Sketching Mad V and VI.
Charcoal on Paper.
Watercolour, quick sketch. I have painted prayer poses several times despite my own beliefs. There is such ardour here, I suppose, a supplicant sure.
Went
back to squalor and starvation.
My best friend finally had enough and hit me and tore the skin from one
side of my nose, though I had provided him with so many women after they
realized just how fucking crazy I was and turned to his arms even though,
then, he was a speed freak and a pot head and an alcoholic just like me.
He is a good man. It took so much to break him from the love and bonds
and fierceness ferocity of our friendship. But I found enough. Wasn't
even LOOKING.
Wartime syndrome before that us fighting the world so hard of course no
cause for us. I ended up staying at my other ex-girlfriend's place.
Tried so hard and stayed straight for three weeks; I think it was subconscious
- conscious I fucking KNEW that that was what I was doing - preparation
for the biggest and ugliest and least sane that I ever was.
Sleeping with my x-girlfriend and my current girlfriend and my ex's flat
mate and some girl (girls? lost days before I found my way back still
high and getting higher) I found at some club... drank everything in the
house and this was the time when I decided actually picked; CHOSE to go
as mad as I could. Push it and see what was on the far far side.
I bought a bottle of brandy and hung it upside down in the fish tank the
fish's name was Death he was left from my friend who jumped. Painted and
drawn figures of me I had done all over her walls I know AT LEAST SHE
WAS A FAN. She kept them all around her mirror twisted bitch she once
talked me into cutting my wrists; fucked all five of the guys I knew.
I sure as hell didn't care.
What was that to me?
Moving UP the scale wild chattering flitting out of my mouth so many quotes
inappropriate walked into a glass door and fell down hurt my damned nose
again. Didn’t eat didn’t sleep. Sick by now of punching holes
through windows doors and wardrobes drew a lion and a witch on one I wanted
more wanted to find the other bits delusions and voices I KNEW were waiting
in the back of my mind: Fuseli's The Nightmare I thought he was a genius
until I read his prose inadequate and nothing never should have become
a part of history.
Spitting words snarls and more and more cuts appearing razors eaten. When
everyone has hidden everything sharp in the house you can chew through
a safety razor and there it is you have your sharpness in your hand; though
you WILL cut the hell out of the inside of your mouth while you do it.
That's ok though huh? course it is blood covered teeth mean their words
more and there are so MANY to say.
Going up and up.
Could feel it in the base of my spine. Could feel it in the back of my
head and behind the redness of my retinas.
A black storm; black as coal black as pitch blacker than the blackest
witch. Rapturous fascinating terrifying spinning with immensity and weight
and clouding my vision with red. A nightmare of power that I could TASTE.
By the time I was halfway there I was speaking in riddles and rhymes...
glossolalia. Told people about the tower of Babel – babble - about
the storms in my mind told them again. Told them about how Poe died in
the street how that was me how I was already dead how they were fever
death dreams. Temporal distortion ooh I loved it soaking each moment into
me feeding on the surreality breathing out mind sickness absurdity hell.
Things would slow down for me and I could watch others in a different
world in a different time. I could lace a sentence with jokes and references
and then I would just wait to see who if anyone got what. Movement so
free easy loose my hands shaking so much I could hardly hold the bottle
slippery from the fucking fish tank but I was so STRONG. My skin burning
hot to the touch could feel myself heating up.
I was careful I drank only enough and not more I wanted to see where it
would take me not pass out. I was never as mad when truly drunk it was
the day after for me and I held to that state some part of my mind relentless
and deliberate. Nursed and cajoled it intoxicating; tempted and caressed
felt it shattering over me a glass club smashing inside my head.
And it worked.
All the things blood-mean and suppurating inside all coming in concert,
allegro evaporating like the ground beneath me.
Tactile:
Like when the plane hits a hard gasp of oblique and swift air and the
whole thing shudders and jerks like the thin and absurd metal that it
truly is.
Like the handstand I held and held at the cliff edge while tens of metres
below insects stalked across hard, hard stones. Like when my arms shook
above them as the ethanol poison sucked my strength from me like age;
and I quivered and shrank before the realisation of my deadly wish.
Like the painless smash of a steel toed boot hitting my cheekbone before
the nerves fire and the my mind reels and shock stabs across the awful
clarity that I feel.
Ocular:
Suddenly starred and flared before failing and tricking as a fall into
strange dislocated darkness.
Like snapping awake sitting up in terror as my mind sparks and flashes
into waking - sickening before the horrors as the nightmare’s steel
shod hoofs strike their chords in the streets of my dreams. As my awareness
and memory grind into sobriety and I turn my head and see that I have
no memory of where I am and that I lie amidst squalour. As my stinging
blood-veined eyes tell me that I do not know the woman lying next to me,
that she is old beyond her years and that there are bruises across her
back that I know I could not have inflicted (could I? Never hit anyone
even when they were hitting me.) That her face has been wrecked by an
addiction that was perhaps similar to my own and my glance flicks onto
a dirty crib next to a broken lamp.
Olfactory:
Like the scent of the first girl that I ever wanted jerking and snapping
my body in a chill wash of icy lust. Just like this, the impossibility
of it. Sliding across and through me a thrilling tear in ancient harmonies
that are irresistible, fantastic and alien. The chastity of that moment,
eyes squinted shut as I realise that I will be wrenched back to this moment
for the rest of my life by the trace of that scent - soap and deodorant,
young female sweat. Innocent and potent, devastatingly sexual
Like the stink of drying blood, stale spirits and alcohol sweat as the
poison seeps through the sprung steel rigidity of my starved and swollen
flesh. The acrid common stench of failure. Pure in the twist and twitch
of nausea.
Gustatory: the foulness of my own foetid breath, the 2% of alcohol expelled through respiration regardless of scrubbing my teeth until they bled. The taste of a thousand turns and turns of acquiescence and surrender. Isolated quantified and rarefied, bitter and sick.
Auditory:
Like when I was 12 years old and walking through the park with my sweet
stupid beagle called Nudge. She helped me as I began the true fall and
went mad so quickly after I first left home. She was young and wildly
happy to be in grass as only a dog can be. In this simple but intensely
real utopia I heard the first soft sibilant voice. And then another over
my shoulder breathy in my ear. I knew they were impossible as I stood
in the gorgeous spill of deep yellow afternoon sunlight. It lit the floating
pollen into pale gold in a slow turning dance. They spoke my name. I was
in a wide grassed park, soft and richly green in the blazing colour of
a child’s sight.
An ordinary, happy child. A child frayed and decayed and raging, flailing
at the edge.
Another small corner of my youth kindness, natural and known as breath
for me for my own hands before the madness took them. l was loved and
I loved and loved.
Myself
in my shame.