Ode To Joy

My dad talked to me for the first time in forever over breakfast. I would have preferred him not to. I'm still drunk. Oh Joy. He wants me to get a job:

"I want you to get a job."

I can’t do that. My head would erupt if I sacrificed any more time for other people. I go through this fucking holocaust every day where I coast through school getting exponentially bored; all the while risking contamination by my fellow students’ stupidity. I need my time in the evening to gather the fragments and put myself back together before I go to school the next day; like applying make-up to a corpse for an open coffin funeral. I need the money but I really can’t get a job. People think I’m lazy but my mind is not a vacant cubicle. It’s occupied with other things. Predominantly, see-sawing between wanting to kill myself and wanting to kill everyone else. My dad’s the only person I can’t stand up to and typically the person I most want to confront. I can moan at him. I always euphemise. He can’t do directness. So I talk around the issue. He laughs it off. Sure he’s easy to discuss stupid trivia with but when it comes to anything tangible he’s useless. He gets defensive. Like when he has a go at me about anything and I try to stay cool; this syncopated thumping claws at my chest. When I try and arrange the words of my defence, the sentence caves in like a rope-bridge, and I deliver this queasy mangled shite in a girlie submissive voice. The sort of voice you don’t intend anyone to hear. I don’t know why he’s intimidating but I fucking hate it and one day I’m gonna explode and confront him with more than idiot shallow words and a self-imposed bedroom exile. He’s a self-righteous fucker and if you try and explain this to him he goes AWOL:

“Shut up Alexis don’t start psychoanalysing me I don’t need a loada gob from your skinny ass I’ve got enough to think about you don’t fucking know me as well as you think you do so stop being a goddamn adolescent brat and get over yourself I’ve got enough to worry about without your melodramatic shitstorms every time I ask you to do something I don’t need your shit you know how your mother cries whenever I tell her what you’re like and how you make me so angry and how you promised to do more round the house once she started working nights and haven’t lifted a finger to help anyone but yourself to notes shaved here and there from my wallet like I don’t notice any less forgiving parent would’ve shopped you to the police by now but I haven’t because I kept hoping you might pull yourself together and do something I can be proud of so we don’t have to keep moving house to erase your spiteful destructive little kiddie episodes from our family history and preserve our reputation so your mum who’s already unstable has to be ripped out of her scarce little comfort zone and inserted into some new and frightening environment where she has to go through trust trials and confidence crises just to even arrange a job interview did we ever have this trouble with your sister who’s sublime perfection radiates from her every pore like scales on an angelfish, whose schoolwork was never less than diligent and whose attitude exudes a selfless optimism and generosity of spirit and then we get you injurious snivelling trash being basically a nasty bastard, a spineless little turd an irresponsible degenerate self-aggrandising waste of mine and your mother’s time do you do you ever see your sister behaving like an attention-craving raw cyst on the good name of this family rotten misanthropic empty emotionless lazy facile intolerant fucking antisocial crybaby the world doesn’t owe you shit take more pride in your appearance you scruffy unkempt stinking turdbag faggot wretch brush your teeth more often you killed our dog because you didn’t walk it often enough you lied you said you’d walked him when you hadn’t so he died prematurely I don’t like to have to tell you this but you need to wake up to your manifold failings as a person sonny I’m doing this because I love you and I wouldn’t be a good father if I didn’t say it like it is I’m doing you a favour so nobody in the real world if you make it that far ever has to tell you this I’m saving you the embarrassment of a public shaming even though that’s precisely what an inaccessible little prick like you needs to be prised open and have the forceps of compassion probe about inside your diseased insides and rearrange your skewed moral axis into anything resembling a human being if only your were more like your sister then we might get an invite to your mother’s parents for Christmas instead of being shunned and disowned because they can’t stomach the notion that they might actually share genes with a turgid dicksore like you why can’t you use your sister as an example where did we go wrong I get mad and your mum starts crying so I get angrier and then your sister walks by to say goodnight and flashes me that sweet smile to remind me that all of this anguish and expenditure wasn’t a complete waste of time and resources why aren’t you more like your sister if only we’d… ”

Or some such bullshit. Maybe if I didn’t feel like a phantom pregnancy that to everyone’s stunned dismay, followed through, I might be as generically uninteresting as my sister.

I was an only child once. Until I was six. Then my sister barged her irrelevant way into the cosmos and what little identity I'd forged at that point got raped, upended. I'd got happily accustomed to not sharing. I've rediscovered the art recently. But for those six glorious years I enjoyed the attention of both parents, high as they were on the residual euphoria that peaks with a honeymoon and slowly dries up through the years. When I was five they found me a babysitter. Joy.

Joy said: You can't build on the sunset.
I said: I want some ice cream.
Joy wasn't a great babysitter. She was a sadistic, evil bastard of a fifteen-year old cuntsplash. It's little wonder I don't like girls much.

Joy said: we're going to watch the 'Thriller' video.
I said: I don't want to it looks scary.
Joy said: If you don't I'll tell your parents you pissed yourself.
I said: Fine if you feel like that I'll watch the damn movie you manipulative bitch.
Joy said: Like, you so wished you said that.
I said: Actually no, given the opportunity, I'd like to have said 'if you tell them anything like that, I'll tell them you habitually pushed me down the stairs and fed me drugs pretending it was lemonade and threatened me with even nastier things if I told my parents.
Joy said: But, er, then you’d be right. I did.

