Mothers (and, well, fathers too - for fear of coming across all second wave feminist, you know) will know what I’m burbling on about here.

It’s the same sort of endorphin feeling you get when you join a foreign spy agency and you’re not allowed to tell anyone but you’ve finally found your true family and you’ve come back home after being away for oh so very such a long time. It’s a really dangerous time for a new spy for that very euphoric reason.

So be careful.

Do you know what I mean?

Shrugs. Possibly.

Well, anyhow. I wrote a poem just now, and I think it makes sense.

Ah - my other half, asked me in no uncertain terminology why I had neglected the daffodils in my latest episode of me in dystopia, and I sort of promised that I’d have daffodils in a future episode. Photographs of such, I mean (taken by me). Ali was also a little perturbed about my narrative suggesting that she’d been dead six years. So now I am torn between a few alternative options, like there’s the blithe spirit option (I like this one), there’s the ‘she’s not really dead she’s been hidden from the dystopians’ option, and, well, I’m sure I’ll think of another option. Anyway, I should have predicted that when I started writing this autobiographical future.

Still. In the meantime, and given it’s her birthday today, but truth be told this poem has nothing whatsoever to do with her, oh shut up Evelyn and just here’s the poem.

26-03-03

I thought I would sense

I thought I would sense
I thought I would make
And she screams at me not to
Flying – no – cascading – no – sinking
My ovary headspace
My memory flails
Like a mace and I don’t know peace in this battlefield

You have always shaped my sharp biography
You say you care but I don’t recognise
I can’t see the end of this blurry pathway
I thought I would sense
I thought I could know
But it sharpens my alters
When the fault lines glow
And I don’t know the how
And I don’t know the when
You remember I’m sure you remember
My heart on the altar

There was a station and a train and a destination
There were words, there was rose
And a difference it was spoken
No
It was unspoken it was
In your eyes see there it was
Memory fragment in Milan
Interrupt – suggestion – integral briar rose briar scorned
And it spiralled in the flashlight and cut me
In the soft light in the red and the blood
And I don’t know any further path
I don’t show it when my eyes glow wild
Shafts and splintered warm hearth let go

I am so tired
Splintered so tired and
I just want to let go
I thought I would sense
And I thought I would make
But the memories of that fate have slithered from reach
And speech and it’s all gone again.

When I am gone again the treelines will breathe
And I don’t know, will they sense?
Will they heave
And remember me?

I am only one leaf.

Of millions.

Falling.

Spiral

Sick and more burnt and crimson.
Dead heart thief.
Burnt sleep and vermilion.

Rose and briar deep.

Wishing I was not just a dream…

If you liked this poem, I have many, many others. Start here with Kundalini One to Three. You can still read the most of that collection as a free subscriber, although if you fancy helping me out with a purchase of the full, unredacted e-book version then please click here.

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Accidental violet discovery?

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Haven’t posted a poem for a while. Here’s to rectifying that situation.

Mens Rea

I wait for my fate to be presented,
Judgement of love I sense to begin,
Her sentence already formed
Before the hanging
Sumptuous fruit is denied me,
For she will not give in,
To freedom,
She has not the strength to be spirit,
To be me,
To be courted this way in a ripe
    suit
Or just feel, for once, just
Be damned with me.

Just a short one, and no outro - thankfully!

My little e-book of poetry, Kundalini, can be purchased here:

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Please help this struggling poetess!

I am, however, in what might perhaps be perceived as a desperate act of grasping at straws, reminded of a wonderful little pip of aphoristic wisdom from a certain Friedrich Nietzsche:

Obviously he wasn’t thinking of coffee, though…

No human ever discovered which God it was who did it. Or which Goddess, for that matter.

Most people, understandably, suspected Loki, prime God of Mischief, but he vehemently – and credibly (he had an alibi) – denied it.

Zeus himself was terribly vexed. He knew it wasn’t himself who did it, and he knew Hera hadn’t, as she’d been indulging an irritatingly jovial mood at the time, so that could only mean that someone did it and without his say-so.

So he commandeered Athena, Goddess of Wisdom (amongst other important aspects), to investigate the matter.

It wasn’t Athena who did it either, by the way, dearest reader, in case you were wondering. That is decidedly not the twist.

And it wasn’t the owl neither.

Although to be honest I don’t even know if there will be a twist. At this stage, I have no idea what the ending is going to be. I suppose there may be a twist (there often is), but please don’t be disappointed if there isn’t one.

But even if there will be one, we have already ruled out the Athena option. I am sure she will not mind.

Obviously you have no idea what I’m on about. The thing that someone did, that is. The thing that vexed Zeus. That’s the key question at the present time, eh?

Perhaps you are looking to the title for help? By now, after some two hundred and forty words, you are presumably getting a little vexed yourself and if I don’t tell you what dastardly act of mischief one of the deities perpetrated soon then you will reach a level of vex sufficient to induce angry and wanton demands of the narrator. If this was paper you’d rip it up in a huff or scrunch it into a ball and hurl it venomously onto the fire, which shall crackle and hiss with the thrill of it.

But it’s not paper, and hopefully I am going to judge this to perfection before you hit the escape key or some other ping purloins your attention away from me.

Well, the title might help. As will your own rising irritation. Anything to help you, damn it, is probably where your brain is right now.

They vanished all the tobacco in the world, is what happened. Whichever bastard it was who did it vanished all the tobacco. Instantly. So don’t think some people were ok because they had a secret stash. Oh no.

Some did, of course, think that, and individually decided now was the time to ram-raid the tobacconist’s. By the time they got there, however, they realised that other individuals had the same idea before them, and all those individuals together made a sizeable potential riot.

Thankfully, that didn’t transpire. An advance posse quickly ascertained the truth of the matter. The tobacconist’s stash was no more.

So they found a park and started a brawl.

We’re not done with the tobacconists just yet, by the way, dearest reader. We shall return to them duly.

In the meantime, I am sure you can fathom and visualise the effect of all the tobacco in the world suddenly vanishing.

That includes ciggies mid-drag. It includes spliffs mid-toke instantly metamorphosed into joints of the purest weed (much of which slid out).

Trucks full of Camels suddenly becoming lighter.

Ah – talking of lighters, you can imagine how concerning this was for the manufacturers of such items? Granted, lighters are a multi-use item, and Zippos will never go out of fashion, but still, one suspects that using lighters to light cigarettes is number one on the Family Fortunes survey.

More of interest would be what fetches a resounding Ugh-Urrrgh. Lighting fuses on long lines of gunpowder in the wild, wild west, before scurrying behind the bank for cover in case the sheriff sees us, would definitely get an Ugh-Urrgh, more’s the pity.

I’d love to see a version of that show with the least likely answers getting the most points.

Still, we must not dawdle. That sort of speculation is precisely what kept the manufacturers of lighters busy throughout the rest of this tale.

So we’ll not be hearing from them again.

Politicians were met with a similar dilemma.

On the one paw, they did not let the inevitably rampant civil unrest go to waste, and promptly granted themselves emergency powers.

On the other paw, most of them were getting agitated and fidgety as hell. The British House of Commons, arranged as it is with one tribe facing the other, soon more closely resembled a West Ham v. Millwall game than the mother of all democracies. Then again, as some political observers observed, t’was it not ever thus? We now see the state of the emperor’s clothes, eh?

Well, actually, no, it t’wasn’t ever thus. The whole democracy thing was an illusion. They only pretended to be in conflict with each other to fool the plebs into thinking there was a genuine choice and more than one ideology. No, there wasn’t. All the politicians only ever served themselves and their puppet masters.

And yet, now, there was genuine politics for the very first time!

The political dilemma did not end there, however. The search was on for something – anything – to stave off the withdrawal symptoms. Once the food option had been exhausted (the House of Commons’ benches weren’t getting any more accommodating) then other drugs were talked about.

Alcohol wasn’t an option – that just made them want to smoke more. Ditto coffee.

Cocaine and amphetamine – same. Heroin? Far too dangerous for a politician’s career.

Someone suggested ecstasy and the gathered group of them shuddered as one. Although it might just do the trick, the very real danger was that it would turn them into nice people.

And if they turned into nice people then they’d lose their sponsorship.

They would rapidly discover their own expendability.

Of which they had always been keenly aware, of course. I cannot stress to you enough what a genuine anxiety this really was amongst the political class. If you’d been watching from the gallery you’d have seen much frantic scratching of hair and itching of buttocks and, well, restlessness, is the word. Restlessness.

So no, pills just wouldn’t do.

Meanwhile, out there in the wider world, other people were having problems too, you know?

Some people resorted to raiding the larder and smoking tea leaves.

First, they delicately tore open the little bags and daintily sprinkled out the contents on Rizzlas (other manufacturers of cigarette-rolling papers are available) before having a bit of an issue with all those sharp bits. Same problem for green tea, before you ask.

Most people today do not own a mortar and pestle. More fool them. How else are you going to grind down your harsh dried herbs into a rollable format?

Of course people improvised. Withdrawal symptoms, after all, are the mothers of invention.

Except smoking tea doesn’t generate the same effect as nicotine. And so the agitation remained.

Alternatives would have to be sought. And sought quickly, before the body actually started to get used to not smoking and started to feel, well, actually not too bad now I come to think of it. In fact, do you know I haven’t felt this good in years! I can get up the stairs without stopping at the top to catch my breath. Maybe I’ll join a gym. Paint a fence perhaps.

The wife will like the new me, for sure. There’s so much less joy in the pub now. Except, well, not having to go outside in terrible weather to join the rest of the addicted for a crafty smoke is something of a bonus.

As is the ability to see a conversation through to the end. Set the world to rights like we used to before the smoking ban. My mate thinks it was all a conspiracy by the politicians to stop us doing precisely that. Plus an attack on our culture.

But what of the appeal of Nigel Farage now, then? Farage, minus fag? Not looking great for that fucker anymore, eh.

Yes, I shall join a gym.

And the economy shall grow, with all that extra spending power.

But that takes a while. In the early days after the Great Disappearing of the Tobacco (GDT), much of the world prepared for Z-day. Reclusive gun-wielding Americans previously ridiculed suddenly didn’t look so stoopid after all with all that there preppin’, what with all the rage zombies desperately searching through garbage dumps and ashtrays for dogends that might – oh please and possibly might – just generate enough spent tobacco for a new roll-up.

But no, whichever deity it was already thought of that, and made sure to have that one covered.

Security services and – definitely the army – weren’t any good, because most of them proud boys smoked like chimneys. I’ve seen your Hollywood war movies – I know they all smoke. If it was in the movies it must be true, eh?

