Tag Archives: blackandwhite

Estimate

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I remember, on a hot summer day, her standing silhouetted against the sun with two enormous clouds behind her like a pair of mismatched wings.  I remember rolling around in the wet soil, as we crouched from the thunderstorm; when giggles turned to kisses and tickles turned to fucks.  I remember the smells – the faint almost minty scent of dry alkaline earth, citrus deoderant and perfume, the rusty iron tang of blood for which she apologised but showed no sign of wanting to stop.  I remember peeling off wet socks and emptying my shoes after we ran across the boating lake to stop a group of male ducks from ganging up on a female with a limp.

As colour drains from memory, and so the scents fade into dust.  The wet earth becomes brittle clods again, the blood dries and flakes, the perfume destroys itself into lousy bacteria and the clouds turn to rain which pass by and are gone before the first shoots of spring can taste it.

She once said, ever the sweet little cynic; “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage… one being whipped just to drag the other.”  I used to love those killer little lines she’d drop like stones in a perfectly still pond, just to see how far the ripples would travel and for how long.  This is why we aren’t together anymore – I spent far too long trying to decide if what she said was profound, or stupid or neither.

 

 

 

Debris

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On a stale summer evening, balancing on a single rail, I light a cigarette and let my eyes water over filthy cheeks as the smoke washes over me.  I feel the dirt when I smile, and I feel the tears dancing through the grime when I cry, so I do neither.  Kicking through the litter and detritus, I listen for the sharp warning blasts from the freight trains that steam and rumble past dragging waggons full of sulphur, or rattling past carrying nothing but dead air and waste.

I dream of climbing the trees I sometimes see on torn billboards, and on the faded juice bottle labels.  Sometimes I’ll steal a fresh one from Frankie’s Shop – I go in with a piece of glass melted into a toothbrush handle and threaten his one remaining eye.  The poor old bastard just nods and holds up money as I go for the broken freezer cabinet and brace for the flies that buzz around the milk.  I run as fast as my panic will let me, even though I know he’ll never tell.

Around the corner, across the car park, behind the burger van and through the fence onto the railway that severs the town into two rotten apple halves, I sit on the floor and stare at the label.  I dream of trees, and I dream of the day I can climb one just to be closer to the sky – the hazy blue I see beyond the veil of ochre.  There are no real trees here; just cold lifeless and slippery searchlights, and the harsh pylons who guard like diseased and underfed sentinels, wrapped in sharp wire and frying all but the few coughing birds who pass through.

I’ve never wished for anything – just more colours than grey and the oxidised brown rust that gets under my fingernails and stains my hair.

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As the amber evening turns into a dark brown night, I climb the disintergrating wooden steps up to the old signal box.  The mattress is finally dry and the room is quiet and warm.  I feel the glow from the remains of the day through the broken window panes and I know tonight I will sleep better than I have done in three months.

I go to a corner of the room and remove a pile of rags – inside is a box of dumped fireworks.  I light one and send it up through the hole in the roof above my bed.  With a whistle it flies, followed by blue lines like thin leaves, a loud pop, and then the dull purples as the colour mingles with the air, and the sparks descend like doomed paratroopers.  I hope she has seen my signal, and I hope she will return soon.

I need my girl, and for those octopus arms to entwine me safe.

 

Grove

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Walking across a dark, rainy bridge of suicides, I can feel her tender hands around mine keeping me from the edge.  Around us, drifts of snow are piled and dirty like dead sheep, but there’s gold in those eyes and silver glinting in those teeth.

We will always walk this path, even now… even thirty years after the fact when your face is covered by the mist of a few broken hearts, a few hundred whiskeys and a few thousand dull days staring into faces as bland as dinner plates.  I sit on the floor, surrounded by a week’s worth of TV dinners buzzing with insects, and I clench my hand into a fist… and as the nails dig into my skin I feel the warmth of yours.  Wherever you are now – happy, no doubt – you will never know how often you save me.

On rainy evenings, I throw on a rucksack and trudge out into the mire.  Ignoring the hiss of passing cars in the spray, and the glare of headlights, I stare down at the soft colours – all those sunflower yellows from reflected streetlights, dark purples and blues from the oily puddles under my feet, and the black mass of the old bridge as solid as a marble tomb.

I don’t sleep anymore, I just shut my eyes and think of the nice things I want to have.  I wiggle my toes under the blanket and imagine cool grass and innocence, before I burned myself on finite desire.

Abhor

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We always tried to be angels, but her smile made me want to spit in the face of God.  We tore along the street like lava, consuming everything in our wake.  When she grabbed my hand and told me to stop, I watched her vault into the open top of a sports car and wink at me – one hand on the wheel, one arm propped on the door.  As I stared, waiting for the punchline, I heard it… the steady hiss of piss as she wet herself and the leather interior before vaulting away.

Sure, we smashed a few windows, and sure, we upset a few natives.  We ran to the churchyard and pulled down as many slabs as we could before mounting each other on the cold slab of a former vicar.  She rode me, legs splayed wide across my hips, jeans still hanging off one ankle and dripping yellow, t-shirt knotted up and arms out to receive the sun.  We came in unison and rolled off, landing with a winding thud in a pile of autumn leaves.  Kissing my nose, she bit her lip and for a moment I saw true love… true companionship…lying in the hundred scents of a thousand dry brown leaves.

Lying under the stars later that evening, she points at one and says ‘Mary Linskill.’ Then another, ‘Alfred Broe’.  When I ask she tells me; these are the names of the people whose tombs we upset….and the stars are their spirits in the dark.

