As Full of Life as Soda Pop

Through darkling woods, all spider-ridden and tokey, the trees bend backwards and spread. Old Goldilocks, porridge-thighed and grey-tressed, makes her way along the shingle path, peppered, as it is, with sweets and breadcrumbs, edible shells and witchcrafted goodies. Tight in her hand, a hand basket, a carrier for dad’s snap and for grandma’s piss-stained offerings. Behind a tree, a craven wolf beholding the bend of the trees. The night begins its crepuscular fall into the full of the night.

Black night then, with the lilt of the carling moon. The branches lined with big-eyed owls. Bats, their leather silhouettes against the threat of the rain. A snap of twig and the undergrowth of rustle. Wind. Things moving. Not a night, whichever way you look at it, for a slip of a boy and his sister the fool.

The mams and dads, of these abandoned children now forking their way through the forest, are comfortable in front of roaring fires, their big old faces dancing red against the mantelpieces. Glasses of port wine, elderberry, a sprig of laughing heather tickling their noses, a brew of indefinable charm bringing the soft lull into never-ending sleep. Princes with hands behind their backs, with lies upon their lips, would do well to free them. Their horses tethered to the millstones outside.

The cruel abandonment of one’s lover, a tawdry whelp who neither knows nor cares. Leave him behind, leave him there. Take the lowest road, past the inn, a wend through the marshes and the frog-strewn lakes. There, over the toiling bridge, a few coins for the ferryman, a gift of spun gold to placate the passing trolls. Leap you, leap like magic to the carpet, ride like the wind, past yellow cleaves and tiny houses, down twisted alleyways and rocky broughtons. A full turn through the silver arches, back to the safety of the safe dry land. Let the eagle lift you, let the eagle carry you and let the eagle let you fall. On crunchy beaches take note of the symmetry and coil your line until the rise of the dawn. Arrival should be enough to wake you.

Back, meanwhile, through the kill of the forest. The wolf and his minions are a dark in the night, circling the withered frame of dear Old Goldilocks, her flee from bears too long ago to care. Oh where, she cries, my grandmother be? And a shapeling shifter, of crone and beauty, steps out from the bend of the very best tree. This way my dear, come along my beauty. Her lank of hair, Old Goldilocks, falling like death from her breast to her knee.

Silken flax ringlets a fall to a climb. The sweetness of the air, the higher you climb. Let down, through bars of solid gold. Rise up, defeat the days of old.

The children whistle the trees to soothe their wits. Their progress, slow, is fair impeded. Guided by the pull of the moon, they tread softly a newer path outside the lines in the sand. The boy, his sister the fool. Breadcrumbs and pebbles weighing their pockets, the thumble man inside. A seven-leagued ogre, the bad. The bad from which they cannot hide.

What cries do hearken between the leaves?
What thumb-sized man pulls up his sleeves?
To battle urge against their fate
To rage their tiny roar of hate.

What evensong of birds are singing?
What carryout of church bells ringing?
Can hide the cries of children gone
Can tell us how to right this wrong.

What weary tread upon the goose?
What slender neck goes through the noose?
To pay the price for death unwitting
To listen to their song bewitching.

Mac the Sack has, in place of duck down, a whole range of goosey ganders. He has, set in place, a plan for the soft landing of the boy and his sister the fool. The ogre, the bad, has one more league to travel and then, and then, he will be upon them. They duck down, beneath a nest of twisted trees, feathers underfoot, their breathing in the minimum. If they are quiet there is a reasonable chance that the ogre will pass. If he catches sight of them, or hears of them, he will eat them quickly, after he has slashed open their throats and rescued his daughters’ crowns. Quiet kids, quiet.

In passing above, a sky ride in his seven-league boots, the ogre has, for the first time in his brutal, pointless, life, a crisis of conscience. Or rather, he has what is simply a quick self-question of whether he is doing the right thing. For the ogre this is as deep as it gets. It is enough to give him pause. So he stops, removes his bounding boots and settles down on the branches below. In no time at all, he is fast asleep. Dreams haunt him.

