Michelle Greenblatt

Streaks of Scarlett: A Story in 100 Parts

from ASHES AND SEEDS

1. 

It’s 7:10, she notes. She’s just about to leave her cursed computer when an another goddamned idea demands it’s time  /  to drench the pages.

2.

I will come back…she starts, then pounds the delete key in fury. She hikes out to meet her edges.

3.

The motion of her eyelashes distracts her as she types, as does the irresistible urge to call this her autobiography. She considers this / sentence; she (re)considers herself. She looks out the window into the nothingness that envelops her. Having endured so many circular, identical events, how can she tell this story again?    

4.

He drives a shiny new white BMW, which he bought but now can’t afford; he rides around all day, looking to score. He knows his cleverness is a weapon. pour to melt, he insists.

5.

She floats in a perpetual state of emulsion, strips the last bit of syntax that makes any sense into pieces that suit her purpose.

6.

Her hand speaks out loud as it slaps her

face repeatedly,

factually and with a plethora of brutalized dreams.

7.

She picks roses |cut| She picks skulls |cut| She picks perpetuation. |cut|cut|cut|

9.

She runs through the empty chalk hallways, the white pages, the chapters of absence, looking for anybody, anybody at all who knows her name.

10.

who is she? they whisper after they have taken (their turns with) her. They don’t imagine she can hear then. None can match her features in any royal database. Facial recognition informs them she does not exist. They contact the FBI.

In hushed tones, they whisper, how can we best be rid of her? And: is she dead because her eyes have gone black.

12.

A memory: He won’t wake up and she wants him to wake up. She repeats this to herself.  you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up. you won’t wake up and I want you to wake up, wake up, WAKE UP.  Each time she thinks this, she grows mightier

in her anger.  She pauses, then rises, casting furious shadows onto the mirrorwalls.

13.

He is flecks of liquid placebo.  He harbors his many hands inside her. 

14.

disentangle! disentangle! she screams as she dashes through the palace corridors.

15.

witch and lunatic, they murmur, shaking

their heads.

16.

Meanwhile, the prince is in the forest, hunting

butterflies. He catches them, scratches their feathers off.  By this he means oh, look what’s left. And: here comes the butcher.  He does, of course, need to eat.  And he can’t fry those jeweled fish forever.

17.

His tongue is made of moonlight, of magic, of dreamlies. When she kissed him the first time—nearly nine years ago now—everything paused as her wish

(let it always be this way, let it always be this beautiful)

morphed to a smashing of prayers, then scattered into whispers, and the echoes of starless whirlwinds carried them away. 

18.

(But his kisses were dust.)

19.

Stillness. A blackbird. All is silent in that bloodforest but for the sighs of the carbon-trees and the scrape scrape of butterfly wings as the prince performs their ritual slaughter for his feast.

20.

Road reverse, reverse road: she can’t get away from this palace.

21.

The sky underfoot, the sun in her / skin (again, and always), skein of fire sweeping through her veins, blossoming in her gut, propelling her perpetually forward.

*

The foreground flies alongside her, colors blurring together in a haze of green and brown mingled with streaks of scarlet in the bloodsap leaking from the deviltrees. As for any context or sense of direction—she lost that long ago, when the weight of light broke her

back. Nothing but loneliness to keep her company now.

|cut|

*

begin, she thinks, begging herself to believe. I must begin again. 

|cut|

*

But here comes the wall of sepulchral silence slamming into her. Her 6½ sapphires spill into the abyss.

|cut||cut||cut|

28.

did you exist ever did you—Scarlett reaches for his hand, gone for so long now. But he has left her a gift of slain sky, shredded narrower than her small

despairing sighs. 

29.

They must have collapsed on the moist ground, but the (lack of) hospital records contradicted the corpus delicti: blood and flesh / evidence they left on the forest floor.  

32.

Her appetite outrages him; he strikes her, pummeling her face and chest, pounding her with his right fist, raking the nails of his left hand down her breast.

No one shapes their weapons like he. 

33.

Rage taps on the window. The window taps on the door. 

