Poethesis

© M. R. Wallis

2009

For Annie,

Charlie, Grace, Erika & John

And Bex.

Forever.

A Novella

are going to try and get me into that fucking shower again.  I keep telling them.  I keep on yelling at them that I don’t want to and how I’d rather just stay and live out my own life in my layers of filth than get naked whilst they all start probing at me with their stubby fingers, around my glutes and my – well, no I don’t tell them that.  Crude.  I don’t tell anyone that. They bemoan me for my prudery but it’s nothing like that.

I just struggle and try and keep them from finding me when they want to douse me.  That sort of happiness.  Prance, or shuffle, it all depends on my mood, down the corridor into my little dorm I share with Shirley who has no hair and grab the pencil from between the springs in the bed and the pieces of paper I screw up into little packages and slot in the little gaps behind the chest of drawers where the nurses are too dumb to bother checking.

And there I write, I scribble, I write and I scribble my words onto those pages and I hope to myself that that’s gonna give me sanity.

Yeah.

I don’t understand what I’ve written.

This is the first thing I’m writing.

Yes.

I’ll add the rest later.  Maybe.  Later?

Later sounds like alligator, doesn’t it.

[RELAPSE]

The first time I died, I drowned.

I was twenty-one.

I know this because I have lived it.

People say that it is horrible, but I felt nothing but bliss.  That feeling of drifting, you know—when you’re about to fall asleep.  Calm before that oblivious black as your eyes get heavier, droopier, sticking to each other as you struggle to grasp on to reality, your body drifting through an endless sea into sleep: that wanted coma of the night.

It is true.

The first few seconds.

They felt like a forced break-in; but then it settled: calmed.  It reached a plateau of a hill before another triumphant climb; the whole world viewed in its tiny finite perspective: just one grain of sand in an hourglass that keeps on depleting.

I didn’t think of my life.

It didn’t flash before my eyes like people have us believe.  Maybe my body’s way of dealing with it all, with those moments of darkness and despair that riddled my (first) life was to wrap them in some sort of protective net of thought and bury them far, far away from my conscious mind—or my conscience.  Retreat from the pain and the depravity of it all and allow me to remember the joyful things in my life—rather than the feckless ones.

All that I thought of was that place in London, off Quay Street—that Italian café with those photos or paintings of Venice on its walls; buildings floating effortlessly atop the expansive waterways, where we’d go to talk when I had trouble coping with all the harshness and the pain of my time at university: that’s all I could concentrate on, all I could equate it to.

My body floating.

Was I dead by then?

…

[...]

Do you really believe this?

I tried.

I really, honestly, absolutely tried.

If I could go quietly, I would.  If only I could shut my eyes and die again everything would be fine.

I wanted people to know what it’s like to die and live and die again.

I am looking out at a hallway of crumbling tiles.

I know this because I have seen it.

They try and curb my mind with drugs but I can see clarity in this madness!

With that, I am not sorry.

For fuck’s sake!

It isn’t like that!

I know this because I have died.

I have died and I have been reborn.

I know this because I have lived it.

It isn’t blissful, it is full of pain.  It isn’t just horrible; it’s a fucking stranger grappling with your head between their hands as they shove the sea down your throat.  The water, gushing around my mouth and down my trachea: branching into two sacs of sponge and perverting my flesh and blood and membranous insides with its repugnant stench and taste.

I cried underwater.

And I am crying in my loneliness right now.

I am looking out at a hallway of cracking tiles.

For a brief period I thought that I could feel the warm tears on my cheeks before the icy cold bit back at my skin.

Nothing I can say can truly highlight the gore of the situation.

Or how much I begged for death to come quickly.

I am begging still, now.

Bubblegum-pink paroxetine, 30mg.

Mustard-yellow mirtazapine, 20mg.

Poppy-red chlorpromazine, 100mg

Snow-white risperidone, 0.5mg daily.

Down, down, down, down, down.

[...]

Bewildered.

(Four/five years later with a fine sense of detachment from it all, with each death promoting me, distanced me, allowing me to fall into a cold carapace of this new life.)

My arms wrapped together, intertwined and twisted and bound by metal rings: handcuffs.  My feet lashed together with plastic ties.

My eyes opened! Oh, why did I have to open my fucking eyes!