Goldilocks, her burden of basket, growing larger by the passing. The shapeshifter has her. In front of her pot, Goldilocks caged.
Shape: Stick a hand, stick a hand through the lock oh Goldilocks and let me feel how you’re fattening.
Gold: I would like to see, before I make with my hand, you make the shape of a mouse because I, here, old and the viewer of much, have never believed that crones like yourself could ever reach so small.
Shape: Ha, you think me a fool, I am not so stupid as to fall for the trick that my brother the changeling made, ant-like and crushed underfoot.
Gold: Oh well, then here is my hand which is in fact, as I’m certain you are now feeling, a magical blade. It will rip the life out of you and contain forever your evil.
Shape: I am melting Goldilocks, I am vapour my dear.
Goldilocks: Goodbye mother. I mean, goodbye.

Children they are and the boy thinks about his old stepmother who, long ago, killed his sister – his other sister – chopping off her head and scooping out her eyeballs, feeding her liver and bits to their father when he, woodcutter that he was, returned home after a long day’s chopping. He ate his own daughter and even wrapped what was left of her in a handkerchief, coiled inside a hand basket and took it as his snap for his following lunch. Oh, and his dead sister’s spirit transmigrated into the body of a falling bird where it rose, phoenix-like, and visited elves and shoemakers and witches of fire. The bird, his sister, at last the high-flier she always wanted to be, aloft, singing all manner of cryptic rhythms instead of getting to the point. Here, said the cobbler, a shoe. Here said the blind watchmaker, a silver pocket watch. That’s a necklace, the bird said. Are you sure? asked the blind watchmaker. Yes, said the bird. I do beg your pardon, said the blind watchmaker, it’s because I am blind you see. Here, here is the watch. And here, said the breadmaker, is a huge millstone that I’m sure you will not be able to carr… well, blow me down! The bird took to the air and flew back home, back home, her songs drawing out first the brother for the shoe, second the father for the watch and third the stepmother for the millstone. Hurrah! cried the useless father, I never liked her anyway.

Goldilocks, old and wrinkled with her thin lips and baggy chin, is a stumble of red through the trip of the forest. Her red flash, intermittent and pulsing through the black of the leaves, is enough to alert our boy to the presence of another who, he notes, is being tailed by at least three grey wolves. They’re behind you! he shouts. Goldilocks, were she the little girl of old, would have run but instead falls and begs for mercy, pointing out to the wolves – who are kicking themselves that they didn’t consider it – that she is old meat, inedible like mutton. They leave her trail. And Goldilocks, though removed in years, is not so removed in rotten character, refuses to thank the boy, even as he demands her thanks. Shhh, says Mac the Sack, forcing Goldilocks into a sack, do you want the ogre to hear you.

I hear you, says the ogre. I hear you.

Ask a devourer of children and he will show you the false way. Talk to the thumb-sized people and they will load you with the tragedy of size. Consult with the wolves and they will lie, they will cheat, they will invite you to make the comparison between them and the foxes. Strike a match and a tinderbox will hove into view. Crawl into a cave and you will sleep the sleep of the restless and the wicked. Marry a toad and you will wake the morning creepy.

The boy and his sister the fool take the lowest road to where the horizon waits to carry them through the seven seas, through the four corners, past the seven wonders and into the loving, waiting arms of their grandmother, newly freed from the belly of the beast. Goldilocks, close to death anyhow, is sealed inside a glass coffin where, for a fee, you can join the parade of endless midgets who pass her from hand to hand, who offer her bones to the bleach of the sky. The ogre, bootless and breathless. Faithless and tasteless. His wife, the spinner of gold, waits for him by the sugared frost of their ice-cream door.

Eat The Knowledge That Grew In Clay

He became, first after filth, a tiny wallow in the miseries and splendours of this so far sad century. He believed, moreover, that this wallow somehow guaranteed him a place inside a rich, full life. He was, as he often told his friends, a right-handed writer who wrote like a left-handed writer. This meant, apparently, that although the right side of his brain had wrestled the controls, it was operating in a kind of delusional, rocky state where nervousness and fear were the truly dominant drivers. He held on to this state by way of a high-level monkeying around.

