Jan cuts a sonnet through the dust that lay like snow over the table top. A beautiful, temporal, verse. A temporarily beautiful verse. Sonneteer, o sonneteer, collapses in a heap on the floor. Sonneteer, o sonneteer, collects ol Mary, Mary, quite contempt-orary with shaven head and French green dress, up the stairs and across the landing, into the room where music’s made. Beautiful, beautiful, Mary, just legless enough to stand the unstandable – to fuck the unfuckable. Jan, sweet slimy Jan, licks his needy sickly drivel all over her naked body – poems her a dribble of obscenity across her dusty skin; Jan’s gentle cooing descends into irreligious filth and prickardy pricking… jabberdy jabbing. Tears glooping, swashling lungs and cunts dripperdy dropping. Flesh ripped apart, bleeding, bones white and thickening shit and spittle. Fucking fucking guts, intestines, spine and pissing, books, poetry, rock n’ rolling fuckedy fucking.
Archive for the ‘Fractured Writing’ Category
Nightmareily through the night does ol’ Ylang-ylangy go. Out to snatch a body or two… but… my stone? ah, there. Lifted out the ol’ Jesuit boneyard where mOther and father are boxed and ready to go.
Daddy-mummy-me: o how that gawdawful triangulation pinpoints every fear, every love, every pain, every joy, every sickness. I am the holy trinity; I, the trilateral man: father, son and Holy Ghost – not an existential ant, but, a trigonal fly. Nastish, selfy, bloated… dead as dead as dead.
There are worms burrowing through my skin, eating away at the soft bits making me thin. The brain, where the world slows, begins and ends and is equalized and pulverized and eaten, is itself food for thought – a delicacy on that score. Thinking is where the world gets eaten and thought is gradually consumed by thought, but, it is not nourished. Thought is fat and hungry in equal measure. Thought is a feast of holes.
I cre… cre… cre… ate my words. Words are worms, the byproduct of a ruined world. Words are worms, the overripe fruit of thinking.
Look how skinny this room is. Jan must have shaved the meat off its bones. Overfed, stuffed, roomy old room, the room I was born in, has lost some weight in the thinking of it and gained nothing in the saying of it. Roooooooom. One and all infected this world with thinking and thinking infected by this world. Cancerized and sodomized this peaceful machine.
Where’s my Ylang-ylangy? Out to snatch a body or two. Funny, gone the wrong way up Princess street. Graveyard’s up the other way. Shifty little Janny-jan gone pubwise. Told me once he lost himself in the mirror, lost in the skuggwa of his own face – couldn’t connect his thinking to his thinking of his thinking of his face. I tells ‘im, I tells ‘im, “realize you did, you don’t belong ‘ere.” He says he knew it all along… all andlang… all Ylangy-jan.
Jan, gadding about all amongst the half naked half dead stinko stigmatics, will come a- lah-lahing back all off his pannikin; come a-galumphin and a-galambolin he will, loud enough to wake the rotting with his stale ol’ breath a-singing and a-songing. I’m doooooooomed. Yet, despite Jan’s rumbled tumbled drunkery, I rarely land on those shores of nod these day. Words scratching behind the ears. O how this perpetual dream never lets me sleep. A perpetual nightmare.
Jan stares at the sharply warped sliver of stone smithereen he had flyquick snatched from the flood of floor in secret before scurrying off to his one chaired hell. He pushes it carefully around his palm – slowly, gently: shh, don’t say a word.
-What an unusual arrangement of solidness; what a solid arrangement of unusualness. Uselessness. Unusefulness. Jan says, parodying Luke’s highfaluting, endlessly synonymic and gratuitously dialectical way of saying. But, Jan knows he is only partially playing at parody; for, Luke’s way of words crawls insidiously through the shallower waters of Jan’s own prattlings.
A small bird is stapled to Jan’s broken table with its chest pinned open wide to its wings; half-alive and half-dead. Jan drags his chair to the table, sits clumsily, edging his head near to the bird, and whispers:
-What do you suppose he eyes in these insides… these guts? No, not guts… flesh – skin; but dead, like meat, meat without intricacy or purpose… precisely like meat. Marbled through with nothing more to do with itself.
