This Darkness Mine

by Greg James

  Silence is not an option. Turn the radio up, not down. Television on. Rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb. Mutter-mutter-mutter the sub-vocal refrain. Leave forbidden swamplands alone. The murky, immoral places where the unsafe lies. Not for you. Beware the bugger-bugger bird and the dubious, juiciest bum to snatch. Take out-of-date laxatives and granddad’s browning stomach pills. Sick out your insides, not needed, what’s outside that counts.

  Hear the crowd. Know the crowd. Be the crowd. Nothing else.

  Never think, give away, give more.

  Take is the only option left.

  This riot has been co-opted; merger in progress, stalling at early stages, negotiating association. As long as the basic principles remain intact, as long as integrity is maintained, as long as we can be perverts, we won’t take drugs. We’ll take drugs if we can’t be perverts. We’ll take bad jobs, fuck one way only and drink until we puke out our intestines.

  Good ropey fun.

  Oh, that’s fine.

  Good clean and legal.

  Let me ink an X on my throat.

  Write under it, boot heel to be ground in here.

  This is the life.

  Story I heard at the water cooler #2

  This happens:

  Crying man makes a gun-shape with his hand.

  Sticks the barrel in his mouth.

  Someone shouts “bang!”

  Does he die?

  The contradictions fly by, dashing themselves into pieces on the contours of the square, falling to earth, sinking into warm slime. An amoeba lies on the surface, tanning itself thoughtless.

  There is life here. My flesh is borrowed and grows around me. Good disguise for the mayhem migrating through the riot-air. My stolen meat soaks it up. Too dead to notice, it does not twitch. Smelling of an addict’s weak liver, I stroll casually through the carnival-riot.

  We could have touched stars, seen worlds born and burn, woven cascades of nova light into the fantastic souls of our children.

  But no, not to be.

  Instead we have done this.

  Gasoline, petrol and carbon markings around a toxic hole in space. Stumps of brick and mortar poking through and a cracked wine glass drifting by. A tracery of skin crusted with scabs and fatal disease, the last trace of the human race.

  A moment of stasis, static and broken connections. Corporate merging. Association by default. Communications fail. All breaks down. Redundancy is rife. Sacking occurs. Unneeded staff shot in the back of the head with a .45 revolver cut from pig iron with a kitchen knife. Brought back to life and set to work. The rest are sacked. In body bags. Black bin liner sacks. Out the back door. In the bins. Children light fires and the bins rocket up into twilight skies, bursting so attractively.

  Old people file by. Last of the Great Rioters. Spirit of '77. Oh yeah. Age brings back the wisdom of the womb, hated as Alzheimer’s until we forget. All the good, all the bad, all the in-between. Wiped away as lactating arsehole gets wiped clean. Re-adjust the elastic strap on adult nappies. Feed back on famine-flat teats, milking the whiskey. Drawing strains of a substance with no name. Look at it vacant and hold it up to the light.

  Evaporation process kicks in.

  The young call it angel hair.

  We olds know better.

  Our fossilised cunts on the display racks of the museum. Glass case integrity is compromised by sticky titty-age fingers. The wrinkles, the folds, no longer supple and soft. The gristle and grime well-settled. How I want it to be. Draw out the death-rattle of old age’s pension. Give it to her. Let the dead flies hatch and lie.

  She’s all parallel lines, missing universal curves. The Round is not sitting on the Square. Music gets in through the papercut tear. Fluttering through from atrophied universes. Pause to listen and hear them verge on collapse. Cockroach-worms nibble at the dimension-line scaffolds crumbling the D-branes. You nibble her toes the same way. There is the intersection point - white-hot - your tongue slips into salt cervical sanctuary. The scaffolds are bleeding stumps of fingers and the old universe, in erosion, deconstitutes itself with heavy, erratic sighs. You hear them as the tyres slip-slide on the motorway. She’s all broken lines, mixing cruddy bits of pain in with the hurt.

  The intersection waits.

  Iron teeth, hungry and torn.

  Put your foot down.

  Take her with you, over the edge.

  Shot of you.

  Going down the cliff.

  A car in flames.