34.

She washes her hands in the bloodriver. Wisps of her climb into the bus that runs back to the forest branching beyond the palace. She can’t find a single place to pray amidst this, his vast darkling forest.

38.

don’t be afraid, he says to Scarlett, I can see you in the deathmirror. 

39.  

what does this mean? she asks him.

40.

Greet the dead the way the dead greet you, she has learned

the hard way. He grabs her by the throat; he hides inside her  /  bones. She forgets what hands are for. a light will come, he promises her, you will be held up and you will be blessed; you will be raised above the most glorious of altars.

It is then that she remembers: hands are for offering him needles.

41.

O sand O silk O galactic black wild—she dances naked, breathless, on the web-spread surfaces of Zodiacal light.

O exposed bruises, O love doubled into madness, madness into self                                                         murder,

flood of sunlight bouncing off dust particles, ions in the coronal plasma, forbidden spectral emission lines—

She reads pages of blank verse; her eyes skim the skies, registering the empty majestic light of heavenly bodies, most of have already died; their light is an echo, a ghost chased by time.

She’s drowning in the cold                                                                                

moonlight..

43.

don’t move, he said to her, don’t dream,

until I come back from the dead for you.

I will come back from the dead for you.

50.

Nights like these, the edges blur into eternity, into a single red scream that begins with the heart’s first beat and continues long after the last breath expires, leaving the body

with only the fact of itself: a discarded sac of skin filled with rotting meat.

*

he sleeps and she sleeps; they dream the same dream:

(don’t move.)

(don’t dream.)

(don’t even breathe

until I come back from the dead for you.)

But to live in his palace?

(I will come back from the dead for you.)


Michelle Greenblatt is the poetry editor for Unlikely Stories. A two-time Pushcart-Prize nominee, Greenblatt’s second book, With Explorative Hands, co-authored with Bill Mavreas can be purchased on Amazon.com; her third book, Ghazals, was co-authored with Sheila Murphy. Her book, ASHES AND SEEDS, is forthcoming. She can be reached at michelle@unlikelystories.org

Abattoir Whispers(Oneiros Books), A Reading by Gillian Prew

 

   

Yes, we are the human slaughterhouse, our voices barely audible if anyone were ever to listen. And what of it?

“…I die, and in this death I see nothing, I see that I am nothing…” (Untitled #1)

 This is Michael Mc Aloran…or his narrator. One could assume that they are interchangeable if not rigorously identical. As interchangeable as life and death, life being a continuum of dissolution, a collection of loosely associated, absurd fragments which the narrator does not care enough to embrace nor reject. Yet, there is care. There is care in the creative outflow of inner dialogue: a man transforming his idea of self, his troubled place in the world into a voice traversing darkly surreal landscapes – his verbal and pictorial wounds.

“…no I do not want to leave, yet I do not want to stay, either, something has shaken the fruit from the razor tree, they sparkle upon rent soil in the moonlight, I laugh because I cannot believe myself, that this is, I subtract from death’s irrelevance, with some sense, deepening the wounds, I am the skyline, I am the aborted sun, I am the disfigured sneer…”

(Untitled #1)

 Mc Aloran makes his own sense of the failure of objectivity and, ultimately, meaning. But sense is transience. The moment of understanding is also a moment of confusion where neither lasts beyond the expression of itself and all is ultimately emptiness.

 “…we spit dreams like sparks that fade into emptiness, and ever the return, ever the return to this perpetuating emptiness…” (Untitled #2)

 Existence is trauma. We are born alone, and so it goes. An inhospitable world is our cradle and our attempts to thrive are idiotic and self-defeating.

 “…I ejaculating into the void with streaks of dissipating words, my death, my death my starry death I am alone, no not else, ever else, the violence of existing, the ferocity of birth, a cold stone hearth in which the bone’s of a child rot unto idiocy, I too am that idiocy, that murder, that abortion, the time taken to unlearn, to forget…” (Untitled #3)

 In this world of Mc Aloran’s there is no definitive suffering. One accumulates scars like years; not always aware of each day, each slice into flesh. It is both an accumulative living and dying; a horror and a wry smile at the ongoing absurdity and meaninglessness of existence.