As the sun broke, the horizon emptied. He threw himself into the tender mercy of the blue sky. But an unexpected regret hit him, on his way down. He wished to live long enough to kick himself over the rashness of this moment.

(His collective mass of organs and bones whistling down tubes, through the moistest pulls of fleshy gruel. How he manages to stand is a mystery to everyone who knows him. Translucent, his blue pipes are merely an advert for his mechanability. See him wobble. Run when he staggers.)

The monkeying around, at the higher level, was enough to lift him past the vulgar notion of splat. Not for him the rough landing on the bonnet of a car. Not for him the indignity of his trousers around his ankles, the shit caking his arse. Neither for him his chin in his chest, his eyes in the back of his head. Mid-air, like a cartoon rabbit, he stepped off a glass ledge and trod softly to the ground. Terra firma clasped him tight.

My own connection to him was something of a shift. I watched him from behind closed curtains. I used eyeglass peepers that could see so far. I had him down even as he went down. You would have thought, given our distance, that we were passing strangers or mortal enemies playing out on a wider stage. The truth, however, is that we were the firmest of friends.

At the landing pad and carried aloft by various supporters and sponsors, he reached down to the hand of my wife who was there also to greet him. My wife, who was there to greet him as a friend, allowed herself to be pulled up and carried also aloft along with this survivor of fall who was once also my friend. Riding together, those two, they looked so natural together, those two, and even I, spying behind curtains, was moved to some small degree by their adulterous antics as they kissed in the rain, sheltering from the spittle of those certain angry gods. Those two up there, the crowd of nothing below them, what rainment could have been a fit for them? What crowns of diamond could they have worn for appropriate glow? What swish of finery, all spun gold and delicate gossamer, could have been a match for the crepuscular push that led them into the fade from my sight? None. Nothing.

His creativity knew no bounds, it was often said. The right side of his brain and the assist from the nervy fear of the driver. He pushed his pen just to watch it go. He shook from the sheer exhaustion of it all.

What the I am on about is that this creator of fancy dawdles and inexplicable moonbattery - replete with all his fancy poetry and prose - was a fucker of my wife. Up she rose and down she went. She later said, to me, on a dusty park bench in Mablethorpe: I loved the way he survived and how the racing loom of the concrete did nothing to deter the very best of his mind. We watched, the two of us, as we spoke of him, our arms disappear beneath a blanket of ladybirds. It was one of those days.

Organs and bones they pulled from the river. They laid them end to end. A certain McIntyre, a constable, said: If we pulled him thin and laid him out and spread him from end to end, we would, in a matter of days, touch our feet upon the moon. Look, his teeth, said my wife, as she sorted through his ruins.

Because that’s what you do, she said. You look out at the rain.

Our Sea-Washed Sunset Gates Shall Stand

What we have here, taken plainly, is the old dream of America. Although, if we take taken plainly as some sort of cue, we may also contrive to assure Old Europe of its dream motif status. Meaning, of course, that the boundaries, the definitions, as we once knew them, most likely no longer apply.

Shorelines, however, are always a reliable yardstick. Rivers and streams also serve their purpose. Line their banks with fishermen and you have, by some definable degree, a measure of the predicted outcomes. As in, vis a vis, the state’s status or, at least, its position in and against what we used to call the whole world stage.

And whereas old Europe has carved itself its accepted mythical status by way of illuminations, chalk drawings and state sponsored Outsider Art, new Europe has been left to fend for itself within a kind of tumultuous vacuum. Art, on its own terms, is not enough to anchor new Europe - not as it currently stands. Which is why it drifts, ineffably, into what might well be regarded by future generations as a gigantic continental twist. But if nothing else, new Europe has at least managed to free itself from the clutches of aristocratic vampires and evil legions of evil thingies. In that sense, it is as much a blast as old Europe was once a boom.