  Chaos and hermetic burns skin the Ghetto walls, wearing them down into piecemeal studs in the reality septum. So many colours and all of them look black to me. They suck on your finger like stunted foetuses seeking wet titty. They stink of something fungal grown from spoiled cheese, making me, the unwashed mortal, feel like aristocracy. So far, so very Colgate.

  Something is on the other side and that’s why the diggers are in with me, burning singes my nostril hairs down to stumps and holes. The bleeding left by chaos makes my eyes spot and run. The corneas are impressed with the kidney-shape after-glow of big bangs and big crunches.

  I do like a little bit of sci-fi, now and then.

  Moth-eaten personalities undo themselves from the clutter being cut through. They wander for a minute around the room, high-nosed and broad in the forehead, leathery and loose patchworks, cast-offs that we leave to drift as we age, shedding metaphysical skins, scattering them to Time and the winds. Most of them are sniffling for a little leftover, a taste of the world before they leave it behind knowing they’ll be snuffed in a micro-sec. They lick at the light switch, hoping it’s a stamp.

  I turn back to the diggers and their work. The septum is going into spasm, almost there.

  Punch on through, boys. There, you done it.

  Hammers down.

  I walk through the old contours, the riot's aftermath, like a stiff breeze, disturbing the folk who sit in their organic bits-and-pieces bodies. Get in close, you can see the weeds growing from them. The parasites wriggling some through the dense undergrowth of unplucked thickets and curling cock hair, downy, wiry, soft and rough. All a bit different. All a bit the same. This world would be a breeze if it was always like this, a shifting liquid womb of amniotic possibilities. This is a sample of things being that way, not the wholesale sold deal. A ransom demand being put down on me. Things’ll be this way if I comply. The otherwise-way being that things’ll get worse.

  There’s not much left as I look down on Soho Ghetto from this height. Aquamarine flames lick up, lighting everything. The police cordon is as strong and firm as ever and you can smell the jack-off in their knickers from watching the Ghetto eat itself alive with fire. Many dead but there are lots of applicants to fill the vacant positions; be outcast of the normal life, feel special and in the revolution. Best if it’s sponsored by a secret brand of Diet Coke. Like a vegan eating fish, the alternative scenesters know how to stand out, as long as it costs more than they can pay, they’ll do it. Nothing quite like debt for funding an overthrow of the Powers That Be.

  Or, as I sometimes put it, Whoever They Be.

  Or, other times, You and Me.

  I go through the august door that takes me to the room and the window, leaving Soho Ghetto to cook itself dry. There should be some nice, coarse flesh-jerky hanging from policeman belts by morning.

  It's all over.

  Everywhere the odour clings to the bricks and runs from the mortar. Railroad sidings from which we crawled, poking our tongues out to taste the air crumble in on themselves. The old wombs do no good. No need for upkeep. See-through walls of plastic and unpainted acrylic are in. Nurture and nature are out. Take this the wrong way and you’ll be all the bad things in Life. Loving, caring and kindness is for sweet meats and we want black meat. Old meat. Cold meat. Whatever demands paternity leave can be done without. The grave is your target. These are the figures. Get a flavour. Sift it through.

  Mortuaries stand on the outer limits, circulating the turgid sewer canals on which our black barges ride. Hooded
accomplices, cut from twilight and song, steer the great canoes. Caucasian junkie hands check the cargo for valuables; watches, wallets and purses end up underwater. We want the keepsakes. Those tattered family photos. Love stains, degrading pride. We peel you off and set you on the conveyor belt, sliding you in through the black meat dimensions that have such sharp teeth. Purge your blood with formaldehyde cocktails then flavour it with Beta Blockers and Xanax. Catatonic gestures brought on plaintive summers. Bright and artificial was orange juice. Hope’s a shabby thing. Past abuse-by-date. The tongueless lie down in dark corners and let the shadows sweat it out for them. The rust holes spit you back into the city. Walking on two legs. Feeling with three. You’re ours, always have been, will be, was and always. Now, back to work, there’s death to be done.

  This morning, the black fog tastes so sweet.

  I drift under city street lamps; detached and photocopied, running with slime and overspent inks. The Ghetto is lost. Where am I to go now?

