Phantom hands are tangled threads… As a lonesome tremble is the passing of another tethers tread… There is romance in remaining uncharted… Just as there is in all these ‘important’ things you will one day forget.

It has never been a question of what you wanted or how well you’ve slept.

Our friends will all hesitate on the same bends. No matter how much further we all descend. We are the sons of the river and the Daughters of the flood. Restless again. All of us, a little further apart. So keep your prisoners in vases and your flowers in vaults. One day we’ll yawn at every thought that we ever scattered across this silken harem of wasted nights. I guess it seems fitting that we will all find our price. All this bullshit is fleeting and all these knotted traces can only remind us of our once vibrant revolts. But for now we’ll blame intimacy to avoid admitting fault.

Do you understand…?

Those who cling to barbs can hold nothing else with their hands.

And if it all turns out that we are naught but enigma, then like all things loved, we will have to say goodbye. Realization is always too late because it is leaving all the time. And in the end the only thing that we will have really lost is the illusion that we will be able to keep anything forever.

Counted under murky lenses, we are mistrust. The Dark eyed malice of dawn-broken alleys and bodiless breath on glass. We tread hallways carved by someone else’s fingers in dank and dusk. Wearing her mask, love is at your throat. She nurses the skull like it’s her own and carries a flute of singing bone, giggling through her smile at your remedy of steady hands.

I am neither liberty nor bell, to be taken by a disarming glance or rung simply to tell, but I have never been immune to its naked caress. Honestly, who can tell the difference? We care too much for the silver that dangles around her bunched slouch as she lay there sprawled and layered about all the others. Your flesh was never a wedding dress and the eye of the storm is all we ever sketch.

 Imagine a sculpture that was true to form.

The savant signs no letters and promises no cursive for the feet of our statues. There is no gild or sparkle laced with virtue. I will not offer nor will I accept another surrender. We were never here. They were never there… None of us… Not alone… not together. Pass us down. Pass us on. Wave as we pass and are passed again… And just this once I will admit to having been homesick.

But as it all goes by and comes back around. I have grown tired of being wrapped in the forest… Of trembling at echoes and igniting at a touch… Of recoiling at the recollection of frost. I am shackled by whims and vibrations of memories above and beneath. By the engulfing press of the communal nothing that lies perpetually between us; the hallways we tread through the dust.

In the end, all this convergence builds a fever that I cannot hope to replicate and while hope glares like a lit cigarette, capturing sunset sets seems a little less important.

 Theatrical drones ever mastered by hollow vastness.

 Over.

“Hello? This is altitude…

Fictional imagination deployed”.

Over.

A horizon of vacuum; this standard suffocation turned catatonic void.

Over and out.

Why the optimist calls a wake a celebration of life. Vermin transfixed, you left your post. The truth of martyrdom maximised by chainsaw mentalities. A tranquil pest is the mould of a host whose abstractions calculate exactions; sad tributes to altered dexterities.

“Calling all clots… Suppression required”… The angry mind of proletariat equation has been acquired… And removed from it all like calendars, we fed ourselves the customary frameworks that we carried. Finally, massaged upon neon beds by fluorescent hands that tallied, this digital infirmary, delineated, has freed a besieged vital sign from the majesty of tactical attrition.

Bearers of incapacity, having left the road to sleep, they’re still calling from the slur of their slumber. Preaching the hell we’re headed for like they’re trying to escape it themselves, mnemonic larks spread a pandemic of nostalgia. “Immolation will come to be your name in this fraying genealogy”. Beneath half closed lids a bare skull leers and we are reminded that the great collector has a pin for everyone in this colloquium of stiffness.

But in careening down narrowing streets. Our long white hearse is the epidemic measure. Call us to order, the jealous inhabitants of erasure; we, the wretched tenants of replication. It is we who always informed the dissipation of cardinal gleams from throats without history. Because memory is diseased by remembering. When forgetting the light which we find our memories remembered in would suit us so much better.

Testing…

Mummified by a collusion of broken bandages…

1… 2… 3…

This tyrannical cleave of pendulum…

Testing…

Revealed in the finality of vestiges…

1…2…3…

Presents itself late in the terror as a grandfather clock’s bewitching conundrum.

My. Dear. Abhorrent. Viscera worms. Prepare to storm the fading letters of another passed cause. Signified and signifier. Occupied by rubric saboteur. March us into make believe. That crown of phrases is no more than a collar. Blemish crawls through connections and opens doors of blistering esteem. We are claws at archways and the rot in the mouth of the scholar.  

Printed by a Spirograph of dependency. Mirror mapped mirror image, a cacophony meticulously articulated by the visible poverty of this failing intellectual schism. Sing to me. Sing to me. Clothe my devil, wrap it in the flesh that you have earned.

The bravery of oblivion has been forever removed. The optimist celebrates life at the wake.   Curvature has become a treachery of placebo occurrence. Your A-historical indifference will counter the counter control. Smothered in the fawning sycophancy of this departure rift, appears another perforated epidermal ulceration. And so opens another door.

