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

The Twins - JLG Clift

Sisters bursting mental blisters with copper nail scissors blood and water gushing out of the daughters in the midst of the monsoon nothing better to do their copy of Twister was tattered and scored and the board had no arrow they didn’t know where to put their feet and no money had stayed in the monopoly game they used to play it’d gone away in fives and tens and hundreds over the years and no there’s nothing left to go and there’s nothing to show for the exit just the red pits of plastic where they used to stay. There’s nothing true about their world or their lives clouds dart and dive dirty woollen knives burying themselves in skies that are all beaten and blue the moon’s full and flawless at the sky’s heart like a cue ball; the twins with matching heads of brittle beige hair twined up into balls with Chinese chopsticks whittled from red marble sit in living reflection no connection to anything nothing lasts neither cast word nor shadow no light below or above they’re just gazing getting nowhere just staring; there’s nothing but the haze of the weather and the harsh contrast between the shouting of the storm and the silence in their Ivy League boarding school dorm red bricks crackling like sticks in Brownie brewed flames back when the twins fought the leering wilderness of wild frontier peeling and popping in the hurricane rain ripping the colour from the stone as it falls from its home in the sky alone to die no not to die it never lived but it’s given millions of lives and now its mad now it’s sad and it wants to take some back the element lacking all remorse steers its course like the horse of death towards the sisters in silk kimonos of red white and blue with skin of milk and teeth of pearl girls drawing breath but for how long? The girls are too wrapped up in the sight of themselves to realise something’s going wrong their eyes blue and green have never seen anything so fierce have never seen nature before have never taken their eyes off each other but now they do for the drunken mother with a hurricane hush her whips of wind rush towards the twins who are guilty of nothing at all beyond self-absorption their world falls into twisting whistling contortions around their ears years of memories whirling around the silence of the dorm drowned in the sound of the scornful storm mementos of once-weres and never-will-be-agains razor sharp sugar glass from souvenir chandeliers floating with feathers from pillows and stuffing from teddy bears tear the skin and the silk as it glides on so slow it looks fast the blood from the girls drawn by the past cycling in the chrome rungs of the cyclone their faces are beaten and blue their skin white their eyes red; Liberty and Ivy the twins of America lie dead their bodies threading through the rubble like vines that have been cut down for reaching too far up into the crown of the atmosphere too fast too sharp and it is here where they died that they will lie found but unmoved their moods drained from their bodies their existence unchanged for the most part; they’re still looking at each other lying in the crackling covers of what they used to own alone, not even the vulture of the hawk or the regale now balding eagle dare to pick the flesh from these girls enmeshed in the rubble their memories in pieces poking out through the foundations like pre-pubescent tufts of stubble because the birds of prey that fly far away from the praying nation paying hand over fist for the actions of the dearly missed daughters know that the flesh is not worth the trouble that it brings after the taste has faded Ivy’s eye tastes like apple pie before it turns putrid and before the twin in the rubble becomes bone, a relic in relics and rags sagging into the shit shaded salt of the land that gave her and her sister birth and has now taken it away because the Twins of America had outstayed their stay and had become lazy, too lazy to even play anymore, too lazy to follow the laws she set out for them; she’s been working to weed the twins out for a while she’s lined their stomachs with dollar green bile that burns right through them in her flem she has spat down disease after disease to try to bring them to their knees to try to stop them staring at each other and look upon their mother and their killer who has now spilled their blood for another, their brother to the East.  But this action, the mother knows, will not give her peace either nor will it enable her to live any longer gleefully, but if the mother must lose herself to her stirring mass of iconoclastic children vampires by choice that take chunks not with their teeth but with bulldozers and oil drills driven in their millions by the voice of a thousand tongues from the top of its lecherous lungs then she will take a few with her she will take what she has given back as the children continue to hack away until there are no children left to speak. The mother will die, meek and mangled in the silence of a world without nations or occupations; a creation left alone to roam freely on its axis, free to be; that is what the mother wants to see.