Grey

There was nothing but grey at the top of that sleet-drenched shallow slope. You ran in bursts, your pride fighting with your desperation not to miss the train you’d promised none but yourself you’d ride home that day. You always broke promises to yourself. You quit smoking four times a week. You launched a coup against carbs, raged wars against procrastination, and continuously swore never to swear again. Yet here you were.  Cursing under your breath you prayed that the panini you had for lunch would not return for revenge as a stitch in your heaving side, your hot clammy face struggled to draw enough breath for your brisk pace through your black-tar lungs. Determination was all you had to fight off this latest narcissistic disappointment.

   You passed some men in orange dress, all clad with hard hats and judgmental smirks. Now you sped only to avoid them; there was no need for saving face with one as ruddy as yours was then. Your eyes drank in the violent tangerine of their (not so) blue-collar disguise. You felt it bleed into your irises like the contrast dye of an impending CT scan, throbbing through the rods of your retinas and searing your mind with an abhorrent hue. That’s why the grey felt so terrifying at first. As you blinked at it over the final step to the train platform, your chest seizing and your pits swimming, you worried it may be all you’d ever see. How cruel of that orange, to advocate medusa – proving now your world would be nothing but concrete; a blank, dreary monochrome rainbow. Yet your shoes were still blue, albeit worn. Your knuckles were still red and raw with your cold. Your world was the same and the grey was just grey.

   You looked closer at the advance. It seemed to stretch beyond the sky and travel through everything. A prison suspended above the cell of your existence, trapping you in your own desolation. At first you didn’t know why that sky made you feel so helpless; but through your furrowed confusion a name surged into your mind. A name you’d promised you’d never forget. A name that lived in your heart for so long that you thought the letters would sit as scars on the organ until long after you succumbed to the moist dark earth. The grey laughed at you as you remembered the day it was frowning upon, remembered the name of the boy you lost, remembered to feel every convulse of mourning in one throat twisting crack of thunder screamed at you by the hysterical clouds. It was as if his face was sewn into every refraction, his tears seeping on you disguised as innocent rain – the other commuters seemed oblivious to the blood that was drenching the bitter November storm. Your hands were stained with his death but you were so used to the guilt you forgot to see the crimson. It was only as you held them up to test the leaking iron sky - to judge the suitability of fetching your umbrella from the depths of your stuffed travel bag - that you found your hands, not pink with the brunt of the chill, but on fire with the shame of his passing.

   You panicked as you viewed them and scrubbed them manically against your jeans, but no chemical in the world could bleach him from you. Dry sobs cut through your throat as you struggled to clean him from your palms, scraping against the metal ribbed bench you sat on as disturbed onlookers edged down the platform, and averted their gaze from your grazed numb hands. The stone advance had served its purpose, and rightly left you to your grief. The hidden sun fled to traumatize another lonely soul, and all you were left with was a date, and a name, and a black, endless sky. The dark was cold but not malicious, it let you hide in it as long as you kept quiet. But why were you so quiet?
    The moon smiled a soft encouragement as you raised your tired eyes to its stormy castle once more. Droplets fell into your pleading eyes and you realized why you were so aghast at the ashen miasma that first met you where the tracks came in to view; it was so empty, it was so bland, there was nothing there. No noise, no memory, no emotion; your sobs were raw with no lubrication, no tears to help them pass. That was where the true horror resided, you couldn’t cry for the boy you promised you’d love forever – because forever had come far too soon. He was naught but a faded memory. You couldn’t make room for the teenager you’d cherished, not there in the heart of the adult you’d become. You had outgrown him, and in his death he’d never catch up. You felt something snap in your chest and then your face became flooded with hot heavy tears. You laughed at the rain as it buried your cackles; the wind snatching them as they left your quivering lips. Of all the promises you’d ever made to yourself, vowing never to stop loving a ghost was the most liberating obligation to ignore.

Good boy

The dirt collected in clumps between his joints. He was panting as he snuffled around at the feet of his masters. Humans with hungry eyes - salivating excitement at the loyal beast snaking between their legs. His body rippled like a caterpillar. His rear raised ever so slightly in the air, for the curve of his spine strained as his nerves were set on fire. His mind was set on validation, the stroke of a hand across his skull or the offer of treats as hands caressed his pink middle. The muzzle he wore kept his waterfall jaws cemented shut so as he longed for attention all he could muster was a whimpering somewhere deep in his dry throat. 

