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