The enclosed haven of the stairway bounced around the sound of laughter; laughter at the shared realisation that they had averted Hemingway's crisis of the unused baby shoes. They each held one and climbed while their faces shook free of the wrinkles from the smiles. They would never admit it to each other -- not even from the ***** of the darkest depths that they would sometimes sink to in unison -- but the true horror was not the anticipation of a non-existent child. No, it was that the flower grew so fast that they could not grasp it, and all they held was a banister in one hand and the past in the other, and they did not know who they would be nurturing tomorrow.

He felt that he did not look in mirrors enough, so he looked now. This is what he did not see: that he was on his third wife and fifth mistress. Nor did he see that both were strong -- stronger than he had kept before -- but not so strong that they could last much longer. He saw a face crashing slowly into tomorrow, but the cause of its crumpling was another. The cause was his wife: shrewish and callous, constantly turning tears into anger and grinding their shrill shards of glass into his skin to cut wrinkles. He did not see his hypocrisy, the fact that he had lain on his mistress' lap and cried the same tears last night. All because of being misunderstood, neglected, and -- this one unstated -- unable to find a still-younger woman for a new affair. After picking something from his teeth he inspected his hairline. "Not so grey."

hands at ears hair splayed screaming
the baby copying her tears snot streaming
is how I remember her always have always will
gripped with need for some small pill
or syringe or---

I'm holding her mother's hand, and -- lying --
Say that I loved her more as she was dying.
Ignoring the cause, ignoring my guilt
Boarding up the windows with the view I built.
We're crazy paving, joined together.
Hands all linked in forgetting whether
We were the cause of the start, the end,
Or the middle, where she showed that she would tend--
Maybe our actions sped her up, catalysed?
We do not ask.
                Our mouths all lie that we are surprised.

---she is pregnant hands encircling
rich and fertile with a hidden promise
boy or girl?
We know now so
we celebrate
even though we had made a promise not to
was that the start?

The hardest question comes last,
At last,
"Will the baby remember her past?
Yes, I say, from far away,
We'll say a prayer on Mother's day.
There will be a picture (blown-up huge), I'll ask who's that?
She'll look up brightly from her activity mat--

I float away, mouth using persuasive platitudes,
Telling them she will know her mother's multitudes,
Wondering whether my memories can be falsified.
Wondering whether I will remember that I lied.

--I'm holding her mother's hand, and - lying -
Say that I love her most now she is dead.
I have fooled her, she looks down, sighing,
But her father's red-rimmed eyes hold steady on my head.

Only one person goes into Father's room.
It is not me.
His sleeping threatens you from his bed.
His breath is sour vinegar and dust.
And,
if you are too loud,
He shouts.

Only one person goes into Father's room.
It is not my younger brother.
"I am not going," he cries.
Not even if you tease him with a toy in the dark corner.
A fabulous toy.
Almost seen in the darkest corner furthest from the door.
No matter how fabulous you make it,
Even when his fingers are grabbing at the air,
And the breath comes out of his wet lips in whistles,
And he is touching the door,
And the door creaks at his touch,
He is already past the floorboards which made the same noise,
He is so close,
He will not do it.
"There is no toy," he will whisper
And even though he is right
You must say
"You are chicken."
But you say this quietly too.
Because,
if you are too loud,
He shouts.

Only one person goes into Father's room.
It is not Mother.
Instead, she calls up from the bottom of the stairs.
She will listen for a while.
She will get nothing.
Then, calling him names,
She will come up the stairs,
Stamping her feet.
She will call out from the landing.
She will listen for a while.
She will get nothing.
Finally she walks up to the door of the bedroom.
She will shout from there.
Sometimes she shouts once.
Sometimes she shouts many times.
She is too loud.
He shouts.
He is louder than her but she has more words to say.
"You are ******* your parents' money away!"
That sounds painful to me.
"Your sickness is called laziness!"
I hope I do not get laziness.
I do not want to be in bed all day.

Only one person goes into Father's room.
It is the charwoman, with her broom.
Once a week she opens the curtain.
He groans.
I listen at the door.
She is busy, cleaning.
She tells him that he has made a disgraceful mess.
She tells him that he has a family to look after.
She is soft, but she is not scared.
He talks to her.
He does not shout.
"Tomorrow," he says.

