Here for your enjoyment - or not - is a lil’ something I’ve been working on for one of my creative writing workshops, they seemed to like it, I hope you do too.

 Peace and peace cakes.

Coasting
  The morbid attraction of a coal black shell, skeleton of amusement, draws more than lonely seabirds.  Sit on the sea-worn, sea-warm, stones and scribble an elegy in black.  Trudge noisily the oak dark legs that lean toward the water, touch the harsh bark of dead man stumps.  Admire the isolated, naked, arching of bones that rise from the sea to the sky and fall back forlorn.  Once vibrant and strident with life, now the only sound is the slapping of the waters against echoing iron. And watch the people, always watch the people.The solitary readers pinning papers against the gusts, the art students sketching in charcoal.  The lovers, lying, loving, the newly weds sculpting imaginary futures from the sea breeze.  The elderly married couples huddled together clasping cool cups of plastic tea, the man married only to his metal detector, pacing, and digging, and pacing.  Always watch the people, always watch the sea. 

Gun metal horizon, foaming, turbulent surf, freshening spray.  Count that mystical ninth wave break.  Bright flecks of worn painted wood drifting, the funeral smell of shore wrecked seaweed, crisp and salt as the sea itself.  Behind you, feel a city bristling.  Smoke a Lucky Strike, watch the smoke drift across the water, as the smoke from the pier did. 

Watch the sea.

I’m not being lazy, really I’m not!  I know I should be writing a short story for you, but instead I’m knee deep in the mire of dissertation.  Having a dissertation tutor who’s speciality is sci fi and George Orwell certainly doesn’t help when you’re writing about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.  Maybe that’s why I’ve only gone to see him once in two terms, hmm. 

Either way, I’m fobbing you off with this short story for the time being.  If you like it at all, leave me a comment, I’ve no idea where it’s going, and maybe someone out there might want to tell me what to do with it.  There you go, your very own private writer to order about.  How many blog reading people can boast of that???

The Crying Room

The purple blanket of the night closed in, shrinking to exclude the world outside of the room. In the darkness only black outlines remained, vague shadows adding to the texture of the gloom in their obscurity. The room thrilled with the magic of a hundred sleepless nights spent lying on the faded black sheets, tasting the colour of memories and the sharp sadness of loneliness. Years worth of poignant keepsakes, drying leaves, brilliant beads from carnivals, a crucifix given to safe-keep by a weeping street woman, all lay scattered across the myriad shelves, each added its own flavour to the darkness. The thick black curtains blocked out the soulless amber of the streetlights, but the windows gaped wide, admitting the fragrant summer night to relieve the cloying warmth left after another sticky, listless, afternoon. Badly taped posters of bands and black lipsticked idols swayed on the walls, invisible but reassuring in their familiarity. Sitting against the bed in the middle of the room, he relaxed smoking a cigarette, soaking up the magic and security the room exuded, feeling it brush across his skin as surely as the warm night breeze. He sat silently, fragrant smoke dusting his eyelashes, thinking and feeling with a mind that reached out into the night and the darkness of memory and a heart that sang with pain. Ash fell to mingle with the blood. The pain he felt dancing through him from a gently bleeding razor cut on his forearm allowed him to touch his inner pain, something that he’d been denied for so long. It was this inability to feel, this numbness, that he thought of, grasping through the thick darkness of memory, seeking out the point when he’d become all but dead to the world.

What ever else she’d done, this at least wasn’t something that he could blame on Jen. Those ten months spent together in the squalor of a shared squat in the shadowed back streets of London had been anything but mundane. The days spent prowling around the decaying dryness of house, high or drunk, padding restlessly over the dusty floorboards on bare feet, following or trying to avoid one another in claustrophobic rooms, waiting for the night to come; the night when they’d leave the house for the caustic underground clubs they both enjoyed. Afterwards, they’d lie twisted together, exhausted, in a sticky sweet embrace on the single mattress thrown in the corner. The blazing, screaming, passionate rows and even fiercer love making that followed had filled the house with the scent of their love. As their love grew he’d gradually lost the burning need for the weed, the smack, replaced it with a depth of feeling that blotted out all else. As he’d sorted himself out, she’d only sunk deeper, trying whatever would get her high, twist her. He remembered the bad days, the arguments that he couldn’t stop. Somehow, even though he was dry, the arguments had got worse; as he tried to reason with her she’d only get angrier. Always unpredictable, she’d slowly become violent, pulling at her short black hair, beating her fists against him as he told her he loved her, once slicing the back of his hand with the knife she used to line up the cocaine. Lost in his memories he licked the scar, the tight raised line always tasted like she had, the herbal green of the weed mixing with the sweet brown of the smack, underlined with the darker tang of old blood. The morning after she’d cut him he’d woken alone with the cut held tenderly against his lips, the blood dripping down to mix with the other stains on the mattress. She’d taken all the cash they’d kept hidden in a jar beneath the floorboards, she’d taken the pile of her clothes. He’d looked for a note but there had been none. Realising she had been all that he was staying for, he’d left half an hour afterwards.

