The weight of responsibility has been shifted; I’m left spinning like an avalanche of wheels. A loathsome 4 year bed of nails has been endured and now been reclaimed. But a bed nonetheless, and one I fear I seek to debase in exaggerated overtones. This was not tenacity’s work, nor grim determination, but fear of the failure and hence an instinctive grip onto my circumstance. I learnt to shift my weight to ease the pressure of the nails.
But now that is over, and yet I am more hopelessly lost than ever. No, I never lost my grip but my parapet has evaporated and into thin air I am cast after all, legs pedalling like a demented cyclist, fingers chasing elusive rungs.
I’m left in an overpriced cave of a room with a tiny window that hangs the sky in its portrait frame. I lie with the familiar acrid taste of having gone too far; outside the trees are alive with a riot of birdsong. My head hurts like bare feet on a pebble beach; my nerves are piano-wire taut.
I spend minutes or hours combing the shoreline of my memory, trying to locate detail from amongst the washed-up debris. I cling to odd fragments in an effort at stitching them into some kind of sense I can feel sure and ashamed of.
After several hours or maybe days, I start to wonder whether the world still remains beyond my postage stamp of sky. Maybe the world ended and in my sordid lethargy I missed the roll call, was unable to respond to my name on the register as civilisation lined up to be neatly packed away into storage. Maybe the world was silenced by an agitated voyeur flicking through video clips on some far-flung web channel.
Outside, the trees have limbered up from the ground and begun an improvised ballet on the tiptoes of their roots. The buildings have given up and laid down their weary concrete heads in sporadic retirement. Bridges and railway lines have started to rebel, bulging and contorting in a structural tsunami hundreds of miles in length.
Outside, still success is a top-shelf commodity, power still caressed and cajoled by lovers anxious should anyone receive more of a share than they. The hungry still long to be fed, the lonely still long for love, the righteous still believe they’re right. The mad still think they’re sane, the sane still think everyone but them has lost their minds.
And still here I am, alone and waiting for my name on that register, still waiting for that next comforting bed of nails to be delivered, because without there is only nothing. And I fear I have not the time to wait for nothing to fall back into favour.
Showing posts with label Experimental. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Experimental. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 June 2011
Friday, 8 April 2011
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Hold out your hands man, you’ll get kicked into line...
(This was written using the 'Cut-Up Technique' used to devasting effect throughout his career by William S. Burroughs)
We were getting ready to leave but the metallic din from my agitated housemates had started to drain down all my shoes and wallet, already ‘Metal Machine Music’ playing by L. Reed, glass of red wine and nearly enough pretensions for close to two days as
I really dunno what’s the matter with me now.
Been aurally violated, smashed and so in this way I spend the next 48 hours believing the different harmonic capabilities of a lethargic stupor as I mourn the subtle nuances of power tools and realise that money is tight but time is tighter.
Only impatient shouts permeate through before being spat out into the world moping and whining. Left eye still puffed up and sore from the time I had gotten so drunk that I’d stumbled around trying to beat the queue to the Union and feeling pretty fucked-off from that couple yet again. I’d been listening to a whole flask of gin whispers.
Sometimes other such avant-garde white noise sunk deep into a depressive malaise only shattered by a claw hammer. You wouldn’t flippantly waste precious time with this orchestra of pneumatic drills, 4 more months of student living, steel on steel. Check mirror reflection. Other night’s debauchery – characters and visions gestating.
Unable to take out my contact lens that refuses to freeze into settlement. I have been frantically clawing at my red raw half-baked lunacies based on some plastic film that had long since acquiesced to mass technologies and the alternative internet landscape.
I stagger down the stairs to a psychological destruction of humanity which is about to play out. There’s one of the great works, an example of who is supposedly out tonight but provides me with an escape route from this bad fucking idea to seek out career, a nice office job, taking on now without a fuck, and need to have started a pension plan, et cetera, et cetera, for future action looking quite promising just thinking about it all.
Predictable thing for me to go and do tonight is to get through, other than my head I will be curled up in foetal despair, with ideas and themes to get out, and for quite some time I stood there, my mind all flowing liquidity. Eye in search of that elusive piece of narrative or plot structure, fallen to the carpet just to spite me.
