neillien

I am tormenting the berserker inside. ...they call him: Dancing Jack.

[neillien]

Santolina Virens/ May 2026 additional version

Mum,

I tried seeing beyond the

Widow instead of into your

dejection, your cold taxidermal

Stare. I questioned,

is she too fractured

I asked aloud,

is she too brittle to wrestle with

a guilty conscience.

To call me out

in her name.

Stub end of a lilac cigarette

Mum exhales smoke.

“To hell,” she screams.

Verging on hysteria,

"Get out of my face."

The bane of adolescence

Being to the spit of mum.

[neillien]

a dog called Styx

From the corner of his eye to an adverse glance from his friend, I fear they think I am a villain.  The way they look at me, I suppose the worst.

Dog dad sitting preening pets on the grass, he gives me the queerest look, and it hurts. The yelping animals alert to my scent, curl their lips in disgust.

I lumber forward. The diegetic sound of feet on concrete and my heartbeat pounding.

How many times I have entered a stranger’s field of view feeling this nauseous sick to the eyeteeth bewitching anxiety, I don’t know. And yet here it is again uncurling, the twiddling of thumbs, self-conscious, serious awkwardness.

My creeping fear sounds like when you put a seashell to your ear - it functions as a resonator… I hear breathing. My own heart beating.

Sylvan dog-dad and his pack of hounds fast and fluent and effortlessly cool. They're watching from the picnic area, sitting on a wool blanket of peach and beige chequers away from the trees, but shaded. The Löwchen with the cleft palate. Cerberus with the human hairdo giving me a hard-as-nails stare. A yappy mongrel with a ribbon tied in a queasy bow jauntily angled around its neck. I’d muzzle myself to be a part of their pack before I go and say something I might regret. Swaddling my mouth with my shoulder-length hair, greasy, too long fringe falling across my face.

I wouldn’t prejudice my behaviour for anyone’s pleasure. No one to look at me when I take off my clothes, remove my beautiful white teeth aligners. Personality and behavioural alignment - the soft blowtorch of their eyes boring holes, too much perspiration, I stink. And uncertain boundaries that slightly hurt somewhere else inside are coming apart.

‘Back-off…’

An unruly chihuahua yapping, darting about.

'Back-off… Back-off... Back-off...'

The fearless little bug-eyed monster dashes at me, snapping at my ankles. I sidestep I skitter I jitter about wildly erratic. The little chihuahua doesn't stop attacking; attempts to bite my shoe; heel then toe with needle-teeth, gnarling. An appalling invasion, gone beyond just looking. Dog-dad could reign pup in, grab the scruff of the neck before I kick the little shit from here to kingdom come. Which I admit I couldn't do but still it takes every ounce of my resolve not to.

Dog-dad sighs, calls dog's name. I don't catch the name. Can only hear dog-dad's effete efforts to take control of the situation is nothing less than pathetic. He glares at me with an intensity shot with blackness, the centre of the eyeballs derogatorily signal my inferiority in a flash. Such contempt describes my worst assumption. If this were a dream I would be stood here now naked. In a state of mortification. My reddening face blushed a scarlet climbing-frame red as the epinephrine hormones dilate my blood vessels. Like hot coal. Scorching. Burning up with embarrassment.

Hesitating, unsure what to do other than look for cover. I spy a phone box on the far side of the children's playground. Did I mention I am in the public park passing through the play area just on my way to the convenience store on Queen Park Avenue to buy cigarettes. That I have turned myself into a degenerate. A dirty trenchcoated voyeur in black leather gloves, clenching in one hand a chloroformed handkerchief, ready, waiting to pounce, discriminately smoother some unfortunate kid, to enjoy their struggling, feel them fall limp in my procuring hands, the proverbial stranger, the abductor of children. A child. The petting of a lecher watching from a telephone box,

Only, it’s me watching dog-dad holding a handkerchief wiping the rear end of the Pomeranian’s thick double coat - in heat. Sweltering makes my teeth sweat. I am boiling over in doubt of myself. My raincoat feels less fetching less pleasing to the eye than I believed when I chose to dress my reflection this afternoon.

Attention seeking. Not to be one of the pack. The hounds baying for blood. I made the mistake of thinking I could do this walk to the convenience store without being down on myself. I gave myself false confidence. Irate with myself for needing cigarettes for not buying more the last time I went through this rigmarole. Me getting myself to go outdoors. I stepped reluctantly out of the phone box, but committed to my actions. The diegetic sound of feet on concrete my heart beat. The monstrously small chihuahua still snapping at my heels.

'Back-off...'

