Awhile ago, I had been at a party. I’d listened to someone talk about Kate Moss for ten minutes straight. I left the room, found my flatmate and asked why anyone was interested in anything at all. We’d come up with no answers.

All this started a month ago, and all that started long before. I will not bore you with trite aphorisms about how I survived, or how wondrous life has become since. At some point my mind broke. This is a collection of memories about my attempted suicide and the absurdity of the entire experience.

Wednesday, 26th of April, 2017, midnight.

Couldn’t sleep. Surfed the internet. Fell into ASMR sub-culture.[1] Meta-satire, transitioning to post-irony, before pseudo-spiritual out-of-body transcendence. I thought, *this is the most ****** experience I’ve had in half a decade, while a woman spun spheres of blobby jelly around my head and whispered elephant mourning rituals into my ears.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, afternoon.

Woke up mid-day. Looked at all the objects in my room, unable to understand why any of them mattered. Milled around the flat. Went online to order helium so I could make an exit bag.[2] Cheapest source was The Warehouse, though the helium came with thirty bright multi-coloured party balloons. I kept imagining one of my flatmates walking in later that day, seeing my crumpled body surrounded by these floppy bits of rubber and a note saying this life is absurd and I want out of it. There was no online purchasing option, however, and I couldn’t be bothered walking into town. I began reading suicide notes. One was from a kid who’d slowly taken pills as he watched TV, culminating in a coma. That sounds pleasant, I thought, whilst at the same time knowing that it takes up to three days to die from painkillers and that the process is anything but painless or final. I opened my drawer, found a bunch of paracetamol and began washing them down with water, whilst listening to the soundtrack of End of Evangelion.[3]

I’m not sure why, but I began crying violently. I knew I’d have to leave the flat before my flatmates came home. I hastily scrawled a note that said, donate my body, give my money to senpai, give my possessions to someone I don’t know, it smells like burning, it was good knowing you all, before walking out the door with Komm Süsser Tod playing in the background.[4, 5] I’d already written my personal and political reasons for suicide in the pieces méconnaissance[6] and **** Yourself,[7] so felt there was no reason for anything more substantial.

I wandered the back roads of my neighbourhood. My body shook. I felt somnolent, half-dazed. I wanted a quiet place to sit, sleep and writhe in agony while my organs slowly failed. My legs kept stumbling, however, and my head was beginning to feel funny. I found a dead-end street and sat on one of those artificially maintained rectangles of grass. There was a black cat lying in the middle of the road, just bobbing its head at me. I zoned out for a bit and when I came to a giant orange cat was to my left, gazing intently into my teary face. I tried to refocus on my crotch. I couldn’t help but notice a white cat across the road, pretending not to be seen. It had a dubious look on its face, a countenance of guilt. What the hell was going on? A delivery person looped round the street. People returned home from work. Garage doors opened, cars drove down driveways. Here I was, slowly dying, surrounded by spooky ******* cats and the bustle of ordinary existence.

“Uh, hey. You look, uh, like something isn’t . . . do you need, uh, help?” a woman asked, crossing the street with a pram to reach me. I groaned.

“It’s just that, you know, ordinarily, um, I mean normally, people don’t sit on the sidewalk,” she continued, glancing down with the half-confused look of a concerned citizen who is trying to enter a situation outside of their usual experience. I mumbled something indistinct and went back to staring at my crotch.

“You know, I can, er . . . I can . . . I can’t really help,” she ended, awkwardly. “I have a daughter to look after, but . . . if you’re still here when she’s asleep . . . I’m the red fence.” She darted off without another word.

Had she wanted me off the sidewalk because it was abnormal to sit there, or had she seen the abnormality as a sign of something deeper? Either way, she’d used abnormality as a signifier of negative change. Deviancy as something to be corrected, realigned with some norm that co-exists with happiness and citizenship. I was being a bad citizen.

I thought, I miss those cats. At least they had judged me in silence. Wait, what the hell am I thinking? This is clearly a case of deviancy associated with negative feelings. Well, negative feelings, but not necessarily negative change. Suicide is only negative if one views life as intrinsically worthwhile—

I could hear pram lady in the distance. She was talking to someone who’d just come back from work. They thanked pram lady and began moving towards me. Arghggh, just let me die, I thought.