 “…I observe my scars in wonder, I cannot then see, I suffocate on the bile of my dying, something grips me, viciously and I expire, void of my ineptitude, I am this flesh, this meat, this absolution, this waste…I smile…” (Untitled #4)

“…At what point, in the striking of lightning does the flesh awaken, once death has awakened in the eyes the clamour of the silence, having no recourse beyond the filth of decay, the brutalizing winds, ejaculating spent bodies emasculated, birthed, into endless nothingness, as if a dream could suffice? I laugh yet I am ice, I see nothing else, penetrative scars, the implements of foreign dreams, and the skill by which such dreams are dissolved, in the cancer of final night, in the shifting parameters of lunacy, cutting the teeth upon the rock’s of bleak mortality, as if to speak were enough, as if to convey were enough, as if this were enough, unto that final line, dressed up for the kill, my head in a vice, skull-dust, heavenly teeth…” (Untitled #11)

In Mc Aloran we have an artist living as a poet living as an artist living as a man. In short, he cannot be separated from his work. His verbal skills translate to disturbing visuals yet one wonders, given that Mc Aloran also has considerable talent as a painter, whether it is the visuals which he finds necessary to articulate in words, as if neither medium can suffice on its own, that his thinking, his interpretation of the world is too complex, too insufferable to be expressed merely in one dimension.

 “…Meat petals and the slashed eye, a clock face smeared with blood, the shadow of a death knell, ice in the veins of the death of air, mocked by the crumbling walls of dissolution, a trinket, a casket full of rotting teeth, the death of air is a flock of diseased birds sprayed across the ashen sky, the waste and the frugality of tears, nothing changes, no, not ever more, I am a dream, a figment in all of this, the shadow pierces like none other, echoing, drunk upon the intoxication of blank stone walls, at which were stared in starvation, hallucinogenic, some kind of dreaming, yes…” (Untitled #21)

His tone, his surreal landscapes, put one in mind of Beckett and Bataille, where his inner dialogue cannot rest with itself. There is a lack of decisive punctuation where most everything is a continual struggle with conclusion to which a full stop would be an almost be an act of hubris. The sun, the eye, decay, shattered bloody skies…Mc Aloran has interminable versions of these all beautifully and disturbingly visual. Here, again, his pen would almost be substituted for a paintbrush.

 “…A chain of metallic petals, dragging along the spine of all living, beneath the teeth of the sun and throughout the breath, lingering, like a shimmering of cloud in a womb of black sky, the tips of the fingers licked clean of blood, ice shatters, something between to the to and fro-ing, the hands quivering with dislocation, chewing glass to make the smile more opulent, there is no darkness, static absurdly weeps, leeches upon the breast, the heart fades to murmurs, where joy advances like an unwanted drunken lover, a singular butterfly smashed offhandedly upon a white-washed wall…”

(untitled #29)

 Michael Mc Aloran is a fractured soul living as best he can in the brief pauses, where the in-breath meets the out; where the comma is the most fleeting of respite. The rest is almost an impossibility; one filled by poetry and art, where apparently contradictorily, the process of dissolution is one of creation. His work is dark, disturbing and compelling; a fractured version of reality. When Beckett remarked of Joyce, “His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.” he could well have been referring to Michael Mc Aloran.

 In a world of existential paralysis, where there are few authentic voices, I would recommend attention be paid to at least one – Michael Mc Aloran.

---Gillian Prew

(Author of ‘Disconnections’, ‘In the Broken Things', ‘Throats Full of Graves’ & 'A Wound's Sound')...

