Eat Drink Grow

Can you see me dying? ‘Not quite’,
Said Mummy, ‘because it happens
Very slowly all the time -

Even when you are asleep.
We are breathing, dreaming
And dying, all the time’.

Somewhere

 

Those three angelics had all the lamps lit and were decked out in welcome. So he bade his officers sit beside him on the magic carpet, and they were at once carried here. At first the boys did nothing, too overwhelmed by the girls’ volubility. They talked so much, held so many opinions, and so on and so forth. It was being away from home, he said. It was the times. It was all this trouble with the war. I, however, have a different answer.

Somewhere.

Something pale and stooped was rounding the corner, or at least that’s how it seemed to them at the time. There was a pause. Eyes were cast downward. I keep thinking that I’m getting well, that I can get well. This night could be an epic film adapted from a so-so book, censored by a blind man. The boys behind him shouted with triumph when they recognised me.

Someone.

With the eyes, with the heat, with the message. I sat in front of them and wrapped my legs round my neck.

Better.

Something vermouth and glare in me wants to claw.

I Fear Nuffink

I fear there is no God. I know there is no God. I fear this. I fear I have no faith. I fear death. I fear love. I fear responsibility. I fear there is no one person I could love completely and for ever. I fear myself. I fear my body and brain. I fear my addictive nature and the way it tricks me. I fear my mood swings and my instability. I fear money. I fear poverty. I fear my anger. I fear ageing. I fear fat. I fear food. I fear relapse. I fear my perversity. I fear my sexuality. I fear I will not get what I fear I want. I fear what I want. I fear I will not get what I need, let alone want. I fear lonely drunken drugged-up defeat. I fear arthritis. I fear hip replacement. I fear ugliness and stupidity. I fear violence. I fear war. I fucky hate it when I can’t get through to you. I fear people I fear outerspace and The Klu Klux Klan and the gas chambers and murder and rape and Vikings on horseback who will slash my spine and pull out my lungs to make the sign of the eagle

I fear nothing will keep us safe under the ungodly glorious undiluted sun

NO LIMITS NO LAWS NO MERCY

NO HEART NO HEAD NO HEFT

NO WARP NO WEFT NO WARBLES

NO GUTS NO GUMPTION NO SCROTUM

NO STIFFY NO IFFY NO SAVVY

NO LOVE NO LEGS NO LAVVY

NO MORALS NO MARBLES NO DOSH

NO MINGE NO HINGE NO POSH

NO MALADY NO REMEDY NO LIES

NO GUNS NO LUNGS NO LIVER

NO PUNCH NO PRIMER NO PORNO

NO DOGS NO SMOKING NO ARTISTS

NO HELL NO HOLE NO HOODIES

NO LUCK NO THWACK NO WANKING

NO DRUGS NO OOMPH NO CULPRIT

NUFFINK NUFFINK NUFFINK

NADA NIRVANA > ZILCH

I fear your cold breath, angel

I fear inky blue fake

I fear yellow frayed

I fear soft choke pills

I’m riding backward on a pantomime donkey – aren’t I?

Stan’s Plans

You come home from work at 6pm. I give you a cup of tea and run your bath. I sit on the toilet and listen to your day. The sweat and sawdust swirl with the grey bubbles down the plughole. Your shoulders are turning to fat. Your face needs shaving. Wash your hair. I hand you a clean warm towel and rinse the bath with the shower attachment, the brass Victoriana one we bought in Camden Lock Market from that old geezer who promised it wouldn’t tarnish. I polish it with Brasso and a toothbrush. It takes two hours hard slog to make it shine.

You dry your blonde body efficiently. You’re tired now and shuffling to the wardrobe you ask me ‘What’s for dinner?’. I lean in the door frame watching you pulling on your navy loungers, an old T-shirt, slipping your feet into the moccasins I bought you for Christmas, when we didn’t bother with a tree, we decorated your double bass instead, and you rock n’ rolled in your new pyjamas, I took a photo, and I didn’t wear a party hat, I wore a top hat we found in the attic. The red velvet curtains were extravagantly long and the chaise longue shrieked – it was streaked – it was stained, Stan – with the dried crusts of your ex-live-in lover’s affairs.

I go in our kitchen, recently refurbished, all new appliances, I wipe them pristine for your mother’s inspections, she can never find fault but wonders what I do all day – ‘Reading and drawing? Yes, but what do you do?’.

I scrunch balls of mousse in my hair. I choose peacock-patterned wallpaper for the hallway. I buy fresh fish from the huts on the seafront. I drive to farms and buy game. I pedal furiously on my exercise bike. I tend the aspidistra. I am the passenger in your son’s stylish car. When he puts his foot down, I throw dice with the future. I look out at the allotments under the god-glorious diluted sun.

I wok vegetables.

