an anagram of 'perfect'

He wonders how far is too far. He challenges the limits, the boundaries.

He asks himself these questions when he’s afraid he’s fucked the answer. He knows questions cause trouble but he pushes the boundaries anyway. The other side of the line beckons him..

Who they think he is when he stands before them, a mass of 850;
When he organises and delegates and promotes and advocates;
When he is orderly, model and in control –

He is not.

The biggest shock of their lives is when they find him stumbling around their territory on Friday nights, torso bare, shirt discarded, squirming on the floor in their bed covers.
Unleashed just like the rest of them.

He delights in this knowledge.

It is not a façade, it’s a context.
It’s a decision. To be this person here and this person, here.
It’s two sides of himself. Each equally as legit as the other.

All of this, he understands.

01/01/10

Today’s date looks pretty, she thinks. She thinks - but she’s not sure. He’d agree - if he could see today. Last night’s liquor eats his ears and his eyes burn from snoring with his eyelids open. Not even dead people can do that.

And it’s odd – so odd – she considers, how the world is never quite big enough. Never quite crazy enough. There’s never enough people. No matter how lonely she gets. There’s never enough.

The most beautiful people in this place bury their faces in red dreadlocks. They hold each other only briefly. Their metal-laced smiles draw my sideways vision. The world is much too small for people like them.

the triangle

Recycled ideas.

We are all sifting through the rubbish bin of life. Beggars desperately searching for scraps of hope. We will cling to anything – anything - remotely implying possibility. Or success. We are all waiting for brilliance to crawl into our hand so we can tightly close our fingers around it. Claim it! Patent it as yours, mine. A thing which I created.

It's all about ideas. So many ideas! I must, I must create creativity! Ideas: How I think and how I arrange the words and the full stops and the lines, the paragraphs the spaces. Writing is architecture. Curves and structures, arcs and phrases, colours. It’s all colours. Shapes. Composition. How I see things. I AM THE ARTIST: Arranging and articulating in a way which is mine. How can I take this recycled notion, which has passed through the lips of so many other writers, rested in the creases of a thousand hands, and prove that its formation in my head was different? Narrator.. I am: Creator, writer, dictator, fabricator; revealer of truth.

Spat out, stuck to the sides - these ideas are most common. Small and discoloured. They refuse to move and cannot be reshaped. They are firm and they are not malleable. But they are there, quietly inconspicuous in their existence. These ideas are found time and time again, variations on mediocrity. They are the most unattractive of ideas. They get in the way and stick to your skin so you can't move. Rigid, regurgitated words, unoriginal in form and in theme. These ideas are not brilliance. They have no lustre. No, they epitomise average.

Occasionally I will produce chewing gum ideas. The worst part is once you have touched them they remain stuck to you. They once tasted beautiful. Sugar coated and brightly sweet, staining the tongue with bright words. Ink in the mouth: This is how I see my ideas. I taste them on my tongue. I feel them brushing my lips. And I do love them. They are incredibly gentle. Whisperings.

But once they have been chewed for some time they are no longer so appealing. Their taste becomes bland and dull. They are discarded on the sidewalks of pages and hidden in the margins. I cross them out, wrap them up, hide them, edit them. They are strange versions of themselves once I have finished with them. I will still claim them as mine although in reality tediousness owns them.

Recycling: The picture has three parts. A triangle. It consists of thought, writer and the page. The origin, the medium and the canvas. For it is a canvas on which I draw my words. And I am an artist.

dirty laundry

This religion is addictive. Hell-of-a-good, my friend Thomas would say.

Upon entering the chapel you are overwhelmed by the sticky sweet incense filling up your nostrils. It's there to remind you of God’s presence. The room is dimly lit by small, flickering lights. Everyone’s hands are lifted in praise.

The priest stands at the altar brushing the cover of the bible back and forth. He’s making music for the congregation. God’s people are wearing their best clothes to indicate to other followers their devoutness. The women have painted their faces beautiful, but as the sermon continues the people realise it’s what’s inside that’s more important.

They drink the cabernet-red blood of Christ and greedily consume the small, white, round tablets of his body. A hundred bodies are buzzing with sanctity. They turn to one another – any other – to offer the sign of piece. They exchange breath and their bodies meet harmoniously in a perfect marriage. How fundamentalist you are is what counts. How far will you go for your religion?

