__\::_(((rain)))_((at))_((((christmas))))_::/__

It would always rain at Christmas, even when it wouldn’t. He had for years been steeling himself for this year, had gathered the necessary equipments, the agents of catastrophe, had prepared the necessary arrangements. Though he cared greatly for his wife the marriage itself was spent; there was nothing left to talk about, there was nowhere left to go. Though the kids were not grown to adulthood they were nonetheless older than the babes in arms over whom he had wept in hospital corridors and darkened living rooms swamped by the great guilt of creation. Beyond the immediate they would find that they would soon flourish in his long absence, happier and better for it. They were two of his very few achievements and did not require him to be so. The year had seen no single point of trauma that had escalated his thoughts to such extremity, only the continuing and gradual swelling of the slighter discomfits which coalesced into something cumulative and suffocating and vast directly beneath the very surface of life visible. Be it work, or money, or people or persons, the dying earth. Be it something inside, the prodigious depression that he had for half a lifetime harboured, had for years medicated, had at no time managed. It was a quaggy sadness, low level and flat but constant, the world a thing that happened beyond him upon which he exerted no force, and he no part of it. The raindrops pummelling the metal scaffold outside were as artillery, almost melodic. He wrote to his wife a note that in an envelope he sealed with a tongue very dry. I remember, it said, the times we were young, and I will and I will until I remember nothing further. I remember our daughters’ faces studied like artworks as they came forth from you and into this. Beyond which he had little to say. He was very calm, had anticipated torrents but felt nothing like it, very calm. It was a short walk to the shore, the small gravel beach at the edge of the tarn. A coke can faded orange at the lip of the water. A flayed tennis ball. Would the water accept him. He would be small against it. He felt a rush of cold as the water reached his neck. The trees bade faretheewell in whispers, they bade merry Christmas.

__\::_the_hevingham_chapter_::/[1.001.5¬¬¬"texum"]

/ in the darkness I bathed /

/ in the darkness /

/ the water black /

/ black water / 

Jim’s cock’s been deeply entrenched in his own mouth in your absence. Cunt hasn’t shut up for a second, a perpetual (very) low level thrum of utter banality. Prancing around like King Shit. Fucking Junior Senior, with his gestures and his dyslexia and his desperation for THE TOP. Striding around the carpet stuffing a bacon baguette into his grim little mouth. His near limitless collection of shit hoodies is quite something, the mucky cunt.

Do you suffer from liquid shit?

Clunt and Winker sitting in a tree

R.I.D.I.N.G. T.H.E. M.O.B.I.L.I.T.Y. S.C.O.O.T.E.R.

