Tag Archives: blackandwhite

Creased

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We are such delinquents, and what a joy it is to swill that word around our mouths like bad bourbon.  So what if we’ve started a few fires?  You can walk on water and I can follow in your footsteps.  You tread the waves flat and I aim for the shoeprint.  It’s easy.  It’s so easy.

Because this is what we do.  This isn’t an affectation or a hobby or a cry for help.  This is why we breathe.  Surfing clouds is easy, swimming in a blue sky is easy.  Opening our eyes to the rain and letting it drip on our cornea’s without blinking is easy.  We run our fingertips through the concrete of a subway and carve our names into the dust and disappointment, and it is easy. 

Time to soar, time to beg for more.  A handful of hair and a crease on the hip, we collide and disperse, atoms flirting through space and dancing around our charges.  I inhale the scents of activity – cheap ass perfume covering the seven days since you last saw a shower, the rich iron of your recent cycle and dry sand in your armpits, in the folds under your knees.

I whip off your dress in one motion, drive a stake through the shoulder hoops, and plant it firmly in the ground, in the name of…. something.  Flapping in the breeze we get down to the basic instincts, as the stars revolve above us like voyeurs, trying to appear indifferent but unable to stop staring.  I finish too soon – and isn’t that a well told story without a decent ending – but for once you don’t seem to mind.  Lying on the beach, our only contact is your ankle crossed over mine.  I’m breathing deeply, sticky with all manner of things, but you lie still, absorbing the constellations into your eyes.  When I look across I can see them glittering like sunlight on fresh snow, changing with every blink, and every languid puff of your awful smelling cigarettes.

It’s hard knowing someone who only comes out at night.  I walk alleyways and shopping centres, fields and forests, trying to find the point of it all, waiting for the sun to die and my hope to rise.  But every now and then, under the unforgiving and judgemental glare of daylight, I hear a familiar noise and look up.  I see the kite’s flying above, swooping in circles, wings hooked like your shoulderblades, and all is well in this garish, vulgar, unsubtle world.

 

Weave

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In the dream, she walks behind me as I stand in front of something impossible, trying to find my way around it.  She wraps her tentacles around my waist with a squeeze and I feel her breath on the back of my neck.  My hair, and everything else, stands to immediate and obediant attention.  When did I get so submissive?  I feel her breasts pressing into my ribcage and her heartbeat thumps against my spine, playing the bones like a xylophone.  I can feel the nerves dancing in my heels.

Nothing is impossible inside your forcefield.  Wearing you like a rucksack, with your arms wrapped around my neck and your legs hooked under my arms we flatten mountains and part seas.  We stomp across suspension bridges, leaving rippling waves that send cars and coaches flying into the air and over the edge.  We reduce cathedrals into dust and snort an ecclesiastical line or two from our forearms.  Your long scarlett red hair hisses like serpents and cuts like a molten whip, slicing through the forearms and necks of any fool who steps in our way.  We collect limbs like pennies in a casino flattened by a tornado.

I offer impossible things, because I like it when you bite my ear in irritation.  One day, we walk into the sea with our pockets full of rocks, to see the shipwrecks and pickpocket the dead.  I know that this is an impossibility too far, and as the cold water curls around my ankles and then my knees, I realise that I’m feeling for the first time.  We go under into a deep blue and I cannot breathe.  I stumble along, in the vague direction of the skeletons of ships, seaweed waving us away, until your heel nudges me in the hip.  You’re pointing in the direction of a metal husk, with eyeless sockets where the Captain’s bridge used to be, and a broken bow like a dislocated jaw.

I trudge over, but my feet are getting heavier, or you are getting heavier, or the tide is pushing us back.  I turn my head to meet yours and we kiss, but I realise as our lips meet that you are struggling as well.  I taste your tongue, mingling with sea water, and we break apart, our lungs convulsing as you hold me tighter than you have ever done before.  Arms around my neck, my ribcage compressed and your heartbeat now beating tribally against my back.

I wake up face down.  My pillows have been violently tossed out from under my head and are resting on my back where your breasts once were.  There’s blood on the sheets from chewing my lips apart.  I’ve gripped the sheets so hard, my fingers have pushed through.  Every muscle is locked tight.  I roll over with some effort and stare at the ceiling until I can escape impossibility and return to a safety I don’t want anymore.

