Notre-Dame burns and there are piglets on my mind, so many juicy, well-fed piglets. They burn too. Like a scrunched-up newspaper stuffed through someone’s letterbox and set alight at three in the morning down some quiet cul-de-sac off the beaten track. It’s one of those mornings where you drift for hours on end not quite here and not quite there, with your front door key in hand as if it were a lamp and its light was shining the way to the promised land. It’s somewhere that pulls in lonely souls such as yourself. A parking lot on the outskirts of a drowning town. A swamp from an 80’s video nasty you were certain you glimpsed for real when you were a weird kid with an overactive imagination and a hyperactive thyroid. A shopping mall with no functioning shops save for one lone newsagent you used to buy your cigarettes from back when you were at university and there were no gray hairs and no overwhelming fear of death that haunts you as it does now. There are night clubs full of insects and you’re an insect too. Awkward dancing followed by strange dreams of lives never lived and then you wake to find you’ve pissed yourself but it’s okay because no one will know other than those who’ll read your words long after you’re gone. The shame lingers though, as does the scent. That murky funk that sticks around the same as the memory of the time you once masturbated in the doorway of an empty apartment store not because you were drunk but because for one brief moment, life wasn’t everything. The buildings crumble the same as my mind and isn’t it a pity that although my memories mean so much to me, I’m unable to tell how much is real and how much is fantasy.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US