Apotropaic Proliferation

(Him):
I was formed in the hour of the turn of the tide
Then plopped out stark naked on the cold harbour-side
I was stabbed to the air like a knife from a sheath
And emerged fully screaming with a full set of teeth
Then my mother arose and staggered away
And dragged her displeasure back to the fray

(Her):
I saw you aflamed by the meteor's light
Abandoned for shame to the dark teething night
I saw your rank mixture of blood and soft bones
A mewling and blubbering mess on the stones
But I knew you'd survive, I knew what you'd be
And I knew that I'd come back to claim you for me

I was brought up by exiles and forced into youth
And knew every day my suppressed caustic truth
And I shared my upbringing with outcasts and cripples
And my teeth always scarred the mad wet nurse's nipples
And I waited for something as the blood-feelings grew
But I never suspected that it would be you

I trod out the years as you grew to a man
Then slipped back in the city in spite of the ban
I skulked from my mountains and staked out your space
My braincells still seething from my fall from disgrace
I was primed for the love-match, I was geared for the fight
(Please never take lightly a revenant's spite)

But when you appeared it was love straight away
And something compelled me to coax you to stay
And I knew I would lose myself if you should go
As your mouth kissed my cheek in an oval of snow
So I tooth-marked your tongue in that tingle of night
But it shredded my mouth with its shrapnel-like bite

Well you could have fled, but you threw your last chance
When your tongue clashed with mine in that dagger-blade dance
You stabbed yourself down when you started to gloat
That your bittered effusions had sulked down my throat
If you'd run away, there'd have been no more leaks
But your iced eyes raked my homeland of distant brown peaks

When I looked to those hills, I felt a sharp pain
And your mouth had polluted my jugular vein
You bit into me, I bled into you
No one had told me that was not what you do
When you kiss for the first time, alone on the quay
But you took your advantage of my naivety

Well you should have learned, you should have found out
A revenant's job is done in a shout
A shout of rebellion and teeth and of blood
That relinquished your grip on your soul's maidenhood
But you must subside, like your grubby tumescence
(You're useful just once when you've reached adolescence)

Well you say you must leave, you say we must part
But try walking away with this stake through your heart
And the filth of your scheme leaving me in the lurch
Will be swilled by my theft from the font of that church
And just for good measure you're ingesting the harm
From this crucifix hacked in the skin of my palm

Well you say I must stay like all stupidly young
But you're silver-infected from biting my tongue
Yes, the bullet self-stitched in that muscle's deep fold
Has poisoned your brain and you'll never live old
And your eyes tell the tale that you feel that first twinge
Of despair from this rosary under my fringe

Well we're stopped in the tracks of our crucified lust
We've infected each other with vulgar mistrust
So we should be sorry, but we can't feel remorse
So we'll let metamorphism take its trite course
To our mutually assured perpetuity loop
With our souls boiling out as our skin starts to droop

You fool, you know nothing of a revenant's ghost
Which is flayed from the undecayed flesh of the host
When the bone-ground, tooth-rotted cadaver-soul makes
A ravening flurry of skin-petal flakes
Formed to a shape that matches the flow
Of the shoals of sharp fish in the water below

Well your skin-ghost is appearing, but he seems just like me
And he's jailed to the waterways, chained to the sea
He'll crave solid ground that he's forced to avoid
With his revenant status completely destroyed
For he'll realise, as the tide starts to turn
That there is no escape, so there is no return

Your flesh-soul is appearing, and I know that she's me
So she'll be cuffed to this city and never go free
She'll wander its alleys and exult in its churches
And shrink far from water and your floundering searches
She'll assemble her hand-fragments, tossed through salt air
And reach out for fingers that fail to be there

Yes, we're blinded to each other as a mark of our loss
So we'll never know if our paths ever cross

No, we'll never know if our paths ever cross

The Island

It blots out the foreground in the lagoon, artificial, tapering out of the silt, bulky walls curving to a flat roof, narrow slit windows with salt-crust in the sills. Occasionally, you will see the thin flit of a face behind the cobwebs, passing from some unknown room to some unknown room and the eyes seem to reflect the grey of the water as they stare at you briefly as you bob below, in your tiny vessel, pitched on the shallow waves of an enclosed sea.

It has not a crumble of soil at the base, not a wave of grass, not the trickle of a beetle: its massiveness is almost a monument to sterility, stone piled on stone heaped on wood pilings rammed into the seabed, a rigid home to people designated to need the strength of authoritarian rigour.

