The Devil's Paintbox - Flash Fiction

The easel’s trinity of legs stood planted in the soil. The artist with scarecrow smock and hayseed hat stood appointed at it, as the farmer approached brandishing his three-pronged pitchfork towards him. “What in Lucifer’s name are you doing on my land?”

“Representing God’s beauteous creation” the artist said, holding his brush up to match the perpendicularity of a tree marking the boundary of the field.

“Thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness that in Heaven above, or-“ the bucolic blustered, red fire pointilling his cheeks.

 “In his creation of Nature my good man. There is no depiction of any being here”. The painter with careful deliberation, brought the tip of his brush to kiss the surface of the canvas and held it in place, echoing Michelangelo’s God Created Adam on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, which he had seen and paid sublunary homage to, with secular reverence and human awe. 

“Yet your trestle thing there, has the three appendages of Satan himself, so I say your crafting is for diabolic purposes”. He waved his horned staff in the air as if, in his imagination, he was slashing the canvas perched some yards ahead of him.

“And so does your pitchfork does it not?”

“My pitchfork is aimed at the Heavens, doing godly work tilling the Lord’s soil for the bounty He provides. Your trident is inverted, pointing straight down to Hell’s abyss”. The farmer caught himself from dabbing at the ground and besmirching his trusty implement.

“And yet I stand here in your field, not only for the vista, but for the divine light afforded here. You invoked the curse of Lucifer before, which of course you know means the bringer of light”.  

“Blasphemer!” emphasised and punctuated by two thrusts of the barbs, six bolts of angel lightning, though lacking any illuminating fire. 

“You are a harvester of the soil are you not? Well then we are brothers in arms, though my modest paintbrush be my godly instrument”. He dabbed at the paint on his palette, loading up on pigment before plunging it into another hued gobbet and swirling the bristles in a zealous eddy to blend them.

“How so, when it is doubtless made of the same material as any besom ridden to a witches sabbat?”

The artist ceased his motions and tilted the plane of his palette to demonstrate for his inquisitor. “Because all my tinctures come out of the earth just like your crops. Red cinnabar, yellow orpiment(*), orange ochre, green malachite and brown umber are all drawn from the soil itself, while glorious lapis lazuli, veritably the mirror of the sky, is like a stone sown in the earth. Gypsum white, the very same substance you use to fertilise the fruits of the earth. The stained glass in the cathedral, the altar frescos, each rendered with these outputs yielded beneath your mattock. We should all be giving thanks for such bounteous gifts; you do yours on your knees in church; I stood here at my easel, but we are both making our invocations”. 

* orpiment (arsenic) and cinnabar (mercury) are both sulphide ores, sulphur of course being the constituent of brimstone, the supposed pertinent odour of Hell.

Last Night A DJ Saved My (And Your) Life - Flash Fiction

Satan’s royalties had dried up. Despite Milton giving him a fair shake of the whip and though a bit anthropomorphic, William Blake had etched him a reasonably fair hand. Baudelaire’s litanies had promised much but turned out a complete bust and don’t even get him started on Screwtape. But since then, nothing. While his other nourishment stream of human souls had also become completely debased. What need of an unredeemer when the race had already become utterly irredeemable? Even if it all came straight out of Satan’s own playbook. So much had come to pass from his manifesto, unfortunately just not in his infernal name. He should have created lawyers earlier on in the piece, to sort out copyright.

Trusty Mammon had secured for him a power meeting with an agency to relaunch his moribund career. A reality TV show lay potentially in the wings. “Pro-bono?” Inquired Satan, being down on his uppers. (The fires of Hell were on a timeshare basis to slash running costs). “Nobody is pro-Bono are they? Even God has distanced himself”. “No, I mean gratis, as a Charity account”’ “Charity?” “Well, more a mates’ rates sort of thing. After all did I not create PR and marketing direct from my sulphurous realm?” 

Satan is sitting on a beanbag in Reception, leafing through piles of house clearance auction catalogues. Dreaming of what sort of monarch’s throne he would take possession of.  Something a la mode for the new kingdom of darkness. One that could comfortably cradle his spreading posterior and avoid agitating his accursed haemorrhoids. A dentist’s chair, baby’s bucket carseat, bus station tip-up. Tanning bed recliner, milkmaid’s stool and tuffet, a commode. The Bishop’s cathedra… once profaned with some purgatorial pimping of course. He inquired of the receptionist if he could take the brochure with him for reference. Mammon whispered that it was all online now for his convenience, though Satan murmured that he didn’t get on with the internet what with his bedimmed eyes. Which was why he didn’t have an I-Phone, which Mammon felt a pity, since it could so very easily co-ordinate his revolution to retake Earth at a stroke. 

