The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  Outside, the world is not burning.

  Not just yet.

  My room is invaded by dreams denied. Orphan imaginings leave their tacky footprints over me, slipping me spoiled sweet meats, cavorting from one end of the spectrum of fucking to the other making me feel under-aged and obscene. Marbled wounds break out, swine-flu snorts and whines grabbing for the lining of my nostrils and stomach. Wet dream tattoos trace themselves out in blood, shit and soft ejaculate. Anointed and shattered, I count the bruises left on me, one crowning my cock where the foreskin is cracked and weeping. A thousand cunts assail me, puckering and suckling, growing teeth so they can bite me. Re-open old hurts. They sprout tongues for the somnambulant tradition of after-sex conversation. I find penis after penis slithering through my palms. Their empty Japanese eyes begging for masturbation; I oblige, I tickle them, twist, twist them, beat them hard and stroke them soft. Hot white marble rains down on me stinging my eyes, salting my tongue. Overheated, overdone, my brain cums until empty then crumbles.

  What a way to go.

  Outside, Soho Ghetto hums herself to sleep, a hive of agitating wasps, a dying whore, naked and beaten on a pimp’s piss-stained floor.

  The garden was nothing special but to me it was a small earthbound paradise. Things grew there. They don’t grow here, not in the same way, that is. Buildings are built on the concrete, they don’t grow out of it, I think. It makes me wonder as you always see buildings as materials then half-done then finished.

  I’ve never seen a single worker working on them.

  I’m told they exist. They must do. But what if they don’t? The bricks, the mortar and the concrete – conscious? Could that be?

  I wonder, I do.

  Could they put themselves together? Is that why building takes so long? Why we do not see the workers? Perhaps it is.

  But yes, the garden, my garden. It was not mine but it felt that way. A small open space in which I could be outside, breathe open air, see open sky, feel open inside.

  I had not felt that way in years.

  Years and years...

  In the garden, she watched him, sitting and thinking. Her little denim soldier, by his side was the stack of newspapers he asked her to keep for him. Now, he was going through them, slow and methodical, too carefully for a child his age. Tearing off tiny pieces then putting them to his mouth, licking them until they were spitballs, affixing them to the ground. He spent all morning doing that whilst she finished the spring-cleaning.

  After she was done, she went outside, to see what he was making.

  There was no other reason for the way he was behaving, repetitive habit and motions always signal a creative pulse at work. It was a circle of spitballs sitting in the grass. All packed together, making a firm, damp ring of grey in the soil. She looked at him quizzically and he looked back at her calmly.

  She’d leave him to it until it got dark.

  At least, he was enjoying himself, staying out of trouble.

  The circles of spitballs had become a short cylinder by the end of the week. She watched him at work, eating normally, sleeping normally, not changing in any way but there was just this sudden fixation on the task he was about.

  Grey days came and went by.

  Nothing much in life changed.

  The same tedious progressions of seconds into minutes into hours into days into nights playing over and over again. A bad song on a failing radio-set, interference clouding the channel, voices hissing through the pauses and gaps that could be the sound of a child’s laughter. She went on being herself. There’s not much else for a person to do.

  She was a wife, a mother and a daughter all inside one skin. Too much really for one mind to bear, all that. She made dinners, wiped dishes and hoovered carpets. All this time, her son sat quietly in the garden making his spit-and-paper sculpture.

  It was raining and he was outside.

  Standing by his sculpture screaming at the sky, wailing over the pounding of the storm, waving his arms through the falling water, making motions for it go away, be banished, not destroy all of his hard work. She rushed outside with a coat, wrapping him in it, taking him indoors, the safe and warm. He fought her, how violently and bitterly, with tears in his eyes, he fought her and he kept on fighting her, every day, until the day he died.

  It’s carnival night in Soho Ghetto.

  The people are out there in force - every stinking, screaming, joy-snatching one of them. A menstrual flood flowing through the shrieking loins of the dying whore, a colour parade of disease and festered feelings, rags and tatters glued onto unsunned skin, flip-flapping flags that were once rainbows, now faded to meaningless stripes of brownish whites and beige. They jigga-bop and whoop-de-do-whoop as they go by my window.

  I watch them go.

  I’ve got nothing to celebrate.

  I don’t care.

  I’ve found another way to distract myself. Out of the dustbins and penny stores, magazines have accrued across the scabby floor of my room. With a Stanley knife, I slit the throats of men and women who died long ago. The pages are crumpled, stained and seamed, no colour of a bright or arresting hue stands out. With a pot of glue, I’m making a collage of the walls, dissecting glossy faces and tan bodies, slashing out their wedding dress guts and morning suit stiffness, replacing the beautiful with those forgotten and unsightly. Within these four walls, I am making a better world.

