Pink Buses

Steam comes off the mug. The smell of coffee. The sound of conversation. Buses float past the window.

It's no Ulysses.

Why did I put on those shoes? My feet freeze underneath white socks.

It was nice to see them again. The cat, the sofa, the cinammon. Madonna on the screen. This was her drug phase. Legs like stalks under denim. Taking the present was embarrassing, but she let me open it. I touched the cat and it scarpered. Not like my Tilly.

I wonder where that house exists now? With the artwork, and the bookcase, and the pregnant woman staring out from the mantlepiece.  Kitchen conversations spread out before me like a yellow brick road. The snow outside. Brown-eyed intensity. The cat holds out its paw.

They put me on the sofa to calm me down. Be gentle, be gentle. Mint tea in a green mug. W came in smelling of alcohol. It will all be ok. It will all be ok. Classical music swirled. The silhouette leered out from above the fence.

And now the pink buses. People smoking out on the street. The trees are bare and the sky is drab, but at least the snow has thawed. A steaming bowl of chilli sits on the table.

Not moving on to bigger and better things. This is my career.

Gran looks so old now. She seems to be shrinking into the ground. That man flickers like a nightmare. Give me money and it'll all be ok. Their faces in the mirror. I've been here before. The whole world exists in my head.

You took the words right out of my mouth. Who was sitting on the plane beside Meatloaf?

But she is here now. The real thing. Not a simulacrum, not a dream. Sitting here in her blue cardigan.

The fields, the avenue, the little  room where I spent Saturday night. Like returning from a sleep, or waking from a coma. But what next?

Silver buddha looked out at me from the top of the drawer. Have you forgotten? The woman on the bag shot out an accusing look. But my head was fried. Now things are safe.

A pot of chilli. The club exactly the same. The lights shining out of our eyes as we danced on the stage. We turn ourselves into fireworks, screaming out the lyrics like we see them. Hands up in the air we become. Cameras flashing. Facebook screen. Dark taxi home. I didn't have time to fill up the hot water bottle.

I dreamt I went back to school. I was so happy to see the kids again. I put my arm around M. I told Anne Brazier that I'd had a dream and I wanted to come back. I know I had to. Happy Calshot faces stare out from the screen. How could I do it to them?

But that office, and J breathing down my neck. Sitting there in the dark wanting to go home. But this is the dream! The outstanding school obscured by snow.

They were quietly working. The old woman sat at the back of the room making notes. The snow fell down softly. I stood by the window, watching. I knew I would never return. Frozen for all time happy eleven year olds. Life progresses, disappointments march. But they are frozen forever. J's office. The frantic marking, preparing. Anne Brazier's face turns away. He shan't return.

But then that place looms out like a nightmare. Monkeys on the phone. Empty space. Desperate trips to the coffee machine. How could I leave them like that?

Where's Mr Hawthorne?

Mr Hawthorne will not be returning.

Sad faces, let down, abandoned. Torturing the new teacher to pay her back for my betrayal. I can't bear it. I block it out over and over again. The advert on the website. Temporary English Teacher required ASAP.

Still. I am glad to be here. I looked at S and D with bemusement. Here they were, once again on my screen. Blood thicker than water. The ties that bind us are strong and will last forever. I catch myself in the mirror. What was that dream? May we never forget. The bright morning sunshine. Sitting in our whites on the train.

Die once and be afraid of nothing ever after. Lazarus rises from the tomb. Bandages unfurl and float down to the sea. I jump in. It's not Ulysses.

The light fades from an already dark sky. The pebbles crunch underneath my feet. I sit cross legged beneath the moon. The pier sparkles on the ocean. An orange light hovers in the sky.

The image fades. Blondie plays on the radio. Animated conversations all around. Time to move on. Sorry kids. Show's over. You'll get over it.

Roads

Storm

In the morning light

I feel

Purple Sheets

Is it normal?
To want your body to melt into the purple sheets until it's no longer there?
Moving, twisting, stretching and floating in and out of dreamless sleep I don't want to be a person today. I want to stay here in this personless space, where there is only the soft sheeted darkness enveloping me like mist.

Fragments

Flicking through it appeared. Cute smile, cheeky face. And the other one, the dangling jumper. What a dangling it was. The black leather sofa and the sweat and the noise. You were so fucking cute with your smooth skin and your pink lips. And we'll not go down below because it isn't fair on me to recall the immensity.  But it wasn't that, you made me laugh. Not like the pretentious tosspots one normally meets in this self-styled bohemian paradise. Individualism couldn't be more self concious if it tried. But not you. You were really warm.

So what happened? We went out on dates, we chatted, we had fun. Texts were sent like ping pong balls every day.  Did I come on too strong that last time? Was the sex so mind-blowingly good that it could never be repeated?  Walking back through Brighton that hot August night with a smile painted on my face and the vegetation dancing through my nose, did I realise that it was the ending, and not the beginning?

I didn't really notice it happening. Didn't realise how much I liked you. I can't remember if it was you or me. It just dripped away into nothingness. It didn't really bother me to be honest, just a bit of fun. I was too busy anyway. So I let it go. I forgot about it.

But I see the pictures by accident all these months later and I realise, I think, something. I'm not sure what. the laughter, the summer, the black sofa, the sweat, the taste of your tongue all came back to me in a moment, like a lightbulb flashing on for a second

Before turning back to darkness.

Happy Snow Day

A and I ventured out in the snow to buy whiskey and lemons. The snow crunched beneath our feet. The sounds of happy people throwing snowballs vibrated down the empty road. I started humming 'Winter Wonderland' and skipping like a child on Christmas Eve.

Steam floated out of mugs smelling of cinnamon.

I trudged back on my own. Three orange lanterns floated in the sky, above the snow. The stars shimmered and reflected off the white road while snow floated down like feathers. I had gone through a wardrobe and entered Narnia.

I was about to enter my house and turn on the TV when a magnetic force pulled me towards the sea. I turned around and changed direction.

