“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I’ve become a manic collector of nothings. Mince words, bleed mouths. I don’t dream of violence. Though I daydream of violence. That’s why there is no violence. Primarily, I throttle up revulsion. I was surprised by my paymasters. Everyone demands the right to comment. I stopped listening thirty-two years ago. […]
Sometimes I seem too ordinary. I consider (too much) how I appear to the cameras. Click and whirr, be free my imagination, such as. It is. What little remains. Go. I can laugh at nothing. For hours on end. With dead end echoes for company. Company. I’m sure we all want to hear the joke. […]
So words sit under my skin, making me itch and scratch, making me shake and puke like some kind of recovering addict. A junkie who now prefers one substance to another. Sweats and shits and sickness and soreness. The words, they want to stay there because it’s warm. I want them to stay there because […]
We should grow beards, take up axes and dulled knives, then stab the tawdry natives in their skinny, bone-stacked backs. Don’t look the fuckers in their faces. Don’t meet their gaze. Skin them alive and we can make fires and coats and leather boots. We can stay warm until February, if we’re lucky. Okay, okay, you […]
This time of night, the paving stones sing to no one and to everyone. They chant their drunken choruses and nonsense rhymes. I wish I was with them, into and without their sweaty torsos, singing meaningless groans and inebriate anthems to the upper floors and the distorted heavens, scudding fast and loose without purpose. Come […]
I wake with spiders spinning their slithering webs across my eyes, and taste them hatching their eggs on my lazy, lolling tongue. There’s a rolling, salty, dirty ocean dragging my limbs down into its oily depths. I murmur questions and wait for answers. Do you still keep keep your plants in an open-air cupboard? Do […]
When my head imploded, it collapsed in on itself, slumping to half its normal size. It had been young and smooth once, but over the years it had become just one more sagging balloon, wrinkled and drooping at the tail-end of some spoilt child’s birthday party. My shrunken head slipped further and further down into the […]
My floor is medicinal. My carpet is chemical. My ceiling is poison. My windows myopic. And my walls, my walls are a punctured, pockmarked epidermis, stretched tight over the crooked frame beneath. Tonight, I pierce them with a screwdriver and watch them bleed down to their skirts; tomorrow, I will moisturise them until they smooth […]
I attempt to lasso the world, twice daily or more. I draw ‘cut here’ dashes around my skull and invite all to delve, safe in the knowledge that anything remotely breakable has been removed for safekeeping. I rope in the sun and daub it with a soldier’s camouflage. I tear the clouds apart. I push […]
Oh, the plans. The plans I had. Each of them scrawled on crumpled paper, folded and folded again for good measure and secrecy until they bulged with so much promise and barely repressed youthful vigour. Thoughtlessly stuffed in careworn pockets patched over sternums and alongside thighs, warm enough to sleep well — all too well […]
That’s right, that’s right, that’s you. You come along here, bold and brazen as you like, and you smash glasses, crockery, fingers and thumbs, sticks and stones against the rocks, you break my bones because names will never hurt me, and then you lean forward. Conspiratorially. Warily. Carefully. Cast your eyes into my skull and […]
I don’t climb the walls when i wake. No, I wait for them to descend to my level, so that I can rap my knuckles three times on the ceiling, without even stretching, and check that the roof is still present. That doesn’t make sense, however, because last night I slept under a canopy of […]
Blood pumping. Heart racing. Fingers dancing. Keys rattling. Tapping. Not sure. Simply not sure. This is tomorrow’s all day. All our tomorrows could happen in just one day. The ocean is so far away. I keep losing the few wits I have about me any and every time I see another part of you falling off […]
I looked under the carpet, but all I found was fluff and floorboards. I looked in the bottom of my glass, but all I found was a watery reflection. I looked in the envelope, but all I found were letters that fell out into perfectly disjointed words. I looked up at the altar, but all […]
There are bodies of words all over the place. As I slept — or tried to sleep — last night, they obviously invited themselves round for a party at my considerable expense. They are now sleeping in drawers, in corners of cupboards, behind furniture, splayed lewdly over every available surface. They are breathing loudly, mumbling […]
Magnolia is an evil colour. Whichever interior designer it was who first came up with the idea that it speaks of calming and soothing and reassuring and home should be shot in the knees until they dance. Nine months ago, I covered this wall with three pairs of cats’ eyes in different shades of psychedelia, and […]
So the fact is that, for some days now, the Lord Jesus Christ has been riding a bicycle up and down the short corridor between my bedroom and my living-room. Being a rather retro Messiah, he appears to favour the classic 1970s-style Raleigh Chopper bike, the tyres of which are beginning to make deep grooves […]
Bulgarian female choirs serenade me in my room, their unearthly wailing almost managing to drown out the Saturday morning shoppers and traffic outside. Sometimes I regret the stupidity that caused me to miss out on learning a foreign language, but not at a moment like this, when I can hear nonsense sentences created in the […]