It is available from Oneiros Books, here

D M Mitchell (Dave Mitchell)

Untitled--(Fragment)

voices coming from inside people walked into mineral deposits walls pulsated like flesh they that admitted only the oppressive purple glow from the black were dependent on the ambient feel of evil and aggravated sun

 it crawled and writhed above dimly glimpsed through the frenzy of 

overwrought minds seeking the furthest sin

filthy glass

about forty feet below him moved figures partially visible he watched with the shameless innocence of one whose mind from this altitude. . . . mercifully

most of them were resilient and free unbowed by the superimposed terrific weight were at least semi-human moving in lines and columns of moral theory

one simple unconscionable coition was far more others were too large incomplete or otherwise malformed to be satisfactory he was convinced than the utmost paroxysm of these human

he pulled back, suddenly shocked by something he’d seen things introverted and tortured by their own conceptualization of evil which he thought had also spotted him he edged soul said to me you are hanging up your misery

round the gallery away from it into a long corridor but that peg it belongs to me brother as long as of steel and glass glowing slightly with twilight's last gleaming

you burn you belong to life you say you want

he could feel something bearing down on him a feeling with you in the beyond forget the beyond

expectation and apprehension crawling from the base of his flesh to rest and thus reach the beyond in spine

a low droning growing with the realisation that this  stillness shall  alight here thrust aside all inside someone's or something's head the interstices of west but desire that thou mayest attain the west when thy floors landings balconies whose geometry mirrored some internal spinal architecture

faceless body goes to earth so that i may alight after thou forms glided silently past eye-like windows in abstract postures of art dead upon you

then will we make united sexual abandon a large reptilian form twined in and out an abode together we shall form the abode

he stopped his attention of the superstructure semi-tangible and flickering dissolving into the brickwork caught by an object within an alcove shrouded in shadows like a blurred sepia photograph

these were embodied memories cast by a flickering torch

walking closer emotions welled up prehistoric states externalised as will disclaim the thing apparently oblivious of his presence

every now you ibadan, running splash of rust silence and then he could catch red flashes of its lips cabin the twirling mountains of the river and the tongue

from its increased grunts of satisfaction it was cool waters overhung with mist cast your bangles evident that it was nearing the orifice that was its/your presence i rediscovered your name and came into your objective

i consume the true source in sustaining the shadow

arms it is dark now and grave

at last he woke the other hungry for torment deeper than death i destroy reached the corridor and turned the handle

he couldn't bring the soul in its husk thus you will never arrive

endure himself to look back along the rows of lost soulless my soul assist in the creation of my divine heir orifices waiting concealed for the next unsuspecting passer-by

was this he will present the offering rising from the tomb on the the only purpose of their half-existence  if so then day of burial

he will install himself in everlastingness though womanish how much of it must remain merely an absence

the next head was tilted in his direction she no more recognized chamber was empty and lit only by a sputtering neon tube for what he was than if he had been overhead.

for the first time since waking could hear a wooden thing the whites of her eyes alone were noises from the main body of the building

he realised visible so that they were like the blind stony eyes at last where he was trapped it was not of a statue.

the thing went further other procedures were resorted who was dreaming but somebody else he had unwittingly walked to

various sexual processes were illustrated which men corrupted  into somebody else's dream but whose

the building was slippery their inhibitions have dreamed vilely of for long ages but inconsistent like an escher drawing the further on have never tried

they dare to think them only walked the bigger and more confusing it became beyond the flickering their most secret most contaminated thoughts

he was interested but room was a balcony overlooking an impossibly huge assembly-hall which not enthralled any sense of sin

these were stretched upward to a vaulted baroque space from its axis a giant crawling centipede reared he ran from the wing into the bowels of the bulk

in the shadow of its base were two rotundities building half fancied that he heard clumsy feet trudging black candles burnt their flames steadily and fiercely in the after him as he searched

eventually he stood at stifled air inverted crosses lined the altar rails

what my soul the end of a corridor hung about with black drapes said to me cast complaint upon the peg

A Preview of 'THE ZERO EYE' (Oneiros Books)

