Friday, November 29, 2019

__\::_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.

Thursday, November 28, 2019

__\::_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.

Wednesday, November 27, 2019

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


You returned from your parents'
five bed gaff in Milton Keynes
striped with poorly applied fake tan
that made your legs yellow
in sinuous crested textures
and with it during your
two week absence
you had begun to bind your
breasts beneath bandage
to androgenize yourself
had stuck in hair extensions
with great wads of visible adhesive
and we walked
the city in the
way we did then
and in the bath later you
sucked me off reluctantly
though just lipped the tip some really
and then held my cock next to
your cheek while you finished
me with your palm and fingers
rubbed the heft into your face
as though dowsing for nutrients
then had me come
in your eyes where I
watched it slaver down your face
and you seemed depressed
and wronged and
I looked about the bathroom
the institutional tones
and saw my beige boxers
clustered in a foul ball
on the sodden floor
the sun through the window glass
and felt absolute shame
at the boxers
the fact of their beigeness
their shameful beigeness
was in that moment intimate
with my own undesirability
your once wet cunt now not
and would bin them
first chance I got
a pointless symbol alluding
to changes well beyond my faculties.

Tuesday, November 26, 2019

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


To witness a birthing human
whole muscles that once in the service of ending
are given over instead to creation
can but provoke great change
a birth itself
each birth of one in fact a new birth
and of all those touched by it
all family, obstetricians, midwives, porters, facilities staff
for in it is the growth
before one’s eyes
the growth of the world
and all of its potentials
the growth of the world
this our world
this pliable world
the growth of the world to accommodate the life of another
the cock a trephine
boring for artefacts
the cunt a portal
a slice in space time
a rift between dimensions of being and not
bringing head, body, limbs,
bringing life itself to bear
the vessel of the universe
stretching under the sheer
weight of existence that
writhes beneath it.

Monday, November 25, 2019

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


The silver girl on the
bench at the bus stop
had striking silver hair
like an emergence from
another world with
huge insect shades and
pale skin that was
monolith smooth
she idly thumbed her
way through notifications
and updates while
from across the road
I watched her like
a television through
someone’s window
did her cunt get wet
and stink did she bleed
from wounds and excrete
like me, her
quantum stabilised surface
alluded to no such
organic demeanours
her pristine flesh
transcended itself
the perfect form of the
flesh becomes more
than the flesh that
makes it
and I wanted to make
her flesh
to flay her of her denim alive
to see the gilded cusp
of her pudendal scarp
as sterile as liquor
and as deliriant
where was she of
where did she head
at twenty-five past
that hour, and
why does it feel like nothing will ever change?
because it willn’t.




Sunday, November 24, 2019

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


Budapest was thick with snow
my suede Chelsea boots
ruined with it
the spa in the City Park
crouched beneath grey sky
its Neo-Baroque stylings
its domes, cartouches
piled with inches of murky slush
refrozen, desolate
we watched oafish men of whom
we were two, women in one piece swimsuits
later roamed the city by tram
drank dark beer in bar rooms
lost at foosball to hustling youths
in stonewash denim
shot digestifs of Unicum
chain smoked in the hostel kitchen
my friend attempting to seduce
the girl he had met on an earlier trip
stained teeth, plainly indifferent
while I feigned manners to another
jeans so tight her eyes bulged
she reminded me of someone else
some former fantasy
and I took her email address but
never used it, kept it in my
wallet like an arsenal of deterrence
only imagined her body on
me like a garment
and when I woke the last morning
my friend – who always insisted
he needed bespoke plus sized rubbers
but in truth was simply ham-fisted – was in
tiny red briefs on the bunk below
his torso scarred from burning
trying to push himself against
and maybe into her great wall
of silence.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

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


The cold was fierce as
I waited for you to return
from a driving holiday in Boston,
then Canada
and you did, with two litres of root beer
some packets of Marlboro
stories of Hooters
already by then something gone
something vital
passed, over
though we would nurse it for months
without attempting resuscitation.

Friday, November 22, 2019

__\::narrative_from_the_fenland_township_(3)::/["the_hungry_earth"]

He watched the car from his window, his father step out and his mother too in their almost best clothes. The infant was wrapped within a cellular blanket and lay silent in her arms. Though it had died some hours earlier its cheeks appeared warm and alive. He wept as he saw them, such an awful party. The infants all perished in the Fenland township, it was the way things had to be. He himself had been the last of a generation to survive and he was now grown strong; yet the pain of the deaths never softened, and the infants continued to come, to be born and then to die, their short existences but memories of things unhappened. Contraception was worthless in the Fenland Township and its use unheard of; it failed with ferocious resolution against the immense fecundity the ancient moist earth bestowed upon its subjects. Life came so death could follow, so it was written in the book of the township. 