And she did. I'd be right. My parents would deposit me in her care; head off to their opulent soiree, get shit-faced, throw buns at other guests, turn up stinking and gooey at about half eleven; Joy would appear in doting, compassionate babysitter mode, return a roughed-up, slightly dopey kid to them. They'd be too drunk to attribute the dopeyness to anything other than his being an active go-getter of a child and it being way past his bedtime. I'd lie awake all night panicking about the gravity of her threats - should I squeal? What if she tells my mummy that I got my penis out and started playing with it? Mummy would be really disappointed. I never did like disappointing her. In fact, my dick still never gets much exposure. Joy could resurface at any moment to manifest the threat. By the morning, I'd have paranoiacally weighed up the situation from every angle and invariably decided that I wouldn't squeal this one time, but if she does it again, I'm definitely telling mummy. And that's final. As final as perpetual deferment of the truth could ever get. And here I am now, documenting it in some hermetic little prose piece. Next time, next time...You won't get away with this, you evil bitch. But she has.

"Alexander, do something ridiculously humilating/ potentially frightening/ utterly beyond your post-toddler grasp of the world or I'll tell mummy you broke my mum's limited edition floral plate." The plate dangles from her stumpy pig-fingers.
"No, I don't want to. That's a bad thing to do."
"Oh, go on. Don't be such a goodie-goodie. Don't be so fucking safe."
"It's bad to swear. I don't want to. I like cats. I don't want to hurt her. Put the plate down."
"Ok, well in which case, you're a very brave boy for saying no. That's the right thing to do. So come with me upstairs and I'll give you a present." The plate is back on the wall. The cat darts for the garden.
"Oh. Ok." Greed fuels our ascent. Hers, for my pain and her sick gratification. Mine, for a phantom present.
"So where's my present?'"
"Sit down up here, cover your eyes and I'll go and get it." It's a tall flight of stairs.
Hey, this is cool. If I were made of paper instead if meat, bone, skin and hair, I'd leap off here and flutter slowly to the ground with all the grace of a swan's feather. Peace. Freedom. Joy. Where is she? The anxious voice of greed. Oh there she is.
"Ready? One, two, three..."

Then I'm crying. Crumpled, upside-down, my head forcibly tucked into the concave of my collar-bone. I wasn't engineered to be naturally arranged this way. If I were made of paper, Joy would have just performed the gruesomest origami on me. Being tiny, it took about four revolutions of my pretty lean body to arrive at the floor. By which time, my limbs had undergone so many fucked-up contortions that I felt like one huge, amorphous double-joint. Jolts of hurt ripping through my slim, underpadded kid body. About two thirds down my head scraped along the bannister railings, rebounding like a scale plundered across the bars of a xylophone by an over-zealous player. Disoriented, the only sense I can rationalize is my hearing, which picks up Joy laughing at the top of the stairs. This hurts at least as much as my journey down them, and my crying escalates. Inappropriate choice of words perhaps. My babysitter joins me; cradles me into a nervous calm. Maybe she's not that bad. Perhaps it was an accident. She was laughing because she's so in love with the giants of slapstick. I've just performed one of the famous slapstick routines. Now she feels bad for laughing when I'm clearly experiencing profound discomfort. I think my nose is bleeding. Maybe it's just snot from crying so much. Either way, she wipes, takes my hand and manouevres me into the kitchen.
"Oh, you poor little dear!" Still laughing, with a hollow, forced self-consciousness at this point.
"Let's fix you a drink. You're a very brave boy. And a very good boy for not telling your mummy about this."
Only now do I appreciate how to unravel such loaded rhetoric. Oh, that's a good idea. I won't tell mummy. Wait a minute. I've been duped.
"Which you can't. It'll be our secret - mummy already knows you're a brave little soldier. Don't want her thinking you're a fearless trooper who knows no humility and has no understanding of danger, do we? Let me fix you a drink. You deserve some lemonade after those nasty stairs sucked you down them. It was like being swallowed by a big, hungry giant wasn't it? And now the giant's poo-pooed you out of his bottom and you're safe. And you can go home knowing you're a hero, and the only one who ever survived being eaten by the big wooden giant. But you musn't - would you like a straw? - you musn't tell anyone about your victory against the evil giant because nobody will believe you. Everyone knows that nobody can be eaten by the giant and come out in one smiling piece like you have. There you go. Drink it all down. So it'll be our secret, what a brave little man you are."
"Ok."
"And you'll never tell anyone will you?"

Yes.

"No"
"Good boy." She ruffles my hair. Her behavioural contradictions are really fucking with me. Her inconsistencies are probably accountable for the fact that I still trust apporximately noone; and for my assumption that any authority figure is covertly plotting to destroy me. All because I wouldn't tie a sparkler to a cat's tail. Actually I hate cats too now, which may be tenuously post-dated.
"Drink it all up."
"It tastes funny."
"Well it's from the same bottle you had last time."
"Well it tastes funny."
"Don't be so ungrateful. You're mum and dad said I wasn't supposed to give you any sugary drinks at all, so drink up and shut up."
"OK." Like, she's giving me something; like she's turning me against my parents by allowing me to gorge on the decadent fancies they so explicitly prohibited. Joy is wonderful.