In the days that followed he’d got a minimum wage twelve hour a day job cutting meat in an industrial abattoir, the only place that would take him, coming back exhausted to a filthy bedsit to lay awake in the darkness. Lying naked in the tangled sheets he’d torture himself with unanswerable questions in the uncaring darkness. Had he changed or had it been her, had she stopped loving him because of the drugs or because of his lack of them? He’d wake up tired and drag himself to work, only to repeat it all over again the next day. For a week his life seemed to consist of nothing more than the irremovable iron smell of raw meat and yellow water stained ceiling above his bed.

 Peace and placebos.    

Ps, if you really want I can put my wearisome novel up, a section at a time, serialised as it were.  I’m not sure that anyone is really interested enough for that, but if you’re masochistic enough to want that, please feel free to ask.

I feel guilty.  I’ve been too busy to pander to the blog monkey needs, so to make up for it, here’s a little present.  It’s a short story I wrote a while back and got into the student paper, but reading back through it today I realised just how naff it really was, so I’ve made some changes that I hope have worked for the better.  Enjoy and feel free to let me know what you think…

An Evening of Expectations

The evening had, I thought, started out rather well. Sitting alone in Jake’s nursing a scotch, idly making shapes in the puddles of spilt beer covering the greasy bar, I wondered which club to go to later. The Ice Club was a better place to meet people, but the music of The Edge was in a league of its own, extreme waves of sonic anguish melting glacially together. I decided The Edge. Mainly, if truth be told, because the substances I had taken before leaving the flat wouldn’t blend well with the more sophisticated atmosphere at The Ice. I would get tense, nervous, sweat constantly, crack, twist, just fucking lose it. No, the relaxed insanity of The Edge it would be, my eccentricities hidden in the swirling mass of the intoxicated. While I sat there abstracted thus, staring through the bar, someone came and sat on the bar stool next to my own. Without looking up I could tell it was a woman, her overpowering perfume swirling like a purple cloud around her. I thought it odd that in the near empty bar she had come and sat next to me, and even odder that she was alone, Jake’s wasn’t the kind of dive most women would think of coming to, not alone, not without a reason. I swung my head to look at her and asked, “Can I get you a drink or something?”
She had a narrow but pretty face, thin lipped, no lipstick. Her fringe cloaked eyes seemed to have difficulty focusing, her erratically dyed shoulder length multicoloured hair and a mish mash of eccentric clothing, almost all black, created a striking image. She carelessly brushed her hair back from her face with a black tipped and lazy hand, revealing an ear with so many piercings that it wouldn’t have looked out of place on some rainforest tribesman’s head. Just as I was about to say something witty along these lines she turned to face me and replied with a confident and lilting, “Sure”. I nodded at the obscure barman and he weaselled over.
“Whiskey on the rocks, and…”
“The same.”
I nodding my approval flung a ten at the man and he returned some change with equal disdain. We shared numerous drinks and less small talk, until eventually she announced she had to, “Go to the little girls room. For a fix”.
Feeling slightly unsteady by this point I simply nodded and muttered a vaguely coherent, “Enjoy”, at her retreating back. I slowly finished my whiskey and stood, noisily kicking my stool aside as she wandered back across the bar, receiving hard stares from several of the occupants of the shadowy kiosks littering the walls.
“Want to come to The Edge?”
“No.”
This I hadn’t really been prepared for, but merely shrugged and started to turn away.
“Let’s go straight back to mine.”
I stopped and turned back.
“Sure. Whatever.”
So far, so good, I thought.

