Bride To Be - JLG Clift

I’d say it left, but it never came to leave, it never heaved itself to the rent by the hour hollow of a would be rendezvous gone awry with a series of increasingly intentionally missed connections and a succession of sighs shifting through the seasons from ones of genuine grief to absolute relief. It staggers belief if you’re asking, which you wouldn’t, because you didn’t, because you never will now and though I try to keep my internal voice still, stern, I can’t help but to yearn, not for what was there, because that’s been laid far too bare today, but for I thought was there, someone to care for and someone who cared, something soft on the rim of romance, something rare and seemingly reachable, instead of this ravaging rawness that caresses me claws to flesh tip to nail bed stained red, red as the cherry in this flat highball waiting to be pissed up the wall, my drunken aim angled for what I thought was the back of the bowl, but was the face of the stall.

It should’ve been you, it could’ve been you, I knew things got in the way, but to realise there was nothing to get in the way of, why keep the façade? Was it so hard to be honest? Was it so hard to face me, instead of leaving me to stare into the the ticking of a clock through the bottom of a drained double, a simple clock with a dirty face and three slow hands that triple despite the doubles downgrading to singles as the tab towers around me, standing, stood up, being picked up by a bouncer who could trounce me but doesn’t out of pity.

I was never pitiful, so I thought, though I guess the look courts me tonight in your place, because it was your place, regardless of what you say. Good or bad. It was supposed to be your place today.

But enough of that. I’m a bride to be, and I’ve got a priest to see, and a mother to make happy, so I’ll free myself of this note, never to be quoted, only to be floated through the federal system, stamp-less, classless, limp with liquor drying crusted in circular formations never to leave the county let alone the nation. I’m drunk, and it is dreary, and the year is nearly over.

We shared our times, toeing our wavering way down a neon Skid Row that was worlds away from Seattle, seeing due to doubles the street in doubles as a stage, and making a show of it all for no one to know about. Bodies in alleys, fingers taking turns, my prints upon you, and yours inside mine, the first to ever mine me there, that way, of your gender, of our species, to make me ever want to say the words I never knew when to say. You showed me something I never knew I could feel, and gradually you left it, not over night, but over drifting decades, an open heart hardening into a haggard hole, open arms never closing around you, but staying open, degrading into a widening wound that this letter has bloomed from. This letter to you, this letter to no one, this letter to the lover long gone. It was a phase for you, that’s all you ever had to say, it was your phase, so why phase me with it? Why appraise me the way you did, your warm fingers in every pleasurable place, bringing a wet refuge from the drought I never knew needed addressing before you started undressing me?

I’m a bride to be, and though I will soon be free of this note, you won’t free me. It doesn’t matter how many maxi pads pass without event, because your fingerprints are still in there, and this love which I wish were hate, feels like a cervix tear. You were in lust, so why’d you suggest love? Why’d you stay, why’d you call? Why did you let me sit down for the one night stand, and let me take your hand, and smile when I said join me? Why’d you join me all those years, over all those beers, in all those queer clubs, those clam baked bars, those dyke dives, and act like I brought you there. Like you never tasted me, like I never did the same, over the years your perceived tolerance building to a tight lipped shame.  And then you stopped meeting, and left me standing in a frame too big for just me, and you left it all to be, burying me behind a bevy of rain checks and a broken levee of pleasantries.

You know I called you today, to see if you’d really settle for seeing me settle, not with a man, because it wasn’t a gender dilemma. It was you: an abstract alley rut that repeated herself throughout the wealth of our dorms amid the norms of our set. I can’t lay a hand on stocking tops today, because of what I wore when we used to play.  It’s hurts too much, just the touch.

I’m a bride to be, and the only place I have left to hide now is behind my veil, soon to be unwrapped, found and revealed in front of a man who fell in love with what something is, and not a someone who made them feel. Real seems so relative, so repugnant, not meant for my today. I would give it all away just to feel your contemptible concept of a harmless phase haze me again. I would give it all, but what is there to give, and who is there to give it to, if not you?

I’m a bride to be, and even after today I’ll be there waiting for you to set me free, not from a place of weakness, but from a place of will, because only a profound strength could instil me with the ability to call you again, and set a date in the calendar for you to cancel on, only to set another, and pretend I’m not pretending that you’re not already gone.

