The Grudge Sludge Express Way (For SOmeone) - JLG Clift

There’s sludge and right now behind a bronze and beige patchwork of weeping skin leaking beads that turn to snail trails and badly drawn eyebrows that are knitting nothing in their sculptor’s fever sleep it’s going through veins like rotten fudge forgotten by some kid behind the radiator when they were small and speechless but now they’re tall and they can talk and the sludge of yesteryear the one that people fear now stalks through her slumbering body and the body of her child who’s alone in the kitchen at the witching hour the sour faced clock ticking and tocking the highchair rocking and nearly falling every time the child moves; the lights are switched off the moon raking across the chequers board of the kitchen floor red against black with a gloss of cool tundra white moon light and the drool of the child trying to drink from an empty Sippy cup and crying and dying in her plastic highchair; her skin’s grey the chair’s flaking fuchsia and is fastened too tight it’ll be replaced by a wheelchair soon enough if she lives long enough to get there; the child’s eyes stare down down down through the crack in the canvas of the red tile near the sink split in two the child sees beyond the black she sees the rot in the crack the termites wrapping against the light wood foundations rotting them right through to make way for roaches and the bustling armies of rats and locusts pouring in by the coach full and on the TV there are talks of the UKIP nation are afoot.

The urban deconstruction crew’s thriving on the surfaces in cold cups of cheap tea in bottle caps in rotting white bread baps in half eaten ready meal stews from the off licence that right now has the N20 twisting through defacing it spitting glass and wholesale bread and brick and display and shelf all at once splitting the head of the keeper asleep at the till against the sill of the shelf coated in the wealth of obscure cigarettes all the packaging now torn and charred and splattered the street empty apart from debris the block the night the child the people the place are forlorn and laid bare bloodied and beaten under the glare of a half shy moon curling into a wry smile as clouds come close and for a moment the shroud that the grudge sludge has cast over the mother and the child has spread outside. But it doesn’t last, and before the sunrise the moment has passed and the sensation of dread has once again retreated back to the flat to sack happiness from the barely family’s howling heads and all that the girl can think about in her second hand bed is what people have said about her.

 She used to be wild and fun a sunshine child but the trudge has changed her the news strained her and aged her she asked the lord who had a score to settle who held a grudge so grotesque in proportion that they gave her something that not only ruined her but forced her baby into concussive currents of contortions for life; true she refused the abortion (a fact that haunts and taunts from the back of her mind) but that’s because she didn’t know about the sludge back then and she wanted a child to remember the cruise and the man and the view and the sea and the night they spent with oysters and tequila under stooping palm trees in Ibiza the sound the life the clubs the bodies of youth rubbing up against each other starting to chaff she saw them as neon wraiths from years ago back when she used to go down there and make mistakes to skipping drums and synthetic snares well she made one last one and it’s cost and now the girl is lost and all that there’s left to feel is the empty of her life and the frost creeping up her toes to her head and the knowledge that she’ll soon be dead.

There’s no cure no core no root to the problem to shoot at everything’s raw everything’s sore she roars but no one hears because no one’s here and all that comes out are the tears; she’s got 2 years left at best and then the beating will cease in her beaten breast and she will be dragged into premature rest and the child be left to suffer alone to feel the home once again become a house that’s doused in dismay and disease she’s posted the keys to the place to a friend in the hopes that someone will find her when her end does come when the sludge as made it to her brain through the lull of her brittle skull and finished its journey completing its STI manifest destiny that the friend will see the key and come to set the child free as well so that the child does not have to suffer the pain of the swells of savage sensation slithering inside finding every year of life that she tries to hide away and dragging it out covered in the sludge into the grey of Autumn day as if to make some point some display some warning to all that watch her body being taken out in the morning with the child in tow crying and still dying alone now that no one cares to hear because they’re too busy having fun to care that death is near lurking in their loins below the ratty pockets of skinny jeans filled with lint and ripped wristbands from fringe clubs and copper coins.

In her obituary in the Hoxton Times she’s put a warning in place of her life story below the picture of her face the words are small and smudged and brief and are met by the immortal youth with cynicism and disbelief: The grudge sludge express way is here to stay and it’s cumming to a groin near you very soon. The page is balled up and dropped on the street and dragged away past multi-coloured Converses and Docs harbouring feet the sheet of paper blooming as it unfolds like a flower that is forever ignored the warning written off as a scare story that will never be read or told again, just relived because the grudge sludge is the sludge that everyone will give everyone eventually it came for her and mark my words it’ll come for you and for me.  Mark the words.

