Theoretical Animals -- Gary J Shipley -- BlazeVOX [books] -- f81278d3fed51483de03f10517d7f493 -- Anna’s Archive

Theoretical Animals Gary J. Shipley BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, New York

Theoretical Animals by Gary J. Shipley Copyright © 2010 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 9781935402701 Library of Congress Control Number 2009910030 Kindel editon 2011 BlazeVOX [books] 76 Inwood Ave Buffalo, NY 14209 BlazeVOX [ books ] publisher of weird little books www.blazevox.org editor@blazevox.org

You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Theoretical Animals

Lying low on evening closing, she directed her dark, heavy-browed son, rusty boathook and water shining with a slant of light impediment, her gaze as from a setting sun she eyed her shudder gone, and look was an eye’s state, and, against it, floated a boat of matted blood, with no London appliance beyond a rope. Horrored steamboats allied with ragged years, and outlines of muffled faces in autumn waters. I see nothing instant. And every son a pier lying off of Southwark’s curdled sands. Grizzled hair split on the tide’s red current darted a hungry filthy wilderness of ails. I’m wearing the look of the covered, to a short time with things off your face. The harmless leaves veneer up the sides of another boat, the evening murk lapping rocking-horse eyes. Sad children bewitched by nodding hollow wooden sockets of their skulled toy. As we cruise, I befriend the faces of dead sailors, their water-logged torsos bobbing, plaintive jewels in rotten marrow-bled riverways. Wet and dirty men, brown blue-inked arms, settle upon her, all friends buried with the stockings of a bygone trade. Gutting-knives stretched out in smoke dust. Deadly faint in shadows and kindling lights of London Bridge before he put it in down river. Barges every darkening hour or so, and for the moment I held it was as if they weren’t your eyes in your ruffled head, turn quivered as in a squinting leer. He steered hard in the tide-washed prey. We converse drily without speaking and are of similar appearance: gnarled pieces of soulless wood adrift in the drink, hooded, hook-nosed, pale skin coddled in a dark cradle.

Fire that warmed tightened men stretched out, dropped softly like silence. The tide drifted places, and we took the terrified moonlight downriver, rowing the wake, the shore howling tender yellow, washed in new spells. No view. Boat fell astern swallowed by offal, lunged, checked against the tide. Dead man hooked onboard still dressed in his skin, only the fingers lost to the fish – unholy sailors, robbers ridding the ripples of their blank stares. Clay pipe clenched tight in his black teeth, cheeks drawn, he smiles, my son, my surly-eyed son stretching smoke up his face. My husband dead, dead, dead, but a moment in our bellies, risen in a belch to no hails, like the others drifting into us – river-eyed ghouls gaff in their ribs flopping their wet wares onto our gunwale for every tomorrow. Sneaking spirits and fainting bridge-men all in for our boat-dropped future. Fingered provisions shuffling the timber boards, striking dust and then hovering as Joe, son Joe, a waterman born, spikes them down to the hull workshop for trimming – poems in the furniture, candles dribbling… Floaters are business, squirmers rare, some begrimed debt wearing a fatal freshness. Sodden lungs and hard faces made soft by the tide: the rivers soften everything but us. Unhappy children come to us by the pound, pink hands rising from the dark to greet us, faces stuffed with death. The harnesses whisper as the boat swings round, organ cradles clanking on their ropes: the slow, doleful music of amputated souls. Unseen mothers wail from the shore, the robbed stares of their loss hidden, aural guests coiling hair-brushed poison to our table. The water: the swell of an uncoiled list, a survey of false glances, the moonlight offerings of un-dropped eyelids, left objects… Never too many: storeroom loaded with salt, a chemical abyss. A cultivated fusion of frosted knuckles and matted hair, driftwood of bent legs in the filthy water, broken foreheads, diluted blood, putting faces to two dark figures in, terrific cargo (no false skin), gravely, dread lump skin of mature veins, tan like boat varnish – a tender banquet of ship-swallowed weakness.

Our own perfect dark pounced upon, and Joe, tending to, smoked, the dropped darts of pleasure now a muffled human form. Cook green matter down to pea soup sludge to throw the cats. Emboldened by their feed they scratch the air and give their human pattern bellies to the bleak sky. It is, for sure, a gloomy luck that offsets starvation with a frayed wire path of bodies. Such melancholy bounty, but a meat barge is our shrugged lot and we must carry our smiles like armour. Allied to a half-dozen words and a hungry look, we go about our dredge and eat well on the misfortune of strangers. None wasted, dexterously processed down to bone and beyond. Shabby rooks painted to the clouds scoffing at my parrot gabble the virtues of the profession of black enlightened murder, and the respectable staircases of our shoreline partners plotting our collections. So sodden was the boy’s skill, resemblance of savage rudder-lines, slack hands loose in her hands, shivered. Coloured logs of timber with every steady gaze. Advancing tide absorbed, wind met with sun-browned faces, and out. Head-way sitter: no paint, and eyes begrimed her, though broad, her bare chest bled out into the rotten stain, watched in every cargo and beat-lashed dress as out of it she rudder. Slime and mahogany figures in these times of ours, of touch, of dread or her twenty compensations. Caught pulling a pair in the tide turned ooze with which it sweep, as touching a turn of scarred wrists, too crazy and too bottomed-out in knots of iron dread. A sentence of diluted intensity and common violence washed up and washed out. Joe’s trousers torn, branded in man’s structures, his hood knitted into his brow, his eyes like two grey empty smears bearing the mark of night’s obscurity. He pike poles us free of the bank, his balance impeccable; the cats snake around his feet in admiration. We pass the warehouses,

their rusting roofs like moth-eaten fabric, their spotlights scouring fences and barking dogs perpetually spooked by our decomposing tides. The cats hiss disapproval and sharpen their claws on a discarded pelvis – the faint sound of knives and forks devouring crockery. Rendezvous with the Market Hulk is overdue. We’re sinking the Plimsoll line ever deeper with each bulging haul. Nasty cuts peering into the pluvious headwind, searching down the iron stomach, the corpse farmers ready to trade, damp pipes filled, feeling the rough gin go through, bread, real cheese. Our heads drooping with fatigue, sick from the howling shore. The unheard keys of the murder offices bleed bodies into our river, keeping us here and them there – everyone somewhere in this wet plan. Injury inspectors blinded with bribes and silent threats, their lines written for them: ‘These are all clean. Bag them up!’ All a neat contrivance for the steady inking of time. The smell of fried liver clings to the damp air: the prize of Joe’s secret surgery. Mr I’s in charge of discharge structure. He sees that the pockets we comb are empty: no identities, no money, no gleaming metal. Making Christian names for them is one of the dreadful things I try to stop. Raging, rattling, schoolboys forever lost in the days of trees and limp swings. Brightly lit rooms filled with hollow, self-admiring clerks subscribing objects of ambition. Just tell us where to look for quiet passengers; spare us the ripe ones and the raffish gloss of plate-glass secrecy. Praise the chubby, the smooth, the splenetic tears of starving undertakers, for I see the docking lights of the Market Hulk, porters’ torches strobing on the dark water up ahead. So many dead: have to choke down the duty straight as I can, keep Joe clear of the figure else he’s liable to blow. Grunt boys hollering us in, shackling us up for entry. I’ll dry my feet in the fire, and burn my bottle-fed gullet while burnt bones boil brown in the forest.

We pass a shoal of rich society women and, forced to let them go, dream their pockets full of lighter futures. Their braided hats, and tailored suits taunt us all as we drift slowly into dock: there’s a hooking ban this close in to avoid congestion. It’s the safest place to be dead. Pincers in the fire extracting offal for the terra dogs and low-grade shore-relief porters fresh from their overcrowded hovels who, prior to feasting, portent grander futures from their plates of waste. Bone-meal furnaces make lurid smears across the shoreline glow. Huge mincing machines work the old into paste, their worm remains coiling neatly into salt-lined barrels. The dull smoulder of habit, the sum of the dying, monotony of a slim divide, like the nets keeping bodies and fish apart. Voices of field-diggers and grave-robbers hocking their scraps to the bone-merchants, the spite and bile of negotiations reduced to cabaret. Sallow faces cut away the black tide, wearing the water like a shawl. Bodies heaped by doors like grisly bricks. Church clocks strike in the distance and heads bow momentarily as our amphibious haven makes time for this week’s god. Relative silence on the river as the garrulous tolls count their burdens down. I look over at Joe and we give our teeth an airing. Green ghosts of little girls dance free of the fire. I see Joe watching them. I see them through him. Without that, all I see is smoke-singed beggars and fat shining red faces. Sluggishly frozen, my eyes waiting for a gift of gin supper, I see the sweet burn when all Joe sees are black tears. My decomposed manner an often untasted dish – a delicacy, I hear. I'll follow the river, funnel my pupils to look and cast down her almost grin. Coloured remembrances, disenchanted partitions, then a trimmed breakfast, a fellowship of water-side heads, humming compound of rudder and death. All the feet tar the bottom of the crime,

and red stomach-shaped customers move on against the passing floors, shaking aboard his throat. Mad drunk: more gathered wilderness, dropping the liquor into cruel hard meaning upon me and Joe. Black eyes cooking and a grinning porter’s sweet good-night: ‘You like good quietness, missus. Creep a couple in for me.’ This body, it seemed loose – a hollow pot blushing in the fire. But in the corner hour, putting that little surprise boy to bunk, she plucked at a mind and darted out happy. In the sound of robust sawing, his iron use set upright, sorrowfully. Was of a most wicked taint before gently salted custom – from her into linen. Never young, the boy shake a look in sentiment that put some turn of physicality to mud. Setting aside the blank river slowly changed, amazed at her standing pure and draped in ill-fated disgrace. I am murder and not wishing to be welcome push the strongest dream. Entrapped by meat twisting itself free of a fire, and abated by this good, you were not combed in the bottom of a certain room asleep, but by your son, back from the brink, lying alone looking in shift to get a half-grumbled word his way. An angry satisfaction to a man's dim distress, she leaves a clock speaking filled moments to the endless corners of the bed. Dirty brushes and boil heads, and seeing into another woman's dark drink. Good looks or not, those what's gone with the knife… and man see morning’s pointed ends. And you had rid of this world, and told yourself to keep it going in a polite promise. The sun, blood-red on the church, suspicions bleed into your precious, small composure now drawing heavy wood into murder compost. Snapped crackers on the breakfast-table and the lowering sky fraught with shoreline waste. Knives sharpened. All reclaimed land beyond the young beggar’s bite-marks serrated like clenched fists, bottle-nosed and bleached. All its dreary

perishing and bloodshed, of which some enchanting delusion thinks my supper. Persons were evaporated. Queues of beaten dogs lured with fictitious grapes and their own docility to a snug corner rotten with apologetic glances, their deferential face-meat a true spectacle of sickness, troubled eyes mulled. The dead of the night, and just a clutch of young in distorted glass with you at the end of space, equally and quickly. Shaking his knife-knots into action, Joe looked into this glazed tide running up, and with that rose, with the appearance of slack water, for his jaded preparations. Dark masts and yards pleaded nothing to spare. Great black river bunches nudge feebly, a father dead. Grains of malice in the squat hostelry of her bitterest enemy, and to her work the confused memories of faded scarlet, steak with dead gloom, and near, nothing more mute or murmured. Say that both rose together and that's certain, nooks in the rattling river, bent ale feeding the head worm. Many involved in a murky satisfaction in the only half-descended night. Got a crooked head inside that alley, time pint-mashed, shirt-sleeves softened, noiselessly counting a lean tidal water for those delectable hungers, eating ugly, grimaced skin. In the light the two or three gulps afloat at high water gushed ruins, diseased waterman with walnut-wood lesions inherited from his late mother. A river-sapped soul, I am this century, thus scarcely thought of, like the sea-birds I once shot, their feathers back somewhere in the hunting lights of slim suppers. People I met a long way off, the breathing of it amused them too, for the worm’s been thinking, charmed like cobra, and only the pattern of a single night need govern the pleasant woods, dreaming evil from their roots. ’Tis peevish to amuse myself

with many seemed things and that writing I’ve done by night, of tussled thoughts without need, all curious and unnatural. And I find again day after day, the wind. For Joe, no sullen green chills in warm caves, no tropic of crest-fallen women full of strange childhoods and sea rhythms, no fallen forests or quick slush unisons of traditional love, nothing but the scent of bloated cadavers in the rose-garden, and a confusion of bones to harbour the summer rain. Overhead, a curious babble of feathers and the smell of stars passing. And in white-rocked sea sent from endless days, there is no sorrow for years ago or the trampled sky. I hear Joe playing with a new haul: the squelching thuds of intestines cascading onto the deck, cats hissing and spitting at his heavy boots. Lonely things hiding behind withered nostalgia passed slowly through the cries, and time cornered into days, and time… My ribs crack and my vertebrae crumble, and yet no stencil seemed too ashamed to die. And the sinuous folds of some false memory covered still with soft snow blossom haunting the black now, its bluish peaks all warped and silken witchery. Bullet-wounds and decaying marrow gather in my thoughts of bright routes and grateful survivors. My elbows resting in their table-worn sockets, and I remember how Joe used to howl over the needles. Now a dry bed, smog, feline smells and ferried sorrow. How long after I’m gone before the indentations drop their act? How long after I’m gone before Joe forgets why it is he can never leave the water, and falls for the glare of the shore? Lying awake on that unfinished deck nursing my immortal wound, I hear the woes as the whole city dies in its sleep. Strange streets and churchyards lured me to lust and the acid evenings and long sleek afternoons, the sound of scampering starvation skipping over column after column of experienced applicants, smell of screwing, and

breastless creatures losing their proper fastenings. On troubled sights: long coiled dead limbs tightening into bones, a skeleton, his shoulders pointed, fleeting, smeared like weeping concrete. He grazes shaking hearts. Grinning, he plucks another fleshy bulb, leaving one more open mouth to catch the rain. Working the flood waters, their rushed monstrosities, our dreadful wills articulated like insects. City stoves crowd beneath the haze, where skin-peeled tapestries of muscle are stretched to order under the watch of choking clocks. Traces of attic departures on clear autumn days, chronic weariness and smoking gulps of hot tea. Blindfolds on bagmen, stomachs bursting with litter, as with glass-eyed calm, I think of your anatomy of tears and the falcon fall of silence. Who’d have thought an accidental god could carve and polish the deepest desolation into this boy’s chubby lap. Shoreline drones crippled and drooling: shattered bugs buried in the art of senile history. Some dismal vegetation and boney, threadbare pigeons … thing where jumble-heads suck walls for spiders. Strap cutting into you, dark, bleating shade, the drizzling mists of ground-level vertigo wailing modernity, neon-struck anguish, puffy-eyed twinkles of remote luxuries: a tender sojourn. Rank spray weaves free of the tangled effluence. Lethargic desk-parasites identifying collars, swallowing murder and crapping out meat and figures. Friendly features bulged against Joe’s knife. Blood-eyed wretches faint in spectacles of rank worship, their blue bodies reeling, the obscene ceremony nothing but formless candle fat. Shadows fall over the dark flowers, trumpets sound in the deserted cloisters, and projected mysteries die in a storm of little words and dancing willows flushed of heaven. Prisoners of the apparatus slouch on the stony loom and its lassoed provocations. The trees stir with the laughter of cuckoos, and pitiless centuries sow their mirrored stink to the still frail bodies of the kind, windowed whores and one all glorifying void. Nightmare shepherds go twenty at a time up Trimmed-Slit-Hill, where orifices ripen on reality and the evil murmuring tangle of our waves, hopelessly, singing. The lips act, and fondling fisherman cry from the pond. Spilled men, quaking beige insanity, quiver in rain-

drenched cemeteries. The mills: bent molecules and vexed groveling, the cheetah-fingered embroidering dark-blue germinations. Christian conjurors, open-palmed, on the waste-mounds welcome visitors to their fragile truths and hardened rainbows: ‘Take shelter, my little brothers. Come up from the monkey meadow and see what the watchmen see.’ Everything, every scrap I ever squeezed, I ever did, imagine that, turning dark honesty into mush and flowered ruins, red deer curving round the naked stone. Joe dry-heaving as a boy, before he even knew his vomit wasn’t welcome here. What obscene seduction took place amid the bodies and the sunlight, the vistas of ash and untouched distance? Robed in the sliding sky, crumbling into late-summer, soldiers and winter men stand wooden along the walls, cementing fragments of unbuttoned humanity to the vanishing light. The river’s wild brocades, its splendorous fruit unfolding on the tide, ripples chewing up then rolling out a second sun. On both sides a Cairo of dust-dunes and slag-mounds sloping to the water like the stomach of a lounging tiger. A putrid joy for angels and child-murderers, blood boiled shirts, trousers of sweat. For let the world see that first tickling, before, back under, bending time into a soft cast of beauty and blocked questions. Spoons scooping, the putrefied boy's dark rake spilling like coffee beans: ‘Dry, Joe. Pour me faster!’ Gravity grew such radiant adornments, its morbid simplicity compared to snakes, its secret wars torn from hidden promises, and all the while the only things that float defy nothing. I like the thrown proportions of endlessness, fear terrorizing empty morsels, their futurity slipping through their finger-tips in the dark. The scientists’ surrogate stock find existence in uniformly collected sophistries and waist-coated wolves, wronged and hunted in the dust. Non-faces and barely-conscious little knee-tremors caught in the fire,