I feel dizzy. I feel sick. Why was that lemonade all powdery at the bottom?
"Well you drank it. It can't have been that bad."
"It tasted really..." Bitter, I sensed but couldn't articulate.
"Hahaghhaha." Fifteen, and she's already got a smoker's cough.
"Joy...." I'm swaying on my stool, trying to steady myself on the kitchen worktop"
"...What was that drink?"
"Ha. Alka Seltzer."
"What?" My vision is obscuring, like I'm viewing the world from the bottom of an industrial kitchen sink.
"Alka Seltzer."
"What's Alka Salka?"
"Alka Seltzer. It's a drink grown-ups have to stop them feeling. It's nicer than lemonade isn't it?"
"I feel sick. I feel dizzy."
"Oh, that's just from the fall. That'll pass soon. You're being such a brave boy. Do you want some more drink?"
"Ok. What if I'm sick?"
"Oh, you won't be. What you need is plenty of drink to wash the bruises off those bones. You'll be good as new tomorrow." I'd seen my mum make gravy by crumbling a stock-cube into a pan and adding water. Joy did something similar with a white capsule to make Alka Seltzer. There couldn't be anything wrong with it if it's made like gravy. I used to find myself absorbed in the sound of my mum stirring the gravy saucepan with a metal spoon, a rhythmic, muffled, modulating 'chrring' as every figure-of -eight circuit brought us closer to lumpless gravy and a big dinner. This new drink just emits a big fizz, like if a snake could foam with rabies when you startled it.
"There you go".
"Thanks Joy. You're really nice." I downed this one in two gulps.
"Oh, you think so?" A slutty smile, I later decide.
"Yeah, well you look after me when mummy and daddy are having playtime."
"Well, they give me some money for it. But I like you too. Do you really like me?"
I hiccup a giggle. Then I belch, and giggle again.
"Yeh!"
"Well, do you know what girls and boys do when they like each other?"
"Play Transformers?"
"Sometimes they do. But Transformers is kids stuff. Do you know what brave, grown up boys and girls do when they like each other?"
"Can I have another drink?" She's spun my stool round.
"Look at this. Put your hand here."

So over the next few weeks, I develop a taste for Alka Seltzer. The third time I fall, and beyond, I'm fairly convinced she pushed me. Sometimes, twice in one night. Then I'd feel dizzy and sick and she'd give me some Alka Seltzer for being a brave little soldier. And because I'm a big strong boy, the aching subsides really quickly. After a few weeks I start to feel sick for longer though, even at home, so I ask my mum for some Alka Seltzer. She wants to know how I learnt about Alka Seltzer. My parents no longer give Joy any money. I'm back on regular lemonade. I use the stairs very tentatively. One evening, I saw a Gremlin on the landing window-sill and freaked out. My new babysitter's name is Chelsea. I tell her it sounds like a dog's home. This endears me to her. My mum's gone to the freezer to fetch the sausages. I sneak myself a stock cube from the cupboard and chew it up. It's really strong.

I was six then. At six years and ten months my sister arrived. I'm no longer an only child. At seven years and three months I push my sister down the stairs. I hate her. At eight years and four months, my auntie and her boyfriend come and stay with us. He's young, muscular, wears a sleeveless vest, is called Simon, beats her up. I have a real taste for strong flavours these days. And that's another reason I can't get a job. Because I'm still drunk. I'm no longer an only child. I'm still only a child though, only, longer.

Ode To Joy:

Joy is now a junkie single-mother. I'm so sorry. I hope for the kid's sake she lives in a bungalow.

Joy says: I want you to get a job.
Joy Jr says: But I'm only seven.
Joy says: Don't answer back. You're the reason I'm in this fucking state.
Joy Jr says: So the cycle of abuse perpetuates.
Joy says: What did you say?

Joy Jr says nothing. So the cycle of abuse perpetuates.

The Haunts Of My Youth

"You treat your girlfriend like shit. I hear you treat your girlfriend like shit. If I was your girlfriend, I'd ask you to treat me like shit. If I asked you to treat me like shit, would you"

"You heard that?"

"Yeah, we could live in this house and I'd let you do whatever you wanted to me."

"That sounds really amazing. You could live like my wife, and I could be abusive and sadistic to you, make you scream my name."

"Wow, you're a poet. Would you do that?"

"Sure, but, I'm really not into that. I'm looking for tenderness in a relationship."

"But you did treat your girlfriend like shit, right?"

"Well yeah. Er. I dumped her by text."

"Shit. That's harsh. But. I thought 'shit' meant hitting her, and forcing her into brutal sex against her will, general demoralizing stuff, like regarding her with less respect than you do your own tired fist. I guess I misconstrued it some. But that's what I mostly imagine you doing when I'm, you know...Sorry."

"In some universe, that's what happened then. You're just unlucky to be in this one. I guess you could hail a cab?"

"Hehe. Is that your dog over there?"

"No. I did hit her once. My girlfriend."

"No way."

"She was being so annoying."

'Did you bend her arm around her back and breathe violent, damning insults into her ear while you gutted her insides with your iron fist of a dick? Sorry, I'm being sick...and weird."

"Hehe. Look man, it's fine. Once I did get pretty violent with her. I think she enjoyed it, so I stopped. She got bored and we drifted quickly apart."

"Do you miss her?"

"No. I've still got my dick and my brain. And my fist. Haha."

"Wow, you're the whole package."

"What d'you mean?"

"I mean, you're, gorgeous, strong, manly, pretty damn funny. You've got a charisma and a...charm I find really sexy."

"Easy man. But thanks. Look, I'll tell you what. Here's my number. Give me a call, then I'll have your number, and next time my parents are out, I'll dial you up and we can do whatever you want, ok?"

"You're taking the piss."

"No way man. Straight up. This is obviously important to you. I'll call you up, invite you in, then do whatever: kick you to the ground, piss on you, rip your arm behind your back, tear you up on the floor, spit on your face and rub it in the carpet, pull your hair hard, fuck you brutally etc. You seem like a nice guy. I'd like to do this for you. For one night only."

"You sure you're not shitting me?"

"Look bitch. I'm so absolutely serious about this. So accept this gift with grace or I'll swallow my number and we'll go our separate ways. You hear?"

"Shit, I'm getting really excited."

