friends are for

He waited listening to quiet music in his rented room, daubed in the dreadful and dull electric light that was filtered by the patient grey late winter afternoon into almost nothing. The curtains were patterned yellow and brown and open wide, and outside the struggling half-dark swallowed the house and the surrounding houses like a vast mouth, its muscles tightening and working in rhythmic contractions to better digest the world in its supreme silence. A man sat as still as dead in the open back door in the house behind in an uncomfortable looking chair, as an older female attempted to dig at concrete with a metal shovel. It was his friend’s birthday, a mid-20s insignificance tainted by the months-long breakdown of his longish relationship with a short attractive much younger girl whose flowing skirts and Indian accessories concealed a remarkable body and thickly hirsute genitals that drunk, some six month earlier at a garden party in the dark, she had wordlessly displayed without underwear, the pertinent lines and the hair still visible in the light from the patio doors, uncrossing her legs on the damp leather seat before him, her ankle length skirt rising with the parting of her knees like fields of towering corn run through jubilant, ecstatic, and slowly blinking her huge dark eyes as though in threat or assurance, though what he didn’t know, a split second of intense stolen eroticism that would live with him forever, the careless sound of his friend’s voice echoing through open windows; she closed her legs with grace and comfort in a motion that felt somehow complete and drank her drink back and placed a consoling hand gently on his shoulder and left him alone.

For several weeks he had feasted on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love era look and to a lesser extent material, her eyes similarly huge and desperately captive in the way that his friend’s girlfriend couldn’t help but remind him of. He had found a photograph online which he had printed out in the college library and taped to his bedroom wall like an orthodox icon centuries old with her long Rublev fingers mirroring the same – to see Bush beneath motorcycle leathers was so at odds with his very perception of all popular music and what it stood for and could mean that the photograph was itself in but one image a paradigm crumbling into monochrome eternity of its own preservation – and stared for many hours at its grace; she stood by a river at a working dock and watched the water move and like an angel saw in that movement all of time. 

He felt the mercy in her voice when she sang, he let me take him in my hands, thought I bet!, felt it in his loins. He imagined the repugnant smugness of Del Palmer, Del’s Big Bass (he tried, always would, to cleanse his mind of the charred image of a second photograph burnt like a radiation blast, this time of the surprisingly-cleavaged [her breasts unconsidered, somehow too human] and carnally squatting –the way it would be! – Bush gripping the fret board of a bass guitar made immense by perspective alone like a conquering erection, Del’s own turgid coarse pocked fret, an odd picture in Bush’s record, overtly sexualised as opposed to sensualised, that grounded Bush in the earthly essence of her own genitals which, while alluring, remained a photo best forgotten, as Bush functioned on a level distinct from the brute fact of reproductive urges. Could she even play bass? Almost certainly, and Del a willing guide and chosen), counting his blessings day-by-day as he played bass and handclaps during office hours in the young Bush’s home studio, belittled by her meticulous demands and expectations, by her expressive dismay at the limits of his musical abilities; then later, undercover of laces and silks and an excellent moon she had privately performed into existence, fucking her by night as her parents sipped from decent tea cups in the room next door and thanked Christ for their incredible spawn, her transcendent dancer’s body wildly accommodating in its versatility of each of Palmer’s more unorthodox passions. 

The girl’s wilful esoterica would bring Bush to mind also, and her eyes throbbed as pools of mercury or great lakes in the stuttering LCD display of his stereo system. 

Their relationship, hers and his friends, had been demolished by the ferocity of time, their love turning easily – unconsciously – to hate as it often does, and though they persisted in habit alone it was truly over, they needed only to speak its end into being; even a sound would do it. His friend felt swamped in his own joylessness, his girlfriend stifled by it. It was a disastrous foundation for longevity. Despite this she had attempted to make his birthday a special one, had planned breakfasts and a dinner and trips to places of interest or mutually memorable sites, one final effort, but he had crept from their bed very early and left the house, and when she awoke herself, shrouded in their musty sheets, and acknowledged his absence she angrily threw the breakfast things into the bin unopened and dressed and left also for no one knew where, the front door rattling behind her as she did. Some hours later but still early when his friend returned he took him to the pub and they bought two drinks a piece and sunk them fast, then a couple more which they savoured amidst blue cigarette smoke coiled as tormented serpents in the weak sun with crisp grease on their fingers like disfigurement. They spoke little but he had urged his friend to try, for his birthday at least, to try to enjoy himself and appreciate the trouble she had gone to. Met with the silence of even the muted slot machine they could hear the bubbles move in their drinks, the barmaid’s rustling tabloid, the burning ends of their unsmoked cigarettes, the microscopic life happening within the fibres of the odious pub carpet. His friend said that it was because it was his birthday that he couldn’t, and then thanked him for the drinks and said it was always the best part of his birthday, their drinks, and fastened his coat and walked into the street and in the opposite direction of the house. He watched through the window until he was out of sight and went home himself. 

