I write the days
Days of strange habit and alien design
Here there is a dislocation of reason and all its attendant securities
Here fractured reflections out of broken mirrors
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Cast adrift within uncertain stories
Carried by the music of songs as yet unsung
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Seeking connections within a heap of broken images
Gleaning small truths to unknown purpose
By the Mascara Snake’s arcane inclination I have become this other self
This self of dreams
This self of fears
This self that only the secret mirror knows
In writing I struggle against the means at my disposable
To pin the flaming butterfly of language to the velvet cushion of comprehension
To plot a narrative course through a wilderness of deceptions
Of diversions and dead ends
And yet I write
I write of the moon sitting huge midst a bed of stars on his tongue
I write of the suns blazing their brilliance to blindness in his eyes
I write of the fires kindled to roar within the immensity of his belly
I write of his league spanning boots and tip the wink hat
I write of his horizon swallowing smile and his blue guitar
I write
Yet the essence eludes me
Simon J. Charlton may be reached for questions or comments at simonjohncharlton@gmail.com. Check out his newly-released album,
The Truth of All Love, with the musician Ben Rusch!
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The Mascara Snake’s shadow play flickering between smoke and mirrors refusing my desire for narrative clarity
In attempting to define the nature of his enchantments I sculpt only winds and whispers
As the ink gleams in Pyrrhic victory then dries upon the page so the thought occurs
A thought that drops with the stunning violence of the guillotine
Absolute and unequivocal
Perhaps all here is ended and these are merely ghost words spiralling out into an endless darkness
Spectral wanderings to unknowable ends
Drifts of memory like the echoes of static from a dead radio
Lost waves falling across the stones of deserted beach
And yet I write
Time here the shadows of absent hands across a broken face
Disordered midst a spillage of cogs and springs
All still seems possible and yet nothing seems real
Here I have known fragility
Here I have known tenderness
Here I have known the dread sufferings of ghosts
Silent screams held within the shadows of shadows
Here I have known the lost reflections of forgotten mirrors
Here the conscious mind creates a foundation for retrieval that the unconscious mind then denies
Spiralling midst a drift of feathers across the fabled crossroads
Suicides lay within the silence of their barely remembered sorrows
A storm broken sign tilts in the crow disturbed soil
Crudely branded ‘THIS IS A LIE’
Awareness blooms in the eternal instant
Pale flowers cracking time scarred concrete
Anaemic petals chasing an invisible sun
My shadow the unravelling threads of the Mascara Snake’s broken weave cast indifferent across the burning sands
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
The sun an ice blasted stone dead on my tongue
The moon a cold silver smear across my heart
I look to the stars
The glistening net that held once the possibility for all dreaming
But in the Mascara Snake’s realm of confusions they denote only oblivion
Fragments of dead time following in blind obedience some unknown law across the darkness
The discordant exclamations of a wilderness song snag in the brittle limbs of the winter stripped trees
The suffering shapes of frost scorched ivy twist with the wind
Ghost lovers lay within the softness of their dying shadows weeping for the memory of their dreams and fears
The horizons are stretched beyond imagining
Distances beyond reason
Distances beyond dreaming
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Scrabbling torn of finger and scrapped of knee midst the dust washed rubble
Plucking blood stained feathers from the ruined earth
Suffering’s corrosive stench a weight upon the wind
Wandering blind midst the fallen ruins of a shadow city that must once have gleamed golden
Seeming eternal
The mightiest of works inspiring speechless awe
Telling now a tale of unutterable despair
I am this hungering ghost of pallid aspect
Hollow eyed and spectral within the mirror’s depthless shimmer
The lights waver
Casting uncertain shadows
Dying slowly towards darkness
The essence of an inevitable extinction
Their gradual dimming a moment beyond redemption
Memories stir their tumid mass
Memories informing that the flesh was always weak in its wilful demands
Its worship of gratification in the eternal instant
The blind insistence of untamed appetite
Allowing not of the madness inherent to undreamt consequence
That same flesh now gathers its age wearied folds and time conjured creases to its fitting end
Each agony of furnace drawn breath destined to fail in corrupted lungs
Eyes to fade within their depthless wells of murk and horror
Shadow darkened hollows where the inversion of arts and wonders is a world of nightmares and dread
The fire is an exhausted heap of lowering ashes
Collapsing through a series of soft explosions
I circle the flickering Halloween heart
Tracing with faltering steps the ragged shadow of a rain broken dog
Crooked of tooth and bloody of muzzle it sorrows within the belly curled surrender of its tail
Raising failed hackles to the fullness of the moon that I follow until it is lost to the light
However I interpret time’s disjointed passage across the jagged peaks of the unnamed mountains the Mascara Snake’s presence insists that time here is a nothing out of nowhere
Here where my destiny is a conclusion self created
Here where my destiny shall be bones sun bleached and sand scoured into immaculate absence
Here my final sighing exhalation shall be nothing save a fading memory
A dream lost on the untraceable breeze
Yet it is these moments tending towards oblivion that have become a bleak comfort Moments hated
Moments feared
Their intimacy of understanding impossible to deny
It is out of such twisted consolation that I seek to document my journey through this land of cries and whispers
Of dreams and fears
Of desert winds and ineffable wilderness
Suffering is signalled by the birds spiralling within their filth of feathers in the upper air
The beaded liquid shimmer of their ever narrowing eyes a precursor of death somewhere in the burning sands below
The sonorous hum of flies waiting to anoint the inevitable carcass with their vile benediction
Each scrawl of ink across the brittle page is a denial of such endings
Each word shaped an attempt at permanence
A creating of self to purpose within the Mascara Snake’s ever shifting weave
A claiming of truth within the shadow I cast by sun’s rise and moon’s glow
As the ink dries on page and finger I realise that such ideas as permanence and truth have no reality when the Mascara Snake grins his tombstone grin and tilts his by your leave hat to extinguish the sun
When he opens the uncharted reaches of his eyes burning soft with blue flames of timeless sorrow
Such ideas are for another world at another time
Another world
Another time
Ideas born of certainties to be tenderly nurtured around the comfort of a winter roaring fire
The greenwood delighting in its death throes of snap and spit and crackle and hiss
Held timeless and leather deep in a dark panelled room of candle soft light and welcoming shadows
Brandy’s aromatic textures swirling to a hand’s warmth in the crystal balloon
Bookcases groaning contentedly beneath their weight of knowledge
Rain scratching its windblown signature at the windows informing us of our benign security
Here I may only claw at the silence in ineffectual desperation
My sun cracked fingers clutching knuckle white the pen’s smooth barrelled length
As if its shape to purpose were the last point of stability in a world ever more tilted
Ever more the unnameable
Ever more other
To cross hatch in barely decipherable frenzy the bare page
Seeking through an act of will to silence the white scream that howls and burns behind my eyes
An act of will that struggles in unequal contest against a design of impossible dimensions
A design birthed within compass of the Mascara Snake’s shadow
Coiled within its maddening tendrils of otherwise and ambiguity
Each moment is the reflection of a reflection in a hall of mirrors
A dazzle of speculations and uncertainties
In attempting to define the nature of his intentions I raise myself to sentience upon a ladder of smoke
A rope of wind that vanishes into the blue glare of the Mascara Snake’s eyes
I tumble into blind compulsion
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Fragile as failing breath across the mirror’s unblemished surface
A smear of exhausted light collapsing into the shadow lost corners of an abandoned room
The broken phone lays in the accumulated silence of the years
The definition of sorrow in its dust wreathed and fractured cradle
Once upon a time life forms drift spectral in the failing light
Time polished surfaces offer reflections of cruel design
I drag the time scarred ruins for the memory of a scream that is the signature of existence
A memory of the big river where swans thread the moonlight with a feathered tenderness
That heaves its tumid mass beneath a sweating obscenity of vegetation
Where old men gather within their crumpled skins a creaking of limbs to spit and snarl and weep against the parched sorrow of their impotence
Where the old women scrub in a blind and pointless frenzy the barren acreage of their arid wombs
Where the bones of the eternal stranger shine beautiful in their sorrowing for all our forgotten possibilities
Our forgotten arts
Our forgotten wonders
The big river that arrives listless and gasping at the salt stinking estuary
Beneath a sky the colour of storms the feather crested waves divide Enticing sailors to their drowning deeps
Hollow eyed they drift the green fathoms to eternal reward
Rum weary they raise an ancient and parched chorus
A desolation of song that is claimed by the brooding silence
The terrible beauty unveiled within the Mascara Snake’s cloud bruised eyes
The Mascara Snake
Wisdom’s jester in black cape black hat sequin and spotlight
Dreamer of wilderness of heart song and prayer
Indomitable within his kingdom of dreams and fears
His dominion of miracles and terminal regrets
Each thought here reclaimed is a burning stone of incandescent sorrows
A crash of lightning out of sky towering thunderheads
The weave of the rainbow remains unbroken as tempests roar down from the unnamed mountains
Within the elemental maelstrom a babble of voices carry me beyond the known points of the compass
Beyond the cartographer’s failing of knowledge that is revealed in the poetry of ‘HERE BE MONSTERS’
All as written shall be truth
All as written shall be deception
Everything is possible
Nothing is real
These are ghost words
Twisted reflections in a hall of shattered mirrors
Signposts raised out of nothing along the road to nowhere
Signposts crudely branded ‘THIS IS A LIE’
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
The failing interior
The failing
Awake to a sky steeped in sorrow
Funeral memories
Imagined or real
The peaks of the unnamed mountains are lost beneath a lowering sky
A boiling weight of bruise blue clouds
Their bleak mass closing the day in upon itself
Wind driven a scattering of birds gather to spiral beneath the clouds’ roiling immensity
Dark feathered they are the smoke of forgotten fires
The memory of lost seasons
When we as children heaped autumn’s fallen drift of colours to an innocent’s approximation of a funeral pyre
Buried deep within our overcoats
Collars high and hats pulled low
Our fingers woollen snug
The frost of early morning a diamond blue glint in our eyes
Our speech taking form on the frigid air
We would watch spellbound as lost summer was consumed within the fire’s Halloween heart
A tumbling roar and swirl of flames warming our faces against the day’s promise of fresh snow
Eventually to collapse into a smouldering sigh of ashes
Raising my eyes from the drying page the afterglow of the memory remains
The palest shadow across the heart’s tender wound
The palest shadow that returns me to this otherwhere of strange tracks carved by unknown feet into the red rock that lies eternal beneath the burning sands
Tracks that vanish into lost distances
Whip thin coyotes raise their dream devouring jaws
Howling their feral melancholy at the moon’s waning
Black rain pounds in fury the sheer sides of the unnamed mountains
The day as if aware of its finite nature sets itself to a greater darkening within the descending clouds that are black as widow’s weeds
Stumbling of thought and tied of tongue I am hostage to the fortune that is the Mascara Snake’s beguiling gift
His fingers peeling a concussion of notes from an ill tuned piano as he sings of the silence and its stolen heart
His face a luminescent shiver in the timeless mirror
Here perhaps he inhabits a badly painted smile
A crooked waxen smear across the face of the drunken clown
Here perhaps a china doll time blinded and broken across the unravelling tinder of a wicker chair
Here perhaps the scurrying mystery behind the varnish cracked wainscot
Here perhaps the sly smile of sinister knowing in the eternal stranger’s eye
In the imagined melodrama of failed expression cold ashes are heaped upon my tongue and a cactus dream sits within the chambers of my heart
The past is when
The future is how
Shadow fragments drift across the wound that is the mirror’s reflection
Failing imagination and a scattering of figments across dead time
A paper skinned carcass sits slumped within its creases
Drunk naked in the dust shrouded corner
Eyelids flutter with never to be remembered dreams
Beyond the time pitted glass of the paper mended window the pale light of a garbage moon casts a diseased shadow that arches the backs of the opal eyed cats and sets the dogs to their idiot howling
Delivered of history to this realm of montage