"I can, er, see that."

"I'm so sorry."

"Forget it, I'm flattered. I guess. So what's it gonna be?"

"Ok man, no contest, give it here. I'll call you up dead soon.

"Yeah, give it a few days, then, when my parents are out, I'll call you up. Take it easy man."

"Jesus. Thanks so much. You'll see me dead soon."

"Shit. You want me to kill you too? Haha."

"No, I meant, you know, turn of phrase, 'in a while' etc."

"Look bitch - you like it when I call you that don't you - bitch? - I'm kidding. That last bit about killing you. Although if you were interested. Freudian slip and all that?"

"You're freaking me out. Do carry on."

"Well, if you know where to find this house, and I fucked you up, and took my sweet time torturing you until you're dead, nobody'd find your body for ages. And if it goes real well, then you wouldn't be recognisable anyway."

"I'd so love to be not recognisable. You have no idea. How come I'm not freaking you out?"

"Meh. You're just a kid who thinks and feels too much. It's my duty as an 'indomitable sexual predator' to help you out. Plus, I'm bored of wanking. And if I treat you like a woman I have zero respect for, I'm sure I could pull it off. As it were."

"You ARE a poet. Would you really kill me?"

"If you asked me to. Fuck, I dunno. Are you seriously asking me to?"

"I don't know. I haven't asked you not to yet, have I?"

"Does that make it a default 'yes please'?"

"For months I've had these spectacular dreams about you devastating me. It's pretty much all I think about. Does that sound weird?"

"Of course. But like I said, I'm flattered. Like, really complimented. My girlfriend was into really boring sex. Pretty much turned me off girls. So if I'm gonna fuck a boy in the ass, and rip him to pieces - a tailor-made sex outfit for you I believe - then now's the opportunity. One night only. Where's this house?"

"Are you free tonight?"

"Hey kid, patience. If you wanna jerk off, don't be shy, it's a bit fucking late to go all timid with your jeans bulging like that, just let her out."

"I'm wondering who's weirder?"

"Look, if you're having second thoughts I can be out of here in no time."

"No. Ok, here goes. Could you, do you think..."

"Look, if I get you in a headlock - were you bullied at school? Did you like it?"

"On both counts, a big fat smiling yes. They put me in a sack once and wrestled me to the floor. I had to hide in there until my hard-on'd cooled down. But yeah, headlocks are go-o-o-o-o-od."

"Ok bitch, here I come. Can I spit in your hair?"

"Please? Oh man, that's so FUCKING good. Pull it. Ahhh. Fuck. Ow. More please."

"Haha bitch, you're such a pathetic little bitchwife, I'm gona rape you in your sleep, and even if you keep one eye open all night, it'll be the wrong one. Can you still breathe?"

"Yeh. Tighter."

"Shit, you weren't kidding. How's this."

"Ugh..Grnn."

"Good."

"Ok schhhtop."

"What? Ok."

"I've gotta get back for my dinner. Let's do this properly when your folks are out I'll head round your way and we can look for this house."

"This is the weirdest afternoon I've enjoyed in some time."

"Is that a good thing."

"I've enjoyed it. Thanks. What's your name?"

"Nick. I know yours."

"Yeah?"

"It's written all over my pencil case in pink marker."

"Now you're freaking me out. Haha."

"A Joke. Seeya around Joe."

"I'll see you dead soon. Ha."

"Hehe. I think I love you."

"Freak."

"Fuck you. Thanks."

The Snuff Mill

I was slumped on a deckchair idly flicking through The Daily Grind when a picture caught my eye in its barbed malice. An Iraqi casualty.

If I had to describe it, I wouldn't. If I were spread across a wheel and laboriously taken apart strip by strip with hot calipers, I wouldn't attempt to explain even that the boy's skin looked cold and pure as marble. Or that his smile/grimace was etched like a military boot in wet concrete. Or that his body was contorted like a buffeted TV aerial; angry semaphore.

I wouldn't mention in passing that he so strongly resembled my long-absent brother, I became convinced I used to have one. Or that the brother I didn't have was actually the boy next door and if we had been brothers, then my fantasy life would have been rampantly incestuous.

You can be too candid. It will go with me to his grave.

1)Text2)Text)Text(3)ural

Cross-section of a piece of a length of rotten wood/ Dulux distillate of a bad egg/ raw, eviscerating slice made in a broken heart to air the wounds for medical diagnosis/opening carve natched into a hemisphere of gouder/ sliver of doubt worn by an extrovert/ dead log cut/ white no sugar/ tenderly modified shit/ joke playing lazy tennis with its own epiglottis/ tree felled/ fill my smile with your teeth/ depth of field/ breadth of defence/ height of ME/ slight of OOPS/ dearth of text/ hatred of rampant/ availability/ inabilty to stop extracting/ wish to/ desire to/ self-checking impulse to/ ok/'no' ain't easy/ retire temporarily/ (you were eighteen - and you treated your girlfriend like shit - lucky girlfriend)/ (hack)ed sculpture/ forest whittaker/ spelling-B/ isn't too tough/ acknowledged digression/ write yourself an exit wound/ creep, half-congealed/ in due course let me explain the eroticism in armpits/ a volley of digression/ love all/ until then/ ha

Why Photographs Lie By Being Too Accurate.