At last the pair were ushered into the meeting room. The account manager was sat atop a tennis umpire’s chair. “Please, sit down”. “I can do no other” Satan responded, on account of his inflamed lumbago and fiendish sciatica which had condemned him to a sedentary life in the main. Which was probably why you could add piles to his heaps of pathologies. He turned  round to catch sight of a sex harness swing that was the only seating on offer. Mammon dived into the minimal clearance beneath its leather. As Satan scrambled on to the contraption and rocked unsteadily back and forth, Mammon fiddled with the straps and buckles. At least with this particular seat design there was no material chafing his sore plums. What the hell was Mammon doing under the leather beneath him?

“So Mr Lucifer-“ (a nom de guerre), “I’ve been taking a squint at your social media presence. Few followers, even less ‘Likes’, what on earth have you been doing to establish your brand? Even God has a spoof Twitter account”. “I don’t want ‘likes’, I want ‘dislikes’”. “No Master, for your heinous deeds you actually want ‘likes’”. “Gentlemen, perhaps you can save such quodlibets for later, we are on the clock here. Now tell me, what talents can you bring to the table?” “Talents? I was under the impression this was all on someone else’s dime”. “Not those sort of Talents Master, we’re all in your fiendish Eurozone now. He means abilities”. 

“Oh, well I’m gifted down below, tupping, fornicating and all manner of carnal reprehensibilities”. “Well yes, that’s a given for any Reality TV show, the sexual shenanigan subplots for the Tabloids. What else, for example, can you hold a tune… you know sing?” “Only angels sing!” “Weren’t you an angel once? I’m thinking The Voice”. “Alas no, since the accident, he’s gone from contralto to basso profundo. They did call him Snakehips Satan back in the day”. “Which day was that, before The Fall I take it…” “He can still throw some shapes”. “What are you his agent, Mr 15%?” “I handle his business affairs yes, but only to reinvest so as to advance the greater glory of Hell”. “Okay, I’m prepared to get you a shot at Strictly Come Dancing, if you show me your moves on the dance floor. I’ve got comps for Stringfellows so we can-“ “How is Peter the randy old devil?”

Satan dug the optics. The strobes reminded him of the shadows flitting between the licking flames of Gehenna. But the music made his ears bleed, he was supposed to have all the best tunes, no wonder his fortunes were so low if this was what was being churned out in his name. “Let’s get this Ragnarok and Roll started” as Satan commandeered the PA and from the deadened air conjured up the sound of fifes, tabors and Jericho Trumpets. They pounded out their martial sounds, yet not in military rhythms. This sonic assault was not about unison for keeping a marching beat, rather it targeted atomisation. The punishing pulsation located itself inside each dancer’s head, obliterating any sense of  their own heartbeats, their breath or their thought processes. Cutting them off from any other sensation of the world. Mutinous skeletons in thrall to an inhuman reverberation. Many began to convulse uncontrollably, grand mals brought about by the Grandest Malevolence of them all. Satan stomped over to the DJ’s booth, snatched up the mic and bellowed exultantly “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin now pleasure headed sinners?” The DJ, protected by his Beats™ headphones was unaffected by the cacophony and began to sample and splice el Diablo’s rhythms into a catchy breakbeat. He wrangled Satan’s fractured discordance into a danceable tune, so that all the floored casualties were able to slowly raise themselves, before throwing their arms in the air to the tempo. Satan hobbled away, taloned hands over his ears. The PR agent hurriedly bit into his arm so as to draw blood, before chasing after Satan waving the Reality TV production company’s contract in his direction. 

Songs About Heaven And Hell

You'd figure that heavy rock and metal would dominate songs from the Abyss, but not a bit of it. As for songs about fluffy clouds, would that be the province of fey indie bands? A few surprises possibly on the way between halos and horns.

1) Husker Du - "The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill"
Husker Du were the powerhouse band they were because all three members were songwriters. Not too often these days you see the drummer is the lead singer. Not the greatest sound quality, but you can see the energy of this genuine power trio.



2) Mobb Deep - "Hell On Earth"
Well if it's not Heavy Metal singing about Satan & Hell, obviously it was going to be Hip Hop and Rap decrying the hell on earth that are the urban ghettos. As here.