She introduced herself as a nurse. From her tone and approach, it was clear she’d handled many cases like me. I’ve never hated counselling techniques. They seemed to at least trouble neoliberal rhetoric. There is little mention of overcoming, or striving, or perfecting oneself into a being of pure success. Rather, counselling seemed to be about listening and piercing together the other’s perspective. Counsellors tended not to interject words of comfort. They’d tell you mental illness was lifelong and couldn’t be fixed. They’re the closest society has to positive pessimists. Of course, they’d still want you to get better. Better, as in, not attempting suicide.

I talked with nurse lady for an hour about how life is simply passing. Passing through oneself, passing through others, passing through spaces, thoughts and emotions. About how the majority of life seems to be lived in a beyond we’ll never reach. Potential futures, moments of relief, phantasies we create to escape the dull present. About how I’d been finding my media and politics degree really rewarding, but some part of my head broke and I lost all ability to focus and care. About how the more I learnt about the world, the less capable I felt of changing it, and that change was a narcissistic day dream, anyway.

She replied “We’re all cogs. But what’s wrong with being a cog? Even a cog can make changes,” and I thought, but never one’s own.

She gave me a ride to the emergency clinic because I was too apathetic and guilt-ridden to decline. Why are people so nice over things that don’t matter? Chicks are ground into chicken nuggets alive.[8] The meat-industry produces 50% of the world’s carbon emissions.[9] But someone sits on the side of the road in a bourgeois neighbourhood and suddenly you have cats and nurses worried sick over your ****** up head. I should have worn a hobo coat and sat in town.

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, evening.

I had forgotten how painful waiting rooms were. It was stupidly ironic. I’d entered this apathetic suicidal stupor because I’d wanted to escape the monotony of existence, yet here I was, sitting in a waiting room, counting the stains on the ceiling, while the reception TV streamed a hospital drama.

“Get his *** in there!”

“Time is the real killer.”

“It wasn’t the cancer that was terminal, it was you.”

Zoom in on doctor face man.

Everybody hugging.

Emergency waiting rooms are a lot like life. You don’t choose to be there. An accident simply occurs and then you’re stuck, watching a show about *** cancer and family bonding. Sometimes someone coughs and you become aware of your own body again. You remember that you exist outside of media, waiting in this sterile space on a painfully too small plastic chair. You deliberately avoid the glances of everyone else in the room because you don’t want to reduce their existence to an injury, a pulsing wound, a lack, nor let them reduce you the same. The accident that got you here left you with a blank spot in your head, but the nurses reassure you that you’ll be up soon, to whatever it is you’re here for. And so, with nothing else to do, you turn back to the TV and forget you exist.

I thought, I should have taken more pills and gone into the woods.

The ER was a Kafkaeque realm of piercing lights, sleepy interns and too narrow privacy curtains.[10] Every time a nurse would try to close one, they’d pull it too far to one side, opening the other side up. Like the self, no bed was fully enclosed. There were always gaps, spaces of viewing, windows into trauma, and like the objet petit a, there was always the potential of meeting another’s gaze, one just like yours, only, out of your control.

I lay amidst a drone of machinery, footsteps and chatter. I stared at ceiling stains. Every hour or so a different nurse would approach me, repeat the same ten questions as the one before, then end commenting awkwardly on my tattoos. I kept thinking, what is going on? Have I finally died and become integrated into some eternally recurring limbo hell where, in a state of complete apathy and deterioration, some devil approaches me every hour to ask, why did you take those pills?

Do I have to repeat my answer for the rest of my life?

I gazed at the stain to my right. That was back in ‘92 when the piping above burst on a particularly wintry day. I shifted my gaze. And that happened in ‘99 when an intern tripped holding a giant cup of coffee. Afterwards, everyone began calling her Trippy. She eventually became a surgeon and had four adorable bourgeois kids. Tippy Tip Tap Toop.

