Stymied 1 (1998)

Too much fags and coffee I think to myself, awake in a sweat at 5 a.m.

Sulphate agitations, exploding away from a conscious past I lie troubled by work yet undone. Dislocated body from racing mind. Gates wide open, all rushes through a crowded muddyspace and I cannot now view anything in clear focus. Another irony of course - usually it's to coax coherence from its huddling terror-stricken corner that's the problem

A palpitating heart that rebels against this urge to rest, unable to wait for the dawnlight; wanting and worrying; loving and lusting; considering everything within immediate reach; when everything is possible - but eight hours away. A trick of physics over synapse, because half a voice knows that come the carhorns of daybreak, the pieces of me that now clamour to exist, exult, sing, will snooze, swear, slide and slink away.

Far away and deep.

I am singing tuneless, taunting phrases of indeterminate register; stuck in the same incomplete groove of panicladen peacelessness: got to feel electric sometime, but uncommunicative, dislocated. And no reason but these greyscale days that sludge into identical plodworsening weeks like Norway. And so very sick of this energyless hopelessness, too tired to hold at abeyance remembrances of beauty, caress, happiness. Somehow I want the black hole to swallow me into its crushing finality forever.

What’s totally immoral about tonight is that I see no reason to be so awake. Not weeping or festering, just annoyance at my lack of understanding of why rest is so important. These seedy, sullen hours are deflowered by disillusionment.

A tiny voice is holding me though in this Iceworld that rations out scrawny morsels of sociability, sensibility, sexuality. I got so many clouds in my head that I just wish that I could let my eyes rain and be done with a violent torrent. But of course the downpour will never come.

Directly through my brain drives a monstrous truck with headlights on full beam. The shockwave of the electric eruption spreads through every synapse and I fear I am losing control of my bladder. My fingertips and the soles of my sweated feet crackle with this split second of magnesium. (For at these moments I am full of immaculate dread that I am losing my mind, that I am speeding incompetent. Terrified I at closing my eyes else this crackspark assault returns with cheap menace to create a compromised fool).

And blast goes the measly frustration at the annoyance at the biological tribulation of the need to sleep. And yawning my body whilst my mind can only concentrate on the subtle changes in timbre & pitch of the clickclackclod of the clock from Superpound in the High Street. I try for tears at the corner of my reddened peepers again, but only manage to remind myself that again I am making plans for fitness and physical dominion – when all I am really capable of is to lie.

Bulbous ideals sneer from tonight, sidewinders of incontinent memories. Spill your seed on the ground and be damned. All art is masturbation in any case. There’s no uproar in printed self-aggrandisement, just egotism and lazy half-truth.

I declare (rictusly) that independence is not all it’s cracked up to be, because you lose mollycoddle and happy idleness. And all you really gain are a few new ways to fall, new cliffs over which to totter, new earthy dung upon which to chew. Dull indulgent complications masked as butterfly excitement and anus adventures. Pushing deeper into whatever rut in which I choose to live out these days of scabby dilution.