Snap.

And all I could see was the murk, just murk and gloom and the dank of the river—not even my hands in front of me clawing for the surface, struggling with the ties I grasped with some half-opened petal embrace, striving to wrench myself out and into open air.

I couldn’t even see the locket that you gave me when I was twelve.

Instead, just shadows and grit and the grime scraped against my eyes and clogged between the lids as I blinked and blinked them open and close.

As my thighs BURNED my insides.

My head bent back, bubbles vomited frantically from my mouth; screams emitting no sound.  Vibrations.  Just vibrations, echoing around the dark depths and upward to ripple on the surface, white spheres forming, splitting, bursting: brief, brief, vestiges of air.

And all around me: water.  Foul. Foul. Water.

I begged.

I prayed.

In my head, then, that I had never asked for water to taste of something; I’d have given absolutely anything for the sweet tasteless stuff from the tap.

I know this because I have died and been reborn.

I know this because I know this.

I know this because I am the haunted spectre, alive.

[...]

I tried to breathe.

I felt my lungs explode with the amount of water filling them.

There is nothing quite so much the same as this type of suffocation.

[...]

I drifted and ebbed and fell down as the water filled my hollow chest: life didn’t pass through my memories or my mind.

If you dropped a baby into a pool they would sink.

All I could think about was that I was leaving you behind, even dad for all our mishaps and the water pricked up my senses and the last bubbles escaped my nose and my eyes glazed over as I drifted, drifted, drifted.  Slumped.

A lifeless and detached marionette without its strings.

And the pain left me as the hypoxia set in.

Receptors failed.

Nerves began their inevitable decline.

And then the calm that people talk about, it only comes a second before the end.

I know this because I have died and I have lived again.

Venice.  Waterways.

Remnants of those hands clawing at my wrists and ankles and in between my flabby thighs, lifting off into the current of the flow, dissipating.

The surging torrent rushed around me and into the distance it carried me, to some distant paradise of a world.

And I drifted into the final solace of that encroaching, callous cold.

[lapse]

It is June 2009, a Saturday.  It’s cold and the rains are battering off the slates.

There is a knock at my door.

I stand, and creak over and everything is aching and my ankles are cracking.

The person raps at the door again and I yell for them to wait up, that I’m coming.

I glance fleetingly at my reflection in the mirror.

Wonder just when I became frumpy: black shawl, tight ebony curls under an indigo cupcake-of-a-hat.  Tartan skirt.  Long grey socks. When my skin became mottled and pink: a spam-face, with deep folds where a smile should be.

The door knocks again.

I grab at the brass handle.

[...]

¾      Joan … mum … it’s me.

[...]

I’m in shock.

Actual, blatant, no one explanation: wide eyed china cup smashed! On the floor- shock.

It’s been five years.

Five years since I saw Anna’s blue and grey body: on the slab in the hospital when they called me in, tearful, choking, to identify her broken body, struggling to keep any composure as they drew back the sheets.

Left eye bruised (cause: rock in the water); lips winter blue; half her jaw crumpled in on itself; skin a saturated tissue paper.  Fluorescent lights all pooling, harsh straight shadows at her eyes.

Now, here.

Five years later.

In front of me, standing at the door.

[...]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, mum!

She’s backing away from me and she falls over into a chair and slumps.

It’s really me.

Please.

Please.

Mum?

I walk over to her and sit down so that I’m eye to eye with her and hug her in the chair.

She shakes in my arms—and her hands, small and wrinkled and cracked in places with age scratch at my thin skin.  I’m shaking with the burden of my disappearance and resurgence, my death. Consumed by her overwhelming compulsion to disbelieve.  I can feel warm blood, swilling in my body and I can’t help but think that even now, after all of this, after everything! I do not feel alive.

I know this because I have lived and I have died.

[...]

A short while later and I’m sat in front of her, my hands shaking with the teacup in its saucer: my eyes are fixed between hers and I seriously consider just how likely it is that she could really come back – it’s impossible – and as I’m blinking and staring at her youthful face I can’t budge the notion that she’s not in fact there at all.

Anna.

She has handed me an envelope full of letters that she’s written: a journal of her past.  She stays quiet as I read the first one.  She makes me read it.  Says she can’t talk until I know.