The nurses began covering my body with little pieces of paper and plastic, to which only one third were connected to an ECG monitor.[11] Every ten minutes or so the monitor would begin honking violently, to which (initially) no one would respond to. After an hour or so a nurse wandered over with a worried expression, poked the machine a little, then asked if I was experiencing any chest pains. Before I could answer, he was intercepted by another nurse and told not to worry. His expression never cleared up, but he went back to staring blankly into a computer terminal on the other end of the room.

There were two security guards awkwardly trying not to meet anyone’s gazes. They were out of place and they knew it. No matter what space they occupied, a nurse would have to move past them to reach some medical doodle or document. One nurse jokingly said, “It’s ER. If you’re not moving you’re in the way,” to which the guards chortled, shuffled a metre or so sideways, before returning to standing still.

I checked my phone.

“Got veges.”

“If you successfully **** yourself, you’ll officially be the biggest right-wing neoliberal piece of ****.”[12]

“Your Text Unlimited Combo renewed on 28 Apr at 10:41. Nice!”

I went back to staring at the ceiling.

Six hours later, one of the nurses came over and said “Huh, turns out there’s nothing in your blood. Nothing . . . at all.” Another pulled out my drip and disconnected me from the ECG monitor. “Well, you’re free to leave.”

Tuesday, 27th of April, 2017, midnight.

I wandered over to the Emergency Psychiatric Services. The doctor there was interested in setting up future supports for my ****** up mind. He mentioned anti-depressants and I told him that in the past they hadn’t really worked, that it seemed more related to my general political outlook, that this purposeless restlessness has been with me most of my life, and that no drug or counselling could cure the lack innate to existence which is exacerbated by our current political and cultural institutions.

He replied “Are you one of those anti-druggers? You know there’s been a lot of backlash against psychiatry, it’s really the cultural Zeitgeist of our times, but it’s all led by misinformation, scaremongering.”

I hesitated, before replying “I’m not anti-drugs, I just don’t think you can change my general hatred of existence.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not trying to argue with your outlook, but you’re simply stuck in this doom and gloom phase—”

Whoa, wait a ******* minute. You’re not trying to argue with my outlook, while completely discounting my outlook as simply a passing emotional state? This guy is a ******* *******, I thought, ragging on about anti-druggers while pretending not to undermine a political and social position I’d spent years researching and building up. I stopped paying attention to him. Yes, a lot of my problems are internal, but I’m more than a disembodied brain, biologically computing chemical data.

At the end of his rant, he said something like “You’re a good kid,” and I thought, ******* too.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, morning.

The next day I met a different doctor. I gave him a brief summary of my privileged life culminating in a ****** metaphor about three metaphysical pillars which lift me into the tempestuous winds of existential dread and nihilistic apathy. One, my social anxiety. Two, my absurd existence. Three, my political outlook. One, anxiety: I cannot relate to small talk. The gaze of the other is a gaze of expectations. Because I cannot know these expectations, I will never live up to them. Communication is by nature, lacking. Two, absurdity: Existence is a meaningless repetition of arbitrary structures we ourselves construct, then forget. Reflexivity is about uncovering this so that we may escape structures we do not like. We inevitably fall into new structures, prejudices and artifices. Nothing is authentic, nothing is innocent and nothing is your self. Three, politics: I am trapped in a neoliberal capitalist monstrosity that creates enough produce to feed the entire world, but does not do so due to the market’s instrumental need for profit. The system, in other words, rewards capitalists who are ruthless. Any capitalist trying to bring about change, will necessarily have to become ruthless to reach a position of power, and therefore will fail to bring about change.

The doctor nodded. He thought deeply, tried to piece it all together, then finally said “Yes, society is quite terrifying. This is something we cannot control. There are things out there that will harm you and the political situation of our time is troubling.”

I was astounded. This was one of the first doctors who’d actually taken what I’d said and given it consideration. Sure we hadn’t gotten into a length discussion of socialism, feminism or veganism, but they also hadn’t simply collapsed my political thoughts into my depressive state.

“But you know, there are still niches of meaning in this world. Though the greater structures are overbearing, people can still find purpose enacting smaller changes, connecting in ephemeral ways.”