Will you quench the thirst of a stranger from your own pocket? Can you articulate the hymns? Will you move your body in the presence of God?
Would you, in a holy place, invite your brother, your sister, to join their body with yours in a temple of love?

The windows have fogged over because so many bodies are proclaiming the good news. The priest looks down at the congregation from his pedestal. He is happy. God is good. God is love. God is heat. All of these bodies burn with the heat of God’s passion. There’s a fire lit in each of these souls which burns fiercely from the pit of their abdomens. The ceiling is dripping with holy water and baptises all the followers into their new found life.

A glass sits on the altar for the congregation to make donations. It is three-quarters filled with unwanted coins. Tokens of how much people value the brothers and sisters assisting their faith. It will go to a good cause.
The only doctrine this church has is that which is unspoken: No-one admits there are rules, for this religion is freedom. But of course, the priest is idolised, the sign of the Lord revered, the altar genuflected to with involuntary stumbling, the bible read aloud to the people and echoed word for word.

And here, in this strange place, they find God.

the difference between good fucked up and bad fucked up

She stands outside in her baggy cardigan, flicking the end of her cigarette stub with her thumb so that ash disperses over the concrete between her Chucks. I know for a fact that on Monday nights she routinely gets high and stinks the bathroom out with the sweet-sour smell of burning spliff. Her ex-boyfriend threatens to smack up her current one, and her lacy black underwear has holes in the seams.

Inside her head her brain is set to ‘shuffle’. Secrets come out if you give her a shake; you can increase the volume with a soft pressing and stop ideas abruptly with the pause button. She doesn’t know it but she is more intelligent than an alchemist. She can make colours appear with a puff of smoke from her lungs and digests chemicals more willingly than any solvent.

He is the same but different. On K Road he meets a man higher up in the corporate chain than himself and they exchange goods: one receives cash, the other receives drugs. He’s allowed to smoke dope but not inside the house becuase his girlfriend doesn’t like that. He comes to class with yellow-grey semicircles haunting the skin under his eyes and I wonder sometimes if he ever sleeps.

The thoughts which he owns are existing outside his head. But is it the drugs or his mind? He’s completely blasé to the world around him; he lives in his own right, a mad scientist, an artist, a culprit.

Another sneaked wine in garden sheds at 11. The candy she likes comes in pretty colours which reflect themselves in the corners of her head. She knows what it’s like to be smacked around. She had a love affair with cigarettes too, this other, and saw things that affected her for life. They’re fucked up, these three, bad.

I wonder how I could ever be so creative without being so fucked up. I don’t even dare to pry into this world for fear that the things I encounter might rupture my corneas, or burst my eardrums, cauterise my fingertips. I don’t want the bitter aftertaste of crime clinging onto my taste buds or the stench of guilt burrowing into my nostrils. I keep away from these things. I banish creativity. I can’t understand shit.

Call yourself an artist, myself goads myself.

But I realise on Fridays: I’m good fucked up. That’s why my curse follows me around. Being bad would block my creative resources and then I’d just be fucked up, full stop.

I’m good fucked up: Tainted by respectability. Molested by chastity. Damaged by virtue. Punished by obedience. Poisoned by sobriety. Infected by sanitation. Crippled by sanity. Defunct by punctuality. Hindered by determination. Dulled by intelligence. Burdened by morals. Slurred by elocution. Good fucked up. So good it’s fucked up. Being good fucks me over.

That’s the difference between me and them. But we are all artists, and dance our fucked up dances. That’s what makes us so brilliant.

moment

In school - but having left school - sorting out irrelevant details. She finds herself standing in a wooden panelled room digging in her bag for a sickly pale green sheet of paper; requesting a signature: her passport out of here. Blue lidded bottles line the walls labelled with strange scribbling like OH- and sodium citrate. Unexpectedly, almost incongruous with this moment, H2O puddles over her eyes. She is touched by the pedagogic yet somewhat matriarchal figure in front of her who has guided her through these college walls. It suddenly feels as though their souls have known each other for a long, long time. It is unrelated to these bottles; the chemicals.

In a moment of hazy de ja vu she considers that tears, whether good or bad, play a part in some of the most poignant moments in her life. The two women, born several decades apart – sharing an instant – embrace.