They arrive by boat, blinking in the flat breadth of daylight. They offer no struggle; they are not drugged, save for the narcotic shrug of their resignation to their fate. They need to be pushed inside, not through reluctance to enter but rather through the inertia that has clouded over them. They are not silent, but neither do they converse: they form a chorus of monologues. This unanswered jabber suits them: they have no need to listen. Their high-pitched chatter mingles with the screech of gulls as they stagger inside.

You wait, standing foot-spread on the base of your boat, feeling for the fluctuations in the waves, retaining your balance, binoculars screwed into your eyes, searching for a response, a flash of recognition from someone you are sure you know.

They depart the same way: by boat, eyes flat and closed in the swell of the dusk. They do not move; they are drugged by death. They are carried out of the building and pushed inside, under the black tarpaulin. This is the only way they leave. And now they are silent, surrounded by the interlocking dialogue chorus of keening nurses, their screamed song mingling with the screech of gulls as the barge staggers back across the lagoon, flashed to a silhouette across the moon.

You put aside your binoculars in the folds of your jacket, sit back down, pick up the oars, and push off backwards between the sandbars to where you think you now live, gazing at the concave walls as they diminish, shrinking down until the line of the horizon lies higher than the rooftop. Tomorrow, you will return.

Sailor not for Trail or Rent

They are trailing me through the Italian Quarter. Bad business in their brain cells. Bad blood in their moneybags. Time to lope away, bow-legged and bashful. Some football losers get in the way, screaming obscenities into the wind like failed actors eager to make an impression; perfect smokescreen; perfect backdrop, so I take off, squeeze between the pilasters and past the old dears begging and then I have to slow down for they are in danger of getting lost in the [throng/throbbing/thrusting melee]

These hooligans are no worries to me but a useful excuse to change tack so I scurry away,

Best to appear afraid: I’ve learned my lessons well, and I make sure they don’t lose me, though they do their best to do so, as I duck and weave through the dregs of society.

They’re well behind. Time to stagger, time to play the soft sailor. Make sure they don’t lose me. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because I have so many possible destinations – they know me everywhere - that there’s always one nearby to choose so I can select a route there to make sure they don’t miss me. Stay in touch, boys.

In order to keep them in touch I have to stop around longer than I would regard as ideal so I end up getting deeper into a maze of alleyways when ideally I would have struck out more into the wide-open spaces. No matter, as long as they stick with me, things are all right and I know one good place to go, not ideally situated but pleasant and comfortable inside.

I arrive and see the door with its new coat of paint and ignore the doorbell. There is no code – they will let me in no bother – but I decide to knock three times anyway. A woman of my acquaintance lets me in.

They wait outside. We sit and drink tea. She looks out from time to time to check their position and their attitude. They have the patience of a woodshed full of devils.

They wait and they wait and are obviously prepared to wait all night if needs be. Thus we find ourselves in a dilemma. Exit via the rear? Exit brazenly via the front? Or invite them in?

We let them wait a while longer, let them choke in their own smoke as it freezes up a bit outside. We drink more tea. My acquaintance sends the servant girl to the door. She opens it. No words are exchanged. They enter. They stop to wipe their feet as they do so.

Sailor 1

Sailor for Trail or Rent

We were trailing the sailor through the Italian Quarter. Press Gang Bang time a’ waiting. Compulsory Rent Boy Order. Hello, Cadet, you’ll have a rolling gait alright by the time we’ve started with you; bell-bottom trousers and no mistake. Then we were fallen in by a smear of football supporters, winners, losers, who knew, equally loud either the way; chanting out the fuck tribe litany; perfect smokescreen material for us, but the sailor picks up the vibrations and starts to hustle away, no fool he; picks out the signs like seeds from a pomegranate and spits them out again, not learned to swallow his medicine yet but learned to taste it no worries and he knows the taste of fear and aggression so he low-tails it up an alleyway, the coccyx-ducking scum, and we almost lose him, almost lose him in the gardy-loo overhanging mediaeval dust of the lives of the old and the poor in a town too moribund to eject them and too sedate to welcome them so yes we almost lose the sailor in this fog of dust and washing but he’s not got his street-legs yet and we do not lose him no sir we do not, we tug aboard his metaphorical bib-sail and hitch a ride to his destination never once opining to him by as much as a breath out of place that we were in any way shape or form anything but accidental fellow-travellers on his clumping passage to a gaudy door in an undilapidated square with a broken wellhead and we pass by on the self-same side as he knocks the three-knock cliché and we sprawl against the wellhead and observe the female party who answers the door whose eyes don’t meet ours but send their servant to tell us to make an appointment at her, not our convenience and this information all transmitted in the spanking of two eyelashes against two eyelashes.