Love, Bills and Being - JLG Clift

I got stuck


Somewhere
Somehow
In some place
On someone
On something
In a ring
Among rings
On a bill
Among bills


Never-ending
 
Just beginning
Never winning
Just beginning
Never breaking
Just beginning
Always shaking
Just beginning
Never learning
Just beginning
Always yearning
Just beginning
Never seeing
Just beginning
Never being
Just beginning

Never slowing
Yet never going
Never newer
Yet never Older
Never to freeze
Never to smoulder

Never pleasured
Never pained
Never treasured
Forever waned

Always shallow
And always full
Always to swallow
Forever hollow
Like you were yesterday
Like you'll be tomorrow


Never done
But always over
Always playing
But never won
Never living
But still dying
Always trying
But never winning


Here I am
A man
Constantly 
Just beginning

 

Wander Years - JLG Clift

I wander those waning years sometimes still seeking sanctuary weak of will from the woes of this week from the traps of my today looking for comfort in my misremembered moments of a yesterday years ago now my hopes sewn like seeds invisible into the sands of that time all those trips all those breaks all those tissues all those peanuted ties all those plaid skirts that split in the summer and showed slivers of thighs slights we found so tantric accidental flashes that drove us manic; all those shirts we’d swear were half buttoned gullible gluttons gawping at something that was never there to stare at beyond the optimistic ogles of our mutual mind’s eye; all those tattered catholic crests sloping over our puffed out chests and their unimpressed and resting breasts; all those little molehills made by us into mountains that haven’t stood the test of time untainted; all those forbidden and always bitter beers that we swore blind were just what the day called for through our wincing on a winter-worn wall in November rain red brick straining against the grainy green of ever-growing moss in Whetstone near our school near my home as we made fun of everything we saw our eyes glazed and glassy after half a can our smiles wide our laughs loud our words blue and booming blooming nothing we meant really ever all of us 16 and never feeling fresher; all of us full of spirit all through the evening feeling splendid for the night fighting flirting hurting no one really just being just seeing the sights just trying to be at the right place at the right time with all the wrong girls who made us curl in our chairs and miss our stops because we couldn’t stop staring at them on those journeys home; the girls that kept us awake when we were all alone who we’d hope would invite us in like sirens singing and searching for ships and sea men; girls to share our sighs to bare their skin to us and bear with us through our muffled and misguided meanders their hands steering ours clear of our pre-mature mistakes letting us learn on their shifting curves constantly the girls steading our hands through the nervous shakes all those apologies all those scraped knees all those unrealised opportunities to walk them to their door afterwards all those glimpses all those glances over shoulders during snogs as we took chances at the gates between classes between sets homeless for the night to dodge our parents’ sight with all the saints to our side and a disappointing metal band strumming away inside in the dim in the dark under unlit street lamps in each other in memory now all this hides ground glass among grains of scorched sand and who we were resides with it all my fears; all those moments we felt were so timeless, aged and caged in those wandering years that we walked away from towards a future full of fears that my tears cannot turn away:

The degree to the dole to the sink hole of suburban decay to a depleting O-Zone and a diminishing ability to finish breaths without wheezing and that queasy feeling when I’m reeling with the wrong person at the end a room away from a subterranean tomb my teeth stained my mind feigned fractured waiting to see if rapture reaps me looking through my life for something to keep me in my body in my bed and finding only echoes of being 16 in my head until my mind’s gone and my mouth moves through the motions to maintain a movie refrain my dying words a nonsense quote barely heard by the nurse who doesn’t remember my name without the chart she so artfully checks every time she sees me; the name of a sled I never owned.

 A lie

to mask the ones I say are true the ones where there was actually a you to address the ones where you were actually there in that bus by my side or in my sight or staring with me 'stylishly' stoic in our black blazers or not caring to look back in your simple summer dress. I confess to all: none of you were ever there to address or to caress but I couldn’t take the empty so I placed you there to deter the distress I felt.

It doesn’t matter now anyway, because I’m alone in a bed with a place for a pan and time spans behind instead of ahead today; panic sounds panels come down shocks shock ticks tock my chest rises and drops my toes curl my teeth clench my head swirls and I see the ceiling and I feel the healing and I feel the heart beating the heat back into my fingers as the life I wish I hadn’t led this way lingers leaving me here with a leer the taste of today as bitter as those beers but worse but real; the room clears of the underpaid double shift leaving me alone again as they always do to sift through this terrible present but I can’t anymore so I press a button, feel morphine pump through my collapsoing core, and I wander back to the wonder years that never were, thumb to the button, never for the truth to occur again.

Kustoms

Trap trounces all sound pounding on ceaselessly people sitting drunken slurping smoke through pureys peacefully on the sullied bed spread the neon glare from the stuttering laptop screen the red of the YouTube logo lighting up the blue of stale plasticine on the desk with the single cigarette rising from it amber in the lime light of the kitchen purple in this one the logo the only thing not switching with the sound never changing the cigarette smoke is rising from the temporary lilac of its filter to the white of the ceiling rearranging itself from a stack to a flat packed mist reddened fumes collapsing into the cracked roof of the loud room in the loud house in the loud home on the quiet street the sleet of another drunken endeavour caking the driveway soles devouring the sludge tucking chunks into tracks printing puke into every nook and cranny every inch drying in like it was always meant to be there and all around the house party something's tearing something's breaking someone's taking something for nothing.

