Dreg Creatures
"One for the road, Lou."
fl oz.
20. At the bottom of the glass, at the end of the night when the clock strikes back
19. idle dregs reveal the character below a sombre face, swirling, gritty, real
18. and hands clutch the slowly sifting hours.
17. Comes now a quiet, stark
16. against a preceding chorus of vigour and mutual strength.
15. Taste echoes back and forth between tongue and teeth.
14. Murmured words unravel carefully / dregs uncurl
13. and fashion themselves a body
12. (nocturnal with fins)
11. In order that they commence the shortest life, finish to start.
10. Each measure of drink consumed synonymous with the years back,
9. a gulp = a year, a journey through the overflow
8. and conclusively, to the beginning; reached at the turning from night to day
7. (before the norm is set and boundaries are drawn)
6. the words of the meaning, of the initial intention
5. transcend the limitations of the glass
4. almost accidentally.
3. And in this given interval, although short-lived,
2. the dregs swim and marble across a face,
1. their characters lovingly, and perfectly, distilled.
The Empowered Room
The room lay in chaotic splendor. Half-books stood on half-shelves while others lay beneath, kissing fervently the stiffened carpet. Cupboards squatted agape as a mouth of half-chewed lasagne anticipates the next mouthful despite its forgotten first. Shoes dribbled their laces lazily over one-another, hummus mixed its self with wine and wine with particles of mushroom risotto, of which the crockery glinted sagely from beneath the bed.
A finger, as I humbly discovered, on a surface dipped instead through a double sandwich of cheesy grease and peppered grit; (while at the edges like old and congealed water over a dam in the heat of day it began a stately dripping, beneath as I peeped creating an eruption of small stalagmites and a shivering sheath of taut web-hair).
More than the stagnant oppression of the air upon which was borne infectious life was drawn into my lungs the room’s sense of prolific autonomy. A gaze about (a tourist, when abducted to an alien spacecraft raises its camera to its eye in passive self-perpetuating incomprehension).
The room beget a state of brooding intensity, and in response to my regard drew tears as if to beg my eyes’ their cleansing. It was superb. It was life beginning.
The Man with a Magic Pulse
It was a pulse, said the sad man in the party shop who bent over the counter towards use confidingly and grasping two cocktail sticks, a matter of concentrating the rhythm of the heartbeat to where the two sticks lightly connected - and then letting the blood attempt to use the sticks as an invisible vein for the pulse of blood between his hands. We all nodded because we didn’t understand what he was saying but we really wanted him to show us the magic trick. First the man held the one cocktail stick lightly and then placed the other as a bridge between his right hand and the other stick. There was a silence where we all watched and waited, then it happened. The stick in his right hand gave an involuntary twitch. Unsure of what I had just seen, I moved closer. We waited with pent breath. The stick twitched again - except it twitched so hard this time that it flew into the air and landed on the counter. Do it again! We said in wonder. How did you do that? He’s moving the stick. We tried to dismiss this obviously impossible situation. But no, he said – watch closer, am I moving my hands at all? We all leaned forwards, I had my face right up close, our eyes were watering because we were trying not to blink in case we missed it the trick. There! The stick twitched – and his hand and all his fingers were absolutely still! How did you do that? We all exclaimed in amazement. Teach us how to do that! The man grinned mysteriously and said that it took a long time to train your body and your mind to do something like that. He had been lucky enough to learn his magic from a wise and powerful woman who was now dead. A woman named Helena. Helena of the Forest. You girls won’t probably be able to find her now because she is dead, but perhaps if you are as lucky as me you might see her spirit sometimes moving about the golden forest beyond church walk, flitting idly between the sunlit stripes on the forest floor. She might even stop, if she has taken a liking to you, and whisper the secret of the pulse. But I doubt it! he said, gravely . And besides, you girls look like you don’t have the patience and diligence required to practice old magics such as these. Oh we do, we do! We chorused. We do, oh please teach us!
