No Life During Wartime

Back to bite, back to bite, don’t breath, thump thump.
Lights, gone. Food, gone. Drugs, gone, Hope.

Desperate sex and wobbly legs.
Get me drunk, look after me, stop the thinking, stop the world.

Back to bite, back to bite, bite me harder, fuck me harder
Than this silence, than this screaming, are they screaming, is it me?

The terror is like popping candy abusing my skull,
Like angry clots of blood trying to burst out of fingernails

Pulsing, screeching, moaning, and then silence.
The constant ringing and now your face has gone all blurry.

The thought of all the itches we will never get to scratch.
It’s all rotting, it’s all gone and you just keep being so fucking kind.

The bile in my stomach, my hands in your pants, is there even a point?
Splashing about in mud, looking for familiar faces, for a trace of something human.

Slaves demanding justice, then wanting the crown.
Grey days, skipped days, were you slowly drift away.

I don’t want to be pretty, I don’t want to write pretty
To hide behind niceties and disgusting adoration.

In the darkness I’ve stopped tripping, I walk steady now.
I’m not longer funny but I’m lonely, as you roll me the millionth cigarette,

As I gulp the millionth gulp of bitterness, my bitterness.
We lost a long while ago and we’ve wasted all our time.

Toxic waste and suspicion, is that mask because of me?
They’ve turned us against each other and there’s no going back.

There’s no life during wartime, only slow self-destruction.
Before the bombs, before the lights went out,

Before the mould and the stench and the disease and the hunger,
The mind numbing stupidness had already knocked us out.

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Featured image: Jobkill by Pushwagner, Hariton (1987) can be found in the Norwegian National Museum, or online at: http://www.pushwagner.no/galleri/kunst/JOBKILL

Empathy

I washed three times but still:
I smell the vile breath, and still
I see the sunken bloodshot eyes
a pain too deep and miserable to scream
from its open grave, vestige of human lies.

Tomorrow your vacant eyes will not remember this face
yet the fetid smell will not ever leave my head.
Again and again it plays,
the blurry vision of a heat induced hallucination
sneaking up, once again, to threaten my sanity.

I thought it was a child,
an innocent, ill-fated child on a bike,
perhaps still burning, perhaps still alive.
Yet all I could find was the shell of a human life
bruised by a world which is infinitely unkind.

As you blinked at me and slurred your dissent
I disentangled your legs from the wheels
tugged you out of your certain crematorium
dead weight to weak arms and shaky knees,
dead weight to all our cushioned lives.

My abandoned car blinked furiously
ignored by the lives that unblinkingly drove by
No longer human, no longer of use,

illegal smelly immigrant

I wretched violently on the way home
the smell of your skin on my clothes and hands
the unsettling disgust in humanity
steeped into my disillusioned plans.
Only one man stopped:

‘anche io sono straniero ma…’

His conscience dirtied by judgement over judgement
your rotten breath etched deep into his identity
an anchor of blame which has nowhere tangible to go
defensive and defenceless to this worldwide generalisation.
Anche io sono straniero ma.

Did I really save your life, did I choose to be this way?
To follow the trail in the grass
where the cheap boxed wine pulls drunkards off course.
To acted upon automation, like the Belding’s ground squirrel,
putting itself in danger in the name of evolution.

You asked god to bless me but did I really do you a kindness?
Or should I have let the heat put you to sleep, cease your pain?
Head nuzzled in the prickly grass, feet tangled in your rusty bike
barbed wire inches from your eye
invisible to the road, invisible to the world.

And as xenophobia prevails, as hatred and fear win the UK
and all these cars speed away, I feel lonely and wired incorrectly.

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Featured: Pink Man / Leviathan (Blu), to be found on  Oberbaum Brücke / Falckensteinstraße ( U Kottbusser Tor stop).

Apocalypse

Always in the car of doom. And it’s doom for all this time, out of any of our control. We’re driving down the road and it’s calm, still vaguely sunny, there’s breeze, the sea is somewhere on the left and it’s almost dusk. A building up front towers over all, the Tikal perhaps, or maybe the Taj Mahal. It wasn’t there before and its feels ominous. I know something is happening a second before the rest. Yet we’re all in this together. Objects start tumbling from the sky before us: tables, cars, machines, electronics, trees, body parts, shoes, flowers and chickens. We see it but it’s too late to stop and we’re under the pouring rain of humanity. And now we all know this is the end, it is the end of it all. Tossed into the terminal, an itch of disappointment tugs at me. I thought this would feel different. There’s no sudden realisation, no purpose, no regret. My life doesn’t flash before my eyes. I just quietly find myself dismantling… everything splinters, matter is no more, and I vaguely think this is what it might be like if a planet struck earth, if we were imploding on ourselves. I’m disassembled painlessly and bloodlessly into blackness. And as our history is scratched out by the universe’s absentmindedness, I become extra dimensional, pulsating sparkles in the nothingness. Inexplicable and immaterial, maybe this is what pure consciousness feels like.

Featured Image by Danish artist Anja Hemmingsen. Find her on: http://anjahemmingsen.com

Post # 6 Maybe I Should Just be Your Friend

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. I must have misinterpreted something, it’s too confusing to be true. Maybe I’m just an antisocial idiot, with a fancy for big words: an arrogant existentialist with a chip on my shoulder. I love myself, wretched, damned and attractive, love how big and important this unbearableness feels. What if simplicity isn’t too dumb for me? I love myself too much, I hold myself too high – am I unbearable, insufferable and vile?

I’ll just let my devious thoughts all go to hell, I’ll talk to you. Goodness knows, we might even be friends! Rejoice together, appreciate all things, the small and the big ones. Give labels and names to everything we know. For certain. Nothing will be heavy anymore. I won’t feel nauseous at the words slipping off my tongue, at the people slipping into me.

No more thumping in my ears, no more hating. Things will all be yes or no. We can talk about anything and everything, set up a firm set of morals and make them true. We can be righteous, kind and strong – certainty will prevail all! Maybe I won’t even feel …

… that scratching feel inside my gut,
saying that it makes no sense at all!