Go down.

See the boys are back in town if they ever left ghosts of Christmas past toasting to an impending success something to celebrate everything’s a clean slate all of a sudden when all’s going well all’s going up speaking to people I saw for seven years conversation wilted and wordless after a few sentences nothing in common numerators and denominators imperfect improper impossible stoned drunk stoppered and poppered and pissed in the soundless hiss of a subsonic bliss in the room of skinny jeans and statues earphones on words thoughts energy gone barely able to heave a breath out a little room across from the exit a little quiet in a house full of shouts and howls and sultry scowls into supposedly sexy selfies to be photoshopped tomorrow drawing attention to that crop top that was borrowed to bring out the best of the breast in you, I go on through cut past the old boy crew to find the new the warmth in the cold the gold in the mine of another suburban home pass around some home grown goods make conversation like normal people would make some jokes finish the smoke part ways for the time being the lack of care the feeling of being unknown gleefully freeing the organic taste waiting in my mouth reaching back to the rear to the throat from that last toke look to my left fling a fag into the sink after I drag the paper back to the full of the filter to the golden ring the eagle in ashes something else smashes somewhere whatever everyone’s too wasted to care the kitchen’s clearing I walk back upstairs.

Go up.

Look down the tiny tufts of leather torn from my tips by broken glass clear and fragmented unlamented lapping lacquer off the floor upstairs feeling spaced still no one speaking staring down the speakers cherry tinted orbs of rubber throbbing expanding contracting pursed between chapped lips painted peach below a roman nose and rosy cheeks and the glassy garlands of eyes straightened hair strained by the static of the balloon as it blooms in waves strands of hair pulsing softly vaguely as it does to her breaths and I think of black forests falling down and getting up again and again reanimating in vain falling back deflated to the white of the snow of the scalp the rubber ragged and sagging I watched it go from new to old and the night just keeps getting colder but only when the wind blows and I’m looking at an old dream and wondering where the times go the times never had the words never said the bed never shared the fears never to be tread upon just the words to be read about the maybes and the could’ves standing in the should’ves yet to become a would’ve still could be something more than a may-have-been standing with the will-have-beens taking in the stuttering synths taking in the scene the sheen of the screen engulfing my eyes reducing them to reflections nothing more just jewel-less visions and below me another bad decision mellows into snogging and quiet patters in the cloak room and but doesn’t matter and another glass clatters and I think about how hard the pieces are to see without the faults without the cracks perfectly pervious entirely empty just to cut just to grind just to break sound continues to shake the room and in the light I see the white of reality and the dark of what was never to be and the gap is so slight it bothers me because with all my might I might never be half the shadow of what I could’ve been so I keep going I keep going.

Go left.

And I’m a deft hand and a dumb tongue in the thwarts of everyone’s land standing on a mound of upturned rug at the tip of the landing handing the ladle on coated in the wash-away stains of a rum and coke too many along with a wealth of pilfered booze brassy drops of a dark beer or a light brandy hit the white of the rug from stainless steel with the grit of something or another on the base giving a twisted taste to everything it touches I pass it on after a swig and watch it go on through hands down the stairs towards the heartland.

Go down.

Reintroduce myself to half a room meet people who by some miracle know about my work before it’s even off  the ground two years ahead of time and over a beer I think about the future the crowd sinking and rising to the beat this one girl in a sailor hat lifted from a bedroom upstairs twerking so hard that she’s capsizing down to the tiles white on black I comment on a nice mac I see I don’t remember the name just the coat I look behind me see the butts floating in the kitchen sink look to the dance floor see more people just names just faces just thoughts from different places all here all steering themselves around the banisters and the sofas and the shelves and the seats I offer roles take on a couple of projects but amidst all of this someone interjects definitely different and I hear faintly her last step land on the tiles like snow falling from a leaf and melting into the freshly mown grass all in a microsecond the cold coming freezing and thawing back to water back to the root from the grey of a calm February sky nurturing the gathering fruit set to burst up bulbs of bright skinned flesh through the spring into the summer colourful things spreading out like the smoke from the bow of her mouth her fair hair the colour of the damp sand my feet found themselves on several summers ago the summer I never got to know the summer I spent free to feel ridden in and out by the undertow into the prolific placid of the Pacific horizon I met every morning from a sea view sofa a fawn fairisle throw about my shoulders; I used to get lost in her blue I always found something new there to stare at she was always fair and she was always aware but she didn’t care she was just happy that I was there not to mine not to hunt just to be and she always pushed me to be something more than just another tourist jumping off a ship and swimming back to the shore. She leads me to the dance floor gets me to dance even though I’m not a dancer but I am drunker than I was before I saw her; the room sounds continue to occur in a two two flow the sound waves stirring bodies around; I grab a glass of Buck Fizz and agree to go back home with her.

