Approaching the denouement of Saturday night
a boozey cloud cuckoo land
in the space between revelry and debauchery
and all such things associated with the pangs
or songs
played on the strings of a heart
I have never seen a bloodstained razor that doesn't look happy
as though smiling a rusty smile
We were remembering the famous artist who cut open his wrists in the tub
an extension of his life's work
a distillation of red
Writing sonnets and drawing hexagrams with crayons
Inside the Sistine Chapel of hangovers
the world smearing across your eyes
smudging into your retina
There is a socialistic notion that everyone is equal because everyone has an arsehole
it is a notion I do not support
It was with her when I felt everyone was equal
they seemed to glow
everything glowed
Incandescent
a lexicon that goes without saying
Amidst weeks of working like an unloved dog
when I should have been weeping like willow
but almost felt alright
In the looking glass hides her reflection
Yiddishy paradoxes fly all around me
the right hand taking away what the left hand never put there
a vulture lays an egg
There's a man at the bar who swears to be the angel of death
he told me that after a long day of mercilessly slaughtering the first born gentiles of Egypt when he got back to Heaven God didn't even say thank you
shaking his head and laughing the the cynical laughter of a slaughterer
Have you heard that the clouds are the cigarette smoke of Angels?
and of all the shapes a cloud could be
What's holier than melancholia?
Jesus Christ was one of the all time great light Jewish entertainers
When the lads talked about football in the pub
visions of a majestic ball where guests were fully clad except for their feet filled my head
Footfalls as soft as snow
Thin air conditioning
Defining eternity as neither here nor there may be unsatisfactory
but it will have to do for the moment
It always gets to that point where the bums start talking about that bet they were gonna make
but never did
which would have made a couple of thousand
I did not get where I am today through being successful
He may not have been very lucky but he was kind
this is its own kind of luck
Walking into a mirage
not a popular mirage
She'd talk about the weight of my gaze and measure herself in the bathroom
all these glances were making her fat
Day came in like a hoax
The ghosts of ghosts
What retinas retain
Our mutual dissatisfaction was unsustainable
more or less beyond meaningless
a constant struggle to find the postcode of Atlantis
The sky at night
in some half dance of chance
within the tender splendour of days in decay
happenstancing
sprawling and smalling
Smoking crack with the prostitute that helped him score
in the back of a mini cab
in a carpark in Scunthorpe
the American academic
a Henry James scholar
thinks to himself this is the first 5 past 4 in the morning of the rest of my life
Walking through the supermarket
humming with electricity
everything aglow
lit by more than light
there is a crack in the speaker's voice broadcast over the tannoy
as she calls for a clean up on aisle 4
the stagefright of the checkout girl