 

viii-

…so stirs the/ hollowed out in vascular unspoken/ a-grace with bleed of the there or else/ of the none/ the broken bones of absences/ traces/ shadows forming in the abscess/ discoloured light/ given to follow/ as if in that or of the which/ spewing forth in cannon reach of absent prosperous aligned/ so roams the eye in coliseum of given dirt/ blood/ subtle as a sliced eyeball/ hence/ no pace the a-lack of turning soil in the dreaming of what still-dredge of given/ taken from out of nothing left to claim/ yet ever onwards/ fettered speeches/ given less than taken from/ hilt/ claim of the whispered obsolete/ till damage season of the withheld/ says it says no no nothing/ collapsed into the splendour of kaleidoscope and venture none/ mocked by the offal of remnants/ settled to fall asunder/ spoken yes unspoken/ silences to obliterate all/ in roomscape of diseased light/ head vast what head/ non-being in the cylindrical of/ all struck spun left to sheer/ pulse shale/ a mimicry of sound/ so stirs the/ as if/ close the wound of it/ closed the coffin lid/ dreaming less or more of it it says/ all the while the amber sudden shock breath the spinning pageant/ shaft/ vault/ and yet the becoming of/ till mockery of meat rescends/ drift/ drift yes of the a-lack alone/ in a given pageant/ it says/ biting still…

ix-

…catacomb eye of the seeing of/ the seeing none/ take up thy cross and walk/ as if to speak of it/ the dusts climb the foreign dead walls/ the glint in the eye of the slaughterhouse inherent climbs the spinal tree/ to strike from out of fission some longing some obsolete/ voice yes or no/ the grit in the shadow of the dreamscape prevails/ all as if/ spoken yes/ no nothing yes or no what of the soiled hands that crave the silenced murmuring/ dead stone/ perhaps/ aching to follow on from out of the here or there/ bone bite and the obsolete/ the lack/ kissed by the blood dust of some menagerie/ the teeth in a bind a lock of/ spurious skylines/ what trace left to follow/ blinded by nocturne/ take up thy…/ [exhales]/ tightens the thumbscrews of desire for that which is merely else/ a deathed tide/ the solace of terror/ sung aloft/ yes/ dead stone/ vibrating silence/ one-two-three/ a meat hook stylus/ atrophic clock/ rooting oneself from out of this unto utter dark/ not a trace of being but for the embers/ the accost of/ spit shine of the boot kicking at the cleft arse/ rockabye/ dense as shit the days advance/ traceless yet traceless/ bound by blind/ spitting out the rancid blood of tears/ shadowing/ mock stun of the given else…

xiv-

…swaying meat/ an overture of silenced/ the dried blood of wounds and the clasp of nothing/ vibration/ yes/ as if it once/ the syringe beauty of the skulled ice/ vermin air/ the asking of as if it were other than/ null/ void/ pennies upon the eyes/ time’s passing/ absence of time/ the stain of bloody words in sands the sands of which devoured/ yet of/ so it is said/ hands dead the virus effigy/ and so it carries/ there is breath through the sneer of teeth what matter what have you/ in an elixir of silence/ (only then/ only there)/ ah the grace is enough it is not enough/ skeletal signs/ the traces of the seen/ bring out your dead your living/ nothing is all// …the fingers bite the skyline/ hence bled there is no other laughter/ collapsed/ collapsed/ head-struck the distance traced/ life no answer/ and yet the burn is this/ given to replicate/ repeat/ echo yes there will be echoes/ such is the lie of having been/ as if recalling were to recall/ in-step/ (laughter)/ the bare foot skeletal skinned of flesh makes impart in dirt// vacancy all/ dead spaces/ the hands absent the voice absent/ the shiv cannot collect the dawning/ drunkenly the whispers of teeth skin the collective waste/ there is none/ naught/ dispersed the collapsed longing for/ in the haven of desire/ till drag of obsolete returns/ voices/ voices/ the hiddeness thronged/ blinded by something that can never be spat out/ will never trickle away like piss/ and so…

--

 (from 'the hang(ed) light')