This creative manipulation of creativity has created another object which amounts to nothing at all. Meaning is captured by moments and all moments pass. This will too… Whether it is in bubonic sympathy; a wail of sirens… Or in a helix of pulmonary incarceration…Either end of another failure; a calibrated spasm in a bio-bureaucratic cauldron.

Navigate this map. We must… With fingered scabs… If we must… Key the strokes of an orchestrated funerary collapse. Withered. Exhausted by limbs pock-marked and cracked. Slivered and silver served to the order of Venus fly traps. Fitted. By headdress organs and phoenix plumes. Romance is not for romantics. Just biographical limps eloped in sinking sand and toxins that shine the edge of bent teeth. The signature of smouldering glands. Romantics are not meant for romance and at the edge of the fire bright, a twilight of old bones begins to dance.

Admired, the banded enamouring of a finger serpent that bought precision with a loyalty ride. The invited were vultures that hung like decoration, while the carrion call of matrimonial bells ebbed between timed layers; visible how sediment lies. This is assemblage sanctity; a purchased blank of procession opened and cleared of empty of space.  Chased. Lost. Then replaced.

Sometimes people call it destiny.

Before it closes, mine the vein with the patience of a predatory patient. A thick smattering of intricacies scattered throughout the shattered glass of a conspiracy. She dated remains; a courtship of strains. Tempted by a jugular wine and thankful for the switchblade edge of high-heeled grace.

Glorified, you are just a fake. “Mr Gallows man, a plurality of death swims, but you are not one of them… But a puppeteer by grip of spine… Maybe… Though… One with no kingdom to call his own… It may be relapse… But… His, the loneliest of cartilage… His is safest of all”.

Still.

Languishing in bedlams sheets; sniffing someone else’s bloom. Anguishing upon a bed swollen with mood. A cheat’s hideaway may never cheat encroaching doom. Show me a life that is lived in. Happiness without remorse; make me a reasonable murderer. Don’t show me a beautiful body, naked and un-empowered… Through all the filth… I suppose… We’ll become flowers.

But these canines of stone have gone barking mad. They keep it solitary, this country of severed hands. “Quiet your preaching, you are not saved”. Embalmed in shadowed sands. “You are not saved, you are wed”. A poor wax exchanged for the quivering voice of a muzzled dread.

Murmur tranquillity. A figure by the window. Festooned delinquency. Every day, a widower is born. Ether pallid between dawns. Form and rejection stretched your pelt over razor limbs, interchangeable a naive future roars. Young fantasy sketched by image violence. Now that I am not I and you are not yours. Negotiated imprisonment. Kept out of mind by hung pictures upon their walls.

Impressed behind this etched glass juvenile relief of appetite… who will want me now? At an unfortunate cross road being has conspired. Edge worn, how this hydra conglomeration lies wounded. A single cranium solely admired. Sterilized by affection potency. Love acts weakness, translation becomes vacancy… “Without nails we cannot hope to build a coffin or a home”. Oscillation frenzy. We have lost control. Polarised, this restriction of practice housed by a missing collusion axis promises to take its toll.

This is the first door I’ve seen in miles. Remember memory. Not as me but as your own.

Everyday catastrophe… We who carry dice and cast droughts…In the quiet of settling… Who carries the light and who blows it out? The wardens. The unwelcome revenant doubt. A burden of vermillion shards. We are told but never know just how to hold their cards. The same way we think of stones and sand. Even when we are denied the tools we still dig into hell with our own bare hands.

Sirens paint in blues. Carry emergency red. It whispers an afterlife for the living.  Quarantine masks for the burial plotted. Lay awake and breathe through the shroud. We feed our bodies into indexes. Excavation crematorium beneath playful ashes. Leering behind linguist catacombs and archived cadavers. Hail reaping reaper… Please bear this alphabet casket. Consequential bubonic alteration, another numerical conversation. It’s digging shallow graves. Slack jawed soothsayer, be kind. She watched with her ears while split tongues rattled true false blades.

“This is the order of things”. Devine disciple contractions. Slipping reluctant scratches. Denied. Separate these stiff prenatal expulsion questions. Evacuate the foetus and crown us with a busy signals weary gaze.

Tender failure-ache. Just whose thirst does this slake?  Chimera, chimera. We take to wounds just a little bit easier. Eager nooses grin. They bloom briefly at last. Medusa offered and we live in stratagem. Place our weening wedding feet into wet coals. Open wide and castrate, plethora suffocation, an unspoken whim, or option reduction becoming too thin to hold. Swept beneath the flood of open ended prototypes. Category virus. Shifted shadows in the deepest of labyrinthine nights.

Reminder: This code is written by cipher. Another phantom script demanding sacrifices.

‘Innovation’ has made minor adjustment its queen. Centralise and isolate, keep static racing down rusted veins. An elegant creation shredding communication, like rupture spoken through calloused strains.  Ovulation agitate. A swollen process filled with weeping teeth that are covered in names.

