There is a single moment of calm in an oasis in Fayoum as one luminescent sun beam dances between the concrete pillars of a sunken dock that houses a sunset. There are young children splashing in knee high water casting tall shadows over camels’ footprints. There is a series of fleeting promises - to holiday again, to play next week, to remember one another. And there we were riding on shoulders of sand and screaming out the unintelligible lyrics of an Arabic rap song that we heard on a miracle boat over a darkened Nile in a glowing city.
I’m lying on an empty stomach trying to remember a quote from a fairly boring book whilst sounding out your name in every accent I can muster when I realise that I’ve managed to make myself more alone than ever all the while cursing the world for what it’s done and as I turn onto my side I finally remember that line and it simply goes:
There is no Fayoum oasis. There is no magic lake. There is just an idea on the wind that I can’t quite remember and a playful din on a sunburnt beach.
I’m in exile now. I pootle down a narrow passage underneath a terrifying verticality, at times formless and ethereal and at others brutal and concrete. We are on a track we ought not look at, one painted by tourists’ skin, its corners nibbled by giants, its once smooth surface pecked by Roc. Break your neck peering upwards to perky mounds or break your posture peering down, a deep crevasse, a wound carved in the earth by a godly hatchet, an endless fall.
There are bumps and bruises and rumps and rousals. There it little else but dull red gemstones and horizontal iron bars and the dribble from a waterfall - or from the corner of my mouth, I can’t quite tell - turns into a gush under deep rainfall when shirts are glued to skin. That fluid, viscous from afar but smooth to the touch, trickles into an ever widening abyss, open at the bottom but fiercely tight at the top.
Then there is me, burning a hole into your back as you burn one in the sky. I wasn’t worthy of your sideward glance nor illicit thought. But there I still was, trapped in a winding fantasy, an altitudinal alptraum, intoxicated by the whisper of your expired perfume or a clean angle of a handful tit.
Yes, there is me, obsessing over the impossible, stuck aboard as the tyres cool and we skid on slicks and fly off mud mountain. As I fall, a tomahawk rag doll sliced full thickness by razor rocks, but wilfully unshaven, I get one glance up your skirt and I can die in peace.
Sailor boy shows half his dainty crack on a hidden nudist beach (where a promise of phallus Maximus was not fulfilled) but refuses to show cock to the rock for fear of upsetting American tourists with sunburnt kids and florescent life vests. We are as if cemented together by algae, before sliced apart by razor rocks and hidden coves. We had climbed a cliffside for this secret haven, barrelled down an unsteady rock vein that scared mothers and fathers alike, only to find that Doppelgängers and Australians had made it there too.
I cup and cartwheel and flail and flaunt until my trousers are shredded and my wingman has crashed into the sand for forty minutes of meditative paralysis. Sailor boy has little interest in drinking alcohol, he would rather bathe in it, he slips and slides on marble and liberates New York teenagers of their sporting dignity. Sailor boy has fish legs and has lost his looking glass in the sea, he can’t make out the sunrise through myopic eyes and he can’t can his enthusiasm for American politics in the Studio. I chase sailor boy down the corridor (I am not clothed at this point) and rejoice in his little squeal of terror and joy, as he barricades himself in his room and pleads through the door.
We had embraced a night before, but my appetite threatens to swallow up the Algarve and all the little sardines therein. Moules-frites entice and cajoule, they want to be opened delicately with fingers, lathered in buttery sauce, then wolfed down with punishing ferocity.
There came admissions, of beautiful eyes and resistant romance. There came promises, of long term investments and slopes and seas. There came fears, of credit scores and blistered skin. And there came bliss, of ensconced shade resting a book on a shoulder of gammon whilst the sand swept beside us. Thrice there came an unnatural athlete, spiking little sailor boy, waltzing on the roof, then sucking the oily juice of a frango grilhado off his swollen little fingers.
There was a sardonic glaze on a beachside custard donut and feeling of peace that I haven’t felt in half a year. And I was proud to call them my family.