Her place turned out to be a two room flat squatting above a betting shop in one of the seedier areas of downtown. Opening the door we stepped into darkness lit only by the red neon sign of the shop below, making the room appear disturbingly organic and vague.
“Electricity’s out”, she explained.
“Doesn’t bother me”, I replied in what I hoped a casual manner.
By this point I was finding it a little hard to keep a grasp on the situation, let alone be casual. The whiskey and drugs were allying in my system to make the world seem more than a tad surreal. I slowly began to notice a dull thudding that had been filtering into my brain since we’d entered, sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down. I asked about the sound.
“Probably just my boyfriend.”
“Ah. Ok.”
The tone of her voice suggested that this was perfectly normal and I began to wonder exactly who this woman was and what I had let myself in for.
“Who exactly are you?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Janine.”
“Nice name.”
Peering around at what little I could make out of the room, my wandering gaze settled on a silver trophy of a horse and rider gleaming in the rose light.
“Do you ride?” I slurred.
“No. I stole it from a jockey I slept with once. I took it as payment for some of the weird stuff he made me do, ” she said without turning to look at me.
Vague images of very short men with riding crops started swirling through my head. I opened my mouth to ask what could have been so bad as to make her steal such a prized possession, but limited myself to a worldly sounding, “Hmm”, instead. For my own peace of mind I’d decided I really didn’t want to know.
She slung her coat over a dimly lit piece of furniture. An excited screaming, rising in pitch, started from the next room, muffled only slightly by the closed door. The thudding increased in pace.
“Drink?”
“Please.”
She walked over to an unseen cupboard, took out two bottles, one whiskey, one vodka, and two glasses and filled one from each bottle and handed me my drink, leaving the other on the side. She then pulled a large kitchen knife from a drawer, excused herself, and walked through the door from which the thudding and screaming was coming. I took a sip of my drink, was pleased to find it was once again whiskey, but thought it could do with some ice. I peered around for a freezer and finding it, pulled the door open. The thudding and screaming stopped from the other room. No ice. Raised voices momentarily replaced the silence but stopped as abruptly as they had started. Disappointed, I closed the freezer again. As I turned, Janine walked back through the door. The kitchen knife glistened crimson in the neon lighting. Dipping the knife into the waiting glass and stirring her drink she raised the glass in a toast.
“Bloody Mary.”
The swirling liquid glowed red in the neon light coming through the window.
I raised an eyebrow and my glass in acknowledgement. Draining her glass in one swift gulp she stepped in closer, wrapped her arms around my neck and passionately kissed me. And that’s when the night got a little weird.

At last, after weeks of extended editting, deliberation and hatred of the humble comma, Diary of a Heretic is finally in its finished form.  It had got to the point where I just had to tell myself to stop, put down the coffee and step away from the keyboard and leave the room.  You can keep changing a piece of writing forever, as you and your tastes change; but it’s time to drop it and let it be. 

 I’d just like to thank the many people who have helped to reach this stage, with their editting, opinions, and contributions to content (whether they knew it or not).  I couldn’t have done it without you all, or rather I couldn’t have done it and remained sane without you all.

If anyone wants a copy just email me.  (This only applies to people I know until it’s fully copyrighted)

Now I just need to get it published somehow…

Peace and polygamy.