Thus we are found in an al fresco dilemma. Do we effect egress to the property or do we wait for the sailor to fall out back through the gaudy door and then effect egress to his own particular property at our not inconsiderable leisure?

We wait. Smoke gets strained up from our diseased gums, spiralling in a nicotine-stained helix as the air gets colder and the wind gets its first teeth but we wait. The wait suggests that the sailor is a party with stamina and money though perhaps seeking to be parted from both before his shoddy reappearance through the gloss-stained door to end our wait.

The night thickens up. We wait. The door opens. Another woman. Younger. She beckons us in. We step over the welcome mat, over the word not on the street. The word is “Rubicon.”

Sailor 2

The One City

There is, of course, only one city really, because all other cities are simply redefinitions of each other. This is the only one that squats, smelly and faded, timeless and ephemeral, revealing its invisible guts to anyone with a sense of smell, smeared in a light so rich that the crumbling stones that compose it seem to drip rather than flake into what the city rose from.
And this is the only one that bathes in its constancy: in this city, even though the wind should change direction, it always brings stolen hints of the same places. It always smells of the exotic, it always belongs to somewhere “out there”; it will always carry strains of the dry heat of the east and the dampened cold of the north; it will sift these essences up and down its narrowed alleyways and absorb them into itself; nothing will remain to contain a hint of anything so transitory as the seasons; it acknowledges no debt to the seasons; it possesses no recognition of their passing other than the change of the temperature and the change of the duration of the daylight: it is a city, after all.
But today, the city feels out of kilter, almost tilting towards the descending sun.
And today, scoured across these lines of history, through every numbered passageway, bouncing into and out of every cul-de-sac, a mixed wind is burning, turning through the city’s right angles with ease, impregnated with external spores, tiny measures of imperfection that seed the air, because out there, across the open space, a modern smell, a plastic swirl of gases, is breaking the wind apart. And the weight of impurity seems intent upon making the city want to dissolve back down into what it was hammered into at its birth.
And today, out there, unspoken-of things are gathering.
And something tenuous seems poised, edged on some futile brinkmanship, as if the city were about to cast itself adrift at long last, as if the city were about to turn on itself like a drunk incoherently punching himself at midnight for long-misunderstood slights and long-forgotten wrongs.
And if this vision should take hold, and if the city should well up, and split on itself, push its insides up until the city is upside down and inside out, split from the centre onwards, flashing the gleaming viscera of its chandeliered innards, revealing its algaed watermarks like courtesans showing bite-mark tattoos, yes, if it should split on itself, it would still be telltale identical, because stains run deep here; deep as rammed-down wooden foundations, and stains spread wide as well, wide as the city’s scheming lines of retribution, lines of vindictiveness across the melting centuries.
But, for the time being, in the time that remains, the wind takes flight again and wavers then flows sap-like across the city to the square. And it drifts in and drifts down, smothering down the dust in the corners of the square with a pull like the reducing tide.
And the square hugs tight, hiding the creamed-out viscera of its own mouldy innards, masking things from view, clinging to its grimy trees, maintaining its dilapidated mystery, its shadows crumbling into dust, its dust melting into shadow. The square is like a microcosm of the city in reverse. There are no chandeliers here.
And in the square, the bloodlife of this part of the city huddles against the outside world, stays still and converses or else goes about its mundane affairs, until the square is criss-crossed with the diagonal track-marks of its lost visitors and lost inhabitants, scrabbling for shade beneath these half dozen shabby trees, tacking from bar to shop to restaurant to market stall, ticking like time bombs, going about their unexploded business, their left-behind tracks across the square still visible as if the energy of these lost visitors and lost inhabitants has somehow absorbed the light and left nothing but black meanderings incised across the damp flagstones like scar tissue.
And listen: a shutter flaps just twice even though the wind has not abated.
And look: a cat scrabbles in the dust in the corner of this square that is trying to turn itself back into a field.
And listen, the droning hum of conversation drops to silence for a period so small it feels like the merest atom of time before the clamour resumes.
And look: round and round a cat chasing a tail in a corner for ever as the world goes on forever until it seems to want to start to sink, pushed down and compressed by the blanket of heat that the sun has left behind, but cannot, and continues to chase its tail forever.
And listen: glasses are clinked. And farewells are almost whispered. Time for another slow retreat. Another night. Another small settling down towards oblivion.
And as the people float away, as the square settles down, clinging like a drowning sailor to what it holds precious: its darkness and its dust and its tattered trees, the city, in turn, begins to settle.
And in the settling down of the city, all that remains is the grate of stone against stone as the city groans and creaks as if held in bony sockets that are grinding into tiny bits, flaking out into the air then back. Tiny powdered specks of stone, like a fungal sprouting. Tiny powdered specks of stone, like tiny powdered specks of time, evaporating and re-circulating, destroying and regenerating the city as its haggard stones keep dripping, dripping, dripping, beneath the drenching pollution of history, dripping seemingly forever.
But out there, something fluid is massing, massing higher than the city itself.

