Tuesday 9 November 2010

wasted breaks

there is a certain moment

between one day finished

and anything else starting

where there is a blank, a break and anything i do is off the record

and what do i do?

wait, mainly.

Tuesday 2 November 2010

Low-rent Body Disposal

We found bones in our garden. If you’ve lived in the sort of houses I’ve lived in, you’ll understand why this didn’t surprise me. Decades worth of tenants, each staying there just a year - not knowing anyone there before, not talking to the neighbours. Strangers connected only by the old tea stains we leave for each other on the wall and the half truths estate agents tell us about each other and the house.

You could have told that from the house itself, actually. Holes in the floor that admit the slugs who come in and squat with us. Cloth-eating maggoty things in the sofas. A roof that only stands up to rain that doesn’t try; because every call to the estate agents is greeted with sympathy and empty words rather than action. After all, we’re renting a cheap house; we’re not important to them. It has to suck, so there’s some inducement to work harder and get a mortgage.

And on to the garden. Enmeshed and matted patches of grass that ate all attempts at gardening tools, just as they’d eaten the bones that we excavated from the vegetative cement.

Large bones. Really quite large bones. Of a size and shape that make the finder hold them up to herself and compare. And shudder. Pristine bones - grey from time outside, but uncut, ungnawed, untouched. Bones, in short, that raise questions.

I lived with artists. Not installation artists, but the sort that find the existence of fuse boxes a revelation. I showed them the bones I found.

‘Oh yeah,’ they said ‘we found those a while back.’

‘And you didn’t wonder what they were doing there?’

‘Yeah, but we didn’t know how to find out, so we didn’t think about it.

... if it’s human remains, can we name it?’

So, for all your serial killers out there reading - and I want you to know, I value your demographic - may I suggest disposing of bodies in low-rent household gardens. They’re private, so no walkers or inconvenient dogs - us tenants aren’t allowed to luxury of animal companions. Noone stays here long enough to tackle the Triffids in the garden and install plant beds, or even nooks. And when the bits rise to the surface, you can rely on lassitude and sheer incredulity to prevent anyone doing more than making an exhibit out of them or setting up an ‘identify that bone’ competition in the corner at parties.

Archeologists and doctors consulted at the latter thought probably sheep humerii, and possible a rib. Or a human scapula. The case is still open.

Thursday 15 July 2010

McPornos

i'm lovin it

drive up in a cap so noone sees your face
order a synthetic aesthetic then supersize
it's just like the real thing (only slightly more rubbery)
but who cares when it's so lovingly texturised!

blank eyes blank skin blank lips to suck you in
wham bam thankyou ma'am satifaction on demand

assembled in the backroom from reconstitued meat
product placement apes desires fake desires sate real needs
buns with just a bead of sweat to hint at organicity
plastic featureless perfection can only arouse sick in me
if you think you'll find happiness in a box
just don't eat your soul to fill your stomach.

try living like this it's fast and cheap and sleazy
money can't buy you everything but you can try
be warned you'll end up fat and dead of malnutrition
and your wonderful relationship will end in rsi.

Monday 5 July 2010

The Ugliest Thing I've Seen

I was sixteen, and I lived in a one horse town where the horse would kick you in the head if you looked at it funny. And then its owners would come and piss on you for causing the horse distress.

Or so it seemed to me, as a fat buck-toothed young lady with no instinct for camouflage and a knack for getting on chavs’ nerves.

I had just started to enjoy myself, for the first time in my teenage years, as I had met some people who hadn’t gone to my school and so didn’t treat me as the butt of every joke. In fact, they almost treated me as an equal. And with these guys, I’d started to think it was worth coming out of my shell. I cut my hair, got some big boots, and drank illicitly in alleyways. My god, it was fun. Some of the best fun I’ve had actually.

One of the good things about my new friends was that they liked punk and rock. There was a small punk rock venue in my hometown (pop: 200,000, thinking pop: approx 200) which was our destination on Saturday nights after going to the classy establishment of the Bargain Boozer for the obvious. We’d down much of our drinks in the privacy of Back Walk, the street behind it, then take with us as much as we could disguise so as not to have the police or doormen or other killjoys take them off us. On our way to the venue there would be much jumping, playfighting, meeting other people (sometimes the bands, gods know what they made of these 15-16yo drunkards) and eventually queuing up around the block to wait to get in.

Hundreds of people waiting to pack into this room on top of a pub. Their sweat collected on the ceiling and ate away at the plaster, which in accordance with the circle of life fell in fat flakes back down onto the sticky crowds. The floor was an un-rock highly patterned carpet, with occasional black sticky patches like the devil’s loogies that made it noticeably more difficult to get up when you went down. Which you did, often, cos you’d glugged your share of the vodka. Straight from the bottle, in my case, before my system learnt to recognise it and gag. The bands playing I’d hardly heard of beforehand, but some of them I see in HMV now. If that’s not an insulting thing to say about anyone.

