An unfinished story about loving a girl

She was steaming like an air hostess, brown hair all fluttering in the propeller wind and the little men in yellow jackets running backwards and forwards and backwards again as if to keep her happy. But I could see she was not happy. She didn’t need anyone. She had herself, and she didn’t need to open her mouth to let out the anger and the fury because everything she had was locked up inside. The girl was very beautiful. Her eyes were blue and green all at the same time without meaning to be, and her hair crawled down her spine and curled around her shoulders like a python. Her cheeks were warm and brown and a few freckles rested quietly on her chin, a few around her nose. She flared her nostrils restlessly as though she were waiting in the terminal, plastic cup in hand just resting there, all silently against her hip. Her scarf was of cheap satin, pale blue, almost indigo, and had become tangled in her mass of dark hair, her other hand held a grey rucksack, the strap delicately slung between thumb and forefinger. She was not preparing for lift off. She was not even at the airport with me. I had seen her through the window of the car and fallen in love with her. She was waiting for a bus, not a man in a business suit with a black shoulder bag and freshly polished shoes, and her eyes screamed at me through the window of my taxi, as though the entirety of her soul was trying to break free. We had stopped at a set of traffic lights; there were road works up ahead and small men in hard hats ran circles around the plastic bus shelter and prodded the pavement with metal sticks as though an earthquake was about to rip apart the surface of the Earth. And perhaps it was. She stood in a flood of private agony, her perfect face battling the morning breeze and legs all thin and jerky and a mile long at least. Her black coat swung out behind her in the wind like a magicians cloak and she dropped her bag by her feet to pull it back around her and seal herself inside its comforting embrace. I can’t remember exactly, but I think she was wearing thin grey slip-on shoes, and as she knelt to pick up her bag my eyes followed every movement, from pavement, up past shoes and ankles, with traffic darting between my eyes and hers, and her knees, and perfect thighs. Her shorts were denim, frayed at the bottom with a purple bruise shyly revealing itself at the hem. She slung the grey rucksack over her shoulder; it dangled there lifelessly for a second but was buffeted back by the wind. She struggled with the straps as they entwined themselves around her hand whilst wriggling to pull down her shorts to cover the fast approaching darkened flesh cloud. I could feel her struggling deep down inside me somewhere, I don’t know how or why. I wanted to get out of the taxi and pull the bag from her, throw the cup to the floor and hold her in my arms as though we were the last two people standing on a desolate wasteland at the end of the world. God, I could have kissed her. The fire in her eyes burned holes through my skin and I grew hot inside the cab, trying to remove a cardigan from around my shoulders without losing eye contact. Was it me she needed at that moment? Why such fear, such fury when all around her were the daily obstacles of life which, over time, we have all grown used to and can ignore.

What are we gonna do?

Sit in dark rooms, drinking red wine out of mugs, and writing books about the disintegration of human communication, and staring absent mindedly out of dusty windows and spending hours tying shoelaces in perfect bows, and photographing birds on telephone wires, taking long hot baths and cold showers, staying silent in public, and writing all thoughts down on paper

Yellow Bath Water

I searched for images of death for so long, but then I realised that only I could know what death really meant, what death meant to me, and why it was impossible to find a representation within a photograph. Why is it so fucking impossible, and why is it that every time my blind eyes stumble upon a likeness, I must look back to confirm if it is correct - if it is true -, and by this point the likeness is so unbearable that I must confine myself to bed sheets and darkness and cry like a baby. For it is only the taste of tears that I enjoy; the salt, the sad wound that seeps life blood from the circulating system, and pushes the feelings out of the pores into my lap, and when my lap is soaked through with the ocean water, I must change my trousers in the half light and continue. When my father reads the poems, he complains that they always have to end in death;, why don’t you just leave it at that, there’s no need for the moral suicides, but I cannot help myself, it is the undiscovered country, and we all want to know, and we can’t. Perhaps, when someone dies, a star fades out and dies too. Perhaps it drops from the sky in a sombre downwards leap of faith. It is so difficult to describe, and yet I still force myself not to cry in public. Those days which bring nothing but the bland and the ordinary, the conventional everyday doom and gloom whose course we all must follow, and cannot swerve away from, they surround us and pull us down with them, down into those murky black corridors, leading to endless black staircases where blackbirds gather to take their first flight and die from fear of height before they have even left the ground. Those scratched surfaces along which I ran my fingernails, stunted growth, will remind me of that childhood which ended in a forced groan of anger, pushed from dizzying heights into my young freckled face, and made me lie face down on the bathroom floor for hours until the pattern of the lino forced its way onto my left cheek. And it is with some fondness that I recollect those few, jumbled moments of ecstasy, but to be only a child and not remember fully her face, her hair, her voice; it leaves me with such hot red agony in my gut, and however much I bring photographs so close to my face that they blur and make cross shapes, I cannot escape the fact that I never got the chance to say good bye. When you are young you do not understand consequence - the wild, crazy devil runs laps of the running track around your head -, and you care not for the outcome. We could jump off corrugated tin roofs; we could climb rope ladders into the oak tree, whose pinnacle, from the ground looked higher than Everest, but still we were not afraid. But now I must face the ordinary. The inability to move forwards without a limb or two remaining under the wet earth with you grabs me with huge boxing glove hands, pummelling me like a cotton doll, smashing out the eyes, tugging at the stringy hair and the knitted dress. So dark was that afternoon when they told me you had left without anyone being there apart from the white clad nurses and spectacled science boys with clipboards and heavy hearts, wishing that they hadn’t gone to university to learn how to save lives, because when they don’t, it forces their insides through an office paper shredder. Dying alone, is that what we are all so scared of? I would rather die alone. I think that I would inject myself with all of the rare and glutinous substances in glass bottles in the ward, and lock the door, and pop the question; we must all take this route, but will it be the scenic one? and curl up into myself and imagine that I was eight years old again, compressed into a ball in that pile of brown leaves under that same sky.