What was I hearing? Was this a postmodern doctor?[13] Was science reconnecting with the humanities?

“We may even connect your third pillar, that of the political, with your second pillar and see that the political situation of our time is absurd. This is unfortunate, but as for your first pillar, this is definitely something we can help you with. In fact, it’s quite a simple process, helping one deal with social anxiety, and to me, it sounds like this anxiety has greatly affected your life for the past few years.”

The doctor then asked for my gender and sexuality, to which after I hesitated a little, he said, it didn’t really matter seeing as it was all constructed, anyway. For being unable to feel much at all, I was ecstatic. I thought, how could this doctor be working in the same building as the previous one I’d met? We went into anti-depressant plans. He told me that their effects were unpredictable. They may lift my mood, they may do nothing at all, they may even make me feel worse. Nobody really knew what molecular pathways serotonin activated, but it sometimes pulled people out of circular ways of thinking. And dopamine, well, taken in too high a dose, could make you psychotic.

Sign me the **** up, I thought, gazing at my new medical hero. These are the kinds of non-assurances that match my experience of life. Trust and expectations lead only to disappointment. Give me pure insurmountable doubt.

Friday, 28th of April, 2017, afternoon.

“The drugs won’t be too long,” the pharmacist said before disappearing into the back room. I milled around th

at the desk, applying for jobs
there is coffee in my cup
and paint in the creases of my fingernails,
on the wall, a whiteboard with new song lyrics
and a list
of things I need to buy,
of course, once I have the money to buy them,
which brings me back to the desk
which an empty bottle of Cabernet Merlot
sits with an empty glass
and notebooks and a mason jar
with cloudy brown-red water
from the bristles of my paintbrushes
my coffee is cold
the french press is in the kitchen
but my flatmate is filming in there
so I’m stuck at my desk
with two sips of cold coffee left,
applying for jobs.
I feel very fragile
right now,
partly because I didn’t go to a job interview
today,
partly because I didn’t go to a job trial,
on friday
though I don’t want to be a waitress
and **** modelling for art classes scares me.
there’s a plant on my windowsill
named Lucy
and she doesn’t have to do anything
and there are two vanilla candles and an incense holder
with lavender incense burning
but **** all the things that
"bring peace"
like small plants, candles, incense, crystals and photographs;
I want a healthy and clean life,
so I have these things
part as a protection
from my own mind
but to be perfectly honest,
I’m at the desk, browsing jobs online,
saving them for later into a bookmark folder entitled
"Wellington Jobs"
instead of actually applying.

There’s one thing you must learn
About women,  it is just this
They  always call you –
Whether it be to make-up
Or break-up
They let you know where you stand.
It was some time after I fell out with Josy
And I dared to ask her flatmate
The droll question:
“Josy holding up ok?”
She clearly wasn’t because
She hadn’t called me.
The short answer I got
Was a cold
“Yeah, she’s fine”
Women too are full of contradictions:
“Fine” means she’s not fine
She’s probably been crying,
The short answer is teasing
They want you to ask more
To suffer, suffer, suffer.
The fact the flatmate was reserved
Means that Josy has told her a lot.
The fact  I thought this was gonna be painless
Is testament to the fact it’s not.

it's largely based on the introduction, drunk poetry of Bob Dylan's blonde on blonde, or Dave Bowie's heathen albums that can be treated as fully-loaded novels with missing charting song, you can champ the narratives akin to nearing ancient symphonies making Nietzsche more of a German Chopin than an idea formation, excusing himself with too maxims; yep, Bob Dylan's blonde on blonde given Nick Hornby's care for the music in what's a fluke of care for piquant fidelity, country and blues, bought at a supermarket; or avoid both and head straight for Ticlah's si hecho palante.