Of fragments ill assembled
Seeking connections within a heap of broken images
The disjointed mosaic of dreams and fear
The bloated deceptions of false gods
Half remembered
Best forgot
Mercilessly torn from shattered pedestals
Junked remnants of an ill conceived permanency
Memory’s afterglow fades
Escapes my shaping hand
The day’s cultivation of silence is broken by the clown’s idiot cackle
Laughter ill shaped by the sorrows that swarm in the shadows beyond the spotlight’s glare
Where a screeching steel progression of torture machines spew flames
Their cumbersome yet irrefutable progress grinding the streets to rubble
Brick and dust and broken glass
A contamination of desires thrown skywards
Ascending to blind the eye of the indifferent sun
The heart cleaves at the lovers’ slip of finger
Their desperate kiss of final farewell that would deny time midst the mounting cacophony of horrors
Their kiss consumed to ashes that the bitter rain sweeps along the gutter to the drain’s gaping throat
All these moments enacted beneath the unending sorrow of an ever broken sky
AND THE 1st THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (With a face like a broken clock it could be said that time was always against me I was born to the sound of a train’s whistle splitting the night My mother’s thighs awash with blood and sweat and suffering My mother’s cries riding the wings of the eagle owl in its swooping flight of death scarred sorrow across the inviolate darkness My father cursing the alignment of the stars The moon’s fire red held in the mirrors of my eyes The jilted bride shrouded in shattered rigging spat her curse where once was song Weeping into my future of shadows and sighs My kingdom of dreams and fears As a child I was intent on madness challenging the sun in day long games of stare and submission Finger painting in undreamt shadows the ceaseless maelstrom of my vision across the burning sands Dislocating the wheel of fortune Plucking the thorn from the withered tongue Swallowing my pride like lemon Adjusting my illness to match the cut of my cloth and the tilt of my hat Staring fairground mirrors into shards of self disgust Assuming my multiplicity of identities within the reflections of reflections The flowering of my awareness banishing thoughts of permanency Of self Of other Of all My eyes as oceans rage with a sudden fierceness as sudden become the peace unending My nights cup deep drunk Swaying within the sinuous tempest of my own creation Howling my songs of driftwood and ashes into the darkness Playing my creaking carcass lullabies on a tin guitar and pissing eternally into the eternal gutter) …“WHEN WE WERE YOUNG WHEN WE WERE VERY VERY YOUNG”
The horizon has claimed the day
And the moon settles its golden sickle in a bed of stars
The unnamed mountains remain a brooding presence in the painted desert of the Mascara Snake’s imagination
Nights are a breeding pool hatching shadow legions who stalk the ill fortuned wanderer
Whispering of corruption and dead time
Of dreams and fears
Shadow legions who stalk the edges of vision in a constant mutation of smouldering shimmers
Insisting of despair and the bottle’s sick embrace
Of futility and the razorblade’s silver sharp smile of cure all comfort
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Darker than ocean depths where sailors’ bones drift silent their unseen gleam in the timeless current
Gasping to break the surface of sleep I encounter only the numbing void of the Mascara Snake’s absence
The spectral horror of moonlight whiter than milk across my skin
Still held with the tidal sweep of hush and moan
The fall and rise to unknown consequence across cold stones
Sour wine claims the moment and a litter of broken dreams spill from the bottle’s parched throat
Stillborn and senseless they are smuggled into the bellies of the ships that lay inert on the water
As still as statues beneath a punishing sun
Locked within the dead song of the ocean’s oppressive calm
The seabirds a silent menace in the cat’s cradle of rigging
The wedding veil white of their feathers glowing incandescent
Unknowing of time they wait with glacial patience
Black of heart their beaded eyes narrowed to darkening ends
The crew are a bleak cargo
Tatters of skin marked with the days of their suffering
Broken across the bar
Shattered of hope
Parched of tongue
Forgotten remnants cast blind to the blue wilderness
The drifting ghosts of faded promises
Their final reckoning starkly realised in the bloody wrecks of their eyes
The salt tarnished breeze is a memory that holds the vanishing notes of a song that will remain forever unsung
Above the creaking timbers clouds gather in a bruised squabble of sullen
intentions
The tempest threatening grumble of thunder builds to its concussive crescendo
Incipient lightning a sudden urgency of electricity tasted on the frazzled air
Creeping as if cowed midst this quarrel of elements the moon as stranger is the saddest dream
Its gentle melancholy tending me again to the sorrowing mirror
Consumed within the night of guilt and shame
The towering mass of perpetual doubt
The skin of sleep is shed and he is discovered teetering at the cliff edge of despair
A hungering loneliness echoes the hungering heart
Chimerical guests gather uninvited at the feast
Shadow murmurs from the heart of darkness
The day first sighs and then collapses from within
Another exhausted fire
I am left to sift through the cold ashes that are the bitterest of accusations
A gathering of sorrows that drift between my fingers whispering the names of a sullen and benighted crew
The forgotten and the dislocated
The holy fools and the terminal failures
The angel dreamers and stardust wanderers
The never known who carry no name and cast no shadow
Who drift with the ocean’s grieving tides
Cast into the silence out of which I write
These words no more than wretched excuses for existence
Life alibis no more than scars across the page
Soon to fade along windowless corridors where the shuffling ghosts of all sorrow clutch the fragile remnants of a broken past
Where the Mascara Snake’s absence is the memory of a shadow that falls across the empty heart
Gut sprung clocks spill dead time that is gathered as rust across their idle hands Wandering empty rooms of eternal 3AM
The hour of unexplained dread
Of lonely hearts and unexplained deaths
When the broken phone is held within the sorrow of its dust shrouded cradle
The connection broken
Wires torn in an act of ancient violence that still trembles in the grey silence Flecks of dried blood across the mirror’s empty face
A discarded razorblade still holds its silver sharp smile of cure all comfort
In this room we may dream a dream of dreamers dreaming
Of the neon flooded wilderness where ghost children gather dust dry flowers
Where strangers mutter with a desperate fearfulness into tight clenched fists Shuffling aimless paths towards an end that refuses them admission
As the unnamed mountains vanish into the gathering night
So self awareness is perverted by darker arts into the odious miasma of self pity
Midnight wakefulness hatching a dread corruption
The mirror offers only a shadow eyed stranger mutely howling the sorrows of an injustice
Complaints born of a twisted perception
And yet such horrors as proclaim dominion are the reality of nightmare when the owl’s call and the mouse’s scream are the shared moment and the bats like unleashed shadows assume their mythic guise and swallow the night
Such horrors are the blood flowing through my veins
Such horrors are the tears that sting my eyes
Such horrors are the thoughts that swirl their toxic maelstrom of self and disgust
A crisis of repulsion birthed from the breeding pools in the undreamt wasteland of rock and ruin and terrible rain
Of desolation and its bitter twin despair
In this land of wind shaped phantoms and changeling shadows the scurrying pen scratches its idiot signature to no more purpose than the mouse worrying in the dust dark blindness behind the wainscot
Ghost lovers tap their sorrows at the storm lashed windows
Wretched of heart they weep for the once upon a times that might have been
The wind screams through the trees
Grief the unredeemable instant ever repeating
Ghost lovers draped across the arms of the weeping trees
Carving their secret selves of wound and oblivion into the heart deep darkness
These are the days of the silent scream
These the days of shattered mirrors
These the days of the bleeding fist white knuckle tightened in self recrimination
Memory haunted eyes blur with a wash of ghosts
The rose garden at dusk
Echoing voices of lost time
A fading bruise
A severed promise
A defeated dream
The faces of hated friends emerge from moon cast shadow
Hang their spectral blue sorrows in the nightmare clutching branches of the skeletal trees where clouds snag the dark bellies of their ill intent
The night shivers itself to purpose
Gathers the unspoken sadness located at the heart of silence
The song forever unsung
Out of this behind the smile narcissism
This obsessive tending to ancient wounds
The summer house shimmers
Forms its walls painted softest blue
Of summer long skies and eternal heartbreak
The secret path leads down to still waters
Uncovers the forest’s emerald weave of secrets
Bracelets of woven grass discarded across a carpet of pine needles that absorbs all sound
The sun’s presence the flickering of light and shadow
A breath of breeze disturbs the water’s surface
An unseen cloud darkens the moment and the rainbow wonder of long ago eyes and time distant laughter is consumed within the merciless crackle of bitterest flames
Colours paled almost to absence drift through prayer broken fingers
Dawn has yet to break
Is the silence perched at my shoulder
The ache of sorrows by the mirror unspoken
The mystery of eyes darkened by sleep’s absence
By the gathering blood orange light the gutter angels are stripped of their wings
Stunned they fall
Their speech of tongues a tormented babble
A rising tide of gibberish
The newborn sun is lost within drifting clouds of greasy smoke heavy with the stench of burnt feathers and blood
This my breath across the mirror’s time scarred surface
These my dreams the sweat upon my skin
These my fears the stains upon my sheets
Somewhere the Mascara Snake roams
Lost within his sleight of hand creations
His vivid hat deep abracadabra
His eyes pale moons full risen to an all consuming vastness
Dictating the tides that claim as delighted prize the drowning sailor’s silent screams and groans
Their slow motion descent a trembling delirium
Somewhere the Mascara Snake roams
His desires a limitless horizon
His laugher dusk soft rose scented
His tears the river
His river the ocean
His ocean the world
Somewhere along the endless dreaming highway of his own creation he sits beneath the slow shifting patterns of the stars
Casting to the four winds of his command a blight of corrupted visions
His song of silence and the secret heart
His eyes hold an astonishing montage of arts and wonders dreams and fear
Somewhere other the illusion persists of home and hearth
Somewhere other the illusion persists of home and heart
Somewhere
Other
AND THE 2nd THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (The world ending incandescence of my smile Its concussive resonance that humbles mountains Whispered acolytes barely realised lay their broken haloes in the lucid dust that is the mark of my passing My hands a blur as I juggle the idiocies of innocence and experience Of desire and despair Casting from my scarlet sack seeds for a wilderness song My voice a dry canyon whisper Hollow echoes fading into the permanent midnight of my dreaming Tidal murmurs reveal a tintack rain exploding out of the naked heart Windowpanes rattling like old bones in their weary frames Fishing for sorrows in the broken glass canal The sun my of days a diseased insistence The moon of my nights a cargo of visions never to be realised As the stars tumble into drunken place so the hours fold themselves towards absence I swiftly follow) …“REGRET? REGRET IS ALL THERE IS”
Within the tumbledown rookeries
A fragment of starlight by broken glass is but temporary illumination
A momentary glimmer
Soon to fade
Shoulder tight the alleyways are slick with a storm’s passing Rorschach stained the brickwork is suggestive of mercy and memory
Of dreams and fears
Weariness and regret
Grease tainted air is a fetid weight unmoving
Shadows fail in the almost light of a faltering streetlamp
A poster time torn and ragged peels into obsolescence
Scarlet flowers burst out of a skull and we’re supposed to be impressed
Cracked pavements birth carnival colours
The clown’s candyfloss smear of a smile ill applied to little reward
The kohl of his eyes smudged uncaring across the age yellowed pancakes of his cheeks
Shrunken within the seam torn ash stained oversized landscape of his suit
Naming his sorrows by the weary repetition of dancing spotlights
Of pratfalls and water fights across piss darkened sawdust
Here in the shadow hung bleachers is the cheek blown chuckle
The strangled chortle
Heart sore laughter rising to the vanished gods
A stagnancy of song resolving itself to silence
A roar of sunlight has dragged me from the depths of a darkest dreaming
The Mascara Snake no more than the sliver of a memory
A lover’s black gloved hand drawing the carriage door closed
Desire becomes the cold stone of absence at the moment of her departure
The sharp sorrow of the conductor’s whistle marking a stark point of division between then and now
Between now and when
Barely contained of its energies the engine strains against its furnace gathered steam
The carriages lay wreathed in lung cluttering smoke
A silk soft breeze swirls the smoke to clear and the dream has vanished
The Mascara Snake no more than the barest touch of a sweat cooled finger across an unsuspecting shoulder
A shiver of anticipated recognition stilled within the unknown gleam of the eternal stranger’s smile
The unknowing sacrifice is held within scope of the assassin’s indifferent eye