Stories, of course, abound. Of travellers and émigrés, and witches and machine heads. And of the masses of ordinary men and women who stood against them. Of how old states, and old state values, were transformed by a miraculous, and totally unexpected, reaching out that built bridges between fractured communities, bovine culturities and desperate traversities. In the end they had no choice but to weave themselves into the various fabrics of the various – the multitudinous – newly drawn dawns of European tests and practice.

And it all took place after the rain. After we, us old Europites, were flushed down the drains with the poison of the rain. Bleached, we beached. After a push through pipes, along gutters, through veils, we emerged into what we first of all thought was sunlight. The luminosity of the brand new dawns. But on closer reveal we were blinded by the exhausted gasps of a thousand European suns, flaring their last before their final inversions. Wave goodbye, they told us.

Of Air Like A Crystal

The retired locksmith, contriving to meet strangers, speaks to the dead and relays their cryptic messages to the witless, the credulous and the recently bereaved. His violent childhood or, rather, his holiday in Norfolk, is disrupted by the arrival of an attractive stranger who, as we soon see, takes refuge in rap, Christianity and the absolutes of academia. Please, no snoring. Back in the land of the real, the Science Train is making its ineluctable progress through the countryside, bringing light and life to the ignorant and the stupid. That is, of course, farmers and animal fans. And yet, despite this retired locksmith’s faith in both science and old shit (such as conversing with the dead), he cannot, try as he might, shake off his desire to dress up as a woman and recreate the spirit of the Blitz. But even then he knows that the chaos of war won’t – however hard he tries – give him the chance he needs to kick-start his life, to get it to flourish. Bombs? he asks. Well, he continues, I escaped with the skin of my life so I believe this gives me the right to worm at length about the reasons why a group of deluded, murderous, backward cunts decided to blow me, and many others, up. And, you know, the more I think about it, the more I relive the terrible events of that terrible day, the more I come to the conclusion that it was my fault they did it. In fact, in fact - the more I go over this, the more you give me the space to damn those you want me to damn (and all from the vantage point of being a sympathetic survivor and therefore the only possessor of the truth) the more I would like to blame everybody except the perpetrators themselves. It was my fault they did it. It was your fault too.

The retired locksmith. Part-time cat burglar and nancy boy. He has proclivities in that direction, as they say. He all a dress in a fold of black, sometimes, when the moon is full and silver. He take to the rooftops and he take to the drainpipes, swinging. No safe is safe. No damsel is safe either. Proclivities again, in their direction, those covered fleshy mounds of forbidden fruit and endless delight. Trinkets, snaggle tooths, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and all manner of shinies are his for the taking. Damsels did I say? More like old, bored and lonely housewives, too far gone from their kitchen sinks with only their servants to blame. Shuttered windows and red roof tiles. Falling plant pots and etc. Top secret submarine plans. He a retired locksmith you see. Locks inside and out.

But hearken, what can this retired locksmith do? In the face of betrayal? Who cares for what he does, least of all his so-called wife of betrayal and fancy? Can he jump the roofs all he likes - the fool – knowing that no-one, especially not his apparent wisp of non-wife, will give a yowling damn for anything he does? Is that the fact of the reality he has to face? Where does she tread, this non-wife? Who is she with now?

She rides there, his non-wife, a rush of dawn and the flash of the past, as she rides into the past, the glow of what went before recreated by new sunny magic that, for the briefest of moments, hides the dark. Until she returns, back into the nooks and crannies of dusty locks and.

Once she was herself, and too, a locksmith, a venture of twosome in the voyages – the many voyages – around doors, gates, lids and the like.

In all seriousness. A salvation of sorts – for him, anyway - when the bombs came. Those glorious bombs. His face, stripped of all its lovelessness, blazed in red, his passionate red eyes peering out from every front page. Oh, the things he put behind those eyes. The things he extracted from them.