  Stale patter of small talk. Leeches sprout legs, arms and faces. Squirm out from there. Spare a quid. Give some change. Stubble hairs grate hydrogen from oxygen making the air ignite a little. White and sparks. Dead weight weighs me down. The streets are paved with the gold picked from screaming Jewish teeth by Kris knives and SS smiles. The altar of the twenty-first century boils over, glowing with the intense humming of evil. I cross Mengele’s necrotised palm with silvered Zyklon-B pellets, keeping one back for emergencies, one for me.

  Everyone has to burn sometime.

  The city is guttering. Going out. A swallowing mouth, choking on us. One piece at a time. It pauses to exhale dirty smoke rings. Burn off the ozone and the carbonised. We’ll get through it.

  There’s always tomorrow. Those dead-bound days of the near-past haunt me more than five years ago, ten, twenty. I’m almost at thirty. Time for an appraisal. Dirty job review. Intricate, worn structures creak and shift. The city and its world teetering on them, hanging on, tilting towards precipice. Peak oil strike and it’ll be gone, snuffed out like an untaxed cigarette.

  Watch the boats come in from distant lands and see the millions on them, heaving sinister. Sit back and watch them burn. The old guns from the WWI cupboards have been raided. Sinking the dirty immigrant bastards. Welcome Home. Enjoy your drowning. Human torches plummet overboard in shameless remakes of the falling man.

  Tell the people it’s a Belgrano tribute.

  Not that they care much.

  Guantanamo Bay has re-opened. Obama was shot dead this morning. You can hear the pimps in City Hall. Laughing teeth showing like boiled marblestone pieces in the warm black of rain puddles. Strike it right. Strike it rich. Strike it lucky. Tin planes hang from their ceilings. They practice their voodoo in filing cabinet voices. Taking Ouija hits from locrian syringes cast in the shapes of bronze scorpions.

  Lack-lustre hippies squat on the steps, muttering to passing ghosts, buy-consume-conform, waving scraps of wet cardboard made wordless by the driving rain. Weather-beaten smears of falafel and other meatless substitutes stain their sacking jackets. One shaves his beard, dons a suit and aftershaves, pisses in the midnight wind onto his beanburger friends, laughing to himself in the voice of City Hall.

  If you can’t beat ‘em, well, you can’t, can you, canyou......canyou......

  There are three Parties in the city, or there were. No-one can tell the difference. It might be the grey shading of their suits, the spit-polish shine of their shoes, the pasty vacancy of their unstuck, overly-lined faces. Difficult, very difficult to tell. There is a factory that makes them, some say. If you get close, you can smell it on them. The protein is in a constant process of drying out, molecules that don’t want to be together are held together by Hansard and black magick.

  Dogs will snarl at them on sight.

  They rarely stray outside of the Interior. This is their secret place of communion where they use smoke and mirrors to speak with forces outside of the Electorate’s ken.

  There’s so much gets by us.

  Rights are not eroded before your eyes but behind your back.

  The Echomen are after me, worse than Policemen. Sinuous strangers who tap into the unspoken ideas that reverberate in the unlit attic of a 3am skull. Another long, low path of paranoia, lined with red weeds, offers momentary escape. They snatch and cling and sting with wretched needles, not drawing blood but pushing it back in. Don’t want me damaged. Want me in good shape. The bad shapes come later.

  “Down that way madness cries.”

  I take a left and do not pray to god.

  Acute perception ... heart monitor jags ... sick green on solid plastic black ... depression of the anxiety ... psychosis of happiness and gingivitis bliss ... fingering the sordid holes ... barbiturates of fear, emptiness-despair ... pastilles offer withdrawal symptoms ... frontal lobe sedation ... down the escalator ... into-inside the howl-white ambulance hell to hospital, chemical burial ... four months of missed appointments ... concern and disconnection ... violent, more violent, a hand grasps old chairs ... move, lose reaction, slump, catch at cold hair ... drowning in a flux tide of spastic, white eidola ... trampled petals washing down the scabbed-over gutters of night towns and dead, wind-blown twilight cities ... buds and seedlings crushed into foody pulp. Gnawed on by teeth that chatter, piss blood and scream ...