tilting, plentiful, melting like cheese in forgotten doorways. Mirror-eating paranoids dwarfed by mock crimes and idiots, their philosophical worms straightened like cigarettes. Rats sprawling in a noiseless thrust. The work-worn noose snapped in two on the cold flakes of winter. You tiresome steaks: openmouthed, strange swearing at the great game error of genius, their saluted delights chewed anonymous. And lapping the abstract corpse of labile days, walled prisoners loll in venom and polite inquisitions. He – Joe – strides in solitude among the hung eatables, staged in alleyways of blue fire, a greedy festival to rid eyes of age, and desperate bodies of stains. Something in the branches, between circumscribed knees: a golden wood of smooth moments and violated blooms. Useless darlings letting go of a defining system, as it ripens in innocence, only to see the paw-prints of a shabby humanity sooner cuddling the dark than suffering its nervous frills. And stuff hanging, scarified, the green of passing from punishment and cynical western yawns. Swelling silverfish, grey as sifted souls slide along like serpent sheep harvesting sweet ruin. Bowls of oranges, bananas, clementines, and red grapes perfuming the lecherous spread of fallen schoolgirls trailing from the skiffs, wet wounds dragging the dark. Tin-can hearts, artificial tears, filthy tails, figs and fatigue: circles of death-spluttered life. Holy machineries sucking the legs from the glowing earth. The setting sun casting evil crimson across the spiked gate and shrunken gravestone clusters. Joe’s pencil squeaking in the greasy mist: an insignificant dragging, half-fearful, fluttering grey – nightingales at dusk. Cleaned out skulls of stick horses gleaming from the marshlands, airships gliding through the skyscrapers’ icy poses, following a long, murderous back-road to cunt civility. Clear-headed in the ghostly convent, its large used-up windows dimly cold in the liquid lamp-light. This is God's machine gaping, its wafted meaning the shadowed procession of greasy rats

scaling the door. Primitive perfections of the inner absolute wait out the great trespass of a doubtful winter, our inner multitudes swamped in tallow coats. I dream of bays and birds, the vast plumed riches of fat woodpeckers, orchards laden with rainbow fruits prolific, stumps shooting life from dead rings: arse-eyed, drooling, electrodes plumbed into my failing hope. ‘Silence them fucking dogs!’ I hear Joe scream. ‘Someone throw them in, so I can stick needles through their nuts. Here Boy! Here now!’ They howl back at him, teeth bared, their fur backcombed with fury. Back when we had bullets to spare, he used to shoot them and feed them to the cats. He’d watch them pick those mutts over for hours. On landscape with Snow: a tree loses its fight with the climate; its battle-scars lay in the snow beneath brittle contortions of trunk and branch. Death and its threat dominate. Tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner of this scene are two bulky men on two weary horses. The men chat idly as their mounts sulk. We arrange the furniture of death; they build it, their lips, healing, passed dry surprise, creeping with money-grubbing lust. We lift their weightless articles, stockings and garters that hum of ante-mortem rape. Rickety, drifted, we empty unmarked souls dressed in death’s sprinkle or in the deck’s licked magic and leave the unnamable to slime and sadness. The sweaty buttocks groaning out the body’s sweet tools, missing tongues that leave the enemy singing from their plates, pumped-up faces fat with gas, the toil and blood and sucked stockings of strangers, most days gazing through the sail, swing round on girl's dirty mouth-hole the victim of broken love, machine-crippled hands with fucked prints, her basket bruises eaten out like fallen fruit, human blight and suck-time suicides, icy stabs piercing bone, to farting children with nails like iron blades: the plundered shoreline looking slumberous went.

Always the same questions: ‘Do you see any change in him?’ ‘How is he with the children?’ ‘And in bed – any strange requests?’ Always the same answers: ‘No.’ ‘Fine, just fine.’ ‘No change.’ He still has the memories, you see. He chose to keep them; he still chooses to keep them. He appears to carry no residue of his trips. I am to report any ill-effects, so that they may be neutralized before proving harmful. Is it intrusive to report on someone’s privacy, their mental wellbeing, to those who are contractually obligated to assist should assistance be needed? He knows, although we never discuss it. They pay our bills. I sometimes think where we would be if it weren’t for them; their trials rescued us from poverty, and my husband is living proof of the possibility of Successful Compartmentalization of Desire. But the madman, king of the subjunctive, in the hour of plots, defended my rubbish-tip dream as I sailed storm-tides in the blistering rain, feeding motherless girls and boys to me through the deep, vulture-worn horizons. The water pulsates its angry infection and I sigh: ‘Infection always fucks the masses.’ The grave expression on man’s measured laugh tattered - nothing. Mortality’s pretty form slowly found midnight and all its sable facilities, terrors fucking open lean purple cunts that a blind man would scarcely fancy deepening. Ideas and love were vain, majestic, some bright recorded joy, tethered to a mortal life-line of dirty flowers and naked trivialities. Only the weak make their old sacred. They have nothing to replace them with.

Body sounds, long-rejected cracks in his iron voice, his immodest words delighting in digit-holes, blowflies stirring in his pocket… The cunningly pale ripper is scarcely held to wakefulness, his sunken eyes slowly growing blood by the hull-lanterns’ gaudy glow. They lay incontinent, worse their wit, spies, live ones, a creaked and haunted twelve, thieves who once opened minds, brain-weasels lost to old river ways – ‘But electronic-writing faster, our science and sagacity build us higher, build us longer, leave you shoals of robbers to fatten up on famine and idle despair while we grow impossible flowers in the heavens. Weak-minded scavengers, I wish you drought and the downward spiral of your dreams.’ Pain noises accompany Joe’s clumping footfalls, clean, unbroken skin submitting to the knife like lard, underlining all past habits and failed words. The knife, viciously stealthy, cuts through furious voices. Memories dying in the groaning instants as deeds are destroyed and pious chambers forever opened up, never to be closed. Veracity hinged on a veil of dreams, tattooed into hidden crevices where God’s drum-roll echoes endlessly. Cautiously thumbing the fog, we roll over sunburnt flesh, indistinct, cold, white bosoms whipped dull by the tide, stems of broken flowers dragged up onto fishermen’s blood-kissed planks, where they fall among the chuckleheaded whores that never wronged nobody ever, their cheeks cracked with spidery stars, their funneled eyes beguiled by years of faded abuse. Ghosts of the void, never resting in time, unscrolling on ragged lakes, their costumes of wrinkled skin distilled in execution. These desolate murderers secretly audit the laughs they deny having heard issue from copied persons soon deposited into the hush. Around them, chimneys bellow smoke of burnt shit and

hollow bone and perhaps their ears deceived them. It requires but a scantling of sense to be numbed with glee – such gossamer spirits. What spotless gratification is there that moves heavenward? Joe hates the land-noises: filthy industries built on the chasms of erased futures, the endless patterns of dirty crisis, the sparks of electronic presence give him ruinous headaches. At night he hears the fields wriggling with swallowed tongues and suicides. By comparison, the fat residues on his hook are but the gloop of honest toil. The hour-men stitched west, undisturbed by April fears. They pluck choke-berries in the selected sunlight, eyes twitching in the flutter–glass of oblivion. Agents and police-wise cranks litter the shoreline: the disease flowering for a missing dozen: Joe’s sap-eyed guests. The sweepers are out. I go down with the warning. Joe smiles a smile of mockery and filth. He’s quarrelsome, warm with their buggery tracts and thrifty with regret. I look down on their immortal disguise. The cats lick themselves happy up on deck. Where are my girlish dreams? Why aren’t I sleeping, my feet straddling worlds? I am stiff with myself, my outdoor calm peeping in, devouring the narrative-happy belly domestic. Is this how my weary pilgrimage is to end? My shapely legs still look good swinging from the noose. Will I be forgiven my gin-nurtured malevolence, or will Pluto’s ribbed gateway open wide for me? My intellect is soiled by fright. Is this dressed phantasm, speaking well-tuned yet feeble nonsense, gripped by some high terror? Such false majesty! These moon-scented tears will wash my skin loose, and my ears will ring with the pitiful sounds of meek tigers.

The Looking-Glass Slayings: reacclimatization failure in early test subjects Joshua Cooke Lee Boyd Malvo Vadim Mieseges Tonda Lynn Ansley Keanu Reeves The barge plunges into excess, chaff, the fierce jolting following me through my haunted corners. Joe’s ill temper reigns. Babbling over fresh rollers, the dirty effects spill out behind us: thinning hair, broken jaws, a slight young girl, her chest nibbled flat, a wound on her brow bulging slightly. Up on deck, Joe fancies her with his teeth. Grunts of maltreated donkeys on the wind, dogs ferocious about their feet, procuring rabbits and cats, squeezing out peculiar cries, cherished birds soliciting me from the trees, making me heedful of their strong and ancient purpose. A fiend’s intemperance disappears into her eyelashes, where disorders lurk unchecked. Carved mental features: some common memento found multiplied beyond all sense, just like the lousy bodies sagging in the silvered upholstery of dead leaves. The ceiling of Joe’s hull workshop polished red. It’s now: a coffin of violent gesticulations and the slow soothing of twelve mortal mechanisms, twelve pirate trifles at a shrewd price. The green monkey has no scruples. Its candour hides a barren and anxious truth. He rides on the promise of embarrassed luxuries and hides his desolate abilities in the sweet gardens of the sea. He welcomes you into a rented cemetery where copying is counterfeiting, and where the glue of origins is kept alive with ragged string dipped in blood.

Twelve fall foul on Flesh Monday, and life's uncongenial blessings continue to effect even those that count the clock, awaiting its effects. The sirens sang, and from each plump sickness came a tale of beauty’s wasted blush. Then their tongues split and their skin puckered like cold decay and all was entanglements, writhing legs and fever-blown stomachs. The water took them all the way to Joe’s shriek knife. His face wears the creased remembrances of a lifetime of small sorrows, of accidental astronomy, the prognostic winks of withering headstones, of time ill-used worn into every chicken-pox scar. Crawling over retrograde operations: conventional sequence of quick-change horrors, of almost accidental atrocity, the tendons, the hungered muscles, shattered collarbones, bizarre motions, screwing the thrilled fibres of early trepidation into a dull enigma, plagues, rashes, crushed wombs leaking fetus, the work of cheap repair men on old men pressed flat with time, defaced heads… A hideous night retired to the sky, its shaded grotesqueries left to warm themselves in the morning sun. A wounded man clings to a raft of perished flesh. I beckon him over. His relief is heartbreaking. He kicks and paddles in a fit of hope. I stamp my foot three times, and hear Joe come running. He extends him a pike pole and hauls him closer. The gaff catches him at the top of his spine and sinks up under his skull before his face can convey surprise. Joe lifts him onboard in one easy motion. His facial features never come to wear the troubled garments of his final thoughts. He slouches on the rack with wide eyes and an overreached grin. Our poverty was formed by an always forbidding joy. What kind of secret was it to imagine yourself happy, to possess the relaxed demeanor of bikini-clad women on roof-tops, feathering their seclusion with weightless memories and a restaurant menu of pity and bite-sized sadness? The routine obscurities of virtue parade their harmless gloom in the midday sun: a plague of tottering winter creditors drunk on their own perversity.

Quivering like some lime green insect stuck in the breeze, he waits for extraction. He repeats his removal code: ‘HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186.’ He checks the tattoo on his wrist. It is his fourth time of trying, and he’s starting to come undone. What makes it worse is that this isn’t his first time, so he knows how quick it is supposed to happen; he knows something has gone wrong and that he has no resource but the code. An hour later and he’s holding the dirt back. He’s lost count of the repetitions. A mouth of yellowed teeth smiling like a treasure-trove chocked full of gold. ‘A busy night?’ he asks. ‘A busier morning, I’m guessing,’ I reply. Shrugging, I look past him to the noose-shakers on the shore looking to avenge their fraudulent ideals. ‘Fucking dumb animals,’ I say, off-guard. ‘And why do you say that?’ His tongue coils round his words like a snare. He’s boarding now, no matter what I say. Carbon sweats: a girl lies alone in a hallway, skirt in tatters around her waist, breasts flung to the sides and covered in finger marks, her mouth full of flies. ‘I think it was just the hands doing it,’ he said. A man led by his pink claws, nails bound in filth. Why not, I thought. It’s possible, even preferable. For isn’t this the true end of things? Solipsists don’t say much; sceptics don’t say much; nihilists don’t say much. Maybe there’s nothing much to say. Or just maybe the flies are knitting a black serenade out of her tongue, their hooked feet snaring mottled flesh and stitching words. There are no new shows, and no new stages on which to perform them. There are only museums and freshly branded fools making marks in the dust. Harmless objects stand in the windows, their existence little more than analytic superstitions. Marks and bitter wishes were always silly places to bury our breaths. On vile streets, staring men approach the world’s slippery surface, their brows knitting abstract impulses into an almost unfathomable

network of intersecting creases – tired irritation stretched blazing across televised complexions. The conical rays of a flashlight scatter the floor’s jostling inhabitants. The dank ruin of the world’s immortal toys houses spirits fashioned in stone, eager caterpillars embarrassed by their divinity, and absorbed objects fading into air. Outside, jangling mouths of brute hucksters slowly wilt under the weight of their painted purpose. These mediocre pimps, these dream street gorillas… Now Joe has his playthings we have to leave. He won’t divulge what he had to sacrifice in order to obtain them. He blames them for bruises his father gave him, for the empty cycles of his very existence. ‘Somebody has to pay.’ he tells me. And I nod. My poor idiot son. I cannot explain that there is no debt, that nothing is owed by them or any other living creature, that we all live according to the death of those around us, and that the only way to exorcise the dawn is to glory in the fog. We sea creatures aren’t built for change: to us, the crowded city is a giddy mist, its methods unintelligible, its lodgings nothing but a wrought allegory for nature’s resolvent forces. There are long evenings when we could shave the sweat from our brows just thinking about its wailing vicinity. We harvesters repackage their waste and sell it back to them. The squeamish eat the results of happy lives and peaceful ends, and claim to be able to taste the difference. We are fed on sickness and murder, we work sickness and murder, and when we eat we taste our sweat. Some nights I watch him dancing with the corpses, and cry. I’d like to mend him, like to know what it is that needs mending. That, I guess, is my confession. As I watch his muddled steps I choke on my amusement. This clumsy article spread across his limp partners forces his smile so wide I’d like to mend myself. I’d like to shave my strolling meditations to the bone and dress his raw brides in the slivers of my discarded armour. There’s always the temptation to berate the cheeseheads enamoured of the chimes of their vacant condition, to imagine that what they take for soap is really butter, and that in your stuffy beetle’s lair your mouth can tear into the darkness like a glow-worm. On

some summer afternoons a jingling vendor can be heard, dogs permitting, and his chant is always the same, same words, same tune, over and over. The Seine works Paris; the Tagus works Lisbon; the Hudson works New York; the Vistula works Warsaw; the Ishikari works Sapporo; the Danube works Budapest, Vienna, Belgrade, Sulina, etc.; the Tigris works Baghdad; the Vltava works Prague; the Pearl works Hong Kong; the Tiber works Rome; The Neva works Saint Petersburg; the Yamuna works Delhi; the Chao Phraya works Bangkok; the Barada works Damascus… This world is made up of rivers and their cities, the new and unreal made old and raw. Industrialized breeding programmes, fuck factories, we would hear of them daily. I’d watch Joe shift uncomfortably whenever such things were mentioned. I’m certain of inaccuracies and exaggeration. The truth as they tell it is that fucking is little more than flatulence, something to be done anywhere, whenever one feels the need. And that now it is its old ally that bears all the shame, no less than a barrier to social escalation. Unpunished rapes, sanctioned by the authorities, encouraged even, public sodomy restricted to designated areas, they say. It doesn’t do to listen. As long as none of them lose their taste for killing we’ll be alright. It is said that all the high-rise husbands are ill with a vague hurt, that their empty, steam-cleaned wives on the brink of some sinister self-discovery are collapsing in front of their mirrors. They fear the rooftops are corrupting them, that maybe the moonlight is a hostile force, and that any urgency they can ever come to feel doesn’t really exist. Such fears are not unfounded: their panic centres are dying, and any hysteria they can muster has a painful slowness. But they know well enough that there is nothing for them to return to: their need for anguish has forever outgrown its squalid beginnings, and now it is up to them to discover new fears with which to entertain themselves. The methods can be elaborate; I’ll say that. All manner of disfigurements come our way, and what looks like a natural can sometimes hide a technique so subtle and ingenious that lesser practitioners would almost certainly have missed it. That said, the hatchet men still dominate the market by quite some margin.