I’ve got in with the doggers in the Hevingham chapter. They park up most weeknights in a small clearing just off the A140. You can see the dipped beams from the road. A small but friendly group, predominantly male. They stand talking amiably while pulling at their limpets like they’re trying to dislodge a tick, pulling the skin taut, their demi-ons, trying to will it into usability while they wait their turn on one of the few women in there. Just usual bloke talk, pub stuff – motors, transport issues, work, the political, recent telly. Only all their trousers are down at their ankles, their legs a great spectrum of varying whites, goose flesh in the cool night. Down on the back seats of two of the bigger cars the birds’d be getting done in, their meaty buttocks pulled to the edge of the seat and soaked with pooled semen and excess lubricant, while first come first served the blokes sink their little selves into the swathes of genital. Joining the convo on occasion, even as they did it. When they pop they’ll stagger back in almost apology and get their pants and trousers straight back up, have a Magners and a smoke behind the small fleet of attendant Mondeo’s with those others who’d finished. The bird’s give themselves a moment, sip of spritzer and a chinwag across the space between the motors, seed out in foaming drizzle down the gulf of their anus, rubbed half dry like Nivea. Stain’ll not scrub out of that upholstery, not never. Spots on their arse cheeks like graffito.  Then the next’d be forward trembling in the halogen streak, diabolic shadows contorted across the bare trees in gestures of profane supplication, prick tapered thin like an animals but about stiff enough for entry if they bend it, welcomed into the ewer of the sodden hooch like prodigal sons returned, the ladies thumbing through notifications while their tits hefted across their torsos like full bains-marie with every puckered thrust. More compulsion than hobby, the dogger’s life. The pleasures seemed few, confined only to that very particular instant of release – the rituals around it but a necessary evil – or to the slight kick of knowing similarly equipped inadequates were appraising ones every effort, screened from the happening lives just beyond the chapter by only thin coppice and staggered hedgerow. In the car parks and laybys the participating ladies became the pinups that life outside it would scarcely permit. Around them the blokes bayed, like children crept into their parents’ bedroom. It was a civic duty they offered, a charitable donation, a generosity of spirit. Outreach to the vulnerable. A cuff to stuff. Community forged in coition. I’d be last – a newcomer to the group, I’d have to prove my mettle by watching numerous strangers ball the bag I was about to; have to feel the clag of their spunk on my sunk scrotum as it hit centre point. The lady, a natural mother, helped me feed it in through the incredible tarn of corporeal juices that I slipped over clumsily left to my own devices. Gently squeezed the tip and rubbed it the length of her crack, engorged and vital. I willed myself to sustain arousal to such lengths as to lose it, felt the meek retraction of blood, rushing from cock to face as I flushed, thankful for the darkness disguising such truths. There was reassurance in her eyes. She guided me into her brown dorm, her faecal sleeve, her welcome gift, her farty salutation, which had me done within a handful of strokes. I found the anuses of the otherwise unattractive to be a potent tonic. It was only on withdrawal, chunks of her fluffy yellowish shit around the rim of my glans, some barbed plunger, that I noticed her husband in the driver’s seat, eating a Ginsters and reading C. J. Sansom. All done love?, he asked. Sounded weary, but then it was late. I cleaned my penis on my t shirt and in lieu of a handshake gripped her toe briefly and tried to find my bicycle in the wet leaves in the darkness.

I firmly believe in the redemptive power of alcohol and felt real unconditional love for the drink, and for years of my life have vowed to drink myself closer to purpose. It’s a tool to find spiritual meaning, and while not now nor ever a Catholic I find the imagery of transubstantiation to be perversely  appealing, and though I drink not necessarily wine and perceive it not necessarily as the blood of Christ, I nonetheless observe a profound spiritual meaning in the periods of intense drunkenness that punctuate the routine of my everyday life. I see depths of life otherwise indistinct through sodden sozzled eyes, a sharpening in the booze that clarifies the urgency of lives all bigger than my own, and of course stagger the streets in harmless ecstasy with a half-sized bottle of the cheapest brandy slipped into my back pocket. It has been a habit since my twenties, drinking pint after pint until immersed in the earth itself. Drink, drink, drink until the disintegration of the self! Goals are everything. In slurred words and mutual loutishness and in minor injury the drinker merges into something so much more than the sum of his most unsavoury parts. I’ll drink to make myself – not others – more interesting, and more interesting to myself, the pointlessness of thoughts all silenced as the drink took over, all noise drowned beneath the rushing of my own blood or my own quiet insight. Drink would allow the sacrifice of self to the moral structure of the values, would enable the collapse of a flawed ethos and the succession of another, a better. There is something peaceful even selfless beyond violent drunkenness, stripped of affectation and pretence, and drink is the constant and the eternal. It is the vessel and also more than the vessel. It is the beginning of everything. Let’s drink pints dotted with odd slurps of house spirits taken down grimacing from iceless tumblers until we fell asleep, faces illuminated in bursts from the flickering lights of the unplayed fruit machine. The world flows all the more freely with the lubricant of alcohol.

coiled around

        yourself

  like a tied shoelace – I’ll undo you

                 to then do you

you’ve a tremendous pair of tits

   and legs in tights

the hosiery!

         what a posture

spine up, broad of shoulder

  - to bear the tits as mentioned, I assume –

              your bass Essex drawl

          - take me to Colchester! take me to Chelmsford!

