Hollow Man

We fell for a washed-out black hat and a white runt rabbit. How did they spin us from citizens of society to slurping consumers? One by one our souls sold out like falling Dominos. Mmm, I hear your bellies rumble, but this is no salami on sloppy cheese, my friend. All the Jekyll and hiding, bending and soldiering into tiny lifestyle brands, with no chance of leaving a four-walled single person’s prison bed. Sucking stomachs and tongues into a place where it’s all stiff, it’s important to look your best whilst staying on script.

There’s no way out. You’re no threat.

Haggling freedom on psychedelics. Sleepwalking through Disney bubble dreams: rockstars in military regalia.…finding yourself in Southeast Asia. The University of ka-ching…Croydon to catwalk…sex worker to yoga studio…mop to hip-hop hoe…prison to children’s T.V presenter. Come closer, let me look into your cloudy filmed eyes, tell me: what were your dreams?

In the land of make believe we’re all free to let our imaginations run like wildflowers.

Look! Over there’s a failed-at-life university professor keeping you in the slow lane whilst having you believe you’re winning a race to the top. It’s not their fault they still feel it themselves; they’re just taking a year out. Watch out for the Pawn Fleas conditioned to keep you anaesthetised on your ‘infinite potential’, whilst selling your birthright from underneath your root chakra.

Despite all the toil, why’s your lifestyle getting poorer and its advertisement getting richer?

What do you do when you wake up from a long dream? Disoriented and displaced with things not quite as they seem. You’re angry, and with sleep-crust eyes react while still only half awake. Slumbering; dispossessed of the dreams churned out by the fantasy producers. Dislocated from your fellows, each suffering a unique version of psychological and spiritual disorientation. Yawning, scanning, reaching for nourishment: creme brûlée, sucking pig, hash browns, an assortment of fried breasts. Perhaps a teat of alcoholic beverage?

In the post-truth era, it’s no longer about punking against being “good orderly citizens”— the world is rudderless and such movements make fashion trends.

There’s low-level anxiety about connecting to anything that breathes, better to stay with the feeds and scrolls of yesteryears consciousness.

Say hello to the wolves dressed up as wolves, unconscious of their inner sheep, promising a new dream of better sleep.

“Max Weber, a nationalist observing the advance of an impersonal bureaucracy in his industrialising nation, reached his despairing diagnosis of the modern world as an “iron cage”, from which only a charismatic leader offers escape”.

Take five: bring out the polystyrene frankfurter hero.

In desperation the encumbered invest their forgotten faiths in a StrongMan; a person to clear up the party when the Roofies mellow out. Promising prosperity, stability, and equality that the elites before had failed to administer properly.

Donnie, Theresa, Narendra mouthing lullabies to send you back to sleep. Reading out loud tales of Mexicans, Muslims, Hindus, undocumented workers, the media, the anti-Americans, the “pretty bad dudes on the other side”. Straight outta D.T.’s.

“I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right? I’ve been on it for 15 times this year. I don’t think that’s a record, Mike, that can ever be broken. Do you agree with that? What do you think?” Donnie trumped.

Narratives are believed not because they’re true, or even sound true, but because they’re emotionally appealing. He-Man’s back with the Masters of the Universe: toiling, adorning spoils, squirting seed at botox robot princesses. C’mon you remember the golden era? When men were gods, you got your shoes shined, kissed your wife at the sink and sailed off to make Jazz.

Every mythical hero needs a villain, cue the cartoon Jihadist, the token terrorist; wheel out that welfare criminal. Now, our fictional tale is in place, because every Superman needs someone to zap.

Just remember that there are infinite more American crimes against its own people than any Islamic terrorist can shake a suicide bomb at.

“Oh, dear California my darling, my love, my only hope, you didn’t tell me until it was too late that you were founded on genocide. I just wanted to let you know that I still want you. Tell me you still want me too, please? Next time I promise to be harder”.

Wake up with eyes wide open. Your mind is not your own, it’s harvested by something inorganic. You’re pregnant with illusion and about to fall for another dirty hand. Oh sleeping beauty, dogs get treated better, at least they know there’s a lead around their neck. Yours is invisible, it’s being hooked into your amygdala, it’s been this way since birth and’s still there at Happy Hour.

-That’s all folks. Goodnight-

Voicicle

The screams Ava hears are coming from beyond the walls, the poor Scottish girl. The man’s voice talks down to her like she’s his baby, other times it’s too damn awful to even think about. A big voice bellowing unutterable things, piercing words with evil intentions. He would kick her right in and say: “shut your ugly little bobbing head”. Ava had called the police many times, but when they arrived the arguments were so silent, their lives were hard to trace. The police made their discrete notes and left. 

Ava found it difficult to live in a world where people’s hearts were disembodied from their smiles. More than humans she loved animals, to her they were truer, straighter if only others were like this she thought.

Some days the voices were like a memory that she couldn’t access, an arc from the tip of her tongue. One day she followed them out of her flat, down the hallway, through the back of the building to a newly painted, white Victorian wall. They had gotten louder as she left, then they were sucked out of this realm.  

Ava spoke to Jesus directly about the poor Scottish girl, asking him for the young girl’s life to be saved. Sometimes she found it hard to distinguish her own voice begging Jesus, and the Scottish girl pleading for her life. When she couldn't make sense of all the voices, she would start to repeat the words in a made-up language, that nobody but herself and Jesus could decipher. 

She tried to sleep with earplugs because the murderous rows and crashes at night were the worst.  When she wore them the sounds often turned up a notch; the girl’s cries piercing through her drums, making her eyes grow wider and wilder. Some nights she realised she’d been lying in bed for hours listening to the Scottish girl screaming.  And with no way of sleeping to all this, she would simply have to go down there. When she got closer to where it sounded like their door could be, he’d stop yanking her hair across the floor.  Ava felt like there was some kind of conspiracy, maybe they had cameras on her, they knew.