There was to be a tomorrow for us to share, but we ate it yesterday: greedily and with cream. I remember your face lit by the candlelight, so hungry for rebellion -- only as we swallowed the last morsels did we realise that hunger would have its revenge, a consequence of today's emptiness. Guilt sits heavy in our stomachs as we dream of the spaceships that have not been built, the spires of Science that we cannot contemplate while dreaming of technological emancipation. I held your hand and there was an old spoon still curled within it, I kissed your mouth and our promises still curdled in it. We could have had years together to watch progress unfold, but instead we burned through our possibilities with reckless passion, and its embers now grow cold.

They lose their lives to small hates so easily that you wonder if they are allergic to love. Perhaps these gangsters, revelling in their roadsters, go banging in their round pools of darkness to shut out the light, light so bright that it will reveal something sick about themselves. Their hair is so slick that it shines in the headlights and warns them to step away, find the shadows, a place that is far far away from cops and gallows. I thought myself a gangster once, true, tossing teens to the ground to grab their shoes; breaking windows with heads to see bleeding prism hues. But I learned otherwise when I found you: I discovered that life is a measured destruction of time already, so I renounced my life so small in order to **** myself in minutes rather than bullets and enjoy each and every doddering slip -- each and every juddering rise and fall as we watch the future play out having already gambled it all.

I shall love you in all the small moments; I shall live in those scant seconds when you forget. I will be the bursting seam of a lie in your mouth; I will nestle amongst the many frayed edges of your hungry anemone heart. Feed on our memories and sense the truth that true love stains you, through and through you are deep and black with this iodine. It soaks in and reveals the fractures, it lies behinds the smiles you manufacture. So now we cup our empty hands and wait for nothing. And it is in the small moments that this phantom's hands will touch yours, and your cup will fill to spilling with half-dreamed maybes.

I know you'll tell me
straight,
and she looks at me for assurance.
You always tell people
straight
right-side-up
exactly what you're thinking.

I just let her talk.

Well,
the sigh comes out like she's been punched in the belly,
I've been thinking about killing myself.
Not in a big way,
hands outstretched, face wide,
I don't want to die,
like,
tomorrow.

She looks at me.
She wants me to say,
"You're not crazy.  It's normal to feel like this.  To feel the steady drip drip drip of life wear you down.  To want to avoid it.  To make little decisions that shield you from the drips.  Numb you.  'Turn on, tune in, drop out.'"

I just let her talk.

Just small things,
she reiterates,
for example:
I've started to eat meat again.
One day,
boom,
clogged arteries.
Because,
part of me wants to die.
I'm stealing my mum's cigarettes.
One day,
boom,
lung cancer.
Same thing.



She shrugs,
Hands, elbows, shoulders undulating like a sea serpent.

I am unperturbed.
We live in a universe of humanity
and
there are so many galaxies hurtling towards
and away from
each other that all things have been done before.
Each galaxy screams with conflicting needs
solar systems tearing themselves apart
planets and moons swirling towards each other
to burn and burst into hateful dust.

One person can want to live
and want to die,
can want to say sorry
even as their hand makes a fist.
You don't need to know about Freud,
Thanatos,
Eros,
or all the grand words that litter the street of fake comprehension
to see
that
this
is
true.

Her eyes narrow.
She can see I am not impressed.
She is not stupid, at least not about others.
But we can all be stupid about ourselves,


no,


we all must be stupid about ourselves.
Life is not for the strong,
or the fast,
or the clever,
life is for the stupid.
Why play a game you cannot win?
How can you enjoy it without embracing your own recklessness?
I don't pity her,
not how she wants.
I am happy for her.
This discontent is
the ****
which might fertilise her life.

You don't understand,
she alleges
as if my listening has a different quality to it now.
A bewildered quality.
As if my ears are cocked at a different angle
eyes at a different brightness
breathing less or more in time with my heartbeat.

You don't understand,
she is sure of this.
I want to ruin myself.
I am applying for courses that I could never hope to be eligible for or
courses that I would never enjoy.
I am not doing what I am best at to make sure I never succeed at it.
I turn away my friends and loved ones with spitefulness.