I walked down the road like someone in a dream. Everything had been transformed. The snow continued falling through the black. There was something in the air. People were no longer walking through their lives asleep. The familiar had become strange and they actually saw it, as if for the first time.

Hundreds of black shapes on the grass. Running, skipping, laughing, jumping. Two dogs whirled around in a magical dust storm. The light from a firework illuminated their faces.

The pavillion ice rink glowed like a beacon. Purple haze shot out into the dark. The canopy above shook and snow fell all over my head. Innocent laughter filtered out into the dark like a dove.

I laughed. A boy with a red face and black ear muffs joined me as he walked past.

"I think they were aiming at you!"

I laughed again. "Yes they did a pretty good job!"

Some energy floated between us like a bridge, and for a moment we paused in the snow like characters in a dream. Then he walked on.

I slowed down so that I wouldn't catch up with him.

A man slid on the ice and fell flat on his back. Wine spilled on to the snow like blood.

A cheerful lesbian shouted "Happy snow day" as she walked past.

People were running across the beach hiding behind pillars and throwing snowballs. The promenade lights shone a yellow haze on the revellers, mixing with the snow like ink.

I went on to the beach and looked out at the sea. The wind was blowing snow against my face and my cheeks has lost all feeling. But I felt exhilerated. What was this dream?

I inhaled the fresh sea wind. I also inhaled the world.

What if it was like this all the time? What if people realised that other people were just other versions of themselves and were no longer afraid?

What if people actually opened their eyes and saw the magic all around them? What if every day was a happy snow day?

The snow continues to fall outside my window. The trees and rooftops are thickly spread with white. Time is on hold. Work has been cancelled.

Magic floats through the dreamscape. Once the snow disappears, and normality comes back, people will fall asleep again. Strangers will no longer talk to eachother on the street.

When I sat facing the sea, covered with snow, battered by wind, I saw an orange lantern floating up into the sky and I made a wish.

I like to think that each lantern I see represents a person breaking free from the structures imposed upon us, in this illusory reality, and becoming conscious of their true nature. Breaking free from this circus endlessly paraded before our eyes to see the truth.

But maybe they're just orange lanterns, and my thoughts are simply dreams.

Conversations with the Snow

Snow falls down like rain. The sky is grey and the earth is cold. Breath hangs like smoke.

Waking up, the usual dread turned to joy upon the realisation that snow dictated freedom.

A white blanket spread outside the the kitchen window. T ate fruit and stood beside the fridge, glowing like a christmas decoration. I leaned against the sideboard black as a crow and moaned.

J sat on her throne in the red room eminating a faintly luminous liquid, talking in Hebrew. She had drawn the Judgement card, which hung upside down beside her long yellow nails. The children had hung themselves because I hadn't done the tracking. She sentenced me to a life of pitch black 6am starts in miserable commuter trains crammed full of dead people.

I screamed and it all became distorted. I tried to escape, but I wasn't sure how.

D and I sat in a quaint pub beside an orange fire. We drank beer and ate bangers and mash. The calming heat of the woodwork was an emination. It acted as a buffer to the degradation of the cold platform with the hundreds of people and the ceaseless 'delayed' sign on the overhead.

There was a wine glass hanging suspended on the age of the table.

"Why don't you knock it off?" she asked him.

"But do most people not just accept?"

"Somehow I ended volunteering in Mexico. The city was bright and shimmering like a dream"

"But what about the children?" A peal of laughter echoed through the courtyard.

"Sanity will tell you that it is mad to give up, but what if sanity is actually mad? What then?"

"What are you running away from?" asks N, from an underwater cavern.

"Pitch black six am starts on souless commuter trains full of the faces of the dead, floating in a nightmare", thundered a loud voice from the sky. We weren't sure if it was God, because we couldn't see past the beard. I hear a sound float under the snow but I block it out. I waken up and remember that it's all just a dream.

"The misery comes from thinking that you are a person", says the Zen guru from underneath the flowerbed.

"But in my dream if I want to change scene I just blink."

"So why not blink?"

Because I can't see! I guess if all else fails and I'm trapped in that house again, with those people, I can just volunteer.

J asks to see my tracking, and my reports, and my marking, and the pot of gold, and the outstanding juice. I respond by beating myself to death with a heavy text book as the children cheer me on.

Then I remember it's all just a dream and blink.

And it disappears.

I'm lying in the middle of the desert, beside a fire, looking up at the stars.

The commuter train spontaneously combusts in to nothing.

Alphonse (Edited)

Grey sky, grey faces huddling under hats and cloaks, shuffling by a metallic sea. Cold fingers pinch their skin and mock their discomfort. A backdrop of seagulls circling as the pier gets eaten up by the grey fog that has descended and snatched the blue sky.

A misunderstood dream of an unanswered phonecall leads me to contact a stranger. This leads me to a long path in the forest under a disinterested silver moon. A wrinkled old Sibyl cackles like a mental patient sitting on a beach. She dances through the dark forest playing on the pipe.

A naked black boy smiles at me for underneath a tree smoking hash. His cock bulges from underneath his tight shorts. I waken up with a hard-on and piercing eyes.

Alphonse waves up at me through the window. He asks if I want to go to meditation. We float along the winding cobbled streets, passing a fat woman in a pink tracksuit. A toothless old man with a long beard sways from side to side in front of his origami swans. I catch his eyes alighting on mine but then he gets swallowed up by the darkness.

An old woman with white hair in a bun and pink lipstick asks me if, perchance, I have seen her husband. She is wearing lime green tracksuit bottoms.

Alphonse and I venture down an alleyway smelling of piss. It is suddenly dark and the moon reflects off his mask. His eyes are grey and he unzips his trousers.

A Buddhist monk appears in the alleyway, chanting a Lady GaGa song. He is in a deep meditative trance. The old woman who asked if I had seen her husband offers me a reiki session.

The rain runs down the street. It is a cold winter's evening. The sky is bursting with stars but all I can see are the city lights. I am in the countryside walking along an empty road. I am surrounded by fields, stars and white moonlight. A barn owl glides silently across my path. I follow it until it disappears.