In front of me; sitting down on that rickety plastic chair, cup of coffee and a rich tea biscuit.  She loved, she loves rich tea biscuits.  And I’m in front of her, shocked, like I said, beginning to think to myself that I must be deranged, or that it is all a dream. Death!

Deep down, I start to wonder who else might return, if anyone could.  If this is real? Could James come back, could mum, could dad? Why is it that she’s back and no one else?  What condition of her life, her existence, pre-determined this LIFE?  I scratch the corner of my eyes and a lump of sleep comes off with the nail.

Are the memories of me at her funeral just a fabrication?  Of seeing her, through cascades of water, descend at her funeral into the darkened pit that I remember wishing wasn’t a gateway to hell; that all this, all this memory, is but a mental construct.  And I have just been insane, rocking in some mental asylum for five years, trying to make 2+2= 5.That even the memory, of yellow roses, cast by our Turkish friends: spilling their golden petals on the cold coffin, are just the fragments of a dream I had, like the dreams you have when the world is in black and white except a few blots of colour.  Rain, mud, blades of grass, violets at the edge of a grave. An old silent film.

I begin to think of all the times since.

Five, long, years.

How my whole life withered and unfurled into this stagnant mess that I’m ashamed to even dignify with the term existence.

All these circumstances, events—

I begin to think I’d made them up: seeing her now, her body as young but haunted through the years.

Her eyes look dark and grieved, detached.

Her arms, that much thinner than when she was alive.

I tell her, I say “You look thin, dear.”

All she says back is that she knows.

Five long years I’ve been asking five long years I’ve been thinking. Praying.  Hoping that she died in some kind of peaceful state, but always at the back of my mind the fact that she couldn’t possibly have.

Anna mentions the water to me, and I flinch:  look down at the pile of letters by the chair, the first one opened on the table and covered in tears. I squirm a little at the idea of water in her mouth and chest.  Of the body at the hospital (which I still insist was wet as well as bloated) water pooling in her absent, distanced eyes.  I dry-wretch into my hands, like a smoker with emphysema, and gathering my breath I look quietly into her eyes; I can still taste the sour acid as it drops back down.

[...]

Maybe it was my fault that mum was being like that, I never realised it would happen like that, that I would get four more chances to see the world anew.

It’s been five years long, hard work finding mum.

Bitch.

Whore

She moved house.

I smile, awkwardly.  Then flinch.  That beast surfacing, unbidden beneath my skin; claws grating against my fifth soul.

I look at the papers.  Think of what is contained within them: the accounts of how when I died the first time I woke up on a beach in Cornwall. How the waves were lapping around my breasts, the pebbles pressing against my pearly skin, and I was naked—stretched and bloomed and invigorated with a larger life.

… How I screamed, wretched, wrenched myself from the pebbly sand to gaze up at the only bit of light on the shore: the moon and a few houses, the kind with posh families living in them, the sort that name their kids Tarquin, Archibald and Rufus.

Grabbed at bits of my skin in a frenzy, wild-eyed!  I laughed, I cried, I laughed again in a hysterical holler until all that I could do was sit down on the cold sand, wet and clinging at my inner thighs and try and not think about what had occurred.  The shit and murk all surfacing, in my mind – as potent as if they’d seeped up through the sand to splurge on my palms.

[...]

-        How?  No, you can’t have.  You’re not real.  You’re not my Anna!  I’m having the breakdown I’ve been set to since she died.

-      It’s me, mum.  Ask me anything.

[...]

I ask her where her birthmark is and she tells me on the inside of her left thigh; why I shouted at her when she was fifteen—because, and she pauses here embarrassed, I found her in her room with our nineteen year-old neighbour; and then I ask the safest and surest question of all, I say: and what’s the biggest secret we share? And she replies that James isn’t her brother but her half-brother.  It’s then I realise that she cannot possibly know that he died.  And I weep in her arms, embracing her fleshy self and reopening a door in my life for her again. Death!  Five, long, years.

A fragile death.