I want to wake up tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that
and
never
be
anything
else.



Now it is her turn
to
listen.

Death is a private business,
I declare,
as you have already found.
It is hard to talk about,
hard to reveal,
it is between yourself and nothing else.
You could strangle all opportunities out of
fear
spite
self-loathing.
And as much as others complained,
it would be your choice.

Life,
though,
Life,
is a public business.
To live is to walk past and through other people.
Where they've been, where they are, where they are going.
If you want to live,
you have to negotiate it.
We are all hostages for each other,
we are all human shields,
we bear the brunt of each other's sorrow, sometimes,
or else we turn our backs to avoid it and so exclude ourselves.
We limit ourselves and each other.

You have been honest to me about your feelings,
and I am honoured,
but you must talk to the people who hold you
and to who you hold
nested in each other's pockets like Russian dolls.

All I can give you is this.
Here it is.
Here is my human sympathy.
You will pass it on to others,
one day.

The lonely form crowds on the street. They collect at the corners, letting the whole world drown in their silence. They are a flashmob without the flash, and a mob that mobs no-one. Each of them is you, a someone you used to be, and therefore each of them is no-one. No-one did this, the blind Cyclops says; and this many no-ones have accusation enough to blind the sky.
These people have nobody and, so, slip through the cracks to end up collected at the edges of the drains. Corrugating in lines that jag up and down like the teeth of a zipper: swarming, dispersing, only to form again.  Chastised by the wind, like so much chaff; chaste and uncherished in mute inevitability.

These people have done are nothing and, so, ask you what you have done for them. What crime is it that they are thinking of? Each time that a shudder of revulsion at this injustice passes through the throng it bangs louder in your memory.

Who have you forgotten?

-- 1 --


He has a need to expend his seed: it is a never-ending endeavour, the smack of wood against leather. In the hot rush to consummate his love he must burn a more energy-rich depravity -- must look for a certain seriousness, a gravity. Right now he is past the ‘******’ and the ‘hos’, “just girls,” he says, “just girls pretending to be women pretending to be *****,” and he wants to see real girls naked and ashamed and cutting themselves for money. He gets off on the very idea of people deforming themselves for his pleasure.



-- 2 --


Here he is, being driven by his car. At each corner he sees girls huddled together, sharing warmth. Their lips are locked in thin lines of glamour and they swap his salty substances without even the slightest tremor of desire. At their waists they hold daggers, levelled at each other’s bellies. All the better to cut out the cancer of pregnancy.




-- 3 --


His vices have turned to hate. So equanimous before, so confidential with his needs: now he does not just implore his occasional dates with the soft sad pressure of his bulging eyes; now he asks direct. “Dance for me,” he says, in the privacy of his own filth. “No, sexier,” he exhorts, imagining the first ****** excitations caused by an unspeakably illegal piece of *******. He blames them for having bodies that do this to him. He blames them.



-- 4 --


He blames them.

The child was reluctant, obstructive, rudely derogated the rules of night-time. In return, the mothers smile crusted over; her anticipating face raged with love, with tenderness, with necessity.

Hold back desperation: “Shall I read you a story?” Yes, a boring story, a story to bore your little eyes closed and your little head droopy and your little snores out.

All children learn to say no and this one was a champion already. Still gentle and formless it was not quite male, not quite female. It was androgynous, sexless, precocious with the possibilities of a gender unslated -- as if pigeon-holes could be sated at a later date. A choice depending on pointing out a celebrity from a picture in a magazine, and saying: ‘that one’.

“I don’t want to be in bed.”

This was said from bed, defiant, huddled and muddled within the pastry of the sheets and wriggling like a still-living filling. Four-and-twenty blackbirds, all singing.

Isn’t this a pretty dish thought mother.

“But bed is good,” she reasoned, “bed is a fine fine thing to be in.” She eyed it herself, covetously, the crispness of the linen holding the warm buttered biscuit smell of a child’s hair.

“Bed isn’t good. It’s lonely.”

Yes, lonely, sang the mother to herself, alone to be with myself only. Swaying with sleeplessness, mother’s voice burst with secrets.