I am in a field smoking hash with a boy with black hair. He turns into the old woman in the green tracksuit bottoms. She asks if I am ready for my Reiki session yet. I tell her I will let her know once I go out to the balcony and have a cigarette.

I eat the cigarette. The boy appears and we drink the thick, noxious liquid. When I open my eyes he has turned into an old man with sores. He asks if I would like a massage. I lie down on the bed.

I am afraid of masturbating in front of the cat.

Jissom

Hark now hear, the angels sing.
Heavy eyelids sweating in the musty darkness of a cold may evening. Some old woman on the TV belting out an aimless tune whilst music swirls and dances in the background.

Close up. Faces looking enraptured. We are free to be free. Except on TV's repetitive bland cycle of filtered excrement. News. Stern looking reporters outside Westminster - Who is going to be the next in charge? Who cares? The illusion transfigures to reality and tiredness takes over.
It sits heavily like sweetened insence while disembodied seagulls laugh from some distant pier.

The drag queen cow girl in the pink frills prays to the lord Jesus while singing about ticking her box and Capitalism. We dance and line dance in the tent until the faces fade. W. in Thailand with a sperm donor while A. sits in the community garden playing piano to commemorate the Holocaust. Beer and cookies paint the night awash with colour while the cat holds out his paw, pointing.

A t-shirted evening looking up at the candles and listening to the waves that lap and clap while digeridoo music hangs in the air. He bends over and gets fucked by army boy, who then turns into a skeleton in an oil drenched Iraqui battlefield. Stray cats, driven wild by rabies, lap up blood, brain and jissom while raising their paws and dancing around in the midday sunshine. A violet sun sets over a yellow field in a green sky.

G sits on the end of the phone talking to ghosts in the bright winter sunshine. N sits watching TV in a faraway room under the sea. Black airplanes explode over an ashy sky, ejaculating sticky white rain over the cornfields.

The old woman laughs from behind her fading photograph in a drawer in a cum-stained bedroom. The woman in the veil sits on the pebbled beach watching seagulls circling in a stark blue sky which doesn't exist. Black cocks crow while a disgraced priest dances with an old gypsy over hot coals.

Maybe It's Close

Green chair overlooking the Pavillion. White trainers are too bright. Cappacino and cakes. White haired shapes sit on deckchairs. Snippets of conversation catch my ear through the silence. Middle aged man in a black shirt gazing ponderously at TV guide. Voluptuous black lady. Cappucino, sugar, breasts. Two Indian ladies glowing sapphire. Black sunglasses. Small white trainers tapping feet. "I like his brain. He's a drug counsellor". Ugly pigeons hover. "It's hard work". Red faced bald man in white shirt sitting mysteriously behind long black hair lurks his companion. She is not as enamoured as he. Unhappy fat man in a maroon jacket gazing inside himself. Frowning. "Not that far, just a fifteen to ten minute walk". Music starts playing somewhere in the distance. Recovering cancer patient eats her cake. "I've only ever been there once". Child sits on mother's lap playing with instrument. What is she seeing? Music adds poignancy to an otherwise uninteresting scene. Old lady, red lipstick sits down, glad of the rest. Obese man with a stick hobbles past. The sun tries to break through the clouds. Music, pigeons and people all blur into one image. Groovy jazz tune gets people's feet tapping slightly. Whistling can be heard over the clattering of dishes. "Because I'm not daft. I was like ok. Yes thankyou. Maybe it's close".

Liberation

That Friday night sensation of pleasantness. The ability to go to bed late in the knowledge that tomorrow is Saturday, and that bed can be stayed in without fear, or worry. My eyes are tired but I must continue.

Lying on the pebbly beach with my eyes closed I felt the sun on my skin and the wind flapping around me like a spirit. Pear cider, David Icke, lizards, consciousness, and the sound of the waves crashing in and crashing out.

The carousel playing the creepy music while invisible children rode round and round. Stumbling into an eerie dark room with A. Penny arcades and age old dolls smiling out through the darkness. A. put in the twenty pence but nothing happened.

Walking along the seafront battling the breeze and squinting in the sunlight. The ghost train was a waste of money. The colourful sheds shining in the evening sunshine as people jogged past with their dogs. White kites and seagulls floated out at sea while a solitary figure read a book on the pebbles.

The Indian buffet was spicy and aromatic and the waiter was morose. J asked if I was ok twice. I must have made her feel uneasy eating in silence and watching the people float past the window.

Then came the luminous karaoke. Japanese tourists in pink wigs stood outside, cameras flashing. Inside we drunk Pimms and sang to a screen. Well A and J sung, I just kind of shouted and tried to be dramatic. Time sped by song by song until it was time to leave. A didn't get my Placebo voice.

Outside Brighton on a Friday night in Summer. The air was mild and the smell of plants made the city seem exotic. Walking past the drunks, homosexuals and hen parties to the train.

Walking back was peaceful and the knowledge that I was going home to a quiet house, mint tea and well stocked book case was quite inspiring.

The last time darting out light in our post-orgasmic after glow where the colours of the city had been turned up in intensity so everything was floating, in a mixture of blue, yellow and silver. The sun shone down on a Sunday morning in Summertime.

But now the lights were turned low and the mild night air smelt of expectation floating like smoke through the alleyways. Walking past the portaloos and deserted roads came N and her boyfriend, like characters in a novel, with buckets of KFC and wine. Small talk and a friendly goodbye.

A and I walked a bit further and then we hugged goodbye. Too much intensity is a bore.

A fat girl and her scrawny friend smoking outside the station toilets asked where they could find a cash machine and if I was Irish. They then began dancing and clapping their hands as the corpse of a train driver asked for our tickets.

He then burst into flames while a clown walked past carrying a suitcase. His hair was green and his nose was red and tears were dripping down his face.