We break apart and I notice her posture’s different, the arch of her back more pronounced than it ever was before.  I guess she’s a tad hunched, like the hunchback in those old Disney cartoons we used to watch when she was young; reaching down to hug me rather than me lifting up on my tiptoes to hug her, my Achilles stretching, aching—maybe this is her way of easing my old age.  I ask her what happened.  Why she’s here.  How she’s here.  She sits back down, her head resting in a pale hand, tapping her jagged nails across the pine and plastic top of the drab table.  She fondles the locket around her neck.  I remember her first letter, about how she couldn’t see the locket and how, in my memories, it wasn’t there when I went to the morgue.  I begin to wonder if somehow, sometime, she found it again.  And through all of this I’m pitying her wretched looks—sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, arms that you can see the bones through, pale hair, she actually resembles death.

[...]

I point to the letters on the floor, spilling from the envelope in the leather satchel: tell her to read them to the end, that it’ll answer a lot of questions; I can sense she wants to hear it from me.

But I can’t, I warn her that I’m not entirely sure how I’d come back.  How I always came back.  But that it is too much, too much to take to tell her it all, to relive the many deaths and rebirths again.

That I cannot bare to actually talk to her about it: to vocalise it.

That I would cry for three hours as I tried to grapple with the words in my throat.

That that is not what is needed.

[...]

All this is too much.

How can someone be born, die, and come back again?

I remember how Mum was when my dad came back from the pub toppling over hedges with garden gnomes clutched under his arm, singing Doris Day, of all things.

I feel a bit like her now, to be honest.

Bewildered.

I ask her again.  She says that this isn’t the first time.  I ask how come and why she never found me.  She replies that there wasn’t enough time between the deaths to reach out for anyone; that she tried a few times—that for the past five years she’d been looking—that actually I just didn’t want to be found.  I sigh and realise the ordeals she must have gone through.

A tiny thought surfaces: I begin to wonder what she must have done to deserve such a fate.

She asks where her dad is and I have to tell her everything.  James.  The divorce. I write the address down for her.

Continue to read, she says. I remember the first letter, how much I cried.  I look up at her blue eyes, her skin, and her hay hair.  I hug her, clutching onto the skin of her back trying to grasp onto the belief that she’s even alive just in case I fall asleep and wake up and this is all in my head.

She kisses me, on the corner of my mouth and walks upstairs.

It’s late, but I sit and read; I watch her climb up the stairs, slight limp to her step. I close my eyes and the image of her on the slab, after five years, rises up in my mind.  I wonder for a second if I’ll ever truly shift it, or if it will remain like a demon, clutching talon-flung onto my withered, greying mind.

[lapse]

Death granted me the ability to remember everything except the person who murdered me, and even now as I’m writing this I still don’t know.  I saw the world that little bit clearer, suspended in time.  A reflection in a shard of mirror as it shatters and falls…

Those final moments in the water: after the voiceless scream, after the pain, after the feeling of a full-to-the-brim hollowness: that final and what I thought was total, calm.  As your neurons begin to fail.  Twenty minutes, that’s how long it takes for them to die without metabolites, your brain decaying with inevitable entropy. The cold of your limbs numbed; your eyes open but unseeing; your mind like a bath with the plug pulled out: swilling and swirling into the vortex of time.  An infinity.  A spontaneous and perpetuating sigh.

Realities split, diverge.  A stochastic differential equation.

My life, my death.

My body in the water, my mind in infinity, my death as a proportion of entropic decay as a whole.

Then what is real, what is reality?  Whose image of my life, my lives?  Who am I?

I am looking out at a hallway of crumbling tiles.

[...]

I drifted into infinity.

And then, on the border of death-

I saw a body.

It was the first time I’d seen a dead body.

[...]

The body looked just as it had been when it was alive: ugly, malformed—distorted. A knot in a tree cut up and re-glued.  Something about it, besides the bruises and the cuts and the swollen tissue made the body’s flesh look that little bit chunkier, made it look inhuman:  its eyes seemed extinguished, withered candles stuck at the back of long tunnels; its hair straggled and knotted with mud; the sheen of its skin a shade duller, distant compared to life and coated in a film of some sort of liquid that made it stink, reek of shit.

I looked at it closer, swivelled around it so that I was facing it: two inches from its dead and wan face and realised this corpse, this macabre body was me!  And I was a ghost: drifting, floating above it.  Voices encircled me, the chatter of how I had died between doctors: signs of rape, a struggle, but the pathological cause of death = drowned.  Found at low tide, on the edges of the Thames.

