Adam and Eve (no escape)

The snake curled it’s tail in a way that it flicked just the tip on her clit and she felt that laser shoot up inside her a little bit and she squirmed back away from it and the snake curled up into a ring and, sleeping, let the sun bathe on its skin. She closed her eyes and laid back, wanting to sleep or just at least dazed off and let her hand come down and gently touch on the hood of the clit and move over the soft flesh there up and down and it felt good and pure and the sun was just like a soft warm blanket that meant she could feel happy there. God killed a lamb and it was horrific, it was screaming and half dead and it’s stomach was open and her and the snake stood up and looked at that fluffy body writhing and crying and they had never seen that before and it wasn’t horrific because they hadn’t seen it before and it was just strange and confusing. The young naked man came back then at this time to see it all and saw the snake and stepped on the snake’s back and the snake flipped around and curled up and extended and bit the man on the leg but the man just watched it happen and looked over at the half-blood half-white wool mess that God had made and pressed down harder on the snake’s back, raising his other foot and really pushing down in a  half jumping way on the snake until the snake stopped squirming and the lamb was still and not crying and the woman looked up at the man and saw him changed, different, but the man was as blank as ever, smiling, holding out his hand to her.

In the afternoon he sat in the office kitchen, drinking his coffee, eating a biscuit and she comes in and she is wearing a tight skirt and an even tighter blouse, makes a green tea and looks over at him. He watches her eat the biscuit, watched her lipsticked lips close over the cookie and all but suck off the edge of the biscuit she takes into her mouth and then her closed small lips moving up and down slightly as her small teeth chew the small piece of hard biscuit she’s managed to pry of with those succulent, decorated lips. She almost looks over and he averts his eyes back to the table, finds a magazine there and pulls it closer, flicks it open and almost as quickly looks back at her body, the outline of her figure simplistically available, imagining her naked isn’t hard, her ass and legs, her waist, her breasts and neck and face all stand there and he looks back to the page again, mainly looking at words and reading them over and over. She finishing dipping the tea bag in the hot water, takes it and drops the finished tea bag in the bin, then a smile at him and leaves. He sips his coffee, tastes bad, looks back at the page, reads that line, over and over.

She was washing away the blood between her legs, she hadn’t ever had this happen before and she thought she was dying. For three days she washed away the blood, in the stream and each time he came close she told him to go away. She lay on the grass beside the stream and waiting for more blood to come, closing her eyes and listening to the water to soothe her mind. On the fifth day the blood stopped, she finished washing herself and cried out to God to save her life. God said that now that you have had the pleasure of the flesh, you will now know the changing of the season, and every month you will know this, like the changing of the seasons, you are now unto the Earth. She was happy because she felt closer to the world she loved, the dirt the grass the sun and the animals, she collapsed sighing and feeling all of nature now inside her and without. God became furious, and so condemned her to feel an unnatural pain in childbirth.

Her father comes home, closes the door, hasn’t seen them all sitting there together on the lounge room floor yet, her and her sisters and her mother, playing a card game and they were laughing and playing. They all watch him walk over to the table they have near the door and empty his pockets like he does every night and the mother says “your turn” to her little sister and they all look back at the game and are aware that they are pretending now, not playing like they were but playing now as an exhibition, as a way of telling the father that they are happy and have a life too. He walks over and kisses the mother and they all savour that smell, the smell of their father coming home, like wood and smoke and old clothes, sweat they don’t know about yet but it is his sweat and the three beers he had after work with his co-workers. They try not to stare too long at him kiss their mother’s cheek but they love seeing it and he smiles at them and silently disappears into the kitchen and the younger one throws down a card that matches the one underneath and the mother looks back from her husband and says “Snap!”.

In the beginning Lucifer Morning Star was the first Angel, with the unwitting power of a true God, and as such the ever loving God who created him became scared of his creation and cast him down to the world of the mortals and so then Lucifer taught the mortals fire, life, love and companionship and told them that one day they would be like God himself and when he was finished instructing them God in his anger made Lucifer King of Hell where he was told to punish all those who did not heed The Word and when hell was overwhelmed God came down himself in the flesh of a man named Yeshua and felt the painful sting of humanity and hence forth changed what it was to be saved or condemned and so Lucifer, now righteous, holds his place by Gods side as a saviour of human souls.

Around the table in this meeting we talked about how having these poor sales performance figures was most likely related to how our sales people were getting old and they kept having things happen to them like heart attacks or hip replacements or sick children and how we could directly see their ailments reflected in our figures and we decided really quickly that we needed newer younger sales people and we discussed how that having the younger ones coming in would yeah sure take them a while to catch up to the expertise and capability of the older ones that in the ling run we would as a company be better off by having these fumbling, learning, need-to-be-hand-held new ones come on would actually in the long run be way better to the bottom line because, hell, surely these older ones would get worse and worse, right, I mean, this is symptomatic of having an ageing sales team, I mean like what’s next, you know: cancer, Alzheimer’s, liver failure, you know, what else kinds of old age stuff would we have to deal with, I mean, they need to use a computer at least and Christ like osteoporosis would mean soon we’d need to give them , what, aides and things to help them do their job and we’re not a charity I mean we need to let them go right? A young bright executive discovered a good way we could legally pay them out.