       - and also the other towns – Harlow town! –

as a kid my paternal grandparents

                          took me to the hypermarket 

          in Harlow

   I scoffed a huge sharing bag

of potato hoops and

                puked in the car

     the blanket covered seats

     the FART numberplate

                                I'd crawl at you across the carpet tiles

                           to your little brogues

                      then nose your legs apart

                  and go up to your cunt now

               tights off - lift your arse - let me at it

                       smell like a sandwich I'll eat right up

                                 and we'll fuck and fuck

                             - your violent grip - 

     the frenzy

       and joy

               release the two tits to me, oh do

             let me be it

With a ramshackle troupe of old pals I attended an inner city high rise block out for pills but we instead left with a dirty white omnichord that a tough teen was playing through a kronky amp in the kitchen with a remarkable sound. we drove then to a sizeable house in the countryside for a kind of party. I was having an intense fling with a girl I had loved painfully in my youth - it would have been twenty years earlier - and we were on each other like disease, consuming each other for the brief period that precedes monotony then resentment. We kissed with the eagerness of animals and there was fission in those gestures, uncontrolled and enormous. I reluctantly mixed whiskey and cokes with a bottle of cheapo bourbon I had in my backpack and passed them about. They were sickly and cruel like the best coitus. Whenever we parted we would press our bodies together, an affirmation, of sorts, that it was happening. Life was so fragile and its contents with it. As we drank in a courtyard garden birds began to plummet from the sky with great force, only one or two to begin with but then many and then more. They hit the rough concrete like bricks and popped in a crimson smear of viscera. We ran to take cover beneath abutments, wooden framed semi structures, door jambs. One friend was hit direct and felled in an instant in tremendous death. In a hallway we kissed. The omnichord was playing in a different room, the sweet melody from the theme to Cannibal Holocaust. The house was reshaping around us, brick steppes leading ever up but never away. The proprietor of a vegan cafe whom I had not before met but whose tofu burgerettes were amongst the most uninspired I had encountered during my brief period of fleshlessness - she was called 'Bren' to us - appeared to be collapsing in a manner, bleeding heavily from an unknown source and hyperventilating. She limped in broad rings away from the house and into the fields around it. We considered her as dead soon after. I took the time to ask the girl if she was content with our arrangement, if she wished for things to continue in this manner. She said that she was, at least until she met someone better. We watched as the walls of the house bore great maws amidst their structure, churning and black, for what end. When later I emerged from the crumbling edifice I searched for her to no avail. 

                               

a violent incident

Although not by character a violent person he nonetheless felt a necessary and prevalent urge to conduct acts of tremendous violence to the unusually-featured mouse-like female staff member who worked in a different department of the modern office complex in which he was employed, and this despite his own often noted absence of those character traits typically associated with acts of such a violent temperament. To himself he accepted that the profound sense of disturbance her more idiosyncratic mannerisms and gestures instilled in him – mannerisms and gestures that themselves pushed him towards this uncharacteristic act of violence – was entirely void of rationality, and yet this sense of disturbance remained regardless and even worsened with the passing days. In fact the absence of rationality was one of the most notable things about the incident and the driving force behind his later problems, and yet he persisted with his mesmeric fantasies pertaining to the evocation of ruthless retribution for acts at best described as personal eccentricities and that had little or no bearing upon the life of either he himself or any other third party external to the unusually-featured mouse-like female specimen who worked within another department in the same modern office complex at which he was employed. 

The incident he envisioned was one of indescribable violence, violence despite – or because of – which he attempted to describe within the defined parameters of the language at his disposal. Unpleasant as they were these graphic scenes, committed to paper in the privacy of his own meagre home, failed to convey the true intensity and permanence of the conceived incident, their elemental focus on the anatomical and its vivid deconstruction somehow undermining what he considered to be the transcendent or spiritual nature of the violent incident. 

The problem, he would explain as he’d impersonally pound her head down against the available surfaces afforded by the communal kitchenette area of the modern office complex in accurate two-handed thrusts, is that I am an abhorrent male, an unfair one, a jerk, a scumbag, a bitch, a cunter and shithead, bastard, motherfucker, a snob, a yob, a knob, a nobody, a silent seething shell, a bitter loathsome penis, a creep swallowed whole by his own recurring headaches and immersed as though drowning in his own judgement. Or he would hold her little head in his hands and beneath the soapy shallow water that soaked her Tupperware clean. The structure of her head would fail beneath him, the skull a-crumble, her two eyes looking upwards at his concentration and closing and opening and finally glazing as her crushed brain gave and slopped as jelly out of life and into some close alternative.  