Pursuit

It is a place of heat and light, this part of the city, flung out towards the north, spread about its three main thoroughfares that are slashed through clean like dagger cuts in a parchment map, parallel, taking a sudden angle together, veering across to reach the sea at the same time.

But it is also a place of huge extents of useless shade that do not reach quite far enough to provide respite from the heat that hacks down onto the unprotected, south-facing walkways, and seems to open them up and blister them, like wounds left unprotected from the elements, as now, in the high afternoon, he struggles along, bareheaded to defy the prickling rasp of the sun into his unprotected skin, going nowhere, and doing that slowly, because this is the way it is for him now, and this is what passes for destiny.

To his side, undershadowed by him, the slugged-out water barely raising a slurry of movement.

He looks up. Ahead of him, a lank-haired girl drifting down the path, unnoticed and unnoticing, dressed in black, cramped against the wall, immersed in her own portable pretence at shade.

He looks down: in the sidelong water, two fish have met in a fight, a domestic skirmish melted into a collision, a fish biting into another fish, one slightly larger than the other, a male and female of the same species, mouth to mouth, like a kiss of death, the bottom jaw of one trapped within the two jaws of the other, the top jaw of the other trapped the same way, neither letting go. A slow fight. A slow bite, their combined shape melded into that of a single, larger fish.

He walks, because walking is all he has to do. Meaningless pursuit in pursuit of the meaningless.

And ahead of him still, the same lank-haired girl, slowly roasting in the blackened portable oven of her clothes, her marrow and connective tissue seemingly melting into perspiration.

And he keeps his route into a groove behind her, maintaining a deferred collision through the lines of men and women striding along the paths of their work, through the gaggle of uniformed members of the sisterhood who are pregnant with silent advice in every glance.

And now two of them are stood still, two nuns standing skulked in the shadow of a scrawny tree, shaking their heads at him, pushing the air back with the palms of their hands, as if they could thrust him back to where he belonged with a gesture strong enough to sculpt the air into a cold front.

But he keeps going. Seemingly forever. But small black birds smear in above his head, small black birds crashing into nothing like hitting a wall of ice and falling down ahead of him, small black birds plummeting down to feet above the ground and exploding, crashing outwards in a paintball puff of blood that bleeds to powder and falls to ground between the two of them as a smear of dust so the air is strafed with airborne lumps of feathers burning to blood.

And still ahead, the lanky scrawl of a girl with the hair that looked as if it had been slashed down into ragged pieces from a solid clump of follicle, glued like a penance to her ever-bobbing head, the two of them yoked to each other’s separate ways.

And now, with every step there are fewer people walking with any purpose; with every step, the more frequent are the loungers and the wastrels, leaning on parapets, hiding from the heat in the occasional porches of stone that act as awnings, cleaning their nails with knives with blades as curved as fish-hooks that they have sharpened in stone-wall grooves older than centuries, betraying nothing, not even curiosity, their wasted-eyed apathy throwing into more acute contrast the dead-eyed precision of the perpetual procession of him and his heedless quarry, like a race of two competing migrations taking pursuit to the ridiculous logic of its conclusion.

The sun continues to hammer on the outside of his skull, then pick into the pulp of his brain. A distant humming lies on the air, seeming to curdle the atmosphere.

Two more nuns stand in the heat. They allow her to pass, then hold up their hands as if to stop him further. His closes his eyes and trudges forwards and their hands brush against his cheeks like snakeskin.

All clouds have been erased from the sky. And the humming is overwhelming, though it has no apparent source.