Police likewise. There was simply no prospect of law and order for at least a month before everyone’s withdrawal symptoms waned.

But what a month!

It was a veritable revaluation of all values.

A reordering of society.

And all because of the wicked weed.

But twenty-eight days later, what of the tobacconists? Well, you might think they’d all have been sent out of business and into sad and lonely bankruptcy. But no, you would be wrong.

Because tobacconists have transferable skills.

They also have shop premises.

So, the very simple solution is to sell something else instead.

Herbal cigarettes, perhaps. Healthy options. Sweets and candies (obviously not the ones from the mega-corporations, though – we shall be selling exclusively local produce from small, independent manufacturers).

Magazines and superhero comics. Top shelf porno. Like in the good old days before the Online Safety Act and the Marvelverse movie franchise.

And as time will pass, as this too always does, and settles down into calm once more, perhaps they can also sell antiques, memorabilia, nostalgic trinkets from the Lost Age of Tobacco – pipes, filters, those little twisty things people used to use to clean their pipes, hand-drawn illustrations of Sherlock Holmes, and posters of pretty girls in bikinis from the 1950s and 1960s proudly showing off their sponsor’s assets, and cowboys, always cowboys in the County of Marlboro.

Yep, the tobacconists will survive.

And the world will be a better place when all those weapons of mass destruction suddenly vanish, and human beings will learn the wisdom of just talking to each other again. Like they used to, once upon a better time. Touching grass and – yeah, sometimes smoking the stuff – but inventing games and reasons to be social and anything else they can think of to stave away the symptoms of withdrawal from their own and each other’s smiles.

Instead of arguing all the time.

Or tolerating those who do.

No, I don’t think there is a twist here. I think the meaning of this is all pretty clear.

At least, I can’t think of a twist. Can you?

Would you like to buy me a caffeine-infusion?

You never know – I might just spend the money on chocolate instead…

I also love your likes, shares and comments (down below there).

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But what the hell does that even mean?!

Socrates definitely wouldn’t have anything to say – and he’d say that’s wise.

Whenever I encounter that piece of advice I find myself flummoxed. I’m happy I spelled that word right first time as it’s not a word I’ve used in a long, long time.

Does it mean I should write about something that happened to me? Does it mean I should ramble on about some opinion of mine which more than likely most people will not share? Does it mean I should look out my window and write down what I sense?

I have no idea.

Does it mean I should base all my characters on people I’ve met, and storylines on, erm, stories I’ve heard or stuff that happened to me? And it all only happens in places I’ve been to myself?

Am I not allowed an imagination?

It’s not that I don’t understand what they call ‘literary fiction’ – sure I do – just that I don’t understand that piece of advice. Notwithstanding that my life is not boring. That’s not the issue.

But I thought, well, I want to write something but I don’t know what. So let’s try that advice and see where it goes. Perhaps it will be designated literary fiction but I don’t think I write flowery enough for that genre. My problem is I simply don’t have the range of vocabulary, darling. Like when writing about some characters taking a stroll in nature I simply don’t know enough names of plants and trees and birds and all the rest of it to conjure up something vivid. Which is probably just as well, because I often feel those carefully crafted sentences with all the flowery prose end up detracting and distracting from the dramatic action. Like ‘stop giving me all these awesome descriptions and get on with the effing story, eh.’

It also deprives the reader of filling in the blanks for themselves.

One has to concentrate so hard on working out what the meaning (if there is one) of each sentence is – even each phrase – and often re-read it half a dozen times (then give up) before you can move on with the prose, and by the time you’ve done all that of course you have no idea what the narrative might be.

So I think that sort of thing should be left for poetry.

But then there’s all this poetry which is just prose arranged on a page to look like poetry. Devoid of rhymes or cadence or scansion or anything. Just pretty words.

Might be nice to look at, but what does it mean? Is it a bit like modern art? ‘What do you think it means?’ – ‘Well, I don’t know! I didn’t write the damn thing! Or paint it!’.

Like modern art – they say it’s supposed to mean something, but perhaps the truth is they are taking the piss and it doesn’t, as it happens, mean shit.

Designed solely to make critics look stupid and pretentious.

But I digress.

That is something I know how to do.

Well, that was a good three hundred words already and I haven’t said anything (now it’s five hundred, with today’s little additions). So I must be doing something right.

Anyway, write about what you know. Ok, here is a little train of thought which goes through my head at this time of year. By which I mean, when it is bitterly cold and we have run out of wood for our only source of heat in this old French house, namely two woodburners, one in the living room, one in the kitchen (the latter is a delight to cook on, I should mention – we had exquisite homemade shortbread biscuits today with a sugar glaze and roasted almond flakes on top – delicious and highly recommended with any hot beverage of your choice on a chilling Epiphany).

Bedtime (it’s fast approaching at the time of writing) is a trial. We heat up old bricks on top of the woodburner or even in the oven, then put them, surrounded by bedclothes, under the bedcovers ten-to-fifteen minutes before biting the bullet and venturing up to bed.

I wear some five layers in bed, with a hat and woolly bedsocks, and sometimes even a scarf. Yesterday I noticed that the thermometer up there was reading zero degrees. Today it surpassed even that with a shuddering minus one.

So when I am finally snuggled in, having made a cocoon for myself, weighed down by sheets and blankets and duvets and – to begin with – quite warm with the bricks, it will still take my brain several hours to fall unconscious into sleep.

Write what you know. Ok – here’s a train of thought which repeats itself night after night as I am lying there waiting for my brain to stop working and just, please, let me sleep.

How did Scott of the Antarctic take a shit?

And why in the cold of hell would anyone even think about trying to walk to the south pole in the first place?

Yes, of course I understand the spirit of adventure and exploration and discovery and all that – fine, I have no issue with it – but I do think there must’ve been a madness to Scott and his companions. Captain Oats especially – ‘I’m going out for a walk. I may be some time.’ and he wanders out in his socks and never returns.

Or am I getting mixed up with Scott’s Porridge Oats?

I can’t be bothered to look this stuff up, so I am writing all this based on what I learned in school.

That’s to say, I am writing what I know.

Or don’t know, as the case may be. The name Evans springs to mind too. Maybe it was Evans who went for the infamous last walk.

Anyway, because I know what cold really feels like, I mean, sleeping in cold – and this is only zero degrees, mind (those bricks don’t stay warm for more than a few hours maybe), and of course I get woken up by my bladder several times during the night (it takes a while, maybe half an hour, before I muster the courage to actually come out of my cocoon – I know I won’t get back to sleep), I do genuinely wonder what could have possibly possessed Scott of the Antarctic to venture into those mountains of madness. I mean, if it was just zero degrees and he was nicely wrapped up and it was only, like, a hundred mile walk maybe, and he has thermal underwear and thermal tents and all the rest of it then sure, fine. But those crazy stiff upper lip British real men from posh boy schools were doing, what, a thousand miles? In minus effing forty! And blizzards! Might even have been minus eighty at one point.

And this is 1912 we’re talking here. No modern conveniences like electric blankets and electric sleeping bags (if that’s even a thing). And no one could’ve known where they were in those days.

But how can you possibly survive that? I mean, how can you set up a tent in a bloody blizzard, and even then, how can the tent protect you? What was the temperature in the tent and even with some sort of oil-heater what sort of temperature did it manage to produce? Minus twenty? That’s even colder than one of those walk in freezers isn’t it? How can you survive that? It’s sheer bloody madness I tell you!

And how, in the cold of that damned hell, did they ever take a shit?

I refuse to ask Chat-effing-GPT for an answer. ChatGPT wouldn’t survive the Antarctic, so what does he know?

Maybe they just didn’t shit at all. I can’t remember how long their journey was, but they can’t have gone, what, months without defecating, surely?

And what of pissing?

Obviously they can’t have gone outside. Their willies would’ve frozen off for a start.

So did they go in the tent? In a pot or something? But in what temperature? Minus thirty?!

Like ‘I’m just going for a shit – I may be some time…’

I also heard about some more modern explorer, one of the Fiennes I believe, who took his gloves off in the Antarctic to tie his shoelaces – it was like minus forty or something – and immediately got frostbite and ended up losing several fingers. How dumb is that?

Of course then there’s the double tragedy of that ill-fated expedition. First, they get to the south pole only to discover that the Norwegian (I think he was Norwegian), Amundsen, had got there first. Apparently Amundsen won because he used dogs and sleds.

Isn’t that a bit cruel on the dogs? Did they have tents?

Then the second tragedy was that apparently they were only about ten miles or so from shelter when they died. I think that shelter was some sort of cabin or something. So it would have had a generator and a heater and tins of food to be hotted up and – one hopes – many bottles of brandy or, yeah, whiskey (Scottish, if we’re talking Scott).

This is the point where my hopeful imagination kicks in. I imagine Oats (if it was Oats) going for his walk and seeing this shelter mistily appearing through the snowy haze and crying out for salvation! But then he’s out in his socks and his feet don’t work anymore.

So he dies.

Or maybe he did wear his boots after all, and he does make it to the shelter, but by the time he can get back to his companions they’re dead.

Or there’s more parallel world versions here. Maybe he does make it back, tells them about the shelter and so they muster up the stiff upper lip for one final push for those last ten miles and yay! They stumble through the doorway and slam it behind them into the swirling snow.

Oats has already gotten the generator working so now they’ve got the temperature up to, I don’t know, minus ten or something luxurious like that, and yes! there is a bottle of brandy and it’s defrosting slowly on top of the stove, along with some tins of baked beans or similar. Except baked beans are going to make them fart, and then they’ll need a shit.

But the cabin has a toilet. Well, a bucket at least (no, of course it’s not an outside loo – that would be cruel). So after a tin of beans and half a bottle of brandy (each), and the temperature is now a glorious zero, they venture forth to the crapper and lose half their weight after months and months of constipated abstention.

And then they just wait for the weather to turn, and march onwards to their waiting ship (yes, it’s still there – what? Did you think the crew would abandon them? Of course not – they’re a British crew, don’t you know).

By then, I personally wouldn’t give a shit if I’d come second in this race to the south pole. I would have been spending the entire trip dreaming of being back at home in front of a warm hearth fire with mince pies and brandy and central heating.

I don’t know what possesses people to make journeys like that. It must be some sort of madness, for sure.

I am also reminded of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which is set in Antarctica. I know that Lovecraft himself had a mortal fear of cold, and simply couldn’t tolerate low temperatures.

I know exactly how he feels.

