so big it pulses without a second to soothe, my chest cramps, a guilty sickness brought onto me as a malady of sin, my repentance, cleanliness, Godliness and loneliness.

I get to the rain-bitten front door of my home, finally warm I walked in, I still can see my bed, all ruffled with Theo's naked body contorted in silent slumber at the stern, as a tear was extracted by the exhilarating first touch of the naive and newborn, a swell growing so beautifully, a vine of sadness clinging to the cliff face of our fathers, this the surge of pride I felt , this is who I am, the lonesome. As I got inside I peered at Theo through the muslin veil curtain, it was coated freely in blood, coagulated alleyways following the flow of material, coloured by life and death. There he lies in full view, his abdomen stretched taut across his skeleton, the dips at his waist snaking slowly from his pelvis to his penis. The long hair on his head plastered across his face, now dry and sticky, the gaping wound open like a child's mouth in sleep, gently breathing in and out, flapping uselessly and free.

I walked to the kitchen, damn I'd drank too much, or maybe I really am sick, poisoned on purpose, with a stroke my bloodshot eyes turn to the growingly fetid and freakish companion I have embraced. I feel flush and feint, I feel a grip-like darkness again, a hold of emptiness, a butterfly that will never fly once its wings have been touched, it will writhe in dust gathering more will to die in it's efforts to live. I perpetuate hatred, my predicament a disembodied voice from the ether, the fore-teller of my life in the void. Zarathustra's labour into the forest rings like an accolade of anecdotal truth, hopelessly carrying the dead inside to hide the life seeping to the surface of my being.

I fall and break my skin, all on purpose, not a lie, but an omission of existence bound up in an almost evilly good way. Wretched in the dampness of living I am retribute to the whole ideal. Staunching the empathy I become retaliatory in a most obscene fashion, a coma of seriousness, my irony is that of unlove and no matter what the justification there will never be any good-byes. Only a final and quick descendent to the grave.

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

It is quiet, all but for the distant buzz of a cooling fan humming gently. The room bears a draught from the inch thick gap exposed at the bottom of the door. It is here, in my isolation that I realise the emptiness is not all around, the living world is bustling and bursting with activity, it is in my head the absence of existence had taken hold. A cold vast tundra of nothingness, a pale chilly expanse of loneliness and leanness, this is where I sit with a start, in the middle. I am hot then I am cold, I cannot respirate without difficulty, I am alone. The nurse wanders in and out, my week of never ending intravenously injected drugs continues. This bleak imprisonment slowed by sluggish synapses and heightened by restless reflexes. It takes all my energy to not just masturbate freely again and again, like a symptom of my sickness. The plain of nothingness returns, I stumble over the flat terrain, no curve or contour to be seen, I am blinded by the reflection of sun off snow, startled and weary I begin to become drowsy once more. I feel I must not sleep, the spark in my cells may dissipate and I would wander this desert forever.

I awake, the pressure on my chest immeasurable. I feel like my ribcage has become an ancient blacksmith's anvil, pounding with hot metals, the weight, all pressing and squeezing every last drop of air from my lungs. Slowly I regain my breath, still heavy and laboured. I tentatively arise from the ice-mound which had been my bed last night to see a curious speck on the horizon. It wafted without pattern, rhyme or reason, it's erratic movement impossible to predict. Inch by inch the dot moved closer, not yet close enough so I could make out a discernible shape. I fidgeted still wheezing from the excitement of awakening to another day in the wilderness.

My face is becoming overgrown, I am being ravaged by early-manhood smatterings of hair, limp and blonde amidst the cauldron of black they glisten in the sparkle of the early morning sun. Distracted by the approaching doom I unknowingly run my dirty fingers through my odd beard and crumpled hair. I have already begun to formulate my rebuttal against this alien invading the sanctity of my inner solitude. Straining my eyes over the glow of the morning upon the whiteness I can see more clearly now a humanoid shape running like a moth around an enclosed candle. My eyes refuse to focus as the the hole in my vein widens to its dilated fullness allowing the sweet and nurturing rush of antibodies into my bloodstream. In an instant my thickened blood dilutes, flowing once more freely; speeding my thought.