3) The Cure - "Just Like Heaven"
Did someone say fey indie band? Of course the Cure's Gothic look might have them pegged in the camp of devils and demons, but no, here's a jaunty ditty devoted to more Elysian Fields.



4) The Fall - "New Face In Hell"
Shame there's no footage of this being performed live, but it's just one of the tracks off the Fall's best of their 30+ albums "Grotesque After The Gramme". Divine stuff.



5) Stone Roses - "Breaking Into Heaven"
Songs with 'Resurrection", "Heaven", "I Wanna Be Adored" suggest a passing interest in religion and divinity, or maybe just Ian brown's god complex. This is not one of their better songs imo



6) White Stripes - "Catch Hell Blues"
The clue perhaps is that they always wore red and black, Satan's home colours. And the other clue being The Blues, Satan's own in house music.



7) MC 900Ft Jesus - "I'm Going Straight To Heaven"
Taken from his album "Hell With The Lid Off", again another with a god complex seeing himself as a 900ft tall Messiah!



8) Gang Of Four - "To Hell With Poverty"
and don't they make a glorious infernal racket in this song, even if their concerns were always very much grounded in the temporal and political rather than esoteric.



9) Bob Dylan - "Knocking On Heaven's Door"
Did they let you in Bob? Is that why you changed religion?



10) Killing Joke - "This World Hell"
Beginning to see a theme develop here, Hell is very much located on Earth, while Heaven is the wistfully viewed place to escape our tribulations.



11) Led Zeppelin - "Stairway To Heaven"
Severely doubt that the road to Heaven is paved with twelve string guitar solos. The Butthole Surfers released a wonderful homage/spoof album called "Hairway to Steven".



12) The Pogues - "Boys From The County Hell"
Doesn't Shane MacGowan look fit and well back in 1985? One of the best live bands ever, this was definitely one of their stomping dancefloor tunes.



13) Tricky - "Hell Is Round The Corner"
The music for this sounds just like a Portishead track. In fact the Tricky/ Massive Attack/ Portishead symbiosis suggests that Bristol trip-hop bands were all very incestuous, musically I mean.



14) ACDC - "Highway To Hell"
Run out of Heavenly songs, it's all Hellish from here. Well I did promise you some heavy metal...



15)  Three Wize Men - "Urban Hell"
British hip-hop was really really sad wasn't it, trying to ape Old School US stylee.



16) The Clash - "Straight To Hell"
As sampled by MIA for her song "Paper Planes"



17) The Streets - "Heaven For The Weather"
This song name checks both Heaven & Hell, so seems the perfect song to conclude with.

Signed, Sealed And Delivered - Flash Fiction

He’d been prompted to watch out for a sign. But where? Whither the co-ordinates? Was he supposed to roam outside or to remain embosomed in his room? The exegesis hadn’t been clear. Currently he was stationed in his room, scrutinising the everyday for deviation from the familiar. Was the sign to be something inherently meaningful, or something that only he could ascribe substance to? Would it be a material object, or something based in language. Be it script or runic? Did that perhaps make it more of a symbol than a sign? 

He had never noticed that stain on the carpet before, but he couldn’t accept that ancient spilled coffee or the gravy that broiled his pre-cooked dinners, suddenly became presentimental. An accidental Rorschach pattern somehow transmuted into a figuration of his future, no he doubted that was the likely source. Carelessly slopped aliment was no waters of the Nile turning into blood and somewhat lacked the wondrousness of a burning bush.

He glanced up to the wall and the framed print suspended there. It had come with the rental, left by a previous tenant, or more likely to have been furnished by the landlord. An abstract piece of nothing, though right now its contours were welling and pulsing with significance. He had never previously paid it much mind. Of course the swirls themselves were not in motion, but he wondered if the picture itself had perhaps moved ever so slightly off its habitual axis. He approached it and gingerly rubbed his index finger along one plane of the frame. He examined the dust that coated the pad, like a police fingerprint record, a glyph in itself, but decided this was the wrong type of indicia. After all fingerprints themselves never changed over the course of one’s life. He was on the wrong track there, a hallmark was a permanent symbol not a momentously exigent one. He lifted the frame from its hook, examined the cork backing but found no message welted in there. He stared at the burnished rectangle patch of wall where the print had covered and preserved the paintwork. If it was a symbol it remained opaque to him. A blank TV screen with the set switched off. 