Adam was so in love that he cut off all his hair and, crying, told God that he hated him and thought he was an insane lunatic who didn’t care for anything other than to be blindly worshipped. God asked Adam where he got his ideas from and Adam said “from you, you heartless monster!”. God knew it was the snake who had filled his mind with sick thoughts and so madeEdena horrible place to live which of course only made Adam hate him even more. God was confused and asked Adam after a thousand years why he did not hate the snake instead and Adam replied “what snake?” and God told him the story and Adam knew then it was hopeless: God created the snake.

He had her head in his hands, lying on top of her with both his hands under her head and she was crying and they hadn’t finished making love and he said “what’s wrong?” and she said nothing in that half true way women say it and she had her eyes shut tight from the crying and he let his penis slip out of her, losing the erection anyway. He stayed there like that holding her and kissing her cheek, feeling with his lips how hot her cheeks were and looking at her clenched eyes. He started massaging her hair and kissing her cheeks more but she shook her head to brush him off so he moves off her and lays beside her, both naked and she rolled into a ball and cried harder and harder. “What’s wrong?” he asked but she didn’t say anything, just lay there sobbing. He stood up and put his pants back on, walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His face seemed wrong, not his. He wondered if he had raped that girl or did something wrong. He smiled at himself in the mirror, just to see if his own face was still there. He washed his hands and went back into the room. She had a blanket pulled over her and wasn’t moving.

Share

One night

Waking up guilty, waking up hurt, waking up with a pain inside her vagina she never new could exist, waking up with flashes of the dark clothed in tracksuit thing over her, waking up with the bottom half of his face, hard and dark and still and gritting it’s teeth, waking up and feeling down to see if her skirt is on and it is and then feeling her shoes on the bed still on and trying to kick out of them but ending up having to reach down and undo them and then lying back with the covers on feeling hot and dirty and strange under her covers away from the night and the rape from some guy and he was grunting and grunting in a half breathe half yes sounding way like uuuuhhh ssssss uuh-uuhhh ssss again and again until he came and she was pretty out of it but he came at some point she guesses and feels down to her vagina but it’s dry and she doesn’t know but needs to go to the toilet so gets up and takes off her ‘party’ clothes and wraps a blanket around her and goes down the hall to the toilet.

What she does remember sitting there on the toilet was that she came, was that she had an orgasm, was that she reached up and grabbed it by it’s back and pulled it into her as she came really hard and good and it was a moment out of nowhere from terror and disgust to a really hard orgasm and she puts her head in her hands and concentrates on peeing and it feels like she is getting rid of stuff from inside her but can’t forget that feeling, that thing on top of her shoving in and out and her drunk and out of it fighting but taking it all and then the orgasm was…was…?

“Sissy I need to go you done yet?” calls her housemate. She’s stopped peeing and is staring at the tiles.
“Yeah yeah Kate. One minute” and gets up, wipes, flushes, stand over the sink washing her hands looking at her shitty messed up make up and into her blue-green eyes, looking for something, looking for hate or anger but seeing confusion. Flash-backs to her quasi-psychology class, the things she’d heard form drugged out hippies…basically the conclusion: you, somewhere deep inside of you, you like that shit. This feeling is disgusting and she wants to throw up, this is against everything she knows, loves and believes and all that. That she could want to get raped, that she should just burst out now, in tears, and confess to her roommates…that she doubts herself in doing that, that she wants to go back to her bed and lie there. That she needs to think, that the idea of thinking is ridiculous…all of this in the time it takes to splash some water on your face and let Kate in.
“You ok, Sis?”
“Yeah, yeah, ok. Fucking crazy night” hehe laughs like that
“Yeah right…what were you home like 3 or something?”
“Something” and walks off, and does what she thought she wanted, lies on her bed and stares at the wall. A poster of a young dépêche mode, looks away because they are cool and judging, finds a nice crevice where two walls meets and there’s nothing else but a limitless beige intersection. Stares at that for a while, trying to let the thoughts do their thing where they battle and win and lose.

Share

Brakes

What they say about breaking up is just not true.
Breaking up is easy to do.
You know I break up every time
I break up with you.
- Violent Femmes “Breaking Up”

 

On January fifteenth which they were painfully aware was only two weeks after the false magic of the new year both her and him talked about and decided to split, break up, part ways, separate or whatever the words are you are told that you are post event. The event itself is insanely long and incredible and both proper and impossible, with tears and a type of hugging they didn’t know was possible or that they were even capable of. It’s at these moments they realised they do care or that they do actually really want the best for the other person even though all the months leading up to this they were in their ways coercively just saying they want to the best for each other or things in the vein of “it’s for the best” just so that there can be a modicum of pleasantness in the final final decision. The final final decision was natural, thought out and rang true but also almost stupid in its insulting unknowing baseness.

 

At 2am she crept into her twelve year old daughter’s room and gently woke her and when her eyes were open she said “come on, we’ve got to pack our bags” and she guided her towards her chest of drawers and said “put your stuff into your bag ok sweetie” and crept back out. The young girl started putting her clothes into her bag until it was full but there as more to take. She sat next to her bag and looked about her room that she had only just got used to with three posters on the wall, one she stole from her brother. It was maybe ten or twenty minutes until her mother reappeared and gestured for her to come with her so she got up and dragged her bag behind her and the mother gestured ‘shhh’. The left through the front door and the mother quietly closed to door and put their bags into the car. “It’s ok darling, we’re just going to leave for a while ok. We just need to get out of here tonight”

 

The first barbeque of November when it was warm enough to get everyone around we had a nice big fire going and some steaks and sausages and lamb cutlets going and I was talking to the guys and the girls were all sitting on their fat asses, no really they have fat asses, but we have kids and when they have kids mother fucking hell they get big asses, fucking hell. Some guys like big asses? Yeah fucking rappers, heh heh. Big asses are gross and I told her she’s gotta lose some of that ass meat and I keep slapping her ass telling her that and she knows it and wants to lose it but fuck me if she’s doing anything about it. The little one she had from her last bloke comes over trying to poke a stick in the fire and I tell him to fuck off you little pyro and his mother says to me don’t talk to him like that and I say fuck off he’s a little pyro and Mike laughs and I get another beer and the meat is pretty much done and Johnno’s wife is a hot little Asian slut and he says she’s as tight as a condom.

