Cher KT

Last night a heavy frost lay on the ground and the lawn was white in the light of a cold crescent moon. I forgot to sleep and sat pounding at the typewriter for hours while my brother and his friends drank and danced in the  rooms downstairs.
Morning came and the sun was very bright. I went down into the living room and looked out over the garden. The sun had turned the frost to water and every blade of grass was hung with shining pearls of dew. Each one a perfect sphere. I went out in my slippers and an old overcoat and walked on the grass and breathed in the fresh smell of the morning. I remembered just how far I was from you, in body and in soul, just how many miles hung between us.
Now I am looking out of my window again. The sun has gone down over the hills and the air looks clear to me. Clear as blue crystal. My brother is on the telephone talking to his girlfriend or some other companion.
There are over six hundred miles between us. A depth no man has plunged to and a height only the bravest have aspired.

In my dreams I am standing at the edge of the Preacher's Cliff, two thousand feet above the water. The air is cold and there is a slight breeze but I am not afraid. The water shimmers blue in afternoon sunlight. I am no longer concerned about prison, about debt, about ruin and iniquity and all the parcels of shame I drag in my waking hours. Here above the waters, I feel free.

VI - The Lovers

Drunken trysts in sweaty rooms. Bedsheets tangled round writhing legs. Gasps and breathless smiles and hazy eyes the soft soft blue of summer skies.
They never told me anything like this would happen. Yes they mentioned butterflies and lurching organs and the agony and the ecstasy yes. And the awkwardness and the moments never forced to crisis yes. But not this.
The smell of hair intoxicates like no drug ever made. The softness of lips and breasts and warm skin and the way fingers touch and tongues caress. All this I was told and more. They have told me nothing is better than the first kiss and nothing is better than falling hotly in love. Others have given me to understand nothing is better than shoving a lump of gristle into a cave of flesh. And I have gone out with these shreds of advice mashed into my own heavy thoughts and I have done what I could.
But I was unprepared for this. For the stripping back of the bark and the heartwood exposed as pale and foul as maggots in an open wound brought blind and wriggling into the light and I felt weaker and more pathetic than ever a truant schoolchild was before his mother.
And she says yes. Okay. I understand. And I know you and love you. And I knew and loved you last night and nothing is changed except we have more sunlight now and still there is nobody else who wants you more than me. Nobody else.
And I was released. I was cleaner than the sunlight that streams white-and-gold through the open sky. I was washed free of all the noxious sorrows that gnawed and squirmed and shat within me.
Of how love is great and how nice it is to be with someone you love I was told a very great deal. Of the tryst of flesh I was told everything but of the covenant of minds nothing was disclosed. Not just to give her body up to me but to take my worst parts and accept them and through her agency make me more whole than I ever was before. That they never told me about.

XII – The Hanged Man

Torchlight flared red with the wind as they danced by the riverside, and cast shadows on sweaty faces. Charles wore white tie and she a long, pearlescent dress; they made it, stumbling and smiling, to the survivors’ breakfast, arm-in-arm, then they went back to her place and slept.
After Cambridge he worked in the civil service. He lived in a flat in Islington, and found a new girlfriend on the dinner party circuit. Until, eighteen months later, she couldn’t cope and nor could he. No hyacinths could straighten this one out. He left her in silence, in a rose-garden in winter.
He went abroad and found pain. Agony. Locked in a Turkish jail for seven months, raped and beaten and interrogated with batons, and the madmen screamed on the rocks outside, and he sobbed until his throat bled.
Then he was released, because Turkey and Great Britain were on the same side, they were best pals, they were rubbing cheeks to ward off the grim gaze of the Great Bear. He went home, back to Islington, and found himself in the violet flames of the November Riots. The skies burned purple and black, lightning spat on the palaces of Chelsea, convicts and royalty ran naked in the streets.
Nobody had a clue what had happened. Gargoyles came alive and eat schoolchildren (they said); at night, anywhere in the world, you could hear the boom of field-guns and Molotovs as men tried their best to save the world with death.
The summer heat had been intolerable; now winter dragged on, pipes burst and froze, pensioners dropped and the living shivered and wept.
It was then that Charles Parris, after the torchlight and silence and agony and the shouting and reverberation, after all of that formative shit, walked from Islington to Westminster on Twelfth Night, barefoot and mad, his hair suddenly white, the violet glare of the sky in his eyes.
He went straight to the empty crucifix in front of Buckingham Palace, the one stained with oil and burnt gristle from a thousand immolated victims.
The frost took hold in his hair as he swayed, inverted, lashed to the crossbar with baling twine, his eyes wide and his hands folded behind his back. Nobody dared touch him or make a sound, and as the sun crept into a grey sky, leaves budded from the blackened wood, and flowers fell at the foot of the cross.