 

Unkempt

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I remember the first time I saw my schoolteacher naked.  I’d returned from lunch early to avoid being alone in a crowd; I preferred to be alone whilst alone.  I opened the door and found Miss Kempt, laying back in her chair with her eyes closed.  Both ankles were resting on the desk as she reclined, knuckle deep inside herself, with a sanitary towel clinging on to the gusset of her panties which itself hung from one knee.  For some reason, it reminded me of the pathetic bunting we’d put around the corridors with messages of learning and wisdom, quotes from dead cunts we didn’t care about telling us to learn stuff we didn’t care about so we could grow up and get jobs we didn’t care about, and meet partners we didn’t care about and have children…. well, you get the idea.

I snuck out before she could notice I was there and took my boner into the boy’s bathroom.  I showed it to the weird kid in the class next to ours in exchange for three sticks of gum and four packets of stickers.  He just stared at it for a while, breathed on it, tried to touch it but then flinched away like it was an exposed electrical socket.  With a last wheeze from his stuffed nose, he gulped hard and ran into a cubicle, slamming the door behind him.  I zipped myself up and left, my head feeling light and without blood.

When we all finally returned to class, Miss Kempt was on her knees sponging the floor, next to a bucket of pale, pink water.

Engaged

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I do a few tabs of blotter acid and head for the arcade.  Mercy is working tonight; a diva with dirty feet and a bruised knuckle from knocking the shit out of her Dad.  I nod towards her, but those circular hawk eyes are scanning the room like a survellience camera.  This time of year, old homeless guys come in looking for warmth and free water, using their last pennies to start a game they’ll never finish as they get the feeling back in their throats and fingers.  Mercy shows none; she stands behind the old fools waiting for them to take a turn of a game they can’t understand, before throwing them out by their greasy collars.

A seventeen year old boy in a huge uniform, with a rock in his throat, waves at me and offers me a gappy smile.  Slip works the ice cream parlour, which is why I never order any.  Slip’s face is pebbledashed with acne, a series of hideous eruptions that produce small yellow snakes whenever he does something like talk, or breathe or exhale into his cheeks.  Mercy has thumped him twice; once when he tried it on with her and once when he tried to jerk off into the salted caramel.

Somewhere around the fifth go on House Of The Dead the wave crashes over my brain and I’m failing badly.  I take a few more tabs, knowing there is no going back now, and my only chance is to fry my brain so badly it tries to reset itself.  Monsters are reaching out from the cabinet to wrestle the light gun from my hand.  I can feel the coins in my pocket chewing each other like little Pac-Men.  I step away from the encroaching zombies and start firing the light gun wildly at a ten year old boy trying to play Virtua Cop on the machine next to mine.  He has red eyes and sounds like James Earl Jones, and I know he is controlling the monsters and so must be destroyed.

When I regain consciousness, I’m sitting on the floor against the shutter of the arcade.  It’s closed, but the lights still blink and fizz above me.  My head has melted to my knee, bone on bone, and I scream as I wrench it free.  Standing up, on one leg and with the sea wind blasting through the hole in my head, I stumble down the empty promenade.  On nights like this I’ll break into a car and sleep on the backseat, because the wallpaper in my bedroom moves and makes me seasick.

 

Rotten Leaves

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Sitting in the woods on the bonnet of my car, the headlights illuminate a circle of trees and this is the stage.  Underneath me, the engine ticks itself quiet and smoke gently wafts from an overheated radiator.  I can smell wet trees, burned oil and dead wildlife.  A rustling and a snapping of twigs announces your arrival.  Swearing, you emerge from behind a curtain of ivy and it is showtime.

Your toe pokes out of your thigh high stockings and your white bra is covered in small brown circles where you stub out cigarettes on your breasts.  You dance and twirl around a thick puddle of soft mud, shards of bracken and the corpses of failed saplings.  The lace thong is perhaps an ambitious mistake – dark hairs curl around the gusset like trapped spiders.  But when you swing those hips, I am in a trance for weeks.

We usually fuck in fields of freshly cut grass to hide the smells; warm iron and bad breath, sweat and yellow fingernails.  But here in the woods, I ask you to climb onto me.  As you walk my way, your foot disappears down to the ankle in mud with a horribly graphic sucking noise.  You gasp with distain, pull your leg free and continue hobbling towards me with one brown, slimy boot.

