Rorschach sex with a grubby drunk

The k-hole

mack — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:59:34 +0000

She counts the beds she has laid upon – the ones in cellars, the ones in hotels, the ones made of wood, the ones made of metal, the broken ones, the big ones, the ones so small she had no room at all, the ones upon which her dog used to lie, the ones with a view, the ones where she had to hang her head off the side to see a little bit of sky, the ones where she kissed men, the ones where she wrote letters and cards and kissed no-one at all, the ones where she wanted to die and the ones where she didn’t. And this bed, now, the mattress slightly bowed with the weight of the bodies it has trafficked through the nights, its frayed cotton covers greasy in patches and a reminder of the cheapness of life. But it is her favourite, for thank God, she cannot leave it at all.

All the dogs of Europe bark

mack — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:34:18 +0000

Tilted on its side, the empty railway carriage, gutted by fire, veers perpendicularly from its eerie in the snow. Wrapped in goggles and scarves, I sit astride the frozen lip of the high wooden door and peer at the turbulent wilderness around me. Surely, God, I abandoned my home for some kind of detail, not this abstract hoardom, this indifferent white lap? I would call for vodka, a mutiny and some kind of imaginary friend.

This un-American place

mack — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:11:26 +0000

My head is caribou. Tonguing the snow for sweet splinters of grass. Dumb animal me.

On a great plain in the falling snow

mack — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 19:32:44 +0000

If you could x-ray the night, you would see me fleeing to the hills, short-breathed and bloody finger-nailed, a phosphorescent skeleton slumping exhausted in a cave, amongst echoes and batshit. The occupation has begun. Torchlights sear the dark, and the sound of a snarling dog crumples against the moss. I feel the rumble of jackboots up my spine each time you are near. Let me scrutinise the faces and check the papers of every impulse. Stop all words at the border. Censor my hilarity, my sense of depravity. Prohibit the singing of certain songs. My senses have been requisitioned. Things are different now: everything is about you even when it’s not about you.

Is the kissing loud?

mack — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 09:35:42 +0000

Head up, hombre. The bulb has blown and I’m supine in the bath, deep in cranial pain at the sound of so many fey, gusting singers on the radio. I’d lean over and turn it off but that would involve motion, disturbing the soapy scum that festers round my torso like tear gas. I feel the odd neuron ping from node to node, barrelling down nerve canals as if they were abandoned streets in the early morning – the fascia lit up momentarily by headlamps before swooping into darkness once more. Life is elsewhere.

With gun and lens and Bible

mack — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:40:44 +0000

The aurora borealis of a drunk like me comes when I’m lighter than fly wings but unable to move. Having doped my motor functions with analgesic Corona, I was spread-eagled and soaring on one of the bar sofas last night, pinned to the leather by my own buoyancy of spirit. The only other people there were the bartender and my friend. The bartender has a hickory leg. Certain women find the wooden limb intriguing and, consequently, he becomes alluring in the same way the sky does when astronomers grub among the stars. My friend was counselling the barkeep about the vig on his flat, as if he were in deep with some black and white mobster from the downtown 1930s, rather than in hock to Barclays. I wanted to insult him, but the words just flopped out of my mouth with all the muffle of a flaccid penis on a wedding night. And as I lay there, hysterically in love with my own helplessness, I saw a dark movement in the ceiling. Intense tightening of my lids revealed the shape to be the nose of a dog. The Alsatian on the floor above had pawed its way through the wooden floor and was now sniffing the free and fetid air below. I imagined this was how we would finally contact aliens – with them burrowing a wormhole into the fabric of time, poking nose first through the clouds, only to find, like the Count of Monte Cristo, that they are free merely to plunge to their deaths, later to be found as pigeon-food in the car park of a provincial station. Shortly afterwards, I passed out.

The bright little longings

mack — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:57:16 +0000

Perched on my rotting window ledge I wish I’d been a mariner, shipping out from all of this. I imagine my boat – hammered together from the carcasses of burnt-out cars and flowers beaten so hard they become an iridescent steel – all blotches of charred aluminium and shimmering light. The violent hum of cathedral organs would break across a city bulleted by rain. Fireworks would crash into bilious cloudage, and on the dockside acres of human wreckage would feast on the single glorious hope of a new way of life, even though life itself has scant regard for change. A rasp of lightning out at sea would expose the dark tracery of a malignant crew posed around the ship, ready to abandon the sodden mass of meat cheering below them. And then a hollow, shrieking whistle from a porpoise-spined bassoon would signal our departure. The anchor would break the cursive of jostling waves and we would steam out of the harbour and out onto the whale-roads, never to return.

Agents of the Fisc

mack — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:09:43 +0000

Stranded at the checkout and 63 years old, but still the desires bloom within him like fetid jungle plants. Orchids and ferns sprout from his hands and loins, wrapping rich green veins around his own diaphanous blue vascular system. The vegetation is so profuse it rots before it flops to the ground, releasing the stench of decaying flesh. Pith and sap ooze from his mouth. His eyes are blinded by streaking emerald juice. A lust as lush as this, so humid and putrid. Knocking chilli con carne tins from the conveyor belt, he sinks to the ground, lost in the fronds and the haemorrhaging liquid stink. People stare as he disappears among the fat oily vines, weeping now and wishing for desert.

As stout as Cortez

mack — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 18:29:33 +0000

The fog was so thick he felt the world was made of pencil – one hand of God sketching the ground beneath his feet while the other smudged graphite around him. In the distance he heard a crowd – a noise like cows bellowing through static. He imagined the people were pillows and this grey mist was their stuffing, come undone in some cosmic bedroom fight – they pressed against his face, whirling like grave-cold steam, desperate for his own stitches to break and the dingy feathers of his soul to spiral into the air. Perhaps the universe had suddenly disappeared and only he hadn’t noticed – the sounds he caught muffled in the fog were the noise of planets crumbling, constellations pinging into blackness and space-time collapsing like an empty milk carton – hundreds of thousands of everything pared down to a single point of repetition: him, walking the same two metres of tarmac forever. He supposed the corner shop would be shut too.

Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul

mack — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:36:29 +0000

He used to draw full moon glasses and a thin nose on the front of his cock because he had a helmet shaped like John Lennon’s hair and his girlfriend’s pubes resembled Yoko’s hair. He would mime to ‘Give Peace a Chance’. It was how teenagers protested the Vietnam war in Surrey. They took black and white pictures with his old Pentax, developed the negatives in the makeshift darkroom under bed sheets and sent them to the Apple offices. They did not receive a reply, probably because Paul’s gang intercepted it first. Later, after Lennon was murdered, they accidentally made a lot of money on property. They bought modern art together and a villa in Umbria. Affairs were already common by then, even though they both looked good for their age. There were drunken rows over their daughter who was somewhere on the autistic spectrum. One time she drew blood on his face with her nails and he gave her a black eye. They did not have any close friends anymore. But after they had argued and slept with other people, after everything, he would get out his biro, draw on the famous spectacles and once again they would find love among the puppets.