Go up. 

Say my goodbyes to a room full of glassy eyes and smiles have a hand hug hear someone drop another mug I give the collar of my coat a tug and we leave out into the cold that stays the music failing to play by the time we reach the road the playlist apparently shut down we get off the bus and the weather is fair for a February night the cold king no more the floor dry the atmosphere tame and tepid and conversation is refreshingly intrepid passed the All Saints where I have memories so embarrassing I feel slightly faint as we pass by remembering reluctantly the whos and the hows and the whys of what used to be way back when; conversation ascends into K pop and Japan foreign serial killers local sex offenders and the evil of pay day lenders and guilty pleasures no need for fillers no traffic in sight we walk through a set of hard red lights against the patchwork mauves of the night’s star littered canopy, I see a kite, green in the bare black of the barren winter tree like a leaf that’s bloomed too soon rattling above my head against nature but nurtured by the branches cradled perfectly stable we reach the roundabout and go about our ways she right I left but I’ll see her again I hope I’ll see her around again amidst the sounds of another suburban Saturday.

Go right.    

I get home smiling under the chrome and emerging cerise of the 4 AM sky. And with a sly sigh the door slithers shut and a gust of wind winds out.

Good night.   

 

Happy New Year - JLG Clift

"5"

This is it this is the time to change among the free range ravers cheering the guys and girls leering towards each other peering across through scarcely parting lips as the beats drip down from the surround sound in the dark of the rafters to the ground.

 The new year. A new year. Another year.

"4"

 This’ll be the one that you’ll ditch the beer and the blow this’ll be the one where you really go for it you know this’ll be the one where no foe will go unchallenged this’ll be the one where you kill it where you crush it where you own it where you tone it that’ll start once you’ve stopped zoning out in the peach paste of fresh puke and Teachers that you’re semi slumped in swigging from a bottle of gin with a girl at the back in the black off the floor no light no sight you touch you make out you go further it feels alright kissing strangers at midnight skipping songs sound like shredded kites in high winds you don’t know the girl you met her tonight but she doesn’t say no she’s like you alone so painfully free of someone to be with just trying to fit in because the lie feels better than the skin beneath the net of her YOLO shirt sweaty and stale and yours much the same cold and pale so frail for the fake of this frantic affection so desperate for some small kind of connection that her fingertips remain in red threading through the writhing hands raking shaking from the speed and the cold on the old of warehouse ground your own rhythm out of sync with the pumping sound that everyone else is dry humping too.

And resolutions repeat and records revolve and another year continues to dissolve. 

"3"

No one knows you’re not together forever not even you because you’re lost lying down concussed comatose ghosts in dank drainpipes on the edge black on white at the edge of a dance floor away from the roar of the real couples on New Year’s Night what a sight to see but what a thing it would be to feel something more than the undoing of zips and the mush of loose lips and the flesh you grip as you tip back into the tar down to the ground the thud of your head splitting inaudibly fluids running white red and clear steering and stirring through the cracks soaking into the black the grit and grain and the stains on the hard of your bed and still the resolutions in your heads go on the strobes shifting white to blue to red your shadows spilling into each other in the light your actions out of sight your thoughts on loan with your hearts so you don’t start to feel alone.

And nothing is resolved and you greet another groin and the meat still feels cold.

"2"

The resolutions rendered amid quaking bass and drunken mistakes the solutions you make to combat all the pollution in your life the scalpel that shreds through all that social strife created to make sure you can do what you tell yourself to do this time find that girl get that grade make your life something more than simply something surface you swear you’ll search for the deep for the raw for the real you say you’ll feel better than before to yourself in a storm of roars from the ravers on the dance floor who all agree that this year will bring more than the one before but with the grit in your back and the gash in your head and the sleet of another loaner on that rescinding boner all you feel is the slack of another lived summer cumming to nothing and the fear.

 The New Fear. A New Fear. Another new fear.

"1"

This is it this is the time to change rising from climax re-joining the free range ravers cheering the guys and girls leering towards each other feeling strange and estranged peering through parting lips as the beats drip down from the chorale of sound in the dark of the rafters to see the girl from the ground. But you never do and are left standing alone. Pink strobes turning to blue.

"Happy New Year".

