There is a black umbrella in the bath

stretched out like a bat buried in an open boat -

its wings, a tongue, he is fallen over the edges

to lap the water, though our bath is dry.

Brighton closes soon.

Some scans / photos I’ve taken of Brighton over the past few months. Pretty cool city to live in, actually. I’ll miss it a lot.

the last one is definitely my favourite.

Vivisection

 I crumbled, heaving a sigh as in my head the supposed epileptic raged and tossed the furniture.

“I’ve vivisected animals, while stunned, and… and it never occurred to me to wonder if they felt anything,” I spat to my hands and heard my knuckles crack.

He frowned, the crease appearing like a stag head bleeding into his face, before it straightened and his features became calm and grey again. I wanted to shake him to his ancient bones and break him, scream and ask what he planned to do for this child that was slipping out of our reach the more we waited and talked between ourselves about things. It’s funny how under different lights the people you trust become, suddenly, suspect.

“I’m so sorry.” He eventually managed, but by then the fight was out of me, and I knew that to him, the boy was as good as terminal. His voice was impossibly soft, like yoghurt and I wondered how I had managed to respect a man who sounded so mild with insouciant age. How I had blindly followed his orders to numb, probe and examine these children, and how at the time it had seemed not only right, but easy.

“Why are you apologising? He can’t hear you and I don’t care.”.

“I find it hard to believe you don’t care, Stephen.”

“I know my name, I don’t need – need you to remind me of that.” my voice was harsh against his, a black mouth opening out in front of me, across the open newspaper on the desk.

Spilled ink; was it my hand or my mind that slipped?

Death to anyone who enjoys; breaking silence, bending backwards, eating veins from chicken carcasses, playing the fool, dipping their thumbs into water, justifying oppositional opinions on important in-vogue issues merely to impress upon the listener the importance of being open minded, douglas fir, chalking on the path, pink floyd, existential crises that result in men buying tight t-shirts and thinking they can ejaculate on attractive women, noisy eating and/or licking their fingers.

Who Knows.

She’s got talent and absolutely no way of making it work for herself,

she has overinflated arteries and a problem with the way cheese

and milk, two of the finer things in life, leave phlegm in your throat

as though unnatural in its consumption by humans. She is likely

to drop out of her degree in the Humanities and cause a minor

earthquake in her discovery that there is no benefit in knowing

the difference between the Greek philosophers, and that even

when haunted by the memory of synagogues that became mosques

and then synagogues again, the things that happens to you when 

you drink and fuck too much are irreversible. 

Bacon

We bite into the bacon and close our eyes, in the kitchen. She says that she’s sick of writing the same thing over and over again, and that when you think about it everyone’s skull look the same, though in honesty I think hers is tiny. She’s like an old woman with netting for hair, and peaky pink scalp that sits underneath. When she started talking of skulls, I couldn’t even begin to say.

“Where were you when you realised you wanted to write about these things?” She always wants to know the answer to this, and I think its because she thinks we’re alike in some fundamental way.

“I don’t know. It’s impossible to isolate the moment you decided something. It doesn’t just happen, like, instantly.” I scratch my head, not sure if I believe what I’m saying or if I’m just looking for an easy way into a straight lined conversation. I don’t have the energy to be anything other than oblique. “It’s a composite, see? Like… when did you decide you wanted to be a mother? It can’t have just been the moment you realised you were going to be.”

“I never really wanted to be a mother. Does anyone want to be a mother?” She laughs, her triangle-tongue darting out the side of her mouth, a creature searching for grease. “You know I never trusted those girls at school who said they couldn’t wait to have kids. It’s pathological. Who wants a bit of themselves sliding out and into the world?”

“Some people genuinely want to be mothers. And anyway, I meant when did you start to consider yourself a mother. Before Danny was born?”

When did I start writing recipes and selling them to people?

Danny is sitting on her knee like a beach ball, his gummy mouth empty of teeth as he sucks his sausage fingers. I hate everything about this child and I hate my inability to understand why he is the centre of the universe. He makes my own womb feel redundant. Should I be producing Dannys? I am twenty five. I’ve never been told when this is supposed to kick in.

“I wasn’t a mother until I had this hunk of flesh pulled out of me.”

We continue to eat the bacon, her ability to speak about things embarrassing me into silence.

JM Coetzee has restored my reading horn, its the most amazing feeling since watching Black Dynamite (do it). JM Coetzee is a motherfucking, goddamn genius. I just finished “In the Heart of the Country” and it’s like, hell, if I could sum up everything I would like to one day be as a “grown up writer” then it would be this book with a lot of highlighted aphorisms and lovehearts in the column. 

Anyway, a small poem I don’t have a name for.

She said that people got tired of writing the same thing,

over and over like the moon hung on a pendulum,

And that all skulls look the same even though hers was tiny.

11

 Sometimes the light in the morning is hard like half rats eating their way into my eyes, chewing up my thoughts and emptying themselves. They leave bits all over me, their smiles and their memories. The light is like a dagger that cuts them into pieces, and I turn onto my side, I see your back and in the hardness, it makes me close my eyes again and wait until my stomach settles. Like looking into a book as it yawns itself shut. We exist palindromically for these seconds, and in this world the purple of our bedroom wall is less sour grapes, than passion fruit sewn together.

We get up for breakfast and we hardly speak, just mumble and sometimes you sing soul songs into your cereal bowl. We drag ourselves out the door, and then you drive me to school, tapping your fingers on the steering wheel, each tap-tap like a four strength pummel in the jaw, slack and wet, and a pool of pinkish spit. I look out the window and count the cans in the bin beside our house and beside every house along the road that looks like ours.

And during the day when we’re not together, I find bits of you all over me, food and smells and things we said by mornings, by motorways with my stomach a mess of lactose intolerance. We do Mathematics and English and because I am terrible at both, I spend my time drawing on my hand, a tiny Geurnica on skin that gets smudged by the rain when we go outside for lunch.

I catch the bus at Stephen’s Green. It is a coke can, set, squared and drying in the sun. It twitches like an eye, its skeleton a presence as it stutters into life. I make the journey home, past Trinity College, the GPO, the statue of Daniel O’Connell, turn at the Savoy Cinema and descend deeper in the heart of darkness that is North City Dublin. The children in the park at Merrion Square bark and roar as they slowly oxidise.

You come home from work and spill a white river on our kitchen floor. A cheerio could sail to freedom on its back but it flows alone, like Magellan on his sail. It source, an empty bottle, a soldier left behind. The battlefield is milky with his blood. His helmet rattles on the tiles like a tuning fork against the hardness of a science school bench. Resultingly, we must have pizza for dinner.

“Aisling?” you say, eventually as we curl into each other in the dark, and for one second the silence is broken, the glass falling about my feet. And in the second, as though the light in the morning had been soft, I realise that we never loved each other, just loved alone and loudly spoke of how our feelings seemed to twine.

But then its quiet as you snore yourself to sleep. Your head is unnaturally blonde.