for some strange reason i woke up early,
usually i miss the morning staying up
till 5 or 6 a.m., like a vampire scared of sunrise,
winter is my most productive period,
summer my least productive,
spring and autumn are seasons when
magic happens, just today the oak tree was
brushing away its flowery bloom
before the fat yoke of chestnuts would fall
a few months later, the spring bloom
of pink or white was already tailored for
the excess greenery of summer, over a period
of two days the flowers withered and
the green leaves appeared.
she once complimented on my cooking skills
and my taste of music, notably *tool,
i first met her when we got together in the
student flats and two girls were *******-up
frying pancakes... the dough stuck to the
frying-pan... so i said 'you need to put some
oil into the mixture!' hey presto a Michelin star
on my attire rather than Victoria's crux
of a soldier... that's how it goes with philosophy
nothing pompous i promise you,
Plato misquoted Socrates talking about
looking funny at men who sought brothel comforts
(the norm in Amsterdam, no guilt, no tabloid spice,
o.k. o.k. Leo Getz style, 'it's like going to the gym,
she was South American, plump, she had a little nergo
boy fetch beers for her clients, she kept the window
open so passersbys could hear her moan after laughing
at my addressing her genitalia with may i taste the fleshy
floral patterns? ah ****, didn't work, you get to write
about *** and it just ends up a string of cliché
like philosophy and the maxim - prostitutes and the
Gemini lips, try kissing both at the same time);
i'd be funny-looking at the other route of philosophers,
mainly through the army, i'm all lazy eye cross-eyed with
those *******... (i do "pending" interludes since
with drunk finger playing the keyboard i tend to
delete by accident about 1 poem for each 10, heartbreaking
experience) - lost the drift, i must be in Birmingham:
no river... no flow. standard model always included
rivers for people congregating, in the countryside
a church would be enough, but for urbanity a river...
this phenomenon of canal cities like Venice is
truly staggering, call it the Maldives of the west,
the Maldives of Europe, 100 years from now
it will probably be more than a Glastonbury fashion
statement of donning farmer John's galoshes.
i've lost the plot... fun-*******-tastic!
oh yeah, the pancakes... well after falling in love
with organic experiments i learnt to love cuisine,
well d'uh cooking, my flatmate just cooked risotto
after risotto until i started pulling rice grains from my nose...
esters and perfumes, the smelly ****, like pickled cabbage,
the grand joke of british asians...
yeah sauerkraut and chicken escalopes are the grand
joke, although try shoving asian spices under your
armpits and you'll be walking the catwalk of Versace for
sure (hey man, stick has two ends!)...
it's an escalope and that's hardly the profanity of
a chicken Kiev, also called a schnitzel... but not schabowy...
you know there's this great aesthetic joke concerning
polish graffiti about the orthography of ****** / phallus
in poland? yep, the variations: huj, hój, chuj, chój...
technically they all sound the same,
they're found next to the anarchists' A and swastikas
on communist apartments.
she wanted so so much, i was at the end of the third year,
and there she is, moving out of her student accommodation
to live with me in my private flat (rented)...
i mean, great... but i'm about to sit my final exams
to get a piece of paper telling others i'm qualified...
what a ******* mess: i know a 3rd of examinable material
i was studying i'll fail, physical chemistry is not my
strong point, organic i can ace, inorganic i can do well on...
but she's there, full-on intense teen... it's a juggling
act that requires a clown, rather than a man,
i'm not saying i'm perfect, but there's too much idealism
in her that requires a hefty stash of pecunia bratus
(money trees)... ah i wish, but had i wished it
i would be writing such uninhibited poems...
up-to-speed... on today's menu!
that's the culinary abhorrence of poetry, remembering
ingredients in recipes rather than rhymes,
for example Thai green curry, and the ***** curry,
the former with spoonful of green Thai sauce to replace
the use of lemongrass, and lime leaves,
actually the limes we replaced with lemons,
the Thai sauce was added, the garlic & ginger paste used,
onions, mangetout added last to add a crispness on the bite,
new potatoes avoided, half a jar of Thai green curry paste,
Thai fish sauce, not salty enough soya sauce was added
(both light and dark), coconut milk of course, caster sugar,
chicken (well, d'uh), basil... yes... basil! lemon zest
and rice, chilli powder!
the second curry involved: cumin seeds, fennel seeds,
a cinnamon stick, garam masala, chilli powder,
turmeric, chopped tomatoes, sugar, chicken stock,
chopped coriander... all in all this is a culinary attack
of poetry, it's not clearly an ancient revenge,
but when i was younger i was instructed to memorise
a poem, aged circa 7... the poem in question was
school bell, i didn't get why we had to memorise it,
it wasn't anything spectacular, i protested,
gave an oath in swear words against my classmates,
got told off... culinary principles invoke the need
to memorise recipes rather than poems,
curbing the influence of fast-food outlets...
i rather remember the ingredient lists of dishes than poems...
indeed i did make these dishes today,
but only because i switched the radio off
and inserted bought art into the device:
Tom Petty's and the Heartbreaker's greatest hits
and !!!'s (chk chk chk's) myth takes album.