Puncture-Kindra M. Austin & Jimmi Campkin —

PUNCTURE Kindra M. Austin and Jimmi Campkin I know damn well where the bastard’s been, but I ask him anyway, just for shits and giggles. He tells me to take a short walk off a long pier—idiot, stinking of another man’s piss and strawberry nudy-bar incense. He’d sat in his car getting blotto before going […]

via Puncture-Kindra M. Austin & Jimmi Campkin —

Touch The Endings, Hold Them Dear

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Self-righteous and profane we tear up the streets with the force of Love… or is it just Cacophany… or just raw and naked Lust, that primal mud in which we swim and suck, fondle and fuck, until our eyes roll back inside our minds.  This bewitchment that drives us into slander and insanity, where every friend is now an enemy, and all tongues suffer only to taste each other’s organs and selves.

After driving recklessly for a few hours we abandoned the car inside the pet shop, crashing through the main window into a haze of sawdust and straw.  Clambering from the wreckage, we stand by the ruins smoking a pair of cigarettes and encouraging the more timid animals to Get Out There and Be Free.  We say quiet prayers that nothing will be eaten, nothing will die.  She whips her arms around like a ferris wheel, as parakeets fly, imploring this dank world to be free.  Be freeeeeee!  BE FREEEEEEEE!  I stamp into her spinning top path and grab her shoulders.  BE FREEEEEE I scream into her face and she eats my tongue without spilling a drop of my blood.

We take each others hands and disappear under the dark archways and into the backstreets, shelter of the angels.  People might call them junkies, winos, whores, but we hear their laughter and we smell their dead flesh as it drops from the bone to blossom and seethe and spread as black tar on the cracked paving slabs.  We see them falling like autumn flowers, infesting concrete cancer with societal guilt… and there is nothing anyone can do to stop us.  Behind the terraces Lady B, in her plaid skirt, fucks a priest who demands to be called Father.  There is no salvation from the damned, it’s just them and us who choose to melt into the streets to grow society anew – without guilt, without principle, without malice.

One day, I want to take a chainsaw to the tree bark that grows under her skin until the dust flies.  Resting under the old railway we smoke from light bulbs and cut our foreheads open until we see the knits of our skulls.  She is autumn to me – straggled and terracotta, wise and damp.  Above us we can hear unfamilar cries mingling with the usual circus; the melodies of the fallen who still sing even as the ground absorbs them into a stain, and the gentle cackling of freed tropical birds.

 

 

A Love Letter To An Autumn Thunderstorm

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It doesn’t help to overly romanticise The Girl; a Manic Pixie Nightmare smelling faintly of green meat with greasy hair and black under her fingernails.  Every morning she drew teardrops under those auburn oval windows in eyeliner, in memory of those who didn’t and couldn’t pass the tests.  Every morning she pressed those dirty angelic feet into the same toeless, ripped heels.  Those feet, the soles hardened and yellow, once kicked the life and death out of her own father, and left a streak of explosive blood across the wall; she compared it to a peacock feather.  She was not romantic, but she appreciated actions…. not gestures but actions.  When I took a beating from a gang of ten with pool cues for commenting on her tits she looked down on me like undersole filth and played on with them, as the barkeep swept me into a bucket and threw me outside.  When I pressed a sock filled with chloroform over the mouth of her best friend, and watched as she was strung up by her wrists over a bonfire to dance, The Girl rode me until my pubes were torn from my skin.

Whenever we drove anywhere, no matter the weather, she opened the window and rested her head outside and fell asleep.  In those quiet moments, where I felt safe from knife blades and cigarette burns, her hair flapped like the banners of two ancient armies on the battlefield.

*

I know I can never touch her again, so I touch the things that she once grasped.  I find the pieces of graffiti that fascinated her and I run my fingers over the same lines of paint.  I search in the weeds for the same bottles of glue to huff; they lay empty with the labels slowly fading like memory itself.  I squeeze nettles and thistles and stare down adoringly as the little white bumps form in my palm.  I cut myself on the same pieces of rusted barbed wire in the hope of capturing a few cells of her blood.  In town, stumbling and confused with yellow bandages over my fists, I flick to The Beatles and put on She Loves You and I remember when I had dreams.  Genuine dreams.  Before the transfusions, before they were drained to preserve the lives of many others, who squandered them with pointless admonishes and meaningless children.  She escaped, blasting past the indecision and weakness into the vacuum of non-knowledge, where every eventuality became a natural progression.

I know the songs we both loved have been extinguished from her mind and it terrifies me, so I keep them alive in my own mind.  As memory exists as a lifeforce I wallow in the increasingly diluted and faded colours, see the heartbeat grow faint, and I feel it in my own chest.

*

But I see the echoes every day.  I see three men standing against the sun like curiously shaped monoliths and, in a moment of self righteous frenzy, I pretend they’ve all fucked her and left her for dead.  So, headphones still throbbing into my brain, I launch over a fence with a blade already locked.  I’m all ready to own the ears and lungs of these three bastards when the song changes.  The memory changes.  I’m not standing in front of her, facing up to a certain beating with only a rusty knife, as she disinterestedly smokes a cigarette and puts it out on my shoulder.  I’m thinking of the time she ate a piece of my hair and clutched her stomach telling me she’s now pregnant.  I knew she was messing with me, but in that smile I wanted it to be real.

So now, I’m left standing in a field in front of three men eyeing me with both fear and confusion.  As The Sun sinks behind them I click the blade away in embarrassment, and I swear I can see her eyes swimming around, bumping like tadpoles, in the black spots that cloud my own.