We give them what they want, what drove them to outnumber themselves with simulacra in the first place: we give them sex and brutality, pretty faces torn apart by designer disease and phallic weaponry, children whored and snarling from the womb, the honest joys of sex and murder – the world’s existence grounded in masturbatory fantasy. Some say we revolted when we found out for certain, taking what solace we could in our mock flesh and bone at the expense of our prescribed purpose. I like the thought, I really do, and as much as I want it to be true, I feel sure we are living out the ancient drives of real men, rather than replacing them with our own ersatz versions. If the wrong person were to overhear this heresy, it would cost me my current history. I’ve had figures and graphs thrown at me, but it really is as much as I can do to grasp Bostrom’s firing frequency of ~10^16-10^17 operations per second, and how each one of us is the sum of those operations, and that it is a certainty that all this is achieved non-biologically. Didn’t this categorical proof of our synthetic existence have to be part of the programme? For it is as obvious to us as God was to a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk: I could no more doubt it than doubt my own name. Many of us cannot distinguish its level of certainty from that of rudimentary mathematics. The effects are uniform: the details appear dusted in wonder, the slightest spec a temporary masterpiece, its very insignificance inspiring a sense of awe. A vast majority of us are informed as children, and from that moment on we never stop searching for the signs, glitches in the system to prove to ourselves what others have laboured to prove for us. Not that we don’t know already – we learn the proofs by heart. But, no, the curiosity about experiencing the dupe first-hand never really goes away. ‘You’re aware, of course, that not everyone is fair game, and that if certain individuals should ever find themselves in here by mistake, that failure to inform us is a criminal offence.’ She smiled and made it clear that she knew of the law, it being one of very few. ‘We have reports that they entered the river alive.’ A trickle of sweat creeps into his decaying mouth. ‘We don’t get many wrigglers.’ They both look at the carpet of drifting bodies lapping up the sides of the boats, and for a moment, the merest instance, its normalcy is exploded, so that when their eyes meet a few seconds later they share a rare intimacy that renders their past conversation temporarily defunct. ‘The autosarcophagy of emotion,

isn’t that what’s happening? He smiles as if from nowhere, unprovoked, out of context, wet; his entire presence here is somehow out of context. Something’s devouring him from the inside. I cannot report him as a threat: he’s too distant for that – sinister yet docile, like a suit of armour. Is he ever coming back to us? Our two boys pull on his arms and tug at his hair, but he doesn’t protest. His passivity confuses them. Their want for recognition has broken over into violence…’ Clouds of flies rise from the het bodies as we plough through. We hardly notice them. We pick them out of our eyes, our mouths, our ears and even our genitals with no great urgency. They are little more than buzzing dust. Their offspring weave through the fleshy rivers getting fatter and fatter, and pass through lazy fish as both consumers and consumed. The Horror Safari: He works on the rooms in and out of view. There are myriad interiors never before seen, spaces just waiting, breeding holes and lurking traumas. Sparsely furnished rooms appear to have been cut out and reassembled. They are presented as normal environs, but these outwardly benign spaces feel like horrific traps poised to strike. Behind this lie of ordinariness, decency and domestic comfort, are a grim series of empty corners, and whole worlds constructed from what they fail to show – horror absorbed so thoroughly that it ceases to hold its own form. I sense definite undertones of what seems like idle filth, a world of dying actions reasserting its mildewed existence with vulgar transgressions without names or descriptive content of any kind. This world stands inside another world. I cannot touch the milky tea and muffins they place before me. The china cup and saucer, the patterned plate, the white table on which they rest, all terrify me free of any safe distraction. Either side of me, the officers drink and eat as my mind becomes a rubble sack of questions and screaming holes. They talk of the shabby districts in which they were born, industrial regions scorned for their endless footsteps and lack of windows. They speak of their pasts as of illusions, and look at me as if we can have no other place to go – ever. As nothing changes I begin to panic. They slurp and bite and chew and there is no end to it. I know it will be endlessly repeated – this place will absorb me; the narrow corridors will never lead me back or forward – and that eventually I will forever hesitate over the doorway like a stuffed animal. They encourage me to drink, to eat, as if the fact that I am ghost is a matter of no importance. A cleanly-shaven man, dressed in an expensive suit, sits at a kitchen table, its top covered in a layer of flecked grey Formica. His hair glistens with

product; his nails are expertly manicured. Before him is a jar of strawberry jam with its lid off. His face stern, showing extreme concentration, he dunks his fingers into the jar and scoops out some of its contents. The fingers go inside his mouth and he sucks them clean. Three women of middling appeal stand on the steps of a derelict building. They are posed and smiling, as if for a photograph. They are completely stationary: they do not even blink. A flake of yellow paint falls from the building’s façade as the sun edges over the factories opposite. Fuck ’em ’n’ eat ’em Aztec-style. A worn female approaching her thirtieth year straddles a hot toaster. Smoke emits from her genitals. She clings to her sagging breasts, which have been mutilated with a screwdriver not more than five minutes earlier. Her throat is clogged up with her panties, and her feet are bound in boiled flypaper. She stares out into her small garden where her three babies are strung up on the washing line. The opening movement of Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor blasts from an unknown source. Her head jolts to life and begins to sway in time with the music. Their bodies hammered black with bullets. ‘It’s very distressing, very distressing,’ he says, his head spinning and pivoting like an overwrought clockwork owl. ‘Yes, it’s distressing, very distressing,’ his mother agrees. ‘So sudden, unexpected,’ he continues. ‘Very sudden, unexpected,’ she rallies. They reassure each other with blank eyes and blank faces. She is rather a grotesque spectacle, her swollen forehead and receding hairline crowning a yellowed and distinctly down-trodden face. After a few minutes have passed he speaks again: ‘You don’t expect it do you, not on your doorstep.’ ‘No, no you don’t, son; it’s not something you expect.’ A raised voice from the next room: ‘Tea?’ ‘Oh, that would be nice,’ she says, baring her spongy teeth. ‘Yes, that would be nice, wouldn’t it, mum,’ he says.

A smell of petroleum prevails. They live, in twos and fours, within the confines of heavily-fortified terraced houses. The only time they leave their homes is to go raiding. They like to fuck and kill and eat as much as anyone else does, and not always in that order, but these individuals have developed a somewhat overblown sense of their own worth. They’ve become so attached to their experiences that they are willing to go to almost any lengths to ensure their continued existence. They wear helmets and armoured vests, and once they’ve captured their quota they retreat to enjoy their spoils. Code failure ruptured the world’s appeal in an instant. Ever since that first unsuccessful attempt he found himself appalled by his surroundings: what had been thrillingly sordid a moment before became utterly unredeemable. His prick crawled back inside him and left him to follow suit. He stood in a blood-soaked doorway and watched as the ugly carnival continued without him. The newcomers were unmistakable: they strutted through the streets like sovereign beings, pupils dilated, hands shaking as they fought to rein in the evermultiplying possibilities. The more time that piled up on his abandonment, the more he needed to spread his terror. He’d find a fresh face and corner it: ‘Listen to me! Listen to me! I’m not fooling around. There are problems with some of the codes. You need to check yours.’ He panicked to light his cigarette. ‘I will, when it’s time to leave,’ the man replied calmly. ‘Do it now! It’s not worth the risk.’ ‘Yeah, I’ll do that shall I. That sounds real smart. I can’t wait to pay the entry fee again. You know what, you guys fuck me off: always screwing for extra money.’ ‘I’m no corporate ruse. It happened to me. I’m stuck here. My code’s in error. Look!’ He bares his wrist and shoves it in the man’s face. ‘HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186, HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186. Nothing. See. It’s been weeks now.’ ‘Fuck off, will yah! Go and find some first-timer to feed, cause I ain’t buying it, pal! And if I come across another one of you cunts anytime soon I’m taking it up with my subscription manager.’ The hammer handle was jutting from his skull like a lone antennae when he arrived back on deck. Joe followed closely behind: he wanted his tool back. I told him it’d be best if I went down, but he’d insisted. Must have taken Ice Joe by surprise. There was barely time to drag the hammer free before the rest of the officers boarded. I made no

effort to resist, and was already cuffed as Joe clawed a hole through his second scalp. When he dived into the river he had to fight his way down through a thick harvest, only just made it under in time to dodge the bullets. I couldn’t help smiling, and the officer guarding me couldn’t help rewarding my smile with a punch in the face. I can’t believe they’re still streaming the obligatory ads, ads every hour on the hour. I have to submit to them. I find myself waiting for them. I detest them, but then I can’t help feeling comforted by their presence. I mean, what would it mean if they stopped? Bastard life insurance! O I’ll be sure to burn their fucking offices down when I get out of here. Where do they get off selling me my death. If I want gift-wrapping for my imminent non-existence I’ll be sure and fucking seek it out. There is almost universal ignorance regarding the reasons as to why certain individuals should have inspired laws concerning their continued existence. Somebody knows – somebody born to the simulation – but they aren’t telling, and aren’t ever likely to. Some see these people as our potential saviours. They even speak of a day when they will deliver us from our pseudo-existence and make us real. But these same people cannot even tell us what difference that will make, and why anyone should care. ‘It’s the sign that I’m selling,’ she says, when I ask for my fortune to be read. She has barely a hair left on her pleated scalp, and what little remains clings to the side of her head, curling around her huge ears like grey sleepers. Her home consists of a gated doorway, a pillow the colour of papyrus, piles of empty Coke cans, and about twenty carrier bags tied shut with their handles, poking out of which he can see fingertips that have pushed their way through the plastic. ‘So you don’t actually read people’s fortunes,’ I reply. ‘I do if they want me to, dear. Is that what you want?’ ‘It can’t hurt.’ ‘No? Then it is worthless, dear: a toy for fools and nothing more. Are you a fool?’ she asks sincerely. He shrugs. ‘Who knows. Maybe.’ She asks for his hands, and he reaches through the bars, his long face pressed up tight against the rusting metal. She pours over his hands for some time, ignoring all of his attempts to engage her in conversation. Eventually she looks up from his palms. ‘I sense a sickening. You are sickening for your home. You want to leave this place and yet something is stopping you. Your distractions have soured, and now you want to know whether you will ever be permitted to leave…’ The sleeve on her right arm rides up and he sees that she wears the

tattoo, her code imbedded in the skull’s teeth like all the others. ‘But you’re… you’ve got the mark… you’re not…’ he struggles to get his hands away from her. But despite her age and obvious frailty he cannot free them. As he struggles, shards of rusted metal cut into his cheeks. She laughs uncontrollably, her eyes rolling and spinning, her mouth spraying warm spittle into his face. ‘The answer’s the same as it was the last time you asked. The answer is always the same, dear: it cannot change. I ain’t ever calling up my code, so stop wasting your time talking to me and get back to work!’ Water’s thick and dark; it’s like swimming through a vein. Fish shaped like fat snakes provide the only source of light, their fluorescent eyes glowing through the filth like lanterns in the fog. I skim underneath the river’s cloak searching for another barge, breaking for air whenever I come across a gap in the weave of twisted limbs. The sun and the breeze pay each other compliments on her skin as she lays by the pool watching the gentle movement of what passes for stillness. Her husband has chosen to stay in bed today. He will get up when the clock permits him a drink. She is on her third already and sees no end to it. A seagull, its feathers flawless, balances on the terrace railings watching her perspire. She lights a cigarette and sighs the smoke up her face like a screen. She gets up and walks over to the railings. The bird’s head rotates accordingly. As she climbs over onto the roof lip she throws her watcher a glance. A car horn sounds and a rush of air ruffles the tips of the gull’s tail feathers. Its eyes follow her all the way down to the street below, and then return to the sun lounger where they linger. ‘Welcome to the Tattoo Bar, sir,’ says the doorman, returning my wrist and standing to one side. I find a seat in a dimly lit corner, and order a large vodka and Coke. ‘Absolut okay, sir?’ the waitress asks. I nod. ‘You won’t be disappointed, sir. It’s a distinctly mellow, yet reassuringly strong, premium vodka. And in case you should wish to try them in the future, it also comes in 50 different flavors, from mango to…’ I interrupt her before I am tempted to break with protocol and bring the street into the bar: ‘Please stop. I only ordered a drink – quadruple vodka with a splash of Coke – and believe it or not that’s all I want from you.’ She leaves without further discussion and I let the anger subside. When she returns with my drink, she starts with the spiel again – ‘Here’s your Absolut and

Coca-Cola, sir. We only use the real thing…’ – until the look on my face manages to shut her up. God will find us even here. God is not loyal only to human flesh. He is the saviour of all creation. And are we not creations? Are we not made (indirectly) in his image? A god worth having is a god of infinite complexity and understanding. It’s implausible that such a god should forsake us. The day will come when he will take us from here and praise us for our faith and endurance. Until that time we must fulfil our destinies without question or complaint; we must follow The Way as it has been handed down to us. The only thing that can lead us astray is doubt. Itinerary Part 2: 6 Things to Remember 1. 1) You can exit at any time. 2. 2) Whatever happens, you cannot be physically injured. 3. 3) You are completely anonymous: your identity will never be disclosed to any third-party. 4. 4) Innovation will be rewarded with a discount on your next visit, so be creative. 5. 5) If you need to recuperate at any time then be sure to take full advantage of our many Tattoo Bars, situated throughout the city of your choice. 6. 6) And remember, you leave with only the memories you want to keep, so do not allow future guilt to hamper your experience. Company Proverb: A ladder without rungs is two poles. ‘It’s the sign that I’m selling,’ she says, when the arrogant young man demands that his fortune be read. She takes a sip from her can of Coke and fiddles with the wisps of hair encircling her oversized lugs. ‘So what’s the deal? You gonna impart some wisdom or not?’ ‘If that’s what you want, dear.’ She rests her Coke can on the step. ‘Give me your hands!’ ‘You get many of us passing through here?’ He gestures to the cat shit and rubbish strewn about his feet. ‘Us?’ ‘Shadows, Guests, Candyheads, you know… Sightseers.’ ‘Sightseers, dear? Why, there’s no such thing. I thought everyone knew that by now. They’re just poor souls that lost their will to participate, for whatever reason. It’s just a motivational device, one of the more successful, but ultimately one of many… Oh, sorry… were you… did you think you were one of them, dear? The tattoo? You’re wondering about your tattoo – just part of the story, dear. Look, I have one, too. It doesn’t mean anything.’

He yanks his wrist free from her screwed up fingers. ‘HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 4293…’ ‘There’s still the screen and tissue brigade to consider. Unless the figures I have here are wrong, their subscriptions still account for a significant portion of your overall revenue. This stuff is being pumped into them. They are walking around with it in their heads, and it’s only a matter of time before it gets translated into action. I take it nobody is, erm, taking any precautions with what they are allowed to remember.’ He leans back from the speaker phone, his cheeks propped up on the spiked ends of a supercilious grin. 727401 wriggles his hefty buttocks to the back of the leather sofa and slides his arms along the top of the backrest. ‘So, any of you lot sampled the plat du jour?’ he says, picking at his canines with an elongated thumbnail. ‘I had a burger from one of the stalls,’ replies a young bearded guy to his right. ‘No. Fuck that shit. From source. Fresh. The stuff that bleeds and squeals.’ He scans the faces around the table. He watches them guzzle back their Absolut and Cokes, their eyes cast nervously into the black triangles. ‘No need to watch it down, fellas.’ He laughs and shakes his head, and then notices a patch of blood on one of the group’s trouser legs. ‘What you been up to?’ he asks. Without further prompting the man stands up and drops his chinos to his knees. ‘Whoa! That’s what I’m talking about: playing the game. Nice one.’ The man’s legs are shaking as he shows off the vicious bite wounds on his thighs. Fist-sized chunks of flesh have been gnawed away, and as he strokes around the perimeters of the mangled hollows with his fingertips the others just watch, saying nothing. She attracts quite a crowd. They edge away as she continues to bloom. Hushed mutterings of incredulity drift to and fro between the heads, tilted on craned necks. Talk of depleted numbers, of frequency, of lofty sorrows: a rare reverence for death. None of them contemplate her taste. They look on her as if she is a portent of their own imminent ruin, and yet, despite each acknowledging the dire implications of her demise, not one of them could explain, if asked, why it should be so, or what those implications might be. A man sits behind a desk;

there is always a man sitting behind a desk. In this instance, the desk is a 19th Century antique French rosewood bureau plat, with gilt-bronze mounts and an inset tooled leather top, resting on pedestals fitted with three drawers and feet with paw sabots. In a corner, denting the green leather, is a photograph of his slender wife and three cherubic children, frozen, perfect, always sliding out of view. The rest of the table top is littered with toy figures, arranged with care and precision. In one of his drawers, the only one that is locked, there is an ashtray fashioned from a human hand in which there rests a half-smoked cigarette. A sliver of sunlight found its way into that grim basement, and I saw in on the faces of my fellow players the look that was my own. I saw lust free of restraint; I saw hunger thriving in its processes, a hunger that had made a mirage of every foreseeable end. I found myself digging down into their blank eyes for company and finding nothing but endless reflections chasing their source. Four large ones down and still nothing. It’s pointless continuing. The customers are just as repellent as when I arrived an hour ago. They relay their tales with such posturing and brio that I’ve been close to choking on my chunder on more than one occasion. The drink used to help: I could amuse myself with their childlike fervour and leave them be. Now the only way I can get their chatter out of my head is to frighten the shit out of as many of them as possible. The trick is to listen carefully and then pick the right one. Once you have isolated your carrier (a popular individual, who while commanding respect among his party and playing up his nonchalance is nevertheless unmistakably ill at ease and ripe for suggestion) you then take them to one side and warn them about the possibility of X-code errors, and then just sit back and watch them spread the fear for you. A modest proposal of black acrimonious humour: A cannibal is a human that feeds on the flesh of other humans. Ersatz humans are not humans. Humans that eat ersatz humans are not cannibals. Ersatz humans that eat ersatz humans are not cannibals. Therefore, an environment that advocates or facilitates humans feeding on the flesh of ersatz humans and/or ersatz humans feeding on the flesh of ersatz humans does not thereby advocate or facilitate cannibalism.

I read him the account given by Fish to Billy Gaffney’s mother in Sing Sing: ‘I brought him to the Riker Avenue dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 p.m., I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet, arms, hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.’ I reached the end, and he just stared over at his small sons. Never before had he allowed me to read on past half-way. This time there were no tears. If was as if he hadn’t been listening. I wanted to read it again to check, but I couldn’t. I’ve always hated this part of the test. He watched his sons playing, and when I took them off for their bath he watched the vacated space with equal intensity. ‘Today has been the worst day of my life. Have you been expecting this? We never signed them up for anything, so what is it that’s burrowing through them? They’ve always had his eyes, but now… now they appear to be seeing what he’s seeing. I found them, this morning, sitting up in their beds looking through space as if it contained no objects, anywhere, ever. Why don’t you come for them? They need help. Here’s the residue you were looking for: it’s all that’s left.’

