16

The city streets have the stench of sick and violence. We're pushed around. Herded like beasts. From bar to bar. Factory to factory. Office to office. Child to adult. Caught in the swell.

15

Then a voice begins to burn out of those lips and onto the skin of my face. Up above, I hear a sound, a low and archetypal drone

14

She perches on the plastic white garden table, waiting. It had been a long time since I’d just listened to the town, entwined with her and open.

13

In the daytime the room was all awash with the same colour; the duvet cream cut over to the wall’s wet cream. Outside all the light was reducible to that nothing colour, a meaningless shade which drew all perception into it, taking everything back to the swallowing sky. The harder it sucked the more colour came out.

The sky takes everything; everything goes back to that swallowing sky.

12

They were ravenous. The mice in the attic ate the spines of the books.

11

I push on. I can smell the succulent grilled sausages frying away in their own fat.

10

The smokers return, I notice the pulpy plod of their afternoon march as they come back into work.

9

Upstairs in a 70’s style cafe, we find a booth and look through the menus. In the cushioned burgundy booth are holes and small cracks which have allowed pieces of the foam beneath to be revealed. An elderly lady with her grey hair tied tightly back takes out a pad and asks us if we are ready to order.

8

I’m surprised at how easily people are surprised. Surprised when some virginal Mickey Mouse mouthpiece gets to 18 and wants to fuck, take a bucket load of drugs and shave off all her pretty blonde locks, surprised when children, with no moral compass or idea of love, commit rape and murder when they are 11 years old, surprised when politicians who earn as much in one year as you do in ten are not working to serve your interests.

7

Down the middle of the notepad, in the horrid crease, there is a thick line of exposed blue ink from where I’ve been running the pen up and down in horizontal strokes. The eyes are drawn between the white, where the blotted artery of blue seeps into the clean white sheets of paper. I gag again, almost throw up, but somehow I manage to keep it down.

6

The idiot people in the supermarket wait in line.

5

The door to the house is ajar. Light eviscerates outwards. In the hall lay her high-heeled shoes where they had been discarded thoughtlessly, like rolled dice.

4

The reverberations continue as I take her hand.

3

I light a match. Rigor mortis curl. Comes to the finger tip, chokes itself. And then another. Strike it hard on the box side. Watch the flame, the flame in my hand and the flame on the horizon. Her flame encapsulates this town and burns black any ambition as lovers struggle for air in polyester-coated covers. This town makes you paranoid. It’s relentless. There is drizzle in the autumn eve.

2

That wincey rain.

1

Grey old night, grey old September.