 

For Friends and Furniture - JLG Clift

Found a friend down by the way today my mum she asks how school went so I tell her how we met how I scraped my knee scrambling with the other boys from the neighbourhood playing war games in the cool of the disused quarry always last slowest in the class clumsy too there was a ditch that the other boys flew over but I fell down from the mound to the stone to the ground to the grit that slit me so; I still bare and bear the scar; the skin tore the blood pumped through tattered flesh to the gravel watched it travel like a river the red slithering through the tar and the cracks in the concrete to the sleet grey of her knackered shoe the sole so worn that her feet were coming through she slowed her stride and came to my side she a few months older than I said it was okay that I cried when the shock wore off when I was in such pain it felt like the clocks had stopped seconds turning to centuries but she took the rag from her head the blue rag that kept the blonde curls taut and off her brow the way her mother taught her to but the blue flew from her forehead to the tears on my flesh and her hair came down to the black and the brown of her eye in straw coloured corkscrews; she made a joke you know, she tried to make me laugh and she did and her rag hid the cut well enough a cuff of kitchen cloth across my leg and we talked about stuff and I played the fool and by some miracle she thought I was cool and tomorrow we’re going to play some more at school.

How long is this going to go on for?

Lost a friend today at a house party drugs and drink and the Kinks flowing from speakers sinking into the carpet on collapsing shelves knocked too many times my drunken teenagers talking about themselves and she’s over there wearing the pearls that he brought for her for Christmas relaying lines from sitcoms so badly it makes my stomach stir the room is whirring the frontmen are singing there’s a stinging ring on my hand as amber ash falls from a Pal Mal held by the girl with legs for days and a clapped out motor mouth that sounds like it could and would rattle on for millennia telling me that I’m a good listener because I’m too stunned by the stupidity of the girl that isn’t her the girl who nursed my knee the girl who sees nothing wrong with what she’s doing to me her eyes hidden by the twists of tinted gold being pawed away by her boyfriend’s prying claws to care about what she’s sharing but the girl isn’t staring back at me so as I see her boyfriend close I shut the other girl up lock her lips with my lips lock her breast to my chest she pushes me back onto the sofa in the room that no one’s in anymore where they store their bikes and bric-a-brac and those who lack the friend they wanted to spend the rest of their days with kicks off her shoes continues her attack there’s a chunk of vibrating plastic lodged in my back a text a tweet a fleet of updates and a few words from the girl in corkscrews and pearls whose dress unfurls to reveal to the pretender passion her breasts that she’ll see me tomorrow and I wonder, semi hidden in the girl, when it will all end.

How long is this going to go on for?

Lost a friend on the way wrong exit both ends time bends us apart when we speak these days we never go beyond the start never get down to the deep to the finish conversation has all but diminished nations apart in thought conversation cut short repeatedly nothing to say nothing new to do the same old haunts the same old crew the same old spot where the hot of freshly spat chewing gum glues to the soles of our shoes floods the treads of our tattered trainers. We’ve been to uni we barely spoke the meeting’s a joke to be honest so silent together in the midst of Mayfair clientele quieter than the furniture that we continue to concur on about this and that at least these old beasts of wood and leather squeak openly and honestly and have the courtesy to squeak freely among themselves not caring about what the tables and the shelves think. It’s gotten to the stage where even blinking is cautious, followed by farces about late nights that make me feel nauseous. This meeting feels stained by an estranged restraint we don’t know each other well enough anymore to complain or contradict or to dig beyond the surface how are you how is the course how is the city we don’t dare force the focus to something more poignant and personal but we do force the surface for all it’s worth bad quips fake mirth bitching about peers and personnel.

How long is this going to go on for?

Lost among old friends tending to the wounds of a relationship winding down amidst the sounds of song and beer swilling bravados belting out songs from a top 20 from 20 years ago. We’re older, and this is still going on the stale of conversation carried forward four jobs later how are you how’s the job how’s the wife how’s the husband how’s the house how’s the kid never anything real, never how’s your life, never a real answer just a series of fines and synonyms for fine intertwining for the twenty minutes we see each other over lunch over coffee and cigarettes formerly now over decaf and Nicorettes we’re watching our cholesterol so the food’s very droll and tastes of nothing pseudo bacon cut from fresh tofu vein-less lifeless and grey on a chipped but chip-less blue plate staying for food is the biggest mistake we make because we can’t shake the feeling that we’re friends only by label and memory but strangers for eternity and the placemats on the table remind me of the rag against me knee and those days for it all to seem like a fable but I’m not able to get beyond that label to fact but I have to act like everything’s cool and like we’re good friends like we were in primary school.

How long is this going to go on for?