Legion

Lying in a flower bed. Open eyes. Clouds drifting across blue like smoke. Distant chanting. Dense forest. Shadows lurk on the wall. The air is cold against my skin. Clods of breath float, hover, and disappear.
Now I am in a graveyard in the middle of Brighton. I am with an old man who reminds me of someone I am yet to meet. White spectres of hypnotized seagulls glide from star to star.

A child with severe learning difficulties jumps out suddenly from behind a tombstone. He runs at me and grabs my arm. His face peers into mine and he laughs. His white eyes shine on me like moonlight. He holds on tighter, throws his head back and laughs hysterically into the night air, cutting through it like scissors on a raincoat.

I look for the old man, but he has disappeared.

A room in a church. Children with learning difficulties sit around a table. Sunlight is dispersed through the stained glass windows and illuminates their faces. They are painting elephants and listening to Mozart.

A hooded monk stands on the pulpit.
"My name is Legion, because there are many of us." They do not seem to hear him. Maybe his is not there at all.

A spotty child with long, greasy hair covers his ears and lets out a high pitched screech. The stained glass windows shatter and I see two white seagulls gliding through a black sky.

The church disappears. The children turn into suited politicians. They are arguing about the old woman in the black dress standing in front of the mirror.
"I woke up and there she was, just standing there, watching herself"
"What about the cats?" asks the leader of the opposition.
"We exist inside their heads" comes the reply.

The leader of the opposition stands up on the table and starts singing a David Bowie song. The other politicians cheer and start dancing and clapping their hands.

A child with Down's Syndrome asks to be taken outside. He wants to pet the cats.

A priest appears with a bell, book and candle. "I am here for the exorcism" he says.

A child with learning difficulties runs past laughing and clapping his hands.

"Anne, can you give me a hand here?", says the priest.
Anne puts out her cigarette and gets out the measuring tape.

The Merry-Go-Round

A bright June evening. A slight wind blows along the pebbled beach, mixing with the warmth. My hands have a soft, smooth film on them from holding the pebbles.

Two Chinese girls laugh and throw stones.

The merry-go-round patters out its repetitive tune as footsteps crunch into the distance.

The sky is clear and bright. The sun hangs supsended like a God, presiding over the scene.

The calm water sparkles on the horizon like an image from a photograph.

The burnt out pier reminds me of something from a dream.

Seagulls glide on the wind as people paddle on rafts in the sea.

The merry-go-round music has stopped, leaving the sound of traffic and children.
Then it starts up again, louder than before.

I want to grasp the image of this mid-June evening and store it forever like a painting. But the more I try to grasp it, the more it recedes - the merry-go-round, the laughter, the children, the crunching of pebbles, the blue sky, the white sun, the burnt out pier, the seagulls. All are just concepts. And writing them down is like keeping a simulacra of a simulacra.

I wonder is the sound of the merry-go-round inside or outside? The merry dance. Round and round we spin.

Stern Victorians in suits and petticoats swirling round and round in a ballroom on a pier that has since burnt out into an image.

Round and round we go. Laughter, children, warm evenings on Brighton seafront. What's the use of resisting? It keeps going round and round in circles. This same June evening has happened before, thousands of times. And it will continue, thousands of times into the future.

And we can either resist or dance. Dance to the tune of an invisible piper on a burnt out pier, surrounded by Victorian men and women and children. Captured forever on a black and white photo hanging up in a dying man's kitchen.

The music comes out of the picture and covers up the room. A stern Victorian gentleman wakens up from a dream about an old man's kitchen, puts on his suit and monacle and gets driven by a horse and carriage down to the pier.

Coming into the red carpeted ballroom he is welcomed by the band playing a tune which reminds him of a merry-go-round from his childhood.

A child gets off the ride, laughing, and runs to its mother.

The beach is full of people on a sunny evening in June, one of whom sits beside a multi-coloured bag and used coffee cup, writing rubbish in a black book. The merry-go-round music is driving him mad so he decides to leave.

Against My Will

Sitting on the train with Dan I hear a man crying. He is wearing a tuxedo, a red bow tie, and a top hat. He has bushy grey eyebrows and purple eyes. A little girl pokes his head and laughs. The landscape flies past like gold.

Flies float around a tent under a blue sky. The heat is sticky and smelly. A couple sit in a cafe holding hands and gazing into eachother's eyes, while a man gently strums a guitar and swallows hop around the ground, eating crumbs.

The bar maid is a slut, but a very pretty one. She is a buxom blonde with lavish curls and a heaving bosom. When she laughs she snorts like a pig. She fiddles with her skirt which sits uneasily on her leg.

Her husband is a fat bald man with a red face. He looks like a disenfranchised monkey. There are huge wet patches under his arms.

A pigeon has got in and they are trying to shoo it out with a broomstick.

Outside a man sits on a stone wall gazing out into the ocean. The sun hangs like an orange lantern surrounded by smoke. The man is old and wears a farmer's cap. He has a large wart on his left ankle.

He is chatting to an impassive seagull about his wife and how she died. He doesn't realise that she is standing beside him in a pink speckled dress. Little boats bob on the horizon and vultures circle round like mosquitoes.

A corpse with a large nose sits at a grand piano. His spindly hands flash across the keys like ghosts released from hell. They spiral out and circle the room before dispersing like a dream.

A bang comes from upstairs. It is a child playing with dolls with red eyes. She makes them dance on flames and jump into wheelbarrows. Two cats appear from nowhere.

The child is now and adult who has just woken up from a nightmare. She wobbles down the stairs, disorientated and terrific. The silhouette of the cat sits imoveable and silent on the wall like a demon from hell. Its green eyes flicker under the stars.

The woman screams in terror

"TRACEY!" Tracey comes running down the stairs in her pink nightdress, her eyes dilated like chocolate drops.

"But why?" asks the boy, broken-hearted. He is sitting in the grass in front of city hall. His lover looks at him silently and turns away, becoming another stranger in the crowd.

The barn was white and clear in the morning sunlight. The roof was shining like fire. A gate creaked back and forth as a light breeze blew along the walkway.