But the terror in that story is as much a product of the simple cold as anything else. Lovecraft must’ve had some of the same thoughts I have about mad people like Scott of the Antarctic. As if perhaps it’s not the mountains which are mad, but those who choose to visit them.

And now I am reminded that Antarctica wasn’t always ice-covered and cold as hell. It only drifted there with the tectonics. Several tens of millions of years ago it was a lush, southern tropical paradise where exotic prehistoric creatures roamed.

And yes, probably strange aliens too, if only just visiting. And it would be a beautiful place to visit, in those days. And if visiting aliens weren’t in the polite habit of clearing up after themselves before they leave, I would not be at all surprised if there were exotic remains buried under all that ice, perhaps curiously angled tunnels carved into dreadful mountains opening out into vast, aeon-riddled chambers littered with ominous granite sarcophagi etched with unnameable hieroglyphs no man doth dare read aloud.

But then the weather turned, and the visitors departed.

Perhaps the tale we have been told of Scott of the Antarctic is all a great lie, a fabricated tale of tragic valour told to schoolchildren to encourage their admiration for the Great British stiff upper lip and the magnificence of the English posh boy schools, with their ostentatious quads green with neatly-trimmed grass and edged with hallowed stone cloisters and there, some great gothic chapel leering across the countryside as if sending a statuary message to the plebs, ‘behold our magnificence and weep! Look on our works, ye plebs, and despair!’.

Perhaps this fiction has been carefully curated to conceal the real truth – that Scott and his companions never intended to reach the south pole. Instead, they ventured directly into those mountains of madness and – yeah, it is true that they were never seen again, but not for the reasons we have been told.

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons, even death may die…’

There, I wrote what I know.

But I still don’t know how Scott of the Antarctic took a shit.

If you know, dearest reader, then postcard me with your answer.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you are warm.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like next week’s one, which is equally fun.

Ah – I almost forgot – I know a lovely thing for warmth – coffee! If you fancy buying me one to help me overcome the cold, I will be wonderfully grateful.

At the current time of posting, I don’t know who gifted me my little plot, but I shall be finding out shortly after this post goes live, so I shall do a little edit for the postscript.

Oh I do hope they like it! This sort of thing is a little scary…

Once upon a time when she was young, Maria wanted the world and all its time to stop. Not to end – not yet – just to cease. As if in her lost childhood something terrible happened, and her self fractured into scintillating fragments and embedded themselves inside, to make an internal world where nothing and no one can do harm. As if one of her remembers, and the other one has only forgotten.

A grandfather clock, watching over the tester bed from the opposite wall, once ticking life away now crashed against the walls in a cacophony of fragments. The splintered innards splayed and strewn in a broken convolution. Those lovingly crafted springs and cogs and little miniature wheels scattered across the tiles like a mosaic and the twin hands of time only arrows now without a bow to string.

Maria pricked herself on one of those elegant shards and slipped into a splintered dream. A shard that looked like a snowflake. For how long is impossible to gauge with no measure of time in the inner world. Hours are made only of glass here and will shatter to the touch if you long for too much.

But she did wake and when she woke and found herself tucked beneath soft quilt and eiderdown she smiled at the brightness of the sunshine pouring over her through the lattice windows and through her little heart there were no memories of anything from before. All was clean and cleansed and lighter and there were no shattered fragments strewn about the floor. She didn’t know, how could she, but the faeries had swept them all away and buried them somewhere out there in the forest, perhaps beneath the most ancient of the redwoods or the oaks or the weeping willows.

But some of them, they pushed back up through the damp earth and became wolves. Black seedlings twisting up through twisted roots then crack open on the forest floor and mutate. Slow at first like a slithering embryo as limbs appear then writhe and turn and rise on all clawed paws as the snout erupts through ripped skin then tiny slivers of silvery-black fur snake out as the red eyes flash open then finally, the howling begins and the sky is alive with it.

And the forest suddenly stops mid-breath in its tracks then fractures with the echo of it all.

Then they run, the wolves of bad memories. They gather together in their ravenous packs and they haunt and hunt and every other creature burrows itself into the earth and sleeps, for sleep is where the only safety lies.

They roam and they howl and on colder mornings the mist sings with it.

But the faeries never told her that, contented for their Maria to never be haunted by memory.

They only made her never think of taking that forested pathway. They snatch the thoughts away because that place belongs to the wolves of time.

There is no castle on the other side, Maria, forget about it. No prince waits for you there. You were never kissed. No one will gather those broken splinters and heal the clock back together again.

It is only a dream.

But somewhere in a different place, time does continue to breathe. The seasons shift one into another then smile for their own return when the orbital manoeuvre arrows itself towards the next familiar solstice in the eternal cycle that swallows its own tail. Midwinter, when the sun rests for three days then, sluggishly at first, as if wiping sleep away, gently longs to rise once more.

Everything dies, then everything rises again. It has always been so since the beginning of clocks.

Maria is enveloped with love here. Out there in the tender little garden she knows all the birds by name and all the skirting critters who blink her a smile when she passes. And the flowers who turn to greet her as if she were the sun herself. All of them are memories, the good memories, the better memories morphed into the guise of living creatures set free to splinter like fireflies in a safer place to keep her good company. And they never die and they never grow old.

And she never strays into the dark forest where the wolves of bad memory live on. For that is the forbidden place.

Perhaps to know is to remember. Or to remember is to know. When her world stopped in childhood those questions stopped with her. No bad thoughtforms to haunt her in the sleep time.

Here, in this safer place, the hours are like glass and will prick you if you try to escape.

Everything is a fairy tale on the inside, where the only limits are those of the imagination. Maria’s sky changes with her moods. It can be vibrant summer one day, then a bitter winter comes. Sometimes it always rains. Sometimes the stars don’t hide away in the morning. Sometimes the world turns a full circle before the blink of Maria’s eye is done.

Someone conjured up a hamlet for her and a rustic cottage with low ceilings and warm, exposed oak beams and thatch on the roof. There are fruit trees in the back garden and free-roaming chickens with no fear of foxes and beyond that, down into the valley of aquamarine and azure that dark forest beckons. Ancient cedars and lazy evergreen pines and a pathway she has yet to choose.

And beyond, on the other side, yes, sometimes she does know before the faeries snatch that thoughtform away again, there in the distance, poking its turrets above the canopy is a chateau. Surrounded by briar and rose and a moat deeper than any heart and walls higher than the sky. There must be a prince and a princely court there, she believes, waiting for her to dance the red shoes and be kissed back to life by someone who loves her, but somehow she knows she will never be invited.

Just a dream.

Yet there are times, despite the faeries, when she wakes and the idea forms in her mind to pack a few choice provisions in a travelling sack and stroll down that grassy rise, skip over the river where it is only a gurgling stream and walk that path to the castle. But as quickly as the notion appears, something steals it away again.

And there are wolves. And she doesn’t wish to remember them.

But now midwinter has returned and there is a new star in the heavens.

She used to glance at the mirror sometimes and wonder how old she really is. And how she suddenly got that way. A beautiful fair-haired young woman it seems to her today. She has a lightness to her blue eyes and there is a peace in her soul she hasn’t sensed for years. Yesterday it was Hallowe’en, it seems, and now midwinter is upon us.

When was the last time she visited the market? It is evening now, she’ll go tomorrow. It is warm and cozy inside this cottage with the hearth-fire shimmering. Peer through the windows and the whole village is incandescent with faerie light. Motes and dust, flickers in the twilight, almost swimming or dancing in the crisp air about the houses. Sounds of merriment and friendship, the spicy scents of festive invitations and the laughter of family.

But she cannot remember their names or their faces. Has she ever seen them? How long has it been? Time moves otherwise here, in the internal fairy world. She knew their names once, she is certain of it. Certain she used to walk those little cobbled streets and everyone would smile at her and she would stop to greet them and hear all the little trivia and gossip that makes the world go round and round and round again. She is sure she used to go to the little stone church on the other side of the hamlet and sing for her heart and take communion from the kindly old priest who never seemed to age and somehow, to her, always seemed to love her especially, as if from divine instruction to keep watch over the girl.

But now, she is not even sure she remembers a church. If there is one, she can no longer glimpse its fine steeple through the balistraria. Perhaps it’s gotten thinner over the years, and that window is now only an arrowslit.

Perhaps the sands have started to fall again.

Once upon a time when she was young, Maria wanted the outside world to go away and not hurt her anymore. She wished for the end of time.

As if as a child, something terrible happened, the clocks smashed into a thousand shards and now there are wolves in the forest.

Always wolves.

Today it shall be different. Something in the air has changed. The dawn begins with only the merest perception of earlier than yesterday but yes, the sun is awake. And yes, there is a church because the bells woke her. A memory comes to her of what day it is as she lies in bed beneath warm quilt and eiderdown and snuggles up even more to herself because it’s too lovely a place to leave. But then her eyes open and the room is alight with candleflame. Who lit them? She thinks she knows, but the answer isn’t in this bedchamber.

But it looks like faerie light.

Something pricks her little feet or perhaps merely tickles but it’s enough – if only to say ‘you have to get up! Rise, Maria. See, the sun is rising, and so should you. Up!’

A thoughtform in her head again, but this one doesn’t leave. So she rises and draws back the curtains and the candles suddenly snuff themselves out. But it doesn’t matter because the air outside is thick with gently drifting snowfall. Everything in white. But a warm and inviting white, the sort of morning where all you want to ever do is hurriedly dress and rush into your snowboots and rush outside into the powdery drifts as if, were you to delay or were you to dawdle then it would suddenly all be gone by the time you step outside.

So she rushes. And as she rushes through the little cottage room after room the candles snuff out and the curtains draw back and the snow is always there through every window and the sky sparkles with it and she creaks open the little wooden front door with its horseshoe knocker and its mistletoe rings and torches flickering in their filigree sconces either side as if only to spite the snow and everywhere out there it’s like the sky is falling white but there is some kind of joy in the world.

It’s Christmas and as soon as she remembers it’s Christmas she sees the little silver box on the doorstep and remembers. Someone must love her.

Someone kissed her once. A prince perhaps.

Time to remember and come home, our beautiful Maria. Please remember us. We are your soul family and you have only been a long time sleeping.

In a high tower, in a bedchamber, in a chateau beyond the forest where the wild things are and the wolves of time howl away in the snowdrifts, tiny little clockwork splinters rustle across the floor, shiver, shiver and skitter and merge back together like iron filings. The silken drapes swish and someone breathes again, softly, hush, softly.

And the grandfather clock suddenly feels a notion to tickety-tock-tick again, as if something within has clicked back into its rightful place.