 

After three years of living together it was hard because her father died when we pretty much just got started living together and she was really messed up and spoke to her mother maybe three of five times a day and she talked to me pretty little. I was working a new job and luckily got to know a couple of pretty cool people a thirty year old guy and a twenty something chick who had epilepsy but she took medication and pretty much only talked about it after a couple of beers she said she probably shouldn’t have. She had a shit job with a shit boss who was basically a pervert cunt, had porn bookmarked in his desktop and made her use his computer as if he wanted her to see all the shit on there but we didn’t know for sure whether he was stupid or gross as hell. We got up enough money to take a holiday, she felt guilty she was using her father’s inheritance to pay for it but I convinced her (fucking finally) that he would have wanted it and she didn’t suspect the cliché. We went to a Queensland rainforest lodge retreat and it was good to get away. I told her how lovely this is and how she needed this and she said what do you mean and I said well, to get away from all the stress and she yelled at me that her dad dying isn’t stress it was that her dad is dead and she is only twenty two and I said but yeah I mean its good to get away from the reminders and…she cut me off to call me an asshole and it took three days which cost about eighteen hundred dollars until she spoke to me again and it was hard to imagine going on with her anymore. I know how that sounds.

 

My name is Tom but guess what the fucked thing is I get called TJ because my last name is Jameson and I have a picture of a rabbit (from Alice in Wonderland) tattooed on my arm which the guys in prison call ‘Jack Rabbit’ and I don’t know if it’s an insult or not but I don’t care and even though I hate TJ because it sounds like an American sitcom character I don’t want to fuck with these guys. I’m in the wing for murder and these guys think I am just like them, some fucked up hard ass insane killer guy but really I drowned my daughter in her little bath when my wife was out shopping and what happened was I didn’t want her anymore so I was giving her a bath and I just held her little body under the water for I don’t know like only two minutes and she drowned. My wife, or ex-wife, yeah, still visits me. She still comes once every two months or so to tell me how much she hates me and curses me and wishes I was dead and she bothers to come and cries and yells and I sit there because I know I have to see that and cry myself and I don’t give a fuck if the other guys see me crying. I am being punished and I deserve every second of whatever pain I get.

Share

I left and couldn’t leave

I came across a town settled down within a three sixty degree hill range, within a hole sort of but the hole wasn’t caused by earthquakes or tectonic plates or volcanoes, it was dug out by humans mining the rich minerals and slate stone from the hills and when they were done the mining companies left leaving behind a hole and a town. I got there in a bus that had to drive at forty kilometres an hour spiralling down and down and it made me feel good to be in such an inescapable place even though I should have had the opposite feeling. This time in my life I wanted inescapable, not stable just forced. I had just been killed in the heart by a beautiful girl, too beautiful for me, and I always expected it but when it finally happened I was in ways worse than I could imagine. In the bad times I always invented ways out of it, or at least there were easy ways out. There was no bad time just the end time, there is no chance or reprisal, there is no sentence or sentiment that can do anything, the idea that words can not work, the thought that no matter how heart-felt or honest or base-soul truthful and yearning you are nothing will change or be resolved for you to feel good or normal again…so, in a nice coach with curtains over the windows I chose this place that I visited when I was about ten and even then I knew this place was horrible and strange and insular and hidden which, absurdly and deliberately, made me choose it now, the challenge of trying to live here in this unearthed place, in this hole that people dug and now people actually try to live in. I can do a hell of a lot of things and one of them I will be able to do here. I’m reading The Iliad hardly, the jerking and long leaning angles inside the bus make it hard to dive into the story, but there is a beauty in reading one of the Earth’s classics knowing I won’t get any kind of beauty in this place, soon or later or ever. We’ve been riding for about eight hours, my eyes stop looking and slide closed even though I know we’re almost there.

The bus halts to a stop and I jerk awake with the momentum. Good. Look around, up and over the seats, there’s maybe three people that make their way up and off. I check my seat and pocket and get up too, pulling my bag from overhead in a just awake panic. Of course its all ok, the bus will sit here for a while as the underneath storage is opened. I pull my bag down the aisle and get off the bus, it’s cold and crisp and there is no one around at all except the three or four of us who got off and the driver opening the storage and its quiet and in the worst way like hearing every little thing makes you realise you are noisy or occupy a space in the world that is noticeable and real. The driver is pulling bags out and none of them are anyone’s and we start to laugh (or they do and I pretend to) until he digs our bags out from being three bag layers deep and he says “it’s always the way, huh” and they laugh more and I can see my bag so I go over and get it and take maybe ten steps away from the bus and realise I don’t know where I’m going because…I am not actually going anywhere and in my head who to call, her, a friend, my mother? None of that is going to happen, I turn around and look to see where the best place to go is, where to stay, where is a pub, I want a pie, where do I get a pie?