The earth was hungry for the tiny bodies of the infants. They perished some three days post-partum, prey to the same condition that medicine was ill-equipped to explain but that the book of the township expressed in the complexity of its principles; they were offerings to the ancient fens themselves, as essential for the continued survival of the township as the commitment of its founders had been so many years previous. The relationship between township and landscape was an intricate and symbiotic one; whilst the township drew upon the resources of the landscape, so too the landscape drew upon the resources of the township. The sating of the earth should ever be the township’s priority, the book spoke, and the infant surplus of each and any generation – beyond those minimal required for the successful propagation of the township – should be returned to the earth that grew them.  

Their breaths and needs unsustainable by the limits of the township the existences of the infants ceased very gently in deaths both sudden and foreseen and the worse because of it; their parents would forever feel their short lives in their fingertips and in their dwindling exchanges and in the threat of the coupling that occurred in the urgency of their grief and was itself further grief or the cementing of same. They would carry the infant dead to the earthworks at the edge of the township without ceremony and commit their bodies to the furtherance of the township. 

His parents had birthed eight healthy infants after him, all surplus. As he grew older he thought he could see sometimes the disappointment in his mother’s eyes, especially, could see her wondering how things might have been if another of the infants had been the one, but such considerations were futile. Things are as are. This was written in the book of the township. 

The book was written by the township founders, Messrs Flamsy and Klepte. Rumour and to a lesser extent history positions the two men as shamed Cambridge scholars who negotiated college influence and resources to pursue private investigations into the occult, by which both men were fascinated, and who were as a result expelled from the university for acts of an ungodly persuasion. The times were unenlightened for free-thinkers. Despite the University’s royally decreed movement away from Catholicism and canon law during the Protestant reformation, a growing puritan influence among a handful of the colleges made the city particularly hostile to Flamsy and Klepte’s increasingly esoteric lines of research, into satanic texts and symbology, ritual sacrifice and a skewed pan-atheistic belief system of tremendous pessimism, whereby within every aspect of the essence of the universe lay at once the seed of its own formation and end, the seed being dark, indifferent and cruel. Legend describes mandrakes – duck-like beings with huge legs some six feet long that whilst having fallen somewhat out of favour in popular tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century are nonetheless firmly rooted in the British and specifically East Anglian folklore of much of the last two millennia – as familiars assisting the two men in their deviance, and that while embroiled in acts of perverse and varied coition such familiars would simultaneously through ready beaks suckle lactose-like serum from secreted entry points around the emaciated bodies of Flamsy and Klepte in exchange for these diabolical ends; describes the two men chased from the city in mortal danger by outraged scholars; describes vast shadowy formations engulfing the hostile eviction party and the dreadful stench of human faeces so severe and grotesque as to render them invalid; describes the fleeing men quickly swallowed in the sodden silence of the wild fens, absorbed into the earth as they alone understood it to be, the societal expectations of the city but a trifle amongst the coarse grasses and spongy earth and endless pools. In the hinterlands they constructed a township free from law and propriety, founded on their principles and theirs alone. It would be a township of paradox, spoke the book. Streets would have no end and lead only to themselves. A town borne of pain that felt none. Rich with life and courting death. Change changes nil. Outside shall stay such and no more. Our young shall feed the hungry earth. The township would flourish, the beacon burnt and never faltered, aflame through the endless years.  

M. Flamsy

M. Klepte

The book of the township spoke of what wasn’t as much as what was if not more. Despite its purported location within the civic buildings, which were of red brick and varied architectural stylings, few if any living persons had bore witness to its presence. There were rumours of weight and power but each was unverified and conflicting. Its existence was beyond experience and was related to the pertinence held within the whispers of it that spanned generations.  

He heard his parents open the front door and carry the infant into the house, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Their footsteps were purposeful and the refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. They called him in solid voices, called him again when he neither moved nor spoke. His father approached his bedroom door and knocked on it, had changed into carpet slippers; he now held the infant and offered it to his son. “Would you?” asked his father. He referred to the earthworks on the edge of township. His father passed him the infant and patted an open palm on his shoulder as though they were not kin but distant mates awkwardly reunited. It felt incredibly light to hold, almost unnoticeable and desperately cold. A bad world encapsulated in their barely meeting eyes. He pushed past his father and down the stairs and through the hallway and heard his mother crying and the sound of the radio and pouring drink and closed the front door behind him and at a slight jog with the infant clutched into his chest he cried himself.  

