In black and white dreams, I am a trilobite. Outside the video rental store on the street that leads from the fairground to the erotic shop with black’d out windows, I spy a centipede scuttling over children’s bare feet as they splash in puddles of rainwater. Their feet are innocent, but their hands are not. When the centipede bites them, they cry for help, but I avoid eye contact for fear of what people might say. In a certain light, the blood running between their toes appears to glisten like oil. On sheets of black paper in my notepad purchased in London from a store by a vast expanse of trees, white ink swirls like semen. On fresh linen, bodies pass back and forth like spit between gasping mouths. Sometimes neon. Other times chalk. In the bowels of an underground car park, candles twinkle and shimmer in the window of a small room. There should be a security guard, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, he’s wandered off; gotten lost in the maze of corridors the likes of which a man such as I will never see. On the foot belonging to the leg of a girl swirling like said semen on said black paper, a toe ring catches the neon light in the most sophisticated of ways. I myself am not sophisticated, but whenever she begs me to continue, her words ripple between our worlds like the leaves on dying trees, and this makes me feel like a poet indeed. Past rows of empty buildings towards the Wilkinson’s near the church that serves no purpose other than to keep the status quo, a girl with almond eyes reaches for a necklace upon a ladder made of bones. Her own bones are as white as sugar, and while the town around her sleeps—and those lacking in high art weep—it’s as if there’s such a thing as magic after all. They don’t call it Wilkinson’s now, y’know. They call it Wilko’s. I’m old, so I know things like this. The passage of time and the passing of years hasn’t made me wiser it’s merely allowed me to remember, and for a writer, keeping a firm hand on one’s memory is what prevents me from slipping away.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US