Eyes white and rigidly open.

My mouth agape and stained brown.

[...]

Time is a relative process.  The inbetweeness of death and rebirth a montage of snapshots as my spirit, or my ghost, or whatever I was flitted about the world: ricocheted off the boundaries between the two constants of life and death as it tried to calculate the mean.

And in those instances, those moments, I saw things.  I wrenched across the world and witnessed events; each time tugged again and again by my ribcage.

[...]

Rain falls in sheets of grey.

Twenty people gather around a freshly dug grave.  A dull black coffin descends as they cry their tears melding, meshing, merging with the rain.

I sit on a grave and I watch it all.

A mourning gathering, all dressed in black.  You: a dress and black stockings; grey hair pulled behind your ears; a small black hat with a large brim to disguise your eyes as they drown in the world.  James, a ragged black suit, dark midnight tie, brown shoes—didn’t I tell him that you should never wear brown shoes with black? His short cropped blonde hair sodden and clinging to his pockmarked skin.  Uncle Zack, in tweed, looking awkward—as ever—fiddling with an iris in one hand, clutching Aunt Emily’s thin, veiny hand in the other.  One set of grandparents: Dad’s that is – both looking the most emotional, the most alive, that I had ever seen.

Voices are muted, now.

Everything I witness is fragmented.  Ayla – throwing gold petals.  Dad, not there.

Across, on another gravestone, the ghosts of your parents sit holding hands and watching: multicoloured watermarks of their previous lives, watercolour paintings: wet and spilling off a page.

Grandma is in one of those floral dresses she always wore, granddad with a flatcap askew and thick round glasses pressed right up to his eyes so that they’re smoky spheres, magnified.  They see me wave and come over to me and say something to me but I cannot hear.  Just mouths, silent and moving.

[...]

Another tug at my intercostals and a ripple across my vision and suddenly it’s dark and no one’s there anymore and it’s just me looking at my grave.  I lift my hand and it’s made of dark grey smoke.  The rain is making pin-trails through me.  I stand.

A ricochet, a repulsion – the force between two same charged particles.

[...]

I’m standing in the garden, under a canopy.  Citronella lanterns are burning on the fringes.  Ghosts of pets are shuffling between people’s legs, but they cannot see them.  Family are talking about me, reminiscing.  I can’t see dad.  No one mentions, no one would ever mention, how I died, but I can see you thinking, see you crying: see you emptying inside.   I reach out to you as the ghostly animals run their multicoloured bodies through me, bursting into motes and reforming again.  I reach out and I’m tugged away again.

[...]

I’m floating above my own remembrance service watching as you struggle, choking back your tears in an attempt to tell everyone just how much I meant to you.  Ayla has to accompany you and stand there with you.

I blink and I am surrounded by darkness unable to open my eyes.  Through the haze snapshots of words:

Anna

Loved

Candle

Daughter

Proud

Missed

[...]

I tense up and the world implodes with light and I am standing behind a young girl with a Peter Rabbit cuddly toy as she places it by a few solitary flowers collected at the embankment where they found my body.

[...]

Then a crushing on my chest – senses suddenly and violently reignited.  I could feel the water in my ears.

Then the cold came.

And the darkness—as dark as death.

It encircled me, my eyes—their lids frozen and numb face down in that swilling water.

The prickling, the biting, the snagging of the cold on my legs began.

Eyes opening, a beach! reality, unmuted and alive!

I remember in particular, a fear as my lids peeled away from one another that I was about to be dragged back along the stone-sand shore by my ribcage and into the water.  Chin smashing against the rocks: blood entering the sea like some sacrifice.  That I’d be gripped and shunned into the depths and the murky brown water and that the hands would grab me around my arms and my ankles and the pain would sear through me again.   And I’d die another thousand deaths, a hell of repetition; a looped ‘life’. Over and over and over and over again.

That I’d be forced to live with the scars of these wounds.

I still live with the scars of these wounds.

[...]

Gradually the fog lifted from my eyes and mind, I heard the crashes of the water and the faint chirping of seagulls on the beach; eyes fully opened.

Disorientated.