Virtual Coma Theory is about how to join the others, I’m unsure how tonight’s ‘cyber universe’ will precipitate this girl I’ve been making slow progress on. If tackled precisely it could be the state I’m in right now, it would be contemporary fiction in its finest chance meeting. Truth is, I’ve been months with the predictable horrors of forcing the groundwork here where the prospects and responsibilities for my own future would be frustrating and yet utterly fucking bored.
Ah well, in the meantime, distracted with ambitions of ‘writering’, a feeling that will come tomorrow, tugging my hair as the chaotic maelstrom of white noise coagulates with the hangover fog to batter and erode my senses and pride just like before.
We were getting ready to leave but the metallic din from my agitated housemates had started to drain down all my shoes and wallet, already ‘Metal Machine Music’ playing by L. Reed, glass of red wine and nearly enough pretensions for close to two days as
I really dunno what’s the matter with me now.
Been aurally violated, smashed and so in this way I spend the next 48 hours believing the different harmonic capabilities of a lethargic stupor as I mourn the subtle nuances of power tools and realise that money is tight but time is tighter.
Only impatient shouts permeate through before being spat out into the world moping and whining. Left eye still puffed up and sore from the time I had gotten so drunk that I’d stumbled around trying to beat the queue to the Union and feeling pretty fucked-off from that couple yet again. I’d been listening to a whole flask of gin whispers.
Sometimes other such avant-garde white noise sunk deep into a depressive malaise only shattered by a claw hammer. You wouldn’t flippantly waste precious time with this orchestra of pneumatic drills, 4 more months of student living, steel on steel. Check mirror reflection. Other night’s debauchery – characters and visions gestating.
Unable to take out my contact lens that refuses to freeze into settlement. I have been frantically clawing at my red raw half-baked lunacies based on some plastic film that had long since acquiesced to mass technologies and the alternative internet landscape.
I stagger down the stairs to a psychological destruction of humanity which is about to play out. There’s one of the great works, an example of who is supposedly out tonight but provides me with an escape route from this bad fucking idea to seek out career, a nice office job, taking on now without a fuck, and need to have started a pension plan, et cetera, et cetera, for future action looking quite promising just thinking about it all.
Predictable thing for me to go and do tonight is to get through, other than my head I will be curled up in foetal despair, with ideas and themes to get out, and for quite some time I stood there, my mind all flowing liquidity. Eye in search of that elusive piece of narrative or plot structure, fallen to the carpet just to spite me.
Virtual Coma Theory is about how to join the others, I’m unsure how tonight’s ‘cyber universe’ will precipitate this girl I’ve been making slow progress on. If tackled precisely it could be the state I’m in right now, it would be contemporary fiction in its finest chance meeting. Truth is, I’ve been months with the predictable horrors of forcing the groundwork here where the prospects and responsibilities for my own future would be frustrating and yet utterly fucking bored.
Ah well, in the meantime, distracted with ambitions of ‘writering’, a feeling that will come tomorrow, tugging my hair as the chaotic maelstrom of white noise coagulates with the hangover fog to batter and erode my senses and pride just like before.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Surrealist Painting #1: The Modern City Romance
“It’s a bit cold outside John you might want to wear your jacket” Joanne says with the motherly affection he has grown to find intensely irritating in recent years. As well as this he dislikes the way she now seems to have her hair cut – in a sweeping fringe – and he is slowly starting to imagine she is maintaining the look just to spite him.
“I’ll be fine honestly” he says as he glances at his tired reflection in the mirror and steps outside the door. Their arms are loosely linked as they meander down the street, past waiting bus-stops and agitated taxi-cabs, the scent of the impending weekend coursing through the air.
“How was your week? Did anything exciting happen at the seminar?” Joanne interrogates as she catches the eye of a sharp-suited young male strutting past them, before guiltily snapping her gaze back to the safer paving slabs.
“Fairly average week. Nothing special really” grumbles John with that crushingly familiar reticence which Joanne increasingly finds at once suffocating and achingly distant.
As she finds herself pining ever-so-fleetingly for a dash of romance or spontaneity to launch itself into her life, John meanwhile has been ambling along hypnotised by his shoelaces and now finds himself slipping slowly through the cracks in the pavement, widening as though they were zips being unfastened on a leather jacket. Before he realises it, he’s waist-deep in the paving slabs, like quicksand it swallows him up and means he has to continue the rest of the walk beneath the transparent street, with Joanne leading him from above in a matriarchal arm-lock.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to step on the cracks of the pavement John?” she tuts with disapproval as they continue on their way. John mooches along all non-committal, passing beneath occupied phone booths and open drains, with no one paying him the slightest notice, on the way to collect their Friday night Chinese takeaway.
