"Know no fear."

She awoke with a start,

They were all there, still

Stilled. They would, eventually

Remain here and rot.

Mouth agape and contorted hands.

Wounds ope on the innards,

Discreetly yet unashamedly.

"Know no fear."

She breathed in and out,

And resolutely gripped

The broken handle of her jagged knife.

 

To the line

Journeying to the line

Unembarrassed by desire

Or hatred, or vindictiveness,

Or gain, or fear, or shame,

we went on, seeking not adventure

Nor meaning to obey orders

Or do our abscond duty

Nor driven by the will to conquer,

We were there as chance willed,

By some fluke of fate,

Owing to a long and serpentine

Chain of events no one governed

We went on because we thought

Liberty was a woman.

Fragment #22

Things need to come to an end

-- however ugly it may be --

for as things now stand,

my life goes by horribly.

The Tattoo

Covering her entire back

The intent artist is putting

The finishing touch to his masterpiece

Never had tattoo been so revealingly beautiful.

The girl had been thinking and designing

Her tattoo for the best part of ten years.

It had taken him a full week to catch her intention

And another to train his wrist to the perfect movement.

Now is the time to prove his mettle.

And the girl had fever breaking after the first three hours,

And they have to do it in one sitting,

No other option, nothing else matters.

It is obviously painful. And the level of detail is boring into her skin.

In about an hour, this girl will have,

Etched onto her back, into her soul,

The greatest overcast one ever saw,

Down to the smallest, darkest billow.

The music rang

The music rang deep into her mind

Made every inch of her skin quiver

The tip of her teats were so hard

Eyes closed, swaying to the sheer vibrations from the speakers

As if she were thrown away

And riveted to the spot

Fractalled into infinity

Like a raindrop

On a corrugated iron roof.

After the fury

The bird hopped from crack to crack

Past the commotion, the rush,

The rot, the stench,

Under that steel arch,

Looked at the towering giants

Belching thunderous bellows

And was gone, in an instant,

Into the soaring, unaffected air.

Food would be gotten

After the fury had died down.

The relevant fall

They all saw him fall to his death down twenty floors

They all thought at once of what they did that day

So that they could remember it all and tell the neighbours

Their own sadder version of the story of that fateful day

They saw a guy fall to his death down twenty floors.

She looked down at him

She looked down at him

His face buried in pillows

And then out the window

Darkness were spreading

Like squid's ink in a fishbowl

The smell of soot in her nostrils

Made her frown and scoff

She needn't look down again

To see him look up to her

And watch his face fall apart

In a million million pieces.

Suitcase in hand

 

Suitcase in hand

He follows the hollow

On the side of the road

Spatters of mud

On the hem of his trousers

Perhaps brought back

From a hundred miles off

Where he was at a few days ago

He realises now he was happy there

Watchful, horrified but content

The barrel of his gun emptied

In a haystack alive with possibilities

Of murder, revenge, hatred.

Memory lapse

[Ten days in Edinburgh at the Jazz and Blues festival, and raw here I hand over whatever I wrote. I will publish each and every piece in a separate entry, chronologically but starting back in time, like retrieving my footsteps in the sand.]

A melancholy face, 

seen through the flitting

window of a surprising

train booming on a race

in the opposite direction,

brought to a tired mind,

years later, as a friend

breaks out the information

of an orderly quietus,

both sat on the edge

of a bed facing the ledge

of the window, like statues

ready to recover from the salt,

her face ebbing away

as the memory of that day

quietly comes to a halt,

finally acquiring a meaning

long sought and deferred,

as that the moment conferred,

duly timed to the awakening,

probably hidden all this long

in the fold of the bed-sheet,

in the cold of the slanting sleet,

or in the iridescence of the sun --

which ought to have been seen

years before on that train

thundering through sun and rain

glowing on that face's dull sheen.