'The boy opens a book he shouldn't be reading...' - JLG Clift

The boy opens a book he shouldn’t be reading the one on the highest shelf the only one that’s had its coating of dust taken off the one that holds a wealth of wonder the one that brings about lighting and thunder outside when the boy discovers its hiding spot and takes it down to read late at night when the babysitter and her boyfriend high on cheap draw from their suburban supplier who hangs out by the dyers at the Laundromat are out like lights on the couch Mafioso shouting on the screen but no level of noise can drag the girl and the boy from their world that’s on zoot mute; the boy could shoot his father’s pistol and no one would hear but the boy fears the gun he fears becoming the hunters son he never wishes to insight such mighty fear into harmless rabbits and deer who always run and who’s coats always turn to sundown red no matter how fast they move because they can’t escape the gun or the led.

The boy is well read his father much the same his father a man of great fame in the writing world a man who’s hurled his exploits in their truest hues of honesty and been praised for it: the voice of a generation the man who’s words have bought the nation to its trembling knees the writer that sees his nation for all it is and charts it down the holder of the Laureate crown the man who’s narrators never reach the sundown they were riding towards the man who writes biblically and cynically of nuns as whores and of priests selling scores in confessional booths and of the filthy fret work of the late night back street strip club funk frontman or bastard blues wailed by the black and the beaten negros who have never eaten with a knife or a fork and who barely talk anymore. He writes America, but he doesn’t right it. The boy is not the man he feels that he should be but he hopes what he sees in the book which he isn’t supposed to look in will help him transition from boy to man from no one to someone from burden to son.

The book arches and crackles big black battered and expands into two uneven stacks of bone white paper with tapered edges and wedges of thick black text in columns running down the bone like rot the boy strains his eyes and starts to read the words he’s never heard before; his brows are raised and his mind’s ablaze characters wielding words he’s been told he’s not supposed to say; men are playing gods and something less and something more than changing laws that were handed to them by the core of time whose ancient hands are lined with withering wrinkles as vast as Arizonian valleys and that are eternities wide and full of nothing but sand and skin and the scars of sins that the creatures he created have committed and beyond the reading the hands are starting to bleed now the creator’s in pain he used to strike back at the nations teaming with his creations but the most recent testament of his acts lead us to believe that the creatures are now always acquitted for reasons unknown despite taking his son from his home and despite leaving the creator alone to sob on his rusting throne as his son is torn apart by the mob that he’s saving as they display his filleted corpse picked clean by the reigning vain and the vultures at the scene of the crime.

 The boy, he reads of perverts and tyrants who rise in the mists of marauding mobs lost flares their hands to attract the masses from the black into their sickly bosom false torches false ways false flames to be fanned by the destitute too tired to tell the second coming from the mega church substitute; these men forged from fear and farce go about their days with ghastly godly displays raping pillaging drinking blood and calling it booze the boy eyes dilated intoxicated by the horror sift to the end to find everyone losing when the world finally mends itself by shedding the wealth of the infanticidal, the suicidal, the heretical, the fickle and the fiendish in equal measures that play contrite but only after losing the fight against the Father’s fabled might; they  keep complaining, right to the end time after time sign after sign line after line, that they can’t see the truth that takes their feet out when they have sight but refuse to register the fact because it’s easier to unbind themselves with excuses of blindness but it never works and in time the much feared man with a flowing white beard and robes to match attacks and his robes continue to roll on as he does through the past the present and the future simultaneously serving as the sutures for life that keep tearing apart every time something starts to go wrong and leak puss and blood that flood the earth leaving only arks and listeners around to rebuild.  But in the end nothing rebuilds, the sutures ripple away into the white light still stained like cathedral glass and the almighty, now just a man, turns back to eternity alone to guild his throne and to sweep the bones of his mistakes from tectonic plates.