He passed their bedroom as he walked through the hall and saw her in there. She looked as though she had been crying but he shrugged apologetically when she looked at him, suddenly conscious of the bitter smell of drink on his breath, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and smoked and listened to quiet music as he himself was quiet then. Maybe five minutes later or maybe longer she knocked at his door in two dull knocks and he pulled it open and she came in and sat down on the floor and he did likewise and almost immediately she wept, an act he found unbearably sexy in its terminal humanity. He put his arm around her and already saw the future and had only to wait for it to unfold. He listened to her talk about her loss, and nodded at the correct moments, and narrowed his eyes when the gesture was appropriate, and muttered condolences and consolations at certain intervals, and he held one of her hands in both of his, and rested hands upon her forearms, thighs, calves. Her eyes were enormous and heavy with the tears that had by then stopped falling but persisted waiting nonetheless. He assured her that she was a good and tender person, too good and tender for his friend. He balanced wit and self-deprecation methodically, and she laughed and was very pretty when she did so. He said she was among the most attractive girls he had ever met, told her that if it wasn’t for respect for his friend he would be pleased to kiss at that very moment and furthermore would mean it forcefully. She told him he was the kind of man she imagined she would be with but it was the moment speaking only and the sentence felt clunky and unconsidered, false even, they felt it both but continued on the path they had begun to tread regardless, their coupling made inevitable by tedium and an acutely focused need for the kind of closeness that it and only it could provide. Their faces were inches apart and their breaths merged and they kissed, the music quiet, the electric light dreadful and dull. By necessity it was violent and determined and hurried for without momentum sustained it would have spluttered dead like a dropped match, and they both listened for the sound of the front door as like animals they clawed each other’s clothes off or just enough to do what they needed. The promise of his friend’s return, his birthday, the drinks, their adultery – was it adultery against a fossilized relationship? – aroused them both into action. She lay down and raised her buttocks up off the carpet and he with one hand pulled her pants off and threw them balled into a corner and with the other fumbled with his own belt and jeans. He knelt above her and pulled down her top and the cups of her bra and gazed at her breasts for some long seconds as though it were a vital spiritual mission but didn’t touch them, just felt the world at his fingertips momentarily. He carefully ran his hand from her knee up her thigh and then his fingers up the length of her cunt which he felt was wet and inviting and much as he remembered or imagined remembering, and he leaned over and they kissed more and he eased himself into her and then with long complete thrusts they fucked very efficiently like old hands and both tried to stifle their noises and largely succeeded, their faces reddening up, their eyes almost touching yet somehow very far away, the floorboards creaking terribly beneath the weight of their moving bodies. It would always end quickly, their warm flesh damp and sticky and unpleasant, his hand at rest beneath the buttock he had lifted as they fucked. Her guilt was instantaneous and all-encompassing and she shuffled him off of her and still lying down pulled her top back up. How frail those rare moments of clarity, how vulnerable. The weakness of simple pleasure. Chaos again reigns like starving hounds lapping. The disgust on her face was so physical it made him afraid. She would not cry for this. She stood and let her skirt fall and left the room without a word or a glance.  

Later he would see her and his friend emerge from their bedroom bedraggled and ruffled and cheeks aflame in the aftermath of a sexual encounter, a reconstructive attempt, their eyes meeting only momentarily over the distance of the hallway then engulfed in the false laughter and aborted hopes of the happening present. The relationship ended only months later with their secret unspoken, the feel of her cunt as he comforted his friend still fresh in his memory.

love letter

Besides, the document lost none of its emotional heft from his accidental inclusion of the file name – “love letter example” – pasted into the header of each printed page, and if anything actually gained the same (emotional heft), although whether tragedy or futility were the specifically intended emotional responses to so personal a document is unclear though doubtful.

