Spirals Downhill

It all starts with the mistaken belief

(sorry Hank, but not that much)

that anyone wants to read anything I write.

The spirals downhill from there.

— useless hack, Paul Stewart

~

A mind unsettled.

A storyteller.

An iconoclast.

Gonzo gifted.

~

My process is simple.

Nothing is simple.

~

Every syllable counts —

but who really gives a fuck?

~

As I try to create art without a brush,

or moulding clay, or perhaps plaster of Paris,

the fight for relevancy and not giving a shit

wages in my head.

~

To be the best is always the goal,

to fill the big empty gaping hole.

~

Sometimes I work backwards, nonlinear.

Often percolation and semenisation takes place

before I’ve even taken pen to paper,

or finger to keys,

or maybe even touchscreen —

less tactile, more detached than the others.

~

Sometimes the ideas live a long life

before being thrown from my cerebral womb

into the light of the world.

~

But who gives a fuck

whether I succeed and outdo myself

and create something truly special

that has readers creaming in their pants

screaming, crying, laughing

or just plain confused

worst result for all involved

is if they actually think and feel

and question and query and look

I n w a r d

(I am not your mirror or your saviour, though)

~

But I do.

Of course I do.

~

Let’s take the story of Ada —

the dryad-type entity in my latest Through The Keyhole piece —

all brazen, sexually charged,

and full of feminine power beyond compare.

~

I knew from the outset

I wanted to top-load heavy

the metaphor of voyeurism,

of being consumed by desire,

the complacency in curiosity,

that giving into it,

so that when the poor fella was taken

by the lovely vaginal centrepiece of his new wooden door

that he picked up from a suspicious old woman

in a market or bazaar,

it felt fitting that he would eventually become

so besotted with lust and need for the entity

that he would be consumed by it whole.

~

Or you could just simply consider

that the challenge is to take

the loose and rapidly erraticising threads in my brain

and make cohesion —

where cohesion is a foreign body,

like a battery that has somehow ended up

in the stomach of some idiot,

quickly, coarsely wreaking havoc

on his stomach and all that it contains,

seeping the acid and everything

into the unprotected abyss

of the lower half of his musculoskeletal.

~

It will come as no surprise

that the first names on my list of inspirations

are not Dickens, but more Dickinson.

Old Charles Dickens has nothing

on the honesty of old Bukowski either.

~

Orwell stirs the pot

and reflects back better,

with more timelessness than Dickens.

~

Even Shakespeare proved

that Dickens was a hack before Dickens was a thing.

~

Really, why the focus on Dickens?

That’s lofty sights — the lofty heights — literal loft.

If my trajectory is a house,

Dickens is the basement.

I want the loft (or ceiling

for you cranky asses that live elsewhere).

~

No crawlspace,

though it’s a good place for inspiration.

~

I sit in the liminal space of a loft,

full of that horrible insulation

that provides a nice itch to scratch —

and no asbestos please, we’re British.

Though I am more Scottish and Italian than British.

~

The phrase is “no sex please, we’re British,”

but I digress.

~

Dickens is locked, gasping for air in my basement

along with Pip, the little proto-incel.

~

In the mid-section of the house

there’s space for Golding, Faulkner, Poe —

how I love Poe.

Poe can live wherever he wants,

along with Hemingway, Shelley and Thomas

for that Welsh twang and humour.

~

I need to read more Joyce and Doyle — but will.

Bukowski has my heart, the old man.

~

Bukowski, Thompson and F. Scott... ha,

don’t be so gullible.

~

RLS looks strange as a concept,

but Stevenson is the bookkeeper.

~

And in the loft is Hank, Emily D., Welsh (who is not dead)

and a host of other trailblazers and annihilators.

~

I recall a piece about a knife

in a crawlspace or basement

that had been left abandoned by its owner,

and how the knife pined for its owner —

pined to be one again,

pined to kill again with its owner.

~

Even my creations ache when I abandon them —

when I move on.

~

Because I must.

~

~

Forward motion.

~

~

Felt used up and abused,

shown a bright and beautiful crimson world

only to be dispatched

like the many victims they butchered in their time together.

~

Unreliable.

There’s nothing less unreliable

than an unreliable narrator.

~

We are all unreliable narrators

because our emotions,

our “feelings” and egos and humility

and fantasy and ecstasy and —

what was I saying?

~

Yes, we’re all unreliable in a sense.

~

~

Unreliability is only unreliable after the fact.

~

~

Like the unreliability of porn

actually making sense from a filmmaking point of view —

nonlinear? The linear is non-existent.

~

Not porn again,

not another lengthy complaint, confession —

I get it, we’re sick of it.

I’m sick of it.

~

Porn deludes, dilutes, poisons,

and firmly stamps out a path in my brain

that leads me down dark alleyways

where there is no big woman

with a big ass and big tits waiting

(you know the drill, pneumatic or otherwise allegorical analgesic, sorry again Hank, but not really that much)

Porn took from me, so now I take from porn.

Hoodwinkery and mockery, being so clever it hurts while being so humble it hurts while being so ferocious the biting will claim your flesh from beyond your reading apparatus.

~

I've never been a fan of spoon feeding, so the spoon is always in the room next door.

~

~

Unreliability is only unreliability after the fact.

~

~

It starts with the mistaken belief

that I actually have anything important to say.

Then I say it.

~

Cue applesauce.

Queue applause.

~

…

Très bien, le motherfucker.

*

Thanks for reading!

Author's Notes: This is for Gabriel Huizenga's "Creative Endeavor Unofficial Poetry Challenge." Chaos exists in my mind always, and no more so when I am writing. So this represents that chaos in my writing process and the thoughts that run through my head when creating something — anything. Below, I have included a link to his challenge and also the two pieces of mine referenced in the poem.