-More like ban is that stan,
said the bird to the man.
-Why, don’t be absurd,
said the man to the bird.
-Ssshhh. Half-dead half-alive birds shouldn’t have the wherewithal to… but… of course, bone.
Jan sits up rigid in his milky chair, pushing the fat of his thumb against the point of the slithery slither.
-I suppose… in a sort of obvious way. Stooping closer to the broke little sparrow, bones an’ blood an’ all. But, what do little half-dead half-alive birds know anyway? Jan hisses.
-A splinter of bone, or, a splinter of skin? In texture like bone, holds the world up, holds its own, Jan says, jabbing the point of the splinter into one of the bird’s opal eyes. This bastard is uneatable.
-Inedible, says the sparrow.
-My grammar need not be corrected by more dead than alive bastard birds. I Mean what I say. I can eat what I damn well please. Jabbing a little harder at the black point-of-bird’s-eye-view. It is not like bone or meat or skin or anything. It is not like anything. It’s all surface and no substance. What does Luke see here, in these insubstantial, slippery, surfaces? So slippery that thinking can slide off it in all directions.
This stone, this partial, blurry, stone is a dream but it comes alive when I think about it, it becomes solid and real when I think about it; no longer just a thought, but, something not me; something… thought provoking. No, this stone does not provoke thought, thought provokes this stone. It has no inside or outside, no surface or depth; it is pure surface, pure depth. How on earth does this sorry little thought-thing catch my eye? Where does it begin? Why? This stone, this fractional, fuzzy, stone is cold and not cold, is dry and not dry, is one and two, et sequential… Jan gets himself lost along a Lukish loop of words and not-words.
Ants congregate in the corner daily; unquenched and slimy, clenched and unclenched, chaotic and proper. Enticed with a little sugar. Come little ones, little little childlike decay and rottener than pigs.
Jan is doggish – rests his head on my lap – loyal loyal Janny Jan, but, with a fisheye brain. Nothing has happened. No-happening escapes Jan’s fisheye. He leaps to his feet and walks backwards, back into his hole, back into hell, back to feed the monster that lives down there. I have never seen it, but, sometimes I hear a grumbling a rumbling a growling… sometimes I see a flickering a flash a fire… a foot an eye a finger. He has a devil down there in the cellar: all the Fs! Sing “all the F’s!”
Peeking through stone guts can wait. The insect supra-structure scrabbling about the skirting board folds and unfolds – breathes, unbreathes. A hole falls through the deep red mahogany desk sleeping under my elbows. Sleeping. Mouth Gapping. Bloody desk dripping dropping, solid vertical blood, four-legged open artery coagulated in suspension.
I fiscaus two cubes of dusty sugar – fisceye siceye – Jan our diabolical and opposite friend – and toss them into the corner. Wawl. Caterwaul. Circumambulator. Tiny dead ants. Circumambulator. Caterwaul, caterwaul, swelling up, engulfing, pushing. Caterwaul sucking, sucking, vacuuming. Ant-circumambulatorant. Corpses: food now. Not corpses, limbs. Amputated limbs. Scapes, funiculus’, tarus’, tarsal claws, tibias, tibia spurs, gasters… the dead ants are not corpses but useless limbs, eyes, ears, mouths. The living mouth eats the useless mouth. Ants, rope-like and smoke-like; whole worlds the size of eyelids; head in a basket. Head… in… a… bask-et. Hymenoptra. Hy-men-op-ter-a. More egged than wombed. More unfolded than born – humen, humen, humen! The screaming! The screaming! O for the oblivion of oblivion to stem this perpetual flow of words that are only spent when all our vegetable thinking is done and dust.
Soft moon a-hanged and propped from seven sea to skuggi by a trillion crooked stilts jabbed into the earth’s panoptic plane of partial skuggwa. shooting light-like across the emptiness and the fullness, the fullness and the emptiness, running cheek by jowl with all-in-all. The soft moon, a rope lashed around its middle, ends tied star to star, skins half a pint of oranges over Jasna Gora and her black mOther theotokos-hodegetria: die Verfuehrung, leading to the source – Matka Boska Czestochowska: This way, this way…
Luke rests the scharfe edge of a scalpellum on the smiling polished surface of a stan, double and triple.
