Butterfly

Butterflew piebald and wry,
A ship’s skeleton,
Beached,
Charcoaled ribs with no ghost of a sail,
Heads bowed stern,
As we all pass by.

The Dream

I dreamt that you were dreaming of me:
We chased and treed the four winds and left them knotted,
Quivering and breathless against the trunk.
You had called to them,
Enticing arms stretched, inviting sly fingers rubbed like lips,
An enbowed beak,
And down they had slid.

I laughed and you cried; then we set them free.

Ellie at the Bank

Ellie stands in line.
She reaches into The Pocket of Secrets. All jeans have one, and although someone once told her that it was for keys or coins, she has always known that it was for small treasures. She uses hers to transport the unusual pebbles she finds. When the jeans are washed, she leaves telephone numbers and memos inside, rolled tight like a carrier-pigeon’s charge. Hot-legged from the dryer, she unfurls the scrolled messages like pirate maps, the edges worn and the ink faded but, with luck, the treasure still marked. She has missed many meetings and potential relationships to this testing ground.

Today, The Pocket contains: a plectrum (with a nugget of Blu-Tack cuddling one side), an origami x-wing crushed beyond all reverse-engineering, and a vague square of folded paper containing her bank details. She shuffles an index finger around, stew-swirling the contents and further damaging the x-wing (unknown to her, a tiny paper R2 is now lodged, bleating, under her nail) and fish-hooks the plectrum to the light. We think… yes, it’s the Blu-Tack she’s after, scraping a pea into her hand; a palmed pearl.

The queue edges forward, a laconic worm-ripple. Ellie extends a leg and traces an arc in front of her with a big-toe-stretch, yet remains in place. This annoys the people behind her, but we can tell that she is used to this – there is a space created that must be filled, but remains empty. Is she crazy? they think. Why isn’t she filling the zone? The empty area agitates the rear-queuers, as if someone might leap into the bank, balaclava-clad, and steal that lacuna, the place that is theirs, that is promised to them.

A robot proclaims: ” Cashier number four please” and the queue shuffles forward.
Ellie glides along. To leave a two-person-shaped gap might cause some violence, society is not yet ready for such a direct absurdity. But she has won one. One region. One locale. She steels her back to the pressing rear-queuer behind… she protects that emptiness from the strabismic limping of these drones.

“Cashier number two please” intones the lady-bot.
Ellie approaches, the back of a ‘paying-in’ slip already defaced, the Blu-Tack pea readied in her right hand like a sling-shot, we know that eventually, she will palm-knead it onto the cashier’s window, but what has she written? Can you see?

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Ellie goes to the bank.

Here, Ellie leaves the house. Note the paused half-turn on the sill: face bowed, reflective; eyes tight and white-knuckled like sharp fists as she reviews The List of Forgotten Things. Confident, she shuts the door and makes two broad strides towards the gate before an abstract arrest sends her back inside, to emerge minutes later with an umbrella that, after a scouring of the local sky, is left lying inutile and limply pathetic against the porch wall.

In the street: Ellie walks delicately with a spread, lingering tread, long of stride and bent knee as if stepping over obstacles unseen. As if the street is a slippery kitchen lino, stretched and strewn with the toys of imaginary children. Further along she spies a dog-shit piled high, crusted and pat-a-caked like a christmas pudding, a shiny six-pence inside.

Ellie is going to The Bank .

Sick oh fancy that.

Click that link, yank that tag, follow the crumbs to another exercise in mutual congratubation: “Wonderful how you love the way you beautiful way you words the feelings the words that love the way… as ever!”

Hoy llamé a, casa abandonada.

If you’ll like me, I’ll like you, and agree to review the potpourri of mental debris that you spew with a gentle praise, sentimental and undue.

My moniker, caressed with a mouse whisker briskly depressed will confess my address: check my shit, press it. (quicker!)

I plunge my beak in, for some sneak peekin’:

Never an ill word heard.

Never a critique to speak of.

Never mind that it is drivel or makes no sense, like Elliott’s clever pretense, a collusion of narcissism keeps us riding the vanity manatee, splashing through the saccharine waves, protecting the Emperor from the elements.

De las paredes brotan arañas.

Poetry

I ought to know: fraught thoughts grow taut, chemically unsorted.

Maybe I should go;  leave, cleave the corded excess of murdered words from the sordid mess of crippled phrases that crazy out my brain stem.  But t… what clichès.

Perhaps if I

Arrange, and cook a sentence,

In tiny ways,

So the gaze falls on just,

A

Few, choice words,

A shiny maze,

The moist curds,

Between the warm turds,

This pretention,

Might disguise the lack of invention?

Thought not.

Two weeks without The Internet.

Deep inside an office block, between floors, within walls, stuffed in the offal of pipes and wires, in the parts that people never see, sits a wretch of a man. A Jonah amongst the dank dripping ducts and tubes that dribble a viscous disgust, he hunches over an antiquated keyboard muttering obscenities to himself, as prayers. Vile waves of putrid liquid lap at his ankles for attention as he skitters back and forth on an ancient office chair, the wheels squeal like long tortured souls. A red light blinks faintly beneath the layer of filth and dessicated insect cadavers that cover a cobwebbed monitor.  He brushes a lank cloying shank of hair across his greasy skull and laughs – a sickening gurgle bubbles up from his diseased lungs to escape like a high-rise gas leak. He reaches bone-white chop-stick fingers towards an wooden magenta switch marked “Internet” and clacks it to “Off”, coughing blood and mucus victoriously.

I wake.

I am in my room, floating at the ceiling. The instant I spy my body below I feel myself swimming down, sucked like food scraps down the plughole.

