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.

I – The Magician

I called her up the night before and got the answer phone.  She was probably out, dancing. I said; “All that I have is all that I am, and that would be yours, if it wasn't sacrificed to the cause.” It was better that way because things got confused when I spoke to her.
We didn’t sleep we checked our weapons and went over the plans. Then it was morning and Giacomo gave us the last little words before we strapped up and went out into the world. Down Hope Avenue to the great gates with the pictures of the moon and the God-Rocket. Then the gates exploded and we ran through and the guards who were on our side started shooting the other ones. It was strange to go down the corridors I had seen so many times in photos and videos and architects’ plans.
Everything went to plan until we made it down the last set of staircases and went through the door into the room. Giacomo said it was a large stone room but when I arrived the walls were made of flowers and there was very little space. And I was the only one left.
The man we had come to kill was facing me across a table. He was wearing a red coat and he kept his right hand behind his back. “Hello, Jamie,” he said. “You’ve got me cornered now.”
“Where is everyone? What have you done?” I asked.
“Jamie, I haven’t done anything. What have you done? I was only trying to help.”
“Oppressor,” I spat.
“Well, it’s a shame we can’t get along. I’ll have to send you away again, Jamie. Bad luck.” Then his right hand came out and there was a brilliant light.
This is all I can remember.

X of Cups

They closed down the factories, and cleared us off the piers; my wife and I stood arm-in-arm, both of us in tears. The soldiers took the terraces, and put curfew in place; they gave the traitors walkie-talkies and armbands.
We gathered in the Dog and Diogenes to discuss revolution. Then suddenly there were jobs. You could earn thousands a week as a guinea-pig for the Projects, or test new equipment for the Lady, and later, for the Moon itself. It might be dangerous, but there was money, and purpose, and we were all together for once.
Nobody wanted revolt then. It was a new dawn, a new age.
God, what a thing it was, to be alive after catastrophe and war, and see men living in the skies, aiming their carbon-fibre Babel at the stars.

III of Wands

To C. Hope this finds you in good health. I have been sentenced to die by the Commissioner, for my work in freeing the prisoners. You may have read this in the Guardian. I am no longer a fugitive – they found me a place to stand and watch the ships come in, where Her agents can’t touch me. That’s right, I’m somewhere in the South China Sea, but I can’t say exactly where.
Oh and thank you for the evenings. Tell your grandmother I enjoyed playing mancala. I hope you keep your job with the Ministry. I never wanted to hurt you, but some things must come above the love by a man for a woman. And good luck, my dearest. Good luck.
If it helps you then forget about me. I have done enough. And anyway, my lungs are shot. I know I should have given up the cigarettes but there it is. At least I can die without worrying for my family anymore – you heard what happened to them, I’m sure.

X – Wheel of Fortune

They treated them like animals. That was the idea. After a buzzword-stuffed proposal to the Commissioner, the call went out and thousands prostrated themselves for the chance to be humiliated. Eight were unlucky.
The ‘set’ was a guinea pig hutch, sized to accommodate its human inhabitants. There was a series of plastic tunnels, large enough to walk through, a communal water-bowl, and a trough filled with a tasteless nutrient-rich mix, the only food the inhabitants were served. They slept curled up in straw and newspaper.
Every few days, the hatch to the outside world was be opened, and masked men in black would enter and take the inhabitants forcibly to a small cage, while the straw and newspapers were removed, and fresh bedding supplied. Then they were taken back to the hutch and locked in.
They were clothed in cotton smocks; each inhabitant was given one smock at the star of the ‘experiment’, and wore this throughout the four month period.
The inhabitants were injected with a sterilizing agent in order to encourage the participants to, in the words of the sub-commissioner, ‘rut like rabbits’. They were also given names chosen by the public; any inhabitant who addressed another by their ‘outside’ name would be punished.
'Guinea Pigs.'
It was touted as the greatest social experiment since the Holocaust.