While her features bore significant resemblances outside of the human species as described, her body and build were those of a child, a matter to which he took a grave and inexplicable offence. He felt his own body tighten at her methodical removal of stray flecks of yogurt from the food’s interior lid with the fine tip of a teaspoon as though engaged in complex and ancient calligraphical practice, noticed how she carefully washed clean and then placed the empty yogurt pots into a larger plastic bag containing further empty yogurt pots and into the main compartment of her vast backpack, he assumed in order to take the pots in question back to the home in which she resided, although for precisely what illicit or diabolical means she might be collating empty yogurt pot after empty yogurt pot he was unable – unwilling – to imagine. These directed traits were so conspicuously at odds with the generalised listlessness of the modern office complex – which although departmentally distinct nonetheless formed their shared workplace – that he found it almost impossible to believe that no other of the many employees had not only noticed but also been deeply disturbed by their recurring practice, and yet as he ate the sandwiches that he bought for his own lunch, day in, day out, he observed no such apparent disturbance on the perhaps two-score faces that soiled the at best rudimentary staff area of the office complex. Despite the pronounced oddity of her diminutive stature she appeared unnoticed by all but he. 

He peered through crisp bags and stray hairs as she gripped the cutlery – with which she ate dark coloured reheated pasta dishes from plastic food tubs – at the very end of the stainless steel handle parts with the very fingertips of her own two hands, so that the utensils dangled vertically beneath them, her fleshy lips manoeuvring the food apocalyptically around her mouth with spastic convulsions as though every mouthful were a moral dilemma (he had heard her apologising to the food prior to consumption on several separate occasions), as though to pacify it with the caresses of moving cutlery, to apologise for the inevitable but seconds before its occurrence, like a strange or quite shitty prophet. Her arms were elevated and angled at her sides like awkward wings to accommodate the process, shit-sharp elbows piercing the very air that surrounded her isolation. She worked the cutlery and the food beneath it with methodical jabs, pricks really, and short scrapes, engaged in some jittering Parkinsonian struggle with the evasive nature of the oiled penne that dashed around the surface of the Tupperware, moved first one way and then the other in vital if microscopic distances infuriating to watch, for which reason, of course, he couldn’t take his eyes from the dreadful sight; she manipulated it, the food, as though attempting resuscitation, to return the durum wheat (&c.) to some semblance of recognisable life, her rodent features twitching all the while with the anticipation of sustenance. How painful it was to witness the daily spectacle as he ardently did. He couldn’t bear to see anyone without the common decency to eat even a miserable pasta meal in the kind of solemn stillness the gravity of consumption deserved, and which he himself practiced dutifully during the passage of all three of a standard day’s meals; the performance of so unsavoury a mix of precision cutlery work (he was dreadful with a knife, worse with a spoon) and nervous habit were like a slap to the personal sense of ethics that demanded equal parts both speed and quiet woe in his own eating rituals. Silently she screamed of emptiness, of something far more – she stoked in him a long dead and mainly irrational hatred of the kind he had deemed obsolete or now hushed, sunk beneath the placidity of comparatively recent fatherhood; she left him brittle, jagged, her foibles snagging somewhere desperate, and although he knew how unfair this was, how wrong, the hatred swelled through him like explicit trauma.  

(It wasn’t strictly just her; point of fact, for reasons he preferred not to address, perhaps childhood suffering, he had a real thing about people – all people – eating, hated it to the point of sadistic reprisal: the chomping, the slurping, tongue to palate, the throbbing or sinking or contorting facial muscles, cheeks flapping like laundered linens with the consumptive effort, mouth hitting stride with a stroke-like sneer as it worked itself around its contents, the clicks of unintended tooth contact, the involuntary groans deep and guttural of satisfaction or pleasure or even urgency that accompanied the process, that moment of abandon that accompanies decent crisps, say, where all self-consciousness is completely surrendered to the food in question, and as the eyes roll and faces sink into retarded stupor and the mouth slackens miserably in receipt some kind of human essence is displayed, in all its grotesquery for however short a time. He hated to watch it and he hated to be watched. When he felt his own mouth off-centre, or large or small, or taking two greedy swallows where one would be sufficient, or felt his head perceptibly vibrating with the effort of a widely stretched load, he loathed himself for all of it, and ate with such speed as to make the whole vile if necessary practice as brief as possible).  