She was not unattractive by any commonly accepted definition, and yet there was – he knew – something carnally unappealing about her face. The only way he could justify it to himself was to say that, should she have a brother, she looked precisely as he (which is to say her brother) would. Indistinguishable. Not a manly face, he assured her by florid letter, definitively non-masculine, but a face identical in shape, angle and unspecified physiognomy to the brother she may or may not have. Somewhat hard, he offered, unsoftened by the straight blonde bangs that were themselves the only thing that might plausibly differentiate her from the hypothetical immediate male relative of shared parentage but as yet unconfirmed existence. It wasn’t to say he wouldn’t do it, of course he would, simply that things might not feel... “right”. As he did. It. Hers was a noble face, he was at pains to point out, but nonetheless the face of a tennis partner (male) with whom he might have forged a moderately decent doubles career at school, comforting and encouraging to the same degrees as the symbolic team that face had come to represent, and as taut with nostalgia and the semi-homosexual undercurrents and gestures that competitive sportsmanship so often nurtures in its most determined practitioners, with passion (for the game), relief (for the game) and uncontrolled endorphins (from the game) blurring in a melting pot of tangible, physical pleasures that were then mentally rerouted into eroticism, the only viable and comprehensible explanation for the wayward frenzy and delirium of excess arousal they left in their wake post-match. Lithe muscle glistening, devotional trust, showers shared &c. A mountainous face, not in scale or proportion but in gravity and permanence, in geological import. Ruffle the bangs and pop on a baseball cap and visualize a light mottle of stubble and the face easily, very easily became of male character. The space between trousered legs bore exactly what genital fruit, on short commutes of bus then walk? 

The composition of the document itself took him considerable weeks to complete as he soon found the best sentences and most charged or memorable turns of phrase were those he penned while half-heartedly (which is to say vaguely) masturbating, and while this onanistic attention began as literarily productive mild caresses of his own primary area, a tease of sorts that maintained his focus, it soon escalated into full-throttle, full-length, full-tank milking gestures that were inevitably, hastily followed by climax, the typing required for successful letter writing superseded by rough self-stimulation, and the easy flow of romantic confessional by the vague guilt and helplessness that accompanies ejaculate on self or surrounding furniture or worse. Inevitably the mood, some would say the impetus, would be gone, shed like his spilt seed coagulating beneath the angle-poise, and he would not return to it for some further days, until bus journeys and their associated and convoluted carnal categorisations would rejuvenate the spirit within him. 

I decided to write for I’m not much of a speaker. Facial tics, hand gestures, slight alterations in body language are more my thing. A little says a lot when it comes to the body. It’s beyond language really, something altogether more primal. I can’t seem to find the words in spontaneous vocal interaction, they simply don’t come, and I come across as somehow deficient. Besides which, I find it useful to have a paper trail in my personal life as I’m expected to in my professional life, for cross-referencing and future clarifications. Conversational certainty is a conduit for romance. 

Did you ever play Did I Ever? The unfulfilling parlour game where every comparison is prefixed with the phrase “did I ever tell you”? I find it fits neatly with my passion for three-part lists and is a great ice breaker at work functions. Did I ever tell you that I like my coffee like I like my women – bitter, strong, (very) serious. Did I ever tell you that I like my tea like I like my women – limp, milky, comforting. Did I ever tell you that I like my bacon like I like my women – crispy, burnt, salty. Did I ever tell you that I like my apples like I like my women – hard, tart, pink. Did I ever tell you that I like my TV like I like my women – mindless, colourful, artificial. Did I ever tell you that I like my movies like I like my women – long, confrontational, rich in metaphoric subtext. Did I ever tell you that I like my rescue dogs like I like my women – doting, grateful, cautious. I could go on but can’t bear the typing. 