Kneeling over my prone body, I feel the metal hood beneath us buckle and protest.  I grab a handful of your hair, flecked with pollen and little bugs.  The natural scents of the forest are replaced with cheap vodka and even cheaper roll-ups.  You kiss me with chapped lips and I feel my skin melting like pizza cheese onto yours.  We fuck so hard the lights go out… only later, as we cuddle ourselves into an amorphous gel, do I realise that the battery has died and we won’t be going home tonight.

Sync

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Stroking your arm, I navigate my fingers over the hairs and goosebumps, trying to read your thoughts like braille.  There are no clouds in this night sky, so we lie alone on the beach sharing our moment with 4 billion years of chemical reactions, and a trillion unknown worlds.  Next to us, the remains of a bonfire quietly hisses and crackles, like a grumpy child reluctantly getting into bed.

I can’t read your arm, but I feel your breathing quickening.  I stroke your cheek and check your racing pulse and this is all I need to know.  You stretch a leg out, one side pale against the night, the other textured with grey sand, a monolith sending out a signal to distant tribes.

….like a monolith sending out a signal to distant tribes.  I think it’s a good line but when I say it out loud you pinch my nipple hard enough that I feel my calf muscles tighten and my ears involuntarily twitch.  Too much?  I ask.  You don’t reply.

In the harbour, we can see the lights of an approaching ship.  A small boat, one of the local fishing tubs that go out from time to time.  The quiet of the night is interrupted by Dancing Queen by ABBA blaring out across the dark water.  As if embarrassed, the stars begin to go out.

As the boat draws nearer, we see a small group of men and women gathered around a large beer cooler.  One guy is standing on the prow with a girl, trying to reinact the scene from Titanic.  It’s a sweet moment, and I feel you nuzzle close to me, until he downs a can, throws it high into the air and shouts BRING US YOUR RUM AND WHORES. 

The boat putt-putt-putts away past the breakwaters, to the sound of cackling.  I look up and say aloud; it’s safe to come out now.  You turn and look at me confused, but one by one the stars reappear above us.

 

Tangerine Eyes

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I’m always nervous when she is in a good mood.  She draws too much attention to herself.  And us.  I’m standing next to her but a few paces apart.  I can see a tree, and I can see her former boyfriend hanging from the tree by his wrists.  She’s wrapping herself back up in a deep, dark coat covering up the black lingerie she wore to entice this fool.  And then, with one ridiculous heel braced against the oil drum, she kicks it away and This Boy dangles like a trouserless pinata…. his dick already beginning to tumble in panic like a demolished tower block.

She has a knife in her pocket and it’s already out.  This is both good and bad.  If she shows the blade early it means The Boy will almost certainly return home with the rest of him, but on the flip side she is in the mood for fun.  And any second now a passing dog walker is going to stroll past and start asking questions.  And I have my own blade, hidden and considerably sharper than hers, to deal with intrusions.

Whilst they – whilst she – talks, I sit down on a nearby rock, like a grey island amidst the thistles and weeds.  The wind hisses and waves through the grass that seems to charge in unison towards this weird public execution.  There’s dog shit on my shoes, my jeans, under my armpits and behind my ears.  It’s been an odd day.

I should get out of this.  I tell myself every day.  But within her sphere life isn’t boring and sex is dangerous.  A sniff of her greasy hair flecked with pollen and dandruff and I’m hopeless.  To see her squatting, shitting in a field is divine.  People may laugh, but then they end up like This Boy.  Kicking and fretting about the loss of his insignificant sexual vegetables.

Her eyes are orange, thin black pupils over a pair of deep autumn suns.  She always has plans… and strategies and I wonder if she shouldn’t be in the military, or as a modern day Boudicca, riding a tank into a warzone with a sword in the air and a pair of goggles to protect from the diesel smoke.

It always begins like this; we’re going to do something nice and normal, like go and get pizza from Earl the street vendor, but we ‘happen’ to meet up with her ex; and for a while we sit and we eat pizza and she tells us stories about each other and our failings, and I haven’t even asked why a black trenchcoat in June?; and then she suggests a walk out to the fields and beyond to the wasteland, and by now I’m trying to mouth to her ex that this is a bad idea; but he’s cock of the walk right now, especially when she turns to me and tells me to fuck off but with a knowing wink that he cannot see; so I do go away to give her the five or ten minutes she needs to string up this silly boy and prepare him for the entertainment…

…and as I’m walking away, knowing I will return soon I think, there she goes again with those flawless Tangerine Eyes.