Oh, I can’t. Said the man simply. Then he winked at us. Now be on your way young ladies – here. He placed the two cocktail sticks carefully into my hand and smiled sadly. Take these to her and say they are from Paul of Clovenheart, you never know, she might let you in on the secret of the pulse.
In the face of uncertainty
Its coming, you know.
Now is the time to be wise. Now is the only time to be wise.
I will get there, eventually, its definitely coming
and if it starts in a place that i don’t understand
it ends in a place i didn’t expect. and its a woah and not a why
So if this makes a whole lot of chaos in your mind
me too. I don’t get it.
So i’m gonna hold it right there until it comes back around for me. Just keep holding it there suspended
unknowingly uncertainly unashamedly
The Place Where I Left A Thought
There
I resurfaced, roaring
and eyes wide to the burning sun.
A cry to life; a first crashing breath.
Bubbling blood shudder
-escapes to out.
I scarred the ground where I stood,
the air around me traumatised
by my breath.
Today I can see
outside to that place, a paler shade than before
and birds are gathering there.
You say to me
that you see the birds.
But I know they are feasting.
A delighted mass of ravenous feathers
scavenging, preening and cleaning away
Through the pain of glass I am thinking that soon
that place I was
will be bird excrement somewhere else.
Soft
Hello
I 'soft
Walking slow
Soft.
And rigidly set in this soft set.
Rich and colorless in the same sense
Melting softly soft
Soft.
I pure
Pace free
Toffee soft and
Malleable, not rigid
And face away, I born again
Without troubles and empty purse
And always soft, I free
From me
Non Sequitur to a Protagonist 's Question-Dominoes
Is it a coincidence that I am not a man? I thought it was sugar that made it spin. Spinney of the ships great waves and bounding miles of this. In between my fingers and around my nails. Through my ears and along my tail. Out and in and up and down up, up and down side ways left right, right.
This was what I thought anyway, that it was untrue. I whispered my untruths for my ears, and for my fiendish armpits as they wriggled in their yellowing mirth. Then as they began again I snatched up my sword and snicker-snacked the venom shit, cleaving it in two.
Audience to the Nightingale Bird
Look at the people
over there, all standing still.
With their heads low staring inward, bodies tense and poised.
What do they do, the people, the figurines? In the moon shadow under the cast iron tree?
They listen for the nightingale’s song, it comes.
Listen online, I say. Go to bed.
Striking of a wet match. They stare inward to the soundless night.
I listen too in sodden socks:
Nothing - and then
There it is. The figures awake.
Heads raise up rapturously, eyes approach the world, bodies’ stance loosen.
Each metallic note happens at the time it is heard, the people are present
until the nightingale bird finishes its melody
Silence descends once more binding resonant memory with future anticipation
And bodies are mercilessly caught and bound in between
Loyal and helpless as promised lovers
And still once more
to bed, I say, this is a bore!
A thud of a stone in a bed of rock’s echo in a man
A stone as big as the man twenty times, like a tree surgeon hanging in the embrace of a gigantic oak.
Soft wooden beads on a necklace hangs about the neck of a grouchy stonemason and clinks rhythmically by his chin in aesthetic council of his age-old jowls. He mutters from between the object and the mouth: I see the crack here will travel to … here. And from here to …
Mouth mutters recede to mental mutters as the task for him relinquishes the use of his ears and tongue and his words are no longer sufficient for his connectedness to the rock.
Solid and thickened skin against the soft stone presses. He taps a metal implement to the surface and reaches for what he knows to listen for, he taps again, eyes closed as he hears the tracery of an infinitely delicate music unfolding beneath his palm. A static rhythm in code, a language both naïve and old.
Through the rock’s lines of sediment the man hears the telling of the stories, the lines inevitably travel from the rock through to the aged lines written deep into his pressing hand and into his wrinkled skin in his face where his closed eyes begin to reveal the stone’s ancient make-up.