Still frame in ignorance at the point of extinction
The struggling imagination is a ragged weave
The sag of an exhausted smile that fails to connect beyond the mirror’s blank reflection
Voices out of lost time are muffled echoes through snow soft days
The winter’s bliss of solitude and silence
The pearl grey light
The snow’s fresh crust yielding beneath a drag of feet
Night frozen footprints seem locked forever in both time and place
Comfort is the spit of fresh cut greenwood out of dancing flames
A feathered weight of pillows tumbling us down through a day’s end exhaustion of laughter into the depthless wonder of our dreams
But the mirror’s bitter eye is bleak company
The smile snags and the weave’s too delicate thread is broken
My hand emerges into the bruised light
A sweat desperate clutching at the pen’s reality
Its crooked passage across the untenanted page barely legible
A smudge of symbols to meet the taunting white glare
This pen my only anchor against the thoughts that rise unbidden out of the day’s confusion
Wastrels of reason allowing only bleak strands of narrative that fail in their design
Attempting to describe everything revealing nothing
Last night the Mascara Snake entered my dreams through the twisted ribbon of his smile
He opened his suitcase of wounded pride and personal wilderness
His eyes were a mute articulation of the world’s unfathomable sorrow
He led me down by gentle steps into their blue shimmering depths
Where broken flowers fade in forgotten churchyards beneath the clouds’ steel grey silence
Where headstones lay down their time cracked histories into the death fed grass
Where love’s first flowering of tenderness and desire is worn by time to a distinction of dreams held silent in a mutual antipathy
Where the heart song luminescence of innocence is darkened by inevitable experience
Becomes the song barely remembered
The song exhausted
The song unsung
The blue shimmering depths where a parchment dry kiss and a brutally turned shoulder was his final goodbye
Still as the breath drawn moment before first creation I knew the eternal stranger’s depth of sorrows
The intimate realisation of another’s pain
Its breadth of vision that shamed the sky
And so the roses wept and the rainbow wept and the stars wept and the moon wept
The horizon a blur of smudged mascara
Even the dogs were weeping
Dragging their sadness through the shadow of the Mascara Snake’s departing smile
Its cold infusion of lies and tender regrets
Such moments
Lost in time
Drifts of ghost static from dead radios
A terminal distortion of barely remembered voices
Tears in rain carrying me into an impossible purity of silence
Within memory’s tragic insistence he finger dipped the crumpled ruin of his nowhere hat and acknowledged the limits of his nowhere vision
Yet the light that danced quicksilver in his eyes suggested a contrary path of possibilities
Dominions as yet undiscovered in the dreaming heart
A whisper of kingdoms and their unrealised glories held in the almost curve of his almost smile
It is here that he lowered his head as if in obedience to an unseen yet immense burden
It is here that he plucked with infinite tenderness a sleepy tune from the worn nylon strings and scalloped neck of his blue guitar
Singing so gently that even the wind failed to hear
He sang of arts and wonders
Of mercy and memory
Of weariness and regret
The heart deep secrets of dreams undreamt and songs unsung
As the final note slid into the silent cat prowled darkness so he turned on his glowing heels and with a shrug that dwarfed the ages hunched his shoulders and wandered on those silver heels into the legend of his own creation
The last thing the wind remembered
Night has developed its usual signature
A dreary weight of rain tumbling from a starless sky
Carried on a moon driven tide to this room of trembling light
There is the distant whisper of thunder
The low pitched growl of dogs on the distant horizon
Milk pale sheets of lighting that barely register their presence
A momentary gleam
The vaguest of disturbances in the corner of the eye
It is as if the elements themselves are in a state of utter exhaustion
Shivering shadows play worn out scenes across the wall as the wind crawls in on broken intentions
The clock’s hands are frozen and in the timeless moment the Mascara Snake’s absence is all engulfing
All that is known of the world
An absence that darkens the barely healed scar across my heart
Waiting upon a warmth of memories to carry me away from this realm of sorrows and loneliness
Dreaming to be delivered of another world and another time
Another world Another time
A hesitant birthing that will deliver me of home as the vision most purely distilled
But that which forms is mere outline
A tentative tracing of dreams and fears in shifting patterns of dust
My fingers raise a trembling steeple and the reverential opacity of church Sunday silence is almost known
A summer fresh stillness of deep shadows
Greenwood and rolling down gathered within the pealing bells Almost known
Birdsong’s heat exhausted flight and the hymnal’s opiate soporific
Almost known
The sun sparkling river a benign serpent
Its rippling glints of star fallen silver shaping the hills and valleys
Almost known
Puffball clouds in idle procession across a sky’s impossible blue
Almost known
Yet in the almost there is no sanctuary
No consolation
The vision corrupted within its anaemic fragility
Fingers crack dry skinned
The steeple beyond sustaining tumbles down into a disorder of brick and timber and blinding dust that in its clearing reveals a sign crudely painted ‘THIS IS A LIE’
I am pinned again to the timeless moment of faces swirling within a shifting delirium of light and shadow
Of failed flames become a drift of ashes
Teeth held smiles are the gleam of insincerity
Their eyes hold only the wilderness howl of ever winter
A denial of life
Language alone remains
Yet each word shaped and clumsily gathered to its sheltering fold within the borders of the page is a razorblade’s stinging kiss
Out of nothing remembered
The silver smile of cure all comfort
Within the diminishing spiral of solitude a fury thrown bottle shatters the moon across cold stones
A mockery of laughter rises from the mirror’s depths
There is the corrosive stench of burnt feathers as birds plummet like stones from the painted night
Claimed within the tidal drift and swoon of the endless burning sands
The moon gathers itself within a cloak of fire
Time here is on an eternal loop
Memories and hallucinations
Dreams and fears
All is endlessly hopelessly recycled
Delivering me finally of the numbing realisation that I in both flesh and reflection am my own truest deception
These words
Written in water
Mirror’s tumble at my finger’s clumsy touch
Shattered glass opening further paths to hopeless wanderings across a world without end
Feet to trace paths like broken veins in the sand steeped silence beneath banks of tumbling stars
A moon of glaring malevolence held in the jaundiced eyes of skinny ribbed jackals who skulk low of belly and greasy of muzzle at the limit of the fire’s influence
In a confusion of dreams and fears I scribble across the taunting blank of the page
I hang such prayers as seem appropriate upon the wire’s curse of thorns
A studied placing as if following the design of some arcane ritual
Sacrifices to gods unknown
Why should it be that I am then stunned when they are ripped apart in a screaming fury of feathers and flashing beaks
A malice of eyes nightmare bred and birthed beyond midnight
I am left cowering naked within my own shadow
Tender as the mucus dripping newborn quivering through its first moments of mewling realisation
Bitter truths sourly spat from a scouring tongue
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Erecting feeble breastworks against the damning tides that rise with the moon and ride with the wind
I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Defeated within the ever reconfiguring weave of language
Such words as attain appointment impermanent as the drifting sands
Failed expressions first shaped by the mirror’s reflection
Emaciated monuments to an unappeasable hunger
Myself the ghost spiralling in winter silence
Myself the ghost
Myself
AND THE 3rd THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (In a swoon of purple rain I enter stage right Steam rises from the burning sands at my feet Trembling ghosts of memory The creatures of forgotten sorrow seeking the mercy of his shadow I shift with the breezes My moods intemperate and wandering My eyes have the look of permanent vacation My nights are a blue murmur My deep hollow breathing of the midnight dream Of spectral pianos played by ghost children in lost canyons of indescribable sorrow The rattle of failed dreams along derelict alleyways The terrible beauty of collapsing stars Bluff and bluster fall away as I run my finger the spine of a perpetual doubt Chuckling my insane reflection in the mirror minus teeth The song in my head is a bruised flowering of regrets A ruptured accordion wheezes its last as I sow the dream to reap the fear Tearing the veil from desire Revealing only deception My fingers of glass caress a final dignity from my blue guitar I whistle a loneliness that shatters mountains I call the moon to dance then vanish into a whisper Leaving only the cry) …“HOLD ME HOLD ME LIKE IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD”
Within the slow turning of the rumouring mill
Wherein grind the sighing bones of Chinese whispers and hearsay
The tongue delighting twists of tittle tattle and blather
Where nineteen to the dozen is the confounding standard
It is said that the Mascara Snake defeated death from the other side of the grave
His song to the new day rising echoes through the Zen arcade
Carries a note of expectation and urgency
Shadowed by a memory of vacillation and decline
Of a clock’s ticking soft ever softer towards a time deep stillness
His song the silence of midnight snow settled to a chilling caress across the dreamer’s trembling eyelids
A drift of sorrows bruise blue across the lover’s heart
Hungering ghosts pay spectral witness to childhood fears of the extinguished light
Of that under bed other world where tormented oceans raise steeples of spray
Where wind driven sheets of spume stain the blanket’s hem
Barely realised yet intimately known shadow dripping forms ascend from the trembling depths
Those monsters of darkest self creation
Breaking the surface in a frenzy of snapping locomotive jaws
Gaping maws of purest terror and impure intent
Hunger the flame that burns in the blood red beads of their eyes
Screaming horses anoint the peaks of the waves
Chasing with the wind that carries me in exhaustion to the unknown shore where the Mascara Snake and the eternal stranger sit in hushed mutuality at the shattered base of a salt corroded monument
The Mascara Snake’s eyes are the sky softly shimmering in their delighted glimmer of something uniquely beyond
In their cloudless horizon spanning immensity a vague memory trembles into being
Barely formed within its fearful shell
Neon illuminated hallways are a mercury dreaming
Tentatively hatched supplicants gather within the cloak of their blindness
An ancient beauty is carved by whispers into stone
Forming prayers by softest moonlight and the fall of shadow
The remembered kiss of final farewell
Something half overheard
Some throwaway utterance that refused to stay thrown
My mind drifts
Is a dazed murmur of confusions and contradictions
Struggles to locate points of reference as it wanders within the dawn’s luminous mist that anoints the distant peaks of the unnamed mountains
The Mascara Snake shimmers into sinuous being
Attended by the silence of the eternal stranger his is a breathtaking sensuality
An invitation to experience that innocence cannot decline
He is muttering incantations over blue flames
Shaping by his words the sawdust smoke that rise in perfect circles
A bottle held within the white knuckled fastness of his fist
An unnameable dread held in the timeless dimension of his smile
Stars are captured in the roiling depths of his eyes as he balances the moon’s honey dripping sickle on his tongue
Desire is the ache of a bone chilling fever that runs in rivers of sweat across my trembling flesh
That bursts in waves across my eyes like newly birthed suns
His kiss a terrible beauty
His kiss that leaves only the black to blue to purple to yellow of a fading bruise
A frozen hand clutches my heart as the Mascara Snake’s gut deep laughter tilts the balance of universes yet born
He rises from the fire shedding first his purple cloak of mystery and imagination and then his skin of immeasurable sorrows
Tipping to the wind his hat of wonders
Assuming a mask of impossible sobriety he giggles through the petroleum smear of his smile
Swallowed by the smoke he dreams into being the glowing entrails of ghosts
The writhing shadow forms of mythic serpents
He worries a rainbow into monochrome collapse
His butterfly mind gathering the torments of spectral storms
Where the memories of forgotten sailors ride with the horses across the sea’s green foaming crests
With a magician’s flourish he vanishes
Stepping into absence between the raindrops that hiss in the fire’s smouldering orange heart
Lightning flashes through thunder’s cracks
The rain softened stars falling in liquid reflection across the cracked mirror
I settle like ashes into a comfort of weariness
Accepting the days as being little more than a game of chance
Random notes from a scattered orchestra
The clatter of dice tumbling eternally through bone dry canyons
The cards facedown will sing the song of their choosing
Held in arid suspense I sense that I am halted at the edge of discovery
This other world of no name
Where the dream is the fear is the dream
Timeless repetitions within a weave that is spun at the tips of the Mascara Snake’s luminous fingers
And at the quiet heart of his creation the cure all comfort of erasure
The balm of utter oblivion
Of tender annihilation