A woman in a fur hat was skipping along merrily as her dog, a little dauchaund, bit at people's feet. The bedcloathes sprung up against my will.

Drag Queens and Bicycles

Written after Brighton Pride 2010

A drag queen with a white face rode past on a bicycle.

An old man in a top hat smiled out at me from a doorway.

Rubbish was streamed across the street and seagulls were fighting and squawking.

A man was making eyes at me from across the street. Another man appeared beside me like a spectre.
"Don't look at her", he said. "She's not good for anyone".

We continued walking up the street. A fat bald man walked along with his leather clad slave on a chain. His pants were crotchless and his saggy ass wobbled softly in the night breeze.

A punk lesbian with a partly shaved head was pissing in her trousers at the edge of the road. Her laughter echoed out into the night sky like nails.

A Chinese boy was getting fucked across a bin by an elderly white man, red faced and panting as he writhed inside him. An audience of midgets sat and watched, munching on popcorn and clapping their hands.

We continued walking along the road. I had to meet my friends at the end of the street.

A young little twink sat passed out on a doorstep. People were taking photographs on their iPhones while a skinny man with a twitch slowly rolled down his tight white underpants and took him round the corner.

I went to point him out to the man beside me but he had disappeared, so I continued walking, to meet my friends at the end of the street.

Red lights rained down from above a shop floor and music echoed out across the street as revellers danced, drank and smoked, waving down at the scene below.

I popped into the shop to get some water. Behind the counter was a boy with eyes that glowed like elecricity. I waited in the queue. When I got in front I decided to buy some sweets and he threw in a few extra for free. As I walked out I remembered something. I looked back and he was looking right into me, as if he was remembering something as well. As if through no choice of my own I found myself back on the street.

I was standing freezing cold and waiting to go home. They were going to go to the sauna but I couldn't face it so I went home with the others.

A man appeared as if from nowhere and said "Free hug?" I hugged him and could have stayed there all evening.

I sat on the beach looking out at the sea and the reflection of the lights of the pier on the water. - reds, whites, golds, greens. The sky was rammed full of stars and the sound of the sea danced in my ear. I tried to block out the voices beside me who were talking endlessly about nothing and I kept my eyes fixated in front.

A solitary white bird hovered above, his reflection on the glass water, while the gays ran over to the seafront to rave beside a colourful bus.

Dreaming on the precipice

Her face was bright like an elve's on a gypsy morning. Her pink dressing gown swirled around like a Catherine Wheel. Our large alien faces peered in to the undergound cavern. A little fish, small as a grain of rice was swimming around, delicately. The meaning of life spread out like a fortress.

The cats supported eachother on chairs, scratching themselves in the early evening twilight. A vine hung from a canopy and blew in the breeze. I crunched the peppers in my mouth and stared down at the green eyes. Bird call echoed through the hanging clouds.

The black face of depression flashed out of the sofa, reflected in the eye of the TV screen. Jarring voices clawed against eachother in a cacophony of grit. A bookcase rose up from the corner like a crucifx. Robed figures sat around in a circle, chanting. The meaning finally spread out before me like a lemon drop. Cut off like a leper in a fairground I sat, wallowing in affluence and excrement.

The terror of thinking I was the only one watching. A feeding frenzy of lice ridden seagulls on a shingle beach. The antidote to the darkness came in the realisation that you existed as well. That when reality cracked I fell out, and saw the reality that I was creating. But now it is time to smash the bottle and dance on the shards.

A child sits on a white toilet cubicle looking at a candle. He shivers and clothes himself in black. Waiting for nothing he forgets where he is. Until he hears the music creeping along the floorboards. A wide ginger Dutch girl turns away her head and gets hit by a bus.

He opens the door, and returns to the party. He sings and dances and twirls like a comet shooting across a moonlit dark. His face glows like a candle and ignites the sparkles which glitter and spinkle like glitter. He dances on the flames like a spider on a web. His loneliness fades like a photograph in drawer when he realises that actors must interact or face distinction.

A smile, a thought, a kind word explodes like a rocket over a field. And the sparks land and turn into dwarfs and ballerinas who go skipping off into the night. Music plays from an enchanted hedge and reverbrates into the night time as two strangers sit on a seafront bench. One of a network of connections spreading out along a circuit board once the light has been switched on.

Depression is dismantled by a little fish and the reflection of a smile on the glass. Peaceful acceptance turns a buzzing bluebottle into a cat dreaming on the precipice.

Trafalgar Square

A young child in a fairy outfit runs around a park. She brandishes her wand at invisible creatures. Her yellow hair blows in the breeze while dark clouds gather above her head.

Glass smashes and scatters as a frail old lady in a pink nightdress clunks against the concrete. Scarlet blood pours from her head. Two drunk nurses with heavy black eyes run out from inside the building and fill their glasses up with thick red wine. They toast to eachother's health and dance to the sound of Chris De Burgh.

The old lady wakens, as if from a dream. She is sitting on a bench in Trafalgar Square. An elderly gent in a top hat and tuxedo offers her bread before turning into a seagull and flapping off into the sky. She starts feeding the pigeons and whistling an old tune. Before long she is covered by pigeons, cooing on her head and crapping on her shoulder.

It is now dark and the stars are shining in the sky like silver beads. The old woman has ripped her clothes off and replaced them with paper. The pigeons roost on her shoulders. Everyone else is in bed, or never existed in the first place. She sits motionless like a Buddha.

A legion of monks with bald heads and red outfits fill the courtyard. Hundreds of Japanese tourists descend upon the scene, their cameras clicking and flashing.

Dancing Poodles

A garish bus stop on a bright July evening.

An old woman with long grey hair and bright red lipstick fingers her clarinet.

Two drugged up homeless people sit drinking tea and laughing.

A very well dressed woman with a wrinkled face and rouged cheeks walks along the road with downcast eyes. Her trouser suit wears her as she follows her black fluffy poodles through haunted forests and solitary lanes.

Suddenly the bag lady reaches out her hand and the poodles start dancing in around in tutus on their hind legs.