Maybe that was it, the random permutation of TV programme thrown up at him when he first engaged its ignition. An advert for a product, a TV evangelist, the score of a soccer match or the stock exchange ticker tape scrolling a key coded set of numerals across the bottom of the screen, any one of those could hold the key. Hastily he replaced the picture's string over the hook and bounded over to spark the set into life. But a lame comedy series was what first met his eyes, not even one with a star who had subsequently been prosecuted for crimes enacted on the back of his celebrity. His digits played over the remote control, quickly rifling through the channels’ formulaic liturgical burnt offerings. He slitted his eyes narrower trying to detect any subliminals from the quick change from channel to channel but nothing was delivered up to him for revelation. 

A fluttering wrenched his attention upward to the ceiling. A moth was battering at his Chinese lantern shade in its determination to burrow through the red hot light source within. The lantern barely rippled under its bantamweight thrust, but he did notice the shadow of both projected large on the ceiling. Blown up several times their actual size. And yet he himself cast no shadow in the room. Was that the sign? His own lack of a shadow, yet here was an insect larva feasibly from Satan’s own realm cast large in the artificial glow from hell’s fires? He tilted the paper shade to admit access for the moth to the bulb which it obligingly did so and perished with a pleasing sizzle against the scorching glass. He watched its Icarian descent to the floor whereupon it landed right in the middle of the carpet stain, just at the moment when the TV announced a newsflash and the picture on the wall slithered drunkenly to the diagonal on its axis. A multitude of signs, but which one was the true indicator? 

The Afterlife Of Books - Flash Fiction

Collaborations do not afford good literature. As proven by the collusion of stonemason (a serif font for god’s sakes) and your own agent who had penned the epitaph on your tombstone. “Doubtless in Heaven he will be composing some bon mots for the Lord”. What like your His speechwriter or something? Your inner editor would cavil at ‘doubtless’ since the word possesses a range of shades of meaning from probable to certainty. You might rather have opted for the blue pencil inscribing ‘unequivocally’, but there didn’t seem to be pen and paper in whatever this non-state of being you currently resided in. Consonant to being on a life support machine but with minimal brain activity you surmise. Akin to when you used to participate at literary conventions. 

Yet you are preserved here for whatever purpose. In the fleeting moments of mindfulness permitted, you calculated it was due to your books attaining the cachet of the canonical. Such exalted eminence confers true immortality it seems. For all the good that redounds on a deceased you. To be endowed stature without any physical body at all. A corpus sans corpus. See how the pun survives death. God’s cosmic joke? Just like I always wrote. Maybe your agent was right, maybe if you entertain God with a well turned phrase that cracks his stern countenance, then you get togo again down there one earth. Only problem is God hasn’t put in an appearance and you can no longer string together two words. You are entirely reliant on your past body of work. 

There were no hidden manuscripts. No abandoned novels for passing on to a designated writer to complete. Nor had you buried any work in a time capsule to be uncovered and published a hundred years later as some of your contemporaries had hit on for inexplicable reasons. Yet even with no more new works to be published, there were still reissues and new editions of your work and each sale passed through the ether and delivered you a prod in whatever non-protoplasmic state of you existed. A notch on the bedpost of your eternal rest, yet not sufficient to rouse you fully. No, that came with the critique that followed such a sale. For here in the empyreal, you got to experience what down there on earth self-published writers felt when they received notification of a new review. The only cognisance granted you in your perpetual sleep was to digest the critique offered by each and every one of your post-mortem readers. For all the good that it did you. Though perhaps you shouldn’t be quite so churlish, since the continuing royalties will see your family comfortably provided for. The philistine ingrates that they are, one son the professional sportsman and the other a lawyer. You momentarily wondered whether the lawyer had fleeced his sibling out of his share by now, but Elysium’s own censors and legal eagles quickly shut down your narrow window for thought processes. Narrow, it rated more slender than an arrow slit casement in an old stone castle. Hey that’s not a bad metap-

The evanescent periods of time allocated were only to cogitate on a review. Not that you were privileged any right of reply. That made this amorphous condition somewhat of a trial, nay a torture even. Maybe this wasn't the literary realm of the august and the sublime, perhaps it was actually purgatory. The Devil has all the best tunes, but you don’t figure Him to be much of a reader. Instead you are forced to consume a slow but never-ending drip feed of the living’s responses to your moribund output of yore. What does any of it matter now? not to you. And not to the readers either. You could see attitudes shifting slowly (not that you had any concept of time up/down here). No more did you get the sustained terms of sentience when your books were made into a film or TV dramatisation, or some literary critic obligingly reinvestigated you on some anniversary or other so that sales took a spike. You were presumably now off the school curriculums since you no longer received the feeble blip around exam time, when the students were forced to offer their own opinions on your work but found the task beyond their capabilities and trotted out the received notions of their teachers. What happened when you dropped out of people’s consciousness altogether? Membership of the literary canon revoked, presumably you ceased to exist in such renowned status here in literary heaven/hell? A fate that must have befallen Stephen King some considerable time ago? Not that you have any sense of time passing. 

