Empty cans of baked beans filled with spit and dead cigarettes line the windowsill. There should be flowers but flowers die, and you can’t be bothered watering them. There are old newspapers and takeaway boxes on the floor. You tell yourself you’ll clean up after you have a beer but one beer leads to four and four leads to tomorrow afternoon, and then you’re right back where you started but whatever, as long as the words keep flowing, that’s the main thing. If they don’t, you’re as good as dead, and then you can worry about all the stuff normal people do. Sometimes you write, and it makes you feel as if you’re the brightest star in the sky and it tickles you like the nipple of a lover dancing upon your tongue. Sometimes you write, and there’s no escaping your limitations and the fact you’ll never be able to conjure the magic the way you wish you could. There’s just no way of knowing until you sit down and bleed and one by one the words trickle out like piss and blood. Reminds me of a rainbow kiss. Y’know, when you go down on a girl when she’s suffering and then kiss her lips making sure you’re the centre of her world, right? A little blood never did anyone any harm, but I saw this video on the internet the other day that would suggest otherwise. There were two lovers, male and female, and they were somewhere in Brazil, yeah, like that’s a surprise. So anyway, they were somewhere in the favela, and the two of them were being chopped up by machete-wielding punks wearing flip-flops. The guy took the brunt of it, and while he was writhing around on the ground, they doused him in gasoline and set him on fire. As he burned like a marshmallow, they turned their attention back to the girl and hacked at her neck before setting her alight as well. In the before-she-was-toast photos that were published, she seemed kinda hot in a trashy way. All tattoos and tits with a big fat ass. But now she’s dead just like her lover and just like everyone else. Why am I telling you this? I’m not quite sure. There was a reason to begin with, but it’s slipped my mind like everything else.
A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.co.uk
A Journal for Damned Lovers Volumes 1 & 2 on Amazon.com
Categories: Lucid
This is beyond divine. Freaking brilliant!
I’m so pleased you think so! Thank you.
The way the narrator can speak so blasé about the brutality is scarier than the actual violent act, which has suck raw, visceral impact. Fantastically done!
Thank you very much! Mans inhumanity to man is frightening, not only in violent acts but as you mentioned, in the nonchalant manner in which they’re described.
Such a sharpened contrast you’d painted between love and murder…
I don’t think we’re ever that far away from either.
Wonderfully descriptive with such driving intensity!
Thank you, my friend.
“Sometimes you write, and there’s no escaping your limitations and the fact you’ll never be able to conjure the magic the way you wish you could. There’s just no way of knowing until you sit down and bleed and one by one the words trickle out like piss and blood.”
This is the truth Stephen. Your honesty trickles out much more beautifully than piss and blood. xx
That’s so very kind of you.
I wasn’t close to my truth for a long time, but I’m trying hard to make amends for it now.
Each piece is a minor victory, a small step to redemption xx