Ruffian sailor boy jokes about making one last statement because of this or that: invest all my pennies worth of sensibility into one losing horse and tear red racing track down my arms with sharpened nails, chalkboard strike, warm soapy water: I’m alive and unwell and unhealthy and unhappy. I have a yearning to be face fucked roughly twice a month. Speciality without spirit and sensualist without heart, iron caged coffin or a Maximised Web. Beep: no chance to call home. ears too big and face too blotchy from too much outdoors or indoors or too much of something and perhaps just privilege - cup myself in the lobby not to show the sun what I’m actually commanding, girlfriend underage or far too overage or cancerous or meagre and thin or a matter of fact manifold of a twisted fantasy played out in a handwritten book that only I know about that exposes what I told everyone was pornography. I’m gagging for the day I slump, relaxed posture, loose vertebrate, slipped disc, foamy mouth, scratched chin on sheet ice, scorpion sting and coconut rice. slump and slur can’t speak: arms numb, nails and needles; legs gone, skin torn and bleeding; head smack, brain matter still seeping; my heart does something different this time: stops beating. One noise she makes goes like this: . The uni joker’s truth: I have trouble, am trouble, make trouble for myself trouble gladly make trouble jokes to troubled friends and wish I was elsewhere - above below edgeways bladeways highways bathways sideways sidewalks mushed man canned peas frozen freeze flick of the wrist release me.
Ruffian boy stops for a second and chuckles: I’ve got my fuck me panties on and I’m prepped to play piggy cos patel did.
Ruffian boy hold your breath: brace your chest and drop down knees over toes hips over ankles shoulders over hips head over knees and over all that a sword of Damocles.
Keep holding your breath sailor boy until you turn blue, we can throw you in the deep and you’ll blend in too, we can drop you in the drink and you’ll sink through, we can load you in a canon and watch you go boom.
Fade to black, heart attack, head smack, lick crack.
Hey look it’s me again providing you with exactly what you wanted. Motivation. Motivation to give up on me to find me disgusting repulsive and everything you hoped I would never become. In the hall of fame relic style trophy cabinet you can see it. Look up there, most don’t. In order you’ll find a failed project, an admission of homosexuality brandishing its wings, an Infinity of wishes waiting to be rubbed out of a plastic pot, a joker who never stops laughing. We used to keep our jellyfish up there, we had a mass of them. Their tentacles sloshed over and stung those below. Occasionally they would fall and our turtle beaks would snap them up deceived by their appearance and hungry for sustenance. We assumed hollow plastic would fill our bellies but instead it clogged them up: sick in guest bathroom, tripping up stairs and on the door mat, gagged in the bedroom. I’m thinking of will’s grilled sausage shop and whether he’s selling or going bust, either growing his business or allowing it to collapse in on itself - he doesn’t seem to mind either way. I don’t get you back I know it it’s a done deal you wrote a letter or two I couldn’t muster the strength but I wrote some things I just won’t share them and never will. But now they’re barking and yapping and I can’t drown it out and they want attention or they want insight or they want crispy ladies or they want affirmation or attention or hair strokes or for you to simply show up on time and get your Fucking Priorities Straight they’re not asking for much but you can’t do it. Base - that’s the word - it’s been ringing since childhood and the betrayal and fear and anxiety and paranoia hasn’t stopped since I had dreams of Minotaurs and recreated the suction on the back of my skull or the jumping of shadows down my throat and made one love interest cry. Thousands of steps have been taken, so says the rustless screw, who wishes he was Grotefend with limitless funding for limitless passion and a clear mission - keep BhasKhara’s wheel turning for eternity.
I wanted this time to show you I’ve changed. I’m not tracing lines and words like Ego on zebra hinds. I’m only thinking of the project.
Hidden behind an apparently concealed yet all too obvious set of plywood doors there lays a life, a life in the barn, a system of sex rooms and kitchens, artwork and sculptures, be they live or dead. In this all too open, well lit, and furnished Labyrinth there is a life, a romance, a configuration of bodies which writhe or lay still or wish they could speak in the evening or wish they could move in the night, pressed and suffocated against a cold wall yet comfortable and euphoric. This life is moving, changing, diminishing in value, accruing percentages of a global economy or making trades for cold, hard, wafer-thin cash. There is no subversion here, there is an expected progression of form moving in an expected trajectory at an expected speed. It is popular amongst colleagues, who note a balance of flavours in one somewhat homogenous fast paced glaringly offensive melting pot, goulash if you will, braised for hours before served to four and eaten by three. There is no escape: there is the mirror that hangs in front of the face and the shard of glass that hangs above the head. There is the steel teeth that hang onto the ankle and the Phoenix talons which steal skin and minutes and hours and energy and everything i fucking have.