“I’ll be fine honestly” he says as he glances at his tired reflection in the mirror and steps outside the door. Their arms are loosely linked as they meander down the street, past waiting bus-stops and agitated taxi-cabs, the scent of the impending weekend coursing through the air.
“How was your week? Did anything exciting happen at the seminar?” Joanne interrogates as she catches the eye of a sharp-suited young male strutting past them, before guiltily snapping her gaze back to the safer paving slabs.
“Fairly average week. Nothing special really” grumbles John with that crushingly familiar reticence which Joanne increasingly finds at once suffocating and achingly distant.
As she finds herself pining ever-so-fleetingly for a dash of romance or spontaneity to launch itself into her life, John meanwhile has been ambling along hypnotised by his shoelaces and now finds himself slipping slowly through the cracks in the pavement, widening as though they were zips being unfastened on a leather jacket. Before he realises it, he’s waist-deep in the paving slabs, like quicksand it swallows him up and means he has to continue the rest of the walk beneath the transparent street, with Joanne leading him from above in a matriarchal arm-lock.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to step on the cracks of the pavement John?” she tuts with disapproval as they continue on their way. John mooches along all non-committal, passing beneath occupied phone booths and open drains, with no one paying him the slightest notice, on the way to collect their Friday night Chinese takeaway.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010
Notes
Notes on a loss of control:
Only one fell-swoop needed to push you to the brink, to shred nerve-endings and decimate personal stability. From clear crystal ripples to a storm of unpredictable tides, that leave you stranded on an island with no discernable direction in which to swim. Unlock the bars to your cage of inhibitions, send your fury and prejudice marching down the hall.
Out on a street, the kerbs illuminated at intervals by lamp light, you come face to face with an altogether more reserved individual on his way home from meeting a friend for a quiet drink; he is bookish and self-contained, a consumer of glossy newspaper supplements and documentaries on a culture of which he harbours contributory aspirations. You will be forgiven should you abandon your elementary grasp on claustrophobic control, and exact savage repudiation for reasons better left unknown. Reasons are worthless when honing the basic art of aggression, for nothing is solved on the apex point of knowing why.
Notes on a lack of belief:
You are held hostage in a prison of nerves, where jailers jangle infallibilities before your eyes. Not half as important as you’d like, nowhere near as popular as you imagine you ought to be. We’re at war with the idea of oneself, battle-lines marked in the sands of the mind, divisions drawn and then amended as the passing of the years work to deaden the fight.
Notes on an infringement of choice:
Why allow yourself ambition when forever being coerced into accepting a VIP pass to a non-too-prestigious exhibition of what you will eventually become? Working yourself to the rhythmic drum of underlying heart attacks, chasing a quick buck like a greyhound to a racetrack rabbit, drinking far more than necessary to make up for previously-established lack of belief.
Scaling the barbed-wire fence in deference to roving searchlights, in pursuit of the perfect body, perfect soul-mate, perfect kids, perfect cloistered existence, perfect sex all of the time, early retirement and a flashing green EXIT sign when it’s time to leave the show, inevitably devoid of any ringing applause.
Only one fell-swoop needed to push you to the brink, to shred nerve-endings and decimate personal stability. From clear crystal ripples to a storm of unpredictable tides, that leave you stranded on an island with no discernable direction in which to swim. Unlock the bars to your cage of inhibitions, send your fury and prejudice marching down the hall.
Out on a street, the kerbs illuminated at intervals by lamp light, you come face to face with an altogether more reserved individual on his way home from meeting a friend for a quiet drink; he is bookish and self-contained, a consumer of glossy newspaper supplements and documentaries on a culture of which he harbours contributory aspirations. You will be forgiven should you abandon your elementary grasp on claustrophobic control, and exact savage repudiation for reasons better left unknown. Reasons are worthless when honing the basic art of aggression, for nothing is solved on the apex point of knowing why.