 

vi-

…in echo’s chamber/ knock-knock/ dread stirring/ closed fist/ inebriate of solace tide/ where cleft alone bites the majesty of none/ of the dementia of X./ the black weight of all devoured/ shadowy nocturne of the bleed’s escapade/ give or taken/ spent light of the hung’s dissolve/ scattered skins scattered by the breeze/ all sight eradicated/ re-birthed/ back then till emptily/ sunk sight/ a butcher’s caress/ concrete kisses still the edge till nothing else/ becoming of the sight by which the dream exhales/ all strung together/ iced white/ diseased the words clamour of the hung light/ fleshed abandon in deserted rooms lacking desire or/ hence given to unfold/ dissipated wounds resurfacing unto/ claim claim of some foreign absenteeism/ knock-knock/ no answer/ the door is the wind’s promise of all else/ other than this/ as if it could be followed/ as still the shadow’s edge collapsed/ tidal immensity of murmurs lacking any merit/ screams that turn to dust as soon as they escape/ walls that peel of the solace nothing/ fleshless/ the black weight of/ no nothing ever/ not a trace/ fragments perhaps lacking traces/ transparent as the film coating the roving eye/ bitten by the dusts of collapse and final/ such is/ ever was…

xiv-

…havoc spliced/ erased/ sight withheld/ barren/ a taste of ashes upon lips of an absent poverty/ desolate/ in-dreaming/ wilt of the dead sheen and the asking promise of it/ (again)/ back at it once again/ stepping alone what fathom/ for the grace of/ fallen from/ stitched the eye/ vicariously/ lips that ember amber/ spinal the uproot of colours/ the skulk of nothing yet will come/ settled/ dredge wilderness/ spit of the blood’s appeal/ drunkenly/ tearing the eye of it from out of socket/ this is the stance the bled/ the acrimonious/ a taste of absenteeism/ shit unto dust/ blind-speak/ a fathom lock/ the broken locks of a door emasculated/ this is the dead speech/ there are the wild flowers of the fields to rent unto petals of blood/ flowing yes or no/ back-held till obsolete/ a-dream/ birthed/ broke/ erased/ collapse then from out of/ gathering again the bones of silences/ riddle or not of this/ sea a-dream/ some oceanic/ this is the pulse/ asking of these walls/ their cylindrical purpose/ echoes/ bones again what yet again/ trace the lack/ what is happening/ nothing is happening/ smoke escaping beneath a doorway/ its seals unbroken in the hanged light… 

xx-

…afar now/ what/ the want/ amber sheen of light what of the commence of it/ given/ ah fling the bones to the dogs it says/ scatter the orchid breathe of given un-tomorrows/ where splice and dream exist/ do not exist/ lunged of the spurious skyline/ let them feed/ the choke in the breathe of it will extend its teeth/ grinning firstly/ shat/ given to the task of it/ of the hollow skull/ sinew of disregard/ nothing ever was and will forever the respite be/ the bite in the membrane subtle as a snare of/ asked of all that will/ in the blue hour of some silent disregard of yet/ pace/ pacing/ hollow bones drained of marrow/ cadaver whispers and yet all’s to climb beyond/ (as if one could)/ in the fatality of the none/ obliterated/ tongues to lack and the breath to sever through the obsolete sign/ make an ending of it/ this is the death of breath it says/ what says/ it cannot be discerned/ here is the pissoir of the sky and here is the abattoir of the swaying hands of time/ boned the dead flesh is quarry/ (splice/ non splice)/ the winds gather/ there are seeds to cast upon barren ground/ no hope/ the candle blown out… 

The Zero Eye is available from Oneiros Books here

The Zero Eye--Michael Mc Aloran--Reviewed by David McLean

The Zero Eye
Michael Mc Aloran
Oneiros Books, 2014
84 pp.
Review by David McLean 

This collection by Michael Mc Aloran is condensed and highly idiosyncratic, perhaps his most experimental collection thus far. It is equipped with an introduction by Aad de Gids that brings out the direction taken, that the poetry laments the absence of something it very well knew was missing all the time. It is of the “itch of the redeem” and the knowledge that the itch never gets to be assuaged.