“Bed is good. It is. It is where you were made.”

And you, child, are a good thing. Making you was good. Therefore beds are good.

Mother blinked dreamily, lies rushing unbidden to fill the gap between a child's world and the truth; the question came immediately.

“Have you ever seen someone making a *** out of clay?” she asked in response. Her arms raised in front of the child’s face. “Have you ever seen the clay sculpted, squeezed?” Then she lowered them. “And this was the oven. This is where you were baked.”

She wondered what kind of dreams these lies would bring, dreams of whispered fertility, Freudian dreams of plumbers removing bottoms and widdlers. Dreams of children baked out of clay and, rocked from the cradle; falling, smashing.

you know that I love you he lied through his redsauna face as the tv shouted the importance of cereals fortified with vitamins and minerals. Billy sat and watched his untied sneakers make snakes on the floor as the voices shook his feet.

no, really, the liar said turning towards him if you were gone i wouldnt know what to do.

Billy kicked a little and the snakes coiled and sprung.

youre all i have left. youre everything to me. i know that sometimes i ask too much of you, you look after yourself and you look after me too. you nurse me through the badtimes and its all because of the beer. you dont cry when i hit you even though you must be afraid.

Billy knew the shape of the beer stink mouth, ******* up with a memory of dead feelings, even tho he wasnt looking.

you put me to bed and clean up my mess and you look after yourself and you dont tell anyone. it's not fair for me to ask but you do it.

and he went on.

Billy thought of this so that he didnt have to look at his father, lying through his redsauna face, saying sorry for what he did, but not being it.

She sighs as she settles into the image of star-crossed lovers, fated across a swirling galaxy. She feels the insistent pulsing of his radiation through the hardness of space -- each inch as barren as the last, as clear as glass, a medium rich for the communication of romance. Today he hit her with caring fists, after another of his imaginary lists. Boys, men, women, girls: in his mind she has had them all, attracted by her deep cleavage, by her round behind. She bites her lip to bleed again, to feel that need again, to be the absolute rock-bottom of someone else’s reckless devotion. It excites her to be so repellently attractive, she calls to him with crooked fingers and pretends that the smell of her last conquest lingers. She makes love to him by pulling his **** to her while pushing his face away with snarling fingers. He can’t hide the scratches there. In her bruises welter the endless depths of star nurseries, nebulae, and out of them new madness will be borne.

I refuse to drown in you, he thinks as he looks once more in her tidal eyes. I refuse to drown in you again. Yet she is already unleashing her waves upon his shores. They lap at him with all the conniving eagerness of a dog's aimless devotion. He takes his last breath. His whole being yearns to lose itself in her hint of cleavage -- no, not the whole being, just the part that pulls strongest when the moon is out and the wolves howl -- and he spins under the assault of her simple availability. He is pulled under. I refuse he cries weakly, mouth emptying into the empty night, lungs bubbling vainly and knowing that as he raves he will break his vows again and blame the harlot, the *****, the temptress who mothered his manhood to tumescence; so that she could for a moment own his essence. And as he plans ahead to decry and deny the shame that this will bring he feels for the ring in his pocket, safe for when the act will be over.

The atheist awoke clutching a nightmare of a new Messiah. This one would invoke terror and burning with such a simple message. Turning water into blood -- all the better to keep them sober -- so that the thickness would bond all men as brothers and all women as equals. And the Old Order would build crucifixes skyscraper tall, collecting clouds at the apex, because centuries of money begets power and power begets self-interest and self-interest begets a ruthless rage.

I have tried to take you, but you dance away to attend your daily prayers; I am left holding sunbeams in bear paws on empty stairs. Clasping you to me, you turn to liquid, gush between my claws: you make me feel ungainly, untoward, a beaten Beast crushing Belle under his mistimed feet. So now I force myself upon you. Eat of my *****, see the traces of snakes that you misplaced there. Beneath the tumescent ******* feel my knees, sore from following you in solemn abdication. They wear the carpet to a shiny bareness, like the moist button of my soul. Can you not see my eyes swell with dedication, do you not understand the corresponding depths of me that call to yours? It is our future sweating from my pores; mop it up, sense the salty possibilities that we can ferment together. Say yes now, as recompense for all the hurt you do to me. Silent, despairing, I have deserved it: if nothing else, give me more of your apathy. It lines my heart with such loving gravity.