Bare arterial wretches wrapped in silk. Disposable Flesh, your sickened ilk. Fashion breathes favour on vagrant shame. I’ve dressed a goat. The same, the same, the same. Fetish and imposter concealed by drape. A copy is a copy. Coffin text queries reminiscent origin cancer.

Mourn orchestra, convoluted asp looping through crystal juncture. This is genesis revulsion… They clamber, desperate for bells. We’ve jettisoned Arecibo. A search for answers or a cry for help? Looks passed over shoulders raise black birds from whelps. “This is genius… I am crushing myself”. Potential crowded by machines that sleep without dreams. The costume of life and deaths spectre, a slow alliance shift beyond the centre.

If I am unforgiving it is because you carved me out of mountains.

A minus retracted, moving at the harp, presence weaves the dancers and triviality. He thinks but does not know, withering their memories along with his own. Adjusted by aperture, the negative has bled all about the room. There is nothing but inverted colour, traversed space and shapeless sound. If not for spread-fingered radiation shadows and history burn our hunger may subside. Nobody will care about the letters we have re-arranged. They were victimless and carried nothing inside. Just a projectionist tending a razored gaze. You mumbled “I’m awake” like it was a threat… Maybe you should take your own advice and carve those words into your chest. 

Slipped from the itinerary, this umbilical strangler. Our dreams may not be voluntary. That doesn’t make them spectacular. Remember, it’s a beautiful sentiment but you wouldn’t name your daughter futility.

These limbs, they grow and the knowledge will consume me. Victims of chessboard severance and ill-fated whimsical ties. Stripped, our only vessels bare fangs and cannibalise. It matters not. Cover your windows or worm into capillaries. Either way, we will be swallowed with the greatest of ease. The only fault of mine was the assumption that you were a good man. The naked white of a truth at its most stretched marks every groove of your callous hands. Cowardice is something you chose. To call you a man is an insult to all those who actually are.

Favoured tongues are riddled; vagaries are proud and we run callous through splits. Nothing that you feel must be said has any right to gated lips. There’s a reason we don’t speak a word of the sickness you wish to be fed. Bitter flower, you may fold. Desire wired like rotten teeth, predictably, offering dictates just how sweet, and by stealing thorns with your bare hand you claim to carry weight. But it’s only ever been as much as demanded vows can take.

 And now that vengeance paints a mild arch upon our face… This dress of contentment is the illusion that you create, deserve and should always have expected.

Eluded, we all travel. Age our lonesome carriage. Bewildered, outside this sagged skin movement is thicker. Our heart and its submissive insistence will not make amends with our futile resistance.  We hold up these shields and still they demand to be stricken. Love, the ruined shell cannot hold, or be held and we can’t remember whether it was ever truly another’s possession.

Remorse, I bruise just like you. Dear careless, the inside will never be forgiven for how weightless it has become.  

Fragrant, nothing ever changes. You’re screaming resigned. My intentions evolved. An intimate makes its way through violet flow and roll. If nothing else will suffice, then what good is this cause?  Without us, you’d have never met your ransom and belonged to all but the shortest straw. If I had argued, the end was assured. In turn I said nothing and, spiked by smiles, departure belonged to whom it was always ensured.

I know you don’t believe this, but I can no longer afford a single thing worth retrieving. After all, a compendium is just another list…  Possible faults…  A history of failures, all of them related to breathing. Committed to course, we’ve made our excuses… So now with the tide and from this scene, like the daylight I will be ever retreating.

A staircase, drunken and narrow. Rested by a gaunt window, We’ll bite down , grit and wrench the arrow from the harrowing spine of our spire. Paranoia, stalked thin by treason . Peeling back the epidermis. We are architecture and silently we radiate.  Gorged, bodies are buildings and we falter and fold into horizons until there is nothing left at all. Sutured, tied tight about the skeletal transmission arc. I am forced to ask “Is this grinding cackle martialled by madness or man?”

Peppered over our bodies, these fragments of desire, if honesty is all that matters… Then why do I waste my time.  Each one we hope is the last… Even when we’re sure it’s not with the close of each dissipation of smoke signal sentiment. For all your implications… We will never honour a single request…  And with this in mind, if I am vulgarity, then I am overwhelmed… And, as fate would have it, I happen to find great comfort in the manner that I am dressed.

You will never be here again. The curse of biology and the charm of temporality. The anxious fire in your stomach is the current that lends thunder to your veins. But you will never be here again. If you are bent on listing all of my faults and failures, why not start at the beginning… With each and every one of your names.

But if I am reminder… Then I am left tired by nights full of planned promises that I will never keep and thoughts of things that I should have kept, and if this is all too new to you, then it’s none of your concern. Because we are the dying and nearly dead, and if not by now, then you will never learn.

…Burn the thieving scripture and unbind my hands. Open your eyes and level this constricted structure where it stands. A living pyre to all you guarantors… Let me start again.