Bone runs deep through the veins of Czestochowa and stiffens the murderous deluge of screams like water made ice floeing from liquid prisons of salvation’s freedom into Luke’s arthritic mares come nightmares. He looks up, through the majestic ceiling, beyond the deep blue calculating-machine sky, beyond the flabby moon, beyond the planets and the sun, beyond the galaxies and bird-eye stars, over the edge of the faint echo of infrasonic beginning, back through the galaxies and stars, back passed the sun and the planets and the moon, back, back, until finally he encounters his self encountering a stone.
-Jan! Jan! I have the wrong implement! Jan, fetch the prospector’s hammer! Jan, for God’s sake, I will this cobble divide… Jan?
But will alone is all alone against hard and fast Reality and its indivisible/divisible things trapped fat, stuck in mid air, elbowing out thinking, then sucking it back in.
Jan scuttles bridge-like, hand-over-foot-like, clip clop clip clop; the delicious rattling snap of slavery from nail to heel to wood; shadows lovingly caress his face and jealously claw at his boot-heels.
-I have it, Jan sits on his feet rummaging around in the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket. Here.
Luke snatches sorry old hamor, fresh sparkling and siolfor – pulls back, mechanical arm fashion, one-armed bandit fashion, the old stone swindler
-You see here Jan, pointing at the stone snapped limb from limb, this smithereening is not revolution, prodding its insides out. Nothing has happened.
-But I saw it, Luke. I watched it brake.
-And yet, nothing has happened, Jan. Have you been drinking?
Jan shrugs and nestles his chin on Luke’s thigh.
Jan floods the forest of floor slicing his trouser fabric and skin on the bent bloody nail that holds the floor to the world and the world to the floor. Ch… Ch… Ch… Christ almighty!
Luke is foetus shaped a-crying an’ a-moaning an’ a-shaking in the corner; eyes all pins and wide as windows; mouth slapped crooked open dribbling into his otherwise stone stuffed shirt pocket. Luke’s skeletal hand, knuckles white with hold-on-tight, strangles the lytel siolfor hamor against his chest. A tolling bell clatters in rope whips through the walls and the floors, through the seas and the shores, through Luke and through Jan, through the ants and the stan, through the screams and the moans, through the meat and the bones – through and through and through.
-What was it? Jan wraps his arms around Luke’s trembly shoulders.
Luke says: groans and moans, expressing all the horrors of unlifely rattles.
-A mongrel pig thing come in through the window?
-B… B… B… Bed. Luke manages a partially paralyzed stutter while slowly raising a shaky finger heavenward before turning liquid from rigid.
Jan gathers Luke up in a ball of flesh and fabric and drags him stairward pointing bedward; Luke all floppy and exhausted hangs from Jan like a cloak of soft lead, mouth still gapping and eyes a-rolling.
Jan flops Luke steak-like onto the bed – cold as a frying-pan – pulls off Luke’s dusty old brown shoes, and tucks him in.
-A fat… calliphora vomitoria. A real slimish selfy bastard. Luke says, slowly awaking from the dazey daze of rumbling aftershock.
-Er? Jan’s face is a question mark, full-stop mouth and curling eyebrows.
Luke pulls the wave of sheet tight over his mouth, eyes shifty, here and there, darting over the room like a thief.
-Has it gone? Luke asks.
-Has what gone? silly old fool. What? Jan says pulling a stool to the side of the bed. What? he repeats as he sits down.
-The windows must be shut, locked, bolted down, tied off, roped, lashed to the mast, closed closed closed! Luke says, his face briefly emerging from beneath the sheet then snapping back under.
-Its gone. Whatever it may have been, it is most certainly nowhere to be seen.
-Go check! Luke barks and bites at the sheet.
Jan disappears out of the bedroom door and reappears a moment after a moment later.
-Nothing. All gone. Jan says as he sits back down on the stool next to the bed.
Luke is sitting up; regained some strength and conviction within Jan’s moment of absence; pulled himself together; knotted together some self-respect and courage out of the tiny threads of hope that Jan had left behind.