The book servers as a key to the others in a sense, a description of what happens “in damage seasons”, a summary statement of the pointlessness and the beauty there nevertheless is in all of the emptiness.

the silent light/ the light by which no light may be seen/
hence the distil/ the teeth of it/ the bones of it in a
slaughterhouse of all/ mocking the lung lock/ awash with
bile and unspeaking reckless nothingness/ no prayers for
the now/ silenced/ shine a light/ here a breath there a
breathe/ in damage seasons/ having breached/
absconded/ not a bloody chance/ no nothing/ no not from
the commence of/ no no other route…

Mc Aloran, says de Gids, is expressing a point about the development of the polities and sociuses in which we live, that their ultimately arriving at this dreadful impasse where everything is excused in the name of political rectitude is what we all anyway wanted, the endgame, the terminus, the final fucked up destination. I see the point of the poems as more ontological, that if we were living in a perfect Utopia life would still suck balls because of finitude, and the fact that the fuckers have remorselessly destroyed any chance of jouissance anybody ever had is just icing on the suicidal cake, as it were.

Still, the book introduces itself as “a book of misunderstandings” so the vicissitudes of interpretation are all well and good.

Mc Aloran is also a visual artist, thus the “eye” is deeply involved in the book, the function of seeing, usually taken as the exemplary sense for humans, and the comprehension of light and color, the conquest of color being something Deleuze regards as fundamental and a source of great anxiety for the visual artist.

…the eye recalls it does not recall/ stratosphere of bled/
sun light of asked of promise/ spat out/ sheen purpose of
the whole/ locked to the might of virulent/ a-breeze/
shattered frozen flesh/ dead light what of it/ the half moon
circus of redeemed purpose/ knocking the teeth from the
broken jaw what laughter now/ fingers yet/ yet fingers
hands to caress/ there is blood beneath the fingers of the
unearthed/ the earth clogs the lungs there is nothing in the
hands of breaking lightlessness/ as if to say/ what speech/
what of the voice that imparts the dead colours/ the
tourniquet heart/ spasm/ spillage of blood/ asks of till
given silences mocking the reaching purpose/ which is to
bile less than ever was before/ a syntax of shattered bones/
till ever-dreaming in the shadow’s longing/ as if to be gone
were the only crosshair in sight/ and yet/ subtle the
change in the pulse/ here or there/ dead light what of it/
spit forth/ the raped tune of these silences that cannot be
acquainted with/ less or more/ dead songs/ dissipatory/
struck shine/ some detritus of light.

Thus the book develops its reach into the emptiness from the most fundamental percepts, from the bottom up, instead of from the abstract and at an already and exclusively semantic level from which the text never departs, as I would have done.

All in all, a splendid read, well worth buying, and it's available from Oneiros Books, here
 

Samples From 'Blind-Worm Cycle' by Christopher Brownsword (Oneiros Books)

   

‘It pains me to sit and watch you struggle with this empty space - your nails scratching at cinders on the floor.’ ‘This is the place my thoughts return me to.’////////Through dread of what it represents, N and I keep to the edges of the room, avoiding quite intentionally the interior: a vast geological system rich in iron oxide and populated almost exclusively by tapeworms (a single tamarisk also; though in its shade cadavers gorge upon themselves unceasingly).////////There is nothing left for me to do but scratch.////////‘It pains me to sit and watch you...’////////Nothing left...////////‘Clear shallow water infected by kelp. This is the place my thoughts return me to.’ ‘I recognise little of the beaches...sky trembling with birds.’////////Ah, of what use to rip my balls out, employing as an instrument a chisel made from the thigh bone of an orang-utan, and to contaminate the excavation with cholera then plead with N to drink of it!

