Before True Rest Has Come
That early evening, in September 1985, only one person was mad enough to light the lamps, and she was the cruellest. She behaved as a bore and did not like prosody. Call her Jasmine. She wore a strange suit that seemed washed by the tides. By her side there was a book and a phantom man and child. The moon was not yet out. I travelled home with a bag by my side. I bore an album too. I did not care for dancing.
Inside my home was a pair of tights that was torn down the legs. I padded barefoot to the parlour downstairs. Downstairs smelt weird. Pungent scents wafted from the cigars dad had smoked before today. I peeped noisily at the corners of my kitchen. It seemed as though the curtains there were forever drawn. My eyes were still heavy from a future dream. A dream of untouchable woman and I was falling, always. I heard my sister weeping. Beneath my larder, I sensed vegetables turn to utmost rot. Upstairs from myself, there was a family viewing the news. I closed the back doors: now there was nobody to disturb me.
But all the noises of the otherwise dead, darkened by mourning, intimated breathing on the mirrors in the hall. And the gaslight, gone, served as intimate relation to a past I had known long before this life had formed.
First there was a long strip of photos of my great grandmother. A professional dickybird with hood once snapped his way as he strode the vanished main streets, calling “Good morning” across the lanes where once shop-windows shone inside candle-light. And here I was, yet asleep, walking down the precincts. Here were the mendicant-blind and the cured killed. All I could do was to bleed into my own heart the peculiar fact that my life as an infant was now ended. But melancholy could not damn me. I was assured by sound of my own personal fate. And school is often spelt wrongly.
Bells rang in my ears. Bells rang at the heels of my school-mates. It was as if an earth of fear had been deposed to reveal a station with a train whose destination would appear neither hidden or absolved. I knew then that learning was to be my only future.
And here I was, running down the dead-ends of my childhood, stout, confident, in command. But I appeared to peek into the windows of forgotten stores. Buried in errands, stepping aside from the common kind , prying strange looks at the broken looking-glasses of furniture shops, my soul was photographed.
“Your image has been taken.” Immortality achieved in the space of one moment sent me skipping along the roads forever. And learning was to my immortality. With hairpins, buttons, screws, shampoo packets, knitting-needles. At nearly six-in-the-morning, I was hurried to awake for real.
The clock struck six. Daddy put his hand out and turned it askance. Then the whole of my life was dreaming but thence self-lead. The dog growled like a demon, and showed me his largest teeth. “Stay still, Stinker. Get back to sleep, boy.” I was yet too tired to speak with a slap. My eyes pulsed with a forgotten tiredness which was soon to permit for seven whole years of learned life. Most of the sheets on this table were dirty. A lump of coal from an open fire should somehow remark on the vandalism apparent thereupon. Foisted on the careful graffiti were drawings of legs and breasts which smudged out rude names and formless numbers. History is lies.
Now take the Jutes. Read ahead, read about King Charles. Move ahead, read about Prince Alfred. Discover who killed the headmaster’s daughter. Read about old Bennett and see him whipped down the corridors. See Liz stuffed with dates or dip a starched collar in the smirking inks as hammers smash teeth into a prim, bald, smirking head. Spiral away from Saint Nicholas and speak of his presence till gifts are stopped. Ride the piggyback of a drunken scream. Catch penny stains sketched as if silk garters. These tables are as true as History.
Upon the last sheet I signed my name several times with a pen which had no lead. I did not opt to scribble with the real. At a first glance there was no sign of interference. Thence I drew my eye to the coke inside its synthetic grate. Dust drifted up into a cloud, and then I settled down into my first true day. If only I could yell at the ceilings and trace dark circles made by former gas or crack into lines the figures and faces which danced and chased animals over hidden fields: Come, let’s look at Saint Joan who has somehow destroyed her parents’ house in Stephen’s Street, or else Staines Grove; he will never be allowed to come back. Mrs. Baker, have a peek now, perhaps, from under these cold sheets, at Mr. Baxter, who worked in the Post Office Tower.
“Be quiet”, I said to myself, “Surely I know nothing.”