Found a friend in the soundless ground today time ticks by second by second cells rolling from the skin to the soft inside of her box in the ground where she dwells where she hides and at a eulogy I tell her friends and her family what they want to hear I tell them we were lifelong friends and that even in death our friendship won’t end and that my only regret is that I wasn’t nearer to her and some of what I say is true under the blue of a Barnet sky in the green of a cemetery of sorts at the worn brown of a bending lectern that’s been out in the rain too many times behind the black of my suit my body quakes in confusion a young man an old man a man waiting to be sprung from the speech by the preacher I wish I had been nearer I wish she was dearer to me than she was because wouldn’t it be nice to mean what I said wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say that friendships never end and that sending a body to the bottom of a mound of brown means nothing because they’re still a friend when in fact the end came long before they stopped breathing and in fact I’ve done my grieving for years through all those warm beers in those boring bars all those double dates that we both hated all those slates that were never cleaned all those words that never did mean a thing all those minutes all those moments; nothing, nothing more than the sting of that ashen ring nothing more than the day when we were small when she played queen and I played king; nothing more than tattered pictures in a chest of a child’s play things, nothing but stains on paper among innocent remains, gathering dust; nothing but.

 

Mannequin Man (Manee-Man) - JLG Clift

Excuse me but do I know you? Didn’t you come to my door, not this Tuesday but the Tuesday before? Maybe it wasn’t you, my words aren’t true like as not but thanks a lot for stopping by for that second that you did before you hid beneath the brim of that tabloid bequeathing you with tits and knowledge and that music in your ears. Who’s singing? They sound good; sorry I probably should go, you go about your way. It’s embarrassing really my apologies extend like wine-less vines once again over another case of misremembered de-ja-vu I’m sorry, once again, that I’ve disturbed you.

 I see you’re reading that article on page 6; isn’t it sad that that’s true and that men really are no different from animals? Isn’t it a tough world to chew? The toughest I ever knew I tell you that much but once more I’m sorry; go about your way; don’t mind me I’m just talking just clutching trying to put some colour into the grey of my day even if that colour turns to blue even sadness would do to be honest something’s better than nothing and nothing is what always seems to stay after people fade away; blue would do but laughter would do better but I should let you get going.

 It’s just I’m lonely these days.

I just keep talking my life’s a haze and my mind’s impaled in the shards of this winter’s frozen tails of hail like Vlad’s steaks quaking in the sunshine (but never melting) but I don’t know why I’m this way; my life’s been fine everything's done everything's complete I’ve got nothing to do but beat my feet across the slick of inner city street in rain and that’s the problem that’s why I keep trying to intertwine my world with another’s and again; again I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ve got my mother’s gift of the gab; my speech has always been mangled it’s always been sluggish my tongue thudding dully spreading speech sullied even more by my wispy lisp but I’ve hidden that well I hope; I hope too much I think I think too much too that’s also very true but I can’t help it.

 Thought holds court over my world now because with no one to talk to how do I know I am if I’m not thinking? Who said that line by the way? Do you know? It’s a long shot but come on give it a go your guess is as good as mine; come on it’s just a guess it’s just a wrong answer at worst hardly a clandestine caper speaking of which have you reached that howler in the paper yet? The one about the windshield wiper the nun the lift and the vet?

It’s like a Faulty Tower tangent I do declare; I imagine the sight of those two must have raked in a few stares from the crowd on the ground floor who were probably wondering what the rosary beads were used for, you know, before the bloke broke the story to the press about divine intervention releasing the tension from his morning glory. I bet that’s going to get quite the mention at the office this morning; personally I hope the fucker loses it all including his pension; I can’t believe he let a lady of the lord board him like she did not that she was a real lady of course but it’s the thought the image the idea he didn’t know that when he leered towards her rear; in reality she was an escort with a talent for twisting into contorts recently divorced I heard because she caused such a stir in her "husband’s" haggard heart that it nearly never started again but of course if they ever interviewed her I’m sure she’d hear nun of that;  sorry awful pun, it’s a bad habit; sorry another again this is a gift from my mother’s side but I’m keeping you you just go back to hiding headphones glued in mediocre music up full still staring at the paper page that's been read but I can see you in your head through your eyes praying towards the sky that I go so that you can get on with your day; I’m so sorry that I got in your way really I am I know you think I really don’t give a damn but I do I really do it’s just I’ve been lonely and longing to know you for so long months actually since that house party in September when you spilled your drink on me not that you’d remember that obviously the only reason I do is because I’m lonely you see but I don’t want the lonely to define me in your bob topped mind although I already know it has; if only there was more to your view of another than what ‘is’ if only you knew what I could be if you cared but you don’t and I just shared for nothing but an empty barrage of shifting stares.

I’ll be going now so you can go on with your life and let me fade, lonesome and loathsome into the façade of your Monday hunched my lips bunched into a chapped burst ball of quasi-rubber looking always for another but always feeling like the other in the office on the train; admit it; to you I’m nothing more than the tawny stain on your best beige blouse the one you look at with nothing but distain.