Even on the rare occasions she sat at table with others, a small troupe of departmentally unified geeks visibly, physically gnarled by their own insecurities, conversed with them even, her eyes remained locked in position unfalteringly forwards, glassy and distant and set very far from the interactions and weak comedic efforts of her associates, and though her lips did on occasion move the words were indecipherable, tripping as they did over great teeth and tongue and manner.  

Until relatively recently, which is to say until some few months earlier, he had suffered a long series of terrible nightmares that were all the more memorable because of their near-nightly recurrence. Whilst the main narrative of the nightmares would vary from night to night, the denouement was uniform across their entire breadth, which had lasted for many months in total. In this denouement he would watch in silence as friends and acquaintances were destroyed in an agonizing and painful manner by a severe explosion of what appeared to be the atomic type. He watched beyond vocalization as they pissed themselves in fear in that almost impossible split second of realization that precedes death, their trousers and skirts darkening in the crotch area or in lines down the leg, watched as faces melted from heads and bones and left but skulls in their place, watched skin blister in vast immediate welts, suppurating craters cooked aggressively, flesh boiling into liquid and viscous lipids bubbling in the intense heat of the blast, watched whole living bodies torn apart like decimated houses by the force of the explosion itself, fragments of bone and flesh and gore instead of bricks and mortar raining through the inferno and vaporised just as quickly. Like his thoughts his dreams embraced symbolism in only the most one-dimensional way, and in this sequence of dreams a number of houses or structures stood testament to the variety of significant memories he held dear, houses or structures that were destroyed before his eyes by the ferocity of the detonation, and as he watched them crumble, levelled, to the earth left forever barren around them he felt at once alone and so very empty, bereft of something more valuable than life or medical life, the most abominable sense of cessation. It was a feeling of genuine dread.  

Like the victims of the denouement of his recurring nightmare her face remained fixed in that rictus grin, as though she alone were the vessel of some remarkable new humour, and the mouse-like female afforded him recall of those dreadful dreams in appearance and feeling, and her presence in the staff area brought the horror of sleep into his waking life in such a way as to make both – i.e. sleep and not – unbearable. He felt violated by association, and his frankly poor grip on normalcy frayed with fantastical persecutions.  

Some Thursday or similar he approached her at work on her yogurt lid with the uppermost tip of a teaspoon, scraping remnants of product for even the merest of flavour until only foil was left visible, at work at the table against whose buffed surfaces she appeared minute, and without a word he snatched the lid from her childish very red mottled meatish hand and drew the flat of his tongue along the back of the lid, in effect lapping the remaining foodstuff efficiently with the kind of extended muscular propulsion the tongue afforded and at which it excels, her eyes large and glistening like aspic against her own gaunt bearing, rightly aghast at the invasion such intrusive oral intervention represented. He returned the lid to her now smeared with his own juices and retrieved his items from the far side of the staff area and returned to his department and desk for the afternoon’s work.  

The following day the mouse-like female was absent, her place at the table she ordinarily occupied marked only by a single yogurt lid smeared clean of food. He inspected the yogurt lid closely and considered the meaning of its presence and reached no conclusion. He ate his highly regular lunch in silent anger worsened by the absence of the mouse-like female, by which he felt affronted and – worse – guilty. He began to see her face upon the heads of others, colleagues, commuters, shoppers, in but short intervals the strobic speed of which felt synonymous with the threat of lunacy; the proportions of the face never altered irrespective of host and so appeared tiny, stamped within the gammon heft heads of the kind of large men from whom he instinctively recoiled in moments of forced proximity. When he kissed his little child and then his wife goodnight he saw the face for an instant, imprinted upon the head of his wife, and he pushed her away from him in disgust and they slept sombrely.  As he lay in the darkness he imagined the face on the pillow next to his and felt very queasy. In the morning before the alarm had rung he made love to his wife wordlessly as had become their habit since childbirth, with no reference made to his erratic behaviour of the previous night, forgotten as it was beneath the fundamental desperation of their physical urges. As he looked down at the occurring penetration and the face of his wife contorted slightly from intercourse he saw instead the face of the mouse-like female blinking and grinning back at him. He tried to pull away but his wife had drawn him very far into her and involuntarily he finished as he stared tearily and afraid at the rodent face beneath him. His wife heard him sobbing in the bathroom though he hadn’t realised he was doing so, but he ignored her hurt and her questions and left for work, and all of the faces he saw were the same face of the mouse-like female, and his growing tiredness was like a presence enveloping him and he felt weak and quite alone, and the windows of the bus in the pitiful morning light and the moments of shadow cast by passing structures were themselves as the large blinking eyes that had infected his dreams, crushing around him like an immense ocean of water until he felt as though his head would certainly implode or deflate in the pressure. The face was everywhere. Where once he had sought solace or harmless adulterous fantasy in the movement of human features he now found only her.  