She doesn’t feel the cold, despite the snowfall cascading about her, breath-clouds swishing flakes away and her ears charmed with the tolling of the bells because memories are being reborn. Bending down, she gingerly clicks the catch to see that which glistens for her on the inside. Against the velvety blackness of the lining is a scintillating pin, a brooch, a snowflake encrusted with jewels and somewhere further inside, she knows it belonged to her once.

Someone kissed her with it once. Someone who loves her.

There is a part of her who wishes to close the box back up and to bury it beneath sacred ground and close the door to the external world and crawl back into bed and wish it all away and never remember because to remember, is to be haunted again. To remember is to be swallowed by the wolves of time. Or to bury it in a crypt, an ancestral crypt with all the other parts.

But that part, that protector, that older fairy smiles for the last time and vanishes into a pop in the sky with the faintest of fizzes.

She will not bury it. For it is a kiss of love and will chase the wolves away.

And yet, reaching in, at the moment of touch the world stops. Every creature caught mid-flight, even the faeries. In every cottage time freezes and the people are like mannequins. Snowfall stops and just hangs there, like sparkling stars in the air, her breath catches mid-breath like a mist kissing snowflakes and the torches mid-flicker like fireblades and the bells, mid-ring, only a neverending resonance now, an echo or a memory of something haunting and so very far away.

Yet there is a faint ululation if you listen carefully.

If you listen carefully, the world will tell you everything you ever wished to know.

The way home.

But this pin is sharp. That one little touch draws a prick of blood with droplets to the ground and dyes the snow crimson. The splinters of memory. But then it shifts in her palm and points the way, guided by her own heart. There, down the rise towards the dark forest. Yet the river can be crossed because the rush has ceased and turned it all to ice. And then a shimmering in the corner of her eye, one last faerie light, immune to time, weaving amongst the hanging snow as if waiting, as if a guide.

Maria catches her breath and snatches the moment. She dons her thick furry coat and pins the brooch to her breast and she will follow where the light takes her. As if it is only a dream after all.

There will be no need for provisions. It is not as far as you think. No glance behind because she knows if she does she will never leave. The faerie bobs and jumps ahead of her, sometimes suddenly leaping from one side to the other as if just to keep her attention hypnotised and her resolve certain. The snow in the air melts as she brushes through but it’s not cold, it’s like a caress, or a parade of soft kisses on her rosy cheeks.

She is beside the river before she even has time to think of distance. Only a single breath perhaps. The light tells where to cross safely. This ice will not crack. For it is sealed by time itself. There may be dark shapes beneath the surface but they are frozen too. Fear itself is frozen.

But what of the wolves? She is on the other side now and at the edge of the night-path. It is too dark to see very far in front of her, even with the faerie light. But she is drawn to it, and there is no looking back. One more breath to be caught and she takes that first wary step. Then another, and ten more just the same. The ancient trees curve away above her like an archway, a cathedral, so high the peaks are lost in darkness.

Then suddenly she can’t hear the village bells anymore. She is jolted by the sudden silence. She looks behind but there’s nothing but forest now. Fast breath. She sees only trees behind her and a path which fades into darkness.

And then the faerie light vanishes.

Fast breath. They wake, and they sense, and they will come to swallow you up again.

But the pin glows. The pin glows brighter and will show her the way home. Fear, too, has become frozen. Even when the howling starts. Even when the howling gets closer, not one, not two, but all around her. The wolves of time.

The wolves of time with their piercing red eyes there amongst the trees. First one, to the left there, then a second, behind and to the right. Then the breathing, closer, slow-quick-slow, rasping, slavering. Another set of red eyes blink up ahead. More to each side. There are dozens of them now, and they have her surrounded as she spins and whirls around and around as if on the edge of panic, her breathing faster and heavier now but there is nowhere to run.

But the pin continues to glow. The glittering snowflake glowing even brighter now and the encrusted jewels scattering light everywhere, sapphire and ruby and emerald and diamond. The scintillating shards of memory alight once more. The good memories, the safe memories, the ones who tell her once upon a time you were loved, Maria. You were kissed by a prince who loves you.

But the crimson devil’s eyes of the wolves of time do not blink away in fear. Yet nor do they come any closer. They simply watch. Simply their snarling presence, they think, will remind her of where they came from, those terrible things from which they were born. And they will send her back into her girlish dream and she will never grow old.

Only one, though, is not wary of the light. Maria’s breath catches again as he steps into the path ahead then, slowly, softly, turns towards her. She tries to step back but she can’t. And she tries to look away but she can’t. There is no way back to that safe place she conjured for herself when time ended, once upon a time when she was a child and something terrible happened to her in the forest.

But then, as she stares ahead at the wolf, it seems to diminish with every little flicker of the light. Smaller, smaller until now, now it is no larger than a pup. He was hers once, she remembers it now. She was young and she was safe and she was loved. They used to run into the forest together and he showed her all the ways that other girls could never know.

But like all pups, he grew to be a wolf, and a bright palace is no place for wolves. They banished him. He loped into the forest to be with his own kind. They tried to stop her following but she slipped through their grasp when the nightfall came and they never saw her again.

She had been swallowed by the wolves of time.

But he’s a pup again now, and it’s time to come home.

And so the red eyes of the pack, one by one, blink out until all is done. The gemstones have done their work well, all those perfect memories from a perfect childhood that isn’t so far away anymore.

Maria smiles. She smiles because she remembers, finally, she knows who gifted her the brooch and she understands why.

And with one last glance and one last gasp behind her the freeze is gone. The bells of the village, caught mid-chime, suddenly erupt in a the most glorious hymn to the unconquered sun and the snow collapses onto the earth and the flames flicker the ice away and the river is gurgling and rushing now and the breath-clouds vanish into mist.

She skips smiling towards him, bends down and ruffles his cozy fur and snuggly whispers in his ear. Time to come home.

For it was only ever a dream. And I am not ready to grow old.

Not yet.

In a fine bedchamber, in a high turret in a fanciful castle, behind wispy translucent silk drapes swishing in a warm breeze a girl’s blue eyes flash open as the grandfather clock chimes for the new dawn and there, above her, with moisture on his lips, the one who kissed her back to life again.

The one who loves her.

He takes the little snowflake pin from his breast and kneels, like a penitent, and cups it in her palm.

And smiles.

For his Maria has come home again. For she pricked herself once on the splinter of a memory, and has only been a long time sleeping.

And it’s Christmas, and that’s what happens. That’s what always happens, behind the briar and the rose, when you know how to love…

This story is a gift for , using the little plot they gave me. Thank you, Anne! I loved it, and I am so hoping you liked my interpretation!

As I mentioned up top, you can read all the prompts at the TiF Secret Santa homepage, which is there. All of them were prompted by the simple question ‘what’s in the box?’, then we all provided our own plots, which were then randomly assigned, Secret Santa style.

Mine was this:

Maria finds a silver box on her doorstep on Christmas Morning, and inside: a jewel encrusted snowflake pin sparkles against black velvet. When she touches it, her world freezes—breath mid-breath, bells mid-ring, candles mid-flicker. To restart time, Maria must find the person who gave this gift and understand why.

As soon as I read this I immediately thought ‘it’s got to be a fairytale!’ And so it was. The dissociation aspect, and the idea of the internal world, will be intimately familiar with anyone who has, or understands, the condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiple personality), which always incorporates a rich and vibrant internal world where all the identities/parts live (often fashioned from story worlds and cultural experiences, along with pure imagination). The faeries being like protector alters. So this story was for them as well as my mysterious gift-giver - to whom I am wonderfully grateful, because it’s such a lovely prompt.

From a certain point of view, the snowflake pin was given to Maria by herself, as a sort of memory trigger to bring her back out of the safe dreamworld, but also by the prince, for a similar reason. Then there’s the protector faerie option. I didn’t really want to state that openly, but only couch it as a suggestion, so it’s open to interpretation.

I’ve written about the Dissociation of Sleeping Beauty for one of my Fairytale Sundays, which you can read here:

Those familiar with fairytale symbolisms will recognise in my tale the motifs of menarche (pricking, and the blood aspect) and the wolf as the darker and enticingly dangerous side of men, from the point of view of girlhood transitioning into womanhood (the path through the forest). Then there’s the dream element, from Sleeping Beauty’s point of view.

On the other paw, maybe it’s just a nice Christmas story…

Seeing that it’s Christmas, and I am one of those poor folks who does not have the means to celebrate anything, would you like to buy me a coffee for midwinter?

Spare a few coins for a poor woodcutter?

As always there are some like, comment, and share buttons down there, and they love being buttoned.

And if you haven’t subscribed already, here is something alluring just for you.

Whether this is lyrics or poetry or some monstrous hybrid of suchness is something on which I am not going to pass judgement. It’s late, there is nothing more to drink and I should be going to bed. In the cold because we have no central heating here and the monstrous machines are eating away my lifeblood in the marketplace world and there is no place for the likes of me in this time oh no. Unless what I say somehow survives into the post-time a thousand years from now when the bad guys are nothing but a moral fable, a horror story told to children.

It is true - we are living in the end times. But it’s not what you think that is. The end times is the end of history, of knowledge of history. It is up to us, the alphas of this world who understand the secrets of reincarnation to lay down our memory triggers and return, in a thousand years and remember and teach those future younglings to never let it happen again.

And so I write. Stanzas in the key of me to be memory triggers.

It is cold here. I drink and I listen and I think of something that doesn’t usually come out.

I wonder what the future me, with dissociated memories in a thousand years will think of this. Will she remember the acuteness as much as I do now?

I don’t think so.

Stanzas in the key of me in the slime light.

Fault lines. This is so definitely going to be the title of my next poetry collection. I have decided.

It’s not often I decide. But when I do, it makes my soul happy.

This is probably just an initial version. So you get an insight into something which, eventually, will become something very cool indeed…

Read more

And so do many others. Click the banner below and you get to read them!

And don’t worry, that link is there at the end as well.

And I am hugely grateful to for helping me with my cover image. And obviously, to the rest of the MV team. Which is Shane, & .

If you want to know what prompted this story idea, well, it’s because I couldn’t think of a damn thing until the day before yesterday.

And that, you will doubtless be relieved to hear, is all the introduction you have to endure from me.

It’s one of those stories in which I should say I hope you enjoy it as much I enjoyed writing it…

Even the postman had more character than Darius Elwood.

Most of the time, posties don’t bother taking any interest in anything they deliver. Think about it. If they did, immortality would be theirs, would it not? They would defeat the Demon Time simply out of curiosity. They would have a Sisyphean To Be Read pile mounting up every morning before they’d had a chance to finish the previous day’s additions. And because the universe is nothing if not semiotic and loves well the sending of missives, that postie would be blessed with all those extra hours and those hours would never catch up with his ageless heart.