Shoom.

I open my eyes. All seems normal until I try to move. I cannot. I am a limbless torso, arms and legs shorn at shoulder and hip. My eyes bulge with terror like egg yolks in a hot pan, yet I cannot scream. I am mute and insensitive.

Days pass.

In my fever, I roll from my bed and face-plant the floor. I chin my way through the hair and skin and pizza droppings towards the telephone.

Days pass.

I wander between worlds, between fear and resignation, but manage to nose the word H.E.L.P into the telephone, and collapse into the irreal, a carrier bag once wafting loose now stamped flat.

Days pass.

I awake. I am in my room, this accursed cell, afoot ; stark and rigid like a storm-struck tree, sharp blackened limbs reaching frozenly, ossified finger-twigs remembering the double-click.

Flick your switch you wretch! I recognise your power… deliver me from this life-in-death!

Days pass.

I am the bumblebee that you step over, briefly shocked, on your way to work, left forgotten and robbed by the side of the road, trying to crawl, unable to find my way back to the hive.

Lives within the worlds within.

“Get it out of my brain!“

The man screamed and fell to the floor clawing at his head, fingers frantically digging as if trying to prise the back off of a TV remote.

“CUT!”

“Ok, nice job Clyde, everyone break for lunch! Anyone not back here in an hour and I’ll be cracking heads myself!”

The squat director trotted off towards the catering bus as the crew fiddled, seemingly busy turning off equipment or stowing cables, but if you looked closely, they weren’t really doing anything at all. Industriously indolent.

“Well, you nailed the take Clyde… I almost believed you had a brain in there.” – the woman tapped a long finger lightly on the man’s temple playfully, but her lips were serious.

“Haw haw. Thanks sweetie-pie. Our love scene’s coming up isn’t it? That might be a little more difficult to pull off.”

“Ha. Don’t kid yourself that you need any kind of acting chops for this grubby little schlock of a ‘movie’.” She mimed the quotes, her hands two wriggling rabbits ears.

“What, you don’t dig sci-fi?”

“Sci-fi yes, lo-fi pie-in-the-sky? Definitively no.”  She had a way of stressing certain syllables in words… an ironic, private joke she seemed to have with herself. He fucking loved it.

“C’mon, sure the script’s terrible, and the director’s a talentless  straight-to-dvd homunculus, ” – she smiled at this, and he felt connected, briefly – ” but it’s realistic. ” – now she snorted – ” We’ll see all this tech within twenty years.”

“Really? Brain based computer chips and whatever?” – she was teasing him, he knew.

” Sure. Not only is technology increasing, but the rate of increase is…” – he reached for a word – “… increasing too. Look at Kirk’s communicator. We had that within twenty years. “

” Yeah, but we’re not beaming anyone up anytime soon! Earth to Clyde!”

Clyde moved closer to her, slowly, and…

CLICK.

Dave turned the TV off. He’d seen this film before, the two actors inane wittering, the ‘will they wont they’ romance; boring. Besides, the sun was pouring a broad wave of photons through the living room window and onto the screen, a patina of light; he had barely been able see what was going on. The inactive TV stared at him now, a deformed eye, opaque with cataract.

Still, that guy in the film, Clive or whathaveyou, had been right. Technology marched relentlessly on, but gathering speed. Now it is at a jog, perhaps soon to break into a loping run. Not that long ago, Dave remembered, it had been walking languidly. He thought of the cassette tapes that now occupied a place of affectionate nostalgia with everyone of his generation: the days of taping the top 40 from the radio are long gone, that infant innocent piracy. That distinctive sound of the player mechanism clunking into gear, a time when one judged a stereo’s quality and sophistication by the creamy fluid flow of it’s ‘eject’ action. The tape, more often than occasionally, would ruck and crinkle, fold and concertina  in the cassette player, provoking a desperate lunge to ‘stop play’ and gently reel the entangled mess from the player heads. But to Dave this was a positive danger. Only yesterday he had heard a song on the radio, one that had once snapped in it’s tape recorded form and he had repaired with sellotape, and found himself expecting a break before the second chorus, a distorted backwards melange of sound like a secret missive from a Lynchian dwarf. The actual song was not as good as Dave’s remembered, altered version. Suddenly, the stark realisation of…

Smack

I palmed the book down onto the table with what I’ll describe to you as, petulance. All very clever, a book within the film etc. ad nauseam, but I just can’t be doing with it. Coincidentally, the sun is rampant outside, spraying radiation hither and thus. My windows too strain the subatomic soup and shower me with chucklesome amber light nuggets. I’d prefer that it were raining, the right to stay cosied and isolated, but as it is I am obliged to venture afuera, not least because of the constant climate complaints I’ve been venting for the past six months. Then there is the novelty value of just being able to walk around in the world without an Aesopean wind struggling to rid you of your garments… just to be able to say that you were there, once, in England, when the sun was out.

The door clicks, the latch catches.

Trotsky

Trotsky sat forward at the table perched like a starling, one fifth of his arse contacting the chair, absently eating his own face.

His visage permanently askew, lips puckered to the left then right as if air-kissing some imagined socialite, he had the habit of chewing the inside of his cheeks. He constantly rearranged his mouth’s interior, sometimes pushing with a distracted finger to give access to fresh grazing.

I imagined that I could hear the audible pop as another chunk of matter was bitten free. How long before he breaks through? Like a Château d’If prisoner patiently nibbling the cell wall with a spoon, anticipating that first glint of moonlight and freedom.

“What’s it got to do with you?” inquired Trotsky.

“Not much.” I conceded.