In town, the one straight street that is the town, there is a lot of stuff I can get my head around; clothes shop; hotel; restaurant; café; shoe shop; Chinese restaurant (!); souvenir type touristic shop…ok, I realise this is a tourist destination and I love and hate it. Did I want to escape, but did I know this was a ‘place to go’? Did I expect some type of innocence, if I did I would have gone to a completely random place I’ve never heard of by just pointing my finger to the map and now that that idea is in it’s going to make an attempt to exist. On the other had the potential to have a half okay coffee and some spring rolls is pretty comforting, I mean, at least I can pretend I have some kind of access to the things I am used to. I want them to be bad because it is a cliché, if it was good my sentiment of arrogantly ‘finding a good place’ will come back, luckily this is impossible because every place here is the only kind of place that is here, that is, you cannot ‘find’ something, it is already solely there.

It’s called “Stanley Hotel” and it looks okay to me, as in low lights and an understated facade that is really a large square concrete block and that will do until I find something else and decide that I am living here for months or years or and it’s not above a pub so I want to go in and put my bags into a corner of a room and soon I have given the lazy middle aged man behind the bar all the ID and credit card stuff his protocol wants, get a key, go upstairs and do just that; drop my bags off, look around the room, turn the hot water on in the shower, feel the heat, turn it off and leave. In the lobby (if you cold call it that, it’s four old wooden chairs around a circular Formica table) there are three men sitting with bottles of beer over a card game they are not really playing. I look at them, why not, I live here. They look back and I stand there deliberately waiting for something. One of the old men says ‘hey there boy’ and I say ‘hey there to you. You guys ok, need another player?’ and they look away and one of them flips a card onto a pile and its no game I’ve ever seen.

Early, seven thirty, dark here, looking up towards the dead hills there’s nothing, there is a dark rim all around, the stars don’t start appearing until about sixty degrees up in the air. It’s black until then, the street lights are yellow as if powered by the ground under foot, like an energy source owned only by this town keeps the place alive, a glow that makes all the dark patches behind everything a deep impenetrable black. There is a bright light source down the road, obviously a pub. I walk slowly towards it, checking my box of cigarettes are in my pocket and of course they are but you know, you check, especially when you can see that there is nothing open. Two old men shuffle past me, eyes down, holding each other up, I feel like I’m back in the city again except for the intense silence and the cold and the yellow glow that makes everything feel sick and old and alien. I’m feeling sick, I have her face in my mind and I know how far away I am. I smile thinking devilish things like ‘good, I hope she knows I am gone and am not coming back and am going to die’. These type of things make the sickness go away, make my face become hard and I am going to order whiskey and whiskey and whiskey.

Ten, ten thirty, I’ve been listening to hokey music that is basically Australian country music and they seem to love Kasey Chambers or anyone that sounds like Kasey Chambers or anyone that sounds like an old young man who has grown up on a farm and likes clichés, basically anything from young men who pretend to have lived in a farm or have come to know anything by living a few weeks outdoors. It’s such a shame that these lost lonely stuck men feel something towards these false soothsayers and sip their beers far too slowly for my liking which makes me know that the steady drinking of scotch and the desire to rip their faces off is the reason I should be here. Slow it down. Slow it down. You don’t always have to…
‘Hey, mate, you ok?’ says a large tall man in a Stetson hat.
‘Nice hat…it’s not… Akubra at least” and I laugh, talking fashion to town folk.
‘Yeah, Akubra.’ He says coming over and sitting opposite me. ‘You ok mate?’ he asks.
‘Me? Okay? Ummm, no. I’ll be honest. No I’m not ok’ I answer, drunk.
‘What’s up mate?’
‘Up…up?…well, um, up….ok. OK, I’ll say: I don’t want to live. OK? Yeah…that’s…’
‘You want to die?’
‘Nah….nooo…don’t listen to me’
‘what’s your name mate?’
‘Name? My name is…’ laugh ‘Fuck Off’ laughing again…looking at his honest hard dumb face. He just looks back at me trying to be serious, trying to actually talk to me, probably was born here, probably thinks I am a real fucking asshole, probably wants to beat me up, for fun.
‘What’s that mate?’
‘Ah fucking hell…I’m sorry ok. I’ve been on a bus all day…I just got here and I just want some scotch. The bottle shop’s closed, everything’s closed, this is the only place open. And I didn’t even get dinner! Fucking hell…you guys need to have your shit sorted before seven if you want dinner…’ and again I laugh ‘seven!…how do you do it…?’, I know I look stupid but I like it. I need another drink.
‘Yeah mate…yeah.’