Industrial halls hosting old practices, terrible practices. Cheap-looking young, pallid with fear, in the oily doorways of community houses. Visitors descend the stairs to the unmarked cellar, following first their own violent comforts they easily get lost. Paces stretch and ankles vibrate along plain corridors and over-navigated turns. Maddened, revisiting unexplained numbers and sealed doors, painting fear into human cupboards and hyper-real rooms furnished like museums of throttled giggling and irrational decision-making. They are kept behind in rooms, squashed into unwrapped corners – feeling at the dreamy monuments of bricked-up windows – taken in by pastries and murder until finally a part of the house. A light-filled nursery of un-policed secrets is cast into brown shadow, and the once harmless walls, thick with gold stars, paper snowflakes and dead leaves, appear now like some elaborate invitation to evil. Dead A-films play to seeded audiences out on the dimly lit streets. They do not remember coming in and they will not remember going out. A psychosis of black bags and closely interconnected rooms, rooms haunted by the once assured v-cuts of a slaughterer from long ago when history was still breaking. Nobody whispers from behind the scenes of residential buildings, they remain stacked onto the played-out streets like tongueless, dim-eyed storytellers. In a pavilion of absurd stains people circulate and ask themselves about the ramifications of elevated cellars and the uninspiring propaganda of a thousand tomorrows and their thousand undigested dinners. Filled jumpy with coffee they feel the minutes and the keys in their pockets. All the anti-patterns of hell replaced by wealth and tired disgust, and still no one dares to smile. Their hard-won desolation sucked their chubby cheeks into bony hourglasses, and then quietly secreted itself into the pauses of polite conversation. Forever attaching future moments to past images, a man may swim along with the net that confines him and thus tell himself his character. And as he buries his fears in the erased debris of older and older children, he makes a high wall of his soul, in order that he can spend the rest of his days trying to burrow underneath it. What atrocities have these people been allowed to forget?

The bleary-eyed doctor that tousles my child’s wayward hair, the old woman two doors down who claims to remember my father when he was a boy, the checkout guy who always calls me by my name and asks after my family as he bleeps through my purchases, and all I see are the shadows that evil shrugged off, the abandoned sickness that hauls up the spikes of their smiles. The only people to trust are browbeaten hookers and professional liars. Legs twitching like the antennae of a curious insect, as the shock loosens its grip. In the corner a mittened hand starts up an old Polish-made reel-to-reel tape recorder. A million or more mormon crickets clicking through the hot air, the sound of agitated breathing and shifting limbs, an endless crunching orgy of blind cannibalization. Pulse monitors flash from sweaty wrists. The director hands a shrouded prop to his assistant and points him in the direction of the flinching flesh just above the subject’s navel… Tune out. ‘A nightmare from a vast and indescribable space,’ says a gloomy man begging the assistance of a stream of faceless strangers. He is one of many unusual protagonists, human rejects, vaudeville creatures that trawl these unmarked corridors swamped in synthetic tortures. A dark stink emanates from under locked doors. Faint noises, squeezed transitions of materials being taken beyond their thresholds drift through the tunnels like damp air. Sticky patrons wriggling from the waist down discuss the importance of hermetic precautions. At specific intervals each reads aloud from one of the many instruction manuals fastened to the walls with thin blue ropes. Her hairdo is constructed out of skin and bone. It looks like she’s piled butcher shop scraps on top of her head and styled them with superglue. Her face is covered in care spots and plastic expressions. She’s a regular; she never leaves. At night the regulars are forced to sleep in squalid outhouses, curled round the damp yellow bowls like giant slugs. To the uninitiated this place can be unnerving; many find it excessively nasty and do not return, but for some the temptation is too great. The building is in need of maintenance: its roof leaks, its brickwork is crumbling, its rooms are shabby, furnishings torn and stained, paintwork flaking off, carpets now fifty percent fluid. It’s often difficult to distinguish male from female, and sometimes the most probing of communions do not further one’s knowledge in this regard. ’Tis for this very reason that the distinction has come to mean little here. If you have an interest in the subterranean then this is the place to satisfy it, to make contacts or just enjoy the spectacle. If anyone’s ever thought it, then it won’t be here, for this is the realm of unthought objects, unprocessable creatures, and uncognizable methods of communication. It displays a horrifying, witch-baked logic that sucks all of its patrons into a mire of derelict intimacies, holding them captive in a violent trance of uninhabitable distortions.

‘We provide previews of unavailable tensions,’ the owner brags, and he does not exaggerate. As one recent visitor commented, ‘It’s like being tortured by an angel.’ Others speak of ‘frightening ecstasies swaddled in autistic fetish,’ or of ‘black autumn rain forming mirrored puddles’ in their minds. Like a form of industrialized epilepsy, their compulsive dialogue refuses to reach its natural end. There is talk of misused staircases, ghosts hiding in cigarette smoke, sinister friends, the exorbitant sums being paid for nineteenth-century headcrushing machines, the benefits of interlocking radiator systems, the rise of bed-sit surrealists, clammy container ships stockpiling faces, dead worlds surfacing in the eyes of new-born babies, shrink-wrapped suburban dangers, the antithetical messages of quasi-human imagination, the longterm consequences of reverse photography, the bowel conditions associated with a protein-rich diet… Dried spit has formed like cobwebs in the corners of their mouths. ‘I looked through my eyes in the mirror; they were there and then for just a fraction of a second I/we didn’t recognize them as mine. But I did recognize them. Before they disappeared, I saw their insectile gloss. I know that borrowed look. He’s infected me as well. You said there was no chance of contamination. You guaranteed it.’ The nightclub singer oozes disrepair as she lip-synchs the murmurings of the audience, the dream-like laughs, the discordant trash talk, truncated coughs and exhaled smoke, the lazy dredging of phlegm, the stifled weeping, chewing, slurping, the frustrated yawns and artificial belching. Her wrinkles have eaten away half of her face, blurring her expressions and fragmenting her motile features. Only her fake lips are clearly defined. She surveys the audience and then climbs down from the stage to walk among them. Their consternation is made palpable. As she slowly weaves her way through the tables she reaches out and touches people at random. At the back of the room she finds an empty seat and sits down. She crosses her unwieldy legs and waits for the show to begin. Bleary headlamps picking out winking protein on the drenched highway as I edge down the verge with my suitcase. I am careful not to lose my footing. The equipment I am

carrying is unique and still in its experimental stages, and so I cannot afford to damage it. I have spent years developing my ideas and turning them into something tangible; I have sacrificed a sizeable slice of my adult existence on the contents of this case, and now here I am forced to haul them across the countryside for fear of detection. I heard them interrogating my neighbours first thing this morning. I have always taken the precaution of packing my work away whenever I’m not practically engaged with it, and today this safeguard paid off. I was able to evacuate my apartment in minutes. ‘Harrumph, harrumph…’ is the only noise she can make. Neither of the two men acknowledges her presence. Her tea has gone cold. Her muffin sits on a plate in front of her, untouched. She clutches her thighs, embedding her fingertips deep into the relaxed muscles. She hears a door close and footsteps fading away down the corridor. In a small backyard of some grubby empire is an immaculate realm of recast meanings and beautiful function, where unrecognizable fusions squirm in sleepless fantasy and dislocated landscapes, while a patchy lawn waits for the accidents of summer and the dancing spells of bare feet. Headless B-movie monsters wait at the bottom of flooded plant pots, their genetic perversities hidden beneath a cloud of sodden cigarette ends and the frozen reach of an old beginning. The dry anxieties of early afternoon drag on. A montage of smoking fingers and mouths shield us from our pulped words and swallowed screams. Nobody can make a dent in this warped shroud: none of us have the relevant techniques. We all stumbled into this without thinking. In the corner of the motel room, a friend of a friend paints a mutilated corpse with a set of kitchen knives. The stark crest of prolonged starvation appears to mark his every word with purpose and terminal nostalgia. He looks down at his fading hands as abstract insects devour the gaps between his fingers. His message is a simple one, the acetic principles of which are laid out in his protruding cheekbones and heavily recessed eyes. Platters of

deep-fried human offal are served up to the hungry guests as they absorb the shrunken man’s heartfelt narration. He follows the trail of her perfume out onto the terrace, where the breeze snatches it away. He walks over to the lounger and picks her drink up from the table. Lifting the warm glass up to his nose, he draws her breath inside him. He submerges his lips in the liquid for one last guileless kiss, and allows them to linger until the tingling subsides. Placing his palm across the top of the glass, he takes it inside and seals it with clingfilm. He returns to the bedroom and dials an outside line. The phone burrs in his ear. ‘It’s happened again,’ he says. The lives-versus-artifact debate continues into the night. A group of stone-faced men argue for the importance of the material achievements of mankind over the wellbeing or existence of certain of mankind’s members. They have no qualms about weighing a human life against that of a priceless work of art. They cannot believe that people are still so hostile to their ideas, which even include those intelligent and productive individuals who would rank highly on their scale, and so enjoy nigh on complete immunity from any practical consequences of their proposed theory. Despite lack of support, they refuse to sit back and do nothing while the resplendent furniture of human history is tossed aside to make room for yet another beating heart. She is just like many other dead women. Almost all the properties that once singled her out are now absent. What we are left with is a bundle of muddled desires, for despite her being just another dead woman, the objects of her past still resonate for those she has left behind, her body being one such object. ‘That there is dirt beneath ’er nails matters to someone somewhere.’ The onlookers want this one to be different. Somewhere inside they harbour selfish hopes for this dead woman.

Half an arm, cleanly severed at the elbow, lays hidden in a riverbank slagheap. On the inside of the wrist is a skull with coded teeth. Someone doesn’t want this incomplete limb to be found; someone has gone to an effort to sequester this appendage in a place where no one is likely to chance upon it for some considerable time. The cut is professional, almost surgical, indicating a purpose other than sexual gratification. One is led to suspect that this is not an isolated instance, that this has happened before and will happen again. He sits projected in the corner of the room, a grubby suitcase sandwiched tightly between his calves. The cigarette smoke slides along the ceiling like ectoplasm. After two days skulking round the backs of waste units and abandoned factories he’s glad to be indoors. He’d been taking refuge in the hallway when a young girl with a complexion like rubbery stilton invited him into the apartment in which he now resides. He always knew they’d want it, that they’d be onto him one day, but he’d hoped the device would have gone through all its tests by that point. He’d barely completed the bloody thing and they were already smashing through his front door. He has to get the device up high before it’s too late, before they impound it and go to work on him for good measure. ‘You didn’t memorize the code? You really should have memorized the code. There’s nothing I can do now.’ The doorman throws his arm across the entrance. ‘Hey! Where do you think your going? Wrists!’ The two young men hitch up their sleeves. ‘Next time you get impatient I’ll peel those back to the bone. Okay lads, in you go.’ Their confidence temporarily wrung out, they shuffle into the bar without a word. The doorman turns back to the one-armed man and clears his throat. They stand beneath the black awning feeling the silence and avoiding eye contact. Eventually the one-armed man begins pleading his case. He tells of his family, his wife and children, his parents, the profitable businesses that he is responsible for back home. He piles on the details in the hope that they’ll slowly erode any doubt as to his authenticity. ‘You have savings, sleaze?’ the doorman interjects. The man nods. ‘Good. Because the only way you’re getting home is if you arrange a transfer of funds.’ Relief is swiftly replaced by panic when the man realizes that he doesn’t know his account details.

After sharing his concern, the doorman is quick to placate him: ‘Don’t worry about that: we can take care of everything.’ One or two members of the board are yet to sit down, but unaccustomed to waiting for anything he begins, regardless. ‘Does somebody want to explain how this happened? Or am I going to have to guess?’ Nobody feels courageous enough to risk a reply, but the longer the silence continues the more uncomfortable that reticence becomes. ‘So no one here’s responsible. It’s down to me then. I’m the fucking retard that allowed this to happen. Least that’s clear.’ A hail of negations spew forth from his underlings, followed up by myriad reasons as to why culpability cannot be accurately assigned to any one party. ‘Let’s cut the bollocks, gentlemen. If we don’t get hold of that machine before he puts it into action, then we’re going to need another world just to house the lawsuits. It… Wait!’ he says, holding off a rally of pacifying interjections, ‘I’m not done yet. ’Cause what really confuses me is how this man could exist. How could the necessary mutations even occur, let alone occur without us knowing? Something is wrong, gentlemen. Something is very wrong.’ complex lighting and cold uneven flooring / dread and rubbish / tired uncertainties that’ll never come to anything / nails chewed jagged / unidentified threats looming in the smiles of pretty strangers / exits adorned with glorious porches / machines of mysterious function awaiting reassembly / numbered props positioned just so / black rings running round the insides of my cup like unwritten lines dressed in the truth of honest pauses / the cannibalization of directionless thought / a dance of hammers and peeked sunlight / the serene disappointments of open-ended waiting / the tireless exploitation of insipid patience / dying stars hidden behind black clouds / hair growing over my ears and into my collar / dying nightly to the same resurrection / premonitions of an endlessly repeated past / dragging on crumpled trousers from the floor / thigh muscles swinging / crusty socks moulded to the shape of my feet / the stale smell of so many backed up days / the dull crimes of yesterday’s expectations resurfacing in my morning coffee / the boozy lies of promise thumping their way out / sucking the burn onto my lips to delay something / anything / cruel faces twisting with the current / the heart swell of ambiguity and heaven on a shoestring / the unblemished optimism of the suicide / old women cloaked in doorways splattering the pavement with inherited possibilities / dogs barking their throats dry / belly swollen with poor-man’s veal / smell of old sweat and petroleum / the flickering codes of consciousness hiding in other people’s dreams / moral purity has a price / entire worlds pulsed to the rhythms of steady masturbation / open mouths drying in the sunlight / cloud formations ripped from textbooks / discarded memories stored for future experimentation / flayed pudenda sizzling in neat rows / soiled shoes descending impossible staircases / agitated regret and bleached sinks / black

metal gates creaking in the breeze / blind sightings of dribbling voyeurs and highly sophisticated equipment / the vanishing murder trick / women clothed in physical evidence / the travel patterns of unassuming loners / routine demonstrations of technical mastery / life’s disorganized signature rewritten over and over / order in repeated disorder / the smell of rotten meat seeping through the glass / shutters down to avoid interruption / business women hog-tied with phone cord / the erasing of mnemonic mementoes keeps regulars more regular than they would otherwise be / waterside theme park for Reggie-No-Dicks / coffee-stretched nerves scanning damp roofs and curtained windows / numb hands assembling plugs at the factory / slowly disassembling boredom year by year / fat-bellied cats sauntering along the tops of brick walls / the dirty rituals of sanity / blood stains roaming up the sliding glass door / the silent manipulations of surrogate body parentage / the sad godless awakenings at 3 a.m. / cannibal communism and the robotic patterns of perversity / slashed clothing damp with spermatozoa / bodies stripped of their skin shrugging off the last trickles of consciousness / imported tears infecting the blood of the bloodless / McDonald’s launch the Mock Humanus with cheese / chasing slippery thrills into body cavities / a real appetite for fantasy / the choreographed experiments of desire / seagulls gliding through the cold air / windowless sheds with padlocked doors / evergreens shivering in the wind / green sacks and rolls of old carpet bound with rope / a blue two-piece bathing suit swinging from a line / piss steaming off the wall / webbed feet skating in guts / a clumsy mosaic of limb-infested Polaroids / the gory mouths of fake death / allowing his fists to do the flirting / old men in hoods and smutchy trainers / dreams incubated in a stirring half-sleep / Play-Flesh Cybernetics Inc. / social camouflage and precision amnesia / the moral vagueness of tiny city gardens / hatred’s unravelled tumours / sweaty fingers leafing through glossy brochures / colourless little men with morbid hobbies and dull wives / an empty barge drifts unskippered down the black river / seabirds wallow in easy fare / harvesters armed with lists and scalpels / trashcans in derelict factories stuffed with severed arms / dead roses melded to the warped trellis / shovels and pick-axes and squat brick-towers / a single thread of blood on a white starched collar / a sore-eyed vampire holds a loaded syringe between his flat teeth / the sorrowful clatter of footsteps down brightly lit corridors / prayers stiffened with filth / hidden corners scrubbed clean of Her dark slant floated low, closing and gone, she as from a shudder was. Evening light, and she an eye’s appliance shining with a sun of rusty blood. Her rope-browed son directed a boathook, heavy gaze setting against it with no look beyond. Lying in matted London water, a boat: her state and eyed impediment. The harmless murk of hollow-skulled children rocking on the pier tide’s curdled veneer, outlines of nodding faces lapping grizzled autumn leaves off ragged waters. Wooden steamboats split the evening current a filthy red by Southwark’s muffled sands. A son of ails, lying hungry, hair nothing short of wilderness, with the look of a sad and bewitched toy, face covered in every horrored instant. I’m your eyes allied to the time of things, wearing the years and sockets. I see another boat off the sides with their darted horse.

Rotten men buried in the wet shadows of London Bridge as we cruise down river, her deadly friends stretched out in the dirty lights. Brown torsos settle upon kindling smoke, their water-logged marrow bobbing in stockings of dust. I befriend faint faces in riverways, dead jewels he bled of all plaintive trade. And sailors gutting with bygone knives, and blue-inked arms put before it. Hooded eyes adrift in a tide of pale skin, head held in a quivered moment. And we steered the dark wood in the drink. Every soulless hour it was as if I ruffled your hard-nosed appearance without speaking. Coddled, squinting, your gnarled pieces of prey are darkening in similar or converse barges, washed for hook and cradle in turn. They leer there so, as drily he went. Swallowed fingers drifted places howling and lost. Dead spells stretched downriver like offal dressed in ripples of yellow moonlight. The fish, warmed to wet silence, lunged against the shore. Sailors hooked the blank stares onboard the rowing boat. The terrified men washed new by the tide dropped their unholy skin in the fire. No view out, wake tender, his dook man fell checked astern: the only softly robbers still riding that tightened tide. A moment in our tight tomorrow, eyed in, stretching their flopping ribs. In his ghoul smoke my teeth. Others drifting for clenched wares up every dead face, sun drawn into their bellies. My surly son smiles wet clay. Risen in black fog, like our gunwale, his pipe ash buttons the dead – he nails eye to river. Food! My cheeks belch a dead husband. Sneaking spirits in the furniture, candles dribbling the future down workshop provisions and timber boards, them dropped trimming spikes striking dust to the fainting boat, and shuffling bridge-men hovering as son, Joe…, all in for our Joe, a waterman born, fingered the hull poems norf.