In 1983 I enjoyed a three month residence in a room at the opulent Saveloy Hotel in Gandek, Hungary, drafting and re-drafting short scripts for a Hungarian cable station. Obviously this was no soap, but a series of skits expanding upon a concept born of an absinthe-funded investigation into the Eastern-European fetish-club scene where I learnt about, amongst other choice 'sports', the act of 'munting'. A faceful of atrophied corpse is the gold trophy in this three player-game. One of the three is a VERY passive participant, at least until their putrefied guts get exploded over an active competitors face, at which point, the active participant ejaculates at the sheer roominess of a hollowed ribcage, rather akin to the delight of a child as he scrapes the fetid jaundiced flesh out of a pumpkin to reveal an echoey hollow which may accommodate his face, except in this case, the genial Halloween mask is an exploded stinking abdomen, partially decomposed and freshly exhumed, grinning with arterial spaghetti and drizzled half-organs. The most accomplished players boast of having licked high-protein eggs and other parasitic ephemera from the lumbar vertebra - at the rear of the corpse. Fun for a rainy day; players must be able to leapfrog. Welcome to the Necrolympics, kids. Bring a shovel and a strong stomach - yours'll be the only one that is. Have I digressed?

Contemporary Cave Painting.

(1993)

Three Acts To Grind.

A True Story With Requisite Bathos to Confirm/Guarantee Verissimilitude.

1)

She came floating like a tank across jungle scrub, offered me a bag of polystyrene double helixes. I asked if they were stoked with monsodium glutamate. She pulled one out and cracked it between her head and shoulder like a walnut before massaging a squid-like emission from the helix down her throat in the idiom of an oystercatcher. She told me I looked down. I nodded in the affirmative. “It’s better to look up than down. That’s why mountaineers always start at the bottom.” A small blitzkrieg detonated in the foyer. Reuben’s hips sauntered briskly from ground zero and above them rested angrily the residual Reuben, cut up on tequila, boasting an eye-popping grin and an umbrella, whose parasol fabric had dissolved leaving a leaf skeleton of a thing dangling by those cherished coathanger hips.

2)

Neon gibbered in the periphery and smoke made The Gallows arid and tight. Soft-focus was the hitherto anonymous director’s choice; like any nightclub the mis-en-scene stunk of bad porn except here the protagonists were sheathed in smoke and drink-smashed perception; unto us a utopia is born. Hassan I Sabbah’s idyll of deceit; a musk hanging sweetly until the substances wear off and the piss-stains, tacky paint-job and overbearing squalor declares itself alive and well, present and correct, read it and weep. The orange bloater downed another synthetic oyster and gyrated horribly like a garbage can before it falls over. Sadly she didn’t follow through or I could have emptied the bag and left her out with the rest of the gutter trash lurking outside. Come Monday she’d be bundle into a truck where her viscera would be scraped, pulped and filleted; her mental bread hair cat’s cradled round fish-bones, dead cacti and orange cartons and the whole blancmange tipped into a rubble crater; kicked into rumours; like what happened to that vulgar fat whore? We haven’t seen her for weeks. I heard her acoustics engineer father grabbed her and sold her off to the Malaysian specialist porn industry where she sucks butt for empty, desperate bugs. Jeez, we all hoped she’d be bundled off in such a manner but true to the modus operandi of the truly annoying her shit just kept spreading like crunchy peanut butter across the crumpet of inifinity.

3)

One morning after the initiatory bout of dirty brawling Reuben and I hatched a scheme to get rid of this tiresome bitch and her look-at-me ker-azy foibles. We decided to abduct her, tie her up and leave her in our bath, end our tenancy and flee to somewhere undisclosed, leaving the landlord on his deposit reconnaisance to stumble on this fucked and starving grotesque. Instead, we were insufferably polite whenever we saw her, which was every night, for the remainder of our inconsequential, sultry lives at The Gallows. She’s trying to buy Reuben a drink but the barman pretends not to see her; a transparent ruse when the prospective customer is twenty stone and septic.

(1987)

Of Architectures And Satellites.

Today's Letter is Archtecture:

For The Love of God’s Sake.

I’m God-fodder, a neat evangelist platter
When I was a mad-hatter I had matter,
But when they cut the cat, the latter was late,
And now I’m the aether relapsed on His plate.

He has a Big Crush on I
For implode and U C?
Aphid and aphrodisiac,
Jubilant and juicy for
Our Father in his flasher-mac.
I swoon like the moon, I’m shy.

Will the real God in this cavalcade
Please stand, I cannot understand
But overstate the pleas to seize
In mine his hand
And pledge sweet loyalties
Beyond the masquerade.

And tense with apprehension
In my camp modality,
Crave to bring forth dimensions
Of Great elasticity. Instead He
Drives me to a hyper pace,
Live, Fast, Die unsung.
A riper waste of space-time
There could never be.
What bad taste I’d be invoking
If only I weren’t joking:
The levity-thief, the japester is He:
Ensures no brevity just grief for me:
The bastard everlasting.

The Mage. (1981)

A Palimpsest for ZL.

"The media is inconsequential. Architectures are all." - Guillame De Carillon, 1993

"Life is metafaction." - George Bruizelle, 1983

"If infinity isn't visceral, who dares love?" - Marianne Harding, 1973

"My coat hurts." - Jack Sizemore, seven minutes prior to his death, aged 53, 1963

"Cease Six Vomits." - the name of the central sculpture in 'The Baphomet Series' triptych by Allesandro Munez, 1943

"A cycle of novel cycles, at twenty-two cycles per second." - Jean-Cedric Pedan, when asked what his next project would be after retiring as a poet, 1933

"Bring me the head of state." - Maxmillian Klineberg, 1911

"All structures envelope themselves; as wombs and wormholes, new pieces perpetuate, from the ashes of ghosts. A revisionist template can be applied to all media, especially if the self is considered a medium. All is mutable, and answerable to rebirth and recycling." - Karena Vasquez, addressing 400 architecture students in Munich, 2003.