First find her ripely inconsolable. She must be beautiful (squeeze the round end -- does it yield perceptibly without deformation?), yet she must think herself ******. The following factors produce this effect: a society which denigrates her, a family which ignores her, fairy-tales which tell her she fulfils herself upon belonging to a man. Once you have selected her, you must purchase. Pay with attention, time, care and compliments. Do not spend too much -- you might suffer buyer's remorse later. Then, before she is sure of herself, make demands. Tell her that her utility is based on your own convenience, and slowly browbeat until soft and creamy.

"He was a young man,
taken before his time."
The TV said.

The old man grumbled that
every boy is taken before their time, whatever their age.

He meant himself.
He was sorry for himself.

I was not sorry for him so
"Girls too, women," I offered, and at his hurt glance
bristled
because he did not understand why
I would need to mention that.

He simply said it again,
every boy is taken--
and I could not convince him.
Nothing remained but this:
I nodded in agreement.
What else could I do?
There are some thing you cannot say
for fear of being offensive.

But now, in private, I can tell him,
Where he will not hear me,
that
he should not have been so hasty.
That
no matter what your age,
it might still be exactly your time
or
even
after your time.

"You are not owed a life,"
I should have said,
nodding sagely.
At his reddening face
His thickening growl
I would have said it again.
"You are not owed a life."

Young, yes, but even so the boy spun circles ‘round the sallow priest.
This older man was young, too -- almost too young to shoulder his responsibilities. Undisturbed by time, unbowed by gravity, he was the still spoke in this wheel, remaining tall, straight, like a candle: smelling of tallow, waxy and sinuous. He burned dimly with certainty, the simple certainty of the taught. This was the priest, but also burning was the spinner for he span circles unbroken, in simplicity complete.
"So, God knows what we will do tomorrow?”
"Yes, yes," answered the priest, annoyed already. Always annoyed at the impositions of children, who call and caterwaul when they have not learned respect, who do not learn respect in an age of information, who do not shut their eyes against the dark awe of the ineffable.
Still spinning, light glinting from him, the boy was marvellous and profound without even trying. "But we do what we want?" His head flamed too, not the guttering candle flame but instead the true brightness of a star.
"Yes, yes," answered the priest, "we have free will."
"But God wants what is best?" The boy span, the circle tightened.
"Yes, yes," answered the priest. "God always wants the best.  Everything is for the best, for God has willed it."
"So what I do tomorrow God already sees. What God wants is the best. If what he saw was not best, he would change it." The boy was concluding that everything was for the best, all he did was for the best, for this was always the best of all possible worlds. And his head rang with the circuit of the circle, for it came back around and completed itself.

The priest pinched fingers at his nose.  "You do not understand."

Please know that I am proud to suffer with you, to sup of this with you: all of the parasites and pestilence that time perpetrates. I share the surprise that simmers in your widening sunshine eyes, which right now brim with tears at the dawn of life. You aren't ready to know this yet, as I hold your hand, but you have many moments ahead of you where this sympathy is all you will have.

Others chatter at the edges of our vision and ask whether you could ever understand. Yet your first response is to ask if she is gone forever, and there is no better definition of what has happened. You understand everything. It is just that, where we talk of the evils done by people, you have monsters that prey on the innocent for no reason. Where we have injustice, you have bullies. And if they are not the same, then you do not understand; and if you do not understand, then it is because you do not suffer. Yet I am here with you now, and I know you do, and I know you will. You will hold its bright little ball tight in your hands and halt it as long as you can, until you burst.

When times were better -- before you met her and decided that love's string was only so long and not longer -- our arms were stronger so we held each other more tightly, cat's cradles weaved around us. It was then that you thought of me and said I will build you a memory palace and into it you packed the smiles you filled like balloons on the hard days, compliments arranged as tessellated tiles, the promises you gave to build better tomorrows. I walk through it now, past windows that let in the light of crashed moons. I walk through it now, through doorways that guard empty rooms.  I walk through it now, waiting for the stones to fall and bury me.