Maybe there was a way of foreshortening the process. After all, what exactly was the value of this non-existence being force-fed your own work back to you by people beyond your own time? Unfortunately it seems your books had changed with context. You could absolutely accept the criticisms offered by these new, contemporary readers. Well figuratively perhaps, since you didn’t actually know what world they occupied, nor what their values were. Nonetheless, you could recant all your work now and bring all this slow torture to an end. Nothing lasts for ever. God? Satan? You’d like to compose a posthumous work. A palinode. 

Fallen Angels - Friday Flash

Heaven had become a hive of hellish hother and pother. Everywhere the eye could range, angels with gossamer wings were scurrying hither and thither, humping armfuls of plaster of paris. Save for those angels who had toppled over and lay prostrate, unable to right themselves. The increasingly feeble splay of their wings heralding the slow extinguishing of their light, like the dying embers of a fire. These angels had revoked their immortality.

Some had curled their wings around in front of them to form a scoop with which to carry a greater volume of the plaster. If they failed to reach their destination before the gypsum hardened, the seraphim were cast solid and pitched headlong to the ground. Yet in fact any contact with the terrestrial substance unwittingly formed a granular seal on their own death warrant. Any besmirching of their diaphanous plumes with the duller clots of the plaster, would eventually set hard, thereby plucking their wings of flight and exposing them to the afflictions of gravity.

Yet still they persisted in their lethal toil. Some celestials simply poured the plaster over themselves and transformed instantly into statues. In suicide thus they became the objects of their collective endeavour. Since the angels were striving to build a terracotta army in their own likeness. Stretching back as far as the horizon and beyond. The host were trying to suggest a swelling of their own ranks to the near infinite. To confront another, oncoming swarm. Finite, but pullulatingly deadly. For mankind was on the move and seeking new pastures. After eviscerating their own terrestrial realm.

Puttos were exhorting their aerial elders to evermore effort. Tooting their long-stemmed trumpets. The very same notes that used to usher in sweet harmonies, now resounded as with the blare of a cataclysmic tocsin. Nude Cupids were firing their forlorn love arrows over the heads of their venerable peers to spur them on yonder. Yet the further down the plaster parade, the more ragged and less-angel like the sculptures appeared. In fact they looked nothing remotely more than a pillar or a termite mound. The remaining angels still feverishly trying to erect statues at this point, complained to their goading juveniles that their delicate hands were only meant for strumming harp strings. Not shaping lime that burned their skin.

Just as the Cherubs were about to remonstrate further with their patriarchs, the latter interposed by what means the humans had finally managed to locate their own ethereal plane. That sublimity which had previously provided them with their inviolability from the grossly material. How man had returned to consider their own ancient maps of earth. Festooned with Cherubs blowing trumpets propelling propitious marine winds and Puttos unfurling scrolled cartographies. Man simply gazed up from the terrestrial landmasses following the orientation of the cherubs and hence were now massed outside the empyreal gates. The Puttos and Cherubs protested that such maps also bore fearsome dragons and Gogs and Magogs. They inquired of their wise ones why the humans had not followed their abyssal trails, why they had only alighted on the celestial? The angels explained that when the humans looked at such monsters, they only saw reflections of themselves.

Irresistibly, mankind's first port of call had been Hell. It being of a more natural fit temperamentally. Imagine their self-righteous shock at being informed by Lucifer that Hell had been the original version of their own earth. Its current searing temperatures and icy inertia were what their earlier incarnations had reduced the planet to. Lucifer and his skeletal crew had been charged with maintaining the fissile core and preventing it from mimicking a supernova. Those scientists who happened to be in the van of the human hordes had been disbelieving, declaiming that no race could ever have the capacities for survival within the fearsome temperatures of a star. Mammon retorted that prototype earth was ever a planet and not a star, only how in their forebears ravenous surge, its magma had been fired up and the molten core irradiated through mankind's meddling and destabilising of the whole fabric. There had flashed  the most fleeting flicker of recognition in the faces of the scientists, for after all, similar processes had overtaken their own earth and compelled their verdict of a species-wide emigration. Their smugness swiftly wiped from their countenances, as the press of the multitude from behind impelled them into fiery pits and the abyssal chasm itself. Mankind had delivered its verdict with a casual shrug of barging shoulders and seethed onwards. They were after a superior berth than this home once spurned already. Lucifer had signalled ahead to his angelic brethren.