At about one a em there are three of us left, two guys and the bartender. I’ve played pool with both the guys and won and lost in equal measures, gained their respect, things I’d heard like ‘I didn’t know you could play pool’ and I said ‘fuck you for stereotyping’ and they laughed and we were touching a lot because we’d had a lot of drinks and the bar owner shuts the front door and turns the main lights off and we’re sitting there inside the pub, empty, closed, and I’ve been in town about seven hours or so. The bar owner pours me a full glass of his cheap scotch, throws two cubes of ice in and says ‘how’s that’ and I say ‘perfect…on the house’. The guy next to me laughs and I wash a third of the glass down, sway a little on the stool. He fills me back up to the top and says ‘come out here’ and the other two stand up straight away and I say ‘where are we going?’ taking up my glass and sipping is slowly this time, noticing I can’t talk properly and feeling good about it. ‘Come out here’ and the guy to my right puts his hand on my shoulder and pushes me with them out through the back and we walk though the kitchen and I’m trying to tell them something funny but notice my words are really bad, I mean really bad and I can’t speak properly at all. I fumble in my pocket for my cigarettes and try to keep the scotch in my glass and one of the others shoves a cigarette in my face and I take it smiling drunk and I say ‘thanksh’ and then try for my lighter but another one has a flame ready for me…’thanksh…’ I say, puffing on the cigarette, ‘you guys are…you guys are…man…fuck…I’m drunk’ and they laugh and I laugh and I haven’t spilt a drop. The bar owner opens a back door, flicks a light switch and there is someone in the corner of the back room, the person turns and I can’t tell if it’s a girl or a boy but I can tell they have down syndrome and are wearing a kind of one piece cotton nightie. The owner goes over to the person and kisses their forehead. The two guys go over and one pulls my free arm towards the others. I stand there and take another sip. One guy unzips his pants and moves towards the corner and I say ‘whoah whoah’ and someone I can’t see says ‘what’s the matter?’ and I don’t know what I say but I feel like I am falling backwards and end up with my back against the wall, glass in hand as the guys take her/his clothes off and I can hear laughing and some strange guttural sounds and I slide onto the floor not seeing much and put the glass to my lips and sip to taste it and in a blur see them all over her/him fucking the mouth and the body and saying and gesturing for me to come over.

I wake up the next morning in my room, got my jeans on and my shirt off, a headache, my boots on the side table under the alighted lamp. The problem is I don’t leave that town.

Share

I have no idea why you came to me with this

I came across the best way to get money and that is to threaten an alone mother with her child, you say ‘give me your money or I’ll kill your baby’ and they give you their money straight away.

Being an artist means living truly, waking up and then immediately being an animal who wants love. Masturbating in bed, masturbating as you get up and walk around, gesturing with your cock like a politician.

Waiting for something to happen, waiting until you make something happen, sitting on the floor and tearing their faces off from magazines and cutting their eyes out.

I call my sister and she tells me how successful she is, I tell her I am sorry for being her brother.

Drinking alcohol, champagne this time left over from your birthday, inside the place where you live, remembering drinking champagne at your ex-girlfriend’s wedding.

Showering and shaving, cutting your hair, putting on a suit, putting on shoes, putting on fragrance, standing in front of the mirror, taking off your suit.

Watching a video of a penis going in and out of a vagina, letting it play on in the corner of the room, watching it from over near the door, the flesh and the sound over there ridiculously happening in the past.

She comes home and ignores me, I ignore her, she goes about doing things and I stare at the wall. We’re waiting from someone to speak but wanting no one to speak ever again and to go away.

Eating old bread with a glass of water and pretending you are a criminal and living in hell.

Visiting a café and reading the paper it became clear I do not care about anything. I looked down from the page at the things on the table and was horrified by the still cups and salt shaker and ashtray.

I was walking along a path in the botanical gardens and noticed lots of ants killing a writhing worm.

In planning your suicide you think of things like your parents, your employer, your friends and the way in which you’d like to die and hardly once think of yourself.

Ah, the voice inside! How it is true but leads to such pain. How ignoring the voice leads to such pain.

A mere acquaintance touched me gently on the back and since I hadn’t been touched like this for so long I instantly felt human and all of my evils melted away.

I awkwardly made love to her, manoeuvring my limbs in ways that were inexperienced and stilted. Soon I had my penis in and started moving it in and out.

Reading The Bible in a hotel room I threw it away because the delicately thin pages drove me crazy with temptation to hold them roughly or tear them.

Stabbing a person feels better than cutting chicken breast, there is a point when you know there is no going back, like bursting a balloon it pops in and is quickly done.

At 23 I lost a tooth when three guys beat me up thinking I was a homosexual so now I have a false tooth and take it out every night and put it on my bedside table.

In prison I made friends with a Maori guy who told me the best way to become a citizen here is to get a white girl pregnant and then her parents do the rest.

I try to go to sleep but I keep thinking about how it is impossible for the girl I love to love me and how there is nothing I can do for her to love me.

Being depressed forces you to appreciate things like a blanket, a shower, clean clothes and food. Other people want you to smile to make themselves feel better.

When I was homeless a person from a charity group tried to talk to me but they were smiling so much I couldn’t believe them and I asked them ‘what do you want’ and they said ‘to help you’ and I said ‘but what do you really want?’.

A twelve year old boy was standing outside a clothes shop listening to his iPod standing on his skateboard and texting a friend and he was the coolest person we’ve created.

I was lying when I told you the truth, there is no way that there is any truth to simply tell.

Share

Nightmares and Wine

Walking at night, it takes you like a victim. The demon natures comes out, can’t hide it because it doesn’t want to hide anymore. I’m one of them, got my face open and got my teeth out. It looks like a smile. Some of them who come along haven’t played with the devil so well, they lost. They are under the drink or the drug. They may have lost their mind. I sat outside at a bar and ordered a red wine, lit a cigarette. The warmth of the moon, the silence of the night broken by humans with their words full of ssss. Their hissing annoys me: “SSShe sssaid there’ssss sssstill a chan-sss”. There are two devils next to me and the hair on the back of my neck bristles, I appear relaxed but am wary of their presence.