You taught me how to cook, and all about nutrition, it’s still a novelty to me. No more fry-ups with lard, no more plain brown rice made to last for 3 days. To have cupboards full of foodstuffs and a fridge worth defrosting and fresh plastered walls painted any colour I fancy. You showed me how to put a king size cover on your king size feather duvet. I’d worked out my own system, using safety pins and swear words. Your way got it done with a twitch of the wrist, voila… you and your smooth moves.

When I rage and fly at you with fists clenched, you hold my arms at my sides and speak gently: ‘I know you could be in Vogue, but I will look after you, I will keep you safe. I pay the mortgage. I have a plan. I believe in the freedom of hard work, I believe in my TR6, I believe in you’.

When I lock myself in the walk-in cupboard housing your record collection, alphabetically from Blue Note to zzzz, only to get lost in a vinyl-smashing frenzy, you sweep the disaster aside, tutting, and sighing ‘Oh well’.

We sit opposite each other in your Decimus Burton flat, in your comfortable winged armchairs, with the Art Deco coffee table between us, you stopped smoking joints after dinner when I moved in because pot makes me paranoid and you are grateful for the bad habit broken. We ration ourselves to hiring a video only once or twice a week, because that’s another bad habit. I’m reading some novel, you’re reading Shogun, it’s the only book you’ve ever read. I told you not to be ashamed, you have lots of specialities and qualities I respect. I don’t want you to be like me. At 10pm you switch off the TV. I brush my teeth and you watch. I’m a good girl now. You are proud you rescued and transformed me. Took me to restaurants, dressed me expensively, introduced me to your tight-knit exclusive friends as a reformed character, all anomalies buffed away with the loofah, all that remains is the well-behaved, well-spoken contour, sipping white wine soda.

I take my temperature with a digital thermometer every morning, plot the results on a graph. To show my GP. He tells me I am not ovulating. I do this for 2 years. I am still not ovulating.

When we lay side by side in bed, the big bed under the small window set high in the sloping ceiling, I roll over to breathe in your ear, always hoping you’ll want to make love. It is remarkably unmoving, deft in the dark, a well-rehearsed routine. Even my fantasies stay unwaveringly the same on each occasion, and I wonder, do yours.

I attend life drawing classes once a week, fill a few sketchbooks, plot an escape in my diary. I go away to art college, and one day I never come back.

The poet who loved me only to sit down and bleat about it.

The painter who loved me only to stand up and daub.

The sculptor who had to see what shapes I made and what I was made of.

I make unstable shapes. I am made of power balls, Russian dolls, balls of string, feather boas, 3-headed dogs, nail clippers, cardboard cylinders, seashells, spiders.

At 11.30am, 10 years later, we bump in to each other in a supermarket, you tell me you’ve been diagnosed with melanoma, I tell you I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar.

I keep looking up at the far wall, expecting to see the door. I see sudden and lurid visions of you – under a cobwebbed ceiling, under a bare red light bulb, beside a cactus toppled with root rot, under an ugly moon, experimenting with our His and Hers entrails, syphoning acidic and alkaline fluids, patiently repairing the valves, retrieving 3ft long outcomes, cultivating the flora and fauna, engrossed in your dissections, forming retroactive safety plans from these cautiously conducted post-mortems.

Lungworm (It is Real)

At last you are here, an excellent unhealthy

do you desire paradise

come and wiggle, fat on dirt, in my moon-drenched kitchen

with the crown of the lily convulsed

belly-red to the melting, trenched in your skimpy skin

convulsed in the flesh, belly-blue

belly-blue to the fur

lily milk furled in the throat

exposed by the belly-white moon

 

show me the fleshy flowers, belly-red to the melting, trenched in your skimpy skin

show me the convulsions, belly-blue to the fur, milked on the moon-bleached tiles

milk bottled, full-throttled, for the choke of the throat

five fingers, full-facial, fur-coated

for the choke of the fur-throated girl

Itmight be said

she was in your head!

here and there were

flesh flame flowers!

you must remember

her rubberised thighs!

let it go on

her electrified eyes!

tell your children

Look! No face!

you formed wild theories

UFO!

here she began

Look! No hands!

behind the smile

her dry mouth!

you never understood

her double blag!

but she wanted it show me the dirt

you grew to believe some kind of dirt

 

She knew you for a dirt dude at first sight, bed-slugged in your spongy loam, you were perfectly adjusted to the acrimony, you lived between potash and ling, and the dirt girl in her liked it

showy cheapo lighter clutcher

paunched in your life-giving necro dirt

with the throat of the lily convulsed

woozy with soft suicide, stoking her flesh flame, you whispered:

‘it is real … everything is perfect and best i do freely’

she knew you’d said that same love tat to Junky Jenny and Creeping Fern

and the dirt girl in her liked it

She had super soda silting her pipes and gallons of basic slag flow, but still she begged you to hoof and horn her, so you let her have it, your full works, right between the eyes

10mls of the synthetic poppy syrup with the power sleep potential and your nitro-chalk crumbled artificials