  ... genitals soaped and ready ... the white foam tasting of clean things ... grease from the uncut hair of angels ... gagging on you, I eat the vinegar flowing through the soft, folded remnants of your shower ... drawing a hot, sour curtain over the day and the logical feelings it impregnates into the unceasing passage of moment-after-moment ... the living, unforgiving, animating blackness that sleeps within everything comes alive in us, here, right now ... let’s retire to the bedroom ... see what other blacknesses are hiding there ...

  Death is not a smell that penetrates our jellied straitjacket forms. It doesn’t have the maths, we can’t accept its equation, we deride it, rewrite it and claim insolubility. Get away from us with your inevitability. You, the thermodynamic that gnashes teeth the colour of dawn and draws the breath out from our tar-inflected lungs. We are too tired to fight so we close our eyes and ignore you.

  We cannot smell you, therefore you do not exist.

  The food falls from my mouth, going down, crossing so many spans of abyss, before striking the pavement. The city smells of dried breast-milk and ammonia this morning as I rifle through overturned bins. Coal gas texturises the low, heavy pollution-clouds into shades of grubby orange and unwashed grey. I am at the bottom of a mineshaft, many levels down, looking up to see the burning. Men are screaming. Wheezing shadows flutter and flap their arms in suffocating canary spasm. I hear vomit and blood hitting the floor. Down here am I and there are things with me.

  The black cancers that crawl over the universe’s sick, dying face, benighted spawn of its unknowable insides. The way they bulge and writhe, one wonders if they are the necro-galactic equivalent of tarred pulmonary alveoli, somehow conscious, brought to life. To be honest, who gives a shit?

  These fucking things want to tear me apart.

  Yes, I’m running again like a mad blind bastard who’s lost his guide-dog. My inner compass is dead silent. I have no map in my head, no light to lead my eyes to safety, soot and ash settle on me and scald my sight, goring my vision with the clear relentless slaughter of tears. The lumps and ossifying tentacles of the black cancers shuffle and slap against the tunnel rocks behind me.

  I feel like I have been running and running, running all my life.

  Exhaustion screams, the individual tadpole souls of my every cell. Telling me to fall, to let go, to not begrudge the collision with calamity that is rushing to meet me, fight no longer a pathetic, meaningless battle, weep no more over what’s long, long lost.

  You get nothing back.

  Life takes and that’s that.

  So much for pathos and redemption.

  Avalanching thunder buries the demands of my failing self.


  I crash through a boundary, tripping over consequence, skidding through the mucky leavings of someone else’s life-disaster, cartilage gunshots in my knees.

  I am throwing up in a public rubbish bin, wiping the beige trail from my chin, I hiccup and pull a face, my bus-stop reflection, smeared, shows me an ugly mask.

  Unwanted.

  This timeless state cannot go on and this knowledge makes me mourn a little. This anti-emotional purgatory is better than nothing and nothing is what I will return to. A world full of nothing for me. A century leaving me behind. I hear the hordes at the gates. The barbed wire rending at the big-high-tall fortifications. I am my own mason. I built myself in here. All the while telling myself that one day I would climb out, one day, one time, to look at a bright summer’s day.

  Such a lie.

  I left holes here and there, for a time, hoping someone might pass by. Look in, not see me, part of me, a length of carved-down plywood, a bloodied marionette string, strangled things that twitch out to death’s lonesome black signature tune. I fashion a ladder from the masochistic parts I tore off and discarded. The ladder descends into a darkness that I know, that is familiar, that is mine.

  Time to go deeper.

  I don’t want you to know me. I don’t want you to see me naked. I don’t want you to see what I write, what I think, what I paint, what I am. It’s all so messy. It’s all without order, angles or lines. There’s no sense even when it’s in alphabetical order. I can’t see my way through and I stumble on what’s there. Battered books, wilting boxes and dying clutters of cluster-comb furniture. I sit in the midst of it all, cross-legged, a child at school assembly, at prayer. I watch the dust gather. Ashes of time, settled. Mice, rats and other vermin come out to play. Chew holes and leave their doings in soft, warm nests.