Notes on a lack of belief:
You are held hostage in a prison of nerves, where jailers jangle infallibilities before your eyes. Not half as important as you’d like, nowhere near as popular as you imagine you ought to be. We’re at war with the idea of oneself, battle-lines marked in the sands of the mind, divisions drawn and then amended as the passing of the years work to deaden the fight.
Notes on an infringement of choice:
Why allow yourself ambition when forever being coerced into accepting a VIP pass to a non-too-prestigious exhibition of what you will eventually become? Working yourself to the rhythmic drum of underlying heart attacks, chasing a quick buck like a greyhound to a racetrack rabbit, drinking far more than necessary to make up for previously-established lack of belief.
Scaling the barbed-wire fence in deference to roving searchlights, in pursuit of the perfect body, perfect soul-mate, perfect kids, perfect cloistered existence, perfect sex all of the time, early retirement and a flashing green EXIT sign when it’s time to leave the show, inevitably devoid of any ringing applause.
Friday, 27 August 2010
Snapshot of a City Dislocate
iron bridges prop up pondering people as they survey paper cups that struggle on along the gutter – blonde waitresses steal cigs in back alleys composing bitchy soliloquies and erotic sonnets on phones – cars progress like cancer cells on a torrent of false destination and monotone routine, so predicable their path along cobbles and asphalt, drivers caged inside with revs per minute intricately correlated to heartbeats – blood shoots round their soft machinery, their muscled hydraulics and nervous systems fragile with the winter chill –
the most exhilarating moment of their day is the double-decker passing the traffic lights mere inches from their face, they feel the rare thrill of being within a footstep of death, they could almost reach out and grab it – daily masturbation now a modicum of pleasure, an extrication of lust, an expulsion of fluid desire that would render us disasters waiting to happen were the ritual not religiously adhered to – policeman on the beat no hope in his face, follows in his trail a vapour of snide rumours and innuendo, dirty aspersions levelled on him –
pedestrians texting into phones are cruise missiles burrowing their way through the invisible smog – and every time I ignore a homeless man selling magazines and praying for a change a little piece of my soul goes through its death throes inside me – a troupe of amateur dramatics play out some kerbside Shakespeare, harassing shoppers with high-fluting lexicon and displaced narratives – these streets are eroding more and more and still we wade our way through to reach the half-price summer sales –
the banks and building societies and financial institutions play with our lives until market’s end, growing day by day, swallowing up everything we hold dear like a tumour – the other day I stood examining graffiti on the side of a municipal building, deciphering the illegible tags and crude sloganeering, wondering if there was any way I could profit from this venture until the light fell and I had to go home – and I wish I could get my hands on some medicinal substances to retreat into numbness and never come back –
I wish I could administer an intravenous injection of hard drugs into the veins of the city, see the walls collapse over time, the tensile strength of steel-framed structures OD and fall to pieces, the lifeblood of the city, the resilience and pride of the people contaminated and in need of thorough cleansing – office workers are wired on espresso and microwavable panini’s, accountants are living their fucked-up childhood fantasies, graphic designers and advertising execs are conjuring up new ways to transform their own graffiti tags and exotic slogans into banknotes and glossy reality – an amateur band rehearses over the internet, full of attitude and ideas, they will part ways acrimoniously before a rough collection of demos can find their way to anyone’s ears –
two lovers are kissing on stone steps as the rain falls upon their shoulders, nothing else matters around them as far as the imagination can stretch, as long as the very concept of time and the false promise of riches and success, recognition and respect, because between the two of them, from the ruins of the city, they have found something infinitely better.