Why did the Scottish girl never leave? Ava knew why. He held her prisoner. He had drilled holes in her two hands and feet and had chained her to the bath plug. That is a very thin chain, yes, why did she just not yank it off? Ava had answers to all these questions because Ava had been hearing their voices for twelve years. There was no way they could leave because they were trapped within the walls. Ava had been trying to find the door, or window to their exit for many years, but it’s not easy to access. 

One day when Ava was soaking in the bath and the screams were particularly bad, she yanked the plug chain off her own bath and for five minutes a silence fell. Ava had freed her! After all this time, it was that simple? Hahaha - she was laughing so hard with relief, she wished she’d put bubbles in to celebrate. 

The creases in Ava’s forehead that had deterred helpful faces her whole life, melting in an instant, like a cosmic shot of botox. And in her mind's eye, she sees herself as a small child running through the daisies with her dog. Smiling she leans back into the bath, she has never felt so relaxed. She’s picturing herself with her dog Bennie, and the sun is shining...until...oh...no...a dark familiar voice calls out and a cold shivery scream runs right through her. “Leave me and Bennie alone, go away, we're ok here…here in the sun”!  Her eye sockets start to tense up, and out of nowhere she hears a thunderous man’s voice: “you dirty stench, with your mash-up face, get your little-wet one out, I’m going to dice you up from the insides”. Ava’s eyes daze, like a child lost at a train station, looking up into an abyss of faceless strangers. Now the noises are coming back up, through the walls. 

Ava gets up quickly from the bath, water dripping from her. For a moment she forgets where she is and that she’s living in a sixty two-year-old’s body, and puts her two sodden feet on the tiles and starts running. She loses her footing on her stroke side, slips and her legs go flying out in front of her. She’s running away from all the voices, her arm tries to break her fall, but it’s too late her head smashes against the cold enamel. 

In slow-motion she sees two greying, over-coated men setting down stone slabs. 
 

She can feel a warm sensation running through her mind, pulsating to the sounds of the voices in the walls. She cannot move and the bath is over-flowing, or is that coming from within her own head? The monster in the walls now sounds like he’s subterranean, he’s trying to torture the poor Scottish girl from underwater. He’s become a comical frogman, he’s gurgling and gushing, he is not so menacing anymore. Ava laughs feebly at him, and as she does part of her brain becomes warmer, she wishes he could see how red her words are right now. She feels less stiff and rheumatic, admittedly she had a sharp pain where she smashed her head against the enamel, and can no longer open her eye, but it’s ok. 

The poor young Scottish girl sounds better too, giggling even. Well, things are looking brighter, Ava may even try to attempt to stand, she gets the sudden urge to call her brother to let him know that the poor Scottish girl might be alright after all. It’s more difficult than she thought, a thick sticky gloop has congealed all around her. Ah damn, maybe the monster is in the house, and this is the poor girl’s blood. She needs to move! But she slips again on the side of her squashed head, something is not right, black dots dance in front of her.

She raises her limp hand to the back of her pumping head, it’s worse than she thought, half of its caved in, and blood is pouring out at an incomprehensible rate, and she only had her hair done yesterday. Is this it? Is this where all the strings have been leading - to some spongy raw mass on the bathroom floor? 

Her brother has now become a faraway thought in what’s left of her brain, he seems like the relative of a distant friend, in a yet to be created land. Ah but wait, the voices have completely stopped, in fact, the walls have crumbled to her feet, she manages to squint a little and everything’s a violent purple…..what is beyond those walls? She tries to pry her better eye open but soon realises - like most of her head, it has become part of the sodden red pulp amassing all around her.

Burying her face, she’s shivering now, her wrinkly skin amok in blackish red. 
 

She tries to summon her friend Jesus, but he seems so pitiful in all this: perhaps the most present and vivid scene of her life. She cannot grasp him as a concept, like a novelty toy that’s never to be unwrapped; pointless and how do you even open it? What was his name again? She couldn’t even remember that. She had prayed for all her life and this is where he had left her. Haha, as she laughs she feels a hot heat pouring out, and down, into her remaining eye and open mouth, it tastes like warm peanuts. 

All her emotions are draining out of her, and now she’s in a half haze. She hears the ogres voice shouting: “Don’t worry dear, out here He is waiting” and her body turns glacial, she wants this to be true, but how can it be coming from the man beyond the walls himself? All the voices are becoming jumbled around her now, and she doesn’t trust any of them anymore. She unfurls them deep within her, unhooking them from her inner core; they slide away, disentangling themselves from her in the shape of a smoky S. Slippery snakes that they are. Ava feels warm within, and for once she trusts her being, there are no longer any distracting flickers. All of the voices have become quashed echoes, she’s flowing out like a silver swimmer. She closes her eyes, well what’s left of them physically. And just lays there. All words, concepts and curiosities fall wide away, and finally, she feels the desert she’d been searching for in ordinary times. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t ever move again; luckily she was never the type to get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water. 

Avoidances

People talk about when they get made redundant. They warn of the possibility of a world becoming a living room. I haven't been made redundant, it's just all my life I've only ever existed at the centre, and these days are different. When I wake up there are no emails, notifications, or announcements needing any immediate attention. Instead, I feel within me a sickly anxiety that nobody is sat waiting for me in town. 

In this phase I have freedom. Yet, my foggy mind is unable to create any connections, the hankering to find something new makes me unnerved, shifty on waking. I find purpose by charging upstairs to urinate; I talk to myself whilst listening to the sound of piss trickling. I wash my hands and line-up the pristine bottles in the bathroom perfectly. I over-water the plants; I have never managed to keep anything alive longer than a few months. 

My restlessness has morphed itself into pacing compulsions; sometimes I go to the bathroom and nothing comes out. I hold my dick in position, and even though there are no trickling sounds to settle my mind I flush anyway. I go to the bathroom, everything is already lined up. 