He wears his crown heavy with lengths of chain and girders, tin boxes full of tin coins, each held fast by a silver lock the size of a dustbin lid. From his crown to his torso, the upper part of which, wrapped a coil like Houdini and welded hot metal searing flesh and locks and locks and locks. Keys in the river, in the fucking river mate. His stomach, punched. A medicine ball. His stomach wrapped with sheet metal, four times round, rivets punched. His waist, his general groin area, his arse, the tops of his thighs, all punctured with steel spears, rammed through, affixed at each end, on walls on either side of the room. His legs of flesh and putty removed, replaced with cylinders of rusted tin, nailed to the floor, through heavy bolts of steel. Let’s, as they say, see him get out of that.

His non-wife, a feather. A barrel of monkeys. A vat of lard. A container of sperm. A river of ice. A hoop of fire. A bucket of blood. A nest of vipers. A snake in the grass. A car full of bees. A room full of lies. A mouthful of spit. A ladle full of dreams.

Not dreams. A ladle full of lies, like the room.

It was, of course, the heavy burden of unwieldy, unworkable symbolism – coated in poison – that did for him in the end. The bombs were, after all, merely a boom.

Sugar In The Morning

A black bin bag catches the rain. The tweeters fall from the roof. The grass recedes like the desert doesn’t. The water, though clear, is poison.

I had an opportunity to soak. I tasted seafood for the first time. In the afternoon I visited the Museum of Modern Literature. I saw you there.

In nautical dreaming I wept on board your ship. The bucket I held had a hole in it. Pitching, we almost rocked. We sang You Brought A New Kind of Love To Me.

What’s left of the Roman town is romantic enough. The open blue sky adds to it. Plus the river winding through it. Plus, of course, the multitude of kissing gates.

I held, in my hand, a neat bottle of brown. Vinegar. Down the sink it goes, you said, down the sink it goes. The poor little fishies, they bubbled.

The garden has a tent. The sky holds back the rain. The children have only their hopes, their fears and their happy red faces. Between us we can make the night theirs.

At the Agency For Cultural Affairs I met delegates from Rome. Diplomats from Paris. Bigwigs from North End. We selected plans that best expressed the appeal of travel.

Your desire for manhood comes to fruition. The tests are carried out, the plans are put in place. But you cannot afford the fee. The waiting is the worst of it.

Her grandfather shows you how to fold a lucky crane. He shows you six times even though you got it the first time. He stares at you. His hands shake with the effort.

Cheeses are your speciality. Rocks, paintings, monuments to excess, installations, sculptures, touchables. All made from cheese. Your nose tells you which is which.

On Broadway you have visions of the nineteen forties. The lights dazzle your eyes, the music tickles your ears. Stage doors beckon you. Limousines wait to carry you home.

I softened my cuticles and pushed them back. I used the rubber tip of the hoof stick you gave to me. What’s a hoof stick? I asked. You had no idea.

Lift off, you cry, as you fly over the stone wall. On the other side, a gang of cows. They herd you to the electric fence. Like a hammer it falls hard on the back of your hand.

The smoke from the lamp makes you drowsy. The heat from the fire makes you dream. You are back in Khartoum. You are being chased by hordes of brown and fiery midgets.

The food I eat doesn’t digest. It sits there, at the top of my stomach, refusing to go down. To make room for my next meal I force myself to vomit. The splashes are red.

Two girls walk the path towards the bridge over the river. You watch them until you lose them behind the bushes. They appear again, later. By then you have already gone.

The professor steps to the window. He brings the bottle to his lips and drinks hard. Outside, in the courtyard, snow. He looks for the first footprints of winter.

You are crippled for life. The other driver walks away, Scot free. You wonder, in your daze, who this Scot fellow is. Your wife pushes you home.

The boyfriend is a puzzle to you. She looks great while he looks like a retard. Not a retard, a simpleton, a mental, a mongol. You stare too long for comfort.

The first thing I learn is how to make eggs into ornaments. Then how to bring new life to old furniture. There are twelve more weeks of this. I don’t think I can stand it.

We suspected hypothermia. We removed you from the fridge. In the warmer room you began to glow. When the police arrived you laughed.

The march of the revolutionaries was already in full swing. We climbed down from our bed. But too late, too late. All that was left were the signs.