 Whatever it doesn’t matter you won’t answer you’re not even listening to my refrain I only hope as I go hunched shelter-less into the city with the hurricane approaching that you don’t feel the pain of becoming nothing more than a stain on the society you used to be in not that you ever will be because of course you’re better than me, aren’t you? Fitter happier more productive because you're more to me than I am too you but before you go I’ve got a question:

Those mannequins in the shops at the Circus where you get off, would you stop if they were naked?

Void of the labours of luxury labels the fables of fashion long gone no longer coated in camouflage to get your attention no mentions of style or sex or popularity just the waxy clarity in the bare of their pale plastic flesh disgusting (but forgettably so) even in the kindest light; I don't think you'd have to stare for long before you cast them from your sight because why would you care if there's nothing there for you to covet. Am I right? Are you wrong? You're neither. You're gone. And so am I.    

 

TAR Night (Time's Acid Reign) - JLG Clift

Time people names come and go white lines diverted from the Kentucky Derby are towed into nostrils jutting out from youthful faces a patchwork of white blotched red tan and brown the lines like miles of motorway on a person-less day disappear fast inch by inch from an overturned plate perched in the centre of a slate grey steel garden table like a manhole the piles forged on it into several dusty gorges with an expired under 16 oyster card bearing a faded face none of us recognise anymore not that I ever did in the first place I’m new surrounded by old drifting drunkenly on the soles of my Chelsea boots that are damp and caked with the pretty petals of the lush rainbow patio I roam with Jim and hot chocolate and a semi-slack smirk trying to play catch up trying to get in on the ‘old time’ stories and the in-jokes being told but never truly getting in from the cold.

I meet people that I’ve never met before more people much brighter than I am used to meeting my generations' leaders maybe or maybe failed potential, great minds engulfed with whispers back into society I guess we’ll see I’ll keep my ear to the ground an eye to the printing press (as long as there is one left) and my facebook open; in the midst of a moonlit rye whisky mist I’m sad to say I cannot list any names but I won’t forget the faces of the ones I don’t want to I’m better with faces and there are several that I’m sure will leave truly extraordinary traces on the Times; they came to me fast introduction after introduction degree after degree future after future these people’s lives so sewn up by comparison mine feels at times like it’s splitting its sutures constantly right down to the core of the Great Work, patched up too many times; sometimes when I write it just feels like my hand’s mangling language into rambling rhyme as opposed to eloquently capturing moments of time; I think about Waits and Cave and I get the feeling that time is constantly coming and it's gunning for all impossible indestructible and immune from blame because to blame it we’d have to tame it which we can’t so it continues to grow shadows out from our feet experience by experience story by story choice by choice until we lie vulgarly voiceless in the dark of our legacy’s silent skyscrapers humbled by the empty scale of the past and the frail remains of the future.

 Standing inside looking out onto the crowd under the shroud of industrial white canopy the lines still creeping up sullied snouts the speakers shout in snares beats and tongues my mum rung I didn’t answer in time people around are grooving and moving and sarcastically twerking ‘working it’ drunkenly but while I am the drinker I am never the dancer and go outside to talk to the birthday boy but he’s busy and I get the back pretty quickly and I get talking to several someone else’s conversation flowing nicely from what I recall although I’m sure Jim being the friend that he is has installed a block on the embarrassing moments of which there must be a few; I talk with an Engineer about Kate Bush under the shifting hue of a sifting strobe I think we got onto a favourite song I know mine’s Symphony in Blue but I can’t remember his though I reckon that it was Hounds of Love that beckoned him most effectively; I start thinking about Nick Lowe start humming So It Goes inaudibly drumming my toes against the table leg out of time; I start snagging my feet on everything my form sagging my heels dragging my legs lagging 5 feet behind my torso walking at an obtuse angle down the staircase trying to dodge the low clothesline that tries to transform into a noose for me; I go up a flight and bump into the birthday boy’s mother and I see her daughter in 30 years’ time I talk with her too and it seems mundane to some degree but it’s a change of pace and conversation that is freeing because there’s a comfort in speaking to someone you know in a land of someones you don’t and someones you probably won’t ever.   