I look at myself in the mirror; I like the way the grey disperses around the hair on my face and cheeks. 

Without direction I head out, it's been a long time since I looked into their eyes to see if they're checking me out. It's been at least nine years of looking at eyes and bodies when they were no longer looking at mine. 
 

I walk to the Spanish cafe it is closed of course. Most places are closed at this time of day. I consider the field's toilet, but times have moved on, there are apps for this nowadays, people haven't got the stomach for surprises. 

I consider my options. I could return to the flat. It will be light soon, I will look out the window and watch them all go about with direction. It's funny how I look at these people, wondering what drives them, I spent my entire life removed from them. I kept my own hours, I created and owned some of the most famous talent in the world, my agencies stood tall in all the expected flagship locations.

I decide to keep walking, my mind is too flighty to settle in the confines of the usual. 

A cafe is opening under a railway bridge, I have never seen it before. It's unusual when local places remain invisible for so long, until in one moment when they seem to just present themselves.

I cross the road and look in. I see a counter and round oak tables. I try the door; it opens. I enter but decide to take the table outside, my mind is craving open space. Across the road is a garage and a few dirty mechanics are already busy working. I feel myself getting hard. 

The light is changing and I see that across the way people are starting to fill up the train station. A young boy enters the cafe, I can tell he is about to start his twenties; he has many bags. The familiarity he shows to his surroundings suggests he works here.   

When he serves me I notice the thickness of his curly black, young hair. 

•
 

It becomes part of my daily ritualising. I sit here on the outside round oak table, watching the mechanics, waiting for my dark curly boy to come in. 

The clothes I am wearing on this day are the same clothes that I wear every day when I come sit here: sweat pants and a tee - all black. I leave the house at 6 a.m. without even thinking of what to wear. 

I realise I have spoken about my leave of work as if it's something troubling, but you should not feel sorry for me. My house is in the most fashionable part of the city and my work has introduced me to the most beautiful. I'm talking about people with that quality that draws you in so much, your breath takes on the same pace and timing. I got adopted into their circle, popular for my skills as a connector, but also for my ability to know the next big face that the world wanted to follow. I had inherited a good eye from my mother and after years of giving them the faces they wanted, I became a fixture on the scene, someone who could make or break a life.

I liked the game. I liked the way they looked at me; like a ring-flash was going off on their insides, radiating through their eyes, hoping that I would catch their best side.  It was always in the nightlife, I took pleasure in it. It suited my inability to find conversations interesting. Never knowing what to say to them; beauty, talent and money moved me - but many people want to talk about heavy things and it was hard to for me to feign interest. Of course, we have to try, especially when they have something we need. I used to see this as a weakness, on my part, yet this is why everything grew so fast, when you don't try too hard, people fret, they give themselves to you. This is the time to get contracts signed. 

The curly boy asks me what I do for a living. This is the first time we have spoken.

I want him to stay this way, as soon as I tell him the name of my agency his face will become aware of itself: his lips will grow fuller, his eyes will be forced wider and brighter. 

I want to maintain a stranger. Part of me wants to see what he will look like once he knows, but I know from then on there will be no going back, everything will take a scripted quality. 

It's the first sign of interest he has shown me, I breathe before speaking, I could be anything now. I could be a mechanic, a lawyer. I can say I used to be an architect and now I'm a painter. He'll never know. 
 

I tell him that I'm an agent. I don't feel like saying anymore, as I don't want him to become self-conscious. I turn the conversation to him. He tells me he studies Philosophy of Mysticism. One of my main board guys in the nineties did a bit of this. 

My attention narrows and focusses in and for a moment there's nothing but us. When he talks about himself, he stutters and his bottom lip becomes thicker. He is no longer beautiful. His face is not symmetrical. The industry standard is that beauty requires this symmetry. One of his eyes is so hooded it makes him look lazy, or almost like he has been burnt, scarred as a child. He is talking about someone called 'Nitsche' or something. When he is animated and forgets himself, he looks like the way he does from a distance: his weak eye becomes evened-out with the other, but, only for a moment, then it recoils back to its sleepy position. 

I wish he would return back to the serving counter. We have both said too much. I want to go back to watching the mechanics. He notices me looking beyond him and says he needs to take something out of the freezer. When he leaves I notice a single thick black hair next to my Americano. I pick it up, look at it, then flick it to the floor and go to the bathroom and wash my hands twice. 

When I wake its 5 a. m. I look at the black clothes neatly folded beside the bed, I don't feel like going back to the cafe. 

Likeable Lara

Lara only existed on WhatsApp for one person. Although they weren't friends on here, he had given her his number, so when she sheepishly typed in his name, could see when he was 'last seen'. Her picture here was one that she knew he would like, of her holding her friends ginger Tom. She assumed his favourite felines were of this kind because he liked redheads, she knew this because his two last love interests were of this category. Not that he would see her photo, although she hoped one day he might look her up, maybe after just seeing one of her Facebook posts or something. She imagined him smiling when he did this because he had once said to her in person "you're a laugh". Sometimes she rubbed herself whilst imagining him saying this again, while in her mind they had sex, this fantasy was then only half untrue.

When she awoke every morning with sleep-ridden eyes, like a blind person reaching out for a familiar shape, she would grab her phone and look at when he was 'last seen'.

Whether it was past 1:00 or not, would determine whether her chest would tighten. If this sensation happened the next thing she would do was reach for a cigarette, which she would smoke in bed in a damp fury.
 

She would concur he was obviously whatsapping a female friend late at night, most likely a red haired. If, however, he had been 'last seen' anytime before 1:00, she would imagine him having been reading or watching Game Of Thrones-like her in bed, and would feel safe with this thought and would be able to eat something as hard as muesli and would not be locked into nicotine for the whole day. If when she looked at his 'last seen' and he was 'online' she would often spill her tea down herself and quickly come off it slightly flushed. This would echo to her ego that she had foolish tendencies, and she could not look at him again there until her tea was a tepid temperature.