Dad opened the gates of the pantry door. The worn best plates shone like fire. A pattern, akin to a willow tree, span round the cups and filled with flowers the fruits of the coiling texts. Jugs were piled up on one large shelf, on another the bowls, the soup-tureens, the toast-racks spelling Brighton, Hastings, Porthcawl. Then for the trifle-dishes. Thence the fitful afternoons when tea-service was brittle as biscuits but proud with gold-leaf. I cracked two saucers together, and the curved spout of a teapot came off in my own two hands. Inside five minutes I had perhaps smashed the whole set. May all the vices of Leicester Square bow down to see me as I whisper in this scullery: the spidery young girls who help at home. Calculating down this pavement where the rich-smelling shops, screwed up in their sensuousness, dry hair in the rooms to the side of this home. I blood off salt with the plant that’s grown. And I should have hopes that the office girls may knock at my door with the very stubs of their fingers. You can hear sex now gliding from the glass porch of this sealed room. “Oh yeah” I must have said, and the just male voices agreeing softly. “Shoo to them who snore in and out of Staines Grove”. I know that they are sleeping under vexed sheets up to the fringes of their grey whiskers. Meryl is marrying the Chamber and Mary is wedding to Lady Settee. I am breaking tureens in this bad cupboard beneath the stairs.
A metal plate dropped from out my hands and smashed to smithereens. I awaited the sound of my mother awaking. No one stirred outside. “Stinker is perfect,” I said aloud, yet the harsh noise of an inner mental voice drove pets in my world back to silence. My fingers became cold and numb for I knew I could not lift another plate without breaking it.
“What are you doing?” dad said to me at last, in a cool, flat tone. “Leave the Streets alone. Let them sleep.” Then I closed the pantry door. “What are you doing, raving away?” Even so the dog had not been awakened. “Raving away,” I said. God would have me hurt quickly now. The incident in the cupboards had made much of a trembling so much that I could hardly tear up the mess I had made inside the sideboards and the china that was scattered under the stairs was too difficult to destroy. The doilies and the patterned tea-cosies were still together, hard as rubber. I pulled them up as one, as if in a hope of wedging them up the chimney.
“These are such small things,” I said. “I should break the windows and stuff the cushions with this broken glass.” Dad saw his round soft face in the mirrors under the duplicate Mona Lisa. “But you won’t”, I said,, “Be afraid of the noise I have made.” Dad burnt away the edge of his mother’s guilt and shame and remembered to poke out his tongue to sap the tracks of my tears. “Still playing to cry,” he said. “Tears have salt and life is all salt. Just like the best of my poems.” Dad returned upstairs to the dark, with the light flailing, and seemed to lock the doors on the inside. He put out his hands and touched the walls by my bed. Good morning and farewell, Mrs. Barker. My window, facing his bedroom, was wide-open to the winds, but I could not hear the breathing of my mother. Most of the houses were still quiet. The main part of the street was a closed grave. The neighbours were still safe and deep in their separated silences. My head no longer touched its pillow and I knew that I should not sleep again. Dad’s eyes stayed closed.
Come down now into my arms, for I shan’t sleep. I know your rooms like the backs of my hands and I do not wish to sleep again. Tomorrow, today, I am going away by the 7.50 train, with five old pounds and an old suitcase. Lay your dreams against this bed for the alarm at six-thirty will hurry you back to the once drawn blinds where lit fires burn before true rest has come. Come with me quickly to where we may hear breathe the floats of the milk-men as they are waking.
Dad was asleep with his hat on still, and his hands were clenched. My family awoke before cock-crow. At least, I thought I heard them. They would stand in their dressing-gowns, stale-eyed and with ragged hair. O, come with me quickly.
A National Train of Love
I sat in a state of privy, with a slag-heap sat beside me. In all the compartments of the train I travelled, there were lessons to be gleaned and learned.Time was dressed in a bland tweed suit. The apologies of god were leaden with shame. Galbraith served my mind and still I danced inside my sullen body whilst love reared up from the chains of the happy-killed. O, my soul lay dented and Everyman reneged on my thoughts and stilled the veins of my brain.