He starved for their touch. He lived for their devotion. Yet all he felt as he begged on command, or thrashed to his back praying to be relieved of his torturous longing - was shame. Yes all he felt was shame. They saw he was unhappy, the eyes that owned him, they saw his despair and they relished in it. They held themselves how he longed to be held and they touched each other almost thoughtlessly, no prompt needed, no head tilt or straining stare. It seemed they mocked him with their equality. Did he want to belong to them, or with them? He licked their shoes and fetched their toys but was it only their affection he required?

No. He needed the shame. He needed the way they withheld their touch and kicked him as he begged. The leash they strapped round him was fatuous, as he would never run from the gift of their torture. He was a good boy for them, so that in time they'd let him be bad. He heeled for his mistress because as she stroked his hairless skin, her hand occasionally brushed his erection. He knew she purposefully teased him, she could grab it and pump it and put him out of his misery. But he was not lame, he need not be put down yet. The curl of her lip as he convulsed in excitement was only a prelude to the smile that ripped apart her commanding face as she withdrew her touch. He yelped through closed lips as if physically pained, writhing where he lay like a pig in shit. He belonged to her, but he knew she liked to share. His limbs grew sad as she turned her cold back to him, but then she invited the crowd to have a go.

'Spread' - she barked. 

The animal in her was a mighty lioness and her roar sent shivers through the rat that he was. She was his goddess and he lived to serve. But as the humans drew arms, of leather and lubricant and the creature kicked his legs in the air - he knew it was all worth it, as his reward was about to begin.  

For you

'Please don't hurt yourself.'
The walls begged me in their noiseless scream as I tried to melt the plastic from reluctant blades.
'But why?' I asked. Hoping beneath my hate that they'd give an answer that could save me. My hands shook with each rough forced flame, the flicker no more violent than the storm within my chambers. I wanted to die, but death was terrifying. No monsters or ghosts could cause me to feel my bones within my skin the way I did that night. But when I pondered waking in the morning I felt vile - day was my phobia, the anticipation of continuing hours; such seemingly endless torture. The walls were so soft with their pleading for my safety, but they spoke mainly of how little people cared for me. I was 'weak, weak, weak' and they told me with every note of their silent orchestra. And I could not argue. So ever present were my snarling shadows, accompanied by only deafening isolation. Yet in that incoherent hiss I heard them call to me, entice something long sleeping dormant beneath the first few layers of my worn out skin.
'Please.' I heard myself beg; 'Give me a reason not to.'
The paint on the walls seemed to sigh with thought. Even my own demons had no reason to keep me.
'Because of your deposit.' they spoke. 'Blood stains us walls.' The controlled pitch of how I was offered this causation led me further into demise. But my walls were honest and I could not bicker with them anymore, no matter how afraid I was now i had no one left to protect me. The flames beckoned death, like a rattling cart with the devil at its bit. He'd known where to find me for a while. I felt him watching, but the souls he reaps must first be diced. Here I was, a sous-chef's fetish. Yet my mind was strong at first and took decades to die - my body however, mere seconds. Did I have a deposit? Yes. The walls could not lie. I asked them, with the last breath of my lungs that belonged to the living;
'What should I do?' They thought for a few stolen beats of my heart, their mind my mind and therefore their life as false.
'Hang yourself. Please, do it for us.' I smiled at the vacant beige of my room, so plain and ordinary. I envied the walls with their inanimate innocence.
'Okay.' I spoke with my neck in a noose. 'I'll do this for you.'

Note

The internet tells me i'm depressed. I googled my symptoms nine times on the train to work; in between the cancer and the STIs this was a fairly agreeable diagnosis. Depression is fashionable now, models wear it on their tiny sleeves to explain their malnourished wrists. Celebrities with depression for the most part stay revered, just look at Kurt Cobain. Elvis was great but no one can think of him now without imagining his obese form slumped on a toilet, arteries clogged with goose fat, singing 'stuck on you' at the cistern as his life leaks out of his rectum. No one would ever impersonate Alexander McQueen or Ernest Hemmingway, there's no Sylvia Plath episode on South Park. There's a certain dignity to taking your own life, and such an innate sadness that comedy can't even mutate it. It's a comedic vacuum, a subject so abhorrent that no one dares play with it. However humanity loves labels, and I was branded with so many that you couldn't even see the cloth of my flesh beneath all the memos from child psychologists that were pinned to me.