A camp gay man with a shiny bald head and a tight bright muscle top skips along the treetops wearing a garland of daisies around his wide neck. From a distance he sees the poodles dancing and wants to channel their energy. He floats down from the tree and starts kissing the poodles. Their tongues swallow eachother up and fade into a dusty street on a bright Summer's evening.

The well dressed old woman continues walking along.

The ravenous bag lady runs after her dementedly with a knife and fork.

The carcass of a poodle lies on a dirty yellow street swimming in a pool of scarlet. Flies buzz around in circles.

The bag lady crawls back into a piss-filled alleyway and gazes blankly at the grey wall. Poodle blood drips down her chin. Her eyes are green.

An anaemic Chinese lady walks down the street under a pink umbrella.

The train station is full of sleepwalkers inhabiting a dream place. They run and curse and bite and scream. The train conducter rubs his enormous cock and spurts jissom onto a pensioner's super saver.

Flies buzz around sweltering train cabins where business people type frantically on laptops and talk into iPhones. A mentally unstable dwarf walks past. The business men and women rip off their clothes and start fucking eachother with large black dildoes.

A priest walks along a lonely wood. A stream trickles music from a babbling brook, while crows squawk in tall trees. Smoke leaks out of thatch cottages. The priest wears a black dress and a heavy gold cross. He holds a white candle and billows sandalwood insence out into the darkness.

He sees a beautiful young woman sitting on a grassy bank beside a stream. Her slender figure looks forlorn under the pale white moonlight. She has her back to him and seems to be sobbing. A woodpigeon bursts out of a tree overhead and falls to the ground.

The priest is momentarily distracted before being drawn back into the scene. He looks for the slender figue but she has gone.

Spider Webs

Spider webs glisten in tropical forests like shiny pieces of steel
The solitary creature weaves her web and tries to stay out of sight
She exudes mystery and has the gift of magic revealed through dreams
She weaves her tale alone
Sometimes she gets stuck in her own web and forgets
Sometimes a careless traveller walks through the pieces of silver string and it collapses
She must once again begin her solitary spinning.

The Whirling Dervishes

Self conciously stereotypical sits the book in the window, as the people walk past on the side of the cold pinch, waiting. Nobody in Brighton writes. They just sit beside windows in funky cafes basking in their individuality.
This carrot cake is too nutty, and she hasn't brought the milk.

She feels her red boots squelching through the mud, laughing under the moonlight.
The fairground glitters ominously in the distance. Screeches and neon energy flies out into the night as the stars stand still, ignored.

The moon was partially obscured by the clouds above the church but I stood, silent on the empty street.
The cat with the blue eyes and the haughty look flared out from inside the window

"But what is your passion"?

I realised that the moon had disappeared and I was in a room, talking to a bald man with bright eyes and an orange robe.
"What is your passion?" he repeated, looking at me like a star looks at a cat.

I don't know where we are. In a wood it seems, with a stream stricken softly in the twilight sunshine. I'm just going to sit here in my hole and become part of the ground, until the grass covers my body and I smell of lichen.
I feel...Nothing. No thoughts, no shapes floating in front of mine.

"But who are you anyway?", the woman asked, mockingly. Her pensive but persuasive eyes jarred me. She laughed and walked into the courtroom.

I was in the dock. Faces from the past were standing behind, whispering. When I walked in they all laughed. An Indian girl ran at me and surrounded me in her henna like a spiderweb glistening in the dew.

"We are gathered here today to commemorate the passing of the colourful jumper. It had so much life, so much promise. But yet it wilted like a sound from the top of a mountain".

Suddenly I woke up. There were a group of people sitting around in a circle, all dressed in white. Reality became three dimensional. There was a sound which got louder substantially, moment by moment. Suddenly I realised they were me.

"But I want to go back to the world!", I said, realising that the world I wanted to return to didn't exist.
"Silence!"
Now I sit and watch, watch the movie unravel.

"But what do you talk about?"
"It doesn't mean only flesh and blood, I believe in it". I hear myself say things and wonder where the voice is coming from.
"You were given the gift" said the High Priestess. "And you threw it away. So now you must go through the motions of this reality you longed for, always with the knowledge that you glimpsed something, totally beautiful. But you can never return."

The child was crying in the corner. "Daddy" he asked, behind the rain. "Daddy? Why is it all so hidden? Why is it so hard to discover? Why must I be here?"

Marking the papers in his pretend office Mr pretend Hawthorne pretends to work, hoping that he won't be found out. A child walked past the window in a pink coat and waved. Just to remind him. Just to remind him. Appearing out of some mystical backdrop.

She was following the old woman through the maze. The old woman's hair was grey, and her eyes were empty. Running and running, hooting and howling, screamed the charade. The old woman's shape kept twisting and turning, forming and informing like mist, untraceable. But the maze continues.

Every morning the girl wakens up and thinks about that old woman.

Lost in the maze, a little boy with blue eyes is crying. The women pick him up and cradle him, singing humpty dumpty and placing him on the wall.
"You must act your role to the best of your ability".
"But why? Who am I? What is this? What is the point? Where did all the wine go?"

The mystery rolls on like a ball of knitting sitting on the armchair beside the sleeping cat. The hot clothes are burning into the waif's skin like acid. He keeps inhaling the gas and expanding like a gas player viewing the score.

The woman with the hair and the jewellery fucks the bar man over the store, screaming her head off.
A teenage boy masturbates furiously over his computer screen, which buzzes gently.
All the people have left. The cafe is filled with nothingness.

"The children keep me sane", even though they're so hard to see and nobody ever tells me anything. I don't know where I'm going from one moment to the next. I don't understand why but it keeps on going and going until it feels like the bannister is about to explode.

"Excuse me. Are there public toilets here?" the petulant child asks, high on life on this Friday afternoon in Brighton.
"Why so serious?"
"Why? Because it's a very serious matter". Never stop long, just passing through, over and over again. A person pretending to be another person.

A monkey is chattering outside my window. I slam the glass and return to be.