I stood, the water sliding down me—dripping off in gushes as I ran my hands down my naked body—the moonbeams arcing around me.  I opened my eyes and closed them, tired and unable to keep them open, and they swayed almost with my breathing up and down and up again, struggling to fend off sleep.  My mind all full of voices and binary responses, head jerking at the slightest movement, and – after extreme sleep deprivation – paranoia, hallucinations.

I grabbed at my right shoulder with my left hand to try and balance myself as I faltered, and bit down hard in my anguish at my lip.

I collapsed onto my knees and found myself gripping at the sand as if it were bed sheets in a nightmare.  My mouth opening, closing like a guppy.  Throat clenching as a fist around sharp glass – raspy. My stomach growled and gurned.  My mouth wheezing, whining, gasping for air.  Then a convulsion.  A stochastic ripple around my belly.  My guppy mouth opening fully, in the shape of a capital ‘O’.  A sudden intake of breath then:

vomit.

A puddle of warm wet acid on the beach.

Wailing—tears, then a gradual sobbing.  I glanced at the sky, a vacuous banshee! and I was cold, so very cold: my skin all goosepimped and inverted, taught against the muscle and bone.  I grabbed at it and started slapping myself to try and see if I was actually alive.  Pain! Every slight pain a reminder of it all: the cold and the feeling of water getting pushed down my lungs; the touch of those rough and weathered hands.

I fell to the floor.

I am alive.

I am crying.

I am alive and I am crying.

Between tears, a thought:

Death is thoughtless.

Expansive.

And I am new, another life in which to die.

What am I?

What am I?

I am staring out at crumbling tiles.

[...]

I felt half-alive as I looked around the beach, shivering and clutching onto the fatty bits of my arms as I peered into the depths of the dark and windy beach.

My breasts hurt in the cold.

My feet ached, my knees raw from racking against the pebbles in the sand as I spat out of death a violent excretion.

My hair felt like cotton wool mixed with hay.  My fingernails entrenched with dirt, sand and all cut up and stinging with the seawater.

My mouth: clammy.

Without looking down I knew there was sand around my thighs, under my arms, around my ankles.  I needed a wash, I needed to sleep.  Even as tears, in beaded streams, gushed down my face all that I considered was how they’d never be enough to stem the insufferable PAIN.

I craved a cigarette.

I stood there, a body thrown up on a beach; thrown out from death.  Stuck, between the borders of two constants: all my thoughts irrational and incoherent – delirious.  I babbled, whispering, deprived of a lifetime’s sleep.  My eyes flicked about in a frantic frenzy, tongue dabbing at my lips in an attempt to soften them even though they were already wet!  I scratched at my forearms because I itched all over, a thousand thoughts wriggled inside and strived to burst out … I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and kept on doing it to try and erase my eyelids and my eyes.  And all that dominated my immediate concern was sleep, rest, warmth – anything to escape the impenetrable cold that was sinking in.

The hollow that slowly carved its way into my soul.

What would you do, if you died and became again – alive?

Of course I couldn’t believe it.

Of course I thought that that it must be a dream – that such a fucking feat is only found in films or T.V. or the work of science fiction.

That death shouldn’t be so crude, so harsh.  And that if there was a God, He wouldn’t spit me out of Heaven and into the cold: naked and fearful.  Indecent, innocent, and insane, alone in my own personal hysteria. I began to question it, whether I was alive or still dead, drifting across some expanse of infinity.

Even the image of me sat fully clothed in a mental asylum being fed pills to try and keep me sane popped up again and again as I struggled to push it away.

Here, where I am now, that’s all they keep trying to do to me every opportunity they attain.

Then a flash of lightning crept across the pane of night sky above me. A crash of a wave broke at my feet.  A car came screaming down a road far ahead of me, its headlights bobbing up and down as it manoeuvred the hilly tarmac.  I snapped back from the daydream, into the reality that stood there naked and freezing.  And I panicked! Adrenaline rushed through my veins, and I steeled.

I started to walk up the beach, towards where I could see houses on top of the cliff.  Although the pain began to lessen, I walked with a limp, my knees arthritic after death.  I stumbled and I sniffed water droplets from my nostrils and half-ran with my hands under my armpits to try and keep warm.

I stumbled and retched as I made the passage up the beach.  Through the pitch black I writhed, my arms in front of me in hope to find some wall or cliff or person but nothing came.

