The seeping pillow lay spreadeagled against the headboard like a bayonet punctured sandbag. The shit stained duvet was rucked and twisted like mud churned by high explosive. The charred bed linen had been wrenched away, to expose a crater in the mattress, a spring pushing its way through the fabric like a tangle of barbed wire. Crusted sperm trails along the exposed fabric like tracer pathfinding for the marksmen to come. On the bedside table, a tumbler with dog ends like spent cartridges floating in a waterlogged trench. Discarded white lingerie lay over the table lamp, smouldering in its surrender, diffracting the mustard coloured light that drifted gauze-like across the theatre of combat. A hooded gas mask lay on the table, one of its eye holes gashed running the length of the canvas. No quarter, no deserters, no prisoners and no conscientious objectors in no man’s land tonight.
“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary, for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses, they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …” Jean Genet Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”
Wednesday, 30 May 2018
Passion Dell - Flash Fiction
Labels:
Barbed Wire,
Blood,
Brutal Sex,
Combat,
Flash Fiction,
Intercourse,
Sado-Masochism,
Semen,
Sex As Warfare,
Shit,
Theatre Of War,
Trench Warfare,
World War One
Tuesday, 22 May 2018
Back In Black (It Never Went Away) - Blank Verse
Chemical spaying of the black dog sniffing around my mental de-scent,
Ureic spray marking my ligneous hide.
Lightning volts to chase away the black cloud squatted somewhere across my pate
Lithium’s little local climatic murrain.
Acupuncture needles don’t hurt as much
But the vision lying on the slab like a stuck pig,
Banderillas sprouting in every interstitial direction from my vegetative mire
Multicoloured, chromatic, garish markers for trepanning bullish me
The mounted picador pricks me, pierces me, permeates me, venesecting blood, lymph and chi flow
Transfusing blood black, sable, onyx and jet
Black is the new black, same as the old black
Lamentation, mourning, mold
Effaced contours of female flesh behind post-nuptial veils
Death cult zealotry over purity
Cimmerian, tenebrous, atramentous, places of Stygian gloom
Chthonic cave interiors,
Lignite, bituminous coal, crude oil excreted from Gaia’s bowels
Tar and pitch for when you cover up the gouging of mother Earth.
Jacobean black bile melancholy
Lucifer named for the light, but his visible rays only ignited by the plummet from Heaven,
Burning up on reentry, fleeting friction match struck phosphorescence.
Black heart black as sin, Goths just playing at it
Smokey Robinson’s - Smokey really? - “The Agony and The Ecstasy”
Here come the leeches…
Labels:
acupuncture,
Black Cloud,
Black Dog,
Bullfighting,
Depression,
ECT,
Free Verse,
Goths,
Humours,
Leeches,
Lithium Treatment,
Lucifer,
Poetry,
Venesection
Thursday, 17 May 2018
Walking Cane And Able-Bodied - Flash Fiction
I became tenderly acquainted with death at an early age. A very early age. Before I’d taken my first breath, my twin drew his last. Carried off by midwife pall bearers, while I was borne aloft into light, air and pain. My first wail a lamentation for us both; for my dilating and his collapsed lungs. Death engendered me, he whom I call ‘father’. My handmaiden through life, or I his. My new goon companion, the cuckoo who had usurped my bosom buddy.
A future headshrinker proffered that I had sawn my sibling off. In a fit of pique a boo hoo (who?). Fratricide in utero. I dismissed it reflexively of course, with that constriction in my throat a phantom emulation of the shared cord that had noosed him off. One into two does not go. Not when it’s indivisible flesh. Gestation’s entrailing guilt, riven at parturition, only became fully fledged that day supine on the couch. The blood they had hosed off me in the delivery suite was not that of my mother, rather that of my brother. The nurse placed heavyweight me to suckle at my mother’s breast, while she insisted deadweight Bruv be laid on the other one (how can a lightweight, or no weight, be a deadweight? Our first exposure to gravity). My mother’s body was lopsided from that day on, grief spiting gravity, so what do I know? My nativity body count lay at two. A brace of husks. Leaving me unbraced and liable to topple over at any moment. Death gave me a bony shoulder not to cry on, but to prop me up. Wearing me in a papoose. Doubling up with my brother’s shadow for a life of twofold stygian persecutions.
Labels:
Flash Fiction,
Fratricide,
Grief,
Grim Reaper,
Guilt,
In Utero,
Midwife,
Pall Bearer,
psychoanalysis,
Stillbirth,
Suckling,
Twins
Tuesday, 15 May 2018
Writing Letters To Dead Authors
6 imaginary letters composed to 6 significant authors to me. A meditation on art and death.
Labels:
Authors,
Beckett,
Camus,
David Markson,
Death,
Existentialism,
Gaddis,
Kafka,
Postmodernism,
Ronald Sukenick,
Writing Death
Tuesday, 8 May 2018
Shortwave - Flash Fiction
Over…
Over?
Over.
Over and over.
And over.
Over and out.
Maiden over bowled
Over.
It’s over.
It’s all flaming over.
Overt.
Ovary
Oh very
Oh vary
Ovarian
It’s over.
Over and out.
No do-overs
No do-overs
Over all
Overall
Overhaul
Too late in the day to turn over a new leaf.
Head over heels
Arse over tit
My oeuvre
Overrated
And undersold by my overseers
Publishers on manoeuvres
They have me over a barrel
Over-egged
Apple turnover
A leftover vestige of appetite
Comes over me
Charon row me over to the other side
Man overboard!
The struggle is over
Over and done with
Long overdue
Game over.
Labels:
Anti-Lipo,
Death,
Flash Fiction,
Language,
Life,
Life Story,
Meditation,
Walkie-Talkie,
Wordplay
Saturday, 5 May 2018
My Top Ten Books
I took part in the Booktube "Top Ten Books" tag and in choosing my all time top ten books, i thought I'd share the results here.
Labels:
Ben Marcus,
BookTube,
David Peace,
Don Delillo,
Franz Kafka,
Jarett Kobek,
Jeff Noon,
Kurban Said,
Michel Faber,
Philip Roth
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