“I saw you use the dance-floor,” taunted a woman in a state of obfuscation and the side of Her head damaged by way of dreaming. The lavatories of Hell lay opened. My dark side appeared to rape my Gem. The scented sentimentalities of the seats which rode were forced to swerve. Lust’s hands turned askance. “Heavenward for these pages you read,” spoke my tutor. The peacock quills of a former state denied my dreams as passion raided the sly scenes of my languid ear. Home and help were ended. The gardens of the thrilled children of life stabbed me in both cheeks of my bum and the guards of Christ’s subhuman Turin Shroud noosed my cries with Atheistic lies. “Jain,” said a second teacher. The hands of the clock on the wall caused words to repeat as if entertained by self-flagellating cries. The hole in my sex descried gloom. It was clear to me that girl kind should desert me. After all, my denial of sex-abuse had been all too apparent and I could not find the masturbatory words whereby I might at last indulge in a sensuous scream. The handle of love turned.
“I do not consider youth as a bed-wetter and I must presume that when I cross my legs the scars of the ocean make a way for plum-duff?!’
These words from a third tutor seemed remotely powered. I dared not understand what She meant. Now my use of the train was gaining swiftness. Running down its rails, the gurgling noise of fellow-passengers caused a hapless sensation of disquiet.
A cloud of people stood arguing with the north-wind. I was not too maddened to experience pain and the length down my leg was never real.
“My name is Dom Daniel. Can anybody tell me why elderberry wine causes trips?”
But Dom Daniel was not blessed. Clasped in His hands was a copy of The Times Chronicle. It was my opinion (for what it was worth) that time was a funnel with weird noises closed around it.
“Thus is the beginning of the end.”
But there is no tangible end. Time unravels into itself and causes mirrors to intertwine. What should I choose to do but fall head-first into a tunnel of papers whilst lessons shoot past me. How should I refine timed life except by living inside my own estranged beliefs?
..
Strangled rats strode beneath my feet. The face of my tutors seemed planed away by foundations but the glibness of cosmetics coughed up invisible bleeding as my spirit lay half-awake in a medical room which did not inspire any true state of sex-yearning.
“Did you try to speak?” asked a man who had a bizarre birth-mark. His face was perhaps a miasma of purple and it was not until I found myself laying prostrate on an impossible settee when I considered my own face as a blemish. There are spectacles on my face and a nose never dinted by amateur boxing. I imagine you know the unhappy scene? “I snapped at you and that means you must listen!”
Slang spilled from the walls where the bodies burned and glistened. Often, I had thought of burning sculptures and thence the wholeness of statues struck me dead.
Now, every table must seem spread. Cold, snubbed peoples killed for home-time and here lay dying all over mean floors. There were no carpets but rugs of magical importance strove to stuff our eyes with Aladdin and His insane lamp.
The train rode faster. A waitress with a scrofulous cold served meringues to sleeping women. The briefcases of the working hordes seemed to pleasure the passing hour. I could neither weep nor taunt.
“I saw you using a pen for no abundant cause. Your words are worth two-pence and cannot change anything!” trilled a bent prefect who surely believed that heaven was still alive.
The rest of my pages are picked to bits by the howling of strange birds. Glimpses of hedges light all lamps and the dishonest peoples cause hateful pain. “I who saw you dancing,” Love said but Love was locked the other side of its door and the bit of sex-business pissed into the wind as the cloaks of the caned scaled the walls of Judea.
“Did you try to speak” asked a premier of learning but her face was pale and guiltless and her sight impossible to bear. She was perhaps ‘pretty’.
…
The wheels of my train span into the sun. The pleasures of sleeping travel surged beneath its counter. I did not think that a choir of songs would awake me but it did and as I walked up the slope to an outside street, bottles span from my fingers. There was a girl with shells for her hair. In the space of the city, a sea of whales span round. I have never considered true life since spent candles burn more brightly. There are tocsins heard in towns which mean all and nothing and the oceans of this earth collide beneath fled flames.
I gave my home three knocks. “Mr Anodyne,” God said, and softly strode away.
The House of Xmas Jocundity (a response to Shakespeare?)
IT is a burnished transparent night in the better half of December. The bacchanal Babylonian fields are enshrouded in a sobering coat of turgid ice. Here and there, amidst these cruel Phlegethonian sheets, dunes of Hippolytian snows dance upon the feline wind, and scatter Seraphic, white blankets across Asteroth’s astir sky.