And the lank-haired girl has now reached the narrow channel along the convent wall and in the water now, there is a lazy snake of laid-out souls, a rope-linked procession of wooden trays, each with a man or woman inside, all in rough-cloth uniforms, drooling and ululating, hunkered down supine, eyes opened but motionless, hand cuffed to the other hand, both legs cuffed to a single ring in the woodwork.

And the nuns look down on the waterborne procession and sprinkle urine from their bedpans on the passing trays. Their lips seem to be chanting, but they make no noise. They smile with their eyes. He stands, and his bile rises and falls as each prisoner passes.

The third one in the procession cranes his neck around, seems to swivel his eyes and look at him with opaque red irises until he floats from view. The fifth one sketches the sign of a cross with two cross-pieces, her two-armed gestures firm but languid like the conductor of an orchestra. The ninth one drools out a bubble of such viscosity that he can see his reflection in it, his features slowly dissolving into nothing but a smile as the crystal ball of sputum subsides.

Nobody else passes by: they all stand in attention along the edges, staring. He moves on, walking backwards behind the disapproval of their backs.

And when he turns, ahead of him still, slowed down in the distance, a lank-haired girl, drifting straight, bent-backed sideways into the succession of buildings, sucked towards its emanated heat dragging him through the stifled afternoon, all along the bleached walkways that lie like the thin white strings of skin in a scruffy wound, as the dark starts to thicken and the day starts to drag itself back to its ending.

And wherever he goes, there is water. And wherever there is water, wherever he looks, there is still the splashed-together pairing of two fish, gripping like terriers in the undertow of his shadow.

And she leads him through a bedraggled park, her frazzled tresses teasing out a resonance from the dishevelled clumps of grass where mosquitoes hail in horizontally, slapping against his skin, suicide taken flight. And he swings his arms like a helpless signal of distress and the mosquitoes disappear but the bites do not.

And when he looks up, she has gone.

And he emerges, shaking free the cloying dust from that twisted scrap of desolated ground, and again two nuns block his path, solidly this time, locked at the elbow, and the two nuns cover their eyes with their hands, growl from the backs of their throats as he is forced to edge around them, growl so deep they produce overtones so high his ears feel like they are leaking pain.

But up ahead, she is still there, lank hair creating slashes through the air as thin and unbending as thoroughfares in a forgotten northern quarter, moving with reptilian grace, dragging him away from home and health, pursuing him from the front, as if she were easing him into the endangered niches and disturbed recesses of that part of the city that was uniquely hers.

And now the pain has gone from his ears but has been sucked down through his body spread across every bone in his feet – liquid pain like the pus from a burst blister.

And he smiles to himself, and he feels the corners of his mouth crease in the heat.

And he rounds the corner.

And there were seemingly no witnesses, save perhaps the clutched pair of fish, still hanging on to each other like shared memories in the dark.

And that was it. And that was him then. Much as before, except motionless, except horizontal, with a sliver of flesh severed from his neck like an otter bite in a sea trout.

And around him, a strewn cross with just one cross-piece, a cruciform heap of grounded wooden vessels, still speared by their metal rings, but free now of their ironbound prisoners, just bits of wood scattered about him like an outstretched echo of a human form. And a single word, cut from his clothing, belonging to no recognisable language, an illiterate scrawl of his skin against the shadow. And a friendly bubble of blood, stuck to his mouth, reflecting nothing, as the chop and slurp of water grew bigger in the cooling wind and silence like a conspiracy reached for cover.

Because then, nothing. Nothing but the silent and pointless healing of scars.

Because then, as was only to be expected, this part of the city covered its tracks. No-one found out anything. No-one knew anything. No-one saw anything. No-one remembered anything. Investigations simply evaporated through the porous walls. So there was nothing left to be done with him but to bury him.

Ten years equals one hundred and twenty months, one hundred and twenty waxings and wanings of the moon, one hundred and twenty blood-shifts in the seasons, one hundred and twenty graveyard visits by a lank-haired woman with bouquet smears of pollen from trails of hibiscus in her fingers before his bones are dug up and taken to the ossuary to be ground down to a powder that is indiscernible in texture from the sun-crumbled stucco of this damp-stretched and heat-bubbled quarter of the city, flung out to the north, scarred by thin walkways, healed-over in the inward depths of its secrecy.

And by then, in the stretch of water between this part of the city and the island reserved for unknown, unexplained and foreign burials, two bony fish-heads will still be there, not a flake of flesh on them, still interlinked, still mouth-grappled together, still bobbing in unison on the rising scum of the tide.