The book shuts the boy but the paper slates slash his fingertip the book falling from his gushing grip to the floor with a thud for the ages all the rage and all the stages of confusion and disillusion hard to gauge or analyse the boy, the boy, look at his eyes! Black and drained by the pain the title of the book he wasn’t supposed to read drinking the blood into the cover and now the boy can scarcely think clearly the thunder and lightning still going outside; he has had all childish thought stripped from the courts of his mind’s palace he no longer wants toys he’s not even a boy anymore he feels like a dying man that Charon has left to row himself to Hades with only one paddle to reach the obsidian meridian of other side he feels so lost and so used and abused by the crude and the crass and the story of Christ and countless tangible tangents about sheep becoming wolves when a lamb encroaches upon their shores that tear away as the sea reaches the sand and the dirt like a leper’s skin leaking the slick of their sin into the ever darker deep of the sea the boy wonders later, years down the line when time has scabbed over the crimes of man in his short time,  whether the ocean ever regrets reaching out to society. But back in the room the boy hopes for help he’s reduced to silent yelps on the floor boards he has no one else to blame for not being the innocent he is in the picture in the frame that was on his mother’s night stand but that now lands and shatters shredded into tatters by the shards of glass but he has no one else to blame and he knows that; he looks down at the book he searches the cover for the name; the read has left a fowl taste in his mouth and foul prints of dark ink bind his mind and sink it down the crown of innocence slipping from place and it’s rim hacking his nose from his face as it leaves it’s taken him far from himself and his wealth of ignorance and listless bliss he’s a man, he’s only 12, he’s never even had a kiss but he knows of this book and all the horrors that hide in its slithering nooks and cackling crannies; he needs to remember the name in an attempt to tame the words that his parents heard and read the words that they never wanted rattling around his feathered head the boy finds the title, two words, still drinking the red from his finger. The boy sneers through the fearful tears holding back the urge to relent to the need to repent for the read.

‘What’s so holy about it?’

The Dream Deflator - JLG Clift

You thought you’d live

You thought you’d live

You thought that fortune

Or father

Would give you a break

When he took the prayers you gave

And made you feel young

Destined for everywhere but the grave

But he’s not saving you

And now you realise

As I arrive with my crew in tow

Before your leaking eyes:

Nothing you say will change the fact

That you are going to die today

Because your way is not his way

And his say outweighs yours

What he says goes

 

You’re starting to know that now

It’s just too late because the gates are coming

And the tears are running from your vision

But you cannot follow them

No you go down with the flem and the lump you’ve finally swallowed

You sink to the pits of your stomach

Trying to reach the warmth of your core

But the core is cold by the time you get there

You just missed it, you knew you would

But you couldn’t resist

The hope that the rope would break

But it didn’t and now on your dying bed

You shake an old man

Soon to belong

To the wailing lands

As your twin pupils

Learning too much too fast

Swell and expand into black

And fail to retract again

 

You thought you felt humanity calling

For an eternal encore

Well you were wrong

No one liked the score you wrote

And now you’re floating

On the ferry man’s boat

Of brittle wood and broken bones

Made from the rubble of broken homes

Everyone on the boat

All the thousands on the decks serving as

Displays of damp dismay for all those who pass

All think they alone are being shipped

To atone for their sins their groans and moans

Rippling out like rotting ring tones from the mobile phones they used to wield

In the crackling concrete complexes that were tomb stones

for the fields that used to sway

In the breezes of a summers day

But their fate is sealed and there’s no signal to be found

In the dank black of the fatherland underground

Where the only sounds to hear

Are the claps of the ferry man’s oar scoring the surface of the river

And the wails of the dead drawing near

Coming home

Through the copper gates

Through the untiring strings

of neon fires their age untold their tongues scold

as they roll from waves into cones on the bay

where the original sinners pay for their displays

Broiling between the vinyl black of the larva frozen cold

To kneel in the sea of the scorched salvaged and savage

Before the Thinker’s throne

The clone of cleanliness with clipped wings

Crownless: the king of the things

That the other king rejected.

And I am one of those things

That he brought back

From the black around the throne

To roam the streets and the earth

To chart the believers in their weakest moments

When the bleakness bulges and bellows above all

I chart the mirth they always thought would stay

Leave their faces as they see that god never answered their calls

Or replied to their letters

And that there isn’t a place set at his banquet

For them

There’s just the pit and the black

And the racks of people just like them

Boiling in the cherry coloured flem

Of the lava in hell

Where the rejects swell and pop apart like champagne corks

Into sizzling shards

Repeatedly

Ceaselessly

 

 

Behold all still alive

I am the dream deflator

And this is my crew

And we thrive

On the crops that the Final Man’s scythe

Reaps

We capture you weeping

As you tire and close your eyes

And try to tell yourself that you’ll just be sleeping

I am the dream deflator

And you can watch me in action later

Channel 4

After the news but before Fresh Meat

I’ll taunt another man crying

Swaddled like Christ

in unwashed sheets

 

and you'll just watch