F O R T Y E I G H T

WORDS AND PRETTY MUCH FUCK ALL ELSE.

[fortyeight]

shhh

two friends sitting on plastic chairs, talking of lively issues  and receiving blank yet loving stares. overbearing silence is being talked about and isn’t here or there. their conversation’s killing quietness and sending words into the air.

[fortyeight]

“the good ol’ times”

[fortyeight]

the right reasons

If you felt as I always think of you, you would be full of yourself. I hate seeing you cry, but I love when you cry  for the right reasons.

[fortyeight]

the bathroom sink

she told me loosely to go and  fuck myself. I jacked off and threw up  in my sink.

[fortyeight]

about the rain again

I mistake  the fluorescent shop windows for genuine sunlight as I watch my cigarette smoke dance  in tonight’s freezing wind. I wonder if the rain will stop falling and question whether it really wants to.

[fortyeight]

linen sheets

My bed, as foreign as it is, calls out for me longingly.  I feel the need  to let it take me. I’ll fall asleep. I’ll not wake up.

[fortyeight]

home is where the park is

Out in the green fields, under the protection of six or seven sycamore trees, I look down at the ground, and sometimes, my knees as they knock to and fro just behind my wet feet. I pace back and forth as my breath turns to steam. It rains here far more than  way back home, and while it feels far too easy to feel so alone, I hand someone a lighter while she’s stuck on the phone. I don’t know her name, let alone what she calls home.

[fortyeight]

WOOF

I AM A DOG. I DO DOG THINGS.

I’LL SHOW YOU LOVE WHEN YOU WALK THROUGH THE DOOR AND IF YOU FEED ME, I’LL LOVE YOU WAY MORE. OH, BY THE WAY, I MADE LOVE TO YOUR PILLOW AND SHIT ON THE FLOOR.

[fortyeight]

those red stairs

I descend a single flight of red-carpeted stairs; the stitching of the fabric worn out and shabby. I fill my lungs with two cigarettes’ worth of death and cold English air. I stare at passersby and judge their bums, their shoes, their choice of hairstyle. I’m careful with where I blow my smoke. I go back up those red-carpeted stairs, knowing full well i’ll repeat the process in less than an hour tops. A cycle that starts over and over, yet rarely ever, if ever, stops.

[fortyeight]

coming soon to a theatre near you

The bookshelves seemed so very quiet, yet the stock labelled: “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE,” never stopped screaming at me. 

[fortyeight]

unfamiliarity

The entire town is situated within a ‘ditch’ (at least that’s what I was told by the waiter who gave me his number). The trees are green as all hell around here. It’s winding, downhill streets and fields and fields  and fields. I enjoy the piss-heads  on the Catholic church steps most of all. Just behind that, though, I like the pubs, big, or small. They have nice beer. It makes things quieter.

[fortyeight]

subtitles

I miss the times we’d spend together sat on nothing more  than terrible wood. It sounds cheesy and all, but despite the concrete that we’d meet at, and while I know you should, you made me feel far more stable than anything else ever could. (I love you;  and I’m scared)

[fortyeight]

4916

smoke pours out of me as I funnel something else in. I choke myself on bullshit and tend to keep the rest in. I guess I stress just a little too much. my mind’s legs are broken, so I’d appreciate a crutch or two. 

[fortyeight]

white wine woes

I change my mind from time to time on how I feel about drinking wine and if there is a decision I think it hides in ink - in ink; or under a tarp at the back of a dark liquor shelf protecting whatever it has, as myself does to myself.

See, I've a bullseye in between my eyes. One that sticks around and grows in size and it took me a while to realise why other people couldn't see it clearer. Then one night, after a few glasses of wine, I looked a little closer, brought things a whole lot nearer, and that's when it hit me; my darts kept bouncing off my mirror.

[fortyeight]

stormy weather

I’m sorry for the scars. No, not those. The ones on my knuckles. I got angry, my blood turned to steam and I buckled under it all.

I kept remembering our phone call and got annoyed at myself for ever hanging up at all, so I did the only logical thing and punched my walls ‘til they gushed red. I could have done better, but I pushed my own buttons over all the things I’d left unsaid.

You know I’ve always had a temper and my head was the epicenter; the eye of the storm.

People chewing food loudly always annoyed me, you should remember. It’d turn cloudy skies cloudier and make everything else louder 'til I could do nothing but surrender and let the clouds rain down like a stormy night from last December.

You have no choice but to remember all the times i’d scream and shout as if my chest were a nest full of bees and I was letting them all out. And it was at those times your love would leave and be replaced with hate and doubt. You’d question whether I was something you’d be better off without.