I am at A's house. We sit on the sofa drinking mint tea and hearing ourselves hear the words we are supposed to say. So why not lighten up?

A fat, red faced man, washes his shower tiles with cillit bang. Eyes fell on the chef and he looked the other way, blowing smoke out to the clouds. But just stop a moment. Stop right there. Step out of the story.


Nobody knows. Sure I don't need to use them, but thanks for the tip.

The Philosopher

Once upon a time there were three little pigs in a forest, boiling soup.
They sat under a canopy of green. Insects fumbled about, blinded by the bright summer sunshine. A petulant child started singing from another room.
"What was the soup doing?" asked the philosopher, sitting alone in the cottage next door, roasting his hands on a crackling fire. "If soup was soup and soap was soap, then what was a human?"

The Aquarium

It's a case of Cartesian Dualtiy you know.
Reality stares right at you through the window like some malicious ghost.
Walking through the labyrinth I discovered it there waiting.
I got lost in the aquarium. All these fish, and people, circulating round, hideously deformed in the bubble glass.
I didn't know how to escape, running round and round I kept bumping into my reflection.
I wanted to get out. Out to the sea and the sky. But once I did get out, there was nobody there waiting for me.

Samhain

Written Samhain 2010

Was it her or was it me?
It overwhelmed me, like an empty vessel filled with poison, seeping into my pores. I couldn't bear it.
To be walking around on this miserable afternoon with the people, and the buses, and the noise. This dreadful silence of shadow.
Where did it go? Why this empty shell? What else to do but continue walking and being?

A vulture circles overhead. Round and round it circles, focusing on its prey. A wooden hut in the middle of the desert. The sun blasts down from on high and the sky is terminally blue. A faceless shape huddles agaisnt the bar, hiding behind a cowboy hat. I try to communicate with it but SLAM! the dog has been hit by the car. Holding my ice-cream I mourn alone on the grass, listening to Enya.

A dead child bobs up and down on the pool. Figures dressed in black gaze on, impassively.
A flute plays in a forest. Skipping and dancing the worm eats the lungs out of the doughnut. The door opens as if from nowhere. Now what to do?

A demented woman screams from behind the bars. The other patients are priests sitting in confessional boxes. A sea of hooded faces look out from the stands, watching the spectacle. A gong stikes and a disembodied voice screams "Testimonial!"
The woman screams and stutters and sputters as a clock ticks from an empty toy shop.
"Sorry but you are too late. A banging noise hits against the desk.

The sound of the sea swishes against the stand. The beach is pure and empty. The moon shines down from on high and the stars bounce and sparkle like bubbles in champagne.
"No longer a person at last!" screams the madwoman. "This beach is all. There is no more words banging against walls and sirens, and drunkards, and moments filled with emptiness and disatisfaction.
"But why?" crys the eagle? Why?"
The eagle is a figment of the woman's imagination and only exists in an empty corridor in a darkened mansion.

What is this bullshit? Me thinketh thou art trying to make some sense of nothingness. Me thinketh thou shoudst face fact that thou are depressed little boy with nothing to say.
Can we switch this off? Yes I think it is impossible to conjecture the madness of the situation but why? said owl. You are far too old. I used to go to the cabaret on a Monday night, but now I sit on my own and listen to Enya.
But aloneness is the way to be. Aloneness is the prize!
"But I'm so bored of it", said the monkey. I keep asking to enjoy this, but all you give me is depression and loneliness.

The lighthouse was flickering through the darkness like a knife. A ship of ghosts was shipwrecked on the jagged rocks. "I remember how I loved these ghosts. But now they are dead and nothing remains". Nothing remains but a cat looking out of the window on a darkened street.

The hooded lady bends over her altar and lights a candle for Samhain. The veil is narrowest, and she wants to reconnect with the energy she has lost.
A cat's eyes flicker through the fire.
A shadow creeps across the wall in a dreamscape while the moon is pregnant with desire. Figures in white skip under the bare trees in the abandoned courtyard. How I long to be with them!
The forest surrounds me like a blanket. I am untouchable. My fear is swallowed up by the moon and the stars which remind me.

Sitting outside, looking up at the sky, I see a star shooting past. I make a wish.

She has her back turned to me and she is deep in meditation but I follow her through the darkness. She wears a blue cape and her eyes sparkle like electricity.
I tap her shoulder and they open.
The shadow disperses and a barn owl glides across the deserted country road.
At Samhain, redirect yourself to The Goddess. Through the eyes of a cat the mystery is reborn.

Remember the insomnia and the fox? The fox that stopped on your path and looked into your eyes? Follow the barn owl. Follow the barn owl across the field, under the stars where words are no longer necessary.

But how can I retrace my steps? How can I turn an angel turn into a monkey?

I was sitting in the cafe with Jim drinking some steam and inhaling some cake when she came in.
Her hair was frazzled and she looked a bit confused. She came over to the table, and asked if I wanted to have her watch. It made me sad.
"What about your memories?" I asked. "How can you just give them away like that?"
She didn't answer.
Dedicating one's life to an owl one went into the forcfield.

It's gone.

Fireworks explode and Celtic music drifts through the castle. The cat sits quietly, gazing out the window.