VII of Cups

Back in Canaan again. Haunted by visions day and night, Ralph saddles up his old motorbike and rides through the desert like a turbocharged Moses. He sings 'Hallelujah' and then all those theme-park three-chord staples, and fancies himself a poet until the visions come again. Falling tower, hordes of bats and bloodstained fakirs with horns in their hands. A host of bright blue bees descends and he shrieks.
The Holy Land is so quiet at night he feels like the last man on earth. He looks up at the moon and wishes he could light a cigarette or drink a fifth of firewater. Vicki texts him and asks when he’ll be back. Then he remembers she’s joined the great army of liberty and it’s another vision and he weeps.
He finds it hard to go on like this.
Ralph is not a traitor but he’s going to send all the soldiers in Canaan to dusty death.

V of Cups

That odd-looking kid with the NOFX t-shirt who loaded the groceries in your corner store, and the hooded Norwegian gunner, they must have told you something. And the mass jailbreak, did that give you a clue? All those long-stay convicts, docile for twenty years, leaving in ones and twos over a week in June. The people of the boundaries and the outer limits. Soldiers, police, renegades and reprobates.
Buskers flocked to street corners; jugglers, trombonists, preachers, poets and men with dancing monkeys in hand-embroidered waistcoats. The paving stones were frying-pan hot in the early afternoon, and at night it was warm enough to sit outside in a t-shirt, drinking iced vodka-and-coke.
Friday.  About six in the evening. Sitting in a corner café, ogling a couple of girls too young to flirt with, when the sky turned black. There was a flash of light in the east, and the sun was gone.
“Terrorists!” he said.
But they weren’t terrorists; they weren’t even murderers, though it was hard to tell the difference in the dark. By the Sunday, 5th Avenue was in flames, and a thousand
drug dealers hung crucified on lamp-posts.

IX – The Hermit

Nobody likes sex. The current contrary misconception stems from a great deal of pornographic films where the women and the men are invariably ‘up for it’, and the woman cannot wait to partake in fellatio, anilingus, digital penetration or the like. I myself, however, prefer the more realistic style, which is harder to find, as the majority of the populace seem determined both to perpetuate and partake in the continued fiction that people do, in fact, like sex.
This more realistic style of pornography is far superior; it shows neither party delighting in sexual intercourse. Typically, the female is least happy about the prospect, and the male is the aggressor, no doubt deluded by the culture of sexual amity promulgated by lying pornographers. As the female struggles, the male’s anger and violence tend to increase, as he is no doubt infuriated sex is not the delightful consensual experience the media have convinced him it will be.
(The violence should, of course, be directed towards society as a whole rather than towards the woman, but given that anti-social aggression on a large scale, perpetrated by a lone and morally sound individual against the depraved and deceived populace, tends to result in conviction, whereas rape often does not, we social guerrillas must confine our activities to the latter).
My own personal experiences of sexual intercourse have been exclusively of the kind described above. My first sexual experience was at the age of twenty-one, when, mind hopelessly addled by societal brainwashing, I decided that a woman wearing provocative attire would be amenable to the prospect of oral sex without further delay, in the back of my newly-acquired white van. She resisted strongly, and having had slight experience of realistic pornography, I decided to take charge of the situation. Sadly, I was unable to achieve congress with her until I rendered her unconscious, by which time I had already ejaculated with the immense feeling of power I gained – a far more fulfilling sensation than the rather paltry orgasm I managed when I penetrated her naked, comatose body.

VIII of Pentacles

And there, on the edge of the city, between the woods and the terraced houses: the gypsy camp, draped in mist and dying sunlight.
Dave sat on a fallen tree near the riverbank, guitar on his knee, playing while Marisa sang. Some of the others gathered around, to ogle Marisa, listen to the music or just avoid the washing-up. Marisa liked singing songs by Shakira. Dave didn’t mind; he could play anything he wanted on the guitar when he was alone in his caravan. He shared with a couple of girls who were on the game, and they were often out at work.
It was long after dark when his caravan-mates came back; Dave slung the guitar over his back, like a soldier with his rifle, and greeted them with a smile and cheap vodka.
“Les étoiles meurent,” Kacey said (her full name was Kazandra). “Regarde le ciel; les étoiles meurent.”
“What?” Dave said. “You can’t see the stars from here, there’s too much city.” But he wondered; could he not see the stars because of the city, or because they really were dying?