Honest
He who doesn't work, works **** or just can't commit
He homeless
He an affair and a **** good fix
****** with a tendency to show underwhelming ****
Twisted into nicety by such anger at the human, the wants
Good at *** when in love
Un-abused
Un-poisened
One of my best mates like
Dyslexic thick ****
A problem
Step child and real life son, grandson always, always, grandson
eldest unappreciated, underestimated, paranioder? Paranoidist.
One of the needers of therapists
Panicked by past
Fractured by future
A depressive, doesn't drink, do drudgery like drugs
A fearfull mess mummy's boy
Fatherless
Fathered less
A letdownshowoff
overconfident,
Anxious, ex husband, probable poofter, please Goddot, please, let he be a cheater  
A ex punk, definite *****, pushover, almost poet
So easily hurt, yet never hurts
My love one. (Cary you Guardian)
Too damed romantic
Cant read but by gosh buys books
Genius
artistic, Autistic, an idiot and just another bad student
manish
Little Boy
child
Unable to be alone and not a good flatmate
Justifier of the almighty grey areas,
The cheated...

the Strong willed.

you'd always come home via the garden path, reveling in the crunching of the twigs, the slooshing of the leaves, the endless clackering of misfound footfalls. till the day, after a particularly satisfying stomp snapping, you looked underfoot and saw the remains of the fallen sparrow's nest


it took you five days to soak out the blood


tonight's supposed to be the biggest moon in 68 years. Biggest moon! Wow.


a girl at the party says it's stupid to care what others think. i agreed with her. She agreed with my agreeance, and then burst into tears. i ignored her and walked away. i'm a frigid *****, but theys' gotsta learn, they


God, the flies, it's such a cliché, but it's true, as you trek down into the sludge you can't see them but you can hear it, the buzzing, you can always, from everywhere, the buzzing


when our flatmate left, he deconstructed his bed. he didn't take it with him, he just, took the mattress, threw it in the water closet, left the headboard on the stairway landing, and the sides and springs'n-**** in the garage
                      i really respect the gesture


in the gully between the graveyard and the mine, they built a highschool. a ******* highschool. lord knows why. it looks like a ******* campers lodge, all the kids climb up the banks and the uni students sell them acid in lolly mix nickel bags. everyone i've ever known came from that school, one way or another. heavens know why. hey, look at the big chimney, guess the furnace is on. it's still in use, huh? probably shouldn't be loitering. anyway-


the big diggerman's dig up the concrete, put it in a bucket.
the big diggermans with the big digger truck, with all the cones and stop signs.
Bawm! Bwam! the big muscle arm, full of strewn piping and pistons, bab's the ground bab bab. Take that, ground! Bab Bab!! the spinning chair vibrates, the man gyrates, and the big arm up's and downs, down down, swivel, dump.


remember when we were thirteen, and the idiot boys made a game of standing in a circle, trying to **** into their own mouths? you wanted to punch them in the face, but didn't want to get your hands *****. if only you'd known, back then, that your limbs were really just overgrown turnips, would you of been so insistent at keeping your distance? keeping the world at arms length? that's always the irony, isn't it. the world was inside you all along

–

At the end of the cemetery, past the hedges, a car park, overlooking the hill, where there's a huge oak tree, and all the concrete is just fractured under its weight, and the asphalt is in tar stricken colours a blackbird in mid-dive splatter. Anyway. Sorry,-

god, you're making porridge? Porridge? *******, are you even hungry, or did you just ******* want to see the ******* oat-*****-muchus coat everything you

