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.