On long train journeys I plan the words for my suicide note. Words became something I hoarded, collected from novels and journals to brandish again when the time came. Never sure whether to begin with 'dear' or 'to whom it may concern', most kids with this fantasy would brandish their addressee ' Mom' - but my mother doesn't need my apologies, she knows what lives inside me. She saw it with the eyes of her soul, eyes that were the trees my corrosive emotions fell not too far from. She's seen something ticking backwards in me since the day I was pushed out of her with a fleshy noose already wrapped around my neck. They say 'the miracles of modern medicine' saved my life that day. I say they wrongly imprisoned me, made me not long for this earth but forced to endure it none the less. For I grew up crooked. Some part of me never set straight. This world was a round shaped hole, I was a square set peg. The word clouds from the tear and blood soaked pages of my previous attempts to right the wrong of my birth are so apologetic. 'I'm sorry'. 'Please forgive me'. 'I just can't go on'. The more I must face the humiliation of survival, the more anger bubbles over in me. I blame the doctors that saved me, the women that reject me, the men that don't respect me. As the days dragged on the weapon with which I planned to vanquish myself changed, I found it grew more violent. From pills, to a cliff, from train tracks to a knife. So why did I buy all those bullets? If I only planned to kill myself? That is why I've written you this note, Dear concerned; to tell you that the darkness in me festered too long. It mutated and grew, and as weak as I was from years of abuse at the hands of it - I could not stop it. There is no blood on this page, but I'm sure by the time you read this my hands will be soaked in it. There are no tears tracked through the ink for the monster behind my eyes can not cry. But there is an apology, I am sorry I was born. I do not apologise for those I took with me. 9.5% of the population are diagnosed as depressed; the likelihood is I did them a favour.

Escalation

The glinting metal of lines in motion,

A foot two steps apart.

Slow creeping cycles,

Shadows grow,

And eat the shoes.

Then heart.

Hand on plastic rail.

This is all there is.

This climb.

This shit.

This curling trip,

Lazy artless lift. 

Your feet frozen in fear,

Electrically carried on.

Cogs in mechanisms,

Built on corpse owned land.  

A silver spoon in your pocket.

Elitist whips across your back.

You starve for shiny metals,

And the latest iPhone app. 

Puppet child,

Strings in claws - 

Trademark manicure.

Bourgeois bit,

Saddled debt.

Contract sofa bliss. 

Born from dust,

Coughed through life.

Asthmatic wheezing drone.

Settled from your parents death - 

Forged in broken homes.

You move,

You grow,

You stay the same. 

Step-by-step breakdown. 

Then one at a time you're lain to rest.

Tetris.

Robot urn. 

Spectrum

You waited softly,

In the blue,

Indigo azure. 

You saved your breaths;

Pink faced,

Through sweat -

Desperate to get more. 

Purple knuckles,

Gripped the rain.

Danced softly 'til the sun.

The blue returned.

The colors swirled.

Screaming,

Empty,

Numb.

Your cheeks a hue,

Of grassy plains.

Peeling citrus lids.

Bloody sockets.

Vein spread skin.

Pulsating, baron ribs. 

Violent fury, 

Normalcy - 

Phenomenally queer.

The bizarre shift,

Refraction,

Bliss.

'Am I alone up here?'

The clouds of doubt,

That smother me,

When you fog through my sky. 

Writhe in every shade of day -

And bring my fears to light. 

Optically,

You elude me.

Even when you're clear.

At your end there lies no gold.

Just beauty.

Liquid -

Air. 

Head

It started small,

Puppy kisses,

Lapping gently at your toes; 

Giving you encouragement -

'Go on',

'Jump in',

'It's not cold'. 

At the beginning, 

You maybe thought,

The waves gave you an edge.

People saw them swell and thought - 

She's raging,

Crazy;

Dead. 

You wore them on your shoulders see,

A scarf to fight the chill.

Your sleeves awash with angry marks,

Sawed dust amidst the mill. 

The waves they whimpered when you left,

They screamed to call you back,

They were a womb without a babe,

Mad without a hat. 

You thrashed,

You fought, 

But then you fell.

Coiling like a snake.

Into the water,

Gasping mess.

No lifeboat,

No life left.

The waves were crushing.

They ate your hate.

Grew mighty from the feast you made.

Drowning slowly,

Sad lost girl.

Choking back the salt.

Tears an ocean,

Blood a stream.

Angry jealous thought. 

Eventually the storm does calm.

Leaving you to rest.

But it returns.

That laughing surf;

Devours you once again. 