-just, there, in this graveside car-park overlooking the city but also in the middle of nowhere, there's two cars. One, a ******* Mitsubishi GT, all slick and weltering plastic, pure pristine millionaire CEO's toy phallus, and beside it, a banged up old Datsun, and it all seems like an allegory for something, but it isn't, it's just, someone dumped these two ******* cars here, but they're not even dumped per see, the registry in the windows are up to date and everything, but they're just there


      all the damp men take the STOP out the truck, stand on the road, hold the cones, watch the digger man seat shuffling; gotta shuffle move up the pavement before you big hand down


You were too clever, weren't you? to bash her head, right there, in the corner, there, above the left cheek bone, so i couldn't tell, right? to make her look like just one more corpse, among the rot? obscure that one side, turned away? left to decompose, mid-perch, on a desert highway? well, maybe it wasn't, maybe it was just someone else, but the fact that you knew, you knew i'd check above the left temple, and that you ****** chose that as the point of rupture, it shows, it just ******* shows, the


the flies never gather, at the point of death, they just breed in the damp, the gulleys surrounding it, why is that


and just look at you now, sitting there, naked as a newborn, crying to yourself, wiping your weepy eyes with your simpering turnip paws, and it's just pathetic, isn't it? And i love you, i do, it's the one moment i can say it, i can feel it with burning, simple purity, with self effacing truth and clarity, because, here, i don't matter. you don't need me, you need a body to hold, an arm to hug you. in loving you i can be absolved of all qualities, and so, for once, i do, i do

Yeah no! In sixty-eight years! What even is the moon



it's amazing, i've eaten nothing in the last thirty-six hours, except a single dried apricot. yet
                                   i need to *****

  you know that feeling? What a feeling. You need to retch, but there's nothing to retch, and there you are, just standing there, at 5am gagging to yourself in a damp field. A stomach, trying to turn away, fold upon and shaft itself a vicissitude. A stomach, no, no, yes, you see?  You need to empty yourself of this bile. What bile? Exactly. There's nothing. Nothing up-emptied onto nothing. And that's all there is, right, that's all that life is, is given right there; the gag, the convulsion, the upturning unto itself, the attempt, attempt, you understand? Of the cathexis, of the innerworld, taken to contain only the unspeakable within itself, miserly bile, a concomitant of all the worlds ills and would be ills and then upon it taken as an ill unto itself, a single nebulous fluid husk of malignant umbra, held in *******, bound in fleshy lining. But then the expulsion, the retch, is attempted, to take all the seething disease of the inner and to project, upturn it onto the outer world. Where? It doesn't matter. In the bin, into the shrubbery, Anywhere but in here. Once it's gone, it gone, that's all that matters, gone, go, go, get. The body tries to push the malaise of(as) the internal unto the external, the outer, but in doing so, finds itself(boundary) empty, where it thought it incubated only vile, there was instead, only nothing, but still, somehow, the convulsing, the retching, the act itself, remains. And that's it, you see? That's all it is, all the emotional turmoil, all the half-hearted hallucentric episodes, the all of everything, is just that, just an, an emptiness trying to upend itself but finding there's nothing to upend, but it still asserts itself as process, as an unending nausea, unresolvable nausea, both grounding and thrown, the throwing and that-which-is-cast, bent under itself,  nausea



the swamp reclaimed the garden last summer. flood season, after all. some days the stagnant waves came right up to the brickwork, can still see the lines, see? your old swing set's a gonna though. all the rabbits either abandoned their dens, or were drowned out. lord knows how many micro-organisms died as well. lot's of new ones were probably borne though, right? hear those flies, bzzt, bzzt. life loves damp heat. you can never tell, never tell really.

as the rain slides  down
the window pane
and the moondrifts from
cloud to cloud

i remember my first
flatmate...