Superficially the town was now as any other, of banks and discount outlets, of mounting traffic crises and closing businesses, its peripheries peppered with the modern fortresses of the supermarket and DIY retailers on a scale inconsistent with that of the township they served, vast squat hulks of brick and corrugated metal some great distance from the unseen town charter purportedly documented in the book of the township. Several months earlier a carnival had visited the town and erected temporary camp in the car park area of one such retailer, billed amongst the township as God’s Fenland Roadshow and helmed by a Parson named Grünther. The Christian foundation of the carnival’s message sat uneasily with the proud godlessness of the township and hostility had been quick to bloom. Citizens vandalised the carnival tent on erection and abused the performers determinedly, their aggression immediately magnified by Grünther’s incredible indifference. He bore silent witness to the worsening violence without intervention, an assured arrogance the likes of which aroused the citizens into even more advanced forms of retribution. In the hubbub of the shredded canvas a handful of citizens who claimed to be directly descended from Flamsy and Klepte restrained the carnival’s fat male whom the posters called Oaf Boy, and while Grünther and the other performers watched encircled they in lengthy thrusts stabbed the oaf dead, the oaf felled, face dumb as he got it, his blood an immense gurgling pool swallowed into the ground, his large assembly of dead skin and flesh like the peel of an orange rolled away from the fruit within. They thought him Grünther’s pet and no one contradicted them. The murder was neither harried nor considered but occupied some uncomfortable territory between the two. Crows cawed their approval in the trees about and Grünther had led the carnival from the township. There will be other oafs, said Grünther.            

He soon reached the earthworks where the infants lay. Unburied, he hadn’t realised or even thought. Around the mounded earth and furrows beneath – in places – but inches of loose soil were the remains of incalculable infants, arranged head-to-toe in long lines of death, their tiny bones stark white amidst the dirt and scraggy foliage. It was an unforgettable sight and truly dreadful. He retched drily and spat and scuffed the toes of his trainers into the mud then retched further to no avail or release. Carefully unwrapping the cellular blanket from around the body of the infant he knelt to lower it to the floor, and its body was sketched with deep bruising where the blood had settled; he looked at the infant, stroked its cheek with one hand and cupped the top of its head and kissed it very gently on the forehead as one would any sibling. He wrapped the blanket around it again and held it very tight, too tight it would have surely been had the infant been alive which it wasn’t. He jogged to the telephone box, there was only one in the town, its glass panels shattered but still somehow as one, ex nihilo sprayed in large vibrant pink lettering across the panels in turn. The presence of the graffiti in the Fenland township was a point of some consternation, but a petty attack on such obsolete technology meant that little had been done to apprehend the vandal. Holding the infant half beneath his jacket he put two coins into the slot and dialled for assistance, requested to be transferred to the police authorities in the next large township and not his own. Though he was justifiably certain that he must under no circumstances approach the police within his own Fenland township he nonetheless was not thinking clearly or really at all as he implemented the telephone call. He dreamt only of change and felt the cold mass of the infant against his chest. He conversed briefly with an officer and told him in fragments of the infants, the many infants. They would meet presently, the officer assured him, and he took his parents address and gave him a time about an hour from then.  

It is unclear where the rumours pertaining to the truth about the contents of the book of the township that circulated amongst the youth had started, but they spread hurriedly amongst the mid 20s and younger. The long-held beliefs and principles purportedly contained within the book of the township and which formed the bedrock of the community and the very existence of the township were as if from nowhere cast into doubt, their veracity questioned, their morals considered in rigorous argument . The youth sought placement within, they said, a bigger picture, a picture bigger than the Fenland township that had given them everything. A global picture of which they – the township – should be a part. They questioned the early settler’s interpretations of Flamsy and Klepte’s texts, accused wilful corruption of their mutual intellect for social or political gain and mass cover up of same, demanded access to the book of the township should it even exist or indeed ever have existed. Its secretion, they said, spoke volumes. Whilst once the township had thrived, secure in its own sense of significance and its own shared values, the revolt of the young dispelled certainty and principle like devastated futures. They committed to alcohol, they sought formal educations outside of the township, they fornicated amongst themselves and swore to reproduce, they made plans to leave the township. These were horrendous betrayals. It was the greatest crisis in the long history of the township, acceptance mangled by clustered broadband connections, the information age incompatible with principle.  