In the garden I’m hit by a face from my past that I don’t recognise and who doesn’t recognise me we used to hang out every day and indulge in ‘it’ or ‘tag’ during play time but sitting here now rhymes and rhetoric regarding the reunion come as scarcely as conversation did we sum up 12 years in single sentences and chat briefly about possible future occupations before going our separate ways and dispersing from pinstriped deck chairs of blue and red cutting into the verte earth threaded with cigarette butts we go off into the malaise of the birthday boy’s mainstay mates I meet the impending wife a remix of a Knife track booming in the back we talk a bit about something and nothing maybe about music actually definitely about music about a thesis (?) she’s writing based on research regarding the divide between sub-cultures and ‘tribes’ in modern music no jibes went around it was a nice natter not that I remember much of it not that there was much to even remember the sounds in the background meander more fluidly  than anything else I’m sure she pandered to my askew interpretations of the terms sugar coated her reaction in an attempt to lessen the traction that could have been; it’s been known of me to make a hames of meeting my mate’s other halves I have a knack for snapping the suave out of their image instantaneously unintentionally of course but nevertheless I must confess I do to my shame I have accrued many a tale on the subject matter that would drive the pale from my skin and that would make me frail with embarrassment but I cannot lament these languishing pseudo-super liaisons because shame forges the frame around that defining still moment that will mark your life more than fame or family will because it tames you into this subdued state of self-hate and grating nerves and sweaty hands like nothing else can.

I look around. Ticking clocks will always make my ears prick up. I cup my hand over my phone to check the closest thing I’ll ever have to a watch so I can stare through the glare.

It’s three AM, and there’s cherry tasting flem glistening in the back of my throat a bourbon bound ball like the bloat of the full moon in the sly slinking clouds of the last summer sky; lines are still being ridden we must be measuring multiple meter sticks now the green of the phoney one dollar bill that has been fashioned into a tube peels apart under the duress of prying fingers their tips stained with dried mud and stale suds the unpeeled bill is lapped at the ink running through the 50 shades of green all the way back to the base white with no meaning the only clean thing in the dark of this morning.

 Day is not dawning but thoughts are still spawning and conversational pieces no matter how thought provoking lie in ruins verbal husks on table tops smoking like Hindenburg wrecks resulting in nothing but yawning from all involved truth be told; we’re all older than I remember and we will be again and again our youthful umbrellas turning to tatters in time’s acid rain; he’s turning 20 I’m turning 19 in under a year the gleam of a future I was longing for doesn’t feel like it’s glowing anymore not as much as it did when it hid in the vagueness of could and may now the day is nearing the future comes running beaten and broken its mouth open speaking fast and loud and I feel far from proud as it lifts its shroud and vows that it’s finally here now like a  prodigal son that didn't learn anything on the run and just came back casting nothing but boredom wrinkles and warnings around the words of wisdom that were surely in there somewhere within lost with the cost of living in the sun; I grieve for these sold words, the words that are never retrieved.

 I’m waspy, baked, shifting from drunk through sober into the dreaded pre-morning hangover off kilter everything starts to filter through to me in its worst shades and tastes conversations are not spoken in joyful drunken tones they’re squealed out in nerve gnawing natters.

 I think about the patters of 6 small feet in pastel wellies in the sleet of winter wittering away in the grey light of New Hampshire day outside the kitchen window of the hillside house I’d like to have looking out of it soundlessly with a wife standing next to me herbal tea simmering in the kettle the sweet smelling steam rising up through the vision through the dream past the undone washing up past frying pans past the crockery in glass front cupboards past the family picture of the first trip to Geneva to the antique tapestry weaving across the top of the room composed of trees and nettles and hollies and blueberries and eternally unpicked cherries and carollers wishing us merry Christmases and happy new years in a future where tears do not dare drip or slip from beneath my kid’s eyelids for fear of a crisp Kleenex wiping them off the face of my world.    

My phones goes, my mum starts and tells me to finish up so I do prying myself from the back garden recliner with the tie-dye tartan lining pulled out I say my farewells to a band of enlightened and chemically heightened ne'er-do-wells; back inside at the door between the stairs and the street I look too the right and down as I leave into the drab of the 4:30 AM late night cab that I’m sure was nice before the last passenger tagged along eating special fried rice and tango tinged beef curry and didn’t wipe the seats they sullied; I see old Converses that were stained on smaller feet years ago when the toes barely touched the tip the tales the adventures lace through the stains and tears like the old Ribena tinted laces chase their most complex form through the holes around the tongue of the shoe tying it down for good. I look up see the hoodie that I remember the birthday boy wearing when we were 12 I wish I could connect it with an event or occasion but I can’t I just know that that hoodie was worn and it’s put a slant in a slat sitting somewhere holding something up in the maisonette of pre-pubescent memory the birthday boy walks me to the door and I depart riding on watching the street and the house transition from in-front to beside to behind to gone.

And it hits that I’ll never see him again at 19 again but time’s approach does not fill me with rage just slight dismay as night peters out into the last of the August days. Three small words linger like titles over the party site in a dismal but poignant refrain: Time’s Acid Rain, Time's Acid Rain, Time's Acid Reign.

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