I ripped the soles of my feet to shreds as I tripped and slipped across broken glass embedded in the sand.

The salt and sand made them agony in this new life.

Each step they sank into the sodden sand and I tripped.  I tried to run but I couldn’t through the numbness that steeped my body and the cold and fearful lethargy of this life.

The beach had pebbles that resembled rivers, going thicker and thicker towards the shore.  High up, closer to the road there were beach huts and sand dunes, in the dark they all looked a grey-blue.

The first time that I came back alive the wind whistled.

But nothing within me whistled at all.

Within my bones only hysteria reigned.

And I am lonely in this jail.

I know this because it is my reality.

I am looking out at a hallway of crumbling tiles.

[...]

I dragged myself up the shore, towards where I could make out a pathway cut into the outcrop, which led to the cliffs where the houses were.  Humbled and cold I stumbled naked, covering my privates with one hand, up concrete steps. There were glass bottles smashed at the sides and dog shit rotting in mounds around my feet.  A cruel wind whipped against me and my hair lashed out, wrapping around my face.  My eyes felt like blisters about to burst in the wind and I grasped at the railing with a death-grip.  I glanced momentarily back towards and with numbing incomprehension I realised I had no idea how I’d got there, the sea looking black and stormy in the night-time.  It rushed up against the cliffs, a swilling-smash of white foam.

Each time I tried to climb my feet were heavy and numb with the excruciating cold of the sea.

It took me over fifteen minutes to get up those steps.

Clutching at my bloodied feet deep choking sobs began to engulf my lungs and gurgle snottily from my mouth.

I didn’t know what I would say.

I fell to the floor and trembled.

I could no longer stand.

My fingers scraped at the mud and the grass.

This tragic emblem
(the weighted trunk around
my heart);
filled with letters,
phonecalls, poetry and novels
—
it is unfortunate to note, I find
(no the reality is I find it hard
to understand)
that I shall only be remembered
when I am dead
—
IF THAT!
—
A ghosted whisper of a
thing within certain
individuals’ minds—
for perhaps I am a
puppet
of the words in my head.
—
To them I sacrifice
any meagre profit I shall
gain.

I’m currently taking a three week holiday to read up on a load of literature (Titus Groan; Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts; Un Lun Dun (hopefully)) as well as marxist theory, all of which are important for the book that I’ve just finished writing. The first draft is complete, the next process is intense and close-editing of the book whereby I’ll have to spend upwards of three-four hours per chapter trying to get the finesse right. But hey ho. Needless to say this means that the blog has been put on the backburner for a while as I concentrate on other areas.

Hope everyone (if anyone reads this) is well.

Max

Back from London – amazing time. A lot of new material. Keep tuned, it needs to be edited and my internet connection here is v.poor. M

Who do I write for?
My comrades?
Meine Mutter?
Mein Vater?
The business man in his glass office?
The answer is everyone!
My friends, I say everyone!
The women struggling to cope
With that dual-office imposed
By this age-old society
Of motherhood and work.
I write for the refugees
For those suffering from the shackles,
Which cripple them.
I write for the world
I write for the aching hearts within
Dulled-eyed men!

I write for your lives
I write for my life
I write for the men who
Are trying to understand their own sexuality.
For the women; for the trans; for the miners;
For the workers.

Always for the workers

(I would hope—
I hope!)

I write for all those bound by the
Rusting fetters of this moaning world!
For those who toil as their stomachs
Ache with hunger, ache with starvation
For the girls and boys who vomit themselves thin.

I write for the victims, always the victims,
I write for the world to understand the difficulty
Of living in this false economy;
For those who are blinded by the dollar signs,
The pound coins,
The numbers on their bank balance
The odd existence of determining human worth
With profit.

I write for those as they are punched
And beaten into blindness as a result of
Hate crimes.

I write for those who are crying now
All over the world
Dreaming of a better one.

An alternative.

A revolution to rid the world of the
Ice-age of capitalism—
Devoid of any humanity.

For I write for humanity, you see.
I write for us all.

I write in hope of a new

A new beginning
A dawn
A dream
A paradise
A brave new world, indeed Huxley
Without the stifling propaganda of
The state.

I write for you, reader
I write for you.