’til she convulsed and wattled blue

dolloped like a floppy dolly

in the bindweed dirt dimension

and the dirt dude in you liked it

 

you nailed that hell doll to the paradise tree

sweet ‘art, it’s a pleasure

convulsed on the trunk, belly-blue

belly-blue nailed to the bark

exposed by the belly-white moon

 

under a car

she didn’t push you

into a coma

wasn’t her fault

open back surgery

she didn’t visit

epileptic fit

blood in your shit

memory loss

you forgot who she was

pale hairless legs propped useless below the bulge of your colostomy codpiece

numb feet wedged on the footrest of your wheelchair

see, she OD’d on your first date, but you die every day

and the dirt girl in her likes it

if you were ever alive, if she were ever dirt

or even a distant view of a hill

 

I see you

baring your vein to the drip

for the lube of the lungworm trip

I see what shape your mouth makes when you find the clarity to cry

it’s a perfect circle, drooling belly-blight

I hear what you gasp in love-tongue when you find the will to wank:

‘twa, duhr, uhn … fumer’

(after this, you like to sloosh the bile around in your mouth, in a cheek to cheek way)

I hear what you say in worm-tongue when you find the strength to speak:

‘surgical squirm, liturgical burn, willywormer, lungwormer, worm’

I see the worm that crawled up your arsehole

and bored a hole through your soul

it catapulted out your eyeball

(jelly flummery)

I see the same faces you see, intravenously

they shape you, ghosts of dirt

 

Give Thanks

for the intensity of comedy, the tragedy of driftwood, the death watch beetle keeping time, tapping in her spine

Give Thanks

for the plodding home quick on wooden feet, walking fast on carved wood legs, the black-notched silver birches, the copse, the avenue, the glade

Give Thanks

for the seeing tree, the hanging tree, the lightning tree, the family tree, the tree with a hiding-place under its roots and the tree-house made of wood

rose can’t remember, but the dirt does

Give Thanks

for the picture perfect garden, the wall you can climb over easy, the tidy path, the foxglove spill, the mother, the blamer, the uptight shamer, standing in a soapy puddle, froth on her best red mules, that glorious red hair alive on the breeze, those big wet hands pegging her flimsy smalls to the line strung between two trees and the pegs are made of wood

rose opens the gate, grabs the broom, swings for her mother’s red head

Thanks

mother swerves out the way and her bushy red hair-do jumps off her skull and leaps across the lawn, lands on the grass in a witchy heap – it’s a living hairy wig thing

mother’s head is a surprise boiled egg, and her mouth is a big red hole, shrieking

ROSE WOOD IS NO GOOD – CHOP HER UP FOR FIREWOOD

rose plants her feet in the dirt, up to her wooden ankles

places her hands on warm rough bark, leans against the paradise tree

GO ON, YOU DO THAT … IT WON’T KEEP YOU SAFE

that screecher, that bald old woman, that ain’t her real mother, anyway

rose is the wooden puppen doll, ideal reborn, oak baby and fairy clay

she treads heavy, crushes trees, all ungrows in her wake, flowers wilt and grow backwards, down deep where the worms shrink

she treads light, trails silver dew, all blooms before her, the belly-moon gloats from its oak tree cradle when she lifts her eyes

for she is the paradise, and the hell, and the wood in the dirt, and the tree on the hill, and the fossil, and the brain, and the sea, and the rain, and the hell in the doll, and the you in the me, and the sky and the sky and the sky and the sky and the last sigh is the longest and the flesh flame flowers know

if you were intact she would break you

 

consider it from so many various angles, it’s like men and women are not involved except it’s something to accomplish in paradise and hell

 

She is the lover hidden under your bed

she shits, spits and pisses diseases

hosts of angels will torch you

when you spread her rubberised thighs

her face will turn to dirt

when you look in her electrified eyes

Look! No soul!

she brings the thirst and you’ll slake it

she craves the beast and you’ll fake it

she will fuck you in your own personal hell

you’ve been there before, she can tell

she’ll wear the mask or the wig or the pleather

sweet ‘art, it’s a pleasure

her hell is the entrance to ache for

Look! No heart!

she is swallowing you, convulsed, in her mouth

is that what your hell tastes like

nasty but sublime

this knuckle-fuck suffocates time

sacred but profane

you’ll get choked up, again and again

is that what you want

your own stuffing

 

foxes turn to stone in the alley

how does real love happen

birds burst to flame in the sky

how does real love happen

get in the Safe and Sound position and you will say to yourself:

It is Real!

f

lesh flame flowers

flesh flame flowers

paradise fossils are free

Fail like Fire

Ghost Dolls

Paradise Tree

Paradise Fossils

Paradise Fossils Are Free

Reblogged from Games Perverts Play:

*

knows a girl red fog rose

butter dishy spider sweet

when she smile long bunch wilt

when she dance peach leaf streak

when she ride narcissus fly

spider wishy butter treat

leaves a trail of tulip fire

*

*

I love flowers and flames and insect blight

that’s what she said on her last night

is that what dirt feels like…

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