 

Across from me this couple look at me and I can’t catch them but I know they are whispering about me and wondering about me. My pale skin, my dark eyes. They have black eyes too, they are playful little imps. I shoot them a smile and they go about pretending they are lost in their own world again. The veil comes down. Good for them. Us beasts need to stay the fuck away from each other. I decide to observe them openly, seeing as they don’t want to play tonight. They appear as though they are talking and enjoying the conversation. Luckily for them it is the end of their meal and they can go without any discomfort. The male looks over and catches my eye as they are leaving.

 

Another male, much older than me sits on the table next to mine. I instantly feel his presence and decide not to look at him. He feels old. He has about him a darkness that makes me feel uneasy. His hands are a little unsure so I relax, allow myself to study him: he is wearing a black suit, white shirt and a black tie, and long thin shiny black leather shoes, too formal for this area, a little out of place. I am wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt, got a thin grey leather jacket hung over my chair and tight silver boots. After a few moments of him acting nonchalant he leans over, looks directly at me and them down to my possessions on the table and asks “got a light?”

 

I slide my lighter over to him, his bony hand takes it away and I know I won’t get it back so easily. He breathes out the smoke in a great purple plume that smells like cloves, honey and death. “I am Frederic. what is your name?” he says in an accent I can not classify, except by guessing it is an ancient combination of Slavic, French and English. “Emmanuel” I answer, hearing my voice sound sweet.
“Ah Emmanuel, I knew someone with that name once”.

“I didn’t know it was so common”

“It’s not”.

 

We talk, he flirts with me too much, I am buying him wine after wine. He pulls my lighter back from his pocket and places it on the table. I instantly take it and light a cigarette. He knows I wanted it but I wanted him to know I wanted it yet did not push him for it. I want him to fall in love with me. I want him to think I am falling in love with him. His lips are smooth and fixed in a slight grin. I don’t know what my face is doing but I know my eyes are visible to him. There is a thing inside of us that wants to destroy the other one. His face has the sick grey pallor of death and he speaks in a way that makes me think he is either dying or already dead.

 

He tells me “I have something you will want to see” and I tell him I have seen enough already. He sits back, staring at me in a new way, its horrific, like I have insulted him or as if I was incredibly stupid for saying what I said.

“I’m sorry” I offer, “I was playing”.

“Don’t play with me. We have been talking haven’t we?”

“Yes, we have”

“Ok then. I want to show you something. I live just…” and he turns and extends his arm and points, “just over there”

“On the docks?”

“Docks? No.”

 

The young imps have gone, holding on to each other and closing the night around themselves. They become invisible after about ten paces, succumb. I am walking with my new friend, he is looking ahead with his thin face downwards. I walk alongside closely watching his face. It seems to hold together in the moonlight, fades and reforms into a face, melts and sets. I can tell he is sick of it.

“Shall we say a prayer?” I ask.

“Why?” he says, challenging me back.

“Our father, who art in heaven…”

“Stop it”

We walk some more, the cats on the periphery, standing and staring them moving behind us to form a posse.

“Where are we going?”

 

He asks me to walk down a black corridor between buildings leading down to the shipping yard. I refuse. He shrugs and says it’s ok. I don’t know whether I have failed a test or missed an opportunity that he had no intention of giving me anyway. All of these things perhaps but I have started to feel sick and annoyed and distracted and safe so the illusion was wearing off.
“Goodnight” I say, casually. He says something that sounds like ‘yes’ but I can’t be sure because he has turned and five steps into the shadow has disappeared. I can hear his shuffling feet so I am relieved he is a real thing after all. I look back and seven black cats are staring at me and there is a bright green light in the eyes of three of them and it’s perfect.

 

I slowly walk home, savouring the fresh quiet cold night, passing by those who are lost and taken, passing by the bright fresh ones who are still living, coming back from their bright happy places to bright clean homes with carefully placed objects and a softness to all their possessions. Everything encased in a certain kind of manufactured comfort. They don’t notice anything because they are simply navigating streets, not knowing who they pass, it’s just a road and there are trees and houses and people. Not monsters and demons and angels and choices that affect your soul. Just a street.

Share

And then you can die

I might take another few dozine, finish the bottle of jack, with few more mersyndol. I might not get up. I might watch the dark sky get slowly light, in and out of strange dreams where it is like I am living and do things that you are supposed to do in the daylight, like play with my kids, like watch TV, like do things and smile and see other people smiling and we are all smiling. It’s just a dream. I swallow eight more pills together. It hurts to do it like that but it’s a dull hurt. Just has to feel like that, a lump of small rocks going down your throat that you wash down with the hard grain alcohol.  Sweet it is now, tastes like sugar. I light a cigarette, pull long and deep on it, let the smoke come out slow and long so it takes up the whole room. My body lets me know it is happy and relaxed. My organs and chest sink in to the lounge. I feel sick but can’t move. A vision comes that I am on a street, a street in the city and it’s bright and my wife is smiling at me and pulling me along and I feel myself smiling and looking at the bright street and then I let myself go with it…

I wake up on the lounge because my girls are in the lounge room, and they are touching me and maybe they’ve been touching me for a while and they saw there dad basically dead or as an entombed version of their living father and they probably kept touching me as a game like I am some beast that can be played with and awoken, there small hands tugging on my large nose and them daring to tough my eyes and kips. I wake up with headphones on still looping that music I was listening to over and over, Junior Kimbrough, an old blues man who tells you he is sick and dying and alone and in the morning you realise he is really dying and alone, not like you thought you were last night when you were trying to be alone and dying. I get up and they run to me and I hug them and kiss them and I feel useless and stupid and happy and I kiss them until they squirm away like the most perfect things in the world and the house seems strong and safe and filled with life. I go to the bathroom and vomit when brushing my teeth and look up to se red eyes and winkles and dry skin and think ‘fuck’…

