Non fiction

Bones

Have you ever been abused by your next door neighbour’s cat? The ecliptic visions flash of that pathetic excuse for an instrument of self-torture that is forced to do your bidding despite its physical weakness of futile serrated edges…sawing away at your arms like a Toby Carvery, Meat. On. Bone. Cowering in the corner, the victim of that slinky unseen attacker you bare the hallmark of that cat’s grisly claws as you danced and diced with its flirtatious scratches.

Depressed?  Yes. Like the button of an atomic bomb injected with human feeling; that chaotic force, the gnawing dread of its inevitable destiny, as if it knows that the two ‘unconnectables’ must be joined seemingly seamless by that fuse and though it inwardly fights must go…Craters. Let’s not go there, but back to these blank walls of opportunity-limiting blank walls of opportunity, for they are not all they seem.

Are you the dangerous type? Smash and grab O.K.? Not the raving pent up negative vortex of blackness that sucks in those innocent bystanders. You are dispensable. This wound up junk bucket with its millions of diseased, swarming, crawling mites is not. The bowels must churn them up and spew them out….someday. And you’ll be gone. on. down. under. Perhaps, even that unmentioned bliss of sheer emptiness. Nothingness. Have you ever curled up and tried to pretend you don’t exist?

But for the moment we’re infected with this puking sickness. Is it any wonder I am compelled to vomit up my guts when my body fights to live. The brain lives, the brain dies. Yet that vessel fights like a war sworn trouper.

It’s all about the bones; fighting the primitive urges to fight back-you see the ambivalence? The central mechanisms don’t even know anymore; flooded with pink meets green meets line meets dash meets multifaceted levels of meaning when the one is corrupted.  But the bones.  The physical manifestation that you are not just that dummy. That dead doll doesn’t do denial; knows this Italian Job of confusion is fodder for sewer rats crawling to savage the last tendon of rotting flesh. The bones are enveloped in psycho-reality by that stinking, rotting flesh that clings like curdling milk in sickening lumps, the real reality of bittersweet.  It folds like a flowing, liquidised, bilious pillow. A parachute of loathing generated as by steaming offal on a dusty hot day.

Those bones, they may be a grim reaper’s blade but, at night, they keep you alive; a hyper alert, switched-on-red force, a subverted power. It keeps you alive in the dark, you see, so you must feel; because that’s when you feel deepest. Cocooned in the very depths of hell itself; the intense, all-consuming desire to be unleashed teases you, and yet you are ever denied it. That black portable cell. Its bars, though invisible are strong with strands of web alluring to the psychedelic fly. The night stretches on interminable. But it is yours to possess and master and eke out its bitter seconds. Scratching around, a frenzied mouse on Ritalin digging in desperation for what is not there. And you knew it all along.

And yes you must pay. Even for this perverse sadomasochistic pleasure. For on the morrow the world awakens to its perceived daylight, and you are as if the devil had taken your very soul.

Delia Stanway