The fire is now dead within its scorched hollow
As the darkness gradually diminishes the unnamed mountains are a charcoal sketch
Smudged outlines slowly attaining their monumental security
The sun sits beneath the horizon
The faintest blush telling of its desire for bloodied birth
Its tentative roseate glow is captured and held within the cracked mirror
At the fall of my shadow the mirror darkness into temporary blindness
My hands rise through a gathering static
Tenderly cupped before the wreckage of my sleep hungering eyes
Gently nurturing memories stolen from a dead child’s dreams
***
Here is unending night
The interior darkness
Here is the deadening weight of closedown
Of mind lock and the terminal moment
The assassin’s eye unblinking at the instant of his victim’s fall
The long dreamt consummation of a purest desire
Rain is a black sheet that drowns the unnamed mountains
It pours from the granite immensities in waves of ever mounting fury
Consuming everything in its foaming wrathful path
Here the Mascara Snake is known only by the terror and sorrow of his absence
The memory of his forms
Their constant shifting between dimensions
Dazzling in their multiplicity
Ricocheting blurs in a hall of mirrors
Yet centred always about a still centre
A beguiling calm and his imponderable smile
It is here
In the gleaming unquantifiable
That language fails
Lines and curves create only an unsteady scaffold ever teetering at the point of collapse
Here language is the redundant witness
The teacup’s storm settled to an unfathomable silence
Yet still the heart churns with obstinate insistence
The old plunger thudding through its hollow ritual of systole and diastole
The twin concertinas of the lungs wheezing through their weary patterns of repetition
Blood still seeks to rush and nerves to sing
Eyes still to capture the days in all their glorious inconsequence of empty ceremony as each god raised is another god denied
All this life
That persists against reason
All this life
That will counter no question
All this life
That will admit of no challenge to its constant state of becoming
Absolute beyond denial in its blind intention
The mind squirms upon the naked point of its own obsolescence
Toils within the labyrinth of dreams and fears
Struggles creaking through a constricting weave that is another’s creation
Strives even at the maelstrom’s ferocious height to reconstruct the securities of a known world
Lightning struck timbers are dragged smoking into the broken light
Such debris as we gather we raise without foundation on flooded sands
A spectral monument to the conceit of humility
Pride’s blighted canker
I dwell feral within a dream’s distance of the unnamed mountains
Probing with abstract consciousness the Mascara Snake’s annihilating shadow
As if the half formed questions that burn with senseless fury behind my eyes should find answer in the expanse of his world devouring smile
As if defining resolution could ever be commanded ranked and filed
It is a weary dredging for wearier words
A stark illustration of promises consumed within the flames of an obliterating fire
Of dreams denied
Of the futility inherent when thinking is set directly against thought
The timeless moment insists only and ever of itself within the instant of its ever becoming
The past is always when
The future is always how
The sun as if indifferent casts its brilliant net across the ancient stones and burning sands
The clock’s hands are stopped within the Mascara Snake’s frigid embrace
Beneath the glacial wilderness of his eyes his frost blue smile carries me to the edge of reason
His laughter is bell sharp canyon deep and by its seismic reverberations I am plunged without preparation into sweat drenched nights of tempest dreaming
Wandering blind midst the stars’ forbidding silence as he dips the moon with a craftsman’s delicacy into the blood red ocean
Wandering blind unknown paths to never known destinations
The train vanishing within its wreath of smoke and heart sorrowing whistle
The song on my lips a song to remain forever unsung
At the fall of his black silk handkerchief the empty box of my previous examination spills a stained strip of yellowing newsprint
Its brittle banner informs ‘THIS IS A LIE’
At the fall of his black silk handkerchief I am chasing the wind through rain slick alleyways
Barely aware of the time torn poster
Of the scarlet flowers bursting out of a litter of skulls
I am chasing the memory of his laughter
Seeking shelter from the big wave that threatens to engulf me within its glittering glistening death swell
I am chasing my heart’s desire
But when the weave is once broken there can be no return to innocence
The idyll of kings and beggars
Of lovers and thieves
Of philosophers and fools
Is lost beneath the terminal shadow of experience
A shadow that mirrors the interior darkness
The mind is locked within a wearying cycle of unending night
The assassin’s eye remains unblinking
Merely shifts through degrees to scope another victim
All that remains is the deadening weight
The deadening weight of closedown
***
AND THE 4th THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (The baggage of my eyes Dark weighted circles to shame the sun Their depth of illimitable loneliness Of world defining sorrows Of the distance existing between dreams and their realisation I ride shotgun the wilderness trail Slumped into time’s merciless passage I knows with devastating intimacy the sun hot blast of the desert wind Its cries and whispers of eternal desolation To the sound of a cracking whip mine is the shadow that swallows the day Mine the guttering flame of an exhausted memory The ragged thunder of collapsed mountains in my hands Lightning’s shock of illumination extinguished at the pinch of my fingers In the weeping hour of realised isolation the colossal rhythms of my heart follow the slow tidal drift of the moon that casts my flesh milk white luminescent Yet against all that I am their lays still a burden of suffering My nightmares a swirling agony of invocations to the goddess dream and the goddess fear At the turning of their shoulders I know the cliff edge reality of starkest despair The blue fragility of their fading songs baffles my ears even as they condemn my heart to a wilderness of frosts Vertigo driven my sleight of hand conjures a rainbow that can only crack the arch of time A petrified dream The eternal stranger with shrouded eyes I plunge depths of arcane desire Knowing only the pale tattered remnants of glory Raising in the immensity of my hands a shredded banner marking days long dead I am afraid) …“TELL ME YOU LOVE ME MAKE IT MORE REAL THAN A SONG”
***
I collapse into a storm tossed dream tumbled sleep
The Mascara Snake’s presence a gently probing insistence
He is a gathering of shadows out of my dreaming deeps
Rising out of the green silence where the songs of dead sailors are a plaintive haunting
He strides the shifting sands with seven league steps and daisy chains the clouds above the unnamed mountains
Plunges his fists into the their rain swollen bellies to release them of their burden then vanishes within the mirror reflected glints of his sky blue sky calm eyes
In the moment of his passing
That begins as a whisper
The murmur of soft water over gently rolling stones
I stumble to rise only to fall again in an agony of repetitions that in reflection are pratfalls across piss darkened sawdust
Choreography by way of banana skin and behind the hand sniggers
Following the spotlight to desperate yet unknowable ends
The world’s axis is brutally tilted and held within the seventh wave of a reeling nausea his passing becomes a seismic reverberation
The annihilating of mountains to wind scattered dust
The return of oceans to arid plains
The grinding agonies of glacial time impossibly realised in the blink of an eye
The body seeks a grace of dislocation from the seething restless morass of the mind Folding itself into sleep’s blessed ambiguity of angles
The sweat across my lips the taste of vanished oceans
The dust in my hands the memory of mountains
Within the creased darkness the Mascara Snake is the silent witness
The arch assassin who roams at will beneath the burning sky of my fevered visions
His hands a hallucinatory blur as they weave insidious his cat’s cradle realm of frosts and fire and forgetfulness
He is the ache of desire within my bones
The tender blush and the exhausted sigh
The glistening sheen of sickness across my skin where fire ants leave their scorching trails
He is the dazzling silver light of mercurial revelation
The ever hungering spectre at the eternal feast
The guests are a gathering of sorrows
Jilted brides and broken bridegrooms tending obsessively the frosted gardens of their hearts
Blind to the scarlet flowers bursting out of the jester’s skull as he conjures a rope of sand and shuffles his deck of sins
The Mascara Snake
Form without shape in an aching void
The mystery of mirrors in darkened rooms
With a surgeon’s precision he dissects the broken heart
Raises his song of arts and wonders to the moon and stars and plunges his blood soaked hands into the boiling ocean
Raising them cleansed to gleaming purity
Flicking from the ends of his fingers shimmers of mercury that are points of light in the distant hills that catch in the eyes of moon cowering coyotes
The stomach raw hunger of their howling gathered within the merciless tempest of his laughter that spirals out into the infinite night
Fragments revealed of dreams and fears
Of desire and its mirrored twin deception
Huddled into a tremor of greasy candlelight I understand with razor sharp clarity that there can be no safeguarding the mind’s fragile constructions against the shadow darkened cast of his eyes
The malevolent smear of his smile
The mind’s fragile constructions
That are raised on shifting sands
That are destined only to collapse helpless against his sleight of hand astonishments
When he shuffles his cards of fortune
Dealing face down an invitation to the unknown and the unnamed
The unknowable and the unnameable
The decks are marked to the design of his inscrutable inclinations
The crack of his knuckles is the pistol’s isolated report across a bone dry canyon
Is the snapping of tinder to raise a fire that will burn of echoes and hallucinations
Of abandoned rooms and broken phones
Of faded voices winding through lost gardens to silence
Of spectral trees and ashen roses
Of distant summers and chimes of laughter cracked into absence
Of sinister murmurs down sterile corridors of eye wounding light
Of the shuffling insane coiled tight within their spirals of suffering
The mirrors refusing their sorrow bleached complexions
The casting of their minds against the current of his cruelly beautiful ocean
A mirage shimmering across the burning sands
A mirage that is swallowed within the fall of his shadow
The touch of his hand
The brush of his lips
The rapier thrust of his laughter
Its grotesque subversion of harmony’s best intent
The saddest song rattling through the chambers of an empty heart
Drifting across a blood washed desert of illimitable regrets Holding the memory of sleep in my shadow weighted eyes
I gather the remnants of self from this awful dreaming
Seeking connections within a heap of broken images
Noting for sorrow that the moon is the colour of dirty snow
And the stars are the colour of dirty snow
And the fading night is the colour of dirty snow
And the hours are the colour of dirty snow
Such roads as I may imagine are wanderings out of nothing
Wanderings leading nowhere
Wanderings the colour of dirty snow
***
Unveiled the mirror holds still the curse of his eyes
Swirls of spite where blooded moons are risen from depthless oceans Huge in this night of sorrows and scribbles
Of memories and misdirection
Of dreams and fears
Snow silent I drift through the wounded streets of an unknown town
Crystal flowers of pale blue shiver through cracked concrete
Broken phones gather their mantles of dust in time abandoned rooms of terminal regret
By a cracked mirror’s cracked light the eternal stranger remembers grief’s awful intimacies
The bone deep shock of a breakage beyond repair
His memories a flickering reel
A montage of churchyards and iron frosted soil
Skeletal trees clawing the blue blaze of the sky
Crows hunched midst the white crowned grass
Shadows of the mourners who shuffle within the agonies of their sorrows
The reel changes and various failures slide into temporary focus
Desires drowned in the stinking bottle
The laughter of hated friends
The sick light of mornings steeped in delirium and tremors
The cure all comfort of the razorblade’s silver smile
The wounded silence of songs unsung
The shattered mirror and the blood dripping fist
The reel changes and a world is revealed of half light and swooping shadows
Revelations written in water by an unseen hand Revelations that tremble at an eager finger’s touch
Disturbed the surface ripples ever outwards
The abandoned dreams of broken dreamers drift to distant shores
Beyond the dunes of salt suffering of grasses temples are raised on burning sands
Their silent chambers are the heart’s desolation
Here the Mascara Snake is known only through his absence as bleary eyed I stare the walls until the walls stare back
Stare the darkness into another hopeless dawn
The sky still holds its scribble of stars
A fading signature out of dead time
The moon is but a remnant of the eternal stranger’s dream
Light creeps down the unknowable faces of the unnamed mountains
Luminescent tendrils that shape the desert’s gradual blushing into life that is no life
And it is by the sun’s rising to full and merciless glory that I return to the Mascara Snake as absence
My pen urgent across the page
My hand cramping in its struggle to tame the quicksilver rhythm of my thoughts
A rhythm in blind obedience to the Mascara Snake’s music of depthless mystery
Conjured out of wilderness at the caress of his fingers upon the worn nylon strings of his blue guitar