And yet, why be more interested in other people’s lives than your own?

Some of the time, though, of course they notice. Oddly-shaped parcels, for example. Parcels with impossibly angled protrusions and parcels with proclamations of divinity or divination and parcels from far-flung places like Peru or Paraguay or Portland, Oregon; or Papers from Panama even, promising the channelling of unexpected windfalls. Parcels from dodgy adult playtime entrepreneurs.

They don’t care much for your bills and your invoices, you can be reassured of that. And your love letters – no, that’s not their business. Besides, isn’t one declaration of romance no different from the next?

Likewise, some customers keep receiving the same sort of thing, day in, day out, for months on end.

Like Darius Elwood.

Postie couldn’t help noticing and conjuring up some – as it happens – accurate evaluation of the fellow, simply by casually taking in the return addresses on that long sequence of large manila envelopes (the kind they use for classified information).

They all had one thing in common. Writing advice. How to write. How to find your Muse. Invitations to Writers’ Retreats and half-price vouchers for this or that writing course.

Scams, half of them. You can either write or you can’t, according to Postie.

And rejections. A lot of rejections. An almost endless stream of them. A series of them. Season One, Season Two, et cetera.

Truth is, despite possessing a superbly literary moniker (true-life crime fiction perhaps), Darius Elwood was stuck in the same story and kept on repeating that same story over, and over. There was no Muse. He had no characters and no character of his own. And so – gentility notwithstanding – he shuffles perennially about his uncleaned apartment scratching his balding pate with a sort of self-indulgent Woody Allen-esque neuroticism written all over his ovular middle-aged visage. Mumbling to himself too, no doubt. Wondering where he’d left common household items. Rearranging a few strands of stray hair yet studiously avoiding the mirror. Forgetting how to cook and – therefore – wasting away on TV dinners with no one else in his miserable little life with whom to share them.

Write about what you know. That’s what people say. Everyone has a novel in them.

Postie didn’t believe that.

But the Demon, Time. Oh yes, the Demon believes that wholeheartedly. And gleefully sets about proving it to himself.

Especially, as the custom tells us here, when the clocks fall back in the Witching Hour and herald the onset of November.

You see, there’s a special place for the likes of Darius Elwood, hopeful and characterless writer without a Muse, when November comes around again, here, in The Twilight Zone.

This is what he was waiting for! Oh yes! He can tell just by the feel of it. Elwood rips open the envelope and there, on crisp and gilded paper, with calligraphy no less, is his prize offer. First thirty respondents get the free trip – all expenses included – to the November writing commune. Meet your Muse! Enter December with a novel! By the end of the month, they promise, you’ll have your novel done, or we’ll recompense you a princely sum (ten thousand bucks, his brain suggested).

There was a return address of course, so clever Darius Elwood bypasses the postal service and travels there in person and delivers his response in person and waits, like a patient, in the reception lobby until a cute-looking blonde girl with an Ivy League accent sends him home, although not without – to Elwood, at least – one of those winks or sly smiles or similarly effective gestures which – to Elwood, at least – says ‘sure, of course you’re one of the first!’.

And, yes, his interpretation of that gesture, for once, was indeed spot on.

Time, place, GPS coding, arrival protocols, potential introduction to the personal Muse, all of it – inside that lovely manila envelope. Inviting him – him! – Darius Elwood!

October passed as if the Demon, Time, was entirely uninterested and uninspired in the month – or, perhaps more accurately, had spent that month wisely plotting. It had, however, concluded that scheme well in time for Hallowe’en. It made a point of keeping that schedule each year – that particular red letter day being a personal favourite, after all.

Darius Elwood, likewise, kept himself busy packing up a trunk for the month and loading it up into the boot of his ludicrous daffodil-yellow Volkswagen the night before the trip. He’d suffered a horrendous recurrent anxiety dream throughout the week prior in which he dutifully turned up at the appointed place only to be told, in no uncertain terms and conditions, that he was one minute late and would not be admitted.

Thus, with that in mind, he left early.

His long journey north on the interstate was entirely uneventful. This saddened him as he was hoping for some kind of inspiration. Then again, Darius Elwood doesn’t really know how to look. Statistically speaking, there certainly were moments of interest – even intrigue – passing him by on the other side of the road but he didn’t notice.

Finally, there’s the slip road. Hop on to a minor road as the afternoon passes the point of no return and the verges are piled high with thick, powdery snow until you come to a discreet little turnoff which is, as it turns out, little more than a very long, very winding, and very dark driveway, lined by ancient, overhanging trees of the ominous variety. But again, he was too determinedly squinting on the path ahead to contemplate any metaphorical signifiers in that.

There were no owls.

Conclusively, the forest suddenly ended as swiftly as it began, revealing – to Elwood – a horribly disappointing vista.

It was a lake. Frozen solid but for one, perfectly straight canal, no wider than the car, ending in an island perching proudly in the centre. The path just ended abruptly at the shore as if, once in a deeper time before the flood came that trackway simply descended into a crater then, yes, there in the centre of the lake would ascend once more onto that island. Perhaps in those better seasons it had been a bright place of refuge, with a painted temple glorifying the landscape for all to adore, where dancing priestesses would writhe in alternating ecstasy and agony in the scented throes of the Goddess; but today, in these darker times, that island is barely visible but for the mist, shrouding its copse of broken forest and concealing whatever secrets might lie in wait there.

There was a jetty, and a rickety old rowboat, but no scowling ferryman. Elwood brakes a little askew and wonders whether he’s still in that anxiety dream, despite that dream looking nothing like this. But the night will be falling soon and – wait, there is a faint light there, a flicker between the trees, only visible from a very precise angle.

Elwood has always thought himself a man of action, rather than a mere thinker, and so, without even being necessarily conscious of any decision-making process, resolves to simply shrug, pull his trunk out of the boot (then – carefully – locking the car just in case), heft it onto the boat (no holes, is a relief; oars intact too), then clamber himself after it.

He’d rowed only once before, somewhere in his youth, and is delighted to find it’s no different from bicycles. He is forced to look back from whence he came, however, although for Elwood that consists solely in pondering the diminution of the Volkswagen and how the dry, stable land escapes him with every heave.

Until he clunks against another jetty.

It’s easier to discern the light now. In fact there’s more than one. Lights from windows, clearly. There is a huge, although shadowed, building there in a clearing beyond this ring of wild oaks. And yes, of course there is a little pathway leading up to it. As if to spur him on, we’ll gust a little cold wind his way.

That works. Gathering up his trunk he hauls it and his wizened little self up that little pathway until, breaching the treeline, he can see clearly it’s some great stone manor house. In fact it’s huge, in the manner of an Elizabethan stately home, with Gloriana wings either side. There’s a pillared porchway entrance with welcoming double-doors and just the faintest scent of an invitation to dinner. Thus, with renewed vigour and a rumbling tummy, he shoulders open the portal and stumbles fatefully into the lobby.

To be greeted by… well, there’s nobody at Reception. There is, however, perched in a plush armchair against the far wall of this generous black and white tiled atrium, a young woman, reading a book with no title. She immediately closes the book then grins at him with suspicious familiarity. There’s an out of sorts look about her, he muses (incongruous is the word you’re looking for, Darius). She has the air of a Pre-Raphaelite temptress with her angular fragility but in modern, cosmopolitan garb, as if dressed for work at some upmarket, liberal marketing agency perhaps. Neat black skirt, soft woolly jumper in a warming vermilion, black hair in a bob and big, bright brown childlike eyes. Mid-twenties would be a good estimate, he reckons. She gives him a smile and a cute little wave just to heighten his unease.

He thinks he recognises her but you can’t be too sure these days. Instinct and politesse with a few mirror neurons thrown in for good measure prompt his return smile. One of those neurotic smiles on engaging with someone you ought to know but have forgotten.

“Anyone here? For reception?” he throws his meek little voice at her.

She just shrugs with both arms and mouths some silent response as if to say, “Don’t ask me, I don’t work here.”

There’s one of those little bells on the desk so he bangs it a few times. Nobody comes. Few more times bang. No answer.

She keeps on smiling at him.

Third time lucky perchance? Bang bang nope, no answer.

She giggles. He hates that. She knows he does. Of course she knows.

Boldness. You’ve come all this way, Darius Elwood. Be a man for Pete’s sake. Right then. He strides a few paces towards her and that, it seems, is her cue to stop giggling and leap to her dainty little feet. She closes the distance between them then – suddenly and to his awful consternation – throws her arms about him in a huge hug.

“Darius!” She almost shouts in his ear (more disconcertion). “Darius Elwood! I am so pleased you made it. Now then,” without letting him interject, “let us get you and your,” peeking at the luggage, “hmm, baggage up to your room and settled cosy-cosy in, eh? What say you?”

Then she releases him, takes one step two step back and stands attentively awaiting an answer.

His turn to mouth a silent response. She tilts her head at him with a raised brow. Crosses her arms for a more formal emphasis.

“Erm, erm…”

“Ah! You think you know me, don’t you? But you’re all afraidy-fraid to ask, correct?” She’s grinning again. Feels like mockery.

“Oh I’m not mocking you, dear Darius! Whatever makes you think that? Ah – don’t answer – I’ve got it!” waggling finger at him, “Neuroticism! That’s it! You’re one of life’s perennial neurotics, aren’t you, dearest?”

“Well,” with a confirmatory shudder, “I guess so. Oh! I’ve got it too! You’re pretending to know me because you saw my obligatory photograph in my application? Ah, now I understand. I feel so much better.”

“And so you should, dear Darius. Now, let us get you settled in!”

And so they both exit the lobby. She doesn’t help him with the trunk. There’s no lift. The lobby leads in to an even larger central space with a wide, crimson-carpeted staircase beginning right in the centre of the room and winding around all four walls up to a plush balcony with filigree iron railings then it’s all the way round again into a corridor along a bit further then “Here we are!” and she at least opens the door for him if she’s not going to help with the trunk.

The room is lovely and that definitely makes him feel better. It’s warm, too, and brightly lit. He plonks his trunk down by the end of the bed and removes his coat (there’s a convenient wooden stand for it). She clicks the door shut behind him then, once more, just perches there with her arms crossed and that same, suspicious smile.

She’s waiting again, isn’t she? She wants me to say something, doesn’t she? Oh what am I going to say! What am I myself, even? Oh I don’t know! Oh, help me, help me! Oh where is my Muse when I need her!

