Trudging through a cold, damp wood; followed by the desire to be reconnected to the body, to feel the sensation of sunshine upon my face without the howling of expressionless ghosts snaking around the limbs, your limbs.
It’s dark. An arrow has been screwed into the bark. It points down to the scentless mud and leaves. A crumpled twin wrapper. A knotted condom. A dead dog.
* * *
I’m eating constantly. Nothing good.
Chocolate.
Crisps.
Coke.
Though my favourite is bubblegum. Delicious…blue, beautiful bubbles of bubblegummy fizz upon my happy tongue and lips. Tingling up my spine; squelching my brain into a temporary stillness and calm.
Breathing underwater. Breathing in the factory sugar, the open expanse of cheerful bubbles, the subaquatic indigofera tickling my toes; I feel my ancestors, like giant, grinning mud skippers, puffing pipes and tapping bongoes.
My head muscles slacken, bulge like a frog throat and expel an air ring from a blow hole in the top of my head (an old, haruspex remedy for demonic possession) into the infinite blue brine.
Plankton
of
gold leaf shimmer
in
shoals on my starboard bow.
* * *
The needle skips. I’m breathless beside the banks of the Kennet and Avon. And empty leash in my cold, blue hands.
* * *
Stamping the can to a metal cookie and kicking it straight into the gutter. The muscles in my forehead grip my skull like a vice. Like a sheet of cold steel, my memory is erased, left stranded in the reeds with the cigarette butts, twix wrappers, knotted condoms.
* * *
Pressing the flesh and the limp soul together is like mating magnets with opposing polarities. A tear is shed. I blink. My eye, dumbly, blinks. A dogs arse cutting off a shit. An old TV, shrinking the world to a tiny dot which, itself, fades and dies.
Until all that is left is the numb face of the body; bewildered and reflected upon the bevelled surface of the icy screen. The world around it, fish eyed, lurking, seemingly waiting to strike.
Addict Lines 