Rolling in bed like a grenade, this fever knows no end. Tightened throat. Throat of glass. Eyes blinded by the light. Palpitations brought on by promiscuous senses. Getting up to piss with blurred vision and the subsequent horror of feeling the piss missing the bog and hitting my toes instead. Little tears escape my eyes. Tiny orbs that capture the light of a billion distant suns. On the rim of the toilet, a spider sits. Only small. But still. The smallest of things leave the largest of scars, like an unresolved kiss or an outpouring of words left dangling in the wind. I speak my truth, but the globe in the corner of the room misinterprets what I say. The music desired is not delivered, instead, I’m presented with contemporary dance shit that leaves me chomping at the bit. Momentarily, I pass out. Dreams of rats. The smell of rats. Exclamation marks as long as my cock. I’m almost dead, yet still, I think of fucking, because fucking is next to death the same way cleanliness is next to godliness, and more than anything I wish to exist in a state that is both within and without. Hacking up balls of phlegm, the day rolls away from my hand like a ball of yarn. Tom and Jerry. Torvill and Dean’s Bolero. The dead castle of Whitby and how it rolls along my tongue as the world clutches the hairs on my bony chest that resemble the arms of those trees in the suicide forest someplace in Japan. I’m ill. I’ve always been ill. The older I get, the more my body turns against me, yet in a strange twist of fate, my spirit shines brighter than a Van Gogh sun.

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