He carried the infant back to his parents house and waited around in the street outside in the falling light, the grass damp and thick and incredibly green beneath his feet. A simple car turned slowly into the street and crawled past the houses looking attentively at the numbers on the front doors. It was ten minutes early but he was sure it was the officer he had spoken to. The car stopped outside his parents’ house and he approached it and held a hand out to the officer but was too afraid to speak. The officer looked at him and infant both and told him everything was going to be okay. He shook his head to say no, the officer had a gentle face, the sky was blue as the sun set which happened so quickly, the officer said it again and that he was here to help, and they approached his parents’ front door together, and though he had his keys they knocked regardless. His father opened the door and looked at the officer and at him, then at the infant, and his eyes narrowed just slightly; the officer showed him some ID and said he’d taken a call from me, something about some infants. There was no mention of the infant he was carrying, it was a topic best left. From the front doorstep he heard his mother talking on the telephone in the next room, saying police, saying come quickly, the sound of the receiver going down, and her slight footsteps and polite greetings. The officer repeated himself to her, mentioned infants, and telephone calls, and my mother nodded as he spoke and her face was very concerned. As they spoke around him he cradled the infant. Within second some five or six of the township’s elders were encircling the front door, shaking hands with the officer and patting their hands upon his shoulders and each others. The officer was watching him, his gentle lined face piecing together the cracked strained normalcy of terrible truths, and conversation multiplied in directions worlds away from the infants and the earthworks. The youth, they said, were dissatisfied. It was simple rebellion, not an issue for the law, officer. They spoke convincingly and much. The officer listened politely but watched him carefully, as though he had a sense for these things. Earthworks. He spoke only to the officer but he spoke aloud. Earthworks. You need to see the earthworks. The officer looked around the gathered faces. The boy’s father lunged forward and slapped him in the face once, and then twice, and the infant fell to the floor wrapped tightly in the blanket. His mother picked it up and carried it into the house. Two of the elders restrained his father and the officer took a mobile phone from his jacket pocket, but of course there was no telephone signal in the township, this was ever ensured. That’s enough, the officer said, to the father ostensibly but to all in truth. I’m going to need you to take me to the earthworks. With their eyes the elders consulted then conceded, and they explained to the officer that whilst there was little of interest to see at the earthworks they would of course take him, that they would be proud to assist the police with any investigation as required, and on foot they set off the short distance to the earthworks, the sun dropped like loose change. He remained close to the officer.   

In fact the book of the township spoke only of tolerance in terms distinctly utopian, of patience, of kindness, and acceptance, and it was for these reasons that it had been left to rot within the recesses of the civic buildings, to prevent the truth from manifesting. The body politic consumed integrity. No township could function with tolerance, the Fenland township no exception. They thrived on doubt and mistrust. Flamsy and Klepte had been fools to theorise otherwise; good men, almost certainly homosexual, privately, but no matter. The lost everything and founded the township as a response to this grave loss: it was a mechanism for coping with it, a patient place, a kind place, an accepting place. The early settlers had quickly corrupted the ideals of Messrs Flamsy and Klepte, had united the township and its successive generations in the very paranoia and gross injustice they had sought refuge from. The honour of their memory was long faded. They bore atrocities in essence centuries posthumous.   

When the path turned sharply into the earthworks the officer gagged, then harder almost immediately, spewed a foamy small pile, the awful stench worse than new shit in the air. The elders were oblivious; the rich reek of decaying flesh and bones and of bodies disintegrating into their constituent fluids and eventually molecules and atoms and into the earth was as inseparable from the township as the dwellings and persons who made it. The earthworks thrummed with death. The officer pulled a pocket torch from his jacket and shone it into the shadows, saw infants decomposing in its meagre beam, countless infants deceased and piled texturing the landscape like cairns. My God, he said vomiting, my God he said again. He shone his torch a second time, as though the bodies might have vanished, as though it could have been imagined, but the infants remained. He staggered from the elders and the boy followed him and took his arm; the officer took his mobile phone but there was still no signal. The township was a blackspot. A void best avoided. What is this? he asked the boy. It’s what I tried to tell you, the boy said. It’s what they do to the infants here. For the earth. The officer felt incredibly aware of the darkness that was of a sudden profound. He turned lost to the elders and thought of his family, lost also. How can I explain this, he asked. This can’t be explained. The boy’s father stepped forwards towards the officer and drew a blade of some form across his throat as though marking points on paper. The officer felt little but did feel blood gushing down his front and gurgling back up his throat and into his mouth and it tasted iron rich like good offal, and he dropped to his knees and from there to his front and the earth took him, its bits in his bits, the whole thing so quick it seemed like an act of prayer, the sounds of his death so full of life.

We’d better get home, the boy’s father said putting a hand on his shoulder. It’s getting late.

Thursday, November 21, 2019