Grunge

I'm an out of work ex-introvert in a tired plaid shirt, with frayed seams and sewed sleeves, and someone else's insignia; on the wash-raped collar crease. Care instructions, Parental guide: Tag. Now I'm it. Faded fear, Adrenal gland: Foe. Had to win. Spin me on cold. Don't forget to fold, love. Lest your careless hold, Smooths me a scared straight curve. I'm a relentless complaint sheet, A thousand qualm army. Mortality, apparently, irrelevant to my infantry. Attention, please avoid mention, Of the punch-out final, deadline joke entitled; The healthcare commission. We're out of funds, Budget cuts: Closed. Stubs thrashing. Slice through septic limbs, Lack of heart: Shows. Pulse stagnant. Let me breathe. It screamed at me, love. Now that the curtains've closed, And all we have is blank. I'm a chemical cocktail mixed the wrong way, Etched with lead, Lead astray, Rays of ex, Ash tray veins. Bleeding limbs sing for thee. This cut's dear; The rest the letter. Hey. Fella. Beat me to death; Please. Then kiss me better. I'm diagnosed. Don't you know: Fuck. Suck this venom out. 'There's no saving her.' Don't mourn though: For, I never deserved us. Through these tortured tears. I am still your, love. There is no bitter thought. But also there's no fight. Love. Did I wear the frayed shirt because it reminds me of you? The pattern on the cuff, scuffed stuff across it too. Hardly in fashion, Hardly well groomed, Hardly turning heads as it walks across a room. This plaid is my armour. This smile my disguise. You were my protector. Why I was still alive. I'm an unemployed broken toy with no tape left to fix. I've failed suicide a thousand times, and shame like that it sticks. I long for blades to rip my skin, I pray for a bus crash. To slash and thrash, trade cash for hash. Curse the world as it goes, by. The voices increase. Please priest, let me sleep. At least make them cease, So I can iron out the crease, On my brow. On my shirt. And in me. Don't cry at the blood, As it seeps through the check. I'm blessed. For the ache trapped in my heart is, love. And it will never let me rest.

Stained

The laundry room was silent,

With soft spinning dreams,

Of me wrapped round your shoulders;

Muffling your screams.

Your eyes were vacant dime slots,

Comfort-soft ice cream.

Lullabies on Eco spin;

The demons in them mean.

I watched you as my cycle ran,

Your blood came squeaky clean,

I caught it with my colour guard,

Satan's satin stain.

Your pulse cut out.

You drained away.

Innocent, it seemed.

A lonely sock.

Forgotten rag.

Anonymity redeemed.

A filthy pipe dream in delicates,

To tongue your skin pristine.

I'm a dirty little scrubber girl.

Thirsty, raw, too keen.

And just like you I'm wearing thin,

My strength has decomposed,

I'm fading fast,

Please run my love. 

I'm hungry,

Sick;

A ghost. 

My soul is stuck dear laundromat,

You trapped me when you closed.

Now I just watch the dryer spin;

And wait here for my clothes. 

ma douleur implacable

'Go to sleep'
The nightmare hushed.
La lune, she wept for me,

A rough hand.
A harsh touch.
A muffled, helpless scream.

A wake held beneath a thousand stars,
To mourn for my identity.
It slipped away between my legs,
As you jabbed into me.

My gasps unheard.
Tear drenched lust,
How cruel a man can be.

A grunted coo.
A gruff drunk kiss.
A desperate whimpering plea.

Ripped leather began our tryst,
Unwilling dead-spread knees.
Body numb to infiltration,
Limp limbs rearranged with ease.

A rag doll I was beneath your frame,
Your words still churn my guts.
'Amore' no more,
Its you I abhor;
with your grotesque sickening hush.

'Baby please.'
'Just go to sleep'
'Then it will all just seem like a dream'.

I tried to swallow your advice,
And drift to safe naive rest.
I hid behind my tight shut lids,
But I could not ignore being undressed.

The more I begged,
That you let me die,
The louder you started to moan.

A rhythmic growl.
A sweat-stained girl.
A tragic symphony; 'help, please, don't'.

Were you ignorant to my revulsion?
Or was that what you wanted all along?
Was I the first victim of your destruction?
You knew you were doing wrong.

Even now as I lay with a man I trust,
You're right there next to us.
As you came your wet words hissed,
Delusional declarations of love.

When he says it I hear your voice.
When he holds me I feel your clutch.
You are there in my dreams,
And I weep,
And I scream,
And cringe away from his touch.

I exhaled the last breath of the girl I was,
that night in the Parisian air.
So a vacuum was forged,
Where nothing belonged,

Not sex,

Nor tequila,

Nor drugs.

You're a monster, monsieur.
The cruel thief of pride.
But there are scabs on the lesions you left.

I am sorry for her,
The her I was then,
Because she never deserved what you did.

You fucked her away.
She was killed by your rape.
All that I've left is a husk.