Thing is, there are in all our lives really but several instances that make us. Make us us. As a kid I was fat. Fattish. Fatter. As a fat kid I was into Meatloaf, rock singer not dish, obsessively so. I have a propensity to obsession, me and everyone. Good, or maybe bad news for the obsessee. Bought all the tapes I could, it was the mid 90s, even the ones with awful shit-grade low res cover art, the close-up facials, the sheer fleshiness of the thing, the accidental hair (like short hair given remarkable length overnight, unexpectedly). Weird that a male vocalist of such minimal or unorthodox attractiveness levels though impressive vocal range (cf. I’m Gonna Love Her For Both of Us climax) would forever bind – some might say hamper – his recorded output with these kinds of celebration of his own face and nothing but (such covers were not framed within a bigger more intriguing scene, specks of humanity within a wider occurrence, instead the face was the scene itself, each more porcine and absurd than the last, mere inches away from Meat pulling a thumbs up and yelping wild laughter), but bind – some might say hamper – it he did. The covers have aged poorly but the music, some of it, still today stokes the same fire in my belly as it had through the 2 x 1.5w speakers of my youth’s tape deck. I bought all the tapes as a fat kid, videos too – remember the brute physical majesty of those ‘old’ media formats? You could strangle yourself on the unwound reams of tape chewed and spat within your walkman, run your fingers through it like an ocean of the black magnetic hair of your most tender lover. I yearn for media forms that accommodate feeling, that accommodate even the potential of death within their very structure, not the vacuous hyper clean emptiness of the digital era – and played them religiously, entirely absorbed in Meatloaf’s gluttonous excesses (of musical style, theatrical and – almost certainly – gastronomic appetite) and profoundly sweaty delivery, like some heavyset bastard genuinely on the edge of an immeasurable danger or physical collapse. Belched every line like his last and let’s face it, it could have been, if you saw the size of the fucker, face strained sunset red with every long note and hair plastered to the sides of it, half-drowned in his own gravy. I listened to those tapes and watched those videos, a fat – fatter – kid, and felt the vitality and frank arousal of the kind of gothic-tinged love of which Meatloaf was a key advocate for every single (semi-attractive) one of the flat-chested micro-skirt wearing female classmates whose names filled the pages of my A5 journals in neat graded columns punctuated by carefully drawn scenes of future marriages – I have always been a traditionalist at heart – in the game show format, each a raucous celebration of lust (entirely alien to me at the time of course and – to my lifelong shame – for some number of years following [a concept alien no longer, I would hasten to clarify at this juncture, as the quality of my penmanship will no doubt testify; the pen is as one with the genitals, as it were and is]). They gave me hope where none had previously taken root, and I found solace in the successes and sexual conquests of the everyman, the fattest man that Meatloaf represented, found solace in a weird filthy world where even a sweating unfortunate could do his business and reap the rewards both feminine and financial; they were reason enough for life to proceed. I had my first self-induced orgasm to a Meatloaf tape, standing up and singing with the kind of abandon that a parentally ill-considered lock on one’s teenage bedroom door affords; I was incredibly surprised by the outcome, the emission, terrified really (you’ll recall that heavy pornography was once less ubiquitous than it is today, leaving my sexual education during my teenage years woefully inadequate and strictly Hollywood-sanitary).  

Likewise I recall with a clarity startling alongside my otherwise absent memory being kicked as I lay upon my family’s bathroom floor – which for some reason I was wont to do after baths and showers, my skin scalded in great red patches by the heat of the water as I like it to be – as a child of maybe twelve by my exhausted father; he grilled me about some trivial annoyance or minor behavioural anomaly and I had laughed in the jerking uncontrolled snorts that dreadful fear incites, my two hands clasped across my mouth and face in a pointless attempt to conceal my anxious mirth, and as each of his questions or commands escalated in volume and severity both, my laughter became to my father’s ears not a symptom of the fear I felt at a vital family moment of such abject helplessness but ever more raucous and mocking and disrespectful. Coherent answers silenced by laughter he kicked me weirdly in quickening toe-punts and I squirmed beneath him, and I remember the point at which he lost it for a second or so and saw red in his life that totalled three bloody kids gone awry and the waste of bloody time it all was and drew his leg a little further back than was justifiable to kick me very hard in one side and I doubled over and cried and he watched horrified and apologised gently and helped me to my feet, apologised further and left the room hurriedly, his face so scarlet with remorse of such ferocity as to conversely make me feel irredeemably guilty for whatever I hadn’t done. Kicked into guilt. Such instances of this type of low-level domestic abuse were equally foundational to the construction of me the man; the disappointment in my father’s vacant tan eyes as the shoe came down scorched inside me like sweat marks on an old pillow, the realisation that me myself and the things I did made him yearn for more of all. It remains a heavy burden to bear, the aspects of I that make me nothing. 

Some significant portion of the document was devoted to a rigorous self-assessment of his own character profile, focussing primarily and at length on a quite repetitive list section detailing perceived strengths and weaknesses of disposition, a list which he referred to several times as evidence of “a demonstrable humility”, a reference which itself undermined any semblance of same and which was also one of his higher documented strengths. Too tedious to detail, the list nonetheless represented self-reflection on the most minute – and therefore entirely uninteresting to all those but self – Proustian scale. Attentive temperament. Arms “satisfactory” (unanimous). Starched penchant (meaning unclear). &c.

I suppose what I’m – he offered weakly, towards the end (relatively speaking; the letter was perfect bound for fuck’s sake), spent, depleted – trying to verbalise is fundamentally this: I’m attracted to you as is man to his synonymously-gendered sports partner, in short and at once both not and desperately. Only sexually also, as in I would and want to. Have a sexual undertaking with your direct involvement. Exacerbate your genitals into high function. 