the most exhilarating moment of their day is the double-decker passing the traffic lights mere inches from their face, they feel the rare thrill of being within a footstep of death, they could almost reach out and grab it – daily masturbation now a modicum of pleasure, an extrication of lust, an expulsion of fluid desire that would render us disasters waiting to happen were the ritual not religiously adhered to – policeman on the beat no hope in his face, follows in his trail a vapour of snide rumours and innuendo, dirty aspersions levelled on him –
pedestrians texting into phones are cruise missiles burrowing their way through the invisible smog – and every time I ignore a homeless man selling magazines and praying for a change a little piece of my soul goes through its death throes inside me – a troupe of amateur dramatics play out some kerbside Shakespeare, harassing shoppers with high-fluting lexicon and displaced narratives – these streets are eroding more and more and still we wade our way through to reach the half-price summer sales –
the banks and building societies and financial institutions play with our lives until market’s end, growing day by day, swallowing up everything we hold dear like a tumour – the other day I stood examining graffiti on the side of a municipal building, deciphering the illegible tags and crude sloganeering, wondering if there was any way I could profit from this venture until the light fell and I had to go home – and I wish I could get my hands on some medicinal substances to retreat into numbness and never come back –
I wish I could administer an intravenous injection of hard drugs into the veins of the city, see the walls collapse over time, the tensile strength of steel-framed structures OD and fall to pieces, the lifeblood of the city, the resilience and pride of the people contaminated and in need of thorough cleansing – office workers are wired on espresso and microwavable panini’s, accountants are living their fucked-up childhood fantasies, graphic designers and advertising execs are conjuring up new ways to transform their own graffiti tags and exotic slogans into banknotes and glossy reality – an amateur band rehearses over the internet, full of attitude and ideas, they will part ways acrimoniously before a rough collection of demos can find their way to anyone’s ears –
two lovers are kissing on stone steps as the rain falls upon their shoulders, nothing else matters around them as far as the imagination can stretch, as long as the very concept of time and the false promise of riches and success, recognition and respect, because between the two of them, from the ruins of the city, they have found something infinitely better.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Some Kind of Bliss
Jake was sat next to Anna on a long-haul flight from Heathrow to Tokyo. They had felt the mutual attractive discourse emanate between them as exit rituals were played out and the plane banked a confident launch into the sky.
They engaged in light conversation about their respective groups of friends, careers, and their recent failed relationships and became increasingly enamoured within the connection they had accidently forged as the journey progressed, as though they were passengers on a solo flight to a destination no one else was travelling to.
Jake thought Anna was strikingly beautiful, but in a subtle way that meant she didn’t display any signs of being aware of it. Her eyes betrayed an unflinching honesty, earnest in the trusting affection she had begun to display. He noticed the way her nose would crease slightly whenever she found something funny, and he felt grateful for his noticing.
Anna thought Jake was effortlessly attractive but mysterious and alluring all at once. For the first time in weeks her mind was no longer painfully lingering on thoughts of Ben, and she said to herself that this must surely be a miracle in itself.
Anna and Jake became flirtatious as the altitude heightened the effects of the mini bottles of wine that were handed out and rested their heads on each others’ shoulders to watch the in-flight movie – some corny American comedy to which neither paid much attention.
The flight slept and the plane glided through rainclouds in pursuit of the flashes and dots on navigation screens. Anna felt Jake stir against her and she blinked into a semi-conscious state, attempting to adjust to the darkness of the cabin. Jake was staring into her eyes with a deep furnace of emotion blazing away inside his own. She felt mild relief as a gentle smile sketched its way across his face.
She asked what he was smiling about and he replied, “I think I’m in love and now I have no fear of dying alone”.
He had just enough time to register the sleepy confusion yawn across Anna’s pretty face before the bombs packed inside his shoes exploded, giving birth to a blissful corona of fire that lit up the sky.
They engaged in light conversation about their respective groups of friends, careers, and their recent failed relationships and became increasingly enamoured within the connection they had accidently forged as the journey progressed, as though they were passengers on a solo flight to a destination no one else was travelling to.
Jake thought Anna was strikingly beautiful, but in a subtle way that meant she didn’t display any signs of being aware of it. Her eyes betrayed an unflinching honesty, earnest in the trusting affection she had begun to display. He noticed the way her nose would crease slightly whenever she found something funny, and he felt grateful for his noticing.
Anna thought Jake was effortlessly attractive but mysterious and alluring all at once. For the first time in weeks her mind was no longer painfully lingering on thoughts of Ben, and she said to herself that this must surely be a miracle in itself.
Anna and Jake became flirtatious as the altitude heightened the effects of the mini bottles of wine that were handed out and rested their heads on each others’ shoulders to watch the in-flight movie – some corny American comedy to which neither paid much attention.
The flight slept and the plane glided through rainclouds in pursuit of the flashes and dots on navigation screens. Anna felt Jake stir against her and she blinked into a semi-conscious state, attempting to adjust to the darkness of the cabin. Jake was staring into her eyes with a deep furnace of emotion blazing away inside his own. She felt mild relief as a gentle smile sketched its way across his face.