The Acherontic eyes of a Clown with a boy’s face are focussed on starry Empyrean quarters. He cares so much for what faith sees, and has no desire to pass beyond those Perian Memories of a Dulcinea, whose sweet farewell chiselled a Lacrymose hole in His Soul and submerged His veins in molten-ice. Tepid saline tides erode His wan alabaster mask. “Well, you saddened Maecenas of mine, it is Xmas Eve,” he mutters to himself, “A time when we all decide to live under the same stars without conflict. These basic annual vows shine upon many a civilisation. But what of afterwards? Shall we still drink from the honey-choked wells of truth? Shall we still imprecate Martian fists?”
Far away, somewhere behind the Nectarious, female scent of lingering rain-washed wood-smoke, a Rosary-Clad Congregation, wielding Prayers, reveres the dark Olympian night. O, Saturn plays the organ, plays it just for me and you, and the Cherubic cavatina of the Midnight Mass intertwines with the Moon; and the Choral-Lamps resuscitate dreams in Atrophosian tombs. Over Lucretian valleys, and along interwoven Sirian passages , drifts the Congregation’s chaste Hymns.
Asmodeusan, a stygian lodger from profligate Italy, has a penile light in his eyes; a penile light that compels women to flaunt livery and virtuous men to file for castration. He grasps a vintage cheroot from King Aphonus ‘ cigar-box and lights it with a Plutovian whisper. It will soon be morning, and he is preparing himself for the arrival of Myrtle’s sentient bine, Asphodelte. “She has Houri’s unbridled favour!” he spits salaciously. “Paphos never beheld such vestal dulcitude!”
A lark’s transcendent cantata bids Asmodeusan’s annulet an antiseptic morning’s greeting. No doubt each mellifluous staff of recalls his lickerish, hymen-spewed past. Even before God’s thick, hispid hair sprouted from Love’s mammonian face, and bibacious wine clung to His soul, Asmodeusan was intoxicated by vile lust. When he was eight years old, he made a laconic virtue of boasting about the adroitness of His masturbatory deviations. And, on one dull Apollyonian day, he plundered a Venusian’s world and stained several pairs of her dew-laced silken underwear.
*
The phoebian star dances on the pock-drenched roof of the House of Xmas Jocundity, and swims within and without its ghostly tiles. The life which lies within is slowly and dearly exiting from the wrecks of hypnotic motion. Life – dear depressing animation – is returning to its enchanted and ghastly inhabitants, and the phantom moon is fading and fades back; back into the deep, dark Prussian blue meridian.
What is to happen to Asphodelte, as she lies in the fairest eiderdown, far away from those free-falling cucumbers in eastern and western markets? What I to happen whilst King Aphonus, her Father, sleeps so long? Is Asmodeusan to gain that lithe and labial fortress? Or will it be Jureis Divinoan, that free and righteous fellow who sleeps on time’s timeless floor? Who shall it be? That is the Question; and nothing lies beyond it..
Jureis reeks of fulfilment, but what can he know? For the solar bowl shines down on Humanity, spilling forth its Omniscient Soul, as if it were the home of Antihodean Wholeness. It knows for certain that Life is never planned?
And Jureis and Asphodelte are free to feel whatever they wish, while Asmodeusan fishes for the largest of lustful fish. And I know, as well as the clown with the boy’s face, that death is as drunk as Pluto’s Jury. Death’s befuddlement will teach the ignorant world that Hell is a mindful dell. “Screw, fuck, lick, suck! Learn of Peace without constructs,” God mumbles to Himself.
Asphodelte is here, singing for freedom, Jureis is present, learning of Healing. The noblest of servants, Hesperion, is endeavouring to quell the panic. “I am here, with self made evident,” he yells. “Learn of freedom, learn of pain, crush oppression, yearn to be the same. This may be a dream, of this may be Life, but mislay anguish for she exudes strife. Love, love is the answer. Learn it before you squander your hours inside this Earth. Surely you understand that Sex is wonderful?”