Within my exasperated fantasy I am oblivious, determined to remain attentive to this new curious visitor to my domain. He was now no more than 20ft away, a figure slightly larger than a man, he had a flattened demeanour with a crinkled nose. His face was a faint shade of yellow with tufts of hair akin to a swarm of fruitfly on each cheek. Over his head he wore a knitted brown cap that lay overlapping his weaved coat. The pattern of the weaving was something I had never seen before. Within the design, when I leaned a little closer, I could see small spiky entities gleefully latched onto other similar particles. It is possibly the most singularly ugly garment I have ever seen, yet upon this imposing figure it seemed strangely apt. He stood before me, serene, his mouth slightly open breathing light gravelly breaths. His left eye was milky white and the right flickered restlessly seemingly unable to focus on any particular thing.

And there it was that we stood looking at each other for an incalculable length of time. My chest still tight I tried to squeeze out a few whispered words, "Why, in all of the rage I have endured under a film of placidity do I still feel like I am the only son of a bleeding and bitter angel? Why, further still, are you here in my place where I can never be lost or saved?" The figure shifted awkwardly from left foot to right. His gullet rasped as a thick discoloured tongue flicked from his mouth. Exhausted I fell down to my knees, bent double I wheezed with my hands in the cold snow, unable to know what to do next I lay face down and drifted away. I have no idea how long I lay prone, face down in this frozen prison of water, secrets of some dark ancient tear, buried deep, locked in an opiate state of blame.

Soon I awoke. My eyes blinked the frost from my lashes, there he was, standing right in front of me. Tentatively I lifted my head and body so that I was on all fours. He had not moved an inch. His eyes still twitched wildly, his hands by his sides, there were no footprints, he simply had not moved.

"What is it that you want?" I ask "Here with me in my isolation you bother me, disturb my rest and you disrupt my disease."

His head turned to me although his good eye was everywhere, there was an intake of breath (I am not sure if it was his or mine) as his crusted lips slowly began to form a shape. Eagerly I waited, and waited and waited. The air hung a pause of indeterminable length, I leaned closer so to be sure his utterance was not lost to the wind. Nothing. Frustrated I leapt to my feet, a foolish move, no sooner had I landed uneasily on feet than the blood rushed straight to my head. Dazed and unable to see I fell right back down, the solid thud of my body hitting the floor echoing around the emptiness. Frustrated I mopped the sweat from my brow and I glanced upwards, the shape still formed on the demon's lips angled perfectly to deliver his answer, yet there was no movement other than the obtuse movement of his right iris. Again I lay back and fell into slumber.

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

As much love as a full life can attract I am spared, here again I stand. I make a brew, shakily confidant I've still got my marbles in a dirty pocket somewhere in a draw, that calms me, numbs me. The pounding of light into my eyes recedes and once again it is just Theo and I, in his handsome distress I purr, moving over to the bed I catch my hand on his toe nail, maybe I should move him soon, pretty thing that he is, he can't lay incognito forever. Supping my tea I ponder upon this elastic train of thought.

So I get up and its 8:30am, I head to work, all fuzzy and gaunt like, the dire repression of angst over anger on the underground, the pure fury and rage of the absent minded pedestrian, by the time I hit Waterloo I'm covered in sweat and inhibition. The clammy air of a train in the summer is enough to make the most hardy of traveller reach for Cobain's final dream. The stump of the IMAX stands proudly like a fat man's stunted erection, burgeoning the skyline with ugliness. I walk around the piss stench of the stairs, the lashing of my boots at the fucking homeless whores, dirty asses rising and falling under their smallpox sheets. The spurt of diseased semen over the empty special brew cans. I want to puke as I wipe the spunk off of my shoe.

As I cross the road I see in the window of a bus a horrific reflection, some mummified beast, an undead creature has stood in my place, as the realisation dawns on me that this putrid whelp is me I am crippled by a red searing of pain in my head, a crucifix of agony, a damp glow of anti-epiphany, a stab of regret. The naive young man looking back from the pool of polluted rainwater is no longer me. The neatly trimmed desire to please, the fluidity of ambition. I feel like the shadow of blood has covered my eyes, the millisecond before my retinas detach, I wait for the gulp as a lump is lodged in my throat, I can't breathe. The gentle tender bones in my body, weak, ready to break on the moment of impact, a flaming wreck I can steer into the deep cooling waters of an ocean very far away, I black out.

