excerpts FIRST BATTLE

I spat on her shoes, as she scrambled up to the window, where I had parked my old war gun, dressed in scruffy black leather shoes, and a flowery yellow dress, I growled when she got near, I stared into her face, as though my teeth were staring, thick and dirty, I bit at my lips. She shimmered, and left. I pointed my head at the far wall, and it stayed there for sometime, until I realised I was still looking outside the window, where the real lands, were basking in light blue plush clouds, turned like flossy lilac triangles fixed in the design of the sky.

4

She paints the moon hanging in the black space, with the amount of money inside her, commanding my miseries. She can keep some kind of place of silent rule.

You will not believe how low the sound was.

It was like the cut of a razor that must have sunk into the heart, and now had made her dead and the death seem like a loss in the heart, so that it failed absolutely.

She caught her own breath in the blue room, with the paper walls, and thick black lines cutting through the shapes of paper ghost’s in the storm lamp,

And bit her lip.

He had been waiting just outside her door.

 Inside the heart that made her, the water of it is slow, the veins pulse gently in the soft skin, the faints should have her but the blood is full of spirit, like tonic dissolved in a blue polish, which are the marks upon her and the rivers that keep her.

I would shell. I would creep. I would fell.

He lit one match, and held it against the wood frame beside the door, dragged it across, and the flame burnt into the blackness and disappeared. He stepped one loud boot across the doorway, then sniffed with derision and went away.

3

I sleep on a bed as hard as a coffin. As hard as I am. Nailed to the floor, my feet, her little token.

 The banging is on my door at night.

His damp puddle sodden trousers flapped with flat, wet, slaps against his ankles. I pulled him inside, he shook me off with his hand, and growled, and shook the wet out of his hair, like a dog.

            There were sooty marks across the sky, which looked close to dawn.

I am in his talk, I am certain. He has a face full of a long drawn out thought, that escapes his lips, but it shudders, and the idea isn’t finished. He says;

“Ordinary people would not understand. Yeah, so I’m awkward, but I’m not the drifter you think I am!”

“But I do need a good night’s rest, so, if you could….”

“You burden me.” I say, simply and precise.

His fierce eyes fly across me.

“What??! You’re burdened!? What the fuck would be good about you??!”

I crash into myself, I grab my head with my hands and I bow into myself, back and forth, crashing in a red anger that I don’t want at all.

He spat on the floor. I got stuck by his anger, and stared at the neon blue tipped spot of saliva, shining in the semi light, glistening streaks of white debris of food bits, dead meat and liquor.

He saw her sideglance. Punched his knees with two fists and stood up quickly.

Inaction

Dead before the living. I can’t even show what he is to them. They are a bad band anyway; they are all like him, with subtle little differences, all…

I don't know if aliens are allowed to write like this...

2

The people, who knew of him, in the closed garden and the tiny huts, often wondered why someone like her, and some, like him, would have spent company.

We spend each evening together, sometimes from afternoons, well into the night.  Only when he calls. A reason for calling, first, he was outside the hut, with some men, joking and laughing and introducing himself to my cleaner, in my last days outside, as I let him in each time he calls, and wait inside when he doesn’t. He was a smiling apparition and ducked his tall head under the door following the cleaner to have some free tea with her and meet me in my rightful place as householder.

“It would be delightful to meet him, and talk, he does watch so much TV, and spends time in the library, that he is learning, so much, so I have told him you are free next evening.”

Introspective, everything in ordinary life seems absolutely trivial. The cleaner’s life was trivial looking, and as we sat opposite each other, he on a chair, me on the sofa, she swept the wooden floor with a broom. I asked:

“Is an original thought, original because you’ve never thought or seen anything like it, before? But after, if you find someone else had the same thought, would it still be original?”

“In your isolation and innocence, all will be purely original.”

“And is what I just thought, original in itself?”

“It is original in itself, I have no memory or experience of anything similar.”

