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.
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