I come to and I'm standing in the office of my boss. I'm coated in a cold sweat and am aware that I haven't washed for three days. My suit is as crumpled as I am, this particular crevice of the world makes me feel sick, this middle-aged nobody with his tiny shaped ginger moustache that I'm sure he wishes was as dark and black as Auschwitz. I swallow hard trying to focus on the rings of communication semaphored seemingly in an incomprehensible language to me as I follow nothing. The smell in here is revolting, I imagine how many toilet trips this monster makes without washing his creased untrustworthy hands, the decaying odour of our bodies emphasised by a tiny fan pushing heavy air back onto us, recycling my disgust.

I'm floating with this feeling somewhere between good and bad, like I'm on a knife edge, I dodge the grotesque street pantomime that involves looking noncommittal and extremely busy, the kind of busy that if you stop me for even a second you stupid moron then the Queen's kidneys will explode into her stomach and I'm the only one that can save her, so FUCK OFF! Fuck your starving children, fuck your damaged little puppies, fuck your Saturday job, leave me be.

Finally I find myself on the tube sitting across from a pair of identical homos, god its easy to be different, blend into the Diaspora of new living, laying and thinking, nothing literate. The one on the right twitches his leg up and down, his ice cold eyes fill with nightmares, thoughts of the dirty sex he will defer to a nightly submission. He wears khakis and an olive green tracksuit top, without realising it I'm staring at his freakish demeanour, I'm snared, he catches my eye and suddenly I feel vulnerable and exposed, the pervert on the trains staring at every crotch and cleavage, I try to break contract, willing him with my mind to leave me be, to stop mugging my thoughts, it gets no better as I glance away. I look back only to find his lover staring at me too now. I am cornered, suddenly the carriage has begun to feel very small and hot, I sweat more and I can smell the pheromones of fear leaking from the deep pore gates of my flesh. Unwillingly I was radiating into the air an elixir of natural chemicals that would reveal every last secret of my life, of Theo.

My growing discomfort is like a virus, it malingers and gestates, I grow hotter and hotter by the second, then something new, numbness, nothing. Nothing came next, they turned away releasing me from my torture, god I've got get home. Somehow this numbness has remained and I have begun to treasure it. I could try and revolt myself by examining the crack in Theo's skull with a spare chopstick. Slowly I tickled the wound, I prized the open lids of skin, still nothing. I remained composed, detached like I was watching some feral child through a one way mirror. The thick end of the chopstick slid in forcing a gulch of brain matter to seep from the vaginal wound. Nothing, with what can only be described as a post-coitus grin I reclined on my sofa, a sofa that last week I got so drunk I pissed all over in my stupor.

Suddenly restless to see how far this numbness went and how long it lasted I craved some alcohol, a wash of moisture to take the cotton wetness from my mouth. So once again I stirred, macabre enchantment smeared across my mirthless face. It was then that it occurred to me, the true hopelessness of life, Heaven is a construct, a falsity, a diversion from the living decay of age. In my most formal I decree the sick and old with a wet sympathy befitting of pity perhaps they seek. Yet when I look for solace I find crumbling ash, ideals, doubt. As though my doubt were cast into purgatory, the isolating angel of vengeance and purity ringing in hollow judgement, in our darkest moments of despair did we create our soulful comforts.

Ask the fit and young and healthy, ones who have not been touched; if they need to believe in a God, I am sure they will say yes, but not as heartfelt as that said by the cripple, the cripple harvested of all happiness because his God has deserted him and left him without legs. Happiness is a true madness, not that which grips me, I am he who has side-stepped that grubby gem of mortality. I change my jeans and fail to wash yet again. I walk out into the street, in permission of Death I am allowed to wander free from fear, enlisting a rapturous glow, in the warm temple of enduring endlessness, both the bidden and the busy. I feel humble in life yet to come. I looked around, the light was perfect, strange in its luminescence , or was it dead empathy turned into light in the poignant matrimony of the shade unto it. My head becomes restless like a forge in days of war, the guide of sweet friendship and unfulfilling graft that is my mind.

The old pirates of time, of fatuous zeitgeist take away the rest of the day. I wander and walk through the many parks and lanes trying to re-find my Saul. My unbalance, my uneven flow of trembling waters becomes a fullisade of happenings, of time in between time. In my usual meticulous order, the prevailing wind of lateral reasoning and the pounding of deliberate misunderstanding becomes double-entendre, laid like a poisonous skeleton, the skull of every rabid ideal soaked to coarse off the grain of every formerly living cell is all that is left. This is a time when the spaces whistle dryly of their benevolent existence.

