Rapture, rupture

Pluck at your hair with violin rapture. Sing-song heart belief. In the darkest night, the candle glows, the wind blows. Lighting those who go astray, shining the way for little children and skipping heart beats. Jump into abundant bosoms of joy. Capture the myrrh through yielding,

cushiony tissues. Enrapture, they are bound to. Monotonous melodies take on mutinous fire-shadows of pleasure in the vast volume of soul songs. They travel to your shrinking stomach, where they make itsy lace-winged butterflies flutter by, as if possessed by pirouetting particles of ecstasy. Glutinous membranes stick to your buttery fingertips, and leathery forehead, possessing the deep lines, soothing collagen to echoing emptiness. Jump to catch the fluffy cotton eyelashes swimming in the confounding heavens of existence. Take them to your eyelids, spread them out, gently. Caress them like you would, the inner thighs of passion. Open your eyes in slow, staged sonatas. See the apple trees in full bloom, waxing eloquent and plumping praises upon your handsome face. Take your potter’s hands to your face, dip them in the clay-pot of honey dew. Use the magic moisture to pinch the stories you want to tell, onto the jagged perfection of your countenance. Smile, the grasshoppers need you. Conduct their flight with a correct cantata. Soar above dithery thoughts. Rise to rose essence-filled water balls. Poke at them, drown in hints of poetry and tints of prose.

The church mouse and the God

We took off, the two of us. Hugging my back was a battered, brown leather bag, inside which rested in a comfortable tumble, my toothbrush, notepad and pen. He came empty handed. He would borrow my toothbrush he said; the rest he had little use for. I dressed in my toughest jeans, an old shirt splattered with ink, and my worn-out trekking boots. He wore dungarees, paired with an immaculate white t-shirt, dark glasses and impractical padukas. The writer and her handsome, rebel muse.

We were going on a dangerous adventure. He had read about the divine light at the end of a certain tunnel that seemed to exist merely in the map he had tattooed on his forearm, all the way up his shoulder. As good sense goes, I was mad to trust him, but his animal charm was not something my fumbling soul could resist. I was but a lowly writer, in search of a muse to worship, and my unlikely God I had found.

We travelled on foot.

Every time I asked how far away we were, or indeed if this blessed light was to be found on our continent, he simply showed me his arm, and said, ‘From here to there is where we go.’ When I did get a little restless, I took my notepad out and started sketching. A sharp paragraph for his profile, a little limerick for his adorable nose, a sonata for his lips, a poem for his gorgeous hair. He held my hand, guiding me around puddles and pebbles, whilst I scribbled away an ode to him. He pointed out, at that juncture, a glimmering speck in the distance that was our hallowed light. We hurried on. But when night came, we settled beneath an apple tree, huddled beneath a single wrap of muslin that he conjured up through a needle stuck in his dungarees. Weakened by the presence of this peasant God, I felt my legs turn to colloid. And he told me stories that seeped through the little pores on my goose-bumping hand, and coiled their through my blood stream, to my brain, from where a bunch of little warriors threw spears at my beating heart. My heart bled a black ink, which stained my pages boldly. We woke up when an apple hit my head, and he was cross that the apple chose to fall on my plain head. He stalked off and I scurried along. We reached a river, on which he walked without creating a ripple. I almost drowned in that reptilian pool and he didn’t care. The shimmering speck grew bigger. It looked like a mystical orb now. And when he turned to look at me finally, the orb made a halo around his head. So awed was I by the vision, I was caught unawares when he hurled a heavy rock on my being. That night, under a wise Oak, I wrote a letter of bloody pain on my notepad, as a purple-blue song wrote itself upon my tender bruise. The muslin, he kept to himself.

He soon grew tired of me, I could see that. He held me close, even as he inflicted deep cuts on the tips of my fingers and drew my soul out, with some potent form of black magic. It was then that we saw people down the road. He threw me by the wayside and made merry with the bunch over a bonfire and bon-bons with naughty gifts. That night, the white sap from the rubber tree wove my despair upon the dark, starless skies. The morning after, we were only hours away from the light, and he walked ahead with his bunch. I hurried along as fast as I could, the church mouse scurrying to keep up with the God.

And then we were there. The light. A nasty smell tickled my nostrils, and stung my bruised being. I walked a little closer, and there I saw a radioactive heap of poisonous intent. When he turned to give me a smile, it was evil…as revealed by the waves of noxious energy. In the radioactive light, the map on his hand was nothing but a pattern depicting the mouth of hell. At the centre of the light was an isotopic pool of death.

I turned, I left. I walked, sore and serrated, till I reached the apple tree. That night, for the first time, I took the pen out of my weathered bag and wrote, of my own volition, ‘Goodbye.’