I had to escape, get away from it all.  The grime encrusted buildings of rotting grandeur I saw from my curtainless window every morning as I woke, hulking obscenely across the street, decaying monuments to forgotten industry looming tall while the endless throng of the faceless masses walked blindly below.  There had been no fuss, no problems.  All the possessions I thought worth saving now rested in a worn backpack across my shoulders.  I had packed the few items of sentimental value I still had, the thin silver necklace, the first collection of poetry, as well as my old tent, a folding cooking pan and sheaf knife along with some tinned food and the majority of my clothes, rolling my stash deep in the centre of them away from prying eyes, having no idea when, or if, I’d return, or where I’d end up.  The rest lay scattered like leaves across my now vacant flat.  During my evacuation, while looking for a discarded shoe, I had come across a small wooden cigar box under the bed, long forgotten and dusty.  On the lid of the coarse aromatic wood the word “Photos” had been scrawled in biro.  Your handwriting.  Continuance.  Pain.  I had long since rid myself of anything that reawakened your memory so physically.  Feeling numb I sat back against the cupboard opposite the bed staring at the little wooden box.  Bending down low I stretched my arm under the bed, keeping my face averted from the dust this raised.  Slowly sliding the box from under the bed I held it in my hands, weighing it, feeling the wood grains texture rough against my palms, gazing blankly at the solitary word signifying so much.  The desire to open the box and revel in the lost past inside crystallised within me, becoming an ache, a desire.  But where would that lead?  An hour’s happy reminiscence, and then darkness.  I’d let it slip, the fragile hold that I had on it all, all the emotions and black thoughts would well up in an uncontrollable tidal wave that would wash my fragile sanity away.  Standing and walking to the sink as though dreaming, I lifted my Zippo from a pocket.  The cool metal and weight of it reasserted the real, pulling my mind from the dizzying heights it had been occupying back down to somewhere near normal.  Taking the photos from the box, slowly, one by one, I lit each with a flick of the thumb and a rasp of flint.  As the photos fell from my fingers to the sink full of water, flaming like failed angels, I caught glimpses of us.  Pictures floated down, falling, always falling, to land with a hiss in the water.  The smell of burning plastic stung my eyes to tears as a small wisp of black smoke arose from each flaming scene.  As the silent parade ceased I looked down to see you staring up at me, as though through a pond full of charred lilies.  I turned away.

Finding the photos of an extinct past had not been good for me.  Drinking started earlier than usual and I set to it with an unusual vivacity, feeling the acute need for oblivion.  The off license owner had grinned as he saw me enter his shop earlier, maybe I’d been stuck in one place too long?  When local drink merchants start calling you by name perhaps its time for concern.  Knocking back Scottish whiskey, cheap, strong and painfully rough, doubting it had ever been further north than the Watford Gap despite its pseudo Celtic name, I sat back against the bed, comfortably numb, faintly feeling the metal frame digging into flesh but not caring.  Lager washed the whiskey down, replacing an acidic burning of the throat with an unpleasant taste on the tongue.  The empty can noisily joined the pile of its dented brothers flung in the corner, scoring three points for bouncing off both walls.  A small trickle of residue from the cans open mouth slowly dripped onto the carpet.  A laboriously constructed joint rested in the filling ashtray balancing on the torn knee of my jeans, filling the room with a sweet exotic scent, the fat cylinder releasing slow lazy smoke that danced intricately towards the bare light bulb and through which I stared at the ceiling.  I looked down, staring at the ashtray, bringing my head nearer to focus, trying to count the joint butts.  After several failed attempts I went back to staring at the ceiling.  I could feel the weeds effects pulling my mind back, baring it to the burning air, peeling back skin and bone, separating thought and action; giving thoughts precedence over sight.  Memories and fantasy slid before my eyes, more realistic than my own lying senses.  People half forgotten and places little visited paraded past mixing incongruously, while all the time my body seemed to melt further from my bones, creating a lightness that is impossible to describe or understand unless you’ve felt it.  I could feel myself losing my grounding, spacing out, a victim of my own treacherous thoughts. Death by consciousness.  Isn’t that always the way?

Or should that be intent?  Who knows.  This is where I’m finally going to post a little of my novel, in the hope of you, the ppls out there in the real world, helping me a bit.  I need feedback peeps.  The extract is from a love scene (hence the post’s title) and I need to knwo what you all think.  Too graphic?  Not graphic enough?  Cliched? etc etc.  Please leave me some comments on this, I’d really appreciate your thoughts.  Plus it’s a good chance to criticise me about something I’m actually going to listen about! (I know that’s going to appeal to more than  afew of you out there!)