  One that I can understand.

  One of chaos, where nothing fits, where order is amok.

  Times and places criss-cross and interlock here; Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and beyond in both temporal directions. Faces from the future wear the bodies of the past. Papercuts cover my hands and little red numbers dapple the collage, here and there.

  The sight of these minute squiggles make my pulse pick up its pace.

  It’s racing, it’s pacing, I stand then I sit, because those numbers, in my blood, could make this collage into something else, resurrect its many dead, give to it a kind of life. A life none of it could possibly want. There are better things to be than alive. A preserved image, diminishing under the heartbeat of sunlight, to browns, sepia and then white blank space. A slow and temperate death that most of us are denied. A quiet, unbothersome fading of all shape, definition and form. How good that would be. How great that would feel, to simply waste away, become nothing.

  By candlelight, I sit at the heart of the room. Glue spatters and smudged article sticking to my weighty black clothes, legs crossed, trance position, watching the walls. The carnival outside dissolves into the usual gaudy abuse of my silence, I shut it out as best I can though the effort makes me cry. A few fragments loosen from their placing on the walls, butterfly to my feet. I think to reach for them but I do not. I can smell the copper of cooking blood in the air. The numbers are working their algebraic magic.

  So I watch and I wait.

  Images in dismemberment fall. Butcher’s geiger counter. Ectoplasmic nuclear cells. Held aloft by inflated lungs as ballast tanks. Fibrous tissue tears, slow bursting. Ruddy-red-red goblins, flat and painted, loom and grin. Simians wear them, shaved, oiled, duck-pink and plucked. They could almost be human. They sing hideously and laugh like little girls. This is the backwoods of my brain. We’re in the bushes behind. At the root of the cerebellum tree where everything is female and sweet like sex with no gravity. A coffin, a corpse and a bursting wound. I wipe you from me.

  Ichor and all.

  Hysterical, the dummy in the burial box talks back to me. Letmeout-letmeout-letmeout-out-out. His long-johns soiled with salty piss. He shits wood shavings and angry pulp. The riot claimed casualties, which were eaten by hungry ambulances and ferried away to the night-hospital where needles are flukeworms and blood dies unstill.

  Yes, my son, there is no getting out of this.

  The hole is in your head.

  In Soho Ghetto, I feel that I am near the heart of the city. The heart of the mystery, of what’s been going on with me.The live jellies, the
black cancers, are back behind me frolicking through the tunnel-holes and interzones that are their birthright. This is not a place meant for me. It is a machine of sorts without working parts to see, without noise, commotion to hear. This does make one wonder how the thing runs; what is its fuel, function and purpose?

  The answers are around the corner.

  They were. They will be.

  I can’t be sure.

  They tell me that happens before a moment of clarity strikes.

  The riot starts when we see all the picture and Soho Ghetto goes to hell.

  Because the rest of the world is doing it too, burning bright in the cauldron of the night. So we, the freaks, gotta go better, burn better than they burn, die better than they die, go up in fuckin’ bes’ fuh-lames you ever did see. I’m not so interested but the heat gets to me, laconic, making me feela slight golden tingle, I go down to the streets.

  It’s carnival time and there’s blood on the ice.

  I’m a ghost at midnight, dark coagulant clogging raw vein street. The crowd is hissing tramps and tripping over day dreams. I hand out a few nightmares, tame in their thin glass-jars but waiting for them to crack open. I sniff something sweet and swallow, some soured rage. The people moving as crowds feel better this way, degraded like old teevee pictures, simplified to broad brushstrokes and wax crayon streaks. Gaudy and vile. Rotten oils spreading over cold water dissociate black rainbows that pollute, soak and choke those that soar and cry.

  The crowd, the mob, the herd is not a symbiotic radiator of love. I’ve cut the gas. Cold, you see it for what it is; droning great parasite, dumb and chirruping, clattering its wire-haired back legs together, seeking a mate. The other half, the lost segment, the one that got away. It trails through the streets, dragging its excretal misery and visceral pain between its legs, unsightly mauve ditches. Its forlorn call is a wicked virus, gets into you, under your skin. You’ll start to itch, develop the hot red rash by the numbers. Cook you like meat on a grill. Then the bugs come, you see them pop out, eggy popcorn kernels sticking to you, nappy-shit wet. Then you stick to them, to us, become one of the crowd, go with the flow, hear the white music, the right music, sing the song of peace without love.

  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 wal
k 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.