Lara only existed on Facebook to maintain a sense of order in the world.
 

Here, with her sound number of 756 friends, who she had met at least once, (even if they never spoke in real life), she would be careful to never look too hasty. Her posts were determined with different people in mind. Sometimes she would post something for one of her left-leaning groups, come away and then imagine one of her mum's friends seeing it and would then have to delete it immediately. She didn't want her mum's group to think that she was becoming a layabout, believing that the world owed her a free ride. 

Here she felt measured, yet trapped, she knew that she wasn't the most interesting Facebook person but it allowed her not to have any burning regrets.

When she scrolled all the way down to when she was born there was nothing posted that made her feel not like herself, she had done this many times and felt warm with the knowledge that she had had some great moments.
 

Like when she posted the picture of herself with her rabbit Ned outside the butchers and it got 42 likes, quite provocative really. Or that time when she posted a picture with the really hot guy at the club and her friends had written stuff underneath telling her network inadvertently that he was fit, giving Lara the thumbs up; that got 24 likes, mostly from the girls out with her that night.

When Lara looked at her photos on Facebook she knew she wasn't attractive but most of them were taken on her best days, which she felt was a lot to live up to in the real world. Many of the photos were only accidentally good ones, she had never mastered selfies since her nose was bigger than average and this technique was not good for girls of her type. One photo she liked best was when she was a teenager and had Gastroenteritis and went down two dress sizes and her cheekbones looked quite jutting. She wondered why this had only got 3 likes, she gathered that it was because it occurred when she only had 94 Facebook friends so it made statistical sense. She had tried reposting it as a memory, but again, it wasn't popular only picking up one like from an old classmate, it puzzled her since she looked really good here. 

Lara's existence on Tinder had a lot more potential since she seemed to have a high match rate. Her age here was five years younger, which didn't matter since she'd never mustered the courage to meet any of her matches. This was just to validate to herself that she could do so if she ever wanted. Her main photo was the Gastroenteritis one, and a bikini picture of her sister for the long-shot; from such a distance it was impossible to tell unless of course, she did happen to meet one of them and then it would then be obvious. Sometimes this made her feel fake and in reaction, she would go on swiping and swiping to the left and with tears in her eyes try and wipe that thought out of her. 

In real life, Lara was very likeable, which meant she could be all things all at once. If she was in the office with the girls she didn't have to say much since she always got coffees and was always on time. Nobody really questioned her here, which made it easier to get out of bed. She imagined that when she went out to go Starbucks people never really talked about her much, unlike the louder girls, which gave her a combination of feelings that sometimes made her unconsciously shout horrible things to herself out loud on the street. 

Headland

Last night from the bed I scanned the room in its complete darkness, looking for the mocking tick-tock sound that always rocks me. I wanted to obliterate the clock, how can anyone sleep to a sound that taunts you, reminding you of all the things put off again to do tomorrow. Hard awake yet trying to turn off the volume of the world through sleep, a cry punctured through my gut, every second, quicker than one deep breath, twenty-four cells within my body cease to exist.

Time is an enduring wave, eroding potential experiences, breaking apart mental pictures still unrealised. 
 

I remember the conversation with my father about the mantelpiece at my Great grandmothers' house with its collection of ornaments, carefully graced into picturesque positions. Twin knick-knacks; the speckled shell hedgehogs, the gold Swiss toymaker shoes and the plates with bejewelled patterning. It's amusing how twos fill us up with a false safety, a hopeful dualism of never being alone, the hand-held solace of scanning and ordering the world into mirrored keepsakes.

The mantelpiece with its neat collection of ornaments remained just so for fifty-two years. Everything in its place; pink feather-dusting became a great art, you worked carefully around the pieces, for fear of knocking them off their thrones. 

Yet after the final death at the old house, the mantelpiece with all its symmetrical trinketry just fell away like a grand landslide. I imagined a pyre, a wordless god, and a heavy-duty bin-bag.  What was the point of fawning and dusting around them for the equivalent of a golden wedding anniversary plus the life and death of a goldfish, when within moments all is swept away.

Alone in a clear midnight, I reflect on what pieces I am keeping neatly for the sake of falling and breaking apart.
 

All anxiety derives from a desire for a moment, the need for an order that is unmovable, unbreakable.

And yet everything is pulling me to yield to a force that is beyond fixity, beyond what I can control; sudden realisations, dramatic loses, turning towards only the new are not the beginning or the end of anything but a reflection that all beginnings and ends are illusory, since there is no past or present outside my own mind.

Momentarily an insight like an ancient crevasse shows me my will as a force that will never disappear but disperse when I die, and that all life emerges from the same spring; all there is left to do is receive it for while and then relinquish it, the land giving way to the sea. 

I am not an object shelved in a world. I am the world. I create the world. I am the life-force of continuing and everlasting change. Time punishes me by bin-bagging everything, but it also saves me by bin-bagging everything.  

Being & Crestfallenness

Run down and running late, Ana walks out of her front door with the postman coming towards her.  He is delivering letters to her house and she is leaving to go to work. She attempts to sidestep him and he is doing the same, they shadow each other, there’s no way past. With avoidant eye contact and movements in sync, they both go forward, looking stiff as they again block the way. The third move will, of course, allow for them each to go about the day, as it would be ridiculous to get chequered in once more. In unison they say the words:

“Sorry”.

At last, they are free, if a little bit red in the cheeks, the morning is not the time to manoeuvre in a silly dance with a stranger. 

Ana walks down the street and further down by the bus-stop sees a nameless man that she once had an all-nighter with. He is all blown up now, Alcohol having become his dominant ideology, overriding the biology of his once boyish looks. She remembers the one-night they got together and feels a surge of shame, as she recalls how everything fell into a dry sorry-fest. To avoid awkwardness, she crosses the other side of the road whilst pretending to look at an intrigue on her phone, sending a cyclist hurtling off his bike. Dizzied and embarrassed he looks up at her with his head on the pavement and in an American accent says:

“Sorry”. 