The Cafe

The little cafe is packed. Blue spotty tables, green and blue circles on the wall. Music plays from behind the counter. Small hands hang in the air beside brown sauce and bread. Outside the drab drizzle of angels lost in the rain. The little head dribble is replaced by grey and pink.
A woman in purple enters the room, like a duchess. All heads turn. Her hair floats like wind. She sits sideways on a chair and surveys the scene. A match glows temporarily before being crushed into the spoon. Smoke floats out under the moon.
"I appear to have lost my way" she declares.
The moon looks down knowingly through the window. Stars shine in the cold night sky.
"I fear that we all may be lost" replies the Mexican. "I don't even know where this cafe came from, or why I am sitting here. But the badge on my lapel says that I am 'manager' so I guess that's who I am not. I am, I mean am".
The woman in purple curls a sliver of purple smoke in reply. She is suddenly very bored of this cafe. But she can't remember what came before. She was somewhere else and now she is here. She will be here for a while and then later on she will be somewhere else. The cakes in the window glow seductively, but it is all too much. She screams like a harpy realising that it lives in a story book.
The cafe disappears.
She is in a forest. She is sitting beside a stream with her eyes closed. She opens them and then remembers what she had forgot. A white barn owl floats across the sky like a spectre, becoming one with the stars.
The river sparkles in the moonlight.
A fox appears in front of her and stares directly into her eyes.
"Oh fox! I was so caught up in the dream that I forgot"
Her voice echoes out under the stars.
A beautiful silence answers.
The silence permeates her being.
She is back in the cafe, but now she knows. She knows she is sitting in a moonlit forest dreaming up this scene. She suddenly wants to fly, wants to write, wants to confess. But then she looks around and sees all the people trapped in the cafe, drinking tea, watching the X factor.
She wants to scream "The cafe isn't real!" She wants to tell the old woman that she is dreaming her old age. She wants to tell the child to stop crying. She wants to tell the tatooed woman with the slicked back hair that she is only shouting at herself. She wants to tell the manager that if only he took of his badge...But.
She decides to go undercover. She's going to pretend that she's a person in a cafe eating cake. But inside she will remember that she is actually beside a tree, bathing in the moonlight.
The moon sparkles. The stars are waiting. The night is cold and the wind rattles the tree while a solitary figure reads Tarot, beside a river, bathing in the light of a dream.

Sick

Sick

Sick of England. Sick of the accents. Sick of the fake bohemian brighton pretenciousness

'Oh look at me, I'm a student whose parent's earn a million pounds a year and yet I'm so left wing and politically minded. ' etc etc

Sick of the flagrant gays mincing down the street, sick of the high prices and sick of my job.

Daggers

Daggers chime and shine
In empty stairwells
Where oil lamps glow
The silence of memory
Fills the space
And then the face
White and ghostly
Shimmering in a silver mirror
Looking into my eyes
Like a foggy memory

I cross the river and I cross the stream and then I dream
Of a land by the sand where no human hand has ever been
Where birds fly high in a wide blue sky and the church bells chime
In time like a place in the dream of a face in a scene in a book
By a bubbling brook where a lady in a veil is drawing out ale
And a little boy sits on a swing
A chest full of gold in a story once told
Where an old woman sat cross-legged on a mat dreaming a dream by a stream

And then the dwarf fell into the well and landed in hell
Where the fires burned high into the sky and the broken souls cried and asked the lord Why a face peered from under a beard from a place behind a screen covered in green
Where the spirit was gone and the song it was wrong and the dancing was simply obscene
And I thought of naught from a very high spot looking down from a dream
And I wondered was it I who had seen?

The Laughing Jesus

An excerpt from a brilliant book, 'The Laughing Jesus' by Freke and Gandy, about the true nature of reality.

1. You have a dual nature. You appear to be a person but essentially you are awareness.

2. Lucid living is adopting a both/and perspective in which you are concious of both your apparent nature and your essential nature.

3. As awareness you are a spacious emptiness which contains the world. You are a timeless presence which witnesses the flow of experiences which we call 'time'.

4. Life is like a dream in which one awareness is becoming conscious through infinitely various forms.

5. We are unconciously one and conciously many. Gnosis is becoming conscious that all is essentially one.

6. Awakening to oneness is the experience of big love. Knowing you are one with all you find yourself in love with all.

7. The purpose of life is to love being this moment. When you are driven solely by other desires you miss the point and become engrossed in the life-dream.

8. The foibles which keep you unconcious in the life dream are your qualities which have become distorted because you presume yourself to be an isolated individual.

9. The way to love appearing to be a person is to become concious of your impersonal essential nature as awareness.

10. Lucid living is a state of enlivenment. It is loving being human.

The Present

For most people the unknown is terrifiying. After the past week, I have discovered that sometimes the 'known' is even more so.


When nobody knows you, it is like you are a blank canvas. You don't feel that you have to act a certain way, talk a certain way, be a certain person because nobody knows you. And the most beautiful thing you discover, is that you don't know yourself.

So you can be who you want to be.

When returning, you don't have that pleasure. You have already been typecast. You revert back to the old self. Everything that went between seems like nothing more than a dream, an illusion.

And it is an illusion. But so is this. When we go to the cinema we are aware that we are watching a movie, but for the movie to be effective, we need to get lost in it. We need to believe that it is real. We identify with the protagonist, we have to for the illusion to work, for the movie to become real. But at times we realise we are not in the movie. We are in a darkened theatre, watching.

The protagonist of the movie is the person that we see as 'ourself', our Ego. The person we think we are, the person that we create in our daily lives. But what exists behind that person? If we sit still, shut down the endless chattering in our head, what are we? We are awareness, watching a set of experiences, that we call 'reality'. Awareness is everlasting. Our bodies change, our friends change, our thoughts change, we change. But awareness doesn't. Awareness lasts forever.

When we are asleep, and we dream, we think that the person in the dream is us. We feel fear, we feel happiness, but in the end, we wake up. We are therefore both the person dreaming and the person being dreamed. 'Real' life is exactly the same. We are the person dreaming (our awareness) and the person being dreamed (the 'self)

When we realise that all is illusion, we do not give up on life. Quite the opposite. We make this dream, the best dream it can possibly be. Because it is all there is.

Years ago I dreamt of going to Australia. I dreamt that dream into a reality. Now that it is over, I'm not going to stop. I always dreamt of living in Brighton. Now I am dreaming that dream also into a reality. In a few days I will be living there. Not that happiness exists in travelling, or in living somewhere else. Happiness exists in only place it can. The present. Wherever that may be taking place.

This world is nothing but an illusion. So why don't we make it the best illusion it can possibly be? We exist in the eternal, never-ending present. So why do so few of us rip off the wrapping paper and see what is underneath?

Go on, rip off the paper. I dare you.