It is a music that dances luminous between the raindrops that fall to gather in silver pools of shivering reflection
Painting a world of arts and wonders
Painting a world of dreams and fears
Demanding that I partake of his vision
The glowing weave of the unbroken rainbow melting across my eager tongue
A heart deep hunger to taste his shimmering palette of delights
The summation of all possible desires
The moment outside of time when all seems possible
When nothing seems real
To know through acts of dreaming intimacy the pain of eternal regret
As memories continue to follow their uncertain paths
The bottle deep drunk striving to hold the moon in his trembling hands
I embrace each note that spirals from his blue guitar as if it were the last thing on earth
The only and the always
My eyes create this desperate charade
An act of abject denial against the heart chilling realisation that all here is beyond language’s means of expression
I write the unnamed mountains
I write the wind
I write the rain
I write the dust devils that are born of the desert’s furnace breath
I write
But within the ever shifting form of the Mascara Snake’s Shadow I fail to make known their elemental force
The scorching rain scours my eyes to bloodshot ruins
My pen in barren fury assaults the page but leaves only a wind faded murmur
The memory of dusk falling across a loved one’s eyes
The traces of her passing fading into lost time
Tongue tied within a gathering perplexity I clutch the departing hem of the Mascara Snake’s purple cloak of mystery and imagination
Threading my fingers to a Gordian knot through his ink dark transubstantiation
Seeking solace from the cold distance of the stars I tremble into a sleep of roughly gathered fragments that exhausts the hours for dreaming
That leaves on waking only a vague and shifting recollection of the terrible beauty that is the Mascara Snake’s song
That leaves on waking only the faintest memory of the desolation unique to the Mascara Snake’s eyes
***
AND THE 5th THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (I whisper of a drifting highway lost and found within a shifting veil of pearl grey fog Where the stars’ incalculable mystery may be sifted through a blanket of dreams I am multiple variations on a constant theme Mercurial yet inevitable By the mirror’s reflection I cannot refuse the moon saucer depth of my eyes My side of the mouth smile that suggests incredible knowledge Mine is the promise of flesh naked across an altar of driftwood and ashes Mine the derelict’s swollen tongued curse wrapped in candy and faded glitter I throw another vision into what remain of the glowing embers The fire gasps and fingers of flame expand until the world itself is held within a glowing immensity My laughter is the rattle of dry leaves against a time smudged mirror The shuffle of ancient playing cards through sun punished fingers I tip my hat and hurl my shadow out into the inviolable darkness Lasso the peaks of the unnamed mountains Shaking them free from their chains of snow My eyes a casual revealing of the truths to be discovered at the rainbow’s end At my unspoken suggestion the sun falters at the horizon’s brink With a flick of my wrist and a knowingness of smile I conjure a varnish cracked piano and a yellow toothed accordion To their pained yet tender accompaniment I sing sweetly of smokestack skies painted with purple benedictions Of supplication mirroring suicide in the lost hours of the night’s dead reaches And so my song becomes the darkness out of which it was born The darkness that threatens to inhale the dawn Cupping the stone of serpents in my fallen hands I leap naked through a wilderness that shimmers to crumble its temporal borders The slippage of time is a jack o’ lantern singing the blues in the slipstream of my silver heels It is a puzzle forever unfolding its invitation to confusion and hurt As I speaks the scars across my wrists fade to white) …“HIS PROBLEM? HE WAS ALWAYS NAKED IN HIS EMOTIONS THAT WAS HIS PROBLEM”
***
The wind announces its arrival
Groaning like an old man’s bones through the teeth like shards of a broken window
A groan become the terminal whisper of a carcass lullaby
An old man’s death bed confession into the gathering darkness
Whispers to ruffle with shifting cadence the red mock velvet curtains
Their pristine weight time reduced to a diaphanous fragility
Candle flames bend to the wind’s invisible command
Throwing a mess of shadows that dance in abstract patterns across the walls
The bed huddles in a sheltered corner
Is a chaos of sheets and stale sweat
Where the creases hold only bruised memories
Phantoms of desire broken across moments of never realised pleasure
The burnt out sorrows of undreamt burlesque
Lying midst the ruin and desolation
Of lies and half truths
Bent out of shape as if knowing myself only by a fairground mirror’s warping reflection
The skull cracks painfully open
Scarlet fleshed flowers erupt through parched soil
The tearing of flesh as the angel’s back is cleaved to birth his promise of flight
The rainbow’s end is hungrily swallowed in a rapacious gulping of colours as dreams infuse the weave’s gleaming spectrum
Blanket grey the clouds are a gathering of doubts
Murmuring to undermine each thought and action
Their voices a swollen chorus of sorrows telling of arts and wonders
Their discordant nail on blackboard screech a revealing of dreams and fears
A gathering ecstatically shredded as light pours through its dazzling liquid diamond relief
Tasting beneath the viscous delights of his honey dripping tongue the Mascara Snake’s essential truths
The sweetest of fruits they dribble their iridescent juices my chin’s shining length
Sucking the pulp’s forbidden sensuality through a grin three miles wide my senses are astonished
Yet such experience
The astounding satiety
Must have an end
The fruit will fail
Sun soaked glories withered on the vine and the juices will dry to a cloying tackiness
The memory of our meeting shall always be shadowed with sadness
Cloaked in the sorrow of songs never to be sung
The heart of darkness that is the far reaches of his continent spanning shadow remains forever unexplored
Signposts raised along roads to nowhere are crudely stamped ‘THIS IS A LIE’
Each tumbled moment of time an act of deception and misdirection
I thought to claim his dreams as my own
To know his darkness with the intimacy of the surgeon’s blade at the moment of incision
The beautiful wound
The flowering out of skulls across a sun cursed wilderness
To divine their mystery and raise a monument to his rapturous vision
A testament carved into the bones of the wilderness that would outlast the ages
That would cause later travellers to look upon my works and tremble
In my mirror fed vanity I thought to juggle the undiscovered countries I sensed within the laughing promise of his eyes and his words did nothing to deny
Stripped now of all illusion I am revealed as no more than a moment’s distraction
A mere pause within his endless act of creation
His jack in the box frenzy of constant becoming
A throwaway line carelessly thrown
A broken stringed puppet jerking gracelessly to the incantatory dance of his liquid fingers as he shaped me to the ambiguities of his unvoiced vision
Shaped me to comfort his horizon spanning mood swings
His landscape of prickles and scowls
His grumbles and groans
His cries and whispers
Stripped of form
Devoid of self willed function
I am in thrall to his demands and declarations
Following the spectral abstractions of his wanderings
Handling with fondest affection his dreams and fears
The terrible beauty of desires hatched within the sugar spun wilderness of his skull
Knowing only the blooming of tender regrets
The heart shattering grief held within the silence of his song
The soft explosion of stars through forgotten hours
The abandoned moment
Timeless within the ever shifting cat’s cradle weave that is his cruel design
***
Waking last night into darkness
So complete as to deny even the dream of light
A darkness swarming with those terrors I believed the passage of time had banished to the furthest reaches of a distant shore
The blood pulsing phantasmagoria of primal memory securely contained within the confines of an aseptic room
As the darkness throbbed with sentient malice a suffocating presence entered the room and lay like death’s shadow across my chest
My breathing the squeeze and groan of a punctured accordion
A smothered struggle against a gathering tide
A gasping for air midst a rising hysteria
Returned
The overwhelming dread of childhood fears
Returned
The under bed fastness of ankle snapping demons
Returned
The malevolent murmurings of dire violation
Returned
The faceless furies awesome of appetite and eager to the feast
Returned
A multitude of whispering horrors spawned at that point of intersections where the extinguished light meets its defining opposite
Eyes plunge the brackish waters of the breeding pool where hatchling dreads invoke their arcane spells of iniquity
The jackal’s howl is a carcass lullaby
A heart stricken melody calling the moon to rise
The jaundiced curse of its eyes
The hungering growl and grumble from its famish stricken belly
Prowling to insidious intent the edges of sleep it waits upon the dreaming instant to strike
Its eyes become a rapacious gleam above the snarling slather of its jaws
All held within the Mascara Snake’s cat’s cradle weave of ever darkening visions
The awful emptiness of desolation that stills desire in the lover’s eyes
His shadow the terminal whisper shaping the outline of my name
Calling me to dance within the heart of his blue fire
Shaping my dreams to unknown ends
To a world suffering beneath the brutal weight of a timeless sun
To a world of endless skies and unnamed mountains
Their looming mass of crags and peaks
To a world of burning sands and scorching thirst
The mind’s spectral wanderings midst canyons of red rock
Seeking the mercy of their fabled shade
I conjure a rope of winds as if to bind the distant traces of memory
Threads no more substantial than tendrils of smoke weaving a world of sorrows through my fingers
The mirror falls
Is final helpless witness to its own shattering end
Scrabbling midst the chiming cataclysm of glinting shards reveals only the multiple mercurial perspectives of a withering self contempt
Forcing me by the blooded light of a low slung moon to confront the question that lays unspoken yet ever posed upon the Mascara Snake’s tongue
To what purpose do I desire those ancient securities of hearth and home
Of shuttered window and locked door
Of what value is a past that is so easily undermined by the barest touch of his breath upon my fevered skin
A caress that drives me to anoint with feathered tongue the eternal moment of his blessing
To lay fallen stars in the traces of his passing
That I may extend this darkest dreaming and so enter the unknown dimensions of his inviolable vision
To know his song in my blood with the ferocious urgency and intimacy of a newborn’s hungering mouth as it fastens at the life sustaining nipple
To know his song even as the futility of such a desire is realised by the shock of my sleepless eyes in the unforgiving mirror
My hands locked in prayer around a cold flame
The ache of dead time within my bones
A sheen of chilling sweat blooming in poison reverie across my flesh
Its signature blossom of a fresher sickness written in his serpentine hand
And yet I strain to the snapping of tendon and sinew to hold and conjure
To create this world as if the Mascara Snake were malleable to my fever driven desires
As if by a wishbone’s dry snapping all clocks could be stopped and the timeless moment be of my making
Instead to fall away in the ragged hour of dawn when ghosts fade within their blue grey murmurs
When the shapes and songs of the known world gather within themselves their singular moments of becoming
The horizon cracks to allow the sun its temporary dominion
The bleeding light is the faceless stranger dancing a subtle invitation across the walls
My eyes are torn open
The screeching of rust locked doors drawn back to reveal only endless corridors of lost time
The dream dies and all that remains is the fear
I tumble void of volition
Blind and naked
Newborn and squealing into the Mascara Snake’s eyes of time shaping blue
Their limitless oceans chasing with the wind beneath limitless skies
Knowing for the eternal moment the magnificent chaos of his vision
His tombstone smile of awful yet beguiling revelation
I scrabble torn of finger and scrapped of knee midst the dust washed rubble of these unknowable days
His song of songs the faintest of touches across my skin
His absence a bruise across my heart
A bruise slowly fading until only the memory remains
***
AND THE 6th THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (Tasting again the beautiful wound of my smile Its succulent ripeness and tenderness of sweetest sorrows that reduces me to little more than rubble and ashes A heaped accumulation of redundancies Open to the wonder of my shaping hands I am the maker of weathers Orchestrating the clash of thunders The dazzle of lightning I call the rains and the desert explodes in a riot of colours A rainbow’s weave of flora that strains upwards as if to paint the clearing sky I collapse into the shadowplay death rattle yukka yukka yukka of laughter With fingers of scorching light I probe the driftwood ruins of my wilderness emotions Fingers that still glow with the gore and glory of other more distant battles I am the maker of weathers and hum a dream of blue sunshine Plucking with brow furrowing intensity a mandolin constructed from spent matches and an asses jawbone I listen to the patient litany of the undreamt world’s trials They are the whispered hush of oceans through impossible ages of time A piano’s slow drift of notes through spectral canyons I caress the silence with a colossal tenderness and vanish deep into the inviolable depths of my beautiful disguise Stitching with heart breaking delicacy the wound of my regrets so I may sleep undisturbed Levelling the chaos inherent to the visions I conjure Each staccato becoming of my impossible beauty a strobe light insistence that dazzles the stars and blinds the sun I spread wide my ineffable shadow of purple folds and evensong Of mystery and imagination I bathe my burning heart in the ocean’s cold and lightless depths Yet each fever thus chilled is but the smallest of deaths I am the maker of weathers and gather clouds at my shoulders as I fall again the aching void The beautiful wound of my world consuming smile) …“WHEN THE WIND CHANGES DIRECTION I BELIEVE ALL HEARTS WILL STOP”