Yet my chipped china can be glued back together,
If the artist is patient and kind,
And with each day that breaks,
A detail's erased,
And I am beginning to be glad I survived.

Vines

The night took control like a glitch surging across a power board. I was lost. Fried. Fused. The black swelled around me; the dry breast of a perverted vulture come to devour my corpse. There was a glint to the dark, a twinkling crystal blood to the pulsating onyx organ. It ran through that night unseen by mortal eyes only gazed upon maternally by stars and the Angels that screamed within them. The feathers scorched from their wings long ago they willingly withheld the flame; they found pleasure in the pain - this was both their punishment and their reward. The glitter that seeped through the earth's night was their cum, their tears; their death. Was it my death also? 

The feathers that dissolved from their arching limbs began to prickle at my skin. They teased at first, bath bombs trapped beneath warm steeped limbs. But they grew lustrous and stabbed through me. Needle after needle poked through my skin until the golden wings began to mold. They grew corrosive and stagnant. I jumped for the sky, clawed at its impossible edges. 

But I only fell. Down and down I twisted. My lungs froze in my chest; weeping lashes appeared like desperate piss across unsuspecting snow. My eyes burst within my sockets. The dark exploded across me completely like a proud firework display. My brain stem was the glorious finale that sent my flesh away in a glistening macabre mist. Ooh. Ahh. Then black. Time to go home. 

Where is home now? I have fallen for so long the pain of my destruction is fading, becoming familiar. I welcome the sting. My home is my body, this pain is my lover. I yearn for this death. I crave it. Soon I start to rub against the needles in my skin, scrape and scrape headless thus thoughtless. I carve my begging across my skin; 'more, please'. And I stop falling. The spines calm. 

Then we are rocking rhythmically together, and I am rising like a rouge balloon, shooting into the sky like a Pegasus. Blood is my liquor and my wounds are my masters. I feel heat unlike anything I've ever felt before and as I reach a climax so high that I can not feel the stomach acid pouring from my gashed torso, or the hug of ruby sinew encrusted barbed wire; I shed a tear. 

For I see a man below me being consumed by a twinkling black claw. He smiles his final smile, eyes flash metals of the burnt spoon twitching in his hand. Flecks of red rain down as his pupils blow and he evacuates his bowels. That man is me. I am the angel that seeps onto his grave. The restraints begin to rub again; my body seizes as my cock rises; and I realise only this level of intensity could make the kind stars smile on our dark, dark world. 

Birds

It's the chirp of the birds that set it off. The night has slipped away. Slowly, quietly, almost accidentally. I once counted the blinks it took for the sun to rise. I forget the tally now. It didn't seem important enough to remember, or at least that's what I tell myself now when I try to count them again. Too many graves have been filled with exhausted breaths since then. The death toll is in the millions now, each gruff exhale a soldier lost in my battle for rest. I build their coffins in my head and write eulogies for them to calm my frustration. 'Here lies a man who was killed by caffeine.' - I carve the pathetic truth into the back of my lids every night, as the beat of my rampant heart pounds in my ears. The angry footsteps of a relentless insomnia. But the birds. The birds still sing to me come morning.

They are as predictable and naive as my bed time routine. Their melancholy chirp is the adrenalin needed to arouse my nostalgia. They remind me of the slow creep of the sun over a tranquil beach, of the rush of wind past my ears as I ride through empty streets, of the accomplished solitude soaking the hour no one else knows. And all too easily they remind me of your voice. The rasp of it, as you began to share my vices. You never occur to me without the sun rise. I think I prefer to leave you in the light, things are clearer there. The day does not rage in my head, it does not mutate my thoughts and stab them repetitively through a wavering logic. With you restrained by the shackles of dawn my hatred of each witching hour leaves you alone. I can smile fondly at the birds and refuse to admit that you help the dim to crush me, that you are one of the knives it uses to impale me.

When we shared this sickness you were my bandage, I wrapped you around my gaping wounds and my delusion soothed the septic cuts. But you were just a band-aid; I was a desecrated leper who'd lost all his limbs. When you left the shock of your departure displaced that of my anguish. You saved yourself, which I could never blame you for. I was quickly decomposing, the air between our sighs was becoming heavy and toxic. As pure as you were you couldn't rescue me. I had begun to infect you, the skin across your perfect body was beginning to mold. I commend you for not fleeing sooner. With each subsequent night I endured alone the shock wore off, and so the blood seeped faster from my trauma. I was a fool. All that time you kept me together and I never even noticed. My punishment now is the memory of you, the shadows of you that mock me in this silent darkness. But I still have the birds. I'll always have the birds. Even if they'll never sound as beautiful now that I don't have you.