A fantastic, adoring wind strikes the House of Xmas Jocundity as jasmine-sprinkled Asphodelte arrives in Asmodeusan’s realm. She smiles upon him and burns hole in his odious trance. “You, sir,” she says, “are an example of Satan’s partner, and I have no desire to brush my breath upon your jaded soul. What ho, Hesperion? What ho?”
Hesperion appears and Asmodeusan backs under. There is no freedom for sexual plunderers. I know what I speak of, I know what I see. Lust is obscene yet resides within us. Asmodeusan must learn to confine his lust to reclusive hours?
*
The House of Xmas Jocundity glows with the light of a deity. It conveys the spirit of peacedom. Liberty lies within its gardens. Therein, repression is Dead.
Asmodeusan’s heart is smeared with sulphurous clay. He envies Jureis Divinoan’s love-glazed eyes. A further cheroot juts from his face, and he feels His lungs rapture into Obscurity.
Hesperion calls for understanding, whereas King Aphonus and His Queen, Perfidene, build a wall between each other. Neither of them can comprehend their daughter’ love for Jureis Divinoan. King Aphonus cannot comprehend Women, and nothing lies beyond His confuted Thoughts.
*
The sun shines upon the House of Xmas Jocundity whilst the clown with a boy’s face cries. He is the master of this chaotic, obfuscated demesne.
Jureis Divinoan awakens. He is Jupiter’s protean servant. but he is drunk, too. They are all drunk. Asmodeusan, Hesperion, Perfidene, King Aphonus, and lovely Asphodelte. All have partaken ofd December’s truth-seeking waters. They are all lying on time’s timeless floor whilst Asphodelte weeps. Tears flow down her disillusioned face. She is the only virtuous virgin in his place. She cries for Jureis’ innocence as the clown with the boy’s face understands that churlish Asmodeusan does not stand a chance. He is the master of this obfuscated ball, and nothing lies beyond Him. “O, life is an intoxicating well of Evil,” God shouts, “Drink from it, and your stomach will vomit diarrhoea. O, why is it that Life is so ferine? Why can’t we all live together?”
As the needles fall from the brazen coniferous tree, Asmodeusan and Jureis Divinoan realise that Christ is an unending Requiem. How do they know? For they have realised that Jupiter has turned against them and all they have nothing to aspire to but DEATH, DeATH, DEATH!.. Pain, degradation, decapitation. Please understand. One day, in the not too distant future, everything will change. When? I cannot predict. O, let the change come now!”
The House of Xmas Jocundity knows what it is like to be free. Its creator is wandering over the Hills of Avalon and strolling through Mammarian Fields. Yes, it knows what it is like. Don’t you see? There are no more Precepts. The Governments of Eastern and Western Markets are dead. The free-falling cucumbers have been shot from out the sperm-clogged sky, and the House of Xmas Jocundity bathes its souls in the sun’s solution. The clown with the boy’s face has created paragon of Liberation and nothing lies beyond it.
Asphodelte wanders across the House’s Fields of green and greets Jureis Divinoan. They are all Life means. They understand the clown with a boy’s face. Jureis smiles, and yells, “My Dulcinea! You are Jove’s finest pearl!” The clown with the boy’s face understands Him and inflames Asphodelte with Love’s life-kissed comprehension…
And then, and most quintessentially then, the House of Xmas Jocundity embraces the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite. Perfidene, King Aphonus’s Queen, reels for death’s purgatorial union. She cannot face the glory of quintessential care, for she has chosen to fish for the largest of lustful fish. Asmodeusan is incapable of catching her tophetic desire. She screams in expectant agony and gives birth to a sperm-choked being and, as Aphrodite’s warmth wraps the House of Xmas Jocundity in idolatrous light. Perfidene places her last brick in the wall between herself and King Aphonus. Nothing of value lies beyond it. The sperm-choked being rises to His Charonian feet, and swallows his mother’s esculent heart, and Perfidene, Aphonus’s Queen is dead.
Asmodeusan’s mammonian face loses its phallic edge. Saline waves burst forth from his isolated eyes. He remembers now. He remembers that poor, vulnerable Venusian in her vulnerable Venusian’s world. How many pairs of her dew-laced, silken underwear did He pollute? If only Death cold recall the Number. O, Asmodeusan is no longer befuddled. He has caught the largest of lustful fish. Now Love’s stomach will vomit diarrhoea.