***
Like some ancient planet swallowing sun
Expanding outwards towards extinction the Mascara Snake has become all there is of the world
He is the beginning and end of all things
The breath born mewl of the infant snatched into wounding light
The final exhausted rattle of futile protest as eyelids fall and colours fade
He sits in my memory as if he were the entirety of my past life
He sits in my dreams as if he were the only possibility for all futures
He is the now and forever
The unsullied days of once upon a time gleaming in the eyes of innocence
He is those same days dimmed to sorrow
Claimed by experience’s constricting weave
He is the straining gut of perpetual feat when even the greasy muzzled dogs of over the shoulder scraps are sated
Snoring midst their mess of leftovers and leavings
He is famine’s signature of death that is the rib cage straining through translucent flesh
Eyes that are dead moons
Lifeless blanks within ever deepening sockets
Roaming the wilderness outside and inside of time he probes with a watchmaker’s delicacy of devotion the secrets of clocks Unstitching the stars from their velvet bed until nothing remains save the moons of his eyes
Hunter brilliant through the dreaming hours when I finger the terrible beauty of his scarlet wounds
Tending with utter devotion their dread sanctity
Anointing each slash of spear with vinegar’s sharp and stinging pungency
The mercury flash of my needle drawing to a close each gaping wound
Dream stitching through the endless song of his night until
As if cast down from glory
Banished from the tenderness of his shadow
I rise from the ink dark deeps and am reduced to senseless fragments
Shored helpless against collapse and ruin
Yet the scent of him remains
A honeyed aroma on the breeze
His beautiful wound of revelation warm upon my tongue
I rise from the ink dark deeps to know the bleak truth of his absence
The intimate sorrow of abandonment
The heart deep ache that is the desolation of desertion
That moment of the carriage door’s terminal closure
The shoulder turned cold against my desire
Forcing me to confront again the child waking into wide eyed astonishment
Weeping from the depths of his dreams and fears
His room darkened to a shadowland of seething shapes and sibilant whispers
He reaches into the unknown that he may find the sanctuary of his parents
Their security of undisturbed breathing
He reaches into the unknown but returns only the absolute horror of emptiness
A stomach churning silence
And so the darkness continues to seethe with creatures of vile intent
The unseen corners writhe with ultimate dread
The under bed snuffling chasing down my scent
The gnashing of razor teeth
The light of lost suns burning in eyes of timeless malevolence
The Mascara Snake is the dream that sings in my heart
Ancient songs forged upon the cracked anvil at the dead centre of time that is no time
Without even the faintest blemish of shame I gather to kiss the ragged hem of nightmare
I challenge the wolf that devours the moon in its hairy fist
Anything to sleep at his feet
Curled tight within his shadow
To feel the swooning tenderness of his breath upon my skin
He is the glorious horror of ultimate addiction
An addiction gratefully attained and obsessively nurtured
An addiction beyond denial
His is the glowing pulse
The delirious sickness
The agonizing ecstasy
His the endless moment of absolute need that I swallow in gulping stomach deep draughts until the divine instant of the world’s whimpering end
Yet in substance he is more than a rope of wind
A castle made of burning sand
A fleeting reflection in a fading mirror
A guttering flame known only by the pale cast of its shadow
I am left staring at the sky
At the wind in the clouds chasing oblivion
Deciphering the paranoid image
The camel
The weasel
The whale
Knowing the moon as solitary witness to my hopeless and helpless wanderings
Knowing the moon as nothing save dead rock and barren oceans
Dusts of time and seismic scarring
Uninvited reason stamps a heavy boot of absolute insistence
Its spine straight stance challenging this realm of ambiguities and unknowns
Dragging my eyes to the signpost tilting in the crow worried soil
The signpost fiercely branded ‘THIS IS A LIE’
Uninvited reason stamps a heavy boot of absolute insistence
Determined that I should abandon this kingdom of mirrors and illusion
This shape shifting empire of the senseless
These days of desolation grinding through endless repetition
Here shadows are nameless memories that walk between the raindrops and leave only a spillage of sorrows in their ceaseless wake
The boot stamps again and the mirror quakes
Eyes I know but refuse to name shiver into focus
Directing me homewards to sit in sunless rooms and smoke bitter ashes with hated friends
Draping mirrors with black silk in the cloistered silence
Home
Where the clock’s hands shall unpick time’s ordered weave
Home
Where the days shall tend us ever towards nothingness
Home
To sit in drunken stupor and stir with laboured disinterest the congealed surface of our once potent dreams and fears
To fade into nights where memories are bleached of colour and stripped of meaning
Lost moments we can no longer describe in time
Lost moments never to be reclaimed
***
Hunger is the all consuming motif
A ravening emptiness that I fear may never be sated
I dream tables straining beneath an obscene cornucopia of saliva inspiring tongue dripping delights
My mind swarms with gut gorging platters that will never have an end
My chin slathered in a gleaming richness of juices to blind the sun
My stomach swollen to shame the moon
But on waking all that remains is the bloat of language
Ridiculous overblown and failed
Such dishes as dreamt are no more than dust
Succulent wonders a scattering of ashes across the parched and cracked ruin of my tongue
Such dreams
Forcing me to confront on the shifting ground of his choosing the Mascara Snake’s ceaseless acts of becoming
Such dreams
Leaving in their foaming wake only bone deep nerve shredding exhaustion
Such dreams
Leaving only words falling senseless from my pen
Words no more than hopeless scribbles across the gnawing void of his absence
Words that pin my insignificance to the burning sands as surely as the net caught butterfly is pinned upon its velvet cushion
Locked behind the shine of polished glass
Here my glass is a sky ever bluer
Ever vaster
The desert endless to all points of the compass
The horizon bleeds
Stained glass melting
Shimmers across my sun scarred vision
In breathless expectation I follow the shapes of an unknown charade
Starless nights wandering blind of purpose
Unknowing of destination
Sugar coating the bitter pill of his absence with flickers drawn from memory’s trembling weave
Home is the welcoming heart
The tender exhaustion of the day marked by the soft light of dusk
Shadows easing into darkness
Home is the welcoming heart
The security of time the clock on the mantle that carries us through the days with ordered grace
Home is the welcoming heart
The peal of bells across a Sunday still silence
Such memories are mere threads laid across the silence in weary repetition
Paling in the punishing light that burns ever harsher
My eyes aching against its white immensity
Day dies into night as night births day
My fingers crack and bleed in attempting to unfold the Mascara Snake’s myriad mysteries and dark enchantments
His arts and wonders
Unknown keys to unknowable doors
Whispers arrive on a stolen wind suggesting that as a child he plunged his depthless interior and painted his soul with a rainbow’s luminous weave
That he harvested the stars in ghost nets of his own creation
The moon a blue vastness beyond dimension settled upon his tongue
Dreaming his world into being
Dreaming himself as the beginning and end of all things
I struggle to order these revelations
These abominations against reason
They are mercury suspended in a mirror’s reflection
Extraordinary in their nature of constant becoming
His ingenuity of ambiguities
Knowledge is the ink drying to fade upon the page
Vanishing into dead time
Truth the butterfly that refuses the pin
Spilling its luminescence of colours across the sun throbbing day
There can be no amber fixed permanency
No point of stillness within the swirling multiplicity of his being
The Mascara Snake’s feast is ever moving
An ocean’s seething mass
Endless in its repetitions of ebb and flow
Carrying forever its tidal burden of sorrows
Is the shifting paranoiac images of cloud shadows wind driven across an infinite plain Where the ghosts of the fallen buffalo mass in soft thunder
The moon swells at the sweep of his dream commanding fingers and I crumple the ruin of another wasted page
Hunched penitential over the candle’s diminishing tremor I scowl the pen’s detested length and with a fool’s intentness of purpose scratch my name into silence
Waiting upon the dawn
Waiting upon the hiss and moan and mournful whistle of a ghost train riding its pale fire into the senseless complexities of the day accompanied by a swirl of whispers on a stolen wind
Their melancholy chorus gently stirring the river of dreams and fears
Despondent murmurs catch in the overhanging branches of the spectral trees
Despondent murmurs suggesting that finally he painted no more
***
AND THE 7th THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (I tumble my dice of yellowed bone Spit a moon of dreams into the wisdom gutter and anoint the night with obscenities and prayers With arts and wonders With dreams and fears The soft benediction of my tongue feathers the night Probing with lascivious delight the flickering moments of vision In the looming presence of my shadow I am a gathering of quivering uncertainties Questions hatch tentatively A child’s fearful fingers exploring the unknown darkness of nook and cranny and secret sorrows Do I tread eggshells? Razor blades? Broken glass? Rainbows? My voice is the seismic reverberation of tectonic plates in slow grinding collision As I shuffle my deck of faceless cards so the wind roars down from the unnamed mountains A keening blade that slices through to the bone I predict that a cat’s eyes at midnight full moon will remain the ultimate mystery I tell of a rain that reduces dogs to cowards whimpering within their own shadows I drop a crooked penny into the candyfloss neon jukebox releasing a music that is hard and low and mean I unveil a wilderness in the blue immensity of my eyes Cocking a glass pistol that will shatter the sun Unfurling the terrible banner of my tongue I taste the world’s waste of shattered bones and broken dreams Abandoned tenements glow in the half light of abject poverty like so many crooked teeth Tombstone green with time The dice tumble through the dry canyon A pistol’s crack Death echoes and echoes death With elongated fingers I paint my face petroleum blue The shimmering glance of my eyes pins the moment to the glowing screen until at the glacial descent of my eyelids the glow fades It is here in the compass denying grey undone that I must pronounce sentence on the world’s wound I am ever open and ever revealing but all remains inscrutable and the Chinese vase trembles perpetually within its awesome stillness Somewhere the dice settle Somewhere the numbers are called Further questions balance on my tongue at the tipping point of almost expression) …“OUTSIDE OF MEMORY THERE IS NOTHING LEFT”
***
Dreams are sanctuary
Safe release from the turmoil of the days
The Mascara Snake’s insane propositions
His delight in suffering
His suffering in delight
The gibbering shadows that dance their insane steps across the burning sands
Dreams are sanctuary and I cling to their dark comfort even as the sun creeps beneath my eyelids forcing my mind to shake itself through slow degrees of awareness
Like a dog caught in a sudden rain I rise wraith like into the dawn’s blue drift
I cast the blooded wrecks of my eyes across a tumble of bottles
A litter of papers tainted with a barely legible scrawl
Adjusting my sleep heavy eyes to the idiocy of my proclamations I note that each page is headed ‘THIS IS A LIE’
My hands ever stranger objects of distance and dislocation shake with the broken stringed tremors of half remembered delirium
My body is still weighted with sleep as coffee scalds a crust thickened tongue and cigarettes settle the indistinct outline
Shaping the spectral self to something almost known
A shadow born smear held in the mirror’s unforgiving eye
Its unyielding gaze a mockery of hopeful focus
Last night returns within the shifting patterns of darkness
The silent swoop of terror’s wings out of a moonless sky
The ground beneath my feet shudders and I am caught within a swaying seasickness swoon
Squirming on the dazzling point of the Mascara Snake’s tongue
Held within the glow of its animate fire
Wriggling helpless as the hooked worm in the depthless wonder of his eyes
The timeless space where all worlds are hatched and all dreams are realised
Quicksilver in their passing
Where desire births only fears and terminal sorrow
Where the song remains ever unsung and the eternal stranger wanders faceless within the mirror’s masquerade
I return to the day’s uncertainties shadowed by the shuffling penitent whose name is known but never pronounced
Dawn’s light gathers strength
Pooling to a gradual flooding of the unnamed mountains’ sheer sides Within this realm of distortions I step beyond myself to the length of an unknown corridor