She isn’t sorry but says it too, adding a customary “you ok” in for good measure. All this commotion signals the attention of the one-night dude, who with eyes widened clearly recognises her and quickly diverts his gaze to the floor. Ana swears she can hear his brain shout out two very pitiful sounding syllables. 

As she leaves the scene she imagines all the sorry people in the world and all of the terrible things they have done, like knocking arms with each other whilst holding the handrail on the bus. Those who accidentally-on-purpose signal the shopkeepers attention, despite not being next in line. There are the dinner party guests who snatch for the same bottle of wine in tandem, giving jerky eyebrow movements and a smiling sorry behind red wine teeth. And the middle England park walkers, letting their dog's noses wander loosely near strangers shoes, apologetic in their anxious gaits. 

Of course, there are other sorry-full things with much wider repercussions, like clumsily putting a crumby buttered knife into a relatives jam-jar and ruining others future scone experiences. Or reading a friend’s treasured book in front of them, whilst ignoring the bookmark and finger folding the very first triangle on a new page.

Ana’s mind then begins to forage into wider regretful territories like why fear has always been more powerful than the desire for freedom?

She also wonders whether anyone feels the need to apologise for society degenerating into polite anxious hysteria? 

Of course, she realises that historically there has always been slaves and today's variety just happen to be the ambitious executive, morally castrated by their employers, terrified by their own originality, suckering their way through life by imitation, believing their obedience the only way to win human favour. Ana believes strongly there should be a ceremonious, national apology about this, especially when taking into account her student loan debt, bleak house and general downhill struggle.

To stop blacker thoughts penetrating her mind, Ana summons up one of her most treasured romance stories, and with it comes a rush of passionate fury that becomes suddenly blocked by a boulder within her, as she sees as a revelation that - are not the fantasies of romantic love just based on dependence? With all her twisted-up positions and girly noises that she has locked herself into, why have those who have known her most intimately not thought to apologise for playing her dumb? After sitting through all those fattening family barbecues and endless cotton-wool conversations, propping one another up in a tranquillised vacuum, why has there been yet no flowers or thank-you cards? Surely her softened-face and agreeable voice; playing the pretty woman in love deserves getting on one knee for, not as that kind of proposal but to express liability.

As a matter-of-fact Ana also couldn’t remember a time when her lovers were reproachful for being addicted to applause as well as to alcohol, and this was way more regretful than some of the other things that people were happy to own their part in.

Ana wondered what the root was of all these fake sorrys and why the most important ones just got left to their own devices.
 

As she turns the corner Ana sees the number 55 bus at the lights, and there out of the greasy window is the one-night dude, and again they lock eyes in what seems like a last flaky goodbye. As the bus finally falls away, Ana prays to God and asks for her being to disappear into nothingness. Then with a tightening breath and a quickening pace she then asks Him if he can "please take that back”, as she doesn’t really mean it and gives thanks for all the things that she cannot think of right now that she is eternally grateful for. She then pulls out her phone and texts her boss that she's running five minutes late and asks him if he would like a Latte with Almond Milk. 

The Retreated

You are more high and I am mostly drinking. You are sitting half-naked on the floor, holding your guitar like it’s an injured bird. It isn’t a real song, but a melody suggesting that you are beyond all this life. A little less than half of me is rolling her eyes at the cliché, the rest is transfixed, without head. 

It wasn’t how you looked, or the unformed song, it was the way you played it; as if I wasn’t there, sitting naked with careless hair, in wonderment on the floor. I had tried to gesture your attention; like many before, but the song had summoned you into a trance, where no one but you were permitted to go. When you looked up your eyes said I see you, but not completely, because this is not why we are here. The space between us could fit just one grey cat that felt more like a gigantic space creature. 

This song makes me uncomfortable and sticky; raiding my mind for the beauty I could gift back. In times of hunting beauty, it scurries from the scene; like the cat, it cannot be trapped-in so narrowly. 

I wish you were here, whilst looking at my reflection in your purple eyes.
 

Our betweenness starting to wallow-up, you are sure getting washed up, right in front of me. All speaking sounds would be so self-conscious now. The only words I want to speak are the unspeakable, but in today's language, it would come out all dead and left-sided.

The closest I could say it now is by laying your head on my thigh, looking out and above to a black sky in calm waters. Maybe just somewhere Up North, to take the ridiculousness out of it. 

Like the time before, when you lay your head on my lap, all of my blood swam towards you. I got flustered, fighting it on an edge, and for me, it’s not easy. 

You move across the room like a rare species, impossible to track, but I don’t care because I have released all that to the gods and cut all cords. 

When you re-enact how they say you are, or how you think you should be, it sickens me.
 

Mostly you seem to talk when I'm not listening. When I’m watching our film of unspeakable unrealities that makes the area of our betweenness even more adrift in a dream; this is the direction of our particular magnet.  

I knew there were others, more youthful, more beautiful, like the blond one, pretty in a universal token way, no one would disagree. There’s the rosy bouncy one, shaped in a way that was impossible to compare sides with. I know you don’t think it, but it can be like this, sometimes, for me too. There is him at home of course and the knowledgeable pretty one, who reminds me of how many lives I’ve still to learn. There is the older, safe bet, forever polite to the waiter. But these are all mere surfaces, devices to forget you because you were the one that introduced me before I entered our room.   

Sometimes lying in bed alone, I feel closer to you than ever, a sense of oneness about what we’d created. A behind closed curtains aliveness with physical jolting spasms, far beyond human control, and as she really is.  

I know to form this untouchable invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from the world, borne of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength.

Remember the time when we took the longest cab journey in the world? For once you wanted my attention firmly, you even demanded I stop talking to the driver. So I pattern-cut the stars in the old faded navy sky and made a shirt for you. 