-Asphodelte and Jureis Divinoan arrive back at the House of Xmas Jocundity. Aphrodite’s ethos complements their Ethereal God, and nothing lies beyond them.
The sperm-choked being fends off the Goddess of Love. He is Perfidene’s catch; the largest of lustful fish. “Am I not the most swarthy of demonic princes? I, Belias!” he shouts proudly at Jureis Divinoan and Asphodelte and “Silenced!” Jureis replies. “You are little more than Jove’s maleficent cast-off; a cataleptic ejaculation. Die, as your perfidious Mother did before you!” And Jureis, wielding a timeless sword, without a minute’s respite, cuts off Belias’s head.
Jureis, King Aphonus and Asmodeusan lose their individual identities and become one Entity. Their cleansed souls intertwine and pass up, up, up, through the roofs of the House of Xmas Jocundity and on, on, on into the deep, dark Prussian blue Meridian. The effusions of their Yuletide characteristics dissolve into a prism of music and swathe this world in understanding and the clown with the boy’s face avows, that one day, in the not too mystic future, dead earth may change.
I close my eyes and wipe out god’s screen. The clown with a boy’s face passes back into my imagination, and nothing lies beyond it. And I am quite alone now, as I shall always be. My eyes are focussed on those starry Empyrean quarters, and I care so much for what I see. I have no desire to pass beyond those Perian memories of my Dulcinea whose sweet farewell chiselled a spirit hole in my soul and submerged my veins in molten ice. What did this all mean? Well, you saddened Maecenas of mine, it meant whatever life is meant to mean? Nothing lies beyond the House of Xmas Jocundity. Nothiing!-
Come back to me, my Dulcinea. Help me shoot those free-falling cucumbers out of the sperm-clogged sky. Come back to me, and together we shall drift over Lucretian valleys and along interwoven Sirian passages. Together, we shall become as one and roam through the vales of purest, mellifluous honey while skating across the thresholds of Hypnos and embracing magical, Morphean planes. Come back to me, my Dulcinea. Let’s tread upon the beds of the Future and sail into Paradisiacal realms where the Governments of Eastern and Western markets are dead. Nothing lies beyond this Empyrean gleam. Nothing at all except PEACE.
(Jim wrote this short story when still at school aged 17).
Use of the Pane
It was way into Christmas. The dyes of the outside trees had stained the texts of school with a cry of scalded birch. The yellowed fists of winter were delving sense because the lustful eyes of one thousand boys were here encased in a room of thirty young people.
There was, on a shelf, the manual of my mind. I could hardly think because the sensual words of feline girls were shrieking from the sun Languid verbs foamed from the desks of vexed kids who appeared to know just how the humane human body worked and the routed shell of beaches out of bounds spoke to the seams of coal-country. Where softness dug, the miners of minors turned around and before rude sin had towelled sweat from the birth of ships gone out to sea, the privateers of life descried their decks.. Veiled with nails, crucified senses were burned to death.
The forests of knowledge dammed the brows of teachers and their misbegotten words.
Eyes swallowed from tendril-trees apportioned sightlessness because their buds of vision were wet with seed. The quietus of death’s storm awoke the dead with a myopic whistle which framed the lids of time.
I could not fathom when the rhythms of speech might darken the staffrooms. Where the battered books of one billion books reproached exams, the lines written by children in detention deadened a need for ills.
‘I have words at the ends of my fingers,’ said a male pupil whose use of poems was perfect. Verse emerged from riled heaven as the names of God teemed with one zillion chic rhymes.
There was a ‘reason’ for glad talk but this reason had invaded life and had made creation void. When I say ‘void’, I refer to the indolence of word-thieves. School is full of thefts and because of this all essays are rebuked by a method of marking which imposes a ‘metaphorical’ use of the cane and inside my head, beds were soaked with fear. Sweat oozed from the skins of youths who could not fathom a need for truth but the distant cries of abandoned cats freed folks from the cob-webs of the vain and sheer.