As I waltzed down the bridle way I saw a hunched figure on a bench. From the back I could make out the wispy grey hair and the thinning scarf around the stranger's neck. I inched closer and leaned over to whisper in her ear,

"I love myself, even in any untoward execution of heavy breath or unsavoury distillation of desire I am still here."

The person did not move. Amused I stood straight and moved around the front of the bench to sit down. It was then that the face of this old decrepit being was revealed to me. The ravaged skin full of age, the thud of a rose petal on the elastic skin drooped from its youthful exuberance, loose and full of expectancy. I realised, the latency of age which brings aesthetic disease to me, year after year, the flow of tides in the pull of time, the running of the sands too far. I was becoming old each second. The crone gazed up through her thick lensed glasses and began to focus her energies and mind. The light shone through her long brittle fingernails, translucent shards of bio-decay attached to this phantom, summing up as more than the breath in our lungs and the beating of our hearts, reductionism right down to cellular synthesis. In the wallowing walls of solitude in her mind a letter of guess and sorrow formed, slowly gaining poise and shape it exited her mouth in a farting rasp that she designed as her voice.

"I'm sorry dear but I believe I was sitting here alone looking for peace. Now you are here I have to talk to you, but remember this, I would rather be on my own until the moment I pass than waste another breath of my life on somebody like you."

Aghast I stepped back. Like a vampire sitting at the feet of the crucified Christ, suckling his blood until gorged and bloodied, soaked on some Messiah's passing to feel free from guilt, she stares at me with a glint of darkness whispering in her eyes. I stare inwardly, a gaze of unwant, the kernel of my existence grasped ever so loosely. A pail and frigid hand, one never to have born a torch of distress beckoned me to sit next to her. I started a steady and tangible move down to sit. A docking of ass and bench distracted by this most curious and sinister grandma. My strength, my youthful body seems to have betrayed me, this old wasp seems to hold no greater love for the beyond than I do. Her body is gone, her mind fading yet she still would deny the use of a Heaven. In her company I relax, in a way I haven't relaxed since before I met Theo. The distress of the last week empties from the spaces between my cells, the dark gaps between the atoms that hold all the parts that we try to hide. The hollowness of the bones to hold the enthusiasm for death and detachment, like putty drained of the fluids necessary for moulding I re-hydrate.


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

He was still there, nothing had changed. the muscles on my jaw tightened as I stifled a cough. Feverishly the sweat trickled down me in tiny droplets of illness. I cooled my skin in the snow as I regarded him, suddenly he turned his head to me and said,

"Anointment comes, it comes in the genes of expression."

Completely bewildered I leaned back on my haunches thoughtfully thumbing my beard. I noticed that this apparition had grown in stature, he was now seemingly a full seven feet tall. What did this mean? I wished to be alone but still he stood resolute and unmoving. I started to move away from him, I crawled and crawled as fast as I was able, not once did I look back. I moved in quick and awkward movements in an attempt to put as much distance as was possible between him and myself. Once too tired to continue I stopped, sagging in a heap upon the floor. As I began to realise that the heavy breathing was no longer mine I turned to see the figure standing behind me in an identical position to before, in my panic I scanned the horizon for footprints, there were none, not even mine. Had I travelled at all? Tentatively I reached out with my hand to touch the apparition, I inched nearer and nearer, my fingers splayed outwards, I could sense the loose cloth of his trousers nearing my fingertips. Breathing deeply and biting my lip I lunged the final distance expecting to grasp solid leg. Instead I swiped at nothing. Trying to remain calm I focused my breathing, after a few stuttered inhalations I slowed to a more regular rate, the sudden weight of air in my lungs was lifted, my body no longer felt like it would forget to breathe.

I looked up expecting him to be standing close, to be positioned above me identically to before; instead he was no where to be seen. Startled I spun on my knees disturbing the piles of snow that had built up around them, there was only emptiness. I had a strange feeling he was standing behind me, casting his shadow over my existence, each time I turned there was only vast expanses of space. I was alone again.