XVIII - The Moon

the moon its hughe cycloptic eye winks at us. we hace no hair because we werent good enough orclean enough we just couldnt fucking wash. so what are we diong to the aerth what are we doign? answer we cant fucking take care either we just fill the lakse with posion we choke the frogs with shit and fuck we jam the pretty flowers of god fullof ash and chemical waste jism. so the moons winking it says look here you say this barrne waste? you see this this is you in the enxt hundred thousand years baby ths is yiu youre next

II of Wands

Back in Croydon again. Only there are no saints anymore. There are only sag-breasted harlots, flocking to the chainstores on the high street.
They undress themselves in the dark. Present their nakedness to me on threadbare sofas, and I sob. The young men are all gone, the young girls are all gone, along with flowers and soldiers; only tombstones remain.
I am fucked ceaselessly by ageing women. I am reversing the drop in the Croydon birth rate single-handed.
The war thunders on. At night I listen to the owls hooting in the abandoned tenements. The young and the poor are dying, fighting in a pointless war. I can hear the trickle of water from the tap I can’t turn off; the plumbers are bleeding on a foreign shore.
We are too sickly to fight, for now.
It won’t be long. The bugles will draw us, weak, useless, from sad shires, and the war will thunder on. The earth is cleansing herself; mankind will wipe itself out and the rotting dead will refresh the soil. Croydon will perish, along with civilisation. Praise God Jesus. Praise the Lord.

XX – Judgement

Let me tell you a joke. The quickest and cruelest of all. It goes like this; everybody dies.
And afterwards?
Well, I don’t know.
Judgement is not the business of the living.

We didn't bring anything into this world; we definitely won't take anything with us. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Praise God.
Those born of women don’t live very long and are not very happy. We grow and are cut down like flowers; we flee like shadows and don’t stay.
In the middle of life we are in death; who can we go to for aid but you, Lord, who are right to be angry that we have done wrong?
Yet, holy Lord, all-powerful God, kind and holy Saviour, don’t give us the bitter pain of eternal death.
You know, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; don’t close your kind ears to our prayers, but spare us, holy Lord, all-powerful God, kind and holy Saviour, good judge forever; don’t let us, in our last hour, turn away from you.

Κύριε ἐλέησον
Χριστὲ ἐλέησον
Κύριε ἐλέησον

As God in his great kindness has been happy to take the souls of our dear dead brothers and sisters, we give their bodies to the ground. Earth turns to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Yet I will show you something strange. We will not sleep, but we will all be changed; in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the last trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised free from sin and decay. For this rotten body must become the body which cannot be harmed. Then this saying will have come true; Death is defeated. Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory? Praise God, who has given us this victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

X of Wands

Billy took the C-Train out of Lucky Town and crossed the South China Sea at six hundred miles an hour, while the God-Rocket hissed through the skies and headed up and out for Lady Luna, in geosynchronous orbit over the Mare Tranquillitatis.
Billy didn’t relax until he disembarked, on the first dry land station. He had a large suitcase in one hand, and wore the insignia of the 3rd Lunar Marine Corps on the back of his polycotton bomber jacket.
He flashed his travel-card at a taxi driver and took a ride along the coast to his wife’s house, fifty miles south. The house was made of ecologically-farmed logs, and looked like it grew out of the forest, projecting over the beach.
Billy climbed out of the car, nodded at the driver and walked up the dirt path to the front door, let himself in and whizzed up a bowl of instant noodle soup. He checked the fuel level in the car, packed clothes for himself and his wife into the boot, and waited for her to come home.