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Saturday, September 18, 2010

And With Blood the Ending Comes

This piece was published at Danse Macabre on June 8th.

And With Blood the Ending Comes

And with blood the ending comes
Washing through pipes, breathing force
A chamber concave impounds the heart
Flesh become one, is flesh ripped apart
There’s nought left but bare walls
To stare through at dusk
And the knowledge that she’ll soon be porcelained with love
Whilst I gnaw the rent throbs of memories she’s left

The yellow has spent itself from starry night
One twinkle of many sequined in the sky
Not missed, but if rare, more precious to shroud
Not nothing breaking through layers and shakes
My tense will tears at regret and at loss-
Being just a bead ‘mongst her pearls-
And with blood the ending comes

Traveller

This story was published as a short short at Fiction at Work on June 16th 2010.


Traveller


An unknown foreigner (for I am foreign wherever I go), a twenty-two year old man (if I am that yet), died (for I am that already) at ten o’clock on the night of November the twenty-second while reading Cortazar against a lamppost which a car, derailed by the fog, smashed into at one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, passing first through his body like butter before hitting the stale, rock-hard bread of his illuminated support. How well this would all fit in with Oliveira’s wonderful conception of the absurd, and mine as well, that I could sit here looking for a blank page in a near full notebook to write about my own death. For I am dead; my epitaph is written. So I wonder why I hitch all through this countryside, and others, looking for beauty, recognising it in everything from the worm returning from its concrete exile to the sewer grate I have used as a urinal, and all those green fields, hills, and trees, each resonating with a praiseworthy internal aesthetic I cannot find in myself. Is that why I keep traveling? Because I only find ugliness within, and I hope and I pray that the more I ravenously devour of this external wondrousness the better it might hold back my dismay? For I am dead, it is true, and rotting away; this shell is my mausoleum, tombstone, and grave. I will go to sleep beneath that bus shelter across the street and wake up tomorrow knowing I died today and maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to start again.