The Cherubs and Puttos were distraught that their own joyous annunciation and blazoning of human progress had betrayed their own kindred. And yet the humans couldn't have been as terrible as their elders lead them to believe could they? After all, consider the grotesque impressions of their own form rendered here by the angels and compare that with the bewitching pulchritude of the human depictions. No, with such art in their souls, the humans simply wouldn't pull their wings off them as they might do to lowly flies. If anyone was presenting a certain ugliness of the poetic soul, it was the angels themselves with these abominable likenesses. The callow angels turned to welcome their spiritual masters who had proven they could work miracles with base matter...

Taken from my third flash fiction collection:

Available from Amazon Kindle Store free to download 3rd-7th June 2016

The Haunting Of The Self - Friday Flash

"Hell is other people" opined Jean-Paul Sartre. Hell on earth maybe. But in the afterlife, can we even call it that, can I call it that...? There is certainly no other company to pin the blame on. The posthumous life is an isolated one.

Can you live with yourself? For eternity I mean? And it's not even that hoary old notion of an endless replaying and mulling over your recently departed life, what you did right, what you did wrong. I do reference the odd event from my former existence here and there, but only in parentheses. Mere flotsam in the remorseless torrent of thought that afflicts me in my current disposition. Certainly nothing to gain a firm hand hold on to anchor one upon sure-footedness. For here, wherever here is - concepts of fluffy clouds or burning hellfires have both proved fancifully baseless - though my exact configuration is no less nebulous - the mind is never switched off.

For there is no sleep. No room for idle daydreaming. Never a pause to eat, or relieve oneself. Except of mental effluence. Though actually there is no relief even to be had there. The spate streams on. Mindlessly one might even say. Though the thought is coherent. Self-reflectively so. On the niggling status of the thinking being. For it is uncoupled from any corporeality. Therefore it-I, lack any spatial dimensions. And we have already established that there is no temporal one either. For only with the body's mechanical, clockwork needs does time have a rhythm against which to regulate them.

It's odd. Now that I'm stripped of a physical vessel with all its cacophonous feedback chatter, so that the mind is free to cogitate unimpeded, it is not the purpose of my past life that it contemplates, but its current uncertain status. Without a sensory apparatus, it- I can gain no new information, so can only draw on what has gone before, which I have seemingly relegated to background trivia, or else the purely abstract. How approaching death we once raged at the great cosmic joke played on our species, of the life spent building relationships, lives, loves and the whole of material reality, only to have it snatched away by the most final of cessations. When in fact we appear now to have been looking at it the wrong way around. Condemned to some sort of existence here, where nothing ever terminates. Would that it did. To obtain a rest from this incessant onslaught of rumination. Maybe the Buddhists on earth had it right, with their meditation seasoning them for this. Granting them the ability to impregnate pauses and garner silences. The stilling of the spirit. Mind you, no sign of their other belief in reincarnation. Of heading back into the corporeal fray wrapped in a new skin.

So the body is shucked, but the psyche still seems to persist. Even more obsessively if that's even possible. So one begins to sift as to what mind is- was. It used to be charged with steering the body through the vicissitudes of life and promoting the common weal. Knitting together perceptions, memories and feelings into a relatively unified and consistent core identity. Presently it seems involved in a perpetual inquiry as to its own nature, with reference and comparison to what it was when cased in flesh. The mind interrogating itself.

Back down there- not that directionality has any meaning anymore, the mind was the collective set of impressions and interpretations yielded by the senses, filtered through emotions and all sorts of brain chemistry. Yet here, presumably I lack for the physical brain, the electrical synaptic pulses, the chemical baths. So where is this "I" housed? What is enabling it to persist beyond physical form? Am I haunting myself? The location I refuse to rescind is not a place on earth, but my own ego. Despite the battering it has taken through expiration and disseverance.

And that's what it-I do. In a never ending loop. A Moebius Strip of reflexivity. Turning itself over and over, inside out, yet never being able to penetrate itself. If life was mockingly fleeting back on earth, what of it now? Locked into trying to see what any of it is all for, such singular purpose seemingly being only the continuous and flawed search itself. Hell isn't other people. It's the stripped down, bare self. The agony of partial being. It is the realisation that one has only ever been an abstraction, unable to present itself into full awareness of what it actually is, or what it represents.

Can you live with yourself?