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

In seemingly prophetic vagrancy I wander through the bustle, the lesions of the city air circulating my bloodstream. I am slowly stripping away layers of bohemian dissidence and shaving and cutting and trimming and blurring all the lines. I am dirty, I am unkempt, out of time and out of place, contrastingly lonesome and embarrassingly present on the streets that rape every second of life from all who tread there. They do not accept or resist my love, I must justify every stupor and wasted moment as though I am the only one, both evil and acerbic, dry and fruitful the stink of the burning paradise, the stench of the wealthy grown rich, never wrestle with a pig I was once told, he loves it and you just get covered in shit.

And so it was that I met Thom for lunch. He was sitting there all smug like, the Autumn light complimenting the redness of his cheeks. God I hate it when I see him first. I like to be surprised, seeing him like this is like mental sodomy, like reaching for the soap even though you know you are clean enough already. I sit down on the wrought iron prison chair. The metallic crunch of the salad he is eating rings in my welting eardrums. I am suddenly lost in paranoia, 'why here? why not there or there?'. I shift suddenly in my seat and slide off it onto the shaved clean floor boards of this wretched hole.

He has started to grow a beard, a dusty web of pretty prickly stick legs, little manhood's sprawling worm-like as fur on his boyish face. The beard, the figurative machismo of the cosmos, the floating pigment of paternity laying over the layers of self inside, the male disguise. Little stars and lines over the body, like feckless freckles on his youthless skin, the herald of the moon and sky fleshed out in pouring and leanings from the lint in the eye of an insect. The woe of comfort grown cold, the morning light turned black and poisonous, with veins and muscles all in situ, all the chains and reigns, all diamond and grime owned by the naive hipster, the lipstick, oh the beard is growing.

I try to breath and focus on his face, as much as it disgusts me it keeps me in the room. He begins to wax about pointless lullabies of life, his soft words like vallium and bullshit. I listen to the sounds, the curls of lip and tongue to form the words, the grunts of air manipulated in his throat to create orderly utterances. It is most fascinating to not listen to the words but to watch past the literacy and become primal and primitive. The orchestral movement of voice box and Adam's apple to create such useless expenditure of life.

I promised to reveal how two such distasteful people ever became acquaintances, the secret that binds Thom and I together. My body cooks with fever, the sweats leaving a curious saliva like film under my armpits, I look Thom in the eye, he smiles slightly, I hold his gaze a little too long triggering his nervous machine gun laugh that fills me with lead, my head begins to weigh like a five year old child, my constipated thoughts feel heavy, I feel drowsy. You see Thom was the first person to ever appear at the end of my bed one morning, my roommate, he has never gone away, never aged or left me. I have tried, I sojourned to Caracas and he haunted me there, the infatuation of my disease stalking the corridors of darkness that I inhabit, that I am forced to exhale and inhale through. He is my doctor, my consort, my saviour at times. A friend whom I despise and tell so, yet never changes in demeanour towards me, I have not yet been able to push him out.

And I hate him for it.

With sentimental enchantment I was held and swayed in conversation, in the warmth of milky fire, with the sulphur of the city laid into my skin I for once listened. In the death of my clean clothes, in the cleanliness that I call my emptiness the leech like features of my face opened and became receptive. As a lifelong ident to all that I have missed I am strange and stranger to all of this new world priesthood of humanity. The cobra venom dichotomy of modern restraint and self destruction, a world I have passed, a new order I inhabit that isn't quite Heaven, it only seems so. As though happiness were in our blood, filling and refilling our hearts everyday, by God did I pay attention to him for once.

So I get up and leave Thom after our little tete et tete. Convinced of the attrition of walking I hail a taxi, one of the things I hate most to do in life. The acrid dry wit of the cabbie draining on and on about things that are beyond me. I sit comatose in the back watching a city of some origin (Gomorra?) pass by in time. The multiplex of familiarity, the domain of the human shepherd, the bastion of the manipulator. The consul of the dark and brown and viscous arts.

I awake at home, with absolute indiscretion and vulnerability I lie in a prison of quarantine. Slumber in my sweat soaked sheets, both memory in gravel and gorge, deep in my throat as I regurgitate my infection, my body belongs in the ranks of the precious, hardy yet weak in the face of my disease. I lay on the tablet of bedding, cloth wrapped around my feet anointed in the water of the skin, the saturated slab of neat stone over which I had bled. A ritual of penance I had begun this morn, the virtue of weakness becomes the strength of the meek, it becomes made through the just heart of endeavour. Not through Passover or any other theological celebratory gesture, I will articulate my physicality in a way that I will be born in unfathomable deepness, a never failing cascade of warmth and dark, in my servitude to life I will swell to new heights of platitude, crassness and simulacrum. This disease will not have the beating of me.