He has broken legs. I am stuck and caged.

Instinct conquers rationality.

I’m in a great depression that hasn’t been recognised. The two ages of delirious progress and dark feeling melt into a modern psyche.

            A technology that imprisons and free. Chokes the skies. Faster and faster into oblivion we fly!

Product, product, trade and war.

Sometimes, I feel displaced, often I have to sit there, while he stares, waiting to take my eyes off him, trying to take them to the television, and talk more. It feels a long time. Flash, flash, the advertisements go, with intense sensations, and sells everything to us.

But I liked his eyes. They were deep. When he frowned he looked deep. When we sat for silences, we stared deep. Most times, there, he said nothing.

           

 A black primal hunger in him takes over.

He would start picking what programmes to watch, if I didn’t hate the thing, and I am mistress of the house.

He made temples sink into the sea, and built for me a mud hut. I wanted to huddle into him for warmth.

His eyes were become animal. Black clouds gather outside. Outside, they cover their skin with blue tattoos, they drink blood. Hunger takes over.

“I don’t know.”  He says when he’s tired.

==

His body is brick and steel. I hint, and the hints are quelled.

He gets nasty, if I dare to hint.

“I do not want what I have seen in the world.”

He stares from the sofa, I curl one ribbon in burgundy, and then the next ribbon in scarlet, wrapping them individually round the coffee table, in direct, closest to the minimum millimetre spaces beside each other.

“White, white skin, that can never hold colour in…”

Inside is everything that cannot be seen.

“Oh, please don’t look into my face!” I squealed and pulled my head back, and screwed up my eyes.

I don’t divine the power in the man, I don’t understand. Big thinking powerful man, as thin though as a birch tree, head lolling over his shoulders, big piercing black gaze.

He liked to smoke and it made the air stale. I took one smoke.

“See you like that, or are you miserable about it?”

           

“Hmmmm…”

“Real, absolute misery, can only lie in women.”

He gave up on the heavy task of speaking, and stared at the light while hours of my own silence, watching him, passed by. Sometimes I had to sit still, with back straight and teeth biting my tongue, because any noise to his sensitive ears, in a bad mood today, grated like metal, he said, drawn across his mind.

The evening news is on. I always like this screen switched off, and I switched the sound off, when he is there, but he has it play on, I suppose so the silences between us aren’t so bad.. He does some strange air punching, towards it, so I switch the sound on. There is a war beginning on the other side of the world.

“Nothing really matters. Existence is a contest between life and death.”

“Civilization can only occur and develop in a abundant and temperate conditions. That place is dry desert. It can’t hope to get better, it will crumble beneath it’s own pathetic need for what we have, what it can’t have…and it will die to have.”

All these sorrow mongers. Men who invited disaster and hit themselves with it, more than they realised.

I had adorned myself at times, at the beginning, but new jewellery on my breast, or make up on my face, made him remark, huskily, and always rudely, in a childish manner, so I’d take down my pendant or wipe my face, a little upset, but he said nothing so bad, turned quickly bright, and then made the evening light.

“Some have said I’m ugly.”

He groaned loudly, and then whined as he stood up and cried, almost a shriek;

“Ohhhh! Leave me!”

==

Cold and unforgiving was becoming more usual in him, than talking.

            He will get close to pumping out fierce anger and its fumes, fill me in, if I get back to the strange, talk where I say I am dead. Imploring before an empty man for love, just makes you love your own emotions most, and stick to them as opinions, all opinions overrule with emotions. We think to fall in love, first, and we go for it, act after act. Improvising between the rules.

“I do not want what I have seen in the world.”

There are places to go and I don’t want to go to any of them. I want you.

==

Too much of him, only in my mind.

“I cannot stop the passing of time.” He said.

“We can make ourselves.” He said, when I wondered about marriage. I was wide-eyed.

1

We each live in a little hut.

Ground floor.

I like to live.

I am alone for a while.

