I Slaked My Thirst With Memories

Sceptically, I lay down upon the ivory earth and waited for the baking heat of the white sands to swallow up my mind. With fingers blistered and peeling, I dug out a small hollow, at first perhaps just for something to drive away the demons, and then with an intensity forged by a cold, rageless passion; a physical embodiment of my secret joke - if the ground would not take me in spirit, then I would force an entrance, storm that sacred vessel as a last act of despair, a knight sullied with sins, atrophied with anguish and desperate to reclaim his rightful honour of atonement by storming the castle which made him, slaying those that would not forgive. And so I would be too! If I must die here in the desert, then I will at least have a burial. And perhaps the burning sands might slake my thirst, as some things which burn for so long eventually feel cool and cold. And those that would be angry with me for dying would not see my naked bones grotesque and embarrassed for lack of skin; they would not see anything at all.
Like a worm burrowing into the stomach of a dog, my failing body writhed with a peculiar reilsh, eyelids encrusted and bleary; swollen tongue rubbing sand into the sores of my gums until I had dug out no more than a helmut of a hole; and then tears, stupid, pointless tears, energy that might extend my life, the final fluids of my body gone; now dry like a teetotaller's liquor cabinet, like God's humour and me, with the white sands glowing pink as the restless sun gave birth to a thankless night of nevermores.
I bowed my head down and licked the last of the salty fluid from my cheeks. Words and visions filled me and at once my cracked and broken voice spilled out like light on that very first day - I was sick with it, like a drunk who held it in his guts for too long and now must purge whether he want it or no - all that I was and all that I am went forth from me as a gush of sound, a fissure in time from whence possibilities spring forth, and tiny whispers pooled there in that hole like inky dreams glassy with the reflection of self, rising, rising, overflowing and seeking exit on the wind, trying to find the moon and stars and someone else, somewhere else to make solid of their sorrow; but I cupped my hands and held them close, tipped them back into my hollow and continued, carefully, so carefully; for the Truth is a delicate thing.
The moon scraped her bloated self across the night and dawn reshaped the land. I lay there, still - whispering my faithless life until my throat bled and I was suddenly empty, finished.
Resting my sore head on the softly swirling sounds of my desert halo, I knew then that I was free. All these things which had kept me, all these infiltrations of serpentine magnitude vesseled up in my heart and held as Hell holds Satan - they were gone; they were thoughts and actions and certainly, they were pain; but it was debris never cleared, dead tissue not amputated for the simple sake of vanity and an overzealous concept of belonging to it! It was a folly of life not given over and not given up!
I should have died then. I should have melted into time as a mournful shadow which holds its liquid only in the weight of others, and to whom day is known as a resentment of light, and night is held as a Hell of sweeping indefinition. But I didn't die. I didn't perish, I didn't fall and I didn't fail. I lived.
I stood up from my rockpool of sorrow and left my abused shell of a body blank and unstaring beside. I felt the wind blow through me and tasted the history and wisdom in it's existence.
I pondered what to be next.

Did You See What People Do?

We get it right, we get it wrong,
We move along, we move along,
We sing our songs and hide our heat,
And o'er Heaven's guise we weep,
For standards that we cannot keep
Coagulate in colours deep within
Our sleeping chest of sorrows;
So spurning on the empty morrow,
And burning what we cannot borrow
We bow along to touch what follows first,
An empty and beholden thirst
For vengeance in our sacred curse -
Callous and contrary verse
Used to steal our neighbour's purse
And spelled upon the altar;
We cannot falter!
We cannot fall!
We cannot fail or He'll damn us all!
And sick with fear we'll favour
Two dimensional behaviour
And believe our only saviour
Lives in lines between the words.

The Girl With a Thousand Echoes

She was a slender thing
With sandy hair and a face
Angled down to the left of the sidewalk,
Coyly making a demand of the sky
To lift her attention.
For five whole minutes I was hers.
I loved her intensely as we drifted by
On a balmy Brisbane midnight
In a way, allured by seasoned callousness,
Escaping from the ever-changing constant
To a pro-noun of
All that was more real
Than all this other stuff
Which can't keep me awake at night
But shimmers in my dreams
As my life inside
Refutes all I refute
By showing me the truth
In a painted form
So vaguely clear I know
Something is still wrong,
And the escapes don't work
So sleep just becomes another thing which I avoid;
For the anguish is much more
Pleasant than the void.
She was alternatively attractive -
And how many times have I written that
Without really knowing the meaning?
But for that second,
In the abscess of that missed connection,
I knew all the love
Of all the echoes in the world,
And all the nonsense,
All the stuff which preoccupies,
All the pain,
And all the hate,
And all the thoughts
For thinking's sake -
Fell down.
Like the twin towers.
Like the walls of jericho.
Like the iron curtain.
Like an epileptic.
And I knew then
That it is just stuff
Which we construct to construe a meaning from.
And really, we are all
Just scavengers,
Walking through a rubbish tip
Looking for treasure.
And it doesn't make me feel better.
But it changes the way I can deal with it.
And it makes it okay
That she never even knew
I existed.

A Love Story Without the Love

The morning after, we woke up late. I was dreaming of a fat green river wound sluggishly through a jungle cobwebbed with vines and hidden meaning. I opened my eyes, but the room was crushingly bare; bereft of anything that might interest me. Picking at lint on a black t-shirt was how the thoughts seemed to feel. But then again, the bed was full of holes, and I couldn't help but fall deeply down whenever I threw myself upon it. And there was also you. But for some reason, that just didn't enter into the equation. So I got up and lit a cigarette, sat on my front stairs and made wagers with myself as to whether the post had been delivered. I entertained these silly notions because I could no longer handle the pressing weight of Dreadful Wrong threatening to unravel the core of me. Where is there to go but down in a life spent on a waterslide? I heard you get out of bed not long after and figured you must have noticed my absence. You joined me on the steps, all squinty eyed and pretty with your hair falling about your face. It's the secret moments of love which dare be this way, those precious memories slid into your senses when you think you could do better, you could do no wrong. You asked what I was thinking and so I said,
'I was writing a story in my head about a boy who carves a kingdom for himself inside a cloud.'
You laughed and said you wanted to read it and I very nearly left because it was such bullshit and I wanted you to know it. At times like these I know I am dying. Part of me longs to accept it, but that stupid, stubborn sense of self which clings to life will fight me hard against the bare earth to let it go. I peered at you closely because it felt like I couldn't see you, even though you were quite obviously there. But it wasn't my eyes that were lacking, it was my heart. Although you sat near me with your leg pressed against my shoulder, although your warmth was heating me and although I stroked your skin, I just couldn't feel you inside of me, and so I had to wonder whether you were really there at all. Was nothing there but a vague sense of selfishness undefined as that invisble other from which I constantly begged acceptance? Perhaps it was just the sluggish remains of the dream picking at my weary life. Perhaps it was the sluggish remains of a life waiting to be dreamt.