Stop sign

The chaos of my mind dulls to your eyes. Part of what is raging within me purrs and coos in your embrace. I am a dulled firework, reaching the end of a glorious performance. My ignition a distant memory, lost in the translation of your gaze. For what was this life before you as my medication? You are the glistening heroin my fiendish cravings fetishized. Even when your touch felt repulsive, and your words cliche, I still basked in the warmth of such long awaited belonging. I tried to reciprocate - to be the baritone echo that the glory of your faithful ballad deserved - but there has been no practice by my kind for these moments. This established scene is but an improvised awkward sketch, the two actors being I and contentment. We are strangers to each other. Its grip is alien. I've studied how to respond, but in practice being human is a lot harder than one would think. Your eyes help. Your hollow smile. Your gushing lies. They encourage a hush that regulates the storm behind my dead pan mask.

I gave in to your charm unwillingly, kicking and screaming my resolve fought, wept, then fled - the new self assured delusion that your admiration animated from the moldy cells that littered my valves was stronger than any walls i'd built to protect me from affinity. But once you closed your eyes those walls returned. Their guard off duty. This time however they did not stay dormant, they were not there to protect - they were built for attack. My cage of solitude became an implement of war. I was handed a lease to cruelty and torture; my new homes, one for the summer, one for the fall. The murky pools of acceptance I had so naively bathed in began to corrode. My mouth filled with the black sludge of dependence, it coated my lungs and every breath became a battle. Allowing myself to drown was not martyrdom; no matter how much I wished it was. I simply forgot how to swim. No voice to lead me, no optics to rescue me, no hope in hell. I was alone. Abandoned easily, without sharp eyes to guide my morality it ceased to exist.

However on the surface I was happy. Ecstatic at the slightest whiff of longing from your direction. You were never to know how unhinged I had become, or suggestively how deranged I always was. The screams in my head that punctuated your innocent snuffling were only audible to me. My smile imprisoned the wailing. Nicotine-stained teeth were the bars that contained my torment. Kept like a convict by the near art of fitting in. Your torture was ward to an inaccurate painting of me, a wax scuffed less-than-idyllic replica. But further beyond that I was the captive of gloom. The loud infinite admission that under my skull was nothing but ill feeling and calculated revenge dangled before me the keys to my freedom The morose orchestra of clinking metals sang furiously through my mind. It incubated true fear. There was always fear.

You stiffen when I embrace you. A scowl curves your brow. Perhaps you're dreaming of combat, to you the cautious touch of my nervous hand is a balled fist launching across your subconscious, not a lost frightened girl seeking validation. Or perhaps I am a pitied enemy in your mirage, my claws pleading and desperate. Ironically the accuracy reaches beyond your fabricated scenery. My desolation is obnoxious. It roars across my face. But perhaps even you are unaware of my pathetic hunger. Perhaps to you this hour is reserved for sleep and I am but an intruder demanding attention in a time you allocate to blank dry rest. You know nothing of the way my brain is crawling with fury, the intrusive thoughts and the endless loathing. You are adrift on a cloud of ignorance, and no matter how hard I throw my spears you remain imperceptible. When will I give up anticipation? When, if ever, will your bubble pop?

There was a time when my monsoon was mine alone. I kept it in check with a cemented routine of solitude and abrasion. Me and my illness grew fond of each other throughout those intimate meetings. I learned to cherish it for what it was; irreversible and fascinating. We mastered a trust in each other, forged a respect for each other, we even began to need each other. But then you crashed into our visceral entanglement and you dislodged all i'd spent years building with one soft accidental huff. My capacity to love is limited at best, so in order to let you in I had to banish the security of my demons. Of course they were furious, and now when they return their horns are sharp and their intentions sordid.

I suppose what I am praying to discover is whether the hours of clarity and bliss make up for the subsequent bedlam. But of course this query doesn't plague me long. Because as the sun rises so do your lids they flutter open and let their innards consume- and once again I lose my rationality in your irises. My trepidation leaks from the ducts atop your lashes and I resent my doubt. How can something so beautiful possibly be toxic? Is this desire for pain and unease pathological? Will it ever release me? Must I release it? Your sleep cycle is my traffic light, a red, green, amber fog. You dare me to rush with you, teasing as my mangled engine revs. Will victory earn your devotion? Does the steering wheel spin a reciprocated tale? Could this quest cleanse my desecrated guilt? Yet alas delicate, powerful creature, retaining no regard to logic or lust; I am simply too drunk to drive.