She asked what he was smiling about and he replied, “I think I’m in love and now I have no fear of dying alone”.
He had just enough time to register the sleepy confusion yawn across Anna’s pretty face before the bombs packed inside his shoes exploded, giving birth to a blissful corona of fire that lit up the sky.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
...
Life is just one long fucking struggle
If I’d known what was involved
I never would have agreed to it.
If I’d known what was involved
I never would have agreed to it.
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Lights Extinguishing Slowly
Here before you stands as proud testament, the last words of me, Dylan Stewart.
As fetid undertaker of disbelief I stood before you in my prime as a majestic spectacle, a tight-rope walker across a circus of gaping mouths.
A wonder of the very world upon which I skipped and jumped, left my indistinct markings and then was gone without a trace.
Well now my blood runs down the walls of resentment, my mind regurgitating my daily penance for things said and done.
For all these things and countless more, I am sorry.
I am sorry for the things done and not done, achieved and fallen so far short of.
Every smog-stained commute, the city’s dust decorating the lungs with phlegm wallpaper paste.
Coming up for air and smoking cigarettes, lining the stolid veins and arteries with chemical depositories and trans-fats, stagnating blood cells with one more drink, just one more drink.
Another chance polluted, another love lost in the ether of lust, desire burnt away through years of lying rotting in one’s vanity and feculence, watching your own mind and body go to ruin like an ancient metropolis.
I look down upon the world and vomit from a great height.
Whilst I bathe in Coca-Cola the poetry of youth is stencilled in neon billboards that rape the stars of the night sky.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to download foetuses from some vast internet database, create human life from binary code, 0-1-0-1-0-1, clone yourself so that every hour of every day you can see just how beautiful you are.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to build up empires in a lazy afternoon and cast devastation upon them in a fleeting afterthought.
What if the electricity ran dry, lights burnt out, cars collided in mechanised bliss, airplanes paused before descent like a ball thrown and not caught.
I’ve seen it all and now when I stab my eyes out with kitchen utensils stained with the rust of yesterday’s food I will see nothing more.
From Belfast to Brighton, the Isle of Skye to St. Ives, Piccadilly Circus to the cobbled backstreets of fuck knows where.
It’s all a mirror-image, a tapestry sown with false promises and scarcely concealed lies.
We are the vermin!
The vermined ones who in our finest hours pose for posterity and hang photos in frames on walls, a snapshot of a second that sets into concrete a memory now long since lost.
Yes if it were down to me, I’d rain down a million Hiroshimas upon you and your vainglorious shopping selves.
Level Manhattan like a billion-dollar Hollywood movie, retire the Eiffel Tower to bed, set graffiti artists to task on the Taj Mahal, pack all the Pyramids and Roman ruins into storage, dismantle the life’s work of mankind’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, poets and priests, artists and entertainers.
The finest achievements in science and medicine, economics, space travel and academia all cast to the raging bonfire of my ennui.
I’d tear great chunks out of religious manuscripts and knaw them to a pulp between my foaming teeth, ejaculate upon Mona Lisa’s smile and lay landmines beneath the paving stones of Las Ramblas, Oxford Street, Times Square and Sunset Strip.
In the words of Mr. Carl Panzram – I wish mankind had one neck and I had my hands round it.
Suffocation in the junk dens, feral dogs, oil cartels, mass media conglomerates, used-car salesmen, disaffected travel agents and frustrated shelf-stackers in just another Walmart graveyard, perverted teachers of primary children, hysterical bus drivers who keep on pulling themselves back from veering across into oncoming traffic.
Here stands your Messiah!
Born again!!
Born again to spread famine, drought and whichever venereal disease you might choose, stamp flowers into dirt where only weeds may sprout.
But this is all for nothing these tidings I bring.
These prophesies I offer up to the world, my dictatorial rule as God and the Second Coming are routinely ignored to fall on deaf ears.
Fair enough then I say to thee.
You can just wash your acne faces in sinks of hydrochloric acid, feast on banquets laced with strychnine and hang yourselves from ceilings using your favourite neck tie.
I take it all back. I take it all back......
We might as well retire gracefully from living, extricate our being and try our hand at something new.
At the end of the day we’ve given it our best shot but things just aren’t working out.
Life is past its sell-by-date, it’s gone rotten and we don’t know what to fucking do with it.