We are all nuts and bolt
In the welded scaffolding
Of the bridge to this birthing earth.

M. R. Wallis

Heyho,

So I’m moving into my new house in Manchester today (that’s fourteen girls and me, by the way. Oh, and one of the girl’s fiancé). Scary stuff. Synchrony >_>. Anyway, because I’m currently trying to pack my life away into suitcases again and then unload them tonight, there won’t be a poem today. Also, I’ll be going to Marxism ‘09 tomorrow morning, bright and early at 08:45 until sunday night so again, there won’t be any poems (at least, updated daily anyway) whilst I’m there. I might try and write one every day still whilst in Landan Tawn.

So yeah.

Let’s call it a holiday.

Why do I feel like I’m talking to myself…

For the past two months running now I’ve won the writer’s billboard competition, which understandably makes me pretty delighted.

- Max

It is important to address
my dear abstract reader
abstract consciousness
(person, self)
that i do not have a suicidal
personality
nor
am I preoccupied with death
rather i am far too
conscious of my place
within this fractured society
my inability / unlikelihood
to procreate
(at least biologically)
to sire – some
some, heritable being.
My words are my personal genetic code;
DNA/base
pair conjunction–
they (I hope) will carry
my legacy.
An open letter.

M. R. Wallis

Hmm. I seem to be in a bit of a rough patch (writing-wise) at the moment, which is a little sad. Well, I say that, I really only mean poetry wise. I’m churning out new episodes of the webcomic that me and grace are going to be releasing eventually. The novel’s going well, too.  Still.  It’s annoying.  Anyway, here’s your daily poem.  Whoever you are.

He is lonely because he is distracted
by the worlds and words in his head.
The lives of the characters that exist in some
tangible connection of interlinking neurons
that make up the webbed mass of his brain.
The weighted arches, the vaulted ceilings
of the buildings of his mind.
He is lonely because he is slipping
out of reality into some sort of pastiche of
a thing.
Each day, steadily more alien to the world.
Until protests, politics, foreign policy are all
things that barely mean a whisper to him.
So preoccupied with the recesses, the rats
that clamber through mazes in his skull.
Even with friends, his eyes are dulled by
what might become of his eternal future
what might become with the people in his head
should he not manage to get them all down.

Hell, he’s practically nursing an orphanage as
he walks and lives.

(Full time parenting is tough, even when the children
are fictional.)

M. R. Wallis

Do I read my own poetry?
Yes.
(But that’s a different
answer to liking my own
poetry.)
I read it till I hate it
and then I try my hardest
to ignore it.

Really this isn’t poetry
it’s just statements
a collection of frittering
concepts as I struggle
to come to terms with
my unfaltering normality.

My kinda poetry.
Joke.

Is it vain to read the worded
veins of your thoughts?
Yes.
To want to swallow the sound
of those words, that
percussive stutter?
Yes.
To record yourself reading them aloud
when no one really watches them
except you when you’re needing
to laugh at yourself.
Yes.

It is necessary vanity, maybe.
Oh, what am I talking about!
—Ignore me.

M. R. Wallis

I know the disturbing potentiality of my future
the lack of content that could quite easily
fracture my whole persona, my whole world
to either be depressed by the lack of progression
lack of fans, lack of idolatry
or by their ability to pummel me from that pedestal
should I ever become fat & weary & slurring
my words, as I attempt to recite my words.

Either way exacts a sadness.

That or I shall remain in some horrendous job
with no ardour involved, no love, no hope or any
joy in that.
I will attend family dinners, reunions, stumble into
my high-school one and be drunk with the
fear that I have failed to become the person I
hoped to—to show them what I could manage to do.
I will sit in my seat at Christmas, eating turkey
with my paper hat cocked and hardly even sitting there
(more like a whisper of something that could have been
like a candle that’s trying to shine through tinted glass)
playing with the sprouts and the cabbage in the gravy
as my brother and sister talk of their kids and their jobs
and I sit and lament my worthlessness.

When people ask how come I work so hard,
how come I write so much,
how come I cannot bear to relax,
(in that conventional stance)
I think of these reasons.

M. R. Wallis

Drinking cranberry juice
from a wine glass
(how dignified, how refined)
until you drop it and it explodes
like a flower going through
a lawnmower in July.

M. R. Wallis