I listen to the drop of each singular raindrop smashing against the building where I reside. I can see the disintegration of summer within the greying skies. The equinox of bastardised totems left decorating trees, the change in season signalling an age of pain way beyond my years. There is nobody to inhabit this world of mine, dreams in the night and in the day bring ghosts made of blood and phantoms of each repression I destroyed with humiliating violence. Every twisted memory and flash of past existence lies in my waking haunting. I yearn for a monastery built in cleaves of gold, a place where I can await the swallow's flight, a wilderness of heavy fog and forgetfulness, fog that clings to the dreary meadows, isolation leading to cynical yet everlasting rebirth.

The softened blow of illness falls lightly on my pathetic lungs, without gut or muscle I ache here in my final form, as a swan I would have lived so simply, eating and floating and flourishing. I am drawn to Haiku;

Too many blossoms
fall into silence at once,
one voice in the crowd.

This is surely the end. Doubt proves to be the most virulent beast, although I am amongst the feeble now I stand upon a precipice. Lost in the endless edges of the cliff face, I am darkened by blood and deeds, a curled lip pronounces.... DEATH. Or so I thought until I realised that the blind burn in vision, the lame fight long and the ugly rise up in beauty. Where is my place? Alongside these soldiers of misfortune where do I ride? I glance at Theo, he is slumped on the floor. My body was nothing to him, as I wake to see him he seems full of delight, I am sure it is not for me. The museum of ancient touches that I once wore so proudly on my skin have faded, they were so primitive in the pathways to love, long overdue.

So I grow tired of waiting, my prison of pain and sinew errs into life, I break from my breathless shroud. Where the Hell am I?

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

And I walk all jelly like, the knitted lines of exhaust fumes across the sky stay forever. My innards scream 'FUCK FOREVER', I'd rather wither inside if you don't mind. It is winter, my fortitude a wash with sickly blotches on the underside of my toes, what a nihilistic filament of humanity I have become, a tourist of optimism and self-esteem, I glance at their wholesome nature and vomit. This instilled pseudo socio-pathic metallurgy of the soul is like nursing a phantom limb, non-existent but insistent on recognition from the darkest depths of your synapses, a dirge of life melting away to nothingness in old age, a clipped and flaccid delivery facilitated by tonics brewed by the contemporaries of Diablo, memories and the like lost in the wind, the jumble of audible choking and crying in the gloaming, tears unreal and unravelled in vessels long sank beneath the tides of time.

As light wastes away and becomes the focus of many a fear, hypothesised dreams of unclean sex, tombs and lands of poverty become the streets. Beady eyes and old hearts course through the tenements, such a soft touch has the macabre, a collar of hate and nails details loss come heady in the premature birth of failure. Every nihilism I aspire to be, each baby fisted intention wanes between the spaces of ink and breath, the man I chased down the street, the man I murdered in such caprice was myself, a long time under water asking to breathe, drowning in the clarity of paradise falling through the sky.

The gilded skins of fancy women dressed in the rags of sailors on every corner, moss bitten iron and slate, the rooves and hooves detonate at will, the rain fall of gunpowder and the sowing of seeds. The salient texture of skin rubbing on skin, all keen like, the brassy court of dance tip toeing around augmented tablets of joy. Learned old men spouting the excitement of fruitful and dutiful discourse, intercourse, cock-a-hoop freedom of dark matte crows on a wire, lurching vanguards of bodies hunched in grey crass moonlight. Balanced precariously in between nostalgia and zeitgeist the sweet mew of each feminine meadow incognito rings, I sloop through the night.

Within the opulence of the midnight hour the curving of shallow wines run red through my fingers, the blood of each grape streaming loosely before my eyes, fortunes paid and lost under my strength overthrown, a list disappearing from my mind, holly lays prickly yet flush on my underbelly, sore and scared the irritation strapped tight to my chest allows light to escape from my soul. The sucking of goodness from my heart through the most minute of holes, induction to the whom of whom's, prosaic warmth, the clunking stoicism of disgraced maternity together in the stains of dissonance, every new colour experienced in loneliness, over intellectualised oblique modulations become notions of love and mate, messianic joy and fervour never before expressed, nectar gleaned from valleys of concrete, the stare of babies trapped in limbo, growing fat, could they come back? I need to go home.

