Number Seven

I set number seven ablaze. I’m surprised I didn’t think of it sooner. I was stoned at the time – when the impulse took me. I put the chip pan on and went out. It’s the most common cause of household fire, the chip pan. I was standing across the road watching when the fire brigade arrived. It was only then that the enormity of what I’d done hit me. I was shaking. I was in shock. I stood there among my neighbours and watched the smoke fuming from the roof. I could see the flames through the windows. All my possessions were burning. Everything I owned was being turned to cinders.

I was a bit embarrassed when the fireman guessed correctly that I was off my face, “the most common cause of household fires” he said. Fire cleanses, fire destroys and fire renews. Friends gathered around to console me, “At least no-one was hurt – are you insured?” At that moment I just did not give a shit. I would rise from the ashes. I was looking forward to it.

A few days later I was allowed to enter the building to retrieve any belongings that I could. To my surprise my bedroom – though covered in a thick layer of soot – was basically intact. I found a shoe box crammed full of old letters and postcards, a lifetime’s worth of correspondence. They were miraculously undamaged by the fire. I scanned through them – old lovers, friends, relatives – bitter sweet memories. They burned very nicely. One by one they joined with the ash on the floor.

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Manic

when it’s on me
it’s a speedball
an acid rush
the distilled rays of the sun
burned into my retinas
fusing the membrane
and flooding my head
with a rainbow song
then I’m a supernova
I’m a lightning strike
an atomic bomb
I’m the Empire State
and the monster Kong
I’m a gushing torrent
a tidal wave
I’m a rattlesnake
with a diamond back
I’m the seventh son
I’m a maniac
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Black Dog

I’m sick to the soul of this shit. My days are long and drawn out in a thin visceral stream that twists around the landmarks of my life. There is a quake in my soul - a quickening of pulse and febrile brow. I am atremble, a candle in a draft. I’m sinking into the mire, I can no longer help it and I no longer care.

It is always a step before and a breath behind me. A miasma of waking dreams played out against my pillow in the constant churning of my incessant consciousness. It’s there in the tangle of my sheets that the turning and returning of my memories break as waves across my brain pan. Every embarrassment, every humiliation, is played out in slow motion for my morbid delectation.

I feel so strange. I’ve felt it before, like something, somewhere, is all wrong. It’s coming from someplace far away and it’s coming for me. I buried something somewhere and some-one is now digging it up. Zombies from the past are trailing me. There are conspiracies whispered just beyond my hearing.

I’ve been here so many times before but I’ll never get used to it – that’s the bitch - I’ll never get used to it. It's an insidious and complex torture, always new and yet familiar. That unhappy shadow is always nearby – and the promise of inclement weather is ever on the horizon.

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Dead Man’s Shoes

Buy me another drink and I’ll tell you a story. It’s set out on the edge – out on the hard road. It concerns a travelling man who slaved all his days for a handful of nothing; that’s where it all goes eventually - down the fucking tubes. Virtues turn to vices and vices turn to chains. It’s a rough road to travel for rich and for poor. Over time the luxury of indulgence becomes the slavery of convention; emperors and hobos both wear tin crowns.

I walked those uncertain miles in a dead man’s shoes. They pinched, they chafed, and they left little room for deviation from an idiot course. The path of least resistance led to the bottom of the bottle, more dead soldiers littering the sorry path to hell.

My cause was lost, the spirit had ebbed away, but I made my crooked way to where the grass was no greener and the people were no kinder. Always onward – never back – I kept on until they found a reason to hang me in those dead man’s shoes.

I’ve seen men hang, hang by degrees, with the life choked out of them over the course of decades. Lynched by the mob,  ostracized, and exiled to the barren regions. Naked men left out in the rain. Men without a friend, men without a home, men starved of love.

There are no second chances for those already dead. They say hope is the mother of all men, but I had no mother, no father, no companions. I’d nothing much to remember and nothing much to forget. I had nothing much to celebrate, but everything to regret.

Some say that Jesus awaits us at the end of this long road. That he’ll relieve us of our burdens and wipe away our tears. So put the pennies on my eyes to pay my fare, wrap me in a pauper’s shroud, but first take off these fucking shoes.

Gouge

All my life they spat on me
Because I dragged the low end
I got used to fighting for what’s mine
Blood of my blood and bone of my bone
I believe in an eye for an eye
I’d gouge away with bloody thumbs
Even if it rendered the whole world blind
Everyone is born with love in them
But you have to be taught how to hate
Each blow that landed was an education
They taught me and I learned it well
I want my pound of flesh on the bone
I’ll dig my grave right next to yours
I will pluck out my offended eyes
And serve the dictates of my primitive heart
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