yellowpeppers

Shallow, padding on sand closer, a yellow iris bitten tight to mine and calling my chest to crack from its centre, the desert wide open. Back flat, sweat seeps, pulled downwards, through to ground that feels still warm from the long day's sun and rough like the jackal's hot tongue which smoothes the splinters of my ribcage flung apart in grating glee encircling something far too vast and hard. There is something about the colour and shine of treacle in all of this. The jackal and I swooped an orbit around and watched the birds spill into the sky, take off, then fly, not horizontal, but straight - straight up.

You swam away, little fish, in the nighttime. And when the sun came up you turned and wriggled slippery hard against the current, throwing shines from you mirror scales bounding across the four walls. Sliver fins burrowing through an outer skein of sleep. You shelled yourself and writhing, woke gill-less, agape and smiling in the happy net of an angler. Everyone sang; "The prettiest fish that we've seen". You were the prettiest fish I had seen.

She's started the games again. I can feel her twisting the cogs in me, tightening everything. My spine is held straighter, violin-string taut; the small bones of my fingers bend only with an increased effort. It happens this way. At the beginning it is almost imperceptible, there is a small, measured space in all her actions and a decision dilutes her eyes with internal clouded focus. Lately, the centimetres she keeps between her two palms on my back are careful and calibrated, I can sense her counting the seconds that she holds my gaze. It makes me nervous. We live in a room in the Mobray Hotel. I like it here, it is vast, we can be lost i

Its was when we were down at the factory, friend, by the chocolate dead waterfront and our four eyes quadrupled and all the different skies were visible at once. So many spheres strung together circling our cloddish centre. I thought that we knew and could say it as seen, but recently all I can tell you is that the reflections of clouds I see might be inverted. You don't care. You are busy making muscles spring from your pale chest. You are climbing some mountain somewhere. I hope that you'll send me a postcard with a photograph on it.

To scream, thick and gutteral whole lungs deep, down the asiles of the supermarket, and then lie cold on its grit-greased floor will not help. Nor will clawing that linoleum bloody, digging past the secret yellow strips of fat to the bone in aimless tantrum. Too many cans of beans have been spilt and rolled about for the situation to be taken seriously.

If your ears are stood, up, canine; and what hackles you have are raised, then the earth is moving. And, as it grinds a howl from your swathes of capillery and deep stone teeth, you might hear the nightcaps chime from the cabinet. But, if you find yourself in some black, coiled space, clasped between two palms, you might feel each follicle fill with the cold morning pins from telegraph poles. This means you are shaking and need not hold on.

The cold hands inside clothing clutch and cling at skin or flesh or hair; distended forearms dangling from the grip that will not shake without feeling just one stroke too far out in the water.

Push one palm through cold air and feel such tiny breezes wrap your fingers loosely strung to their bones. Stop wondering where the wind comes from.

Everyone is having sex and half of them are faking it I know this because everyone looks double glazed, and when I sit alone and roll a cigarette I count the sounds of open mouths that gape one wish, that they were closed. Everyone is having sex but me, I'm on my smoking step and thinking, with one crumpled fag, of witticisms, puns and gags, (quite off the cuff you understand), to tell you, if we ever meet to make you want to hold my hand.