Breakfast

The shattered fragments of china were of varying sizes. The littler chunks that littered the room were an opaque hue of green; a sugar bowl perhaps, or an ornate cup. The bigger pieces were obviously plates - smashed like fireworks and exploded in shards across the ceramic tile. The way they spread across the room was a mine field - the nightmarish quest of a shoeless adventurer. But blood from nicked toes was not enough payment for this crime.

A black lake spread across a chequered plain. Oozing with a friendly morning steam which ascended in a mist to the default cream sky. The lake was advancing, stemming from a weeping glass tunnel with a snapped plastic handle. It shrouded the red and white squares that were unfortunate enough to be stagnant in its path and it ran for the edge of that plain. In a feat of escape, or with the thirst for an end, the lake dropped beyond the plastic coated horizon and slid to the mystery of the ground below. One drop at a time it leapt to freedom; if it survived the glass would not know.

What was that sharp demanding note? A pitch violent screeching, monotonous and endless. Was it a warning? What was it warning of? The accompanying flash of red was like a light house signal; screaming 'please, please, please' to those ignorant to danger. It passed through the dense smoke that was quickly filling that place like a navy ship search light through a sea-hung mist. But like a singular match in the depths of a chasm - it could do nothing to help.

The licks of orange were hungry today. They passed through the world feasting on victims of cheap fabric and dry leaves. Able to be where ever a banquet lay, invited by the accidental slip of a hand, or the heat of the sun. Today the slip was of feet; the dance of spilt coffee - which lead to a soft skull on a hard floor. The licks tasted the woman tenderly at first; savouring the initial raw lashes of flesh. Delectable and virginal. But the flames had been growing ravenous since they left the charred breakfast exhausted in the pan, snacking on curtains and cabins in preparation for their main feast.

The coffee wept for its careless mistake and the drops picked up pace, thinking that maybe were they able to catch the licks in time they could stop them from gorging on the woman who gave those drops life. But the battle had already been lost, the moment her slipper lost contact with the ground. The fire's gluttony consumed her, drooling blue heat and roaring with a thousand degree bite. The only solace the murderous spillage could cling to, was that the damage to her lungs caused by the friendly coiling smoke would kill her long before she felt herself becoming a meal for the heat. At least that was what it thought; but of course it could not hear her scream.

(Im)pure

He watched the moon set over the grey blocks of architecture. The mist he was so fond of was hovering around their edges, merging the sharp corners into blurs of sky. He never remembered the setting of the moon. The glorious erection of sun too chauvinistic in its performance that the man forgot the tired old moon as it shrank away to breathe over another soul's night. Today he couldn't face the sun. He was afraid the light of the day would burn him and cause him to accept their night was over - that a new day was forming like a rampant virus and would soon engross him in its honesty. The man had felt himself redefined that night. The hours of moaning panting poetry between the sheets and kissing across the skin had sparked chaos in his chest; a wrathful warmth of longing. He was enslaved by the impossibility of what he knew to be the most honest desire he'd ever possessed and under the ghostly smile of the moon he was allowed that brief happiness; that momentary connection with contentment. It's irregularity and beauty a foreign confusion to his unfulfilled voracity.

The man's eyes drifted through the cool dawn mist and a personal haze formed between his lids. The inevitable danger of his tryst was rising with the wretched majesty and ego of his galaxy's relentless star. It threatened to dissolve his immunity and leave his pure devotion tainted. He felt the skin of his bare chest as he faced out the large window - he traced the sky line as he traced his love's inflictions of lust; softly scratched into his powerful frame. The clawing hands of a cum drenched entanglement, pleasure, hunger and fear all singing a melancholy choir across his figure. He smiled through the prick of tears and lost himself in the memory of gasping lips and warm tears of a finally found release. The edges of his happiness were moulding though. The fungus was stronger than the antiseptic thoughts he was forcing against it. He could not hide from the anxiety of rejection, the fading euphoria of a dream finally made real. The desperation to know the body of his true soul mate again - to lay lips across lips and hands between thighs was raging like a tsunami through his mind and his blood. The man's incandescent eyes could not stop from darting to the bedroom door to again drink in the fragile nudity of the flesh he had so long fantasized about.

The blue of the sky was loud now - the day had arrived. The man cursed the moon for leaving him there under this crumbling mirage. Before the day had it's opportunity to expose him entirely the man craved one last look - one last solid gold gem of adoring pride. But as he pushed the door open softly to the place he'd left his flame to rest on the cinders of their burnt out passion; he saw his son's youth-stripped eyes were already widened. In them a stagnating blank lost horror. The truth of the day didn't matter to the boy, the night was just as fluorescent on his torment. Its soundtrack a begging pain-gasped opera. The sodden sheet could never again protect his innocence - shield this new nudity. The man sighed with heavy grief. He knew he didn't deserve happiness when it came at such a cost. Yet both shredded souls knew now he would never stop stealing it. With that screaming, thrashing truth he knew he could never again depend on the veil of a naive moon.