You put me in the mind of a distant acquaintance of mine, though without the beard, a proficient drummer but flawed conversationalist (I imagine you as the opposite but can verify neither assumption); or of a particular TV detective from the box sets, whose name and especial ability has always escaped me – awash in the consonants of all the others – in a way that his arousing taste for institutionalised violence, misogyny and misogynistic violence hasn’t (which, incidentally and importantly, with you as female, does not make me a misogynist myself, simply an audience or rather: one who can ‘enjoy’ the artistic representation of the misogyny of others as an effective and politically disengaged aesthetic tool); or of many other faces and persons prevalent within my interior, such fond and tender memories birthed in the limitations of your – our – UK genetic tendencies. I acknowledge the apparent bias towards male points of reference, and the plausible disparity between my own purported heterosexuality (as I believe is demonstrated by this document) and my near-painful desire to entertain your intimate bit in the fullest possible way irrespective of the already-referenced slightly male physiological elements on which some part of your attractiveness hinges, and yet I would like to reiterate for absolute clarity that despite the rather comforting presence of those more male characteristics that defy categorisation and are really more of an unspecific essence within your persona, it is very much the woman within you and your clothes that I want to teach to love me.  

It’s not me it’s you. Or rather. My error. A Freudian… thing, if ever there was. Slip. A proficient slipper, by J. Sainsbury et al. I am. The Proficient Slipper, produced by St. Michael (who was St. Michael? In the retail – which is to say non-biblical – context the name stuck in honour of the Belarusian Jew founder [one of two] of Marks and Spencer. What greater honour than the manufacture of decent quality clothing and foodstuffs under [one of] one’s name[s], or a variant on it [and self-canonization to boot!]). Before your time, probably before mine too, but I have a memory for branding, logos, jingles. Verbally speaking, orally, I am a hell of a mistake. Of course I meant, it’s not you it’s me. Clichés pertinent for a reason, because they’re right, or can be. The way I was formed. It is me. 

This bus is a grim microcosm. Absolute Christ. It’s a bad climate on wheels, moving death at unnoticeable speeds through city streets ill-equipped for it. Hot, cold, wet, sad. These silent faces are little silent enough, yours a beacon in the morning and to a lesser extent the afternoon. I watch your hand clasp the holding rails provided and imagine perhaps my genitals in its place gripped between your long fingers. I heard your voice when you spoke to a friend on the telephone when I followed you from the bus one night in secrecy; it was dark and you wore a hooded red coat and your face was like a perfect charcoal sketch. I was surprised by its pitch, your voice, high and abrasive, blurted out like an error message from the mouth your face held, and it made me think of the determined sobbing of the young, and was interestingly all the more attractive because of it. I followed you for some streets and bathed in its discrepancies before I didn’t. 

Ah Sally – can I call you Sally? It’s my mother’s name, a revelation which breaches nearly all of my internet security options; I trust you Sally (but will update nearly all of my internet security options) – the fit of your trousers is bad – can you see it? full length mirrors can be so hard to find; I should know, my jeans fall from my body like an infant’s soiled nappy – but also fine; the black office-smart fabric sinks as it should and rises too over your amorphous parts. I perceive you through windows across the barren commercialism of the business park, outside the bus, possibly elsewhere, perceive your telephone manner and confident receiver technique, the easy way disdain twists your features simian and tight. I perceive you working me well like a piece of ancient machinery, and I know or feel sure that in this perception I must love this person, must and could, that she must and could love me, given the pertinent facts or information which can accommodate fully reasoned decision-making. Love feels so much like indifference – I can hardly be bothered to talk about it but do religiously. 

There were a great many pages of text. They grew from nothing from the simplest thought, which instead of being dismissed or left to flounder was elevated by bus travel into immense significance. His erratic leaps between oppressive inanity, focus and casual psychosis, as well as passages of great tenderness, would make for necessary reading around the department and of course later the office. It would become a talisman for the singular cruelty on which the office thrived, printed affirmation that although things could be better they could and would be much worse. 

I best sign off, Sally. Endings are my second weakness, right after beginnings. I prefer the middle but so rarely get there, and never get past it. That’s a promise. 

Could I please drool my junk like weary rivers through the canyons of your chin? Your tired bus eyes scream bed like a declaration that fells the structure.

All the very best.