Faceless strangers drift timeless and silent
Held within the undefined limits of their mercurial passions
I wander through sterile light midst a carnage of visions
A slow motion train wreck that unfolds with awful deliberation
Carriages spilling their cargo of screams and horrors down winter bleak embankments
The tarmac scarring slaughter of a highway locked in a blindness of midnight fog
The screech of tortured rubber and the shrieks of the unseen suffering
It is irresistible to behold even as the taste of blood taints the air and the stench of charred metal and flesh become the scents that we carry down into future dreams
***
Trust is the porcelain heart
Cast without care across cold concrete
Irrevocably broken
Trust is the failed flame
Confidence collapsed into the sighing ashes of the exhausted fire
A memory cracks open to reveal by stolen light
Kisses at lost midnights when desire refused to be dampened by ugly squalls of rain
Snow softly falling across a loved one’s streetlamp shadowed smile
A window gleams
Its beacon of yellow warmth thrown across winter lost fields
Guiding us home across their unbroken silence to a time locked capsule of dream long nights and day long dreams
But these are merely stale fragments from a shattered vision
A heap of broken images that refuse connection
As the cracks seal so I am left to tend the scar
To stare the walls until the walls stare back
Hearing only the Mascara Snake’s weave of incomprehensible utterances
His words are thorns of fire piercing my unclean flesh through to the scarlet chambers of the hungering heart
This desire to capture the reflections and ambiguities of my passage through this land of dream and fears is perhaps a desire too far
Yet perhaps glory
If such it may be judged
Is attained in the attempt itself
Or are these words merely stillborn artefacts out of time and out of place
My pen remains clamped within the hopeless fury of my fist
Its passage across the page a series of ugly spasms blindly directed
Tending now and ever towards failure’s wretched stench of spoiled fruit
Its scratching through the silence of the Mascara Snake’s absence a crippled jabbering
A dead end junk trail of gibberish
A scrawl of signposts pointing to nothing born of nowhere
Crumpled pages litter the floor and my thoughts tend towards the raging furnace heart of a newly kindled fire
Its flames consuming my idiot narrative in a roaring hunger
These lunatic signs
These imbecile signifiers
I am gathered in the arms of a carcass lullaby
Following its twisted melody to discover its viral contagion of dreams and fears
Hysteria is the state of being achieved by living through another’s memories
Drifting void of thought midst the shifting dunes
The burning sands flowing like time through my fingers
The wind is a multitude of voices
A babble of imprecations and swirling horrors
The unnamed mountains are a brooding presence
Dark ever darkening beneath the nesting clouds
Days I no longer remember failing in the eyes of a reflection I can no longer name
This tumble of sentences the paradox inherent to an ordered senselessness Words
Always words
Suggestive only of themselves
Never the more that needs to be said
Never the more that needs to be known
Promises made into the mirror’s open face are promises that can never be realised
I have become the amanuensis to an inexhaustible murmur that somehow exists outside the stultifying confines of language
A murmur demanding of trust yet delivering only betrayal
I am trapped within an ever repeating spiral of now going nowhere
Out of a pitch black silence a scuffle of voices gradually emerges
Shaping themselves through sibilant contortions to a disdainful chorus
Sneering a refrain hatched behind the wilderness eyes of the bilingual eagle
“FAILING BETTER FAILING BEST FAILING BETTER FAILING BEST”
Within the looped insanity of the timeless moment the Mascara Snake’s laughter is belly deep
Rumbling waves
Darkly joyous
Within the quaking depths of his shadow I pummel my useless fists to bloody rags against the dull full stop that will not cease
Not cease
Not cease
Until
***
AND THE 8th THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (Mine is a one way dreaming Glitter ball reflections of worlds as yet unknown Within my hall of mirrors I dream the eternal stranger wandering blind somewhere deep within the grey undone That shadow land of sighs and whispers The bones of long dead children lay bleached across the burning sands Their runic mystery the coins that jangle in the lost depths of my scarlet sack My nights are shimmering liquid visions A weave of rainbows within the bitter sweetness of my constant becoming I squeeze the memory of a song from the accordion’s collapsed lungs And now the music changes Tender lullabies become the ravening wolf ripping the throat from the newborn lamb The blood and gore of its entrails signs to new dimensions I hunker down with the taste of oblivion rising from the bilious pit of my stomach Rising from the image that I capture of myself in a killing machine made of tin foil and wishes held within the death wish moment of my hand’s embrace I glow The blue mystery of my eyes a spectral luminescence Beyond the circle of the fire’s light there is only the ineffable darkness Strangers sob into prayer locked fists when I temporarily fade from view My song of groans and bleak remembrance held in the trembling tongues of fire Held only to slip away Lost to the desolation and decline that will carry me into a restless sweat smeared slip I will rise with the discordant moon of my dreams Challenging the audacity of my presumption Holding in my throat the laugh that condemns me to know only the limits that I allow Judging myself no more than a shadow soon to fade Now the music changes I nod a solemn head Twist a rope of sand around my fist and say farewell with the saddest of all smiles My vanishing point at this moment in time beyond comprehension Now the music ends) …“REGRET? REGRET IS THE END”
***
The sky glows with the memory of distant fires
The sun is a diminishing presence
Shrinking in both form and effect
The temperature tumbles and my breath frosts the air
Names out of memory take shape and hang suspended in glacial purity
Momentary comforts soon to fade
Immense furies gather in a swelling roar above the unnamed mountains
Elemental angers astonishing the birds that are stunned from the sky in a plummeting rain of feather and beak and beaded eye
The clouds boil and seethe
Barely contained of their dark energies that they would unleash through tornado and tempest
Thunder is a gradual gathering of ill intentioned grumbles
Belly deep and ageless
Lightning’s playful expression across incandescent sheets soon to fork and strike with electric malevolence
The imagined solidity of the world beneath my feet trembles at such fell purpose
Yet even as the clouds collapse mightily from within and release their drenching weight
Even as the pitiless deluge scars the earth to the accompaniment of a terrible percussion
Even as bones shake and teeth rattle in a seismic cacophony that suggests the chaos of the world’s ending
The heart song rises
The flowering of tender shadows
The gathering of gentlest sorrows
The seeking of connections within a heap of broken images
The gleaning of small truths to unknown purpose
The ghost of a ghost dreaming a ghost
And so we huddle into the comforting depths of our secret selves
Huddle tight around the memory of a vanished flame
Soft asylum against the night that breathes
Seething malevolence
The blood streaked wrecks of jaundiced eyes guide crooked fingers to pluck the stars from the sky
Dashed blind into the hungering mouth of the silver bucket
Allowing of a deeper darkness born before time
A bargain foolishly struck across the cracked anvil
Where teeth and talon prowl to dire intent
Muzzles low to the blood soaked earth
Seeking the scent of dreams and fears
Where in a feather soft swoop of wings all screams are silenced
We seek a semblance of consolation within the veiling smoke of the near exhausted fire
Shadows are bruise blue
Draining into the gutter of rain washed memories
Last night rises on trembling legs
Staggering seven leagues to settle in glowering silence above the unnamed mountains
Eyes of delirium quiver within the mirror’s uncertain reflection
The bottle’s song was an urgent invitation to darker arts and a corruption of wonders
An invitation to betrayal that I could not decline
The moon had followed its usual course
Its swollen wonder diminished in the harsh fumes that rose from the bottle’s broken neck
Yet in its ascent could be registered a slight reluctance
As if it were unwilling to witness the discordant clamour of mirthless belching
Weary of the dead end repetition
The hunched shoulder swallows pulling me down into a dream’s lucid deceptions Cloaking the bitter reality of the Mascara Snake’s absence in a hallucinatory weave
Drowning the unnamed mountains and burning sands in a twisted sweetness
As if such a clichéd disordering of the senses could return him to me whole and of honourable intention
Slumped cup deep I passed beyond the subconscious mind’s needling aggravations and slept cradled within the drunkard’s glow of temporary innocence
Sleep’s skin fell away and I woke into a bedlam of fractured light
Slumped across a heap of broken images
A pulsing mesh of half remembered faces
A gathering of names without connection
The mirror seeming to delight in my hangover scarred eyes sunk deep within sallow flesh
My head a wound of raw hostility and malevolent intensity
At the quaking edges crawled the spectral dogs of the eternal gutter
Slope backed circling the scent of their decay
The black drool of their lips curled back in failing snarls across yellow teeth
Sand lay its barren corruption across my tongue where once there were stars
The sun limited in conception
Little more than a rancid smear across the unstable sky
Hunched over the lost steam of cold coffee
Its corrosive bitterness perversely welcome
Old man trembling
Old man muttering
Into the dim light of memory
The shadow play of faces that refuse definition
Weeping for all such moments that are conjured out of time
Weeping for the Mascara Snake’s essence that is held within the crumbling ruin of my heart
Failing against best intention to deny the pitying self
My hand through the mirror a clutching at cliché
The blood that patterns the walls a repetition of dreams and fears
Yet such clarity of thought
Such diamond precise reading of this self perpetuating despair
Such exactitude in awareness allows of no second chance
Denies the recycling of memories to different ends
Instead such meticulousness merely secures you to the sullen moment midst the thunder’s rolling grief
The lightning’s incandescent strikes
When only the ghosts remain and you become the body shattered across the breaking wheel
The scream of the butterfly pinned without mercy to the velvet cushion
The bull’s exhausted roar of futile rage collapsed tragic into bloody sand
You become the self you always dreamed
You become the self you always feared
When only the ghosts
Only the ghosts remain
***
Wearily stirring the fire’s exhausted heart
Raising only a scattering of sparks
A transitory flight of embers that return in the instant to darkness
Leaving only a soft rain of ashes
A drift of memories no more than rumour
The fading echoes of unrealised dreams
Of promises made by fragile declaration
Fleeting as the clouds that shift their storm eviscerated mass across the peaks of the unnamed mountains gleaming weakly in a pale wash of sunlight
A silence has settled across the burning sands
A silence within which my eyes follow the scribbled path of my travels
A disjointed and dispiriting narrative returning me always to the brutal realisation that however I choose to interpret this desperate scrawl
This fall of words failing ever failing across the page
The invitation formed with such care in my imagination
And here truth’s blade cleaves without mercy
Was never of essence
Was never truly extended
My foundation one of smoke and mirrors
Of whispers and sighs
Following roads out of nothing
Roads leading nowhere
By signposts crudely branded ‘THIS IS A LIE’
I remain forever a stranger at the feast
A spectral presence haunting the margins of carnival and delight
Wandering within a shadowed wilderness where the dogs tremble and whine within the fastness of their unknowable dreams
Locked within the binding coils of an aching hunger
Across the frigid air of words unspoken and songs unsung this act of creation becomes a stale repetition of failing symbols
Points of reference and acts of interpretation forever internalised
Hollow memories reverberating in canyons carved by the wind to the Mascara Snake’s enigmatic design
I remember a broken phone in an abandoned room
The porcelain doll time cracked and yellow cast across the fraying weave of a time bleached chair
Dust motes captured in the final light of a dying sun
I remember sitting in breathless anticipation
A pulse racing expectation
Craving the warmth of the heart strong fire
Its light captured dancing in the blue expanse of his eyes
My body tensed
My nerves stretched to a singing receptivity
But such anticipation delivered only empty rewards
Expectations never met
Again I taste the charred acrid bile of unknowing
The mirror of this moment no more than a mirror
Passive in reflection
Mystery and magic denied by workaday smudge and age rendered scratch
I stare blankly into the night’s storm distended belly and interrogate self with an astonishing clarity of spite
Fearing dreams
Dreaming fears
Sustaining this fragile scaffold through repeated acts of banal yet tender observance
Rituals doggedly observed to empty ends
Somehow an ocean
Somewhere a beach
The liquid murmur of the stones rolling towards oblivion beneath the waves’ velvet claws
A single star and a failing moon
The wind across the water a siren song
The wound and its unveiling of a secret beauty
The flesh and its scarring intimacies