EL.

A Portrait From The Archives (c.1974)

A cursory posting today, as needs must speed my swift departure to meet with cohorts on the mainland. Any positive outcomes of this pivotal consortium will be posted here in due course i.e. when details can be safely shared. Until tomorrow then mine kindred hearts, yours,

The Mage.

(Incidentally, this photo was taken three months after my prison break, and was professionally shot, as a farewell gift to my family before I sacrificed all familial and social luxuries to go underground.They pray for small mercies. They get smaller/)

Meanwhile, a poem dredged from the archives of my former vocation:


The Perfunctory Man.

Whilst fireside I kneel and pout,
Play weight games with the poker,
A tireless apathy won out:
My world hung mediocre.

In the stealing eye of noxious flame
I saw the Imago dei.
He stared complicit; sang my name
Determined we should save me.

Homunculus of earthenware
A stuttering sylph of coal.
Soap-box sermon from the air
Has me plucked from the shoal.

The greatest pride, my host confides;
Fruit of his cloven gut;
Triumph of his bilious asides
Will be to burst the rut.

From shoe-shined coffers plentiful
Hails a century of Pucks.
A galaxy of sentinels
Addressed to push my luck.

To be flung upon the canvas of space
Where harlots jest with choirs
The entitled right of every race;
Celestial pariah.
.
The pot-bellied prophet cast in earth;
The pedant of the heart;
His pedestal a tickled hearth
I bow to his imparts.

From deep within the fire-eye
Ten rheumy vines extend
Their hymnic creak a rhapsody
Of hearts about to mend.

Glazed buds shooting from the hips;
The Big Cahouna, Behemoth
Unearthly roar of righteous rubrics.
The decalogue of Sephiroth.

My heart entwined in hardy vines,
Fat pulsing motor bulging
Through the mesh of fishing-lines
The purpose not divulging

Lest I plump haste to err my feet
So cold to taste the embers.
Plunge roots us home to heaven's fleet.
One shrub gives mighty timbers.

The seeds of illumination cast,
Minutiae scattered 'cross the hub.
The germination of the mast:
I'm to sea in a hammered tub.

From which will bloom a galleon,
Of three ten-storey sails
Like raptors sprung from carrion,
Gleam deep beneath entrails.

A perfect double-helix
Blows our renaissance, before,
As envisioned by the phoenix
Vaporous seamen take to oar

The bird, atop our crow's nest motions
For immediate embarcation.
As the shore melts into ocean
I can see the hope of nations

In my temples still are spoken
Through the rasp of terra-cotta
The polemic of my token:
Aye, my feet are getting hotter.

He unravels the Kabbalah
Be it Lourdes, Mermansk or Salem,
Be it Vishnu, Hitler Allah,
In the Voudon doll or Golem,

In the Rabbi's myth, the maker
Templar, Incubus or siren
In the gullet of the Fakir,
In the flesh-breath of vampyren

From Lao-Tzu to Paracelsus
Via Jung, the Mage and Karma
Lies Tradition born to help us
Sail the breadth of our arcana.
Our vessel the Gematria
Lashed square across the water
Ploughs furrows rarely statelier
In search of Lillith's daughter.

And how remote she may be found
We'll slowly recognise
Our destinies are homeward bound
Below our feet the skies,

Horizons may be obsolete
Inventions of the eye
Beheld by men bound to compete
Together in the lie.

My faceless crew ne'er weary tread;
Their souls with the elect,
While I, blue, blistered and un-fed
Steer thrashing and unchecked.

The land on all sides vanquished swift.
Alone on thunderous breaks,
A starfish prow-stretched masks a rift;
Shows how my concentration quakes.

Three nights on we've skirted shut
Round the same magnetic locus
With sodden maps I've flirted but
My compass fails to focus.

Is this the gaol of Bermuda,
The frontiersman's oubliette?
In quicksilver eye, the barracuda
Circle. Dizzy, you forget.

Aspirations trashed we stalk
About a lunar underworld;
My spectral crew refrain to talk
Their figures waste to pearls..

Between soft walls my words dry out
As hollow and spurned as my hull
I never will be heard cry out
So decrees the goblin's gull.

The Golem's word was kindly meant;
As Faustus had to learn;
When glimpsed by minds of weak intent,
Impotence had me burn.

My splintered vessel aches and groans
A symphony of woe.
Is this the way careless seeds sown
Are fated, doomed to grow?

El Bruxo (1972)

Dead pastiche or profound, formal, insightful slab of noise? None of the above? All of the above and so much less? It's very not me. Although I wrote it.

Journal Extract No. 1 (From the Quill of A Youthful Poet Who Would Later Become A Mage.)

Salamandadism.

Salamander upon a beach decides to empty his head out on a rock and as the nut giblets flow, so do his worries. A salamander is a useless snake. It is a limbless, floundering tonsil. Together we’re a marriage. A pair of tonsils. Tonsils are also useless. The salamander is an appendix on the reptile gut, a footnote in the reptile chronicles. When I was younger I wished a salamander was stripy, yellow and black. I saw one, it wasn’t, and wished I hadn’t seen it. I’d rather have my danger-pocked salamander exist in my head, where he was perfect. The model salamander, replicated badly on earth by God’s vulgar claws. That’s not what a salamander looks like you clueless old fisherman. Get back to the netherworld. Charlatan. If anybody saw God, I imagine they too would be disappointed. Wouldn’t live up to the hype. Bastardo. At least a salamander can be proven to exist. Even if it is substandard. Man. Regarding salad sees a caterpillar. I once saw a yellow and black stripy caterpillar on some grass at the beach. My father explained its name to me, which eleven seconds later I had forgotten. I keep forgetting it, and maybe this is deliberate. A name can deaden a thing. If the caterpillar’s name could be recalled, it would fade to matte finish liver and dark grey, and would be shaved. Like an extant appendix. And that would look very silly. My salamander’s woes just pour out onto the rocks, and now the rocks are anxious, like the water cycle, a pool of defined capacity is subsumed, expelled and left suspended. So I ask my dad to take me to the beach where I pick up a stone and throw it awkwardly into the sea, not admitting to my father that it was a failed skim attempt. The stone gashes the ocean, and now the sea gets very violent, having been penetrated by the rock’s bad humours, but we have gotten back into the car.