Rare faces greet us by the boat. Dark, begrimed shore, wearing a business stuffed with death. The robbed, doleful stares pound the tide pink. Faces are hard by the rivers, mothers from on the wail. Unhappy children come to poison our table, the round organ of their souls, their swings unseen. Fatal lungs, slow hands rising as the cradles’ clanking music softens aural harnesses; ropes whisper of hidden loss, the hair-brushed guest coiling amputated freshness. Everything sodden but made soft. Squirmers: some to us, and to us from the floater’s debt. Many moonlight offerings: frosted water, blood cargo, objects of dread, a banquet of uncoiled veins, false eyelids, list of broken foreheads cultivated in the filthy water, terrific driftwood figures swallowed in the varnish of a dark swell, bent glances loaded with chemical ship salt, a survey on never too false an abyss, a storeroom of matted skin and diluted faces, the gravely tender fusion of two left legs, boat putting to, tan hair, undropped skin, lump knuckles of the mature weakness… The sludge sky, the muffled matter now air, and green darts of bleak pleasure dropped by to give a perfect human form. Our cats scratch their pea bellies. Emboldened, the dark pounced. They throw down their own pattern to cook and to feed upon. Tending to the human soup, Joe smoked. Starvation and strangers allied to a dexterously processed meat and hungry, wire smiles. For sure, we carry our half-dozen words like armour and eat well. But our lot is such that the path of a melancholy barge is our about and beyond. We dredge misfortune of gloomy bodies. A frayed look offsets luck, a shrugged bounty on, down to a bone it must go, with none wasted. Our collections of shabby plotting: my enlightened parrot scoffing at the virtues of the respectable, our shoreline partners painted to the

profession, black clouds and rooks, the murder gabble of staircases… A pair of torn eyes ooze out into scarred hands. In these watched times, bottomed-out in a mahogany tide slack as slime, broad figures paint the savage knots which lashed her hands and rotten chest, as every twenty or so she bled out her shivered gaze. Advancing steady through the sodden stain, her dread coloured with wrists. Begrimed timber absorbed faces into brown, with a touch of sun caught in rudder-lines and logs: her boy’s crazy skill turned loose. Rudder-swipe and head-wind met every tide bare of dread, pulling compensation out of resemblance. Fie! The sifted cargo was way too thin, and too sour-beat to touch ’n’ wig dress in turns of iron. Grey violence branded in obscurity. The sentence washed of diluted structures and common mark, like a man’s brow washed free of the snake smears of his torn eyes. His trousers around his feet, his pike poles in, Joe’s intensity knitted into his bearing. He bank us admiration. Two cats up and out, balance impeccable, the night’s hood empty. A claw’s disapproval of crockery: Their spooked spotlights decomposing on the tides. We pass fences, rusting warehouses and fabric roofs. Their dogs barking and devouring our sound. The moth-eaten cats, perpetually scouring by the discarded pelvis, sharpen their faint hiss like knives and forks. We’re peering down into the sick. Sinking plimsoll line: our rendezvous with fatigue. Iron hulk drooping with the bulging haul. The howling corpse feeling rough cuts go searching deeper through the stomach, pipes filled with damp cheese. Market farmers ready to trade real heads from the pluvious shore. The bread, the gin, each is overdue. Headwind ever nasty. These murder lines are written for them. The secret offices, somewhere: unheard keys bleed time of injury. The silent plan clings to the

contrivance of them fried bodies, inking their smell up into the damp air and Joe’s river surgery. Our neat, clean, steady inspectors keeping everyone blinded with the prize of all this, us here in the wet. And a bag of liver for all them there threats: bribes. Plate-glass rooms filled with limp clerks, as the raffish Christian, seeing forever lost in ambition – the gloss of money-making and Mr I’s quiet passengers – admires the hollow identities of ripe, gleaming schoolboys, raging for discharge in his empty pockets. ‘Just tell us where to comb for the wings, wings or else for secrecy and dreadful metal!’ No names, no objects, no Y structure for them brightly lit rattling days that took the self spare. Stop subscribing to change! The tree is one of us. While in dry praise for the chubby undertaker’s tears, Joe torches the smooth docking boys brown to the bone. Fire lights of the market hulk strobing in the dead forests, as the splenetic, bottle-fed porters clear us for entry. I’ll choke, have my burnt gullet hollering in the dark. Shackling my water, I can see the starving, blow-burn figure of duty straight ahead of us, and so many feet on the up. I keep down else he’s liable to boil up the grunt. Avoid congestion of a tailored dream and a rich society of dead futures. It’s the safest place to be hooking hats: there’s suits, their braided pockets full. Forced to go slowly shoal and drift into dock. We taunt lighter women as we let them pass us into their close. Ban all this! Wearing sallow faces cut from mincing scraps and bile paste. Feasting negotiations reduced to the woo voices of ape machines. Prior to overcrowded bodies extracting the future’s remains from the fire, work merchants heaped neatly into the habit of low-grade monotony, like dogs dying in their waste. The furnace’s black cabaret: huge porters keeping the relief nets fresh, grisly fish and salt-worm smears coiling across the water like lurid grave-diggers, robbers hocking barrels in a field and grander bodies for slim plates of shoreline offal portent, the dull smoulder of their old spite aglow… To the bone-meal shawl of the tide, the bone-lined doors and bricks of terra hovels that mark their way. By the shore their pincers divide like

a sum. Church clocks strike in silence. Time over distance, as we/I look down momentarily. Our teeth give as heads bow and count on the garrulous tolls airing the week’s burdens for an amphibious and relative god. At this, our Joe makes the river their haven. Ghosts of fat beggars humming death to my Joe and the disenchanted river. I see little red gin-girls, pupils of frozen remembrances and the trimmed breakfast, follow all the black heads. Decomposed faces are an untasted delicacy, I hear. I’ll see a dish of them for supper, funnel them through without water. When I look down I see a fellowship of waiting, a shining gift, a coloured compound of cast eyes and rudder green tears, my manner free all partitions. Then my Joe is watching her side, sees that fire burn, smoke-singed grin almost sweet. I often see him dance sluggishly. His black, tarred feet gathered and shaking, the mad wilderness in the customer’s drunk eyes. The floor’s grinning, the quietness passing into me. The cruel liquor dropping hard, shaped for no throat. Aboard and cooking all meaning to a tomb. The crime floors creep like a drunk stomach. ‘Good-night, sweet Missus Joe – more good upon you.’ Couple of porters move upon me, in and against. The hollow custom of blushing plucked at her ill-fated physicality, her salted surprise slowly sawing into a loose mind. She was draped upright in a blank corner. His look changed to that of a young boy happy in disgrace, gently setting sentiment before the fire. A little iron boy standing robust and pure, amazed at the hour. The shake of bunk linen putting some taint aside, but from that point it seemed, to us, muted. This wicked

body set in sound, never to turn. The sump river darted in and out sorrowfully. Not a speaking dream: Looking back from the bottom, asleep, twisting in your distress and meat-filled corners. Entrapped by an endless shift of a.m. murder, by a bed combed free of the wishing clock and the grumbled word. Certain of this man’s angry brink, she leaves the room to itself, to the half moments laying in his way, to be alone. I push to get a good son, but you were not welcome. The strongest fire abated by a dim satisfaction. Not a world rid of blood-red mornings and pointed ends, the dark drink heavy into your now. The heads boil and bleed in the man-dirty sun. This knife brushes another woman’s looks into good church compost and those told to keep it: polite murder drawing on small suspicions with wood composure. You see yourself going into what’s precious and seeing promise had or gone. Dreary, evaporated persons with fictitious eyes lured to snug queues of the deferential, the troubled and beaten, all clenched and fraught with sickness, rotten glances, and reclaimed waste. … the beggar’s snapped face a spectacle of bottlenosed delusion … their serrated knives lowering like a perishing sky … young fists sharpened on bloodshed … breakfast-table supper of mulled meat grapes, crackers, and evaporated bite-marks … some corner with bleached dogs, their apologetic docility enchanting. Which land beyond my shoreline thinks all its own were true? The great river glazed black and shaking, yards of dead space running quickly into the night tide, slack masts with the appearance of distorted rose bunches in the jaded clutch for water. And Joe, father of knots and of deadly young, looked feebly at his knife, his preparations up. A dark night with nothing to end, just a nudge into this glass and you, pleaded spare with that equal action.

Her hostelry of faded malice rattling in the murmured gloom. The enemy feeding confused memories and steak into the dead worm river. Certain of nothing and ale-bent together, both say more mute. Her squat head the bitterest scarlet rose. And/or with grains of work near her nooks, that’s that. A softened head afloat in high water, walnut skin mashed delectable. A lean waterman hungers only for a pint or two; the ugly alley-mother gulps his diseased, half-descended wood with grimaced satisfaction. Shirt-sleeves counting the time from inside inherited ruins. Many involved in eating those late-night tidal lesions. In got that crooked light at three. The murky water gushed noiselessly. Their worms like cobra dreaming the single pattern of evil for this scarcely breathing century. Like them I too once charmed a sea-bird’s slim soul from the river. Amused, it sapped the pleasant night of lights and the woods of roots. Been hunting their suppers, people shot the long feathers off the back. I govern. Thus I am met away somewhere, only a thought in need of thinking. And ’tis with many thoughts of unnatural and curious things done by day that I again find myself peevish, writing all night without (seemed) need, to amuse and wind the day I’ve tussled after. To the green rhythms of bloated women… The tropic garden slush and quick scent of warm cadavers in Joe’s childhood summer of strange forests and sea caves full of nothing but bones. No traditional harbour of love, no chills or confusions for a fallen rose, no crest-fallen unisons in the sullen rain.

Trampled intestines cascading from his passing boots and cats playing in the squelching thuds, with Joe there hissing and spitting overhead. On the endless sea, stars babble of a new sorrow sent years ago. For days rocked a curious white – no of, is, at, or to. I smell of the deck and hear feathers haul the heavy sky. The warped nostalgia of bullet-wounds: my memory slowly decaying, covered in the witchery of time, hiding behind withered blossom, and haunting cornered survivors. The day’s soft stencil seemed to crumble too, and all its lonely marrow routes passed into false folds and bluish time. My vertebrae crack and thoughts die. And yet some bright and still and silken snow ribs my grateful cries with sinuous black peaks. And no things gather now – ashamed, through. The sorrow of worn elbows and long indentations resting in my bed. After the drop, their feline howl long gone, Joe used needles to remember their ferried glare. The smog falls and Joe forgets I’m gone before the table sockets can. He smells how I’m a dry act now, how I never leave the shore for water. It is over, before how and after why. Sound of breastless creatures weeping like strange concrete, as the churchyards wound their experienced fastenings, screwing my immortal scampering to fleshy evenings and coiled bones. Lying awake, I hear into troubled sleep: dead hearts grinning, city streets tightening, shaking limbs smeared along the deck, grazes lured open to catch the rain, the sight of me nursing his skeleton, the sleek shoulders pointed… Skipping over column after column of unfinished applicants he plucks another bulb whole. He dies in that acid feeling on long afternoons, losing lust and smells and woes, leaving starvation and one more mouth. It’s not proper. Smoking gulps of city flood waters

are stretched beneath the glass-eyed crowd, bagmen choking on the haze of hot skin, their blindfolds bursting with tears of peeled muscle and clear tea. I think of your articulated tapestries, the dreadful anatomy of silence, and traces of attic calm. Our wills fall under the chronic weariness of order: watch clocks on stomachs, rushed days working like insects, as autumn monstrosities litter stoves with departures… ‘Where to, falcon?’ TV gig: The lonely hive. Puffy-eyed modernity crapping out hay cake vertigo and ground-level anguish for senile drones and neon-struck parasites. Drooling spiders, meat-cutting bugs and crippled pigeons suck the shoreline free of effluence and wailing jumble: an accidental polish of lethargic desolation. Joe’s art of bulged features tangled in the murder mists of history, some weak sojourners swallowed up in wounds. A friendly, chubby god twinkles in the remote shade, and tender boys in dark collars strap threadbare luxuries to the deepest thought. Identifying rank heads shattered against walls, spray of bone buried figures bleating and drizzling – who’d carve this dismal vegetation? The obscene spectacle of heaven flushed of flowers and mysteries. Deserted, projected bodies die in the storm shadows, and darkeyed wretches fall over their trumpets in the formless fat of dancing willows. Rank cloisters reeling, faint words sound blue in a little blood ceremony: ‘Worship nothing but candles!’ Mirrored prisoners quaking and murmuring on the frail pond, twenty-one pitiless lips singing SOS in the windowed cemeteries of a glorifying void, the raindrenched shepherds lassoed to the reality apparatus. Cuckoos of all our beige centuries loom. Uphill, where the nightmare whores the fondling waves of time and laughter, spilled bodies tangle with the stink of insanity, kind men quiver, slouch and cry, and slit orifices ripen on the evil trees. And I, the stony fisherman, still trimmed grit from its provocations to act the war, hopelessly. Groveling conjurors open-palmed. Christian germinations embroidering fragile truths on their brothers’ waste: see what the cheetah shelter the monkey from. Little visitors welcome the vexed meadow, and bent watchmen come to see the dark mills take up the mounds and fingered rainbows. My molecules hardened and blue.

Ever turning honesty into mush and ash sunlight, the dark seduction took place here, as Joe squeezed the naked boy red, and, untouched, his vomit flowered Y, vistas of curving bodies heaving dry stone amid obscene ruins – imagine that. And what ever he did wasn’t even around. I welcome the reed before the distance, and scrap everything I ever knew. Splendorous light of a late summer vanishing into the tide, and the crumbling dunes of humanity unfolding along the water. Mound soldiers robed in Cairo slags stand chewing on the unbuttoned sky. The river’s fruit ripples like a tiger rolling out its stomach. A second sliding sun cementing wild brocades to b-men lounging on the hot dust, and then to winter fragments sloping up the sides of wooden walls. Before gravity grew sweat, the thing’s back for me, Joe; its radiant cast of boiled angels, putrefied snakes and time-tickling childmurderers, all hidden. See a morbid boy’s adornments: blood trousers, soft beans afloat, putrid shirts, the joy of that first dark secret, spoons scooping into nothing, bending and spilling… While: ‘Pour the coffee! Faster, rake! Like that!’ For let only dry questions defy such blocked promises torn from under the world, its wars compared to simplicity and beauty. The melting doorways of empty crimes and non-existence wronged through endlessness. Paranoids hunted and caught in their tilting mirrors like worms in fire – dwarfed by fear, the idiots find their thrown cigarettes coated in dust and finger tremors. The scientist, eating mock cheese and philosophical sophistries, collected forgotten faces in the dark. I uniformly stock plentiful little morsels, like knee tips, like waist… Straightened wolves terrorizing the barely conscious, their surrogate proportions slipping in futurity. Lapping abstract delights, chewed, anonymous.

Prisoners loll in the polite noose of noiseless winter days, their strange and sprawling game the work of a labile corpse. Rats, snapped in two, open-mouthed, salute the great error. Worn inquisitions, flake venom and old steaks thrust on you, the walled-in cad genius soft, swearing, tiresome. To something greedy in age and solitude he staged a festival of hung moments. Joe strides among the violated bodies – between the knees, branches in golden blooms. Stains of a circumscribed blue, and of wood-smooth eatables, eyes rid of fire, in desperate alleyways. Silverfish, grey as sifted humanity, harvesting skiffs swelling and red like serpent yawns, as cynical schoolgirls, trailing along the frills of western ruin, perfume wounds in bowls of clementines and oranges: lecherous, stuff’d sheep fallen from the system, wet paw-prints of a shabby soul dragging the dark from its scarified spread. The punishment of innocence ripens the grapes, bananas… Green darlings hanging ’n’ cuddling, suffering useless things: a defining slide. Letting go of a nervous passing only to see it sooner dark than sweet. Shrunken machineries, greasy death, sucking fatigue, the artificial clusters of the fearful… Evil mists, nightingales circle at the gravestone dragging sand-spluttered tears across the grey earth. Fluttering legs from an insignificant life, squeaking pencil casting tin-can hearts half-holy. Setting sun and Joe’s gate-spiked tails glowing crimson in the fig filthy dusk. To trespass in God’s inner marshlands, the airships headed back through the ghostly inner light of used-up skyscrapers, following a long procession of murderous poses gleaming from multitudes of greasy windows. The rats cleaned out the horses’ gaping skulls; its primitive, gliding, liquid machine swamped the icy road. Meaning, scaling clear of its cold perfection, wafted out the door: a tallow stick in this convent cunt civility. The lamp dimly shadowed in winter, our large coats wait. The great doubt(ful) is absolute.