The second day saw her continued absence in the workplace, in contrast to her facial ubiquity outside of it. His performance at work – assessed in the kind of numerical terms that meant little in the context of his output and associated expectation – had already begun to suffer, as he was a man who appreciated unbroken sleep and was lucky enough to acquire it even with a small infant; in his deprivations his hands seemed thicker and immobile as they slumped across the keyboard like meat, and his brain refused to engage in even the most basic motor functioning it required to carry him through his menial duties without comment. In the occasional glimpses he caught of his own reflection in the black screen background of his VDU the rodent face grinned in response, framed by the familiar curling of his own long hair. He was immersed in a sea of she both analogue and digital in form and he found it impossible to concentrate, felt moving sweat crawling his scalp like hungry insects, felt his bowels turning, felt a need for violence – an act real and animate – that only it could quell.  

In the staff area the empty table which he considered hers, despite her comparatively short tenure in the company, was littered in clean yogurt lids and only lids; there was not a pot in sight. He grabbed two fistfuls of the lids and scrunched them between his fingers and threw them to the floor, but still the table was blanketed in lids, so rich was its covering. He picked more and more lids in increasingly frenetic movements and could hear pockets of conversation at the surrounding tables turning to him and his conduct, their whispers amplified by the muted television set, could hear sniggering and condescension elsewhere, and he swept an arm across the table top and left the yogurt lids falling to the floor like the glaring snowflakes of commerce. They fell around his shoes in piles and he felt a hand on his shoulder; the site security personnel had accompanied his manager to the staff area and together they led him away from the yogurt lids and outside to the car park, both of their faces replaced with the face of the mouse-like female. He recalled muttering something about not feeling himself, with the alienation and distance of memory, as though it had been spoken weeks if not months earlier, and his manager agreed that he looked unwell and said she would drive him home, that he should take the rest of the day and perhaps week to allow himself to recover, that it – by which she meant parenthood – took its toll on us all. The car journey was merciful in its haste because he didn’t dare look at his manager; the facial surrogate was too convincing, the dimensions and proportions meticulously realigned in her ordinarily haggard physique. Likewise he didn’t dare enter his home, couldn’t bear to see his wife and daughter’s faces in absentia, replaced by the other. He wandered the quietest streets for many hours, finally sought sleep on a bench by the river in the former industrial district as the sun started to rise. He scooped a handful of tea-brown water from the river and washed his face and made his way to work.  

His colleagues were all surprised to see him and his arrival prompted equal measures of mirth and fear, as though involuntary phone calls to unrecognised numbers were inevitable, a heady mix that gave the office a strangely libertarian ambience. He felt the heft of their glares and their telephone receivers. He looked at no one and spoke little and trained himself to not see. Normalcy was a prerequisite until change might be instigated.  