When we’re alone I know this is a lie, we imprisoned ourselves with our own tongues. Why don’t you tell me what I already know? I want proof, you strange fool, why are we pretending that this dance is enough? Or maybe it is for you? Why don’t you say? Instead, you like me, even more, when I am cruel. I have one of those at home, or maybe I’m just getting you all mixed up. He knows my body better than you, but there I am stuck in a glass chamber heating up. With him, there is less film and more theatre. With him, at home, there exists no interpreter, just a memorised running commentary with domestic foreplay. 

Back there being exists in the speaking between us, not like here, where being speaks within us.

I want to be as wide as possible for you but the truth is I miss you more when you are here.

I am not daisy enough these days, getting by making men high by my daggers. I needed to adjust, without you and heal my sheltered heart that eventually I left lying around. I hope this is not how it is meant to be truly; I still often think of you when I cannot think of myself with nothing to show.

Mental Fractalist

Great systems of being have truly elastic adaptability; when one part is knocked down, they will display a self-regenerating power like a growing crystal, a network of blood-vessels and vegetation that reaches out towards the light or river tributary.  

Like a fractal that tells a story of the process that creates it, by version of a picture that also tells the story of the process that too creates it.
 

And just as there are expanding stories and higher heights of awareness, there are also parasitical, non-entity type pictures.

Cancer cells are really just like human cannibals feeding in and off each-another in infinite regress, eventually eating entire organs. Decay attracts flies, flies get ensnared in webs, and there soars more shit.

There was a time where my consciousness concerned itself with orientation towards casual causes, and how everything effects me.
 

Cover-boy strangers, top-up jobs, famous dresses; like a needle trying to find its special coloured cotton. So I’d secure the object with a steely eye, pass it through, make the threads bare-tight, wrap it up messily at the end, attached and unable to ever unhook itself. 

Beauty doesn’t live by virtue of needles and knots, it needs to breathe and beat its wings with other beings of its kind.  My frightened instinct had to lock it all away, cut off its supply and keep it unchanging. Like a child hiding it's favourite toy away from prying sisters.

There were the lovers that could only exist behind velvet curtains. Ego-swamping secrets. Muting my phone from people I loved, so I didn’t have to hear the tones of truth, and in doing so mutating myself even further. 

An attention firmly fixed on the road ahead, with a decisive drive for acquisition of desire, soliciting desire and trying to posit myself higher than those I chose to pleasure with. As Jung said “all cognition is akin to recognition”, so if you don’t know it already, it just floats by the glass window.

Existence always felt beyond the glass. I remember repeating: “It seems I’m trapped within a glass-house and all life is happening on the outside”.
 

This splintered out into multi-impersonal personalities, a cast of carefully cultivated identities designed to ensnare in a spidery web of invisible stickiness. 

My mind only fixated on imagery of the obsessional kind, enchanting, sexy loops that laughed at me with fashionable faces.
 

In my deadness and fixity, where all change seemed like a threat, beef side-saddles grew through ploughed make-up on sapless skin, amidst staged performances that fell flat once the observer had left the scene. 

All this linear, loner looking means that many a rare flower is missed forever, it’s always the same-old weeds. 

There’s never the new growth, the emergent becoming old, and the fruitfulness of perpetual self-becoming. 

Yet there is always a way out of the Hall Of Mirrors. You just have to know you're there and look beyond The Self -similar patterning, with a desire to move through the door that enters to a new mode of perception.

My sign read: ENTER Stop Trying To Escape Reality. Like Alice I drank the drink that made me smaller. Indeed the drink made me smaller, but the drink I really had to take hard was the one that made my ego smaller. Enough to exit one of the many Hall Of Mirrors, into a new dimensional space.

My attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to my attention, like a hand drawing it's own hand.
 

The world arises from a spiral process, that spirals and searches its source, more like a picture that comes into focus all at once, than a linear object with a time and target.

See at all levels there are forces that tend to separation and cutting-off and there are those that tend to coherence and unification. These are not mutually exclusive, but do feel so at times.

Before there is harmony, there is always difference and it’s through the clashing of the swords and fires within the embodied self, that one is able to move beyond self, into a forever changing field of fertile colour.

Face Apocalypse

Tired out humans roaming around sheepishly, without purpose with Wills wilted like rotten vegetables. Too weak to fight their untouchable symbols of fear: Bank of America, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, The Rothchilds, all as unreachable as the Demi-Gods. Fracking one another's minds with tales of doom; fuelled by hatred, anger and frustration.

Minds closing down like borders: “We the people demand to close our borders. Only allow people who once made a contribution”. 

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AD
 

All the jobs are long gone. Hospitals are closed. Dirty children run on the streets during once upon a school o’ clock. Wars are in streets but mainly in hearts. Dogma and debris' everywhere.

All love is totalitarian comfort, survival and ego protection. All society is neurosis and narcotics.
 

Off-licences are barricaded like the Bank Of England. Politicians have moved from figures of blame to beavers in hiding. Industry is too hard to grasp, so instead of discussing the agricultural policy and fossil fuels people kill for hunger and set light to books to build fires. Climates change and yea the planet is heating up: “at least we’ll be warm”. All liberties, civil and humanitarian are abstract concepts, meaningless in all this muck. The eco-system has become just a bunch of trees and grass.

No-one cares who is White, Muslim, Intellectual, Feminist, Fascist or Capitalist since there's no time for identity when you're broken and begging.
 

Once there were nameless Orwellian ears listening in on us, now everyone is off and in-line with their own illusions. All the magical thinkers have no safety to talk to their semi-gods. Inertia dies and rigour mortis is born.

