Lanterns, or, The Vital Importance of Getting to the Bottom of the Garden

The sky was clouded over again, the fish on top of the ice. I broke through the kitchen table and made it outside. I breathed in the plants. They smelt jealous, like death.

There was a fire, beside the water. Or maybe there wasn’t. I can’t quite be sure. Anyway, I decided it was the utmost necessity to go there. So I put on my blindfold and gently tiptoed through the grass.

I felt something on my feet. It was snakes, or was it mosquitoes? They were biting at me. I became tattered, unsure and disorientated. I saw a bone. I scratched. I tore my skin of. Then I saw someone.

It was that Finnish woman with the bad temper. She stood in the middle of the garden. She blocked my way, her arms folded. Her eyes were cold and hypnotic. The blue sky made her look like cardboard.

She said that she was not, under any circumstances, going to clean my room. So I spat in her face and pushed her to the ground. I put on my boots and jumped on her head until it was a beautiful shiny red pulp.

I then took my skipping rope and started swatting the horseflies. They gather frequently, in this swamp.

...

It is now dusk and the clouds are turning pink. There are a few boats on the lake, but no-one is in the cottage.

The wood is getting rotten. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like, to be a piece of rotten wood, all wooden, and rotten. But then I get bored.

Sometimes my eyes sparkle like diamonds. Sometimes I have to pull them out so that I can hear better.

It sounds like Portishead. It smells like shit. The grass has tangled up the white chair.

Sometimes they drive me mad. I get this sad feeling in my solar plexus, like I’m going to cry. But I mustn’t. At least, not until I’ve got to the bottom of the garden.

There’s a light flashing somewhere, across the lake. Maybe it’s flashing inside my head. It makes me want to blink. I look up just in time to see an airplane.

...


“What did you say?” (We were standing beside the smoke under the tree).

“Well I can’t say really, because she’s my friend, but I had a dream about it”

Her skin began falling off. It was all rotten and smelt like the dog corpse I keep hanging in my bedroom. I keep it hanging there, just to remind me, you know, of mortality and brevity and such matters.

Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and hold it up to my nose. It fills me with the sweetest feeling of ecstasy, Like looking at the stars over a lake.

My lantern, my dream, my deathless trance. Nature running naked through my field of bluebottles. They stick to my hair and my face.

“But what did you see?”

“Well I really don’t know, but you know, if we were talking right now, in a dream it would feel exactly the same. So you look out for dream signs. You ask yourself several times a day – how do I know that I am awake?”

Then, once you are satisfied with your conclusion you get out your lantern, and you go outside and submerge yourself in the darkness.

You submerge yourself in the darkness and you walk down to the bottom of the garden. And then, you breathe in the lake and the stars.

You breathe in the lake and the stars, and the breeze and the night flowers. And you ask yourself again “Am I dreaming?”

And if you still do not reach a satisfactory conclusion you console yourself with the fact that you have, indeed, made it to the bottom of the garden.

Deckchairs

White hair gets people's feet tapping 
My brain is not a drug counsellor
Her trainers are Music sitting on mother's lap image
Groovy jazz music lady
Red lipstick, sugar, breasts.
Fat and gazing in the distance
A red-faced bald man adds poignancy to an otherwise voluptuous cappuccino
With an ear in silence he plays with his instrument
What cancer patient greets this fear?
Ladies glowing sapphire, whistling mysteriously behind tapping feet
“I like the conversation that catches when I sit on deckchairs”

Fangs and Tusks and Rusted Skin

The last thing she expected to see was an elephant. But there were hundreds, all around her. They were dancing, stomping their feet, down and up, up and down.

The dust made her throat sore. It circled and exploded and settled under the painful sunshine.

All of a sudden she realised that she had created them. She had created this dry earth, this beating sun.

They stopped. The thudding had been getting lighter and lighter and now - nothing. With horror, she realised that they were waiting

...

Inhuman eyes bored into her skin. The silence, the dust, the sun. A gust of wind disturbed the sand which floated and then sunk. A sound in the distance, faint at first, carried on the breeze, closer and closer.

A voice - swirling and soaring over the repetitive beat. It was inside her. It took her over. She was possessed. Drunk on the music, the desert, the isolation.

She was blown gently into the middle of the circle. The eyes still fixed on her. This time she did not look away. She faced them head on. And then, slowly, she began to dance.

Slowly, surely, she began to dance. Twirling, sparkling, exploding. Possessed, she was no longer in control of her body. Taken over by a force outside of her she got faster and faster. Hypnotised, powerless, she became God.

...

The elephants were working themselves up into a frenzy. They began to spin and stamp and thrust their trunks into the blue nothingness. Stamping, spitting, turning and whirling like demons.

Their trunks were erect. She began to stroke. Holding them, feeding off them - A demented banshee, an inflamed old sybil cackling out into the desert.

She pushed the red ball deeper and deeper inside her body, swallowing it whole. The laughter wrenched through her insides, tore her open, exploded out and vanished.

...

Nothing left - No sound - No vision - No movement. Just fangs, and tusks, and rusted skin.

The cold and rook-delighting heaven

A mask in the corner will not think. Leave it there, on the stool, for the school children to walk past in the cold morning on the way to their buses.

Follow the cat down the street past the cars, past the locked windows with the blinded curtains mashing their indifference to the cold, to the ice.

Gasping like a grey faced old man in an oxygen mask outside the cancer ward, indifferent to the boxes and the files and cases building up, impassive, careless.

The fat woman with the glasses, mentally retarded, sitting beside her radio. 'A Case of You' coming out through the static. This is her life, this is her dream.

The truth, full of files and papers, shudders under her weight.

...

"The cold and rook-delighting heaven is grey and vast". Once again I am here, in this forest, walking past the school gates.

The tree overhead bursts open - a wood pigeon, frantic, hurrying across the field. It does not see the ground below. Focused, flapping. Like a naked, motherless child. Lost, wandering, meaningless.

Graffiti scratched into the stile. Climb over, force yourself to continue trudging upwards.

There was a time with people and snow and a blue jumper. A flash, a shutter, a summer day.

"May I hold your hand?"

Photographing the cows and then the top of the final destination, looking out, planning the future. The escape, the moment when life would begin, not realising that it was all there.

"The moments passed as in a play strutting and frutting".

The characters' dead bodies are decomposing on the silver water.