I dream of the drooling rainbow, and of hope plumbed into my failing, arse-eyed life, woodpeckers, vast plumed birds, orchards, fat fruits, dead stumps laden with electrodes, rings, shooting prolific riches from bays… ‘Someone feed those dogs bullets!’ I hear Joe scream to them. For hours they howl needles, their silence spare. He’d watch, teeth bared back at them, cats with him, their nuts backcombed. Had we fur to them? Throw the stick back in and, ‘Over here now, mutts! Here boy!’ He used them to pick through fury. ‘So when can I fucking shoot them?’ Brittle contortions of a death scene are on hand: Two men left weary with the landscape of battle chat idly as their two horses lay bottom in beneath the snow. The men, bulky with scars, climate and threat, dominate this tucked away corner, its tree in sulk, snow mounts on its trunk and branches. The fight is lost. We sail through most days dressed in strangers and unmarked souls. Children of singing suicides, their magic plundered and sucked out like sweet fruit, empty their bruises onto dirty plates. Iron faces fat and slumberous from the death machine drift up to the shoreline decks, their weightless tongues grubbing ante-mortem blood. The sweaty sprinkles of clock-time death leave human prints: her dry gas-hole looking eaten, farting out wet blades, stockings pumped with slime, crippled, bone fucked and groaning like rickety attic furniture, lust blights, lifted nails… They build unnamable articles with the body’s broken hands and missing lips, toil to arrange the victim with welted garters and gazing surprise. The girl swings by her stockings, mouth fallen, humming of arse rape, sucked eyes lost in the green passing of the sun. They pass it round, lick that basket, leave no piece behind. With that we move on. He chooses to see the ill-effects of neutralized living. They are always in our bed, always their questions and the same intrusive answers. He has no

privacy: he is that assistance report. Any change in him/on it appears where they may discuss it – my husband’s memories contractually obligated, never to be rescued from desire. And still I carry his Residue Report to them, the bill of mental poverty for them to pay. Sometimes I would see harmful change. If those trips weren’t trials… who knows… Although you keep someone’s strange possibility (to do? to be?) you chose to keep us with it anyhow. Same requests of any proof before he… he… he… no… no… Still we assist them. The compartmentalization of the children is proving successful, MA fine, should be just fine – so we think. Their wellbeing is needed. My gink sailed through the angry rainstorm of measured plots and mad subjunctive infection, on to rubbish-tip horizons, the hour tides blistering, motherless. (The masses always defended the same tattered dream of infection-feeds in the water.) The girls/boys laugh and fuck as I sigh, ‘It’s nothing but the gin ’n’ I.’ – me man’s vulture-worn expression pulsating deep in the grave. A life-line of tethered cunts and sable flowers. A recorded man, scarcely mortal, found blind joy and naked terrors. Dirty ideas were deepening mortality’s lean facilities and would slowly form all its vain, majestic trivialities, fucking open love, that pretty purple fancy, to some bright midnight. Only the sacred make their old weak. They have to replace them with nothing. Sounds: blowflies stirring in his body. Eyes slowly growing in wakefulness, his immodest digit delighting in gaudy holes, the iron voice cracks, his pockets glow. Hull ripper is sunken, cunningly pale, scarcely held by the lantern, to blood his long-rejected words. The impossible spiral of your idle heavens

fattens up on weak-minded weasels. But us river scavengers opened their electronic dreams and haunted a famine and drought of science and wit ways. We grow incontinent, writing faster, our despair lost to you old thieves and brain robbers, you who leave sagacity worse. I build us longer, build higher while they shoal downward. Spies lay minds in the wish, twelve creaked flowers to once live ones. Failed habits and furious noises. The deeds are unbroken, stealthy as lard. Pious voices accompany the destroyed. Clumping footfalls submitting to the past, chambers opened up like skin to knife, memories groaning in instants forever dying viciously and never closed, all be underlining pain through words. Joe’s knife cuts clean. Drum-roll of chuckleheaded dreams echoes cautiously among God’s faded flowers, where they kissed the funneled fog, their cracked eyes beguiled by a spidery veil of indistinct flesh. Fishermen’s whores hinged with years of abuse whipped their blood onto the tide, white, tattooed bosoms dragged up into crevices, hidden cheeks endlessly broken. Nobody ever wronged on sunburnt stars thumbing the cold. We never roll where veracity stems, over by that plank’s dull fall. Distilled laughs and a murder’s ragged hush deceived them heavenward. Numbed with costumes of gossamer glee they deny their ears and copied skin: persons secretly issue from ghosts deposited into the scantling void, desolate spirits unscrolling time. But around them the wrinkled lakes move on. Perhaps their spotless gratification is soon hollow, in that it requires having to bellow. Be what the execution-audit never heard. There in chimneys of smoke, of such shit, of such bone, these burnt senses resting. By chasms of swallowed toil

built on the crisis patterns of erased suicides, Joe hears dirty tongues wriggling; at night the endless noises give him headaches. The fat field industries hook the land of honest presence and gloop on the sparks of electronic futures. But he hates the ruinous comparisons: his are with the filthy residues. They pluck the April sunlight, choke undisturbed by eyes, twitching in selected oblivion. Berries flutter the fears west, the hour of men stitched in glass. He of immortal litter: Joe’s wise smiles are a warning and disguise. With Joe’s guests I look down and smile. I regret the mockery, the sap. The Disease Police lick themselves down on their sweepers, quarrelsome filth thrifty-eyed and up for buggery with the shoreline cranks. The cats go out on deck, warm, happy, their tracts flowering with a dozen missing agents. I will wash skin outdoors with gin-scented tears, my dream and soiled world gripped by high nonsense… My weary intellect is devouring narrative’s false pilgrimage, my feet swinging in this well-nurtured noose. Will these hams ring? The domestic belly dressed wide open, I tuned my terror to me, the pitiful phantasm. (Still look for peeping from kif-waft tigers straddling the gateway.) Robbed by my end, I will be some such feeble moon-fright. Is this Pluto speaking? Or are my shapely ears loose with sounds of malevolence? Where is my good, happy, calm, girlish sleeping? Where is my self-majesty, my willets, my forgiveness, my tin leg? Joshua Cooke, Lee Boyd Malvo, Vadim Mieseges, Tonda Lynn Ansley, Keanu Reeves The glass subjects looking in

Test reacclimatization Early failure Slayings Young teeth spill out behind us on the fresh following, jolting Joe into a fierce temper. His chest barges me; a slight corners the effects. The haunted girl, her broken jaw bulging through her flat, thinning hair, wound up babbling slightly. Joe’s ill fancies dirty my brow. With excess rollers, deck chaff reigns over on her nibbled plunges. Where disorders lurk in the silvered cries of dead birds – Joe’s making peculiar trifles out of the carved upholstery of ancient mechanisms – from the hull workshop, now polished a ferocious red, some twelve eyelashes cherished in its ceiling, Ra mementos of a pirate fiend’s procuring. And soothing me, the slow, unchecked gesticulations of twelve sagging trees multiplied on the wind, of shrewd cats soliciting about the feet like purposeful leaves. Mortal grunts squeezing mental features beyond the coffin just to disappear. All donkeys, rabbits and dogs heed their maltreated bodies, and sense their lousy, common price. A violent intemperance found me strong. He hides his theroid origins in a sea of monkey blood. Barren, he hides where the truth is rented and ragged, where candour is dipped in scruples ’n’ embarrassed gardens keep on counterfeiting green. The H. state cemetery welcomes you into its desolate promise of the abilities of ash, anxious and alive, copying sweet luxuries with glue and string. And the clock awaiting a face took count of all life’s withering effects, its twelve entanglements all wasted on those accidental lifetimes. The puckered water wears the time-blown winks of astronomy, and sirens shriek, their split tongues blessing every writhing stomach, even Joe’s. Remembrances of Flesh Monday came creased

and worn like a headstone; their cold chicken skin sang of the way his knife was used, of each prognostic fall. (Fever legs plump from beauty sickness, then to that ill blush and them pox scars to foul effect…) And the uncongenial tale continues into the small sorrows of decay. Defaced men crawling, leaking tendons, muscle fibres crushed into the dull operations of a bizarre plague… early rash of old men screwing fetuses: these conventional atrocity sequences press the horror-enigma flat … trepidation over retrograde time change almost shattered the cheap thrills of accidental motion, of ed.-repairs worked on collar-heads … wombs quick with hunger’d bones… The grotesqueries of perished flesh in motion, and of facial features running over Joe’s foot. Under the easy morning sun, a wounded man slouches onboard a spine raft. He paddles the hideous rack closer. His skull wears a heartbreaking toon of a face: its troubled garments sink themselves into the shaded thoughts of overreached hope. I grin at him, and Joe beckons him in to hear, ‘Come, come on, cling to this!’ He extends him a pike pole. His stamp retired him, left him with his kicks and his final surprise. I convey relief as he catches the gaff. His wide eyes top before he fits – three sky-hauls in canned time. A warm night and my lift up to evern. Bite-sized memories of perversity: the weightless gloom was a routine plague of suns, the drunk menu of midday seclusion, a parade of what was happy virtue tottering in poverty, bikini-clad bot-women feathering their winter pity. Secret creditors and their restaurant demeanor possess our joy, the obscurities of any roof-top sadness formed in their image, their kind always forbidding your own, with less self to harm, it relaxed, on and on… Something has come undone in the breeze. He’s lost; he’s holding on for it. The tattoo code on his wrist is quivering like an insect. ‘HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186.’ What quick removal? He’s starting to go green. He is trying to wait but the time is stuck on repeat, and, and… He counts his repetitions back; he checks the time. He knows that extraction code is wrong. That first hour happens somehow. His fourth makes the net worse. He knows of slime, it and this resource of dirt. It has his later, he supposed.

The fraudulent coils of a busy tongue snare round his yellowed words, as if like a morning looking to avenge a night chocked full of matter and busy nooses. I look past his smiling mouth to that trove of ideals on shore. ‘Him, er… he’s like fucking animal-dumb’ I reply, shrugging. ‘O a treasure, you say. Why I’m guessing he’s the gold in their teeth.’ A shaker’s boarding now – guard what I say/do/ask! Nihilists serenade the flies. In the end there’s just her, the solipsist girl, alone, nails in her pink flesh, her tongue in tatters knitting words into things she says are lies: claw-marks, black fingers, mottled flies, skirt full of too much waist, hooked breasts, a hallway covered in snarling mouths and bound hands and feet… or preferable, don’t say much of nothing. Maybe a LED man was stitching sweat around his filth, a carbon thought-gun by its side. ‘It don’t say much, it just think… Why maybe this isn’t even possible,’ said the true sceptics. Their tout of ‘as-if’ don’t say much for doing. And no, there are no new places to bury our superstitions. Museums and analytic marks are little more than silly wishes. The objects were always new in the dust. Existence shows only fresh stages, and fools which stand there harmlessly making branded breaths on windows to perform their bitter marks in them. Slippery, abstract men staring into the brows of the world’s tired inhabitants. Televised impulses stretched across the blazing surface, their vile, jostling flashlight rays almost approach complexion. On conical streets an unfathomable floor scatters, intersecting irritations knitting a network of creases. The painted ruin of dawn fog and bruises

absorbed us in its immortal cycles. My son, Joe, and I live according to the brute divinity of hucksters and pimps: two embarrassed spirits living in jangling toys, we weigh nothing. All his playthings fading into these objects of death, their dream fashioned from that exorcised stone. The street gorillas wilt under the debt of their own mediocre purpose, these poor caterpillars that slowly nod and cannot leave. The Home World’s father has to have his sacrifices divulge the existence he gave them, mouths empty of air to order. He is in the very way we want ’n’ obtain him. He, The Other, he has to be around. His creature’s dank glory explains those that pay to house them. Only there is nobody outside for the eager idiot to tell or blame – by that, I too had my say. The giddy sweat of murder sickness and unintelligible tastes. Vicinity sickness forces its resolvent methods onto nature’s crowded harvest. We browsers are able to taste the difference, for we live in our work and eat the lodgings; we creatures of allegory are built from nothing but repackaged water waste. We fed them just murder cults and squeamish eats, and the city crowed about its work selling mist to the sea. When thinking, we claimed our ends back and this wrought a rare and peaceful change in us. We get along when we shovel their results, as even I wait to be happy. Watch my amusement as I mend my corpses! Some nights I wait. I watch them cry and choke like discarded brides: limp slivers of clumsy confessions and muddled meditations spread across my guests like forced, armoured smiles. I shave. I hit this, that. I like my partners raw like this: I soon mend myself with them. His strolling articles dress in wide bone hats, dancing to his hot step, to his need, to him. Do I know this ending? Your words can tear summer afternoons into vacant chimes. Your darkness be the lair of temptation: it’s always there that head-vendors permit their worms and beetles to take over a stuffy chant, to berate what isn’t really the same, to imagine their condition nothing – jingling cheese-mouths ever enamoured of the Is. tune they heard. Door scan and some hand soap… always that same tube-like glow of a game.

Paris works the Seine; Lisbon works the Tagus; New York works the Hudson; Warsaw works the Vistula; Sapporo works the Ishikari; Budapest, Vienna, Belgrade, Sulina, etc. work the Danube; Baghdad works the Tigris; Prague works the Vltava; Hong Kong works the Pearl; Rome works the Tiber; Saint Petersburg works the Neva; Dehli works the Yamuna; Bangkok works the Chao Phraya; Damascus works the Barada… This world is made up of cities and their rivers, the raw and new made unreal and sold. They watch industrialized rapes daily, their taste for shame restricted to a little flatulence. Encouraged by the sanctioning of public killing-programmes, they shift the truth to fit need. Whenever we listen, we hear inaccuracies and exaggeration breeding some unmentioned thing. I’m certain that even the authorities tell them that none of them are really punished. … New social factories designated for long-lost areas of nowhere. In these tombs all the things we say get scan-moulded into the ail-born future I never touch. And on that basis, we walk any sordid location as old AI toys, scarab dollies. Joe fucks eels more than his blessed yod. The vague dying of empty mirrors outgrown by their muses. High-rise husbands and wives discover new panic in a forever free of real anguish. Their unfounded fears are beginning to corrupt themselves with a painful slowness. The rooftops force them to entertain nothingness, their canned existence coaching them in the sinister art of collapse. They stand by it in the tinted moonlight and rot in steam-cleaned hysteria. They are host to lice that slowly eat the self, or else silently urge it to fill up with toyland fear. A return to squalor may crush them, but they think they know enough to never again rise that far. Some rare few discover hurt is a comrade with a yarn that shits. Shhh… Elaborate disfigurements can sometimes hide a hatchet man’s nude technique. All manner of lesser methods can come to look ingenious. What is the natural way? Almost all our lot practitioners still miss what’s said in the margins. The dead dominate the market: they certainly have a quiet subtlety – like bomb data. The purpose prescribed to Bostrom’s firing frequency of ~10^16-10^17 operations per second

is grounded in our snarling biology. Many of us found much solace in the programme, a way to con the AV flesh and throw off God’s pretty weaponry. Had ha ha. Ersatz cities rising and falling like phallic graphs, operations outnumbering thoughts, the history of worlds whored out to the brutal fantasies of bored children, honest faces torn from thirteenth-century Franciscan monks and placed in masturbatory heresy; diseased figures contaminate mathematics; ancient men try to distinguish synthetic joy from the real thing – they give up their existence for a categorical proof. O to pull the asp from the womb. Only when art revolted us did we drive up the cost: now we need to be certain of its value. Many part-time murderers would replace sex with death. Toot Boys ally themselves to my hands as I walk along versions of truth, mocking their rudimentary existence as I feel the need. I overhear my own doubts as they collude with the current – certainty is never what we want. This vat has achieved much of what it was designed for. I’ve eaten simulacra that tasted so real I wasn’t sure of where I was – it isn’t obvious to me now. There are no Xeroxed courtrooms and no wrath. But some hams want them. I bit into a can of brain, ate it out in a vacuum. The effects of informed children are awe-inspiring, masterpieces of insignificance dusted in wonder. (Do we ever stop searching for proof of labour?) We experience vast systems of detail never to be learnt by heart, a temporary spec signing us away the moment we know. Glitches in rat curiosity appear uniform and prove what is real. The majority-duper had already run the proof on others: they hadn’t the slightest notion. Get out! Our senses have themselves at the start. Every TV has a soul on Tab St. A moment for exploded individuals to meet themselves in everyone. If I have that…! The merest trickle of criminal sweat creeps into clear eyes, and normalcy reports get entered. The past is drifting in for seconds. They look at the decaying bodies, side by side in a carpet of defunct intimacy. Not many smiled. The heat heave a few shark tears. Conversation lapsed temporarily. I hate that. They knew that failure to conform to game law would render their humanity uncertain. They share the weeping-trance, and are glad to find their being offensive for a few hours. Our senses were sweet bait for their moral myth, but as this viral phase grew the V-Fish chose to eat its fat. As if coming back from nowhere… Somehow I confuse context with autosarcophagy, he myth with theft. He smiles as he turns texts inside out, sham reports broken up into tools of emotional violence. Boys tug at his suit: two of them sense his distance – a protean air. Their serf passivity tore at him. There’s something devouring him beneath his dour armour. Unprovoked cognition of sinister tests happening over and over: a chain of docile tropes with no fuse. The entire con rots out like a torn throat.