In the car I sit staring out the front window to the backyard, wanting to mow it, wanting to do something in it, I don’t what it is, there are blurry images of renovation and improvement, trying to apply a different kind of life I don’t have. It turns to be an advertisement I hate so I look down to the mechanics of the car and push and pull the levers and buttons to make the thing move. In the street, leaving the street, it feels both proper and abhorrent, every urge to stop the car, to burn the car, to start the car and drive away, to curl up back in bed and finish my box of pills because when they are in it will be so true that nothing will matter. The mobile phone next to me rings and I think for the hundredth or thousandth time ‘change that fucking ring tone’ and I press the green button and let them speak by saying ‘yeah’ and listen to what they want and think ‘shit’ and prepare to drive for forty five or more minutes to this place they told me to go to to fix whatever it is problem that suddenly exists for me…

There’s nothing for me left to do at two thirty. There is no more work. The only way to put it. Standing on the side of the road next to my car, processing the horrors I have seen, wanting to wash my hands but not wanting to go to a McDonalds or KFC so I throw the cigarette away and drive towards civilisation, which is going to mean driving for a while to get away from the cesspit of bad mothers and disgusting unfit fathers, closer to any kind of sentiment amongst the community that values human life as important. The urge to drink a  beer and take a piss and wash my hands overrules this humanist plight so after about twenty minutes driving though the flat lifeless streets in these connected by nothing communities I find myself in a local pub with purple-black carpet, bright lights even though its daytime, filled with locals that should be in nursing homes because their long thin necks and wrists that have lived more than seventy years on this planet to exist now to slowly end their life through schooners they drink like babies sip juice when they have leaned how to drink for themselves. I order a beer and put five dollars on the counter and find the bathroom…

Outside in the street, cement, the road, the hot sun unfiltered through no clouds, no one to be seen, houses standing like graves, you understand why those who live here are so filled with hate and are so wiling to share that hate with you. The urge to have another beer, to stay there forever drinking cold beer until you can only stagger home drunk enough to ignore all of this death and hate and dull repetition whereby you will do this and see this and think this every day of your life. But this is not my town. These are not my people. A warmth can come into my chest juts thinking about not being here and having my family all tucked up at home, the older ones finished school and getting home, staying in their uniforms until their mum tells them to change, running around showing their teeth with their smiles. When I walk in they’ll rush to show me something the did, some beautiful thing the created from nothing…

Four thirty three and I am driving homeward, they worst of the days shit fading as fast as the car moves, a thin veil of garbage that tears away from me as I leave the pit of terrible humans behind. They live there, the stay there, I drive away. Like a bad smell of a nightmare that you wake from and instantly feel better about it not being real. Little bits and tendrils get stuck in and you have that pity thing of course but you can shake it by returning the next day and the shroud comes back an your eyes dull over and you become what you hate: a robot that does the job that interacts with people you tragically don’t think of as people. The idea at this time, thought everyday; pull into Blacktown, get a hit. Twelve minutes away. Ten minutes; pull into Blacktown, get a hit. Eight minutes, you try and listen to a song on the radio to pass through it. You listen and tap the wheel and pretend to sing and miss the exit so you feel safe. Three minutes; get a hit its early. One minute and there is another exit and as you drive up into it you knew was there you hate yourself for trying to pretend you were better or smart or free or good…

Driving with heroin in your blood is smooth and easy and normal. Cars flick by on your right hand side and the sun comes through the visor like a friend and the easy highway bends slowly as you see the ton come and go and the over head bridges flow over head in an instant and you forget you a re driving sometimes and wake up from the dream with your hands still in two places on the steering wheel, steady behind the car in front you’ve been slowly following for a long time. No more, don’t want any more so you throw the syringe and the rest of the junk out the window, turn back to the road and try to stop yourself dreaming too much and feeling too good but the warmth in your arms, on your face and up your spine is so soft and lovely and the sky is blue and the day is perfect. You are away and you are moving away more and more…

It wears off, especially when you turn into the street where your house is that has your wife and children in it, more, it wears off because you want it to wear off, just that glow left where you are calm and can be the person they want and in a way you want too. That could be the drugs talking r making you talk but no, deep down you know you want to love and care for them and have you be the person they know lives and cares for them. Christ it sounds so 1950s but it’s a beautiful thing to have in this age of computers and mental torment and doubt and insecurity as the last turn comes where it is pulling into the driveway, turning off the engine and sitting there for a moment simply deciding whether a cigarette is a good idea or not and basically knowing it’s a question of ‘maybe my body/mind would like a cigarette’ and ‘maybe my children don’t want to smell the fresh cigarette from their dad’ so I get out of the car and don’t have a cigarette and walk in…

