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… 

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. 

Writing Letters To Dead Authors

6 imaginary letters composed to 6 significant authors to me. A meditation on art and death.

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

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. 

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.