--

N’s thighs gape hideously as if the aperture of which they mould were in a state pertaining either to ecstasy or distress. Serpents awaken from several ports scattered about my body, entering in one fell swoop her anus, mouth, and cunt; the squelching of juices making all the more apparent the heavy atmosphere of the room. In hugging her chest N breaks each of her ribs, and as a type of silt pours from her eyes she is temporarily blinded. She requests in Braille that I bind her at the waist using instead of rope strips of her own muscular tissue where it hangs out of numerous excavations. Similar to a lampshade wounded by firearms, I wail and shout, but radiators prevent me from decoding the syntax of gun powder! Whilst she remains in bondage, and birthing fragments of sky, N takes my prick in her mouth then gnaws it loose, a thousand beetles conspiring to replace it in one congealed mass. She caresses me with her feet as one might a startled mule. Pressure is applied. She begins slowly, divested of uncertainty - rejoicing in the motion like a forest does the seasons.////////There is no part of N that is not open to me now (entering in one fell swoop). I might just as easily penetrate her pelvis as I would her cunt. The bone is soft and yielding like melted wax. Her interior is that of a plum gone rancid. She pukes algae and sunbeams across my face. I bleed a larval mush in the early stages of pupation, the body of which remains unshaped but for a set of jaws.

--

Glancing at my cock, stiff in the palm of my hand, I notice it has reconfigured itself into a double cord of nerve, broken up at intervals by immense swellings from which additional nerves branch out, appearing to connect the body of what can only be considered an insect. Segments bulge before forming around themselves an exoskeleton in order to support the internal organs. Compound eyes stare out at the interior of the room. The Door is o-...Formic acid dribbles from its tip. With instinct of its own the transformed phallus makes a series of rapid vibrations from its thorax - this, coupled with the movement of wing muscles, causes air to pass through spiracles as a mating call is sounded then returned by N. I pull her towards me. She does not resist. Anal claspers emerge from my buttocks to hold her in place until the act of coition is over.

--

Try though I do, I cannot tame my hands from shaking. Many days have gone by since my last meal. Shadows flit and combust along the window ledge. A stream of energy gushes out through my ears...nostrils...through my arteries as well - the latter of which I have rent asunder using a solitary pubic hair. A calf is ejaculated in three stages from my cock. It is stamped to death in a moment of boredom then the two front hooves are removed and used to replace my eyes, which, like forty watt bulbs gone dim, have been released from their sockets.  

--

Prior to ejaculating, a band of light sears my vision...the walls of the room dissolve to reveal a plateau delimited by the easternmost range of a mountain. Blackberry thistles advance across the clay soil, annexing territory from its competitors by putting down rootlets like pipelines to mine nutrients from the earth. The tendrils of creeper vines coil about my legs, searching for a vertical surface around which they can stabilise themselves as they grow towards the sunlight. Mist dissipates across the plateau, and scored into the latitudes beyond it the hills twitch with vegetal hunger. In the far distance birds of passage coordinate their flight patterns to form undulating waves, scanning the territory beneath them for insects whilst their shadows cast a melancholy image like that of faded curtains admitting sunlight into an empty room (ossified momentarily on the threshold of the void then annihilated). Meanwhile, their fluid gestures program my brain rhythms into an alpha state, instilling within me a notion of my oscillating in accord with them. Despite the sun only moments ago having entered my perceptual frame above the rim of the horizon, I can feel its warmth dilating the arteries in my body and reinvigorate the cells in the surrounding tissue; the darkness shrunken away now to angular shadows rooted to my limbs. ‘Remember,’ I say to myself, registering every synaptic impulse from the dorsal horn of my spine to be aligned with the solar flux, ‘it is the earth that revolves around the sun, not the opposite. A hundred billion suns distributed among a hundred billion galaxies, each of which shall one day burn up and die, as too is destined to become of us all.’ I raise my arm at an angle of precession to the sun in order to shield my retinas from its active flares then survey the degrees of curvature in the landscape, connected by points of light, and understand them to branch out from my neural axons. Sliced into algebraic dimensions and contours after the last ice age by glacial shift, the terrain sloping away from my feet at a gradient flows resplendent with tall fescue grass and rhododendrons screening ruined settlements. The cool mountain air is filtered by my bronchial tubes into my bloodstream and my wrists shine with moisture from the shrubs. I notice the rootlets of the plants to be assimilated into my nervous system, having first located an entrance via my urethra, as they spread forth like fungi in a vast network, my cock blossoming into a flower, each petal retracted in celestial joy, ejaculating spores.       

Blind-Worm Cycle is available from Oneiros Books here