And here it is……

The crest of the hill peaked a meter or so into the fragrant trees and the small wood continued down the back of the hill into a shallow valley.  We sat on the leafy soil, resting our backs against a tree trunk, cradled in its roots we were able to look out over the houses and gardens of Arlington and the surrounding hilly countryside patched irregularly with golden, green or brown fields, shaded by the rhythmic movement of light and shadow of the swaying branches above us from the brilliant sky.  Birdsong sporadically broke out around us and the whisper of the trees in a gentle breeze only accentuated the sense of stillness and silence that surrounded us.  Sitting surrounded by the tree roots Jackie and I were close enough for me to hear her breathing, and I knew that I wanted to hold her, share a kiss again, but I also realised that today she was as melancholy and withdrawn as she had been teasing and flirtatious last night.  Seconds slowly melted away as we both just sat staring out across the countryside while the shadow patterns of leaves played about us.  I knew I had to risk it.  To let a moment like this pass and forever wonder about could have been would be to waste something irretrievable.  There was so much I wanted to tell her, so much that words could never really express.  I gently slid my arm around her shoulders, feeling her sun-warmed skin against my own, and leaning in kissed her cheek tenderly, almost just brushing her face with my lips.  Before I could move, she turned suddenly, grabbing my face with her hands, kissing me so passionately that it hurt.  Frantically I wrapped her up in my arms, pulling her against me, feeling the heat of her body melt into mine, returning the kiss with the same ferocious intensity.  Our tongues intertwined, she pulled and bit at my lip while she tugged at my t-shirt, only breaking off our kiss to pull it roughly over my shoulders.  We rolled to the leafy ground, her astride me, hastily pulling off her white t-shirt and flinging it aside to surprisingly reveal she wasn’t wearing a bra.  I awkwardly tugged down my trousers and boxers.  Pausing for a only a second, she put her hand inside her short red skirt, untying a bow in the side of her lacy white underwear to drop it to the ground without removing her skirt.  Cupping her small pert breasts in my hands, with a swift intake of breath I pulled her quickly down onto myself, pushing a small moan from her open mouth.  As we began to make frantic, desperate, love I remember clearly the leafy shadows and scraps of light dancing liquidly across our skin; then she leant down to kiss me once more and I closed my eyes as her lips met mine.

The first time it was needy, fast, rough and passionate.  She scratched, raking at my shoulders and chest with her nails, she bit, leaving imperfect little red O’s across my shoulders and neck, she pulled at me with a physical need that surprised me with in its intensity.  Afterwards we collapsed side by side, filled with a euphoric mix of bliss and exhaustion.  It was a long time before either of us spoke, we just lay panting heavily, staring upwards through the gaps in the branches to the shifting sky above us.  Eventually she rolled over, laying an arm across my chest and a leg over mine as she nestled her face into my shoulder.  I didn’t want to ruin this moment, but I knew that if there was going to be anytime to talk about what I’d noticed in my few lucid moments of our passion, it was now.

  “The scars on your legs.  How’d you get them?”  I didn’t look down at the little red lines ridging the top of her thigh, I just kept staring up at the uncaring sky.

  “I did it myself.” She said with an edge of anger, without looking up at me.  Then she sighed, and in a small voice that sounded younger than normal said, “Sometimes when things get the worst and I think about what it would be like if I just took myself away from all of this, I’d cut myself.  I did it on my thigh so no one’d see, it’s not a cry for help or anything, it just makes me feel better, releases something inside me.  Even you probably can’t understand.”

I felt her shift slightly on my chest, as if somehow withdrawing into herself.

  “Look at my arms.”

I felt her head turn downwards to look at my right arm and I brought it across my stomach to let her see better.  She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled it in a sigh very different from the last.  The arm across my chest slid down to rest across my stomach; she gently brushed her fingers over my arm, across the mixture of raised angry red recent cuts and the flatter purple lines of bitter old scars.

The second time it was slower.  I lay on top of her, stretching her gently, while we watched each other with intimate eyes and kissed with heavy lips.

After occasionally talking about my writing but never actually showing any on here, I thought it high time to provide you, the reader, with a glimpse into it all.  This may interest anyone with a literary bent but you don’t have to tell me its shortcomings, those I can see for myself all too well.

A letter to the poet

I thought I knew what love should be

From hours spent in the library, tending

Fading books and gossamer dreams.  Those

Of eclectic poets who have ceased to breathe.

Marvell, for your time, my thanks.  The strokes

Of mortality.  But to coax the coy now

Would take a stronger ploy, then dead words

Lavished in frustration on indifferent ears.

My mistress is more than shy, virgin-

Like in the extreme, black Madonna, passionate

In my temptation, resolute in snowy chastity.

If I had but not read John Keats.

Lofty, the Odes of reflection carried

Me spiralling celestial.  How after touching clouds

Roots, can earths base love satisfy?  Bitter grit

Shreds feathered wings.  Mortality is imperfection.

How then can this cold human affair compare

To the passionate glare of literate love?

In showing the mystical heights and flaming depths,

You leave me centred in the dull ache

Of mediocrity.  So thank you Mr Keats,

You glorious bastard