__2019_\::ref_fp::/["myst"]

in the myst / the copse

z __[((__:\\"what_would_the_dream_be"//__))]

The dream then would be

picnicking on a mossy riverbank

thick with blooming thistle

in the seep of the infant Swale

before our first daughter could walk

The dream then would be

us younger and freer and drunk on O’Hara’s

fucking in the wind and the rain

in the long grass that

decked the shale of the Cliffs of Moher

The dream then would be

of the Trinity Hall grounds in darkness

when overcome I’d go sheathless in

from behind

and cease before summit

The dream then would be

of cunnilingus on the futon mattress

in your then boyfriend’s spare room

a whole life mapped for an instant

in your white skin and your wet snatch

The dream then would be

the post-industrial landscape in the moors

above the ghyll

almost lunar

the scarred earth and hushes, the seams, the spoils

The dream then would be

a trio of wine bottles on the boardwalk at sunset

the clamour of the city peaked in silence

then in twilight making love

beneath the canopy of a weeping willow

The dream then would be

the beach at Cromer where as new lovers

we twisted ankles on rocks and sinuous gullies

from pints at the promenade pub – a home now –

exhausted from kissing up irregular wooden steps

The dream then would be

rear entry catalysed by the lust instilled by family visits

while feet away beyond your bedroom door

your now deceased grandmother

limped from the car and loudly, tearfully shat the bathroom

The dream then would be

a daughter born in qualmish pallor, some sleeping doll

another too, years on

soused in foul fluid, these our gifts both

scant magic your cunt can’t muster

The dream then would be

fleeting moments of the children both playing

in the breeze of the bedroom some Saturday

the precious light and the company

how lucky I am for such dreams as you’ve made.

y

One thing I have learnt

in this long pointless life

it’s never too late to stroke the flank of a live seal.

berlin alexanderplatz

I went to Berlin at the end of the summer at the beginning of which the Ukrainian girl had dumped me citing "artistic differences". She was right, and a very competent painter and latterly conservator. I've long been in thrall to the Slavic face. It was a disastrous mini break. Her mother had arranged her a modest hotel accommodation as a birthday present but, not wanting to give me the wrong impression, of love or lust or anything resembling it, I supposed, she refused to let me stay in her room, instead had me fork out for a hostel in Mitte in which I left a small grey holdall of underpants, shirts and - tellingly - sheaths, that would return through customs resolutely untarnished by anything like use, and drank somberly in the smallest hours of night on the roof terrace. She would bring me continental breakfast items wrapped in napkins from the hotel buffet. I could then still recall vividly the feel of her cunt like a garment around me. As we walked about the city I tried in vain to make a case for a simple coupling, liberated from the norms, emotions and expectations of the messy relationship we had left back home, but she was unconvinced, my argument from purported indifference quite undermined by my persistence and my uncontrollable teariness. 

I'd spent much of the academic year preceding it considering the broader cultural and philosophical context of Wenders' Wings of Desire, and was moved to great silence at the foot of the Victory Column, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, finally to despair at the conglomerates chrome redevelopments of the Potsdamer Platz, altogether more hopeless than the immense devastation that was in Homer's stark odyssey to a single armchair through the war-levelled topography of memory. 

We shared a small bottle of brandy in her hotel room one evening, before I returned in the darkness to the hostel, and lay resting on her bed, my head gradually angled until in her lap, where I carefully inhaled to smell the cunt through her trousers, felt the scarred skin of her arms, so close, I had thought, to us being at it that when moments later I was once more in the street I felt afraid, as though just awoken, and harshly. 

When we first got together I'd been another person. We watched Tarkovsky in Russian on VHS tapes with cardboard slipcases which she translated with a slight delay, until such time as the beauty of the images overcame her and we listened only to them. 

She talked like a lover about the city of Odessa, the dewy clit of the greater Slavic snatch. The sandy beaches, temperate waters, the heat, the women, all tight stonewashed denim and large t-shirts, watermelons from street vendors piled five feet high in red genital grins. Leaves me elbow deep in her memories until they become my own, until our break up some half a year later takes away both my love and also my memories that always were in fact hers. I participated in a performance piece by one of her Slavic friends, playing a spinning top. 

I used to attend these huge barbeque events her parents would have at their palatial dwelling in Milton Keynes, attended exclusively by Russian speaking geniuses lugging great buckets full of chicken wings around slathered in marinade, bowls full of layered salad white with mayonnaise, the stench of boiled egg and beets on the air. The last one I attended, this a year after the split, I slept through, from 2pm until the next morning, in a heap of denim in the guest room, and then left without goodbyes with a salami sandwich on black bread that had been left in the fridge in plastic wrap. In the midst of exams I’d driven to Edinburgh via Newcastle two nights earlier in a Citroen Berlingo, hadn’t slept, sniffing coke all the way, then got wild drunk at a homecoming party before making it to Marylebone for a nauseating Easybus trip, sweating profusely and ruined of stomach. It was the most of horrendous of all the horrendous trips I had to their house, lusting over the Slavic face of my girlfriends mother and looking at her knickers in a laundry pile in the utility room.