Opening the door you expect children like dogs but it doesn’t happen all there is is their toys around the place and a dead house. Some part of me thinks ‘perfect’ but the other part that was dreaming and feeling good about my life for once is let down and I take the four or so paces into the lounge room and it feels so cold and dead and sitting on the lounge, pulling a teddy from under me I feel stupid. The sun outside drawing me out again, calling me a worthless man. Getting back up feels better, looking around for something I should do, a task, I walk down the hall to the bedroom, looking for my wife or a note or something. Hell, its early and she could be anywhere with them. I open the bedroom door and see her naked on top of some guy, riding him and I see his cock coming out of her glistening with her juices, I just stare not knowing what I am seeing really and look at her back as she turns around, look at her spine and back muscles twist as she turns on top of him and look at me with a blank sacred strange face I have never seen and I stand there looking and looking and only after it comes into my gut, a sick twisted pain do I turn away and walk two steps then turn back fast and go back and yell ‘what the fuck! Honey what they fuck is this?!’ and she is already off him lying there and he is sitting up naked and I can’t see anymore…

Driving away, not even looking at road, not wanting to die just not really able to look at the road, it’s a black thing to drive on and you need to grip the wheel and now not caring whether my hands grip the wheel, the faces of my children, the road, the car, my wife’s face, his naked body, who the fuck was he? Eventually it’s a highway to drive on, hitting the accelerator and feeling the car, makes me feel good to just have the car going faster and faster, to scare me, to force me to focus on the car and so when the tears come into my eyes its not from a place I know about they just come and I pull over and just listen to the cars pass by so fast…

The chemist believes my story about insomnia and back pain, the chemist does what they should and gets me a box of dozine and mersyndol. The chemist is lovely and nice and the pain on my face tells him that he is doing the right thing. It is a new chemist because you can’t play the same tricks on all of them, they get to know you after a while and tell you to get the hell out of my store. Over the counter drugs pack more whollop then the ones you can get right off the shelves. We all know this, The trick is knowing the brands and the ways in which you need to access these ‘behind the counter’ medicines. I take them back to the car stopping off at the bottle shop, buying cigarettes and a bottle of cheap as hell scotch and get back in the car. In my mind my naked wife. In my mind wondering where are my kids? Are they playing at  a friends house…are they…are they…lose track. I turn the engine on and drive, drinking from the bottle, turning the radio up. I end up at a look out about half an hour from my house, I can feel my house, I can feel what is happening. The scurrying, like rats, the frantic mess. The phone calls. I haven’t heard my phone ring because my phone is not on. I put pill after pill into my nothing, I drink the scotch. I take more pills in. I start to feel myself passing out, my legs first go numb, my arms feel strange and unattached. I put some more pills into my mouth, flush them down with the scotch. I light a cigarette and turn the radio up more. I don’t like this song. My eyes are heavy and my body is falling way. I am smiling for some reason. I put the rest of the pills into my mouth. It’s light and I am laughing sort of through the pills and think of myself as like the cookie monster from sesame street. I laugh enough for a few pills to fall out of my mouth. I drink the ones left in my mouth down and it hurts with the scotch and the cigarette and the fact that I can still see her like that and I wanted to see my kids and hug them again…

Share

Life is not such a trickery, as far as you know.

I grew up without a father from the age of 8. I you know what that is like then you will know what happens is that you instantly love any male slightly older than you. I started taking heroin because one time when I was fourteen I was in the front of a ute with a couple of guys in their early twenties who took me to Cabramatta to score because we had smoked all the pot I had and they thought this is a good idea and also to take me along. I sat there on the left side while they talked about their past and music they liked looking out the window and the streets as they turned from rural to city stuff and let the breeze wash on me because I was pretty stoned. We got there and it was night and dark and as far as I remember started walking away from the car down dead looking streets and pretty soon some Asian guy popped right out and said to me “want a cap” and I said “what” but my companion were quick to jump and said like “yeah yeah” and went down into the alley with him while I stood on the street and maybe smoked a cigarette and they came back and we were gone. Back in the front of that ute they shot up and one of them said “I’m sorry” and I said “is there any for me?” but there wasn’t that time.

I finally was able to convince her to take me up to her room. We walked through the pitch black house and up the stairs and she didn’t care that I was trailing her because years before I had lived there in her parents house for several weeks and maybe it was a few months so I knew my way. We took our clothes off and got into bed and the thing that happens is you remember how each others bodies feel against each other and the ways in which you fit together so its easy and in some human way perfect and beautiful and in the kissing you realise from each other that it is perfect and generally a good feeling, the way your bodies seem to know and appreciate it more than your heads that spoke over and over outside smoking cigarettes and drinking baileys. She guided my hard penis into her wet vagina and it was a wetness I wasn’t used to with my fiancé, the kind you can only experience with a new lover. I started moving it in and out and getting it deeper and deeper and she flipped my on to my back and started rising me in a pornish sexy way and I thought ‘she must be doing this deliberately to make me think she is far superior in bed than ‘her”.

I loved her in a way that made me feel inadequate because she was so well known and well liked and I had a hidden group of people that never intersected with the world I lived in and I liked it like that. I met her as she alighted the train at around 6pm everyday and she wore these high boots and smelt of officiality and we went back to her house to have sex after work and feeling her white cotton shirts made me think of high school sex. This one time I couldn’t get it up and she said ‘what’s wrong’ and I didn’t say anything, instead I slid down and started licking her pussy and it was too hairy but I tried to get hard by rubbing my flaccid penis on the edge of her bed and she started grinding her hips into my face liking the attention and I wasn’t changed so I started to tug on my penis like masturbating but nothing was happening so I tried to make her come with my mouth and fingers but she kept pushing my hand away and saying ‘fuck me now’ and I knew I couldn’t so I stood up and said ‘I can’t’ and I put my clothes on while she sat there trying to talk to me and I left and maybe said goodbye or an apology.

Share