So ends this parable from me, Dylan Stewart; could be a suicide note, could be a love letter.
Or it could be the tired old ramblings of a withered drunk, slumped on a bar, chewing on his false teeth, trying to remember the way home as the landlord tolls the bell to signal time gentlemen please.
As fetid undertaker of disbelief I stood before you in my prime as a majestic spectacle, a tight-rope walker across a circus of gaping mouths.
A wonder of the very world upon which I skipped and jumped, left my indistinct markings and then was gone without a trace.
Well now my blood runs down the walls of resentment, my mind regurgitating my daily penance for things said and done.
For all these things and countless more, I am sorry.
I am sorry for the things done and not done, achieved and fallen so far short of.
Every smog-stained commute, the city’s dust decorating the lungs with phlegm wallpaper paste.
Coming up for air and smoking cigarettes, lining the stolid veins and arteries with chemical depositories and trans-fats, stagnating blood cells with one more drink, just one more drink.
Another chance polluted, another love lost in the ether of lust, desire burnt away through years of lying rotting in one’s vanity and feculence, watching your own mind and body go to ruin like an ancient metropolis.
I look down upon the world and vomit from a great height.
Whilst I bathe in Coca-Cola the poetry of youth is stencilled in neon billboards that rape the stars of the night sky.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to download foetuses from some vast internet database, create human life from binary code, 0-1-0-1-0-1, clone yourself so that every hour of every day you can see just how beautiful you are.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to build up empires in a lazy afternoon and cast devastation upon them in a fleeting afterthought.
What if the electricity ran dry, lights burnt out, cars collided in mechanised bliss, airplanes paused before descent like a ball thrown and not caught.
I’ve seen it all and now when I stab my eyes out with kitchen utensils stained with the rust of yesterday’s food I will see nothing more.
From Belfast to Brighton, the Isle of Skye to St. Ives, Piccadilly Circus to the cobbled backstreets of fuck knows where.
It’s all a mirror-image, a tapestry sown with false promises and scarcely concealed lies.
We are the vermin!
The vermined ones who in our finest hours pose for posterity and hang photos in frames on walls, a snapshot of a second that sets into concrete a memory now long since lost.
Yes if it were down to me, I’d rain down a million Hiroshimas upon you and your vainglorious shopping selves.
Level Manhattan like a billion-dollar Hollywood movie, retire the Eiffel Tower to bed, set graffiti artists to task on the Taj Mahal, pack all the Pyramids and Roman ruins into storage, dismantle the life’s work of mankind’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, poets and priests, artists and entertainers.
The finest achievements in science and medicine, economics, space travel and academia all cast to the raging bonfire of my ennui.
I’d tear great chunks out of religious manuscripts and knaw them to a pulp between my foaming teeth, ejaculate upon Mona Lisa’s smile and lay landmines beneath the paving stones of Las Ramblas, Oxford Street, Times Square and Sunset Strip.
In the words of Mr. Carl Panzram – I wish mankind had one neck and I had my hands round it.
Suffocation in the junk dens, feral dogs, oil cartels, mass media conglomerates, used-car salesmen, disaffected travel agents and frustrated shelf-stackers in just another Walmart graveyard, perverted teachers of primary children, hysterical bus drivers who keep on pulling themselves back from veering across into oncoming traffic.
Here stands your Messiah!
Born again!!
Born again to spread famine, drought and whichever venereal disease you might choose, stamp flowers into dirt where only weeds may sprout.
But this is all for nothing these tidings I bring.
These prophesies I offer up to the world, my dictatorial rule as God and the Second Coming are routinely ignored to fall on deaf ears.
Fair enough then I say to thee.
You can just wash your acne faces in sinks of hydrochloric acid, feast on banquets laced with strychnine and hang yourselves from ceilings using your favourite neck tie.
I take it all back. I take it all back......
We might as well retire gracefully from living, extricate our being and try our hand at something new.
At the end of the day we’ve given it our best shot but things just aren’t working out.
Life is past its sell-by-date, it’s gone rotten and we don’t know what to fucking do with it.
So ends this parable from me, Dylan Stewart; could be a suicide note, could be a love letter.
Or it could be the tired old ramblings of a withered drunk, slumped on a bar, chewing on his false teeth, trying to remember the way home as the landlord tolls the bell to signal time gentlemen please.
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