A moment passes and the rock in part is the stonemason, momentarily enveloped, absorbed, the man, as a man, is gone.
Upon opening his eyes, the rock’s age disappears from his face and by contrast the man looks new born.
Reading a Cave to a Room
I address myself, and through myself,
I address this ground, these walls and this light
I address the air and the sounds and the smells
I address this room. I draw this space into my words.
These words, seen in the dark and spoken with silence,
are less of everything.
So that when I read to you, my constructed friend, my friend of many births, experiences and no judgement, you know it’s not that I have been there, but that I am there as I read. As you will be also…
Outside circling inwards:
Hand on wet walls slide -
floor to ceiling / ceiling to floor
A seamless transition.
Balancing on our feet, balancing in void/is void.
Utter, utter blackness
Unfaltering, unyielding silence
Inside. At last.
From the surface, ten-thousand feet/
or one-hundred feet/ or ten
because Here
it is the same.
Here
are the forest roots gathered for communion in hungry debate of the world above.
Here
the food chain assembles its course to upward stomachs. A great and marvellous kitchen expands
against the pulse of my palms.
Here
are born the monsters of dreams.
Three people meet deep beneath the earth
Where the roots of gigantic trees stroke languidly at the tops of their heads
while at daring angles, the walls make cut and jagged scoops to a makeshift floor.
A writer, a physicist and a ghost.
The writer reaches a finger and brushes the tip of a dangling root and proclaims a beginning is at their feet, and at the bottom of the food chain the passage of energy circulating in the damp earthy halls and chambers here is so minute it seems to us to be entirely still. We are like earthy gods, says the writer, like chefs of a great kitchen feeding the world above. Live seeds, we are sown. The writer stretches out a hand and lets the roots tickle on the palm.
Of seclusion and wealth, of people and their skin…
Digging, writing, the ink in black: now a sensation, a gesture. Coursing up fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder and to my back. Here I am to the solid earth a voice again a gesture, a vibration. A stirring of the earth.
A slow deathly water. Deeper than currents or tides to where live the creatures unimaginable, and the colors unfathomable in a murkiness so pure as to breach the boundaries of each sense and merging them to a conscious perception of being. The sensation, the wetness of my own voice as moist earth on my tongue. The sound of the black when I stare so hard I feel as if I stare all the way back at myself, it’s like a soft buzzing, that turns into a note, a high note, with my body a thrumming instrument of ferocious enveloping noise. An accompaniment in its constant workings, whirrings, tickings, thumpings.
The water-worm and the space-fish, the jellyfish-mole (casting its own luminescent light to its small ghostly eyeless body, clawing stingers throbbing, pulsating onward. each hair on its little body a micro-torch in a translucent rolling rings of light. Like a flickering of a dim malfunctioning screen, quick rolls of light between dimmer colors in a static noise, or a blinking light when you turn it on). Thick, heavy water in a sea teaming with forms of alien life, isolated and unaware of their peers.
Ideas of grandeur, romanticism. Says the physicist, we are here in a room. Why, there are rooms coming and going in the world. Some so quickly we see only the result of such a room, others are so big that we see only a minute fraction of them our whole life. The physicist thinks for a moment, carefully filtering thoughts into words. Room between my lips for example, when I talk - or room in my eyes as in the darkness my pupils dilate. A room is a bubble of gas within a solid, and a bubble of gas can transform, or move, but it can’t disappear. While we are here, we change the layout of the cave and disrupt the natural order of substances below ground level.
Order? Says the ghost. There is not natural order to things. You both speak of what is not here, not what we can smell or touch or see, and you both speak so surely. Do I change the layout of the cave? What is real, what is for certain down at these depths? Silence meets for a length of time that seems to pass between small bursts of crumbling soil from above. Are we three people here, or one person with conflicting thoughts? What separates us here? I think I am more real than you, a series of postulations, theories and stories… What is real at these depths?