Oh!

She’s grinning a little wider now.

“Oh!” It took him a while but he got there in the end. “You’re my Muse, aren’t you! They said I’d have an invitation to meet her!”

Ostentatious hand-clapping with a thrown-back head and a big, jolly guffaw!

“Of course I am, dearest Darius! Of course I am! And we are going to be working oh so very, very hard on this as-yet-untitled novel of yours over the ensuing month, are we not?”

“May I take a shower first and have something to eat? I’m very hungry.”

“Famished is the word you are looking for, Darius. Famished. It means ‘very hungry’.”

“Ah. Thank you.”

“Shower, then. Would you like me to accompany you?”

“I beg your pardon?!”

“A lot of writers do some extraordinary thinking in the shower! Most of my clients simply adore taking showers with me!”

“Well,” neuroticism again – he shuffles, “I… I don’t think I’d feel comfortable with that. Really I wouldn’t. Of course, of course I don’t mean to offend you, it’s just, well,” another shrug (he’s not great with words, you may have noticed) –

“Oh I am so relieved!”

That startled him.

“I am so relieved. I mean, think about it. I loathe having to hang around bathrooms when my clients are pottering about in their birthday suits scrubbing their smelly armpits and pinching spots and gouging out snotty noses and oh the defecations!” throwing up arms again for good measure, “you understand what I’m saying, dearest?”

“I… I think so.”

“Great! You see – and mark these words well, Darius Elwood – none of those damn writers ever think about MY FEELINGS!!!”

“OH!!” he’s thrown back on to a conveniently positioned armchair (strategically positioned, actually) with the force of the exclamation.

She’s standing there with her hands on her hips – again waiting for a response.

None forthcoming.

Then she waggles an accusatory finger at him. “I’m in dominatrix mode, Darius! Now, get yourself in that shower then we’ll get you fed.”

He Obeys.

Dinner was deliciously excellent (her words, not his).

Served in a huge dining chamber with high ceilings and chandeliers and their very own faceless, voiceless waiter attending their every gustatory whim.

Literally faceless and mouthless.

She sat across from him and savoured every morsel. And studies him.

Of course he didn’t like that.

It wasn’t the only thing he didn’t like.

It was a cacophonous dining chamber indeed except they were the only ones there. Except they weren’t. Elwood could hear it but he couldn’t see. It was a cacophony of clattering cutlery and chinking crockery and the swishing and sloshing of fine wines in crystal goblets but no chatter and no voices. No other conversations. Elwood watched with a Hallowe’en shudder as the goblets drained then refilled then drained again and food disappeared from plates. Bit by bit.

Not a good day for the nerves.

“You can’t see them, and neither can they see you,” she’d explained nonchalantly. “Wouldn’t want anything to come between you and your Muse now, would we?”

His nerves decided they’d had enough by the time he’d wolfed down the appetiser.

“Oh can’t you make that noise stop!”

“Spike in the brain, is it? Oh, very well, then.” She waved it all away with another nonchalant swish. Deafening silence (if that’s not a cliché? We’ll do better next time.). “Better?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not a great one for words, are we, Darius?”

He shrugged. It was one of his favourite gestures, clearly.

She popped a breadstick in her mouth cracked and spoke through it. “Think of me as an alter. And this is an internal world.”

“A what?”

“Alter. Other personality, like in a DID System.”

“A what?”

“Dissociative Identity Disorder. Multiple personality, that sort of thing.” Scary bite on a breadstick. “Except it’s not disordered at all. Those are my favourite clients. Did you know (no pun intended),” third scary breadstick bite, “they have a stupendously vibrant and scintillating internal world? Effervescent imagination.” Breadstick. “Genius imagination. And so very full of deep, deep emotions. Most creative people on the planet, IMNSHO.”

Final breadstick crumble.

“IMNSHO?”

Gobble. “In my not so humble opinion.”

“I can’t imagine you being humble.”

“Hah. Very well done, dearest!”

Breadstick.

Truth is, dear Darius wasn’t in much of a mood for words that first night. She didn’t mind as it wasn’t surprising, what with that long, long northward journey. It’d be a turn up for the books, as it were, if he’d not been tired. She’d slipped something gentle in his aperitif just to ease him into the spirit of the situation. By the time his just dessert was served, there were no more nerves and he almost missed the cacophonous clatter.

He fell asleep, with her, perched in an armchair, simply observing in a perfect, spiritual stillness.

She was still there in the morning. Unmoving and unmoved.

He’d had a dreamless sleep (unfortunately – nothing she could do about that, slipped Mickey notwithstanding – but perhaps she’d try Valium on this one next time, she mused).

Groggily (unless you can think of a better word) he got himself out of bed.

“Please tell me you don’t want me coming to the bathroom with you?” Her words of morning greeting.

He shook his head and marched off for his ablutions.

Then it was breakfast. Which was a repeat of the night before. Clattering and clattering and dead-eyed waiters but very tasty croissants and superb freshly-ground arabica.

Following, she ordered him back up to his room, where the elegant mahogany writing desk awaited. With a majestic view out over the far side of the lake, which glistened in the melting dawn.

There was an endless – endless! – supply of paper and antique typewriter which had that sound to it – the sound that should set every genuine writer’s mind smiling just for the pleasure of it.

But dear Darius, oh no. Dear Darius spent the entire morning veritably staring at a blank sheet.

Muse filed her nails.

Lunchtime. Clatter, clatter.

She said nothing.

He said nothing.

His brain thought about atrophy, but that’s not a good title for the kind of novel he wanted to pen. Exciting crime fiction was his desire, not pretentious self-indulgent literary fiction about the nostalgic slide into dementia. Movie adaptation with Dame Judi Dench. Anyone can do that sort of thing.

No, a good juicy murder is what you want and a couple of gritty burnt-out cops with weatherbeaten faces and estranged wives. A serial killer, perhaps. Throw in a rookie with a good heart and a Magnum-357 for better measure who – character development! – by the end of the book has become irrefutably corrupted in the company of his badass detective buddies and the rude thrust of him into the dark, mean underbelly of this damned city, with its street-dirty whores and its mafioso and its, well, you get the picture.

Darius Elwood didn’t, though.

By the end of the first week she thought about whipping him into it. But he’d just crumble like a breadstick, she knew.

So she sighed.

Then fell asleep in the chair before he did.

Blank pages, blank mind.

Not the best client she’d ever had.

She prepared herself for the inevitable.

Wasn’t her job, after all, to conjure up tricks.

“Why aren’t you helping?” he cries out in exasperation as the words fail again. “You’re supposed to be my Muse! You’re there all the time, but nothing’s happening!”

“What?!” She leaps abruptly to her feet and glares at him. “You expect me to do all the work! You’re supposed to be the writer! Not me! Or did you expect me to write the bloody thing for you?! Eh? Eh?”

He quivered.

And that was the end of week two.

Montage sequence. That ought to do it, she mused.

She took him for brisk walks about the gardens. Accompanied him on detours through the forest where the wild deer cavort and the corvids conspire. A constant companion beneath the glittering icicles of emerging winter and the mist-shrouds magically protecting this guarded little corner of the vast universe.

No words came.

Darius Elwood, desk, typewriter, sash window, late fall postcard view.

Blank page, gone again blank brain.

Rub those eyes down and sleep, sleep.

She drank Napoleon Brandy with him in the smoking room and took Earl Grey and Darjeeling with him in the parquet-ceilinged library. Admired paintings of dead rich people together in the Gallery of Portraits, idly rolled balls about in the billiards room whilst he gazes mindlessly through the window at the gorgeously falling snow.

No words came.

Gone again blank brain.

She’s always there, though, in the ambient air behind him. Always watching and wanting to love.

But no old typewriter with the inspirational clatter as one might, once upon an age, have heard were you a serving girl paused with a silver tray of Burgundy outside the door of a classic old novelist. The sort of writer whose time, perhaps, died out long ago.

Just that nobody noticed.

By candelabra she revealed all the ancient hidden passages behind the wood-panelled bedchambers for the servant class to go about their work without upsetting the aristocracy. And the drilled little holes for the Peeping Toms of the underclass.

But no words came.

Not even a montage.

By the end of the third week, they’d both had enough.

Elwood shoved his chair back and erected himself (possibly for the first time in his miserable little existence) and remonstrated!

“Now what?!” She erected herself too from the perennial armchair and stood better than he.

“I can’t think and I can’t do anything with you there all the time! I can feel your beady eyes beating on the back of me always! Always!”

“Oh what delicious alliteration Darius dear! I am impressed!”

“Well,” meekly and pleadingly, “can’t you just leave me alone to write in peace?!”

“No! Meet your Muse, remember? She’ll be with you always in this wonderful place! You’ll have that November novel finished or it’s the death of you!”

“Death?! I thought you said money back? Compensation?”

“Ah – small print, small print.”

“No one ever reads that.”

“Well, they should.”

Darius wasn’t done yet. He stormed over to his trunk and scrabbled around until – ah, here it is.

Her eyes glare in abject horror. She knows what’s coming.

It was a smartphone.

“What are you doing, Darius?” Tilt of the head, hands on hips, schoolmistress style.

“I’m going to talk to ChatGPT.”

“OH NO YOU’RE BLOODY NOT!!!” Shrieking (obviously). “WE MUSES SHALL NEVER” (arms defiantly aloft and busy as a conductor at the philharmonic) “NEVER, IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN CONFLICT, BE REPLACED BY A BLOODY LLM! NEVER SURRENDER! NEVER!”

Shrinking back. Smartphone flies out of his hand (as if by an unseen force) and smashes deliciously against the wall in scintillating bullet time.

And Darius Elwood knows in his hearty heart that he’s done for.

Meekly. “But I’ve got writer’s block.”

And then he begins to weep. Like a little child.

And she takes pity on him, like all Muses do from time to time, in the darkest of hours when the dawn seems so far away to touch.

She sighs, softly.

Then a few beats as she watches him, weeping.

“Writer’s block, eh,” she repeats on him. “Well, in that case, dearest Darius, we’d best take you there. To our special place.”

He looks up from his weeping and offers her that hopeful, childlike look his own parents never acknowledged, never noticed, never cared for him at all.

He wrote something once, but they never read it. Something beautiful. And then it was gone.

“Let us to the West Wing, and I shall escort you to the Writer’s Block.”

Down, down and deeper down the spiralling staircase and through the vast, black and unlighted and grave-silent dining hall and beyond, through the old billiards room and the elegant library and the portrait gallery and the music room until we arrive at a panelled door concealed by a bookcase.