VII of Wands

Let’s split you bastards. Let’s really hit the fucking road and rocket out of this dead dog city, this whole dead dog fucking cultural paradigm. Let’s wake up ten miles from the nearest wifi point, no a hundred (or would we have to be in the sea?) and ride the tides of fate. In the day we can hide out from society, and at night get really pissed and blissed and skate across rainbows like living gods (all the old ones are dead).
We can live in a hut made of banana-skins and wood, we can cut the air open with razorblade flints and drink the juice of the sky. What can’t we do, sir, madam, what would you have us cease and desist? How would you shut us down if we ripped the button from the console, if we unplugged ourselves and hopped around juiced on pure fucking reality? Touch that, you bastards, touch that and tell us how to sing then.
Oh it’ll never happen. We’re trapped. Our prison is inside, somewhere between the eyes and the mullet lies the death of freedom. Shit yes brother, shoot my skull open and let me out.

Ace of Pentacles

“Whatcha gonna do with all that ass inside them jeans?” is rarely a good chat-up line, but it worked for Harry.
“I’m gonna get you love-drunk, on my hump,” was the response.
A little background first; Harry had been besotted with Tina for weeks. She was cool, intellectual, handsome if not pretty and mixed with the ‘in’ set; more than that, she was perennially single, although not altogether celibate.
It would take a bold man to woo a woman like that, Harry had said to himself on more than one occasion, and one armed with all the weapons of love. He rehearsed little bon mots and acid cultural observations to sway her, but never found a chance to use them. After a while, he resigned himself to chasing some other, more attainable woman, and he succeeded with a perfectly nice girl called Perry.
Perry didn’t last; no more than a couple of months. One night, middling drunk, Harry ended up in a bar, and spoke to the girl next to him; “Whatcha gonna do…” etc. It was Tina; they went home and had eight months together after that.

Queen of Cups

The dog was ten feet high. She didn’t notice it until she started washing up the breakfast things, and saw it stock-still in her garden. It looked like a Great Dane, grey with black blotches, unblinking, didn’t even look like it was breathing. She called the local police station, told them there was a giant dog in her garden, didn’t mention just how huge it was but told them it was big and she was scared.
Until then, she locked the doors, shut the windows, headed upstairs and watched through the bedroom window, coffee cold in her hand. She nibbled at an Oreo and the cops came ten minutes later. That was when the dog turned and ran, barking like gunshots.
She didn’t know then how lonely you could be. The phone rang and the office said there’d been an accident; she dropped the coffee and ran out to her car, drove all the way to the city hospital and they said he’d gone, sorry, he’s gone, and then all the forms and finances and so on.
That night she dreamt of being fucked by a giant dog. It was ejaculating in her tousled
hair when the towers fell.

X of Swords

A life in photographs. Here is the infant Sanjeev in sub-fusc; smiling with uncertain eyes, against the college walls. And then, here he is, blurred and serious, pushing through a crowd. This other one, just here, this is his first love and look how she smiles.
A corner away lies sorrow.
Here he is again, black-tied and bright-eyed, entering his final year while the world battens down its hatches. Here is a grin in a cafe, a scowl across a quad, a guffaw from the chair in his room; sharply attired, he descends into the City to join the serried pinstripes.
Five years pass. God falls. The bloodied shores call with bugle and fife. Here is the infant Sanjeev in combat fatigues, and the waves wash his corpse.

IX of Swords

They called him the last escapee, but he was just another god in leather and black, running from the shadows and the song.
I was living in a garret in Battersea; it was a spring morning, and the light was like opals and pearls in the air.
I checked the news on the BBC website when I switched my computer on, and there was the story. It was worse than the day Diana died, they all said afterwards, half the golden girls and boys hauled out in black bags.
Alex never meant to make it out alive; all he wanted was another place, somewhere brighter and full of air. He picked a bad day to run. They hounded him, the men with guns and the freelance Fourth Estate. All he wanted was, well, never mind. They shot him down whatever the dream.