Pretty much anyone ‘alternative’ in that city, it seemed, was there. Rows of teenage boys in baggy jeans and black band tshirts (it was the early 00s), girls in stripy tops with tonnes of bead bracelets and baggy jeans. Some of the older ones had dreads or coloured hair: they had special cool points.
And because of the sort of town it was, and Newton’s third law of motion, where there were loads of alt kids – generically called skaters at that point, somewhat inaccurately – there were packs of chav/townie types. Some of them had cars and would drive past slowly yelling stuff out of the windows. Some would throw stuff. And some of them would get hands on.

They got one of the guys I was with. I don’t remember the details; it was a long time ago. I remember:

A group of teenage townies (that’s what we called them: sportswear, hoop earrings, fake tan, expensive trainers, inadequate womb nutrition, difficulty conjugating verbs, anger issues - you know the type) around him. Some guys, some girls. One of the guys punching him.

‘I’m a pacifist.’ He said.

Smack.

‘So you won’t hit him back?’ said one of the girls. Maybe this was impressing her.

Him: ‘No, I don’t believe in it; I’m a pacifist.’

Smack.

Hundreds of people in the queue stood together and pretended they couldn’t see it, glad it wasn’t them.

‘So you’re just going to stand there and let him hit you?’

Smack.

I wanted to go and intervene, but there was only one of me.

‘Come on, hit him.’

Smack.

‘You’re just going to stand there and let him put you in hospital?’

Smack.

I went to go over, but my boyfriend pulled me back.

“It’s not worth it", he said; "they’ll just get you too.”

Smack.

He pulled me with some force, but I could have broken free. I’m not the world’s best fighter but I was angry and at least I’d have done something.

Unlike everyone else who stood there in the queue, like they always did, glad it wasn’t them. United by a dress code and a music style and a lack of spine. Waiting to getting out their anger in the mosh pit on their friends, boasting about their bruises, shutting out the outside world.

I don’t know what happened then. I let him walk me away.

Smack. Smack. Smack.


We came back later and the pacifist was drinking like a fish through his beat up face. Like always.


He’s usually homeless when I see him now, cadging drinks and being the one with the sad mad staring eyes of whichever group he’s in. He’s not a pacifist anymore, I don’t think.

Sunday 13 June 2010

Why I Stab Myself

Another spike of metal pulled out of my face. Another bright steam of blood stripes my cheek. I watch until the blood floods my eye, and then wait blind and hungry for the next one to go in.

I do this to myself. And I’ll do it again.

I’m not a self-harmer. I don’t do this because I deserve it, because I’m a bad person, because it gives me something to focus on or even because I’m bored. I do it because I like it and it makes me feel good. Because it makes me feel brave and strong. Because it’s cheaper than drugs and less complicated than sex.

So every couple of weeks, I go visit a friend of mine with a split tongue and William Morris floral patterns carved into his arms. He puts on latex gloves and swabs my skin with alcohol (infections ain’t so much fun), and slides needle after needle into my flesh.

The skin is just as receptive to touch and stimulation underneath as it is on top: more so, in fact, because the cells under the skin are still living. The skin you usually see, that your lover runs their hands across, is already dead. The needle under the skin pierces through to new skin and new sensation. It feels like nothing else to access the space inside. Sure, there’s penetration and endorphin flood in common with sex, but it’s the higher brain functions and not the animal libido calling the shots.

And sure it hurts when it breaks the skin, but not so much as you probably think. Pain comes from the mind – a thousand placebo trials, fire-walkers, fakirs and mothers lifting cars to free their children show us that. A 22 gauge needle is 0.8mm wide and barely feels like anything; a sting, a flick on the forearm, and it’s over. Further up though, extra-long 20 gauge, 100mm by 1mm, requires an effort of will not to spasm away. I stay to see what I can take. To push myself.

Wearing rows of them in my many fleshy places, raised ribs of steel are faintly visible under my sun-deprived skin. Raised still more with other needles woven under the first. Still more when that playfully sadistic bastard twists them, eases them in and out, and laughs with me as I squirm and whimper. Long needles interpenetrating my skin more than once; needles laced to needles, flesh corseting flesh.

More delicate regions like the face and genitals require more care. There’s more wiring under there. More muscles to impede, more blood vessels to puncture, more nerves to hit; but still less than you’ve probably been led to believe. The body is a wonderful machine but in the end it is a machine; if it was that temperamental it wouldn’t last as long as it has, would it?

Rows of needles through the forehead distort the face closer to the last ice age. The sharp points assimilate into my field of view like just another row of eyelashes, though the tension and restriction of the facial muscles make it harder to forget them. When they come out, they come out as easy as butter; almost too easy. The only way to know they were ever there is sudden warmth and the perfect red stripes. Two hours later, just some small red dots.

You can pierce your cheeks, have a mouth that you can’t shut because it’s full of needles, can’t open enough to talk. Breathe hard and air escapes through your cheeks with a sound like a puncture. Then they slide out so neatly, so sweetly, and a mouthful of blood later your mouth is airtight again. Two hours later, you wouldn’t know it’s not acne scars.

The body can take it. You can take it. Despite what religion, law, and primitive instinct say, you own your body. Who else could?

The pain is just your body saying ‘You’re not dead yet. So live.’ And I’m just getting started.