As we pull out of the gravelled car park I see over my shoulder that the angsty sea has engulfed the beach, the rocks, the calm broken body of the salamander, and as my father tells me the name of the caterpillar we didn’t see, the banks, the maram encampment, and all of the caterpillars are washed away, named, maimed and shamed. My dad asks why I’m smiling like the Mona Lisa. I carry on, and he starts smiling because I’m still smiling. He thinks he’s done right by taking me to the beach. That one stone tied up my whole world tight in a smug self-satisfied ribbon, and that’s why I’m smiling. It’s like I’ve fixed the crack in my snow-globe and everything, for a fragment of time, is okay. I can never tell anyone about this. Just because I’ve recounted the incident here, doesn’t mean it was accurate. But the way I interpreted it all made it magical.

First Missive From The Source (Part Two)

A detractor said to me: The position of completely insane political agitator doesn't pay very well.

Verily I said unto his servile, damnable ass that "It may not pay in beans, but in pays in legend, which is the only currency to transcend mortality. Think beyond the curtain fall, oh, myopic one, for there is more activity behind the scenes than on the stage in any performance. Do not think of your cataclysmic life and death events as the very bookends of existence. For that is a sure way to fall from the shelf. No, the truest treasure lies in the perpetuation of legend; the immortalities of myth and half-truths, tall tales and limericks shall long outweighh the memory of money and such chintzy ephemera. Money costs lives, memory transcends them."

At this he lopped off his own head with a cudgel, and thus wove his memory into the tapestry of this manifesto, ensuring his endurance hereafter.

You are voiceless in a world where those who have a voice say nothing. A cacophony of silence, where the noise of sixty-billion people saying yes by doing nothing renders inaudible and trifling the sound of one man saying no by doing something. I say unto you, rise up my brothers and recognise that you each are one of a brotherhood, who when united by focussed passion are a force of indomitable might; a force of unopposable will. You are not an extant node drifitng in a sea of petty rewards; you don't need to live for dog treats; you don't need to wag your balding tail for the master. Real dogs turn on their owners when persistently beaten and yet you who boasts a greater brain than such a turncoat beast routinely bares his ass to the brickbat with a pleading, propitiating smile; a cognitive capacity that could be applied reactively to the notion of a beating, and yet stews listless in the cauldron of your skull, strirred into a lifelong rite of passivity by the voodoo snare of your owners; the savages, noses pierced by a lone staple, clad solely in a loincloth of 300gsm unbleached recyclable A5, jigging a catalepsy around the living grave of your head as they lay you to rest under six feet of post-it notes and head office memos. Rest in Peace, Rot in Paper, Revel in Passivity.

Trees give life, while paper in such abundance absorbs and subjugates life with the enthusiasm of the most efficaceous kitchen towel. Your new job is to steer the steering group towards their own exruciating demise; your primary objective is to devastate their brittle economy by absenting yourself from its sustenance; by evacuating the none-too-watertight ship HMS (His Master's Salary) Society and seeking firmer shores, where your toes shuffle through golden sands instead of the shit of a besuited demiurge. I offer you the lifeboat with which to journey to these shores. Then with the distance granted by this idyllic safehouse, you will see the stinking, rancid vessel in all her fickle drudgery slink off the radar into the depthless fabric of history; and with her will drown the captain, naked as an Emperor, tie-pin rusty as an anchor, saluting those who served for even a second aboard her mutinous galleys without contemplating self-abortion. And all the remaining crew - for their inexcusable self-apathy - so righteously deserve to join her as she comes to rest a shattered hull upon the icy, vagueish sands of yesterday; yesteryear; back in the days when it wasn't considered a crime to commandeer someones very existence and determine its trajectory by the hissing of the Admiral's wallet.

How absurd it seems to us islanders to think of a time when every ship was designed for the jettisoning of treasure before any have been accrued, for the toppling of the crow's nest long before its meeting the final cannonball. How incredulous we listen as those who remember such days - the founding fathers of freedom - relate the woes of obedience; how the crew were gagged and bound and forced to operate a galleon not of their making, and not to their own maps. The elders will weep at the realisation of how few actually jumped ship when presented with the chance for their hand at the wheel; how scant was the enthusiasm to let the mothership tumble to the abyss, followed by all those blinkered dogs who man her riddled and feeble armada. Yet all it took, they proudly assert, was the hollering of a few stray dissenters to plant splinters in the main brace, to leaden the anchor and foul the crow's nest, sending the Good Ship Society plunging into the dense and pulverising waters as they watched from the island on which we share these very fables of yesteryear.

I am only a humble mage who pleads with you to excuse yourself from the dinner table on which you yourselves are the main course; who incites you to shit on the tongues of your abusers, to manipulate the arms of the manipulaters as they eat, plunging fork into tongue into soft pallete; as you leap from their mouths and watch with satisfaction as they choke and gurgle on their own diseased blood - blood which you have regretfully pumped for your entire shelf-life up until this point - watch this from the table and then leap to the periphery as it capsizes under the weight of its own vacuous self-importance; a self-image that relied on your steadfast conformism to the common goal (i.e. the betterment of your superiors) for its support. The board around the table will tumble as though it were a vessel forged of lead.