Barely remembered in this room of candle spun shadows
Seeking to pin the butterfly to the spinning wheel of acceptance
The blind denial that will not settle
That shifts and shimmers like a rope of wind
These are dangerous moments as acceptance takes on the belligerent mantle of the sullen shrug
The dull grey horror of acquiescence
The skin crawls and burns with a fever of ants
Resignation inhabits the must murky corridors of an anti dreaming and stalks me with a predator’s centring as to its singular purpose of primal impulse
Shadowing me through the slow hour of dawn when against all experience the sun’s rising attains the impossibility of suspense
In the strained moment of awful expectation I remember again the Mascara Snake’s eyes at the moment prior to his back’s final turning
Their vanished blue a severing of all possibilities
Their dead light of depthless sorrows
And so I sit
And so I wait
For the wheel to turn through another agonising cycle
I sit and wait upon the beautiful disease
The dreadful tenderness of its misguided mercies
I sit and wait
For in my weakness there is nothing more to be done
***
AND THE 9th THING THE MASACARA SNAKE SAID WAS… (With sun speckled eyes that shine with the liquid gold of pure laughter I unzip another horizon Slow breathing hobos drift through lost lives Their stumbling bones disjointed shadows across the burning sand It is sleight of hand that achieves nothing A blur of hands and inverted cups Never revealing the sovereign pea Just another batch of forgotten headlines fading across age yellowed newspaper Just another tide of memories sweeping in on a storm broken sea I tumble my grumbling bones through the phases of the moon The hunter’s dream to the paling sickle The hours burn with the ferocious intensity of ancient paper A ghost child plays a badly tuned piano Slow notes drift echoing in spectral passage Counter melodies echoing from the blind walls of the bone dry canyon Salamander rejoice in flame My voice is the chime of deep frozen mercury spilling across the night With further sleight of hand and slyness of finger I paint dreams that shimmer their luminescence of electric blue down the gulping drains of midnight The dogs wear fragrant muzzles and whimper tidal memories With sun speckled eyes that shine with the liquid gold of pure laughter I am lost within the dreaming I conjure an orchestra aflame and cleave the vision fish through to the bone Split the skull of reason and eat the scarlet flowers within I hatch the eggs of unreason Succulent ovoids Their milky stench Driving deep the midnight hollow I am the maker of weathers The bellows of my lungs birthing a darkness of clouds that are the signal for black rain Drenched I hunch into the barest whisper of flame Deconstruct a guitar string in a style fast and bulbous My final cascade of note spiralling out into silence With a final shudder that resonates within the heart rock of the unnamed mountains I vanish Leaving only the diminishing memory of my whisper) …“THIS CASE IS CLOSED”
***
Cast adrift beneath a blood washed moon
I swirl helpless within a paralysing vortex
Gibbering at the terminal wreck of my resources
The destination that I seek wreathed in the smoke of funeral fires
Obscured within a drifting opacity of final teeth grinding mind numbing frustration
A destination that falls beyond the limits of the cartographers’ knowledge
Beyond even the inspired ignorance of ‘HERE BE MONSTERS’
Where the compass in a seeming act of conscious insurrection
Of breakdown and bewilderment
Seeks each of its points simultaneously in a whirling and indecipherable blur Execution falls short of intention
Intention itself a series of broken connections
Severed relations that fail in the meaning as I dream the anchorite’s refuge of silent obsessive vigil
Abject in surrender to this gathering of ghosts
This feast of friends who glimmer for only the briefest of seasons
Silently paying witness to my wilful decline
Who vanish on the wind at my shaping of their names
My hands follow the nature of their obsession
Cramping through compulsion as they raise a senseless steeple
My eyes clenched in a void of contemplation
The idiot refuge of prayer without hope
Prayer without end
Out of the mystery deep darkness a stale repetition of worn out themes
Of dead end explorations
The casting of dry bread upon stagnant waters
Tongue tied invocations to a snarling wilderness where shadow denizens dwell within the burning agonies of their never to be sated appetites
Out of the mystery deep darkness a weary recycling of nagging and abrasive spite
These bones of calcified milk a hopeless scaffold turning slowly to dust
There is nothing to offer this world of masks and mirrors
Of dreams and fears
Save a sullen atrophy
A glowing sorrow that disallows even the notion of peace and security
Mirrors hold a world of sun and sand
In their arid reflections birth a season of silent screams within the contrary weave
The narcissist’s final refuge is drinking the darkness into a newer darkness
Thirst is the assassin unleashing its bone wracking horrors on waves of fetid breath through the failed hours of night
I dream the constancy of the clock
Its hands slicing time into contained units as my pen scratches through the silence to its unknowable destination
The ink’s gleam a promise quick to fade when ethanol’s tainted charms blur what remains of vision
When the misshapen fragments of memory cast their phantasmagoria of shadows
Embracing again the filth and the fury
Murdering by another’s design the dream and living by another’s design the fear
For what remains when the final vision is reduced to a handful of dust?
What remains when the rainbow’s end is a pit of tar?
What remains when the song is forever unsung?
What remains when the signposts read only ‘THIS IS A LIE’
The Mascara Snake sits within his realm of other wise and ambiguity
His dream spun weave of intricate bewilderments
An enigma whose faces dazzle the sun
These are moments of reckoning
Splintered reflections thrown from a shattered mirror Shards of an almost identity carrying me through a wind of changes to this place of neither time nor dimension
Shards become a mere gathering of fragments heaped against my ruin
Fragments heaped to little purpose save the erasure of dates from an imaginary calendar
Dates that have become tenuous connections
Memories of lost years
Of the summerhouse by midnight
Star washed lawns and the blue of the moon my only dream
Drifting spectral across a cloudless sky
This an innocent claiming of impossible dominion
This an innocence wholly betrayed through experience
Reducing the summerhouse to a wreckage of splintered wood and peeling paint
Abandoned of memories all that remain are the ghosts of ghosts
The lawn’s once crafted lustre now lost beneath a choking of weeds
The sculpted roses fallen to their natural state of graceful chaos
The moon no more than gilded smears across shattered glass
The stars remain to dazzle but theirs is a cold comfort
Clouds are a gathering of ancient sorrows as the day darkens beneath a brooding sky that heaves and rolls with barely contained violence
Thunder rolls its elemental signature through the bone dry canyons of my empty heart and the lightning sears my eyes against the dream of dreaming
The pen in my hand no more than an empty gesture
These words carry me along unknown paths to an unknowable destination
So let the clouds open
Let the rains fall
Let them taint me with poison or cleanse me of sin
The Mascara Snake remains the bleakest kiss I ever knew
***
This then is how it ends
The cliché of the hollowed out bang and the futile gesture of the proverbial whimper
A weary sight to meet weary eyes as straw men are consumed by fire along the mud slick banks of the tumid river
Are they cleansed of sin at the touch of healing flame?
Are they redeemed within the furnace heart?
Or are they merely consumed?
Rendered to ashes
Delivered to oblivion
Either is of equal significance
Either is of no significance at all
Tendrils of oily smoke rising above the forest’s muted emerald canopy gather the clouds within their greasy strands to deny the sun
A rain of ashes lays waste the directionless heart
Still I tunnel obsessively the failing interior
Placing the ruins of my faith in disorder
Still I would claim mercy within the Mascara Snake’s realm of mystifications
Scrabbling within the furious heat of fever
Torn of nail and bloody of hands midst the heaped debris and swirling dust of a fallen kingdom
Still I seek connections within a heap of broken images
Reclaiming nothing save the sterile memory of a shadow self ever in thrall to the Mascara Snake’s whispers and groans
Carving dreams and fears through the wilderness hours of his absence
Carving with a dull intensity to no purpose
Carving out of a hope that is no hope
The diminished awe of an exhausted kiss like stale rain upon my lips
The mirror’s awful cascade of reflections
The shaping of ashen names on a dust dry tongue
The stirring of dark waters that curdle to birth a shimmering mass of faces that fail in their congealed silence to sate the hunger that gnaws with desperate unending insistence
But the hallucinatory weave is ever unstable and cannot be sustained
The lights that would carry me home dim to a shivering darkness behind the boiling sorrow of my sun fevered eyes
I write out of a bone aching fatigue that is my only reward for attempting to divine the Mascara Snake’s ever shifting truths
I scream into the void of his sometime smile and wait upon the echo
A sullen gathering lay their cold sweating palms across my burning flesh
They are a strange comfort that carry me into the belly of night where midst the falling of stars a world is revealed
A wretched perversion of arts and wonders
A world of confusions and hurt
Spitting his moon of sorrows into the wisdom gutter he said “DREAM ON FOR DREAMS WILL NEVER RUN DRY”
But whatever the weight of his words
And they are thunderheads dwarfing the unnamed mountains
However he chooses to define absolutes beyond my understanding
Whatever the truth of his delirious flights and visionary furies
His casual yet crafted manipulation of mystery and imagination
I return always to the frozen dread of an immutable realisation where each gesture within his grander scheme
That lies ever just beyond my straining reach
Becomes merely another conduit to self recrimination and its despairing twin self pity
Lonesome roads of thought and counter thought
Of gracious acceptance and harshest denial
Where the feather soft flight of the eagle owl is a murdering song
Its stone like plummet of whispering shadow the last thing the world knows
Darkening shadows are sadly hatched
Weary creations in time abandoned rooms where dreams are the wreaths of dust gathered of their own silent remorse
Trails cleaved against hope through the forlorn wilderness of crow and cackle where temptation alone survives
Gleaming its unblinking eye of eternal invitation
The shine and sparkle a sleight of hand hiding a depth of horrors within
Where acts of betrayal are second nature to the deceiving heart
The easiest of gestures
In the gutter stinking ruin of guzzle and groan nights are spent crawling through an interior darkness where a spill of illumination reveals flowers bursting forth from time bleached skulls
A cloying scent rising from the pulp of their scarlet petals
Lovers writhe in a stench of skin and sheets
Bodies locked within sinuous knots of tongue and torment
The mirrors of their eyes holding tricks of the light that hide the tricks of their hearts Feasting on the flesh of orgasm
Their faces a scattering of reflections by broken glass and melting flame
Their faces resembling ants captured in the killing jar
In the silent afterglow second hand daylight lays in a rancid smear across their jaundiced flesh as eyelids peel back with a slow screeching of remembered agonies
Eyes are forced to confront the wreckage of devastation
Of cataclysm and carnage
A world of ghosts softly sighing their exhausted narratives
A world of idiot scribbles scratching vainly against the all encompassing silence
The only time I heard the Mascara Snake raise his voice above the merest outline of a whisper this is what he said
“WHERE’S THE DIFFERENCE? WHERE’S THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE?”
Reeling like a hurricane caught drunk within the concussive waves of this alien outburst I sought as always for the securities contained within the oldest lessons
To decipher the rain scarred walls
Seeking subtext as a way towards meaning
As if within the ever changing dimensions of his weave
The incredible contortions of his ambiguities
I might find the perfect reflection of a self I know to be at best only and ever provisional
A delirium of tremors that is the act of my constant becoming
For no matter my desire
No matter my hunger
No matter my self generated need
There can be no absolute definition
Subtext remains a realm of ever shifting mirrors
Where dazzles the subjectivity of all meaning
We exist as strangers seeking defining connections
Solitary hearts chasing eternal communion
And so each moment becomes the appropriation of another mask
Another set of externally applied morals and directives
That the connection be made
Communion achieved
The eternal stranger of the mirror’s reflection is only banished at the terminal hour when we discard the masks and deny the external
Only then are we able to tend the wounds of our secret and broken selves
Nurturing private pains to tender conclusions
Only then are we able to treasure the ashes of exhausted fires
To wait on the phone in time abandoned rooms where fragile hopes are the last of all things
By the Mascara Snake’s arcane inclination I remain this other self
This self of dreams
This self of fears
This self that only the secret mirror knows
Yet I write
For within the undying days of his undying weave there is nothing more to be done
***
AND THE LAST THING THE MASCARA SNAKE SAID WAS………………………..”THIS IS A LIE”
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