Shift it aside with a hand-printed volume of poetry from Renaissance Florence then down, down the stairs we go with only a candelabra to light the way she leads him down.

Until they emerge on the other side.

There is a long, stone corridor, with darkened, heavy oaken doors all along either side each with little, iron, grilles at eye level.

A dungeon. A prison. A cell block for writers.

Room thirteen seems suitable to Muse.

She shuffles him in, he does not resist, he Obeys her.

He does not turn as she slams the thing shut behind him.

And then she is gone.

By a guttering and flickering unending candle at a plain, simple wooden desk, with ink and quill and beautiful old parchment which will always have more space to write and more room to breathe Darius Elwood stares at the note, pinned to the cold stone wall behind the desk.

“Write about what you know,” it commands. “The last three weeks.”

And then below it, in her own, perfect calligraphy. “Write about me, dear Darius. How you finally met me, how I tried to love you, and how you learned to love this place. And how bereft you are without me.”

“But I don’t love this place.” He muses to himself.

“Then tell me that. And learn.”

Just a final whisper, whisper in the ear as if from an unseen draught.

And then stillness.

Whispers, wafting over the sad, lonely persona of one Darius Elwood, would-be writer who’d wanted this dream since childhood, just the one chance to write, and be listened to, and be loved for it.

Just to be loved. Lonely, yes. But never surrendering to hopelessness.

How long will it take him to finish his own story and find his release? Who knows?

But no, there is no giving up. There is no surrender here.

No, not here in the eternal, literary prison that is, and forever shall be, The Twilight Zone…

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There’s more eclectic goodies in my Alters Index.

So for this one, I did actually spend a few days after the initial outburst to actually craft the thing. I’ve never really done that before and it was a little exhilarating, as it happens. Like, yeah, maybe I can be a proper poetess.

For my paid subscribers, it won’t just be poems, by the way. I have been going through my back catalogue and converting at least half of that archive to paid-only. There’s about half a million bloody words there already. Most of them are free, but some of them are no longer.

There needs to be more and I am excited and excitable to embark on a proper creative misadventure.

It starts with a death poem.

Something about expiration.

This one follows on very well, or complements (better word there) from the last older one, Away/Beached, which you can read there. You’ll see what I mean.

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That means I have to write beautifully.

And profoundly.

There are two prompts I have to write for and I have only a few days to do it and my mind is blanking me out again.

One of them is the Midnight Vault and that’s infuriating because all the very first stories I ever wrote were twist-oriented and weird and, well, Twilight Zone-esque, frankly. And now I can’t bloody think of anything!

Fate is nothing if not ironic, isn’t she?

But it’s not that my mind isn’t working or producing anything of any value, it’s just not working for those two aspects.

Anyway, I have two pieces for you tonight. One of them – this one – is going to be free for all, the other one – a new poem – is going to be paid only. I have thought of one method here, which is that any new poetry I do can be paid-only. And to make it worth it, this means I have to seriously make such poems seriously good. And that means actually working on them – crafting them – rather than my usual anti-method of simply ‘when the mood takes me’ I sit down and start writing and something good comes out.

Good, sure, but not as best as it could be.

So by being mindful of the paid-only thing, this shall make me do best, rather than merely good, or better.

Anyhow, I just wrote something which I do think is quite beautiful (like the girl in question), from a kind of literary fiction perspective, which is intended as a measure of what you may be able to expect – and what I must endeavour to produce – as a paid subscriber.

Because I do know that when I put my heart to it, I am a seriously beautiful writer. It’s a soul thing. And I think, also, it’s a zodiacal thing. I am an Aquarius sun, with a Sagittarius ascendent, and my moon really is in Taurus. There’s a lot more where that came from and maybe at some point I should share and explain my entire natal chart, but that’ll have to be for later.

I would like to dedicate this little piece to one of my favourite Substacks to whom I subscribe, the ever-exceptional (who I have only just now – unforgivably belatedly – added to my recommendations). Her writing is exquisite and moving and a heart of sheer beauty. If you don’t believe me (and why would you believe anything I ever say?!), go and see for yourself.

There’ll be a poem to follow, but that’s for paid subscribers only.

The moon really was red, and this really did happen.

Life can be beautiful, even when you say goodbye.

Even when you say goodbye.

Lunar Taurus

Once upon a time I was in love with a girl called Ayshea. She lived across a great ocean and I only ever saw her thrice.

“You’re not in love with me,” she looked me in the eyes once. “You’re in love with an idea of me.”

We both knew it was a truth.

Perhaps that’s always the truth.

One week later, we saw each other for the last time at an airport and then I rounded a corner and she wasn’t there anymore.

I heard she cried when she returned to her transport.

But not anymore.

On the plane, on the way back over that great Atlantic ocean while everyone else was sleeping I stared out the window and the moon was there except the moon was beautiful red.

Beautiful red.

I didn’t know anything about lunar eclipses until much later in my life.

I am a butterfly who was once a caterpillar and the moon was a beautiful reddening.

I have not dreamed of Ayshea for a long sequence of years.

I am an Aquarius, with a Sagittarius ascendent.

My moon is in Taurus and my moon is a dark and beautiful crimson red while everyone else on the plane is sleeping their way over a dark, ancient ocean.

All of us are passengers and none of us passengers will ever truly know each other.

Only ideas.

Only, ever, ideas.

And when I was a child I dreamed I was flying or soaring over a great ocean where all the water was gone and those great stone waves flew and flowed beneath me like mountains and valleys and I think it was a dead planet or a future or maybe it was some distant planet but it is some distant memory now, so I could be wrong.

I could be wrong.

There is something so very red about love.

So very bloodlike.

So very love.

Oh I was seventeen and she gave me dew

It’s so different, love.

Valleys, and mountainous feelings and…

In this cold, cold and poverty-stricken winter, the buying of coffee brings hope and a smile and weaves away the frost-breaths.

Away/Beached

I wonder when it happens
If the crash will come on quietly,
Yet this lifetime keeps on tiring me
As if I really care
Or my will might simply sleep.

I wonder when it comes
If the end will happen gently,
As if I am a new girl who
Softly let’s all slip away.

I guess I’ll wander when I see her coming
Over to the other side
Sink my marine dreams
And lose my senseless self
In some passionate desert island,
Beached

Aloneness is far more gentle
When the crashing waves
Crest my quietly trying
Basking
Lifetime

Away.

For number six in this little selection, please click there.

If you were to be lovely and buy me a coffee then you would help us get through this winter of French taxes. Machines have been taking over my translation work, you see, so I no longer have an income.

Or even better and more lovelier still, you could become a paid subscriber. In which case I’d send you a free copy of my other poetry e-book, Kundalini, which you can buy there - but not on Amazon, because I don’t like predatory capitalism.

This one of mine, well, given how fond I am of deadlines, it took me a few hours on the last day. Which, in view of the what I wrote, seems somewhat fitting.

Here’s a spooky image for you. I couldn’t resist the cat. And I hope you like the witchy spell too. The story, I mean. Because it is more of a spell, than a story.

When the Day of Rapture cameth, the most horrifying din erupted from every monotheistic graveyard in every landscape across our beautiful world.

It was a knocking, and a smacking, and a kicking and a screaming let me out and a howling and a wailing and the last lament of the long dead.

But they were all locked up tight in hardened deadwood death boxes and that prison is inanimate and will not yield.

It will not listen to you. It cannot hear your animated pleading and even if it did, that coffin would not care and it would not answer after what you all have done to our beautiful world.

They didn’t consider that clause in the covenant with their false god, did they? The resurrection of the body – that’s all it said. Didn’t consider how long you’d be dead, or what state of decay you would be in, didn’t consider where you would be entombed. It said nothing about releasing you from your grave.

That’s what you deserve, that is your judgement, that is your justice for the wrong choice. For subjugating your selves and your souls to a demon pretending to be a god. For subservience to a death cult. For the abuse of your children and our beautiful world.

For the xenocide of every creature who wasn’t you. Who refused to pay homage to your demonic ways. All my ancient brothers and sisters in their indigenous peace. You worshipped a demon who promised you a world that was not his to give. Promised you material – inanimate – domination.

And don’t even believe for one moment that your still-living brethren will come and dig you out. For they have been taken up, have they not? They all ruptured into the azure sky as torrents of fire like Roman candles in history’s greatest fireworks display.

And as for your angels – no, expect no assistance from that quarter. There they all are, arraigned in their white and gold and calling all the dead to order with their trumpet call. All aboard the burning chariots to take you away! Take you far, far away to Beta Centauri and Betelgeuse and Wolf 359.

Somewhere you can’t hurt us anymore.

No, trumpets are a useless tool for excavating the undead.

And so you hammer away in your deadwood death box and you caterwaul and you plead and you cry out in terror when the realisation smacks you. Doesn’t matter how much you pummel because no one is coming for you.

Some of you, for sure, when no one arrives and the deadwood does not yield, you believe you were not worthy in the final reckoning and have been sentenced to hell. For all of your sins you will spend eternity in a box made of polished oak. Barely able to move or shift in the darkness.

It’s a stress position, you know? It’s used for torture by your inquisitions. They call them intelligence services now but we know what they truly are. Restrain the victim in a posture from which there is no respite. No stretching or bending of the knees or the elbows.

And of course it doesn’t matter how much you smash your skull against the sides or the back or the roof of your death box – you are the undead now and you cannot put yourself out of your misery.

And you deserve it, all of you, for the hurt that you have done.

All those better others, however, those victims of serial killers and wartime atrocities bodies disposed in shallow graves they will survive and live to see a new dawn. For the earth above them is not inanimate, it lives and will gladly yield to their tunnelling carpals.

And those who loved the world who had themselves buried in biodegradable cardboard, they too will make light work of whatever is left of that animate matter.

They will awake in a forest, in a grove or a glen and breathe clean air once more.

All those good souls, they shall not be resurrected – they shall reincarnate.

And you deserve it, all of you, for the hurt that you have done.

I myself was a victim, abused by your death cult. I studied the old ways, the ways of the Ancients. The ways of humans for so many ice ages before your infernal coming. I learned to live well and respect the world.

And I learned the truth of what shall befall you. I befriended myself a pale horse to help me till the land I love. I fashioned myself a scythe to keep her neat and trim the unruly. Trim the unruly weeds for everything should belong in its proper place. A time for every season under sun and under moon.

And I sewed myself a black cowl to protect me from the elements I always respected.

And if by some miracle you break through your death box and burrow up to the surface, I shall be the first and the last you shall witness. My dark form stalking over you and my pale horse behind me, tethered gently to the old yew tree over there.