==

She is rolling out the thick soft curtain cord and tying it up again and again, as restlessness gets caught up in wanting less loneliness. She untangles the cord through her fingers, sets it back on the curtain, drops it until it hangs by itself, then rerolls it and ties it round her hand.

The curtains are always shut.

The house has paper thin walls and doors, built in the oriental style.  The garden is a state-run affair. It is the model of an old Chinese city. The poor moved in, after all the space that was available to live in, was being used up, into the middle of the city itself, which is some way away from Chinatown, so, some of us, are oriental, some of us not. My name is Ai Mu Kuan, it is 2042, and this is a story about Meng.

Let the world pass by.

He said;

“Drink with me, and let the world pass by.”

==

I seem to run into clouds, so high I got. I stand alone like a wall, you can walk all the way round me, and kick at me, but I’m always going to be there.

The river has beautiful sparkle eyes, even on days that are grey and dismal. It talks.

He wears a white shirt that is getting dirtier by the day and hangs down to the knees. He has large brown eyes, thin wrinkly hands.

I am merry in his talk, I am certain. He has a mind, a long drawn out thought, escapes his lips, but it shudders, and the idea isn’t finished.

I can see lots of his ideas merge into mine, into his, when he can’t finish, we still finish together.

“I am just…I am…”

knew of, what was the Ultimate. A rule and law

fixed upon the lowest skies, fitting the clouds, with curses, and jibes.

That we were low amongst the lowest, there was no more thought that day, when we crashed. We all fell down.

The hate-man

remained, barked at own low lack in anything called life. He was my murderer among many

murders. He was so unattainable, with words, I was choking, the faun had supplanted us. It was

sick, bilge inducing, vomit, dead, empty rotten flesh, made inside thought. It, had thought, it

thought kill any low man upon the sea of the Ultimate. There was no Love, here, there never was

there never will be. We are the law, we kill the Ultimate. It was names of men I knew, all sodding

flesh men. All the eyes upon, me, made up my brand new thought. It sucked out my eyes, and

stirred in the forming of new ones, just so it could, slip in, fork me, bury me, and I sat patient, in

the thought of the Ultimate, as I lowest upon the low, I agreed, could no longer find him in the little

water upon the little cloud, rushing through, drains and sinking into mud. All my Ultimate, denied

me, as I fell upon the ground, and crashed in refusal, to care, or to move, or to fight, to roll upon

the floor, meek and unheard, my fell crashed down the Plan, I was forsake the forsaken, and the

first murder was against the mind of the crowd, of the fall, of the feared, and the gone, and the

gone, all the good that disappeared, and the dirty man sat upon the throne, all brought down, and a

higher scream flitted, unheard by the causes of the man, I was sure, of the politician, and of his

plan, I was sure he was just a day to day man, and had caught a big prize,

But he was writing a plan he formed to go forever, even if it was a bad, stupid form, at best bad,

worse

so I wondered about him, and how he rose to the platform, holding onto the same plan, blocks and

blocks, in a jigsaw pattern leading up to the platform. Being the main plan, all the same.

I wanted to know how, ------------the unheard of, and the main man, with his old plan, which was

one day to work and to work the next day, to grow upwards with that old plan, to work day by day

stuck in the plan that got monstrous as the plan got higher,

that contained the nation I wanted to own, but it was taken from me by the man who wanted to

have looked like he worked day by day

I asked him, "What did you want to go to??? Why did you work for this Plan, every single day,

lying to yourself and all of us, working honestly to keep to this strange damned plan, when me, I

would just abandon out of all my honesty. "

Why do I know working for that plan is ; madness. Madness in a suit.

To stick to it, to pretend. To kill in it.

The screaming shook nothing mortal, it shook nothing, all immortals were contained in the plan of

the One, all present prostrated and called upon the One. All of them accepted.

But we weren't going upwards, we weren't even moving.

All clean and removed and caring and deified, and all the men, again all the men, lied.