Jerome,
who tooks his smalls
home to be washed by
his mother,
who was fastidious about
trimming his ginger...brown
beard, but not so fastidious
in cleaning the sink...
the owner of Muffin, the budgeriagar who survived
being vaccumed up once,
but not twice....
Jerome, full of gay angst
and closeted pride...
who taught me...
love is not an animal
that can be leashed
but is a thing,
of wild untamed beauty...

Jerome....who gave love
in buckets and bunches
of floppy daffodils...

i lost him as a friend, many
years past......but some nights drear and dark
he pops by....to say cheerio

Don't fall for your flatmate it'll never work.
Just click your fingers and say come 'ere.
Not like that, say it with charm be gentle but masterful.
You sound ****** when you say it.
Down deep in the lake fish glimmer like stars.
And old embers are heaped on the horizon like a city.

i met the girl
with the marbled skin
in the bus queue
drunk, naked white arms, getting wet,
pressed against me in the darkened apron
a friend of someone who called me friend
but whose name or face or accent
I forgot within a season
of course i noticed her scars
shiny, thick, swirls of burnt skin
on cheeks, arms, hands;
some the very shape of the bandages
which held them in place
when she was a baby
pink chewing gum stretched over
ankles and elbows
she was funny
sharp and attentive
she half squinted her eyes
when she listened to me
i knew she was watching
me watching her plump wet lips
painted metallic pink
pushed into a betty boop square
by her cheek patches
she gave male celebrity names
to her huge *******

we sat together on the top deck and talked
so feverishly we missed a fight
at the back of the bus
(not so much a fight, an ambush
the tipsy, loud, student
was never in a position
to return a blow
- even if he did have the skill or fire -
after the local boy’s heavy boot
crashed into his jaw)

when I met her again
after the summer
we matched like socks
no words or hesitation
no doubts
we shared every sofa, room, bed
we ate together, smoked together,
missed lectures together,
and drank so often and so hard
our friends
- also students, drinkers, fiends -
warned us to settle down

in the mornings
when i lay in bed with a silent goth
a bipolar italian
a hairy, angry artist
a tiny farm girl
i would text her
and beg her to come save me

in the end it was our
not having ***
that tore us from each other
when we slept naked
on her mattress on the floor
i never shuffled over in the black
never reached out for those scarred limbs
of polished wood
or those heavy folding *******
i just slept
the sleep of the dead
while she read oscar wilde
wearing nothing but a head torch

her flatmate
two years older, wake and baker,
mass of curly hair and scarves and books
burst in one night
demanded to know
if we were having ***

and our peers kept misunderstanding
demanding
that we either **** or marry
(or preferably both, in that order)
kept asking what we did at night
two naked adults
must surely be rutting
putting ourselves
inside one another
do it or stop it
get on with it or stop pretending

she began to listen to the whispers

one night she asked me why i didn’t view her
as a woman
i said i did
but more importantly as a friend
it was easier for her to think
i found her ugly
than to realise i found her
much too beautiful

Being happy isn't having enough money to go out tonight
it isn't slurring your words
or being surrounded by birds
in a bar or on a hillside.
Being happy isn't having your political party in power
or having *** in the shower
or drinking your favourite tea
or getting down on one knee and hearing a shriek of joy.
it's understanding the word "no"
and carrying your grandma's wishes with you wherever you go.
Being happy isn't a fluffy, roasted sweet potato
or a sesame bagel with smashed avocado
it's stooping down low
and saying hello to what grows
at the bottom of the social food chain
and talking and taking away a bit of someone else's pain
it's swapping smiles with a new stranger every day
walking miles through danger not to have your say
but to hear someone else's.
Being happy is always giving a couple of quid to the homeless,
whether you have it or not.
it's keeping smiling when there's a twist in your plot
Being happy, it's, it's cleaning your flatmate's dishes as well as your own
it's having a clear state of mind - where you feel at home.

text me back to tell me that you're in

that you're in the living room,
downing gin,
sat next to an overflowing bin
whilst your flatmate plays the smallest violin

because if you're out I know you're meeting him -
(swollen from his evenings at the gym)

and I'll turn up, to tear him limb from limb,

so please text back, to tell me that you're in