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Relief Is Poison

THE MAYANS
THE BYZANTIUM EMPIRE
THE HAN DYNASTY
THE ROMAN EMPIRE
THE BRITISH FUNERAL-PYRE

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BC
 

I’m tired, I hate my life. Everyone else looks so happy, why do I feel so miserable? I could just hang that telephone cord around my neck right now. I shouldn’t of had that late-one last night. Her cry is so loud, oh I cannot do this anymore, I'm such a bad mother. I'm truly evil. I wish I never had her, I wish I'd never been born. I have trapped myself. I mean I love her but “me and my husband have been working all our lives and she’ll have no future”. 

GOD I need to get some fillers. That deep line makes me look real old. I am old. He’ll leave soon, it’s obvious where he goes and wishes to be. My face looks ancient and ruined, facing collapse in on itself. A face that once launched a thousand selfies. I need to sort myself out, get my teeth veneered, get eyelash extensions. 

I need out of this house. I feel awful. I deserve more than this, I have a degree y'know. What is my purpose? I’m starving, I’ll get crisps and chocolate. I’ll call my sister.

I need to start meditating, I’ll go Buddhist Centre. Maybe there will be a little romance there. I do believe in something like a God, I believe in The Laws Of Attraction. I'll get Zen. I’ll stop the booze and the weed. I’ll look younger. I’ll dress-up real sexy and start an Instagram. I’ll get many followers. I'm a good writer or maybe I’ll do escorting.

•

You will search for escape in mediocrity and monotony relentlessly. You will grab as many desires as you can hold. You’ll seize them with your manicured talons. You will check how many LIKES you got. You will obsess over past loves. You will think of yourself, as the centre of all that is through many different coloured lenses. You will be passive but you will be mildly entertained. You will stop time in your mind. You will scroll down for distraction. 

Like all the civilisations fallen before you, you are no different. You will prevent change. You will embrace magical thinking. You will look backwards to better days.
 

“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” you will say - you delude yourself that it creeps up like a snail but it’s more like a war-machine. 

And you will complain that The World is coming to an end?

 

Silent Cocaine Nights

It hurts when your habits don’t ignite you anymore. I remember those long nights that I lived for; the fizzy bubbles: “it’s really pure powder y’know" and the fair weathered-out fiends I’ve shared it all with so many times. It should be so good. It used to be like painting a magical picture with a kaleidoscope of colour. But now the only oil left is brown, and the canvas is not blank, it’s beige.

Its 2am and I’ve had a gram already, my heart's going to that place where I need to keep checking it’s still working. My mind is splintered like a mirror dropped from a great height, and the only way I’m able to speak is by picking up all the pieces and putting them back together again.

What I mean is I have to think of a topic, then choose a sentence in its full entirety, memorise it and then say it to the other person, who is not even listening. If I try to speak off the cuff then only half murmurs come out, or sentences that have no meaning or relation to who I really am. There’s a dull girl whose not putting her coke out quick enough, sat far too close to me:

“When I was 15, my dad's friend used to touch my tits when my dad wasn’t looking. One time he got me so drunk on Twenty Twenty and asked if he could touch my sports bra. He even fingered me once. Me and you are just like soul sisters. Do you believe in karma? I’m getting Virgo vibes from you. I get along with Virgo's. Got another note, this one's got blood on it”.

My inner voice says: “Go Fuck Yourself” but there’s still half a gram in her hand and I’m too Red-Stripe wiped to go cash point and get more. I nod and pass her a fiver that looks like it's been through the wash since the seventies, it's impossible to roll right.

This girl doesn’t stop mouthing shite, and is clearly at the beginning of her cocaine lifecycle. She’s yet to find herself in the dip where the highs flatten and communication is stunted to a stale story, interspersed with drawn-out twitchy silences. 

I have no more words. I have become an incessant nodding entity with lips pursed into a frozen formula.
 

I know this feeling, I have experienced it many a time and weirdly this picture of myself never arises when it seems like a grand idea to call-in the first gram. 

A room full of dry mouth. A head without a nose, dead-doll eyes; pulling my hair out from my fringe in a jagged motion, I’m trying to hide my face. Staring at my phone, scrolling and scratching for something. I’m lost, lonely and desperately want to merge with someone, but it’s only possible to be alone right now.

I’m in that half-world, half-light where nothing is good enough. No gallant prince has found me yet, and if they did get close-in I would get up and move to another co-ordinate of this day-party hell. 

The light is coming up and I see this place doesn’t have any curtains. Wrinkles of fear are visible in the corners of my pasty mouth. 
 

A cold-sore is being born on my upper lip, time is running out. There’s one guy on the make but his booze has run out and he doesn’t look as good as when I kissed him earlier. 

In  fact he looks way more impotent than earlier. I became interested in him at my chemical peak when he got out his article that was published in The Scotsman on July 23rd 2004. He’s a writer but hasn’t written anything since then. 

On wondering whether to stay or face the daylight and cold I think of his article and feel shame about my superficiality four hours earlier. I think of his article with its languish, arrogant language and snobbish word-play, that’s very much at odds with his louche, lazy personality.

Good writing is architecture, not interior decoration.
 

I flinch as I see myself in this man clutching his long-gone article; a thing to desperately hug on to in hope it’ll reveal something to others about an original intelligence and depth of being. Something that cannot be mustered in these chemical days.

It’s time to face my insides and go outside. I ask the host/lapsed writer to borrow a pair of “thick, long socks and a hoodie”. He asks me if I want to stay over and I can see the shame of his article party-trick in his clinging pinned eyes. I want to console him and tell him we’ve all had a Please Love Me Article Moment, but he smells stale and I can feel my cold-sore coming between us.

I mind-read him and intuit he’s wondering whether I had it when we kissed. I think to tell him: “don’t worry it came up only one hour ago, and we kissed four hours ago” but he seems like an utter stranger now, and such words would make the gulf between us even more murky.

Instead I say: “Thanks for a great night, see you around Je….” I forget who is and why we’re here.
 

All I do know is that I recognise his longing to be bigger, alive, yet feeling less than the finished article.