Although the domestic limitations of his previous evening meant he had brought no lunch with him, when the lunch hour arrived he walked alone through the modern office complex to the staff area as he did every other day and saw her, the table populated not by myriad yogurt lids but by she herself, and by the single yogurt lid she had removed from the day’s single pot. With the spoon in the tips of her tiny fingers she took the food to her mouth and he felt both relief and disgust once more. There were numerous eyes upon him as he watched her eating but hers were not amongst them. He looked around the room at the mouse-like faces of the other staff, at their working jaws, their masticating lips, their pleasured blinks, at the falling strings of processed meat and salad bits and grated cheddar and dabbed pickles and mustards and stray crumbs on jumper fronts and dripping fruits, and he placed his bag onto one of the empty tables and approached the mouse-like female. He stood above her and she did not, would not look up. She stirred and spooned her yogurt and she would not look up. He drew his open hand back very far and swung it forwards and into the side of her face, and the crack of skin on skin was loud and hideous, and the yogurt spattered her face and his and his hand and hers like blood binding them, and she dropped the pot and finally looked at him, and the unbroken grin and the unfocussed eyes that had haunted him in their permanence were at once broken and focussed, and she stared with such confusion and hatred that he took a step back, and she was very small and seemed so very young and he thought of his daughter, and before him in her seat with her cheek reddened in long finger smears and dotted with dairy she began slowly to weep, then sobbed, and her great teeth chattered with it, her eyes rippled beneath themselves. The violence was not as he intended, was quick and ugly. The room altered about him, and as a physical presence he felt disdain materialised into the individual persons who formed the staff, united as they were in defence of the mouse-like innocent. Chair legs scraped along flooring in loud screams, their mutual standing urgent and final and somehow reflexive. The mouse-like female dropped her spoon from between her fingertips and placed her face into the palms of her two hands, which only served to worsen the spilt yogurt. He was sick and wanted to reach to her and hold her and apologise and clean the yogurt carefully from her features and make her see that things were or would be okay, but he moved not a muscle. He felt the breath of the geeks before their presence; they encircled him like snarling animals, their fear transformed into rage by the power of circumstance, some five, six, seven geeks unrecognisably alive, the Spaniard with the fat back, good tits, weird gait, slightly spastic face, inhuman laugh, the wizened but kid-young dork whom he’d heard speaking at length in defence of British culinary heritage and the significance of flavour, all of them. At once they began to push him, fourteen moist hands, and he made no attempt to resist and fell to the floor at their feet. One eye peered from the between the clasped fingers of the mouse-like female. The geeks set quickly to work on him, each with a stainless steel spoon gripped in the very tips of their fingers. Their lips moved but he heard no words. Their faces were hers. The curved ends of the spoons dug at his flesh. Two geeks delightedly sank their cutlery into the curve of his eyeballs and scooped them out easily, the pain incredible but also necessary. A second before the eyes went he saw the mouse-female; she smiled and had wiped the yogurt from her face. That smile. He felt his eyes like decorative appendages dangling from their orbits, caressing his cheeks, such a peculiar feeling, saw nothing at all but still he saw the face. The eyes but trifles, the face was within.  

Blind to all but it the spoons sank further, the geeks consumed. 

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["december"]

You were to Christmas with your

extended family, your

young young daughter

in a small cottage on the salt marshes

around Burnham-overy-Staithe

prey to the whims of tidal creek

I wanted to follow you there

with bags full of meat and

of savoury delights

to kiss your belly

your face and breasts

in the absolute darkness

to wake beside you

to read books quietly of an evening

to sink into you like a sea of fiction

the confident way of your hands

to rest through the season

and as they slept

your extended family, your

young young daughter

I would peel your

cunt from its trappings

like the biggest

present under the tree

and we’d grind wordlessly

a real fleshy cosmos

grind until spent

I considered the details as I

walked home through the streets

of the city in the dark.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["november"]

I took a bag of MDMA to the

Blackheath fireworks

and collapsed insensate

teeth chattering, my friends

propped me against a wall

and enjoyed the spectacle

of gunpowder like killers

I dribbled vomit into

my lap, my jeans

into a half-drunk water bottle

I saw someone drink from after

horrified and incandescent

with blame –

you fucking universe,

you low rent galaxy –

they managed to get me to

the pub for a pint of craft

stout, dark as tar,

before there’d been such a thing

like the time the landlord came

over and I’d taken a bag of

MDMA and I was laying in

the garden in underwear

and collapsed insensate

teeth chattering, my great

white back smothered in

mosquito bites and I could

not form a sentence

and listened as though from

very far away to my

friend tell him I was ill

and that we’d withheld rents

to ensure we retained our

deposits

and the landlord said

“know your limits”

it may have been a threat

or else directed at me

my intake

but I did

did know them

and disregarded them also

what good are our limits

other than as the waymarkers

to oblivion.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["october"]