You didn’t like the thunder because it was part of the storm that bore my name and tore your world asunder. And I can’t blame you for that.

I was the storm that kept coming back. Every other week, like clockwork, i’d turn bright skies grey and black. I was horrible weather that weakened your defenses with my incessant attacks.

The skies would turn stormy, no matter the season, and i’m ashamed because now, whenever you see me, you’ll know the reason as to why they name hurricanes after people like me and you’ll always think the same. And I’m the one to blame for that.

[fortyeight]

Ode to the Little Boy at the Bus Stop

I don’t usually like children, especially within your age range, but you, no matter how young and cute, have made me feel such great rage. The bus will come when it comes and while I know you’re not even four, please quiet down, God help me now, or I’ll slam you into the floor.

[fortyeight]

the opposite of altruism

A chocolate muffin that I bought out of greed with the rest of my food sits next to my cigarettes, uneaten as it was  when I paid for it.  Therein exists a metaphor, but I’m too careless to look for it, so I’ll leave that to you. When I write, I’m not sure as to whether it’s for you,  an actual ‘you,’ or myself.  And at the same time, I don’t know why; to answer everything  you could ask.  I think I write to give you something good. I write to give you things  I’ve never deserved and never goddamn should. 

[fortyeight]

my grandma’s house

        Around the time of the early Autumn of 2007, I returned home to find my mother crying quietly to whoever was on the other side of the phone.  I'd just come back home with one of my childhood best-friends after doing whatever 10 to 11-year-olds do. I'm pretty sure we were doing things that blur the line between whatever's legal and whatever isn't, or playing video games at the local internet cafe. We'd hit both sides of the spectrum on a near daily basis.               A few weeks later, I was taken out of school about a month before the Christmas break, which for an 11-year-old boy who was starting his descent from the top of the class, felt real damned good. Other than that fact and my newfound access to English sweets, the next two and a half months I spent out of school back in the country I was born in were exceptionally sour. My allotted time for watching T.V. in the early morning always got cut short by having to visit my grandma in her hospital bed. It's selfish to have acted that way, I know, but I cared more about preserving the image I had of her from a few years back rather than the one that looked up at me with weak and sunken eyes. I'd rather remember my grandma as the strong woman who made sure to treat me like every child should be treated whenever I went back to my hometown. She always had trouble getting up the stairs, but that was the arthritis. This was an entirely different beast.                 She had been diagnosed with cancer in some place I don't quite remember back when my aunt or uncle or whoever was on the other side of that phone broke the news. By the time my mom and I made the flight back home, it had spread to three or four different places. After a while, we didn't have to go to the hospital anymore because my grandma had been moved back to her own bed, with tubes and those little sticky pads stuck to most of her body. She was too weak to make the back and forth trips from home to hospital.         It was a weird time for me because with all the adverts for Christmas shopping plastered on the T.V. and anywhere else someone would turn their gaze towards, it really didn't feel like a 'Merry Christmas' back at my grandma's house. I don't know exactly what it was, but there was a sense of foreboding in the air. One that wouldn't go away unless it could be replaced by something worse. Every time I walked up the stairs that my grandma used to struggle so badly with, I'd see her reflection in the wall mirror that you could use to peek into her room, and I hated it. The floorboards on the landing still squeak under every footfall to this day, so I know she could hear me pass by her doorway. The day before she died, I told my mom I didn't want to see her lying in bed, so I guess I never really got to say goodbye. I don't know if that's worth keeping my memory of her intact or not.         Her funeral was 4 days after she died in that room. It was Boxing Day; the 26th of December. My family still goes to the cemetery on both days every year to lay flowers down at her headstone. I have a feeling she would hate the over-extravagance of it all. I haven't been in nearly 4 years. Her funeral was the 2nd I'd ever been to that I can actually remember and writing the "What I Did Over the Christmas Holidays" essay a few weeks later was one of the hardest things I've never been able to write. I guess that's what this is.          Even though both of my grandparents lived in that house, it was always referred to as "Nan's," and rarely ever "Nan and Grandad's." It's hard to make the transition after a house gets a name change. When someone dies, you're more likely to remember them the way they were the last time you saw them rather than any time prior to that. I think that's why long-term illness is such a bastard to deal with. I'd prefer to remember my grandma the way I grew up knowing her; sneaking me sweets in my grandparents' tiny kitchen when my mom wasn't looking and letting me lie on her bed to watch what I wanted to watch on T.V. rather than what everyone else did. Last time I watched that T.V., I lay down on my grandad's side of the bed instead of hers.