Dear Huge-Bosomed Female Reptile From Hell’s Smelly Belly

That gauzy veil you tra-la-la behind; it makes you look ugly. It brings out the enormity of your nose. It accentuates the pockmarks on your face. Makes the grey in your hair look like it was sewn from all the ageing maggots of the world. Most of all, it makes your insecurity stand out in high relief- even a starved Somalian kid’s ribs seem inconspicuous in comparison.

For the very fabric of that gauzy veil was steeped in a deep vat of pretense.

And then brushed with grimy dots of cheap glitter before you wore it upon your being, so excitedly.

You smile so widely for me- but all I can see is your big nose. You tilt your head in impossible angles and act coy- but all I can see is the disgusting disproportion of your nostrils. You wear all those tight clothes- yet, I can only see your face fading in the horizon, so pathetically behind your nose.

You say black is back. But you still drape that smelly shroud of deceit upon your adipose-infected self, to cover up your darkness. Do you not think black is a desirous colour? Why do you have a wardrobe full of miniscule black dresses? If such is the shade of your heart and mind, why won’t you showcase it? Barbie and Ken look happy in pink- but don’t you see? Ken is gay and there have been no summer rains in Barbie’s dry, cold world. Pink is not the colour of the season. No one cucking fares.

The human soul is black. Every single soul. But even black has different shades. Who is to say black can’t be pure? Why do you assume it isn’t the exact shade of innocence? Have you proof that it doesn’t incite passion?

There is the black of the night. The black of being consumed. The black of pleasure in pain. The black of current, and that of currant. Of Sabbaths and Bettys. Birds and Velvet.

Your black is just as unique perhaps. Just perhaps. But you choose to camouflage it and bite from behind, catching people unawares. But don’t give yourself credit. You aren’t rabid, not that powerful, no. You don’t kill. You just bite, and people exclude you from the radius of their existence after that.

Dear, Cellulite Bottomed Girl. Instead, why don’t you occupy yourself with thoughts of velvety cakes and Jim Morrison in tight blue velvet? Of days in Oktober Munich and flowers drifting in the nippy October air? Of Mary Hopkins’ voice and the voice of your heart’s reason? And if you absolutely insist on being just like me, why don’t you just shuck the fut up and observe from a corner?

Why won’t you be real?

Or if ‘real’ is an alien concept in your ammonium-sulphate filled world, here’s a better idea. Get out of my face.

No love and looking forward to the cessation of your existence,

Me

28 years

To be able to live knowing that life was a short, sweet melody, and not a long-winded song. A snappy vignette of the best parts. No flim flam. Boo hooey.

Being able to indulge in shameless debauchery, knowing you didn’t have to preserve your body, for use beyond those splendid 28 years. 28 years spent in some sort of quarter-coma and bursts of prodigious lucidity, wafting about much like the fragrance of a lily-of-the-valley. Riding along on substance and liquid alone. Wearing otherworldly psychedelic sunglasses that tint the present day, a colourful shade of the past. Bearing only netherworldly intentions.

A rebel without a cause. Without disguise. Without guile. Just all the bile. After a heavy night with the effervescent golden gods. Waking up the next morning, to the sound of the gods hammering away at your medulla. You acquiesce them with hair of the dog. A peace offering. All you care about is going higher, hitting the zenith of madness. Hit the road Jack. Remember all tomorrow’s parties. Remember little else.

But what would I do if I could count my days to the last breath? Would I play pretend? Would I theorise and philosophise, the possibilities of life in a different era, while I dedicate the present to impious indulgence? Would I make my life an ode to megalomania? Or perhaps a tribute to wasting? And wasting away? Would I sell my soul to the Devil for a lifetime of evil pleasures at my beckoning?

In a life that would end before responsibilities began, in a life that would end before true love’s honeymoon came to an end… I’d surrender to life.

To risks. I’d live recklessly, fearing not the dreaded tomorrow. I’d take the plunge. I’d taste things the way they’re meant to be…without trepidation coating my taste buds. I’d love like there was no tomorrow, because there would be no tomorrow. Glad to meet you; it was my pleasure and all pleasure. Free-falling. Free of the thought of failing. Songs to be written, poetry to be experienced, verse to immerse in. With a peg to nurse and a pug to pet. All the sleep to catch up on. So much of it. Without the ink of bad memory drawing out a detailed pattern of insomnia. No more skeins of stress staining my sleep. The forty winks that only a man with no time deserves.

Days dedicated to getting intoxicated on the sublimation of self. Notebook by side. And warm candlelight. Thoughts that wax eloquent on sufficient lubrication pour forth onto papyrus. A legacy in a thousand letters, with nary a fetter. 

There’d be too little time. And yet, not a minute in surplus.

The End would come at the 28^th hour of the 28^th year. I would wait with my suitcase, stuffed with words and worth. Life would be snuffed out in an instant. I'd play my part dutifully with a few snuffs and puffs. A few hours of messy heaving. And then dry heaving, when little remains but the spirit…readying itself for flight. In the arms of an angel I'd go. 

Far away from here.