There were black lines bursting

from their exposed chests

in place of the white flashes

I had previously imagined

black lines from between

small beautiful breasts

so black

the blackness that

precedes existence

black lines that appeared first

in dreams before

death followed

the children the first to see them

until the black lines

soon surrounded the town

and penetrated its workings

so it would scarcely

resemble the town

it had been

to burst from between

small beautiful breasts

as unmoved as I

for often the children

were the first to bear witness

to such matters of note

solely because they did not seek to,

and as though by design

or collusion

numerous children offered dream-accounts

relating to the essence

of the black lines

an essence unclear but almost certainly

– they said –

malevolent

and did so in synchrony though without

– they insisted –  

prior consultation with the

peers and associated children who

appeared privy to

a mass experience that

like some foul larvae

had reared from the depths

of a supposedly shared genetic fundament

encoded into the ancient neural structures

as though to mark the

commencement of an unknown

cycle of violence and degradation

dream-accounts that would

forego detail for instead

a broad sense of emotional discomfort

by way of allusion, lyric expression

the single commonality being

the black lines themselves

bursting from between

small beautiful breasts

webs of norm and ritual like

grim tendrils tearing

through the heart of the machine

the people of this world

had become plasticised

become mannequins to me

only insentient husks

the silent conduits of

my private arousal.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["september"]

What was the point at which

enjoyment stopped –

when I disconnected the slack wires of self

was it IVF, masturbating a sample

into a plastic cup in a toilet cubicle in Kings Lynn

while a groaning bloke loudly defecated

in the next cubicle

or earlier, much earlier

I stood above the railway tracks

on Vesta Road

above the New Cross Gate Cutting

and considered jumping

for whole minutes of time

and chose finally to hate love and

not to love love

such meagre defences as

the brain permits

the imposed devastation

the excitement of others

of children, young lovers

is a foreign tongue

I covet their fluency

their sacrifice to vulnerability

to admit to excitement is to

admit to compassion or its equivalents

to admit to the potential of defeat

it’s all or nothing

it’s binary

buffing the greys into absolute black.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["august"]

The main memories

of that very hot summer

are of sleeping on the red floor

of the yellow room

in briny garments

of learning to smoke

like the heroes we

watched smoking

of rich yellow urine

in twelve glass Coke bottles

that would become

emblematic of creation

of the redbrick redoubt

under dead grey sky

of sleeping on the Downs

at Mt. Zion, near Portslade

I raised the fundaments

of an identity

that would never develop

and never improve

a blueprint of a personality

and we were sexless

and also were happy.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["july"]

We smoked a few big hits

of the extracted product

and within seconds I was on my knees

on the grass

in the pit of the earth then closed about me

staring up towards the crag

of the pit of the earth then closed about me

screaming for Mikey

I could hear myself laughing

but was very afraid

and the delirium passed

as quickly as it had otherwise begun

and we went to town

got drunk and took ecstasy

shared the carmine sofa bed of a

long haired Jewish girl

whose great pubic thatch

I had glimpsed in passing

in a gesture of inebriated abandon.

__\::_screaming_for_mikey_:://["june"]

At the end of the exam period

I took drinks in the Marquis of Granby

a yellow-fronted dive on the

fork of two roads

one an ancient Celtic trackway

the other a freeway into

the Kentish townships, the Roundhill

all nicotine stained air con assembly

and chain smoked fags

cheap export strength lagers

Irish crisps

was fucked within the hour

cracked with a boy-faced lad

pint-sized, he was

little more than five feet

I was getting feverish with

flu and relief

and we drank with the intensity

of two slight acquaintances

comfortable with the surety

of never meeting again

and some couple of hours in

joined by a short haired

girl I’d seen in lectures, seminars

never heard

huge white teeth simultaneously

in and out of proportion

strong thighs swathed in

bright blue denim

her sublimely awkward flirtations

were polite if somewhat end-of-days and

with little persuasion I was back

to her small flat, her big bed

fucking her clumsily

like an avalanche slipping

and she was quite still

the whole exchange formal

more like an organic demonstration of

the way bodies can couple

than the tumult of lust one hopes for

these things

a pleasant way to pass the hour

before I took the train to meet my girlfriend

for what would prove to be convalescence

and sodomy.