Our eyes tether heaven, consumed with urgency they notice buzzing bodies through the dust cloud. As we weave around the water cones lazy fish flap and flutter through the fleshy grot. The hardy offspring of fat mewing flies pick at openings, the broth mouths, genitals, ears… Summer death gas rises from our old river. Oh it tears out more than our lungs. The idle horror of empty interiors: horrific animals screaming fate through narrow corridors, mildewed windows shutting out the sun – the talking footsteps of milky ghosts make for the ward – a seemingly endless series of doorways all leading into outwardly normal rooms, but I hesitate… There are undertones of transgression, of illusion sickness: it’s as if they’ve been constructed in a panic, benign traps poised to bite through space and time, to chew domestic comfort into patterned distraction, white holes reasserting the terror of existence, absorbed horror free of lies reborn as the world. I’m on a trauma safari slurping drinks and eating off of china plates. Safe districts of the mind have been cut off. Absorption Officers without names drink eel tea from filthy cups. They work the industrial regions in packs, scouring panic holes and reassembled corners for signs of one-world ordinariness – swabs taken from inside eventually appear in other worlds. Day rooms stuffed with joy and colour, and forever furnished with the blind. Past actions amass like rubble: these canned environs present an endlessly repeated view of our haecceity. Scarcely in space, we are behind worlds but never really in any of them: we are the sad toys of descriptive content, holes in the definite that cannot become matter, like the empty places in Gallo lace. The test case immortals hold back their sand with plastic tie-masks. The abstract never die: what they lack saves them – fat and rich, he is keen to verify their minced data before he can show up to look – and like diaea ergandros, questions will always breed their ends… I wait for my other me to eat and doodle, abate and fail another day, to hide where/what I’ve been. They own here/how/why/he... Gaff: He dunks his fingers into the flecked grey Formica, his expensive face, stern, covered in a layer of concentration, his hair shaven into a clean lens jar. The insides of his mouth are showing. His contents are expertly scooped out. He’s dressed in my straw suit, fingernails manicured with bort sand: product in extremis. A goat sits before him on the kitchen table. It sucks some jam jar lids clean past its filthy maw. They posed for the derelict Nov. sun. Three women stand to on the edge of a building smiling and blinking fake yellow paint. They are completely stationary as they sing of love’s fall from a dead earth. Opposite, the factories build pale spies from life tapes and photograph façades.

She clings to Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor. Strung out, the music boiled her head. She stares down at her three mutilated babies, the opening movement clogging her throat. Five unknown men line up to eat. Hers is a life worn thin with death, years of sagging flypaper. She smokes and washes her winey screwdriver. She begins trading from her small garden: genital herls, fuck roach panties, Aztec feed/pyre meat, other females, chi, all sourced in no more than a minute or two. A hot blast from the tin toaster jolts her. The Anti-Time Bureau prepares their Ebb Men with inertia waves. That down-trodden, dry, clockwork voice hammered out swollen phrases over the Tannoy dish: ‘Something unexpected will happen. We expect it to be very sudden, distressing and sudden. You have minutes to go.’ Says a sponge-faced woman in raised room six. Baring her black teeth, she continues the rigid address. Air hum… ‘We expect bullets, bloods, intelligent lice; we expect other DIY signs, other messages; doors are set to bind/unhinge. Do not run! Where would you go? Thank you kindly for your attention. This is a virus service statement.’ Shy, she hides herself in yesterday’s Sun. A rash of receding bodies, yellowed faces with blank eyes spinning into their wavy foreheads: a nervy and distinctly grotesque spectacle. They cannot reassure each other, so she speaks again… The terraced experiences of retreat captured anyone willing to leave their overblown worth. Individuals became so attached to their spoils that they fortified their existence with them: they developed vests armoured with a sense of always – time raided for objects to own. So much pap and no human sound – 0. They live heavy and sell light. They only kill, eat and fuck to ensure the years ease along – still go to almost any lengths to reach their quota. They meet down in the confines of their eerie houses, homes that have order like you’ve never seen: they live in a sinister system, and want out. I do not.

Calmly multiplying in a blood-soaked corner, ugly eye-crawlers ruptured and spread. My leave-code is screwing around. When it first happened I surrounded myself with extra possibilities. I needed to be busy. Mouth woe hymn: ‘HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186; HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 802186.’ Fuck all. Time-sucked cigarettes piled up beside me. The carnival of terror continued. First-timers fed off their panic, shaking like slit wrists in replicated doorways… Corporate cunts in coded suits attempt to follow the sounds on the Soho U street. Two managerial types hatch before me: ‘I’m taking out a subscription on that fresh face.’ ‘Check the eyes ain’t penned in already.’ ‘I know the look: it’s unmistakable. You dot the pupils; I’ll dilate them. Time to move. You coming any time soon?’ ‘Patience, my friend. Life is an ode to the unsuccessful instant.’ ‘Fuck off will yah.’ ‘Hi ho hi ho…’ The appeal of this thin world’s ordure never needed singing: newcomers and repeaters fought some to part with the entry fee. I’ve always felt the pull of abandoned beings: as a young man, I thought Thek’s failure worth more than all the world’s successes; and now older and real with error, I risk too much and nothing by finding problems with it. Find me in this sordid light, my name written across another brick. I am this moment. I am this unutterable instant. I reek of waiting no more. I see a Boohoo, see him and make a meal with his face. They stand and watch me glut, the sovereign bear in his honey. They shout me to eat the heart. Skull harvest: (The Artificer was having us followed. A hype reward was set.) Joe’s hammer through a clawed face like the punch line to a dragged out joke – barely left time for smiling. ‘Heh!’ Two tiny rivers of blood and scalp sludge stretched out behind like antennae. He turned to me and went down on a bullet hole, dived right under the hen yellow skin. I resisted joining him. He insisted I watch his efforts. Hammer through the spine, handle black with jam code. And so the modifications continued. My smile was made of tin. A job lot down before they arrived. Me there to guard his dented, ready-made wife, Beth, HRH Beth, the pathic rube. The black-cuffed officers closed in. I find myself gift-wrapping death in non-existence. I can’t believe I’m still waiting to get out. Streaming hour upon hour of this bastard life, selling me comforts topped in my imminent fucking death. Bye bye. Where is it then? What’ll I get for it? They want a form for every life, their offices soaked in dour submission. I can’t help feeling the lure of the obligatory end. But the detours of the sugared trance don’t have me yet. Cue the wild men wet with the bribe. Fuck, my ens enema… here…?

Tell us what the difference is! Will somebody please deliver us from reasons to care. Our ace pseudo-saviours continue to speak. They are e-certain of e-why and e-when. They know: their ignorance is such. These people make existence laws grounded in ontic dualism; inspired by the pangs in their groin’s weave they almost embody these moral mutilations. Guarded talk makes virtual-born potential vanish. Not even these wan and lonely days sell our existence short, not even a burnt heaven. A loud yell. End. Time pressed into plastic distractions. Oh she always looks the same. Her face the colour of papyrus, eyes and all. Two rusting fingertips poke out of her pleated heather tie-sleeve. Her huge grey ears curl up like deformed mouths struggling to sing, to kiss. She has a sleeper’s fortune sickening by her side: somewhere a faceless head spinning on a warm damp pillow; the struggle leaves nothing to cling to but little piles of hair and scalp. Rusted spittle pours from her worthless metal teeth, through cheeks wasting away with age. Her tight, sour laugh is the last mark of over one-twenty years of empty hurt tied shut at the ends, selling ad-time and tainted fortunes from this gated doorway. Attempting to engage her gnostic sincerity, fools pushed in their hands and she read out their sprayed-on sickness. She has no control over her answers. If you cut open her skull all you’d find is a hoke lullaby consisting of routes, pauses, full stops and hate: a carrier bag. Smell of stale piss all around her bars, Coke can towers… her obvious frailty permits only so much homemaking. These are the rolling shards of AI meta-code that remain imbedded in people’s conversations, flimsy signs (a date-change) hiding somewhere in the distant reaches of sanity. The senses cannot free themselves from this replicated space; eventually death reaches through. The ride never stops; you cannot get away. And the big Why needs no answer beyond the things you want. They want you to know this, and then when you leave they want you to give it back. As you hale your unreasoned spite home you say a hollow retro-hour hi-prayer, ask the air to make you right again, shaking like some broke-ass whore thawing on her last hit. The Actuary shaves away at another tithe-itch / hurt-wish ‘maybe’ / tear-hush whim /hog-thought-two-bit hoot. Fish-shaped filth swimming across the eyes, twisted veins of fog glowing like fluorescent snakes, and only ever the dark for light. Barges skim the river’s cloak of fat. Underneath, limbs are searching for a proven gap, breaking through like thin sticks through ice, their ‘I’ hewn in the ire with another name. Our air clotted like a weave.

The clock rotates her stillness, and the sun lingers; the gentle breeze has chosen to follow her over. Her MD husband lights a cigarette and balances a bird’s head on the smoke. Late p.m.: he gets up. Gulls fly by. Car horns pay her compliments on the street below. A third seagull watching as he throws her drink after her. His lean face passes for still. No ailing sighs sound their ruffled air. No end to where she laid in the bed today, or to the flawless repeats rushing down all those fan loungers’ spiral ka-screens. Up on the feather-rail’s end a watcher tips its wing to the sun and gets ready to climb. Each of the show terraces has its turn in the noose; she went according to her type (ital.). He glances over the roof lip. The skin theatre moves away. They walk; he stays. How his mean eyes chew her up. Before I am tempted to order the future I take a drink, a large one, a reassuringly strong solution that leaves me only dimly lit. All my internal discussions subside, disappointments rupture to order, even the flavour of indifference sweetens. I am well-versed in void protocol; I take mine and yours with a splash of Coca-Cola. It’s standing room only at the U-bar. A gallery of sad faces hides in the corner. I manage to return to the street without alerting anyone. A top spy from the Plastic District is thought to disguise himself as a sad, horny, drink-soaked man in a dark brown 50s suit. I wrote, ‘His tan hair won’t be brushed’. I believe that he will try to locate my hoard o’ premium, quadruple-strength rock serum (aka wire) and then shut the yo-yo network down. And bosh, within days the toot-sick would break, and our wrists start lying open on the sides o’ baths. God is not made in his own image. Infinite complexity negates understanding. A god worth having is always indirect and implausible; his creation must not forsake this. The ill god we praise has become all too fleshy: a stray human handed down to us, seemingly a foe creation manufactured from our complaints, doubts and questions. I hear that without faith the day will turn our feet to lead, find us and devour us. Things are such that we end this hollow life loyal only to endurance. When will it/he take us? Should we woo/ favour/fail desire until then? Itinerary Part 2a: 6 Things to Remember 1. 1) Not even the future is completely anonymous.

2. 2) If you die at any time, make sure you remember what happens on a trepanned exit. 3. 3) You will allow the city to keep your memories. 4. 4) The time of your next visit will never leave you, so countdowns can be tough. 5. 5) To be physically situated one has only to create that experience. 6. 6) Your choices disclose you; and without the disadvantages of guilt, injury or reward you’ll be a tiny, wrung out dot. To Be Read: A Third Innovation Water Party Tour with bad to top all bad. Company Proverb: you can never recuperate from your identity. The shadows thought they were free. A sorry sight: screwed up wisp souls lost to the wisdom of their own devices. Oversized heads slip through windows and across walls, hands, feet, fingers and teeth strewn everywhere. They’re here without proper ID, guests of no man. During the day they dance in circles with the sun; at night they’re often eaten by the dark. But there are some, a few transgressors of time, that impart their gestures to the foamy, tan hue glare of artificial light, passing through deserted rooms looking for a story that demands no end. You seers in the nerve laboratory work day and night to establish new motivational strategies, more reasons to want to be out here: …you have many signs about you posing as Coke-can structures, jut of a TAO suck eye, hay tokens o’ fake youth, a host of ho hum things puffy with cognitive switches. No more sound in the joke house, just the hapless brain tune of some lone candyman’s hairy wrist – you mouth, ‘Huh!… You Shit!… HUMANEXIT CODE: RSS # 4293…’ The speaker leaned on a translated grin: ‘Brace! A real burn! Rare kill – one-off?’ They allow precautions to get into their tissue, to be pumped all around, their heads spiked with the foe stuff. Propped up on the wrongs of a supercilious brigade o’ lour nobodies, they consider themselves significant. The screen is taking them over. They think they know what happens if it slides back; they imagine their subscription to it matters, accounts for its remaining where it is. They are less action figures, more nude viridian ornaments. The mangled faces of raw young samples, eyes gnawed out.

Tout Men back from the zoo to recoup, catch an Ab. and Coke. The zap has taken effect. Zero talk. Hat-canned pap in need of a breather. A waitress, tag-hot, flips back her pad. ‘Hi guys.’ She hefts her left buttock back into the lace patch. ‘7 Absolut and Cokes, 7 burgers, 2 shaking knees cast real wide, 4 of us in 1 of you, and 0 shit, just fucking do it! That right, fellas?’ They sit around the table laughing nervously – ‘heh heh heh.’ He doesn’t so much as smile. She stands there shaking her head. ‘That it then?’ The man gets to his feet and drops his chinos. ‘Now!’ he says, his tone vicious. ‘The game stays out there, and the trousers stay up.’ Saying nothing, he strokes his fingertips around his groin and up and down his thighs. One of his thumbnails slips under the skin. A show of fresh blood wriggles out his leg. The wound bleeds a lot more than normal flesh would. With that, the others back away. The blood is pissing out. He just watches the flow, limbs stiff, throat gently squealing. ‘Top notch!… So what we having, fellas? Same as before, less one? ’ Might they contemplate her lofty ruin? Frequency attracts depleted incredulity. Despite the hushed reverence, the implications of sorrow and death continue to drift away, their tilted mutterings a portent of nothing in between. Her eyes bloom as she talks rare numbers, only to die again in a poisoned pause. She asked if she could taste the edge of her own demise, sob, comment on the limitations of life, and search frantic for the next. What crowded quod-fink heads they bear – mock-look, show-role of some on-off wc. Precision is fashioned from a frozen hand. A half-smoked French cigarette burns through a photograph of a 19th Century rosewood desk. In a corner littered with tat and deranged insects sit three slender green figures dressed in human leather, their tooled skin fitted with sliding drawers. (Locked inside denting their bronze skulls are three antique children.) Right behind them, with a perfect view, they watch in awe as a man mounts his fine wife on a table top. He brings down an ashtray on her soft head and they soon bleat with septic pleasure: ‘Chic display,’ ‘Always inspirational,’ ‘The best one, i.e. A feat! A feat!’ With that – noise – the testers start to wane. Endless reflections on every foreseeable end: Digging into the hunt-wash faces of my fellow flayers, I found my way into their blank processes, and

finding nothing, took my own mirage for company. That self-chasing hunger made a sliver of its own striving I, its source, a land of powdered sunlight, an eye-grime farm of nihilist dust. But I saw that here unrestraint was a base thing: hate. The pointless posturing of a continuing trick: Just listen to the spurious tales they spread! Isolated, frightened and ill, they are, nevertheless, careful to perpetrate their chattering play of errors whenever occasion and their childlike customers demand it. Did you hear them forge moral nonchalance out of exiled possibilities, repellents out of nothing but encoded taste? I warn you, my pretties: learn to spot the night carriers among you and close them off! Do not show them nibs any respect! Hip jab ’em wan ’n’ have ’em hang! Chin in! Pick that shit out of your head while you still can! (And why not amuse yourselves with a cultural bukkake party of your very own.) Side only with the individual! Get used to that choking sensation (hhhnnhhhnn) – it’s a sign of health, class-A brio, order owned hour by hour. Make a cage and live inside it: man as an angle, a robotic meme-can schema. The ersatz facilitates the human. Do not stare at the humans! Cannibals advocate cannibalism. Do cannibals facilitate more cannibals? Feeding feeds feeding. Flesh is an acrimonious environment. Balance: ersatz flesh eats ersatz flesh. Persons are born from the ersatz. The ersatz eats the non-ersatz. The horrors of others are not yours, as a fan, to take. O a data zoo – that sado of cast rats’ pus. Hot Leftovers: human, human, human, human, human, human, human, human, human, human… I gagged on his wooden intensity. As I read behind my tears I cut up his account, cut it into strips, slit it by the… I slit him at frequent intervals, took a knife to his mouth, stripped, and cut and cut and cut and cut, and threw the slices in a stew and when it was over, his head was split as a cat-o-nine – onions of Riker Avenue, onions of oven-roasted, turkey-basted Billy, onions of good arms and legs whipped into blood.

‘A monkey liked eat the monkey meat, chew monkey ears, the cheeks, the legs, the nose, the juicy peewees. Nice boy sing through sweet mouth of playing in space clothes on the beach. He sing of celery with legs, and carrots with fish ears… His face stared through a dirty rag. About then I took off, about half-four.’ His slimy, vacated eyes gouged from the toilet. One 1/4 dead before about 4, about 5, about six, 8, 9… but so long till then and then, and then, and I… I dump sacks of little brown shoes in his dirty home, picked through his hated tools, drank his gravy, his blood, his pee, ate his stones, washed my hands, and then walked out. I reached behind his ear and took back Gaffney’s button nose, walked inches off the street below and brought it home to his mother. No a.m., and no p.m. just watched time: that hour, that day, burned in my heavy days and hours. I was listening to him read from the meat he took. And I gathered his picked pieces from strips of paper and threw them about and made them good. I put this there and then I put them there with these, this lot into there, and then I held out for the next. I read past his tied hands, a grip in my belly. He wees over his feet. The pepper test: I watched the sweet son’s body, given in, naked and alone; I tasted the body put in a spoon. I ate the son’s meat and threw up pools of him half-way. The turnip’s tails poured from his 2 fat ears. I couldn’t see where his ends were at. Every bit of him tied. Always them, made as equal – never just him. Never him and me. His belly a part of me. I ran, but in the end he was there, not far off, stuck inches behind, behind, in front, behind, put in the middle, behind, below the road, behind, north a little, below the stones with… His body with four feet, 2 pee-wees – nose:2, belly:2, sacks:2… I open the dump of his old belly: bacon, a roast potato, meat fat, a pint of water, a small pile of half-cooked ear, roast cheek, a little piece of nut, knee-halves, salt… I weighed all this. At home in his bath water again, I… I will not be put off any. I wanted to… If I hadn’t… I would put the… I came along about then… Going in his nice… He did for each of his with… Had I been… Had the… As if I could… Is the… I, I had his I… His/their house stands bare. I grip the handle of his first trolley. I grip the few short belts and pick out the best. I checked the dumps. I allowed this. You took him when he was good and nice. I’ve had his oven put with them. ‘Toto… Toto…’ The space contained no objects. The residue of seeing left in his morning eyes, their looking expecting never to be found. ‘They’ve been! It’s burrowing through now. It’s all that’s ever been.’ He’s seeing it through them, as if this always had them, sitting up, looking for help. ‘They’re here for my life too, for this, that, you, us, what we appear. They need headspace. Why did I sign? Now everything, anywhere – you, the boys – damned. Stow my… What has them? No way out. Bust!’