I Am Not As I Was

I spent most of my childhood covering my ears, so as not to hear my parent's row.

“you have given me VD”. 
“You are a slut”.
“You broke my jaw, you Jew Cunt”.

Covering your ears enables all this to all go away.  This is not intended as one of those indulgent images of poetic pity pathos. No I am just making the factual point that kids cover their ears. 

I sporadically covered my ears as a teenager, apparently I wasn’t very attractive. I was this tall when I was 12. I still have the silvery stretch-marks that climb vertically up my calves: “It’s because I grew too quickly” I would tell lovers. Walking home from school, with a heavy Head record bag and a heavier heart, I would imagine what the future would look like in a time where I could choose who to be around, and would no longer have to cover my ears. 

Wilful deafness at home and wilful deafness from the kids at school were very different experiences. I would call covering my ears to the school bullies more of a denial of what was going on, because this time I would, in fact, hear them, but pretend I didn’t. Typically as a teenager I mostly admitted the information that made me feel great about myself, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettled my fragile ego. This is the reflex of the journey for many a New-Ager, who carries on covering their ears well into middle age. Engaging only with other people who too enjoy covering their ears around one big happy drum.  

This History Of Covering My Ears makes me wonder whether all this going inward made my right ear finally give-up, as my instinct had seemed to want to shut the world up.

On Thursday morning, I woke up to the sound of the sea. Like listening into a mammoth shell. As I got out from the bed in my white Victorian ghost nightdress, I had to lean against the wall. Nausea, dizziness and a sense of loss. It was only when the phone rang, that I realised my ear was encased in a steel cloak that was not my own. As I listened the tone was all out, in the right ear I could hear the goad of a baby alien: A Voice Of Unreason, the other ear was still well. 

I am not as I was. 
 

Are we ever? What is this bane of looking at life elegiacally? Something seems to be endlessly running in a different direction towards an older vision of me. I call out but ironically it doesn’t hear and just skips eerily back through time. 

Sudden Hearing Loss is not as scary as it sounds. There is a quiet lulling, the senses having been dulled, like the waves pulling you into the rocks then unleashing you gently; flushing the newer to where the water touches the sky. Through stillness there is an unquestionable knowing that I see more, even as the landscape slides.  Then a head crashing realisation that it is everyday that one is open fully to life being irrevocably different, after resting your head on the pillow for a time. There is a balmy knowing that the person I am yesterday is dead.

Holy Sinkholes

Holy Saturday unfolds in a dark, dank space, where Jesus lays with blood congealed on his hands and feet, in a half-world state. Perhaps plunged into  an abyss of spiritual and psychic depth — a lore without much scriptural standing but suggesting that Jesus made a wild descent, with mythical overtures, into The Void Of The Underworld. Basically one Jesus gets mauled then another moves.  

Messiah fantasy jokes aside it's been two years, since every single time I sit in the bath, I imagine I'm falling into a sinkhole.
 

It all began with the flooding of the bathwater. Twice it rained in the kitchen, with the two cats looking-in, wanting to cross to get dry-biscuits but not being able to walk on water. 

In this same bath, in a lulling state I pictured being plunged into the kitchen, soft, naked with pieces of enamel tearing through my skin; a vein piercing through my forearm, breathless and half still.  

This image colours my mind like blood through water.
 

Bathing like my imaginings are frequent, and further and fervently I plunged, eventually falling like Alice, head-banging-foot, through the dark earth into darker navy. Twisting and turning, my being stiff; flexed and focussed on my eventual splattering descent and demise onto a strange, cold floor. 

But after many a minute when the picture doesn’t materialise. When the fears fly away from all the free-falling one flowers up to something entirely new. Letting some breath out, veins merging back towards the skull, eyes sighing comfortably back into their sockets into midnight blue/or is it brown? The only knowing is that it’s seemingly impossible to see where all this is going. What is certain is that with all this loss of control there’s a surrender out of strategy and a relinquishing of self into the infinite potential of the void. 

It’s really not a choice, since I’m moving too fast to latch onto any random passer by. Plus there's not many people who seem as comfortable with all this chaos and of all this non-knowing.  A general kind of person wants a picture. I could tell them I am hurtling head-first into the floor but I’ve began to wade in a mesmerising meditative plunge pool of empty. I am naked, helpless and I’m closer than ever to my unconscious soul, and to be honest I do not know if the bottom even exists, it’s just what a smidgen of myself thinks it knows. All this wading has made me realise that at first the emptiness befalls a horrifying loss of life; on the one hand, yet remains a gradual state and realising awareness of the emergent life to come. This difficult, timeless time is one of the symbolic gifts of furiously not accepting the size of the bath and the temperature of the water. 

At this juncture many o’ man will just reach for their passport. When one reality becomes suffocating, too many people decide to venture off into new terrain. We all know the man who submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation. No the trick is not to divert attention sideways, like a 19th century anthropologist who runs off into the jungle to alter his social economic branch and have his ego talk niceties to the locals and go smoke plants. NO! One must stay with the void and plunge further into the inner sinkhole, not just change the geographical picture, for the real voyage is into the psychic spiritual underpass. It’s there that the pictures will eventually morph, it’s in my bathroom I delete the ‘needed’ programs, change channel and joyously merge into a whirling infinite lagoon. 

On Sunday nobody recognised Jesus when he left the cave.
 

This is  significant, as it underscores the difficult and mysterious nature of The Resurrection, which defies all norms and defeats rationalisation. The embodied spirit of Jesus returning from the dead was not exactly the same person who died but some altered version of Jesus; metamorphosed more than restored to his former state. In reality, the manifestation of Jesus after his death beggars the imagination: he acquired a new spiritual body.

Rising from the murky waters out to the new temperature takes time, like an awareness that grows deeper and more complex, more thrilling, as it breathes, moves and magnifies. With the old skin shed, purified, the totality of being is brighter, and really there seems no point looking backwards, back down into the black hole.