Thunder

The light was assaulting. A blinding scream of electricity, launching into my skull. I tried to hide from it but the protection of my wafer lids was minimal, and the memory of it burnt enough to scathe. Was this heaven? I was struggling to remember a time before this moment, before this light. I knew this light, and only this light. This light was my spouse, my sibling, my self. But this light was unforgiving. It was naked and painfully true. It was the light of sobriety. I remembered something before this heaven. I knew it was not only this paradise I knew. A darkness crept into it - bleeding through my beautiful phosphorescent memory. An envious coal crimson of desire and destruction - it was tantalizing and horrifying. It smiled with blood stained lips and breathed an orgasmic perfume, my knees trembled at the memory of it. Knees. A body. I was more than the eyes that burnt and withered in this light. I tried to find my knees with the apotheosis of my apparent being - scanned the light for my body. I saw toes. I saw knees. I saw calf, thigh, cunt, stomach, breasts; me.

The light began to dull as I was permitted to feel my mind. Or rather it felt me, felt every nerve in my godforsaken justforgotten body. It shrieked at the abused limbs, howled across the corroded organs; whimpered in agony deep in my arteries cores. I ruined this body. Fed it the wrong fuel relentlessly and threw it across concrete and dance floors. It hated me passionately, a hatred reciprocated by my loathing of it. It didn't take my body long after awoken to feel the body next to it. My skin tingled in fear and disgust, prickled like a cat towards an enemy. As if anti-magnetized it began to creep away, towards the unfamiliar floor and away from the stranger's bed. My body stabbed against my mind, my skull trying to rid itself of the pulsing nemesis inside it. My hurried hands grasps at the clothes that hid my body's revulsion from the eyes of others, and from the sensibility of myself. There was bottles of liquor scattered all over, profoundly as empty as my heart felt. The place was somewhere I'd never seen; but the scenario was a frequent intruder. Slipping into shoes and slipping out the door I felt that darkness again. It was starving, the black; worn and desperate. It ate at me as I scanned the empty early morning street that met me after I closed the door on the intrusive truth of addiction. I blinked into the grey melancholy sky, repressing the tears of my realization. With a shudder I smiled into a practised mask of denial. The tears that dared battle through were rightfully executed by drops from the sad, lonely sky. The clouds were weeping for me. It was only a light drizzle, but I felt like I was going to drown.

thing

From the first euphony uttered from your lips I was hooked. Flayed by your words I lay bare. My skin felt the crunch of your teeth as you pronounced your 'T's, chowing down on my vulnerability as if it were a quick snack between urgent appointments. Through the weeks that followed I grew septic. My exposed flesh gave home to disease and I welcomed it feebly, too afraid to fight it in fear that you'd see - see the side of me that deserved to be your equal. As long as I hid in your naivety I was safe, the maggots could nibble me away and I'd go quietly. Letting your existence consume me. Not like in the way I longed to destroy myself with your love. I'd explode in your arms like a firework. Awkwardly lit and fired at the wrong angle during a november 5th family celebration. I'd ignite all the wrong places and leave the witnesses screaming as I seared their flesh with my passion. I wanted to be a flurried disaster against you. To leave no survivors; have blood drenching us as we manically laughed amongst the wreckage. We'd use the limbs of our victims as pillows to lull us into a protected post-coital dream. 

But instead I stagnated. Alone. There only to boost your ego. I fumbled and fell, like a fawn on ice. The mighty wolf I was became dormant in your presence, she cowered in front of your brilliance; transmutated from predator to prey - as if faced with a nova whilst standing atop a dying star. My confidence faded into submission as I began to worship you. I was a gold star awarded to a finger painting. You were a masterpiece of the entire galaxy. I longed to journey to the centre of you, to be annihilated by the heat of your divine superiority. Instead I kept to the shadows. Offering support and suggestions when I could. Suppressing the screaming truth for so long that it took a form too repulsive to imagine. And then it met the maggots writhing within me, and together they dined on the last shreds of my identity; my remaining morsels of self respect. With their teamwork I was reduced to a husk. A shell. A shit smear on your horizon. My piteous state a curse I was delighted to be blessed with. As from my state of sub-existence I was free, to placidly watch the exquisite storm that was you rage.