Little Bodies

i tried to write a haiku, but it spilled over into something else


shrunk into delight
i watch with eyes in mirror,
you comb my wet hair

in city sleepers,
silent cabinets echo
your name: johanna

cold hands and bathtime
towel turban. keep us warm -
soft drips on shoulders

outside the window
night erodes the garden, with
plushy yellow moon

not even the tap
is heard. midnight air chills us
to the very core

of being. damp cheeks
burn with cold; i hear the siren,
the rugged tyres

diesel bomb drops loud;
explodes. squeeze shut the exit.
exit wound, quiet death

Fuck

The sex was good.

Not 'special', as such, but all molten heat and both pouring out sweat and wild wolf screams; enough to set the morning on fire. A few minutes in, a power cut. It was just getting light outside, I heard a bulb blow downstairs, shards of glass rattling on the laminate. Milk man Recyling van all doing their duties, serving the people; the single mothers, porridge on spoon, the old ladies, fumbling for their eyes as the alarm clock resounds through papery walls, the dog walkers, the selfish reversing lorry siren, the paper boy, the girl he sees through the window and falls in love with.

We lie silent. Breathless. Not a sound and I can see her heart raising up and pushing out the skin towards the ceiling.

Family Tea

is there not a battle left to win? for all of those girls and for those boys who hate their mummys and daddys and want to throw rocks, smash glass, scream louder louder LOUDER until grandma's best blue vase breaks into four china segments on the kitchen tiles. for all of those babies in baskets which the stork dropped 'cause he got distracted by television, chip shops, the gambling man, the hot weather cloud, society, certain death. such lack of concentration, no ability, petty quarrels and flying plates hit wall hit ceiling. mankind; the adults are squashed - byebyeoxygen - beneath the giant hand of inevitabilty that floods their ears and nostrils while we, so young and free fly up (through the bulldozed brick piles, black sweat tarmac, hot shovels, detritus flakes littering the burned up patio) and burst out into earth like sweet wallflowers, into the warm july breeze to scream back at your taunts, you parents; why the lies? if i eat this carrot my eyes will not become torches, there is not a blackcloakedpaedophile under my bed, if i go cross eyed the wind will not grapple with my pupils until they stay that way. why did you tell us that you were always right? that we we were always wrong? that we should always listen. when i break out of our already broken household - because daddy walked out (said he fell in love with a nice blonde girl) and left mummy on her own with big tears, just some really informative sciencebooks, and nine year old with falling out hair; leukaemia bruises up and down legs - i am so free. i love the night air, the solitude, the gravel and the dirt rolling down my back under my t-shirt, the cigarette breath making smokeclouds and ghost shapes out my mouth, the flickery streetlamp, the empty road, the empty pavement, the no oneness. it is here; in this moment i detest mankind

Stuhl des Krieges

and i guess that where the armchair rests, fire on fire, blood on lips of the beholder we shake so silently, watching, the murk and dust that slides into the damp fissures, escalating all quiet and solemn; n o b o d y s i t s h e r e a n y m o r e and i hate it and i scream at my armchair and at my white blank and staringeyes living room walls with the ivy ivy ivy all stuck to the walls with its glue green fingers; God help me i scream, but i do not like the Maker, 'cause he is so wrong wrong wrong and people are dying up and down and in water and dust-on-face malice weapons that crack alive the dry yellow morning sky, why can it not be me with gunshots in my brain and tumorous absyss' - a hole of death for those alive to rot? oh gently - and army coat smothered in mucus and filth and sloppy tears and pain and squeals from the craggy rock edges as the next hit little boy, (only gone to do his daddy proud) is launched like an
elastic thunderbolt
into extinction,
and all i can do is stand and scream FUCK at my red armchair, it's legs all knotted twists of pine, hot brown toastlike coloured, almost edible. why do they get ripped apart at the seams, fucked for following their dreams? brady with the buttoned up/down shirt, pale blue stripe and black plimsolls used to sit on my red armchair on sundays, drink my firehot tea from the mug with the rainbow on but now he is dead in dust all alone and that's all i can say