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

Trapped in a given size, in any given moment I cannot feel the gain and loss of existence's beyond my comprehension. A consequence of sweet nauseating bliss in the womb leading one day to my padded tomb. My limitations both finite and infinite, unending and undying simultaneously. The boundaries of experience and existence, my own death will not be in my experience of life, I will not know it when it comes, therefore I become immortal, I will never know death so I will never die. My limitations become the be all and end all of everything, things beyond me do not exist, I only have my own knowledge and my own questions, nothing else is there.

Within the thump of my heart every part of me that you see as a part of you is a part of me I hate. Theo (with the ranging emotions of a greening corpse), no part of me is the poet, no poet's part bears relevance to the super-nature of your demise. The voyeuristic tears of the poet (the part of the poet that makes the poet), the part of the poet's soul that cries is the part the poet tries to escape. It is the part of me, the poet, that you see as a part of yourself, the part of me I hate. So I, the poet, have a poet's heart, the headless thumping heart, the part of me that has become a poet and I wish I was free of. It envelopes me.

And so yet again I sit and stare at him, the feverish heat in the room makes my knuckles tense all white, I grab at my t-shirt ringing with sweat, I shift from side to side. Maniacally I squint at the freckles on the back of my arms, the angel kisses forced upon me at my arrival into this world, a rape by a seraph on the glistening cherub still wet with birth . I stand and kick Theo square in the ribs half expecting a limb to come loose, nothing, not even a whelp. I grow bored of his static company. He has to go. I pick him up and there he stands.

We walk hand in hand and greet all who see us on the stair way. I exude a cool air of nonchalance, two fellows out for a night on the town. Cigarette in hand I lean him on a railing. All James Dean like I drag on the deadness of the poisonous atmosphere, I cough and realise the heat in my lungs has never fully dissolved, the infection lurks in the smallest darkest corners. Theo turns to me and grins, his yellowed teeth and bristled face mock me. As I try to once again continue our journey to the heart of the city I take a slip on the damp concrete. I fall three flights of stairs with the limp stiffness of Theo lying on top of me. I must have cracked my head because I'm all woozy like, I can't move and my right arm looks twisted round the wrong way. The effortless attitude of the rebel all caught up in pain and numbness, here I lie drifting in and out with my friend the corpse on top of me. His knee is in my groin.

In the brewing storm I allow my fickle nature to absorb the abundance of weakness lost since my unjoyed birth. It is a grotesque silver lining on my blackened heart that gives it it's sheen, the easily tarnished veneer that gives all vile and venereal offing's their gloss. Poisonous blood as artifice, as parasitic petals carried by rats in the sewers and undergrowth. The unduly disturbing suicide smiles lining the walkway below Beachy Head. The place where the nesting swallows enjoy goblets of dire humanity in its most extreme and vain mortis, ever a drama queen born in the belly of a son, a bastard of theological luckiness, the dark arts of a cynical soul laid to prey on a naive daughter of comical manliness. A festering pile of absolution, a pile of black carrion made into paste by its own debasement. Like a finger slowly lodged into the belly button, the slow pierce of the nail as the digit is absorbed into the fleshy fabric of the recipients gut. The heady aroma of domination, the squeal and squirm of the doctor, loss of blood and faith laid to waste in musical entry points, the crash of drums and thunder into plains better left for the Gods to mourn, a deciduous place left unattended and lost as though an invasion would usurp all the deadwood no longer shielded or scrubbed clean by the water margins of time slipped by.

And here I think, it must be that my experience and existence ends. I never died in my own experience, but maybe I'll get a chance to see half of it? To see the slow transition of light fading out into the eternal nightshade of death. The snow begins to fall and I appear in the wilderness again. I am alone, Theo is gone. My arm is fine, my head is still there. I look around to see the familiar rolls of snow and ice and emptiness. The whiteness is blinding and I close my eyes.

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

And I woke in the bed of a hospital. I was on a drip. Panic struck me. And there they were, my loved ones all gathered around me smiling, 'Oh you're back my dear.' I breathed in, clear, I breathed out, clear. The heat and fever had disappeared from my head, my bones no longer felt like liquid. Humanity was restored, was I dead? Clearly not. My disease was gone and apparently I was healed....