Clutter

Clutter like dark leaves, or plastic moulding,
Or leather balls painted fragrant pink,
Bright varnish, glossy emulsion, scarlet lips.
Clutter like silken paper, fast photography,
Plastic masks, fragrance of dildos and boxing gloves,
Bleak lettering, garish type, and clutter of keyboards,
Clutter upon clutter.
Clutter everywhere, clutter is iron railings, cheap overcoats,
Cigar-butts, blue cars, broken machines.
And clutter is a symptom of the broken machine.
Of perfume, of silk, of dribbling nose, of the permanence
Of manly shavings and afterdaubings,
Either that or the slobbing belly under chaffing lycra,
The ozone stiffness, the video screen, and mascara hatred,
And tearing grey, and fashion crucified like string.
Formed from steel into a nine, a cynical, inhuman nine,
That boxed-in glamour puppets sing in cages,
Pressed like silk in fashion tombs of sex.
Clutter of sex, of flattened bellies, blazing eyes,
A solid, definite splat of ghostly semen,
A meaningless aim achieved.
Clutter of Love laughed at by red-faced ghosts, sunburned
By greed and fashion's lust, spurn the earth and grin
Like death in stained-glass window hate.
Laughing like clutter.

Star of Hope

As I stare at the wreckage of my life,

The fractured nights and days of strife,

The promises broken into frozen parts,

And love that yearns in fits and starts-

Lists of ambition dead as stone,

Unseemly dreams uncouthly blown,

And over all a clinging swathe

Of loneliness and bitter waste...

I see arise, as from afar

The figure of a fiery star,

That from this morass rises free

And clothes itself in seeming purity.

And that I call a hellish paradise

Is where this Star of Hope has fullest life.

The star of acid, star of cutting spite!

Whose hatred will illuminate my night-

And sorrow raised to such a pitch shall be

The friend of subtlest sanctity-

The star of joy and dull despair

Enmixed, can burn full bright and fair

Enough to burn the eyes of they

That cherish all the fullest day.

No, I have hidden from the sun,

And if that night is to be borne,

A Star of Hope must lighten me;

Like to the light that shepherds watch,

From Christmas to Epiphany.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.

It is not without interest that your currency has become debased.
What we formerly cast down as tyranny we resurrect, even exalt, out of a sort of cheap nostalgia for the blandness of safety. The flag of surrender is the flag of your banality.
Even the voice of heaven would not move you, nor the chants of the free nations moving under clean skies, never cursing life as you are bound to do.
Slaves, they dared to call us.

Your principles are a hollow bell struck without feeling.
We who adhere to a total revolution, a rebellion of the spirit, the affirmation of the third millennium, need no justifications.

Side effects

From a tenement flat dancing mardi gras girls out on the corner. As seen in times square. It's a corner installation, to tempt the passers-by into the show, hand out flyers. More often it puts the pedestrians off, alienates them, they look confused. An enforced feeling of festivity in the mardi gras girl who takes up her stance on the corner, her shift commencing. The Burlesque Dance. Arching her back she flings out her arms the glitter like sweat on her bare skin, her smallish breasts pushed out.
Unable to come. The drain that comes from the cock, from the base of the balls, from the bladder, the liquid waste products dispensed with; the small relief, exquisite and spreading like an opium haze, relaxes the muscles. So when you are unable to come you are unable to relax.
Meanwhile the hoped-for orgasm relief becomes an impossible-to-reach pinnacle, a spice that has lost its appeal; the relief lasts a second, the point at which the peak is reached is no longer sharp but has become dulled through over-familiarity, and the cum is followed by a white noise opium numbness, a void flooded by a vast metaphysical question without an answer.

The Flat

I have taken ownership of a flat in some distant part of town.
I visit there at dusk expecting to find the place empty. No place I have ever seen before. It's up a flight of steps, large, white, cubish walls, floor-plan is vaguely L-shaped. A feeling of repose or desolation. Reminds me of a bunker or an Arab sort of house. Worse, it has an atmosphere of Oakley.
Inside the rooms are dark. I come to a room at the back, to my left. In here is a bedroom which I want to enter, if only to walk around it, get the feel of it, have the pleasure of solitude in a backroom in a distant flat. The feeling being: No-one knows I'm here, repose, reflection...
Inside are a few beds with piles of cheap unruly blankets thrown carelessly over them. Again, the Oakley atmosphere of bareness and desolation. I see though that in the shadows a figure is lying asleep, at full stretch under the ragged blankets. It's Joe, who it seems has beaten me to it, come hours earlier with a similar intent and stolen my refuge of reflection, repose, and thought...
I close the door softly and head for the adjoining back door. I press the handle softly and the latch gives way. Door is of light white-painted wood. A flimsy back door and there are no keys to lock it.
I emerge onto the back green, strangely soft and reflective. Nearby a dank closemouth. I see, very realistic, the opposite end of the stairwell, choked with litter, the neglected grass. My breath comes out in smoke.
The feeling is merely of reflection, not sadness or hope. I reflect that now I can go to mum's but soon all that may be over... My place may as well be here. No particular bad feelings associated with this. Contemplative, philosophic. No despair.
The painful feeling though is one of distance, an empty space between me and the centre. And then, the crumbling blank-white interior walls.

Florida 2

O Florida! You are florid indeed, but I want no swamps, no humidity, no poison flowers. I only want green lawns and golf clubs in summer, sun-slanted hills clad in endless green scarcely different from old Eire. Great tropics, slants and the drip-drop of plants, another Antipodes.
The green lawns, the smooth hills. Pastoral golf-courses where old men play, in clean polo shirts and grim gopher expression.
O Florida, naked peninsula, sorrow of Spaniards, hothouse of the world, bottleneck, human-ruined Paradise! Who dares slant its sun across you from on high, marking the linebacks, punishing alligators, in a mild and commonplace day? And I wish I could escape into the hills, the swamps, the trees, go forth there and make great loves in the fenlands and forest, the surf and sunshine.

I was attached to a suburban golf club. It was a reputable place, mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, so I felt rather out of place, being neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant, and only incidentally caucasoid. Perhaps I should explain myself: I am a hipster, a college boy, a gen x phantom of cigarettes and T-shirts. I like sneakers, fagpackets, and am lackadaisical about my hairdos. I frequently have a goatee in the style of Butch Vig, and a comparable expression of boredom. My hair at times grows scraggily long, at which times I push it behind my ears. I am the "slacker" but am too cool to call myself any such thing. I only mumble cursewords in answer to any queries about my job description. I am far too postmodern to have subcultural affiliations. But I have a nice line in ironic nostalgia.

How then did I come to be in this golf course cum park, this Flordia concourse, sun-splashed and genteel? I'm not gonna tell you. It's not important to the fundamentals of the story. Perhaps you may perceive, dear readers, gentlemen and ladies, that I myself do not know the reason.

Cemetery Nightmare

Nightmare: In the oldest part of the cemetery reading the stones. I notice, as in real life, many of them refer directly to resurrection ("When I Rise" etc.). In the ivy'd stone wall marking off the old section is a large gap of "window". I puzzle about the function of this.
Peering inside I notice naive statuettes placed in a sort of shrine, but very neglected and decayed. One seems to represent the conventional Death the Reaper, cloaked, with a skeletal jury of his peers. It seems I am indicted and condemned and must give an account of myself to this court.
Now I am half-conscious and become aware of the darkness and silence of my room, in which I can see the skull face of Death as a hanging judge. How Do I Plead?
Wake up with an overwhelming feeling of sadness and fear.