x

I stalk your image in photographs

internet photographs

tangibly harmless in

the ways that mean something

though not in mind

or, come on, in spirit neither

the internet has granted

me your private life

and I will scour the holiday

snaps, the days out snaps.

the other people’s wedding snaps

for nipple slips, accidental

gusset baring

then save to file

a scrapbook of the stolen gaze

of borrowed flesh

the lives of others

assembled into one of my own

shadow of a life

an apology of one

colonising your tenderness

we shared a single bed

in university accommodation

a south facing room

stifling as the sun came up

while you slept I peered beneath

the oversized shirt you

were wearing and saw

perfect pitch nipples like

valves on your small breasts

saw while you slept the suggestion of

pubic hair curled in the gap

between the waist band of

your knickers and your

flat brown stomach

and I touched your whole body

softly enough so as not to wake you.

a sexual incident

Port-drunk, fortified and nauseous, she kissed with the force of an active vacuum cleaner, her tongue working his like baker’s hands, her mouth sucking so hard her cheeks sunk in with it, he could feel it with the one palm he kept to her face throughout as though in confirmation of her presence, but he – himself demonstrably guilty of the same two characteristics – was unsure whether it was ferocious exuberance or inexperience that belied such a technique. Her near-perfect breasts felt unreal in his palms, her cunt swallowed his probing fingers sunk to the knuckle with the same determination her mouth employed, and he was painfully aroused by the tangible fantasy of the stockings and suspender belt she wore in the bed where others wore pyjamas. He didn’t dare attempt the humiliation of their botched removal and instead pushed the gusset of her underwear damp to one side and felt the curls of her hair and the cunt itself and surged with life. One of the great regrets would remain the fact that it had been too dark to see, and the only image he had – would ever have – had been constructed like a blind man by touch. 

As the incident proceeded and then continued to occur in his mind he recalled lines from a poem he had composed a year or so earlier, a poem concerned with imagined incidents of the most sexual grouping, written in an attempt to somehow eternalize the very depth of the lust he felt for the girl then still in school and the associated physical trappings that clung to and from her like sensitive architecture, like fleshy emblems of man-made prowess. It was the kind of poor and derivative poetry at which he had always excelled (and which was why he had turned his back on poetry at all), with one decent stanza – essentially a pretty candid list of the ways in which he wanted to fuck her (unless your sister watches/unless I lose myself in your cunt/unless I can strip you quick and just watch myself doing it/unless you flap the musk of your cunt sails against me, your tender twat, your sugar snap snatch/unless my spunk fills you up until it drips in globs from your eyes like milky tears/unless you’ve felt an unsheathed cock buried up to its hilt in you – already acknowledging both his own coldness and weird inevitable removal from situations of imminent release and physical inadequacy by settling for, even inviting an indefinite, unspecified, unsheathed cock, not even, especially not his own) which, despite lifting one or two maybe three-plus lines straight from the Henry Miller he was reading and didn’t dare understand (without credit – this preceded the conventions of academia), still managed to convey a sense of truthfulness for the first and some would say last time in his writing simply because the sex acts he described were so void of the monotony and pointlessness and guilt and expectation of actual real-life sexual encounters (and were instead rife with the kind of joyous thigh slapping guffawing pumping and gobbling that reside solely within the purview of the imagination) that, ironically, their so-considered ‘truth’ was borne specifically of their non-existence/occurrence – that was bookended by two of the atrociously tepid cod-existential musings that are a prerequisite of late teenage insecurity, misreading or paraphrasing the continentals into soundbites of shared reconstituted angst and whose only conceivable depth might be found in the self-same sink unit into which they (which is to say, the stanzas) should be rightfully, forcibly expelled with the very puke strained out after a shared bottle of vermouth, gravely not enjoyed but solemnly swallowed regardless, as though acting on the limp refrain of a suburban UK rock song. A first foray into erotica, the poem’s uncomfortable coupling of candid intercourse and struggling conceptualisation would characterise his later work, his own staunch commitment to some arbitrary literary integrity that he theorized first out of and then back into existence (itself but a transparent defence against the critiques levelled at his uncontrolled sentences and fragile plotting – fuck plot! – in the occasional creative writing workshop he grimaced his way through smugly) unfortunately rendering every even vaguely erotic skit increasingly and weirdly unsexy the more of it, which is to say sex, he actually had. He would not pander, he said, to an audience of shitlines. It was and should be work to read. His fears were redundant, his audience immeasurably small, even non-existent.  