Of course it all works within a blackish paradise, where there are no leaks, where we stand perfectly twice as tall as we are wide, where we are surrounded by homogenous asexually reproducing huffers and where we have our ideological floating castle. Of course the machine kept ticking, not in stunted growth great noise a din or a growl but in a purring kind of sexual way, smooth shaven skin or the shape of your immaculate figure that you disliked so much. I thought I would talk of the sand or the hangman or that paedophile but I open my mouth far too much for many different reasons. Of course it would work perfectly - but I know why and I’ve been thinking why and dit dit DOTTING Dodd Domingo Dir Direct Line Dimensional Spectral Allow me to Access Miller if you Mind the gap the can because I can’t the clown on circus street a little esoteric and now the clap. Some sounds I like go like this: beep beep, uhhh, ahh. I know the reason. It’s because in isolation, in a world of fiction of our creation of automatic generation in our minds of the suit of the cards of the specific spade we have moulded the exact thing we wanted and all it was was flat there is nothing.
Friction and tears. Holiday wish.
The three things I hated told Matilda and Moritz and only they know.
Isolated now I feel a different kind of loneliness - it’s worse but it’s more me if there is one of those. It’s free and Wild and I live herniated or in a way opposite to how I thought I should before which is opposite to how I think I should now but which seems to be exactly good enough to suffice until some sufficient change of scenery gives a new wave of that dish we made together.
Do let me know.
Playground frowns and refugee shaped vaginas. Whores and Heiratas. Long mantle and sunk costs. Lost girl and found girl, disappearing act and excavation mission. This is not a book. This is libel, slander defamation of character. This is a prolonged insult. I see him in the broken mirror and think myself him, search within myself and find him, become him and his style just like I did with that doctor last time. I sink into the sofa, the plasterboard the bookcase, a cockroach on the wall. Get lost in him, eventually find something mediocre and consider myself a hybrid. Downstairs there is the heavily contested front room which should be rearranged to provide space for a wrestling ring or at least a yoga palace. Roast duck roast duck roast duck, Szechuan shits, long train with self-important woman, foldable lady.
Don my revolutionary expression and start speaking in epigrams until that intimate partner grows tired. Kafka melts into the wallpaper behind him. Petit pois incur apocalyptic visions wherein the world turns a golden hue and I’m matched with you or you or you. Young doesn’t hesitate. For Rules, like Crutches, are a needful Aid to the Lame, tho’ an Impediment to the Strong. A Homer casts them away; and, like his Achilles Jura negat sibi nata, nihil non arrogat, by native force of mind. Freedom and Truth, cocktail sausages and Zishy, Kendra and Hopkins, Georg and a hilarious interplay of foreign entities, disparate speech acts, and disconnected tissues. Unwise, uninteresting, unsynthesised, uncontrollable urge to say things about patterns of behaviour or of cardigans.
Same guy over and over and if I saw you again you wouldn’t want happy or sad one meaning passed time one a broken heart or even affection or distance one cruel and playful the other dark and sorrowful you wouldn’t want me fat but thin healthy at least so thin in fact barely perceivable disappearing hopefully not there at all even so impossibly thin that you can’t see me sideways you wouldn’t want me either way. You can’t choose. I could have been so much more or less or better or probably worse but it isn’t anything other than Bergson’s actuality which slips away in behind the brain and lays there dormant forgotten or simply dormant until called upon to rehash old scars, tear through ears and temples and eye lids and access delicious fears that hide underneath. This is all virtual.
Never stop pop and locking sharp feature dark eye ring eye bag eye socket skull like empty face empty mouth empty bed empty wardrobe or keeping something still, something which lost its smell left in that drawer it’s cheap wood infecting your unique smell until all that’s left is varnish and varnish away. Varnish and keep varnishing keep covering up broken nails and broken hearts and wear masks and glasses over grimaces and tears and hats over bad haircuts coats over ugly bodies baggy T-shirt’s over some essentially beautiful figure that’s all too close for comfort writhing we could say writhing or was it writing or righting some wrongs or something similar they’re all the same all the same I’m still the same I’m not changing or growing just on a constant stream of absolute bull shit and nothing less
Saw Rey in the porter’s lodge and had no choice but to tell them that back at the start of secondary school after a litre of Mountain Dew and a bar of cadbury’s chocolate I pooed myself on the side of the road and then Danny was sick but he still walked with me and it was traumatic yet strangely enjoyable. So excited to be living with you know whokh and producing artisanal products