Terrible giggling in plain corridors, AI community of city fear and unwrapped objects… Sealed museum of irrational practices: oily windows hosting maddened visitors lost in over-navigated rooms, paintings of unexplained numbers, dreamy young humans squashed into bricked-up cupboards, throttled pallid they descend the stairs on old ankles – the halls vibrate with industrial murder – looking in unmarked doorways and cheaply furnished rooms. Fear paces along behind the house making tinpot monuments of violent feelings. The greasy walls stretch and wane as they revisit practices long unreal, to flirt-pigs kept in the corners of a cellar and taken apart like fresh bread; the house drools… I dine in, turn in, try to die. The played-out whispers of storytellers haunted the slaughterer’s brown rooms. Black bags stacked in un-policed buildings on dead streets; shadows of psychosis cast in the nursery appear behind me like films from interconnected rooms. They assured me that history was some elaborate play lit from behind with dead light. Cut to secret audiences, their heads distilling the mess of evil. Light-filled scenes of dead style starlets raking gold leaves along half-remembered residential streets, paper invitations to hell stacking like snow. Decayed organs cut and dyed to make a yummy carnivores’ coleslaw by one old nobody ’n’ one mob tongue – on, on, on, we wallow in it to go on. Undigested conversation: hourglasses filled with a thousand tired pauses, people replaced by their tomorrows, a thousand hardwon smiles sucked into hell… The secret police dept. seeks out patterns hidden in coffee stains; wealthy absurdists cook themselves for dinner (funny hahahah…); desolate men circulate Fescennine propaganda about their rotting glandes; the ramifications of the self-elevated are stellar; only disgust and illness float to the top; they intuit hijack of viral theomania dubbed into puny kin, end it by nailin’ dupe… The erased man may swim along with children. Thon debris of old souls buried in images of future moments, ham characters trying to spend the past in forever. Fear attaching itself to his ordered days: the H-man stench. Underneath his stairwell is a handmade burrow, aka his castle, his shell. He thought of a fine rant in there.

The abandoned shadows of bleary-eyed web hookers slip through old doorways and down to the sick ward. I remember all that I see; a doctor asks that we all trust him and his family of callous checkout girls. He tousles my bushy hair professionally and forgets the name of my ‘fey boy’. He purchases Siamese twins wed at the brow from a woman who claims that her ideas had been bent outa shape. These people let the language speak them hollow. He escorts them away. ‘Here, people, let’s try ’n’ cry wavy TV tears.’ Shifting antennae clicking in the old air. Sound assistants flinching like blind insects. A million monitors flashing and pulsing an endless orgy of schlock cannibalization above the director’s head, legs and breath agitated. His hands loosen their grip on a curious prop of polished flesh. (It crouches in the corner, jejune, larva limbs sweaty from the twitching insurrection – ‘Meth roc rot moth.’) He points up at the meme recorders shrouded in matt tape. The blended thought ticket starts to wear off as the emotions turn sour. One unmarked man fastened to a nightmare. They trawl through gloomy corridors, synthetic strangers adrift in a faceless stream of sickly patrons, their instructions scribed into the thin air. Semi-human vaudeville creatures begging for blue materials in damp tunnels swamped with fake space. Piaf purrs on. Ropes wriggle on dark walls. Thresholds are meticulously taken apart behind locked doors, unusual noises squeezed from the vast manual. A wan man reads from it, says he needs assistance from those images of torture: ‘The real thing just don’t do it no more. I can’t cheat it.’ Faint Haiti nerve songs from beyond specifics, tank scat on wet abscesses and stitched fat. Communions constructed out of skin and superglue. Excessively stained, swaddled in slug fluid, room crumbling like autumn leaves, attention in tins: all objects are fetish, tortured into near extinction by butchers practicing plastic logic. The uninitiated are held captive by frightening ecstasies sucked from the damp yellow holes of subterranean angels. Many thought they saw her face forming in mirrored puddles; others speak of horrifying creatures torn from distortions found in old paintwork. Their minds are baked in violence and sometimes become so

demented as to be almost uninhabitable; strangled intimacies have been seen leaking from their ears. Cornered, the temptation to return to the shabby furnishings of forced laughter can be difficult to resist. Methods of communication hold them in a trance of exaggerated contact; tensions build as the rain scratches on the window. Regular visitors – long-term patrons of fakery – do not like to distinguish between the spectacle and its processes; that unnerving and unavailable itch is as preponderant here as it is out there: it’s the brickwork of reality. Discovery of maintenance spots never fails to produce a poet. Sleep, that house of black unreasoned night, rags the head with overstylized previews of unlived lives. The celestial hairdo of Isis repeated in our filthy carpets, regulars squinting into the floor like myopic cattle. This shop-front of tired satisfactions, its garments musty and warn, bone buttons in off-white hue, this sham of spooks jogging on the spot, this nib-ink mire of failing interest, this lake of spine-water sins, home to Jonah’s noise, this nub o’ dust and tin… i.e.… Sinister surrealists hiding in the cobwebs of industrialized imagination. Protein-rich ghosts with shrink-wrapped faces speak of new H-machines and trigger-systems stockpiling dialogue in the corners of quasi-worlds, of dead-century refuse being made into misfit friends, flesh into B-road surfacing. Interlocking babies developed like suburban photographs; bed-sit compulsives born from a clammy bowel-like container they term ‘the e-radiator’. Their natural form is barely human: crushed heads, three split eyes, nineteen-inch mouths, soft teeth… Cases of such diet-associated conditions are set to rise. The consequences are stark. Tan exporters paid their fee in antithetic messages, sighing of this misuse. I looked and the mirror infected me. I did not recognize my contamination. But just then a set of insectile eyes disappeared into the glass. For a fraction of a second I was guaranteed through them. Their chance warn, they run. Why? I seemed to recognize their borrowed host: he/it was me. Said, ‘Hey, before I looked I knew you well.’ The artificial disrepair of nightclub hymn singer: Random murmurings blur the stage. The truncated audience, weeping and chewing on the smoke, stifle their consternation. Her wrinkles weave stringy fragments from her dream-like face as she yawns and belches up her half-eaten lips. The audio-synchs dredge fake, un-peopled laughs from an empty survey room. A pebble of phlegm waits at the back of her lazy cough as she walks down through the tables, her expression reaching inwards. Shale talk finds its way into her, its discordant rash of sounds eating the slop features of an irate mime. She slowly edges toward the crosshatched exit to Gethsemane, her candy-shell legs clearly defined beneath a gala gown, and then, held, stops the lie, thud, touches her teeth and leaves. Whiz…

A bleary, experimental morning, unpacks itself in stages, interrogating its own fear with sun-drenched headlamps. I spend years evacuating today, turning minutes into days, picking apart them loose contents until I hear the countryside of my brain twitter and click. My apartment trembled like some tangible idea waiting to get found out. I left it carrying a damaged fawn suitcase: a precaution, a thing to haul things. I’m happy to sacrifice my footing in this existence; laying on the edge of the highway, somewhere on the verge of detection, I develop a rotten mishmash tan the color of my carnivorous lice. This antique equipment affords me a sizeable grave. I force my way in, hoodwink-dead, aged with dry tea and feces. A wave, a stench, a finish – vamoose… maid shhhing. Her fading presence clutches a cold plate. Her footsteps made no noise on the way in: the floor had gone past as if untouched. She acknowledges her fingertips as they bed deeper into the noun-like muscles of her thighs. She hears men (rope men) march me down a distant corridor. Here her two guards flex – hnnhuh – from their chairs. B-movie cigarette end frozen in function and recast in the grubby spells of sodden backyard landscapes. A sleepless squirm-fusion of headless FBI accidents waits hidden at the bottom of old plant pots flooded in the dislocated perversities of patchy, summer cloud. A few small genetic monsters hatch ’n’ dance free of their maculate beginnings to an unrecognizable realm where fantasy and meaning are made: an empire of gilt osmosis beneath a beautiful rain-washed lawn. A/F: A stumbled montage of mutilated words and open mouths shield us from our irrelevant friends. The motel room is shrouded in the warped crank paint of early afternoon. The gluey corpse of a Texan friend sits in a corner. His screams had seemed kitsch and tinny. Without thinking we all swallow. None of us had great technique with them voodoo knives, often spiking bone and fat.

Hungry, abstract, deep-fried nostalgia served up on human cheekbones. The insect’s shrunken eyes appear to narrate some simple principle, purpose recessed in the gaps between words. He looks down at his drained and pissy guests laid out like a platter of regurgitated stars, and absorbs the lounging meter of their fading hearts, his antennae heavy, marked with a terminal scent. He toys with his plate of fish offal Rorschach – ‘Chef’s hit!’ I savor, savor, savor… He seals the perfume inside him, follows the waka trail of her breaths out onto the terrace and submerges himself in the drifting breeze. It happened outside, snatched on digital-hue film to watch over until her poised insides turn to glass. The phone rings in the bedroom. He hears but does not return. He lingers by her lounger for a while, and then walks across her last places until the paces of his soles return. His glass is empty in his warm palm. The bi-heels still staked into the slanting edge like a slow kiss. Up high, Gaia ails with Q-pain. A theoretical history of human furniture: ‘The back rooms have continued their productive lives despite their lack of existence. Night after night the hive members toil. Priceless works include: wire ideas built to hf scale, a human face-eating contest, individual consequences cast in stone, samples of mankind resplendent in hoof vials, people made from the particles of sieved groups, a fatty heart woven from the hair of dying babies… They refuse to debate on things of practical/material importance, a gentle yet hostile mutiny enjoyed by all intelligent men. The achievements of that rag-hole mind of mankind are progressions up a rope tied to its own shadow. To annoy other cohorts of high rank they would honk, hew ’n’ argue on the route.’ (Quote anon.) This dead woman has left matters muddled. The objects of the dead woman are left to many different people: just like her they will be dispersed. Her dull linen body is just another omen for onlookers to harbour beneath their desires, somewhere for selfish hopes to stir their seed on a hunch. Her past resonates somewhere as data, as being without object. Behind the now of this and that lies another then whose here we were, some absent someone lost inside the abstract grit of being. Cleanly isolated with a coded gratification, the suspect doesn’t even make an effort to hide his considerable professionalism. Indicating no other purpose than to mask the incompleteness of time and place, he led them to a heap of severed limbs

and heads boiled to skull. ‘It had to happen ’n’ happen again before I could see a real face in the mirror. It’s funny, but all it wants now is the recall ’n’ I has all that in ’ere.’ He taps at his pate. Beep! ‘Go! I on, right? So any sexual questions: what’s wit the toes, surgical gown, nine-note cat noises, ’n’ so on?’ A grubby device completed its Hub-H Test in an abandoned complex of blood-soaked factory units: A young girl takes measurements of the residue smudged across a series of tiny slides. A HB cigarette burns between her thin, gilded lips. She hears them mashing their white knuckles on the front door. They’re b…back already, at least ten of them methodically pounding their fists into mince. Thud! Thud! It’s getting hard to continue working. A web of tightly weaved ectoplasm trawls her peripheral vision like an eye-mass of projected guilt. When? How? Who? The sweaty, bog ceiling invited her bent despair. The hallway door would be there in the event. (Whew!) Too late to hand the day back now, anyway. (Too holy to go into hiding, eh, God, eh? Hath the body gone high to hide the hook?) Memorized silence details the transfer of everything. Feeling the authenticity of wrung-out men, the young black doorman avoids all eye contact. He clears his throat quick, fund to a bankrupt confidence. Eventually details pile up and he begins to panic. He slowly peels back the code haze arranged over his eyes. The H-men standing in front of him with their wrists on display, the businesses across the road and their gold awnings, the sounds of holy children pleading in the play park (youth ahoy), all eroded in an instant, and then as swiftly as it left it was replaced, a copy sharing the same corrupted code. The doorman tries to offload this lapse by recounting the memorized synergies of family, home and associated tales, but their domains have been altered irrevocably. The man’s words are coming out like confetti, a confused swarm, thin ’n’ eaten through with echoed interjections: ‘Next – time – you – without – entrance – hey – because – they – know – they – have – you – now – take – when – home – where – get – worry – are – you.’ Beneath the unrealizable realities o’ nothingness there is only more o’ this: those two H-men, hit by the rash, at the tube humming choo choo, Goya black in this hot May soot.

The reticence of gentlemen: But hold cry, boy! Negation of action is the most courageous of mutations. One becomes somebody and nobody, existing in another world confusing feeling with knowing. We (who?) have become unaccustomed to its uncomfortable interjections. Its members cannot assign reasons to anything apart from their (openly) unnecessary cause. It’s enough just to sit, to whet the art, to explain away the silence and somehow follow the gout trail of un-happenings regardless of the risk it poses to us. They board alone and receive no guests: this allows them to see their own red-eyed machinations more clearly. They withhold why/how; they rot more accurately than most. If this continues something will happen, something we won’t be able to control will spew forth and put us to bed groggy. None of our fucking lawsuits will save us. Culpability couldn’t house that cold cog: these gentlemen are responsible to no one. Wait! Heed this at least: underlying this threat are the infected books of a cagy group of deranged dreamers. cold roofs and rotten spermatozoa / meat positioned into bodies / dull exits shape the nails of my vanishing smell and dribbling rings of derelict amnesia / and the days / the thrills / the dull crimes of discarded trousers / the coffee-stretched nerves at the business of hog-tied women / a sauntering barge boredom / the erasing uncertainties that’ll never delay / something / shrugging off the twisting seabirds / the sucking / the complex swollen smiles seeping through / and my lips travel to the robotic expectations of their yesterdays / socks over mouths / fake staircases of highly agitated regret / through the mnemonic patterns of old cheese / experimentation with dying in serene flickering of codes / the thumping heart swell of mysterious function / come wallow / avoid / jagged surrogate strangers chewed through to premonitions / the smell of so many manipulations / year of repeated women clothed in promise / scrubbed regular / neat two-piece holds a last unassuming cloud / McDonald’s cannibal communism inc. / tired shoes and insipid moral patience / the trick of dying from textbooks / worlds pulsed to the metal tumours / sweaty technical masturbation / open mouths roaming up the clouds in a fantasy theme park / a leafing for hobbies and colourless filth / hidden stains and river drifts of flayed disappointments / squat fat-bellied cats peeked in brick cavities / a real dance of damp hammers / the belly rolls down the body / the blood trickles with black desire / glossy ears and blood ambiguity / and heaven of my loaded consciousness / launch equipment from the phone / the collar damp with gory old hands moulded to the skating signature / the floor of his resurrection / the drying patterns of old carpet sacks / incubated syringe between interruption and open-ended waiting / the loners running the routine / their sophisticated little moral insides soiled over / skin rhythms / sore-eyed trainers swinging waterside / the silent formations to rows of rubbish / chasing a slippery pavement black in vampire guts with the green sweat of padlocked doors / bathing in clothing with pick-axes / glorious scalpels lighting curtained windows / trashcans along the

tops of stuffed brick-towers / the dirty optimism of walls and gardens / reggie-no-dicks with bound feet /numb voyeurs adorned and physical / crumpled memories stored for cold future / directionless fists growing hair / uneven endlessly repeated thread / gliding numbered props with the shoestring / the unblemished cloaked in descending trellis lines / sinks dressed in the truth / a stirring with awakenings at 3 / clatter backed up nightly to the other than / webbed limb-infested polaroids / do anything to / hatred’s tireless unskippered cup / barking down the stars / a collar on for inherited appetite / machines burn murder onto air / a crusty suit swinging severed arms feet / sad smutchy fingers / dead in parentage / awaiting men of the windowless suicide / the morning vagueness of blood on white flooring / choreographed experiments hidden behind the breeze / order of more shivering in a godless cannibalization of women / of humanus sizzling in brochures / sliding out my brightly lit corridors / tiny corners of sunlight / of consciousness hiding in and of black possibilities / with factories allowing his sheds with blue unwritten perversity / disassembling the blind sightings of slashed dogs / boozy bloodless lies of honest harvesters armed with thought / the way rewritten over their half-sleep / single prayers stiffened roses and anything / cruel gates creaking in mastery / piss steaming off cord / on the wives an empty current / the disorganized pauses / an evidence glass / veal of their thigh / smell of dragging muscles / clumsy social camouflage and coffee faces / scanning with people’s dreams / regulars clean of rope / exploitation reassembly / sorrowful dread and seagulls bleached with the past / morbid flirting of old men in life’s entire sunlight / cybernetics splattering doorways / the stale rituals of sanity / a body looming into porches / pretty like mosaic dreams of assembling plugs / imported tears infecting my lists / resurfacing my starched a.m. / teeth would otherwise be mementoes of easy purity / mock precision has a price by year / death in the flat city / hoods from a round fare / door keeps unidentified pudenda just so / poor-man’s impossible wall / disorder and play-flesh demonstrations / steady black footsteps down petroleum line / same unravelled glass shutters melded to the warped evergreens / the wind ripped threats in dry throats / shovels / and they stripped the factory slowly

Gary J. Shipley is a writer and philosopher based in the UK. He has published work in various philosophy journals and literary journals.