Why I said all of those things that seemed to have no forethought:

"Sorry for the other day. Words seemed to have a power over me like nothing else did. They were a largely inexplicable force of movement, a hacked off helicopter propeller that turned of its own accord. They courted me to begin with, paid in cash for boozy, wine-drenched dinners. There was a wink over the table, I invited them home. Whilst we sat silently sipping our coffees, they danced teasingly around my mouth. As we slept, they weaved themselves with undulating dexterity around my body, crept silently down my throat; waiting to prize open my lips and reappear at any time they wished."

Tooth Farm

There is glitter around Daisy’s eyes, silver. There is thin blonde hair hanging limply from her scalp. There are small white specs falling like tired snow, light as anything, around the crown of her head. Daisy is visibly wincing; screwing up her eyes as if blinking through dust, emitting a low moan that appears to come from deep within her stomach, from somewhere low and empty. She’s screwing and unscrewing her toes, slender and pale, grabbing tightly onto the furnishings. She’s yelping.

The apartment has shifted in the last few hours, taken on a more sinister tone. The couches are old and beat-up, bits of foam exposed underneath the striped blue fabric, the arm bolsters torn to shreds. No one really notices though, unless they feel it with their fingers, because the light globe has been busted for a week or so.

There’s about ten of them, in this living room, all sitting around her. Daisy can see their faces partially, as the creamy blinds spit bits of light upon them. The light sits sometimes on her breasts, shows the small pink circles under her semi-translucent dress. No one is looking at them now though.

It’s all men there with glitter Daisy, men with flattened chests and sun-brown nipples, men with hardened, peeling feet and rolled up, washed out jeans. Silver-eyes is in the middle of them, making noises that they’ve never heard her make, twitching violently. Dark groaning, no sobs. She’s got her mouth open just wide enough to see a pit of black on the right hand side. There’s a tooth on the ground and a pair of dirty pliers. They’re asking her to finish wailing, murmuring internal pleads in the silences between the thick, ungodly sounds she emits. Daisy, shut it, Daisy shut the fuck up.

She lost her first casualty in the tooth farm and gained twenty dollars and half a pack of cigarettes. She grabs a fistful of hair and pulls out strands of dirty blonde.

The Dark Horse

"You," I breathed, "are the dark horse. You move always in the night.
You graze for only a moment in the spring-covered field, you pause gravely where others burst forth."

Tonight it is Aldous

Here he is
in bed,
breathing in the printed text.

Doors of Perception

He is encountering the Holy things,
that are holy without need of a definitive shape.

Here he is
seeing things that wear no guise,
things that just are, in themselves.

He lies in the darkened part of a bedroom,
in the front of a sea-facing house.

An ode to moving very quickly and never wearing a watch.

I often long for that time when youth was newly upon me, when it still tasted slightly foreign and against my face felt full and fresh. I long for it, as it was then that everything was new. I traveled frequently in those days, sat against the cool marble of railway station floors in Nice or in Rome, or some other place, and felt the sweat of summer drench my shirt through a too-big backpack. I skipped across countries like chess squares and the days unfolded like crinkled maps.

Once I lay on a Croatian deckchair and felt the sun encase my skin, read with oil stained hands the thoughts of beautiful and terrible people. I felt the plastic of the seat melt with the Adriatic's prickle. I made notes in the side-columns of the Communist Manifesto - I annotated everything. It was a time of learning, a time of doing. If I wanted things, I would take them, if I made plans they were executed.

Once I hid in the furnace room of a cheap London hostel and laughed casually as things that were not casual were told to me in earnest. The boy in question was going to become a doctor once he left this dead-end job, or at least that’s what he said. For if you are youthful, you can believe what you like and pretend nothing matters, you can ignore the telephone calls and voice-mail messages as if they were scribbled notes on paper airplanes that were interceded or torn up.

When youth was eating me, when it ate me, I was in a university room in Southwest England; I took a bus home in the morning and buried the incident away. Everything was ‘sound’ and ‘lush’ then, except for those few small October regrets.

I would like to feel - again - the thrill of youth upon me, the surge of a billion ideologies all calling out my name. The shouted lines of boozed-up club promoters as they descend into a Lagos gutter (full of vomit and too much vodka), the words of a dear friend as they speak the final ‘good night’ into our darkened sleeper rail carriage. Everything was new and pulsating then, every phrase was filled with light.

From the hours of one until five

This afternoon you were in everything: embedded in the roughness of a brown paper newsagents bag, sleeping gently - with blanket and beard - on each of Hyde Park’s gum-stained benches, in the flicker of the carriage lights on the long train ride home.