They went at it for some time and he lifted her hands from his shoulders and his lower back down to his prick but they lingered only momentarily, impersonally across it with all the tenderness of an uncertain handshake. He tried to work at it himself but could not do her simultaneously, his brain frozen with the distinct fine gestures, his fingers dead still in her cunt with every self-stroke he managed. It must have only been eleven o’clock or similar but felt much later, and very soon their kissing lost something and without discussion or precedent simply petered out like an engine failing, a mutual acknowledgement of futility. They extracted themselves from each other and lay for several moments in the dark, she then sat up on the edge of the bed and straightened her underwear and placed one hand on one of his and said goodnight and returned to her own bedroom. He could see the brilliant white of her teeth and knew already that this huge thing was nothing, just nothing, and though he tried immediately to play the events back in his mind, to relive them while he wanked himself to sleep, they were already gone or going, flickering into the indecipherable like damaged video tape, like some kind of neural flutter or remnant, a reflexive, instinctual sentiment of undetectable source, like a twitch post-mortem of the most primal motor function, then gone. The taste of the fortified wine on his lips turned his stomach and he rolled to one side and hoped he wouldn’t need to puke, and felt grim guilt followed by honour as he came reluctantly onto the sheets and slept poorly as he always did in the beds of others. 

The next day they ate breakfast in the winter sunshine, along with her sister and a couple of other friends who had slept elsewhere but then were there. They sat far apart and didn’t touch or speak but smiled broadly, their mouths as ancient cracks in the landscape. The dark romp had been a short glimpse of something now forever absent, already too distant to paraphrase or allude to. With her sister and his good friend they drove her to a ballet class, and while she hugged her sister and his good friend goodbye she barely acknowledged him when she left the car. He wanted to throw the door open and run after her and say something but there was nothing and so he didn’t, and felt sure it would prove to be the right thing to do. 

As they drove through the countryside and the violence of the tree’s bare branches to their respective houses he imagined holding the burning sun within an emptied out jam jar as some relic or token which he could present to the girl as perhaps the most potent symbol of his feelings, the most physical of all offerings, to give to her the giver of life. The jar would smell slightly of blackcurrant and sugar, the flavour the jam had been before it had been made into sandwiches or toast, and the sun would spill from its glass edges almost immediately, too great to be confined within its limits, and the devastation would be unashamed. Every time he closed his eyes he would see a sun shaped light reflected on his eyelids, would hear the sun’s laughter embracing the earth.  

Over the months and even years that followed his lust and obsession incrementally dissipated as is the wont of affairs of the genitals of youth, and were replaced by others and yet others in layers of new arousal that formed solid structures over the lusts of the past and formed personality like ancient rock forged into mountain ranges by dreadful loneliness, layers of memory and feeling as abundant sediment rich with resource and deposited for mining at some unspecified future point.  

He saw her again as part of larger social instances, but the erotic tryst of their recent past was so incredibly unmentioned that he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t imagined the whole thing, though he knew he hadn’t, the lingering feeling of anatomy on his hands and his tongue serving as permanent scarring reminders of what nearly happened but not. Increasingly these sightings would involve new and always handsome boyfriends, nice enough guys whose hands he shook insincerely, remembering his poem in silence as he offered deliberately obtuse small talk and waited for the night to end. Some maxim’s carry pertinence beyond the page. The nondescript man with the iron pectorals and the bald chest always gets the fucking girl.

w

The college porters gathered

en masse Tuesday

for raucous pursuits

intimate pursuits

backs bared

dealing deck after deck

in games of staggering complexity

which continued through the

random momentum of the game alone

the cards answerable to nil

but their own continued movement

and they drank college wine

from deep in the stores

and got wild on it

kneading and gnawing the varied fleshes

of the handful of lady porters

who took to all fours and

crawled the room evocatively

like the mammals they were

all pocked doughy arses and genitalia in burgundy

the source of great intrigue as

they toiled past institutional furniture

knees raw from the coarse shag

ladies who stripped of blue uniform trousers

and heavy soled shoes were middle aged

and nubile and profoundly accommodating

hard faces softened by the lamplight

over which a college flag

had been carefully draped,

the ten, twelve male porters that formed

would wrestle,

would grunt and thrust

and pump and pulse

feel the sticky spilt wine

upon their chest and pubis

and collapse breathless in unruly embrace

that climaxed with ritual

beneficiaries of the ancient will

of the college that for these very rituals

took genital form.