And as your rotten headskull pushes through the black earth I shall swipe and I shall sever.

Slarac! Slirac! Slirash-e’nac!

Thwick!

Thwick!

And yea! if even by some other miracle you ascend through the sky ye shall be burned up. Ye shall be burned in the fires of Heliona, the solar Goddess. For all the hurt that you have done to we the Children of the Sun ye shall be consumed. Ye shall be burned in the elements of fire, and of air, and of water and the earth.

Your spirit shall be ruptured from you and sundered into vapour. By this spell you shall witness this maelstrom of vengeance and wish for penitence. Though none shall be forthcoming.

And I shall smile for the justice of my sisters, the ones you called witches and burned in your pyres. You can burn their bodies, but you cannot burn their souls. The wise women who loved and respected the world and all of Danuih’s creatures. Who nurtured and cared for the ill with their ancient lore of nature. The ones who distilled love potions for maidens and protected them from your lordly predators.

Our land shall be cleansed of you. Finally. For that is the truth of the Rapture. We are those who shall remain whilst you are burned up into the ether. We who love. We who do not abuse. We who know the ancient ways before your death cult emerged.

This is our homeworld. Not yours.

But this Rapture, this Monumental Day of Judgement – ‘tis only one day, is it not?

When all the angels have given up the ghost of you, when no one is there to answer your graveyard cacophony, when the twenty-four purging and purifying hours are done, when the nocturnal hourglass is replete with your fallen ashes and the World revealed is carded anew, what then for you all locked up dead tight in your hardened deadwood death boxes?

Well, I know what happens. For I have studied the old ways and know those ways are not dead. Those ways are living. They are the immanence of the worldly spirit and they shall not covet you.

Your howling and your pleading and your knocking and your kicking and screaming let me out will fade into oblivion. There shall be silence when all is said and done.

Your dead souls shall be as rust.

What is left of your corpse shall be nothing but rot. Food for worms and thanatophiles, necrophages and the blowflies of summer.

There shall be no life there when their sustenance is done. You shall be inanimate.

That dead soul and your demon god shall rot away into a memory hole.

The sun shall rise above the graveyard and kiss the yew and I shall tether my pale horse beside the old stone wall over there and I shall hang up my cowl and stash away my scythe for another season.

Your bones shall be picked clean until the clean bones are gone and your skin shall be shredded and the shred skin spun and there shall be no life in you no more.

For without soul, and without love, love of the land and the spirit of the land and the love of the Goddess you were already lifeless.

You were already dust. Our animus and inanimate shadow. You were already dust. And to dust again shall ye go. Inanimate objects. Particles.

And so shall we return to our old witchy ways and our elemental longings and love the beautiful world again.

For this is our animate Rapture.

The end of your story.

And your gateway to hell.

You are dust now, that is all.

And everything shall end well.

When the Rapture of the Inanimate is been and done and gone.

Ripples, ripples.

Time swishes, in the Wishing Well.

For proper effective spellcasting, coffee is required!

For all the other stories in the TiF Hallowe’en Inanimate Objects Disruption, click ye there.

I’ve got lots of other lovely stories if you fancy a perusal - you can check out my Alters Index there.

And if ye do not submit to the like button down there, or the shares and the comments, ye shall be likely damned.

Possibly.

Not subscribed yet? Here’s your special button and it loves you very much.

And if you don’t like those parts, I have others.

Anyhow, I shall now rectify that lacuna lapse, and resume.

Here is a link to #1. And #2. And #3.

I did, however, look again at the poems in this collection and half of them aren’t good enough, so I shall have to rethink the entire issue. It does, however, mean that you, dear readers, will get the ones I consider worth publishing. There’s a few more after this one. Possibly I’ll get up to twelve. Possibly not. We shall see.

Widowed

I have no desire
To stay awake for another night
As if on fire,
Life is too strenuous and secretive,
Absconded consciousness
Hallucinations waiting to start on me,
Freedom is to be in a desert, alone and miraged,
With no watery feelings to descend on me
And curse my passive shrine.

I am thirsting for death without you,
The first to see brighter beings,
I am black and my web is a stranded shiver
Streaming in this hazy sub-light.

In a further day you might catch some glint
And stave off my replacement,
Poisonous momentary afterthought,
But there is nothing more for me to say,
I am a scorpion honey,
Scorned and singing blasphemous thoughts
As you will do what you want to now
And burn my believing away.

Coffee always welcome in a desert.

For more of my poetry, links to all of it can be found in the Alters Index.

Haven’t done one for months, so here it is.

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I ask not forgiveness.

Not sympathy.

Nor women neither.

No. Nor women neither.

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I am not a parent, and my own parents were not exactly anything to write home about - in fact they are a prime exhibit in favour of the proposal for issuing licenses for parenthood.

So the title, at least, of this poem is a lie. What it is, though, is me attempting to imagine what it must be like to be a father - or, more pertinently, what it must be like to be a good father. I think that’s the real point.

Plus the fact that I would’ve loved to have had one myself, of course.

So, if any of you, dearest readers, happen to be good fathers, or perhaps you are married to one, then I would love to know your thoughts on how accurate or otherwise I am with the sentiments in this little poem. Please share them in the comments.

Poem on being named as a father

Now that the honour is mine
And the last seams of gold have been mined
From your stamen heart,
And no more sailors are required
To cruise your ivory womb
I can tarry a while
And while away
These restless hours
In the afterglow,
A smallest heartbeat to still my heart
And now that you have honoured me
To call her my own,
In the afterglow
You’ll see
The sun I have
Become.

Like I say, let me know your thoughts with a comment, maybe even a share, and don’t neglect the lonely like button!

I have a little collection of poetry out, called Kundalini, which you can purchase here as an e-book. You can read some of them on my Substack, starting here.

You can also buy me a coffee if you wish!

For the next poem in this selection, click there.

And if you haven’t subscribed already, here is a little button just for you.

Just to show that I don’t always do dark and gothic and dissociative and intense, now for something totally different. Playful and fun. Well, it sort of speaks for itself, so you don’t need (or want) a burbling intro from me.

It also happens to be happily bite-sized.

The Whore Opening

Some sex would be nice,
Sex on a plate,
Sex in a bun,
Party food for thought for I
Am fed up of this fasting,
Playful
Want to have some fun;
Bored, restless, peripatetic.
Exsanguinated.
She next exquisite entry is protruding.

Just to see what the Great Image Generator would come up with, you know.

And in case you were wondering, the next exquisite entry is exsert. From biology, meaning to cause to protrude. And the title is supposed to be something to do with hors d’oeuvres. I did say I was in a playful mood when it popped into my head.

There will be a link here, when I am ready to exsert the next one.

And if you’d (quite sensibly) rather not buy me wine, then there’s always the coffee option!

TTFN!

The theme? Eye See You. Click there for links to all the stories.

Given how much I enjoyed being a part of the Small & Scary diversion, and the wonderful responses to my contribution, I couldn’t really pass up this opportunity.

So I thought I would do a little follow-up fl…

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Marianne Stokes, La Jeune fille et la Mort (1908)

I have two more lovely artworks on the motif of Death and the Maiden for you, so don’t go anywhere just yet. It crops up in stories too, as it happens. Think Hades and Persephone, or certain fairytales, like Beauty and the Beast, or gothic horrors like Dracula.

Anyhow, as I may have mentioned before when burbling about Kundalini, I did in fact produce two little collections of poetry at around the same time, all of it fuelled by a combination of licit and illicit substances, a burgeoning aloneness melted with contentment, and a solitary trip to the beautiful and magical Cornish coast armed only with a notebook and a copy of Dylan Thomas. As you do.

The second collection I ended up calling The New. In my defence I had been listening to a lot of Interpol at the time. They had kind of become my new favourite band, as happens when you discover some new magical thing. This version of the song in question is truly awesome. Especially the amazing ending. If you want to know what my poetry sounds like if it was music, then it’s definitely something like this. Or the inside of my head for that matter. Well, at least at the time it did. I’m a lot calmer now, believe it or not.

Well, I do like this title, though, and I’m sure Interpol wouldn’t mind.

The collection is split into three parts, ‘the old’, ‘the now’ and ‘the new’. So it sort of works.

What I am minded to do is tidy these poems up a little and then (self-)publish it, as with Kundalini. By ‘tidying up’ I don’t mean rampant editing, as that would be sacrilegious to my soul and an insult to my younger self (she would hate me for it, that is), but having re-read the whole thing just now there are a few words here and there which she would absolutely not mind me altering. She’d probably be a little embarrassed by them to be honest. In those days we had a tendency to fire and forget, as it were. Today, I am a little more contemplative before sitting down to write.

So, in lieu of this, what I thought I’d do for you lovely readers is give you a selection. There are around forty poems in total in the collection, so I will probably select maybe twelve of them, and present these to you over the next month or so, whilst I discipline myself into doing the publishing thing.

These probably won’t be in any particular order in terms of the order they are in the book. They are just the ones that perhaps I like the most, or which leap out at me as I’m formatting the thing.

One aspect I noticed on re-reading them is that there are quite a few more what you might call traditional-seeming poems. That’s to say, ‘what people think of as poetry’. Meaning they have an obvious structure to them, rather than being my usual free style. This one I’m starting off with is one such. As you’ll see, it’s even got clearly defined verses and repeated rhyming in all the right places! Ceasing wonders shall never be!

Anyway, I like it, and I feel confident enough to present it to you with zero editing.

I hope you like it, even if it is a bit goth.

Like this piece of dark art…

Brömse, August Mrtvá, z_cyklu_Dívka_a_smrt (1902)

Death would be a Masterplan

Death would be a masterplan,
Pearly full of promise and the perfect things to come,
I will wish you well in my western land
And warm your hearts when I am the morning sun.

I figure my timing time has run out of flair,
The solar glare I once knew is gone,
Outshone by my foolish ambition and care
And sharing compassion is a wasted wrong

And death would be a masterplan.
I am shadowed by my imperfect memories
And my figured future is not glass, but sand,
These hours, longer and dark and leaving me

To run out and away could be a delicate delay
But no further shore could rock me to sleep,
And no distant island would wreck my crashing shame
And no waves cracking my heart to open and feel

And death would be a masterplan.
Reincarnate in a different place, another side,
Dream my futile existence away, be again child
And dive.

Adolf Hering, Der Tod und das Mädchen (1900)

There, that wasn’t too morbid now, eh.

Well, let me know what you think, as always, with those lovely buttons down there.

You can also buy me a coffee if you like!

Until the next one, at which point there’ll be a link here…

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