Saturday, 31 May 2014

The Stagefright Of The Checkout Girl


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












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