Without legs, a table is but a board, and if the words of this board have no way of trickling downwards, then it has no foundation. Gravity pulls it down and its authority is scuppered. The board is made from a very exceptional wood wherein if it falls, and no-one hears it fall, it has fallen irrefutably indeed. For when the canopy clears to let the sunlight into thine reddening eyes, you shalt know that the board hath sunk and upon its earthbound surface you canst dance and and jig and join together in rejoicement at its felling. You are no longer the collective foodstuff of indiscerning gluttons; you are a delicacy for your own titillation, and so you will savour your unique taste and texture; every mouthful shall bring with it volumes of learning and experience, colour and shape; no longer seasoned with the vulgar, homogenising flavours of middle-management (lest we forget, once, in the Darkest Ages, you wilfully submitted to being managed) you are free to explore the complexities of your taste unsullied, untainted in its vibrant, unsanitised magnificence.

Let not the rapist plunge his rusted sceptre into your soul, impregnating it with the living death of ownership, I beseech thee, oh, prostate slave to your own complacencies. Leap from death's chair and startle the executioners by saying very loudly and with much conviction as you twist the axe towards their necks, 'NO'. I am El Bruxo. I am. You are everyone else. You are not. I am El Bruxo. I am now. You are everyone else. You can be.

The Mage.

First Missive From The Source (Part 1)

I am the voice of the damned. I am the armpit of the snake. I am the breath of the wasted. I am the bane of the wolves. I am the death of slavery. I am the bringer of light. I am the turner of black milk. I am the tuner of the spheres. I am the corrector, the reflector, the protector, the resurrecter. I am the spirit of ecstacy. I am the tormentor of dead souls. I am the clarifier of vagueness. I am the sharpener of blunted instruments. I am the arrow of truth.I am the maker of marvel, the murderer of mediocrity. I am the manifester of wholeness. I am the liberator of lies, the commander of the commanded. I am the replenisher of the dead inside. I am naked and deliberate. I am El Bruxo. I am.

You are not. You are dead. You are animated, yet beyond life. You are a bag of diseased motor-neurones observing the impulses of your captors. You are jaded, repressed, depressed, a sagging gland stuffed with melancholy. You are a rotten, ambling sack of bones gyrating in a ballet of futility. You are the donor of days. You are the grateful receiver of grief. You are the banisher of your own time. You are the children of the commandants. You are the scalder of your own putrefying skin. You are poisoned eggs, your growth stultified before you've even left the abdomen of mother goose. You cook yourselves slowly in the oven of commerce and emerge black, shrivelled and pathetic to die slowly on the false hope of a trickle of cash nourishment from your altered state.

Who altered your state? The Government? Who told you to ask for this? Are you all willing participants in your own enslavement? Does this habitual abasement satiate an entrenched masochistic impulse? Is being denied a choice easier than making the wrong decision? When did the soul become taxable by at least one hundred percent? Does the guilt at spewing your children straight from the womb into a sickly panopticon keep you awake at night? Does guilt speak to your weathered ears at all? When did the agenda of schools switch from education to preparation for a life in shackles? A subtle exercise in the stimulation of the subservient gene. When did you submit to this sinister programming?

A qualification entitles you to what exactly? It guarantees you a good job? Is a good job one where you work a minimal amount of time for an enormous amount of money? Are you guaranteed this? Is a good job one where you turn up at the office, shit on the fax machine, fax your shit to your detractors, leave the office, retire, and wait for the platinum cheque? Is a good job one where you sit at a banquet table with your favourite humans, indulging your every taste while money trickles exponentially into your bank account which in turn accrues interest with rare verve?

Is a good job one where you spend every hour indulging the arbitrary whims of an autocratic goon, for fear of being cast out of the tight and stifling embrace of a corporation?

A corporation whose operative currency is statistics not people? A corporation whose need to appease the super-, supra,- mega-, and ultima-corporations greatly exceeds it's love for the puppets creaking along the shopfloor; the puppets who generate those statistics? A corporation whose might has long superceded that of any god. A corporation that talks idly of super-powers, legal wars and collateral damage without a shimmer of macabre irony. A corporation that strives to sterilise, not liberate. A corporation that seeks to streamline your ideals, toxify your brains with talk of a civilisation; mop up your dreams from the factory floor and ply you with the promise of gold as a means to manifest these dreams, all the while sweeping them into an oubliette deep inside your heart, which is subsequently locked forever. A corporation that once prompted you to hand over the key to the vault of your dreams in exchange for a little security. A corporation whose grasp of love is voiced by a generic and patronising greetings card message. A corporation that preaches of tolerance and understanding; of forgiveness and generosity to your neighbour and other such trivialising platitudes of deferrment. A corporation that buries you under reams of dense and sterilising bureaucratic bunk whilst burning the work of poets before your eyes have the opportunity to be opened. A corporation that extinguishes flames before they burn with any fervour. All that paperwork; all those trees; so little intelligible and inspiring use of language; so much oxygen-generating habitat decimated to bring you: the payslip, the shift rota, the range management table, the replenishment list, the bank statement, the contract (a concept favoured by hitmen and still your suspicion is not aroused), the sales chart, the tax form, the national insurance document, the human resources handbook, the manifesto of greed, the agenda of slow and clinical death, the bible of ownership, the recipt for the leash you bought yourself by being born into the arms of a cash register.

To Be Continued...

The Mage