-The windows must be shut – nastish things gets in those ways. There was I, all admiring of the ant machine when… no-no, no more of that. And where were you, ol’ cowardly Jan, my fair-weather protector?
-What window? There are no windows open. Jan says.
-What, Luke’s face falls off its brittle moorings, no windows open? Then still it lurks in the shadows. Luke’s face drains and turns white, stiff and still. It’s hiding. Go Jan! Leave! Kill it! Kill it! Luke says thrusting the point of a finger at the fearfully dark space that reaches through the door eating into the ribcage of shape and form, before he jumps back into his swathe of covers, fully submerged and shivering.
-Never fear I shall take the hammer and make mincemeat of the little bugger! Jan stops in his bloody tracks: ah… what was it again?
-A fly! A fly! Big offish, lunatic, bluebottle. Luke says poking his head out from the covers at the stool side of the bed and halfway down. Go on! head disappearing back into the muddle of bedclothes and pillows.
-The hammer. Jan says.
Luke shoves a trembling fistful of hammer out from the wooden sheets. Jan snatches sorry old hamor, fresh sparkling and siolfor, from Luke’s corpsish clutches.
-My turn to make smithereens, Jan la-la‘s, skipping out the bedroom door.
A god awful smashing an’ a-crashing an’ a-banging yells and whoopedy whoops rattle the ceilings and the walls.
-Is it killed? Luke says still trembly trembling under the bed covers.
-Dead as doornails. Jan sings with overflowing smugish trills. Dead as dead as dead! Chin up. He sits back on the stool shaped stool beside the bed.
Luke emerges from his nest warbling warbles and singing sighs.
The long chemical light flickers and traces thin, very thin, outlines of bodies, profiles of movements, light traits left in the dark… and junkies look cool, no matter what they say, all style and no substance: slim and tight, tight skin hugging the bones and tight clothes hugging the skin hugging the bones. Smack heads and crack heads and drunks all a-quivering and a-twitching. There is no depth here, none of us even pretend that there is, we all stick out like splinters; nothing goes in, not even the needle, it all pushes out. Each twitch, every movement punches out, but never gets out – everything happens on and over the surface, everything is the surface. Bodies are like shapes pushed out of stretched rubber – voices, words, language, just the same, just shapes pushing out from the surface – love, hate, indifference, thought, not-thought, real, unreal, all come to pass on this slippery surface.
‘But what of the orgasms?’ they will ask, and, ‘what of the bone chiselling pain?’ Skin deep, skin deep, tra-la-la! If there are things lurking beneath the surface, what are they to us anyhow? the pain is not under the skin but over it, vibrating across it! In this light, pain is only a reflection in the wavey surface.
-I have a suspicion I’m mad. I can only talk nonsense… this makes no sense… people look at me as if I’m really gone, man… and she always wants me to bleed the radiators, but, the radiators work just fine and it’s the doors that will bring me right down… they only ever open to a quarter of their capacity… walls are always getting in the way… I am a door… walls are my enemies…
The long chemical light perpetually flickers and no one is real under these conditions… not real-life-real at any rate; we are dream-real: partially all there, but, totally fragmented.
I drift into the open air. The sea is as green as the morning. I smell that salty air and I am a child again, I am everything again, I am part of the world again… I can hear the pebbles rattling under the waves crashing and a small boat rocking – wood gently knocking wood…
[photo taken in Venice in the autumn, 2008]
She sits alone, puts the sounds of the words she is writing into her mouth and absentmindedly lets them all spill quietly out again. She appears inverted: a dent in the system where the sick repetition of information passes between the paragons of information beneath sorry, decadent, impressionisms that vibrate to the pretentious jangle of [...]
Your anorexic dimensions stick awkwardly into my memory – fidgeting through my mettle and blood. You squat over me at the curve I drink on, the bend I think along, spread thin over time spread thinner. You get inside the hole and make a hole inside where a hole does no good, fit a space [...]
O, these artsy little roomy ones taking away our automatic guns to blow their smug little faces dry “the poor animals! the poor animals! O, why must they die?” The singing, slimish, selfy ones taking away all our pellet guns “O, life is gentle, life is sweet… where is my stomach, O, why can’t I [...]