Infamy must serve as an instance of tuition where the startled screams of woman get lost in a forest. Rape streams from out the conifers of the love-maimed and the dirty clothes of inchoate sex must die or else become a spurious porn magazine….
I looked at the tired and saw therein a horde of waiters. Inside this mind’s eye, there were courtiers who downed G-&-T from disembodied sources. As drunk as tailors, the unravelling spool of space milked ambrosia from the clouds.
‘I am not daunted by lies and if you cannot read, please say!’ preached a part-time Prefect. But her Incubus of sensual frowns burst the curls of love’s faith because the darkness of the Void allowed fools to dispute all romantic lunar-landings.
‘I am assured that Aladdin made touch-down!’
Smog cloaked the eyes of Christ in a veil of black-and-blue while the surface of the moon burnt one’s soul with drills, deepening into the very soul of this earth. Can one be sure that UFOs do not emerge from this world’s infernal crust?
‘I had babes when too young and was then relieved!’
Speech such as these was ten-a-penny and moved the uniformed throes of immaculate humankind. The blasting noise of several million farts silenced the gene-pools of Nazism and Hitler lay drowned in a pond of skin-veined metal.
“Oh, but how terrible,’ A dauphin child spoke from out a board-rubber.
“It’s very kind of you to say life is comfortable, but look at the confusion. Just to think of living here. There’s something around which cannot make me happy.”
But happiness swelled from the ground as school-yards shortened the scent of earth’s cruel smile.
As the night rose above the rooms of this school, the trades of perverts spat forth. The stars of Time noosed the Deities of light and dark and the cornucopia of sense loosed aliens against the coitus of the laid as ships, wedged in bottles, drove the dawn ‘west of Suez.’
Lives dwelt in their own framed ball-park. Students crossed the lines and died before born. The canes of the killed thrilled as they crushed chiliads of moaning and weeping.
The clime of stiffened throes entertained the tiles of fear. Crying thrilled the chapel of flowers, smashed inside red rain.
‘I cannot breathe because I am too young,’ spoke lads where future suffrage blocked the outside loos.
And ripped to bits were the buttocks where the fields of soul soaped to slits the sexist Harness of killed cries..
‘Can you suck the teats of life or else constrain the etchings of mankind!’
And the skies of mad and disclaimed boys danced inside pictorial heavens as the Doctored scars of mankind felt bared breasts.
In this glib space, the tits of suitors swelled with the sperm of the tamed and thrilled. Hung up by the penis till pens died, the strangled cocks of wisdom spared spoiled genes and the swiftness of red seed dazzled fusion with the pared deeps of sun-lit drains. Here, the homes of murders roamed and the surfs of the tangled tamed ran with silk as sinks thrilled with the spilt skins of the penitential dawn.
‘I do not wear a bra.’ Thus were the words spoken by a highwayman of a female Fm-Tutor.
‘I cannot cane you but I change you!’ Thus were the words spoken by the cold lips of an aged Head-of-Year.
And the dire fates of the learned delved the sums of time as triangular pentacles appeared written on gleaming desks.
…
The plugs were trapped and water ran away with the blisters of the inchoately praised. The dugs of pets back home shed milk and the dining-halls of frailty served strange foods to forgotten souls. I was made sanguine by the main-meals I ate, all of which contained French stews stirred into smashed potatoes.
The scars of the stars roamed the fields of the damned and I was spent because my train of thought appeared to drift away. And where the mourning morning awoke stoned, there was a quay of calm situated somewhere out my front window. I could neither weep nor sleep whilst the coda of songs extended their tunes to the beat of alarms.
‘Oh, can you please leave welts where there was none!’
And words such as these swiped dregs from the bottoms of queer beer-glasses as the teetotal throb of this enervated life got spanked by the missions of a ‘tutored’ mind.
‘Several puffs from my pipe please!’ spoke a School-Premier and I was scarred forever.
Jim Bellamy was born in a storm in 1972. He studied hard and sat entrance exams for Oxford University. Jim has won three full awards for his poems. Jim has a fine frenzy for poetry and has written in excess of 22,000 poems. Jim adores the art of poetry. He lives for prosody.
You can find more of Jim’s work here on Ink Pantry.