Their little pink coloured tongues have worked their way around their rear ends / transferred fishy anal gland smells to their mouths. 

picking up on the tension, the

Wolflike in their dreams. Prepossessing

Damp smell/Walked through the rain and not quite dried through

absorbed in paranoia* 

I shouldn’t have allowed such thoughts to enter me, but they nestle and I cannot retreat.

The sight of you. I bet you weren't expecting admiration from

and I force myself not to be uninvited, unwelcome, NOT TO IMPOSE. I shouldn’t have to be here jealous of that bitch playfully coy enjoying the brushstrokes dog dad applies/ Their puny little legs and arms were flailing frenziedly in the air.  with each keen stroke of the brush keeping an eye directed at me. An empty glare Their picnic/happening

Makes me feel nauseous, sick to the eyeteeth,

If they bite. Am I going to bite back.

My bite is Ferocious /teeth or are they/ excessive drooling. owner stretched up, all agitated.

In a circumstance like this [encounter] I am pertinent to my worst atrocities.

Again ambiguity/ An empty glare I am unsure how to interpret.

. . .

Unfinished draft. Celebrating my thirteen-years-old today, Tumblr account.

[neillien]

[neillien]

[neillien]

Summer Rites, Solstice

Sunday, a band of heavy rain at dawn. Cold, algor mortis.

My entire body felt like a spare limb slumped in a morass hanging limp, a clump oily and black.

We tried to sit straight and failed. Wired blood reservoirs at their most narcotic, turn on/switch off. Eyes complete the dark.

All our frustrations fell to me.

Outbalancing the sultry stillness, I found scratches on the soft underside of your forearms. Demarcation lines,

Separated into three thirds male: sex, dried and staled. Boundaries opened, end in tombstoning.

Monday, stranded in a new daylight. Flaccid spines, pliant flesh, skin floating like flying fish from our faces. I didn't want to wake up. I didn't want my soul to hear me howl.

And

for the first/last time I am reappropriating the love of metal fingers in my body. The drug supply is a constant larva. It gives, and gives, sinking deep with the sarcophaga flies, gorging on every orifice.

I didn't want to wake up I didn't want my soul to hear me howl.

These punitive hours have a dreamlike quality, and I wonder how inscrutable I am, blank

on the brink of afterlife.

no longer identifiable as Ne il. I don't know who I am and that's the best thing.

Tuesday, I tried standing. My entire body felt like a cudgel attacking the back off my neck.

The three of us perch on our elbows, laughing at ourselves, at the room in a shambles.

He put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. He split a black Cialis between his teeth.

Still he hovers over me. Those huge compound eyes of his staring in every direction other than this side [the correct side] of the spindle.

I want to sleep like Beauty slept. I drag the vintage glass sarcophagus on my back. No one will look twice at my lack of Disney experience.

[neillien]

January 2025

[neillien]

discreetly, the door the door.

. . . the mere suggestion of his touch and we rear up, diasporic in direction like hormones released into the blood during sleep. we release our arms and push, facedown. The musculature of his chest - pressed heaving against my spine, represents the cochlea fetishisation in my mind. revelling in fits of oxytocin. snail mucin left on my behind. Him, her and they. Everyone loved my boyfriend, he was the perfect gentleman.

[neillien]

santolina virens

Mother, I tried looking out of the window instead of into your reflection , at your cold taxidermal stare. Full of hysteria. You put me to shame. I put me to shame. Mother. Am I too fractured. Am I too fragile to wrestle with a guilty conscience to call myself out by her name.

[neillien]

Scarecrow gets it, tinman gets it, cowardly lion sits this one out.

Judy’s face drops dead, slips off and lands like blancmange

the ruby slippers turn to slush. Some guy shrieks, Oh My Blood. Another guy in a feathered wig, or is it a hat - flinches, pulls back. Hot Je3us! Tough, young quick-witted torso in a thong, quipped - aha! Summer is a bit unpredictable like that. Not of any authority, but I point down at the puke anyways. The auxiliary person with a dustbin and a yellow A-board comes, stands the CAUTION slippery surface sign up and gets scooping. When the dancefloor reopens, when every trace of Judy glitter is gone, we sashay and sway and wiggle our way around each other to the sound of Lizzo's Hard Truth. The Perspex floor flashes emerald green and Nephrite Jade: a conventional glow but feels new like I'm dancing on permafrost for the first time alone.

[neillien]

Tuesday’s inspiration: burning shapes into the night

[neillien]

cute with a subcutaneous smile,

accidently obsessed

I tried looking out the window instead of into your reflection, but your blood got into my loins dragging you out of your maelstrom possessed by the shape of loves’ eyes. .

To stop myself drowning I need to drain off, I try dealing with the procreative hours we spend on each other wasting our powers, but I am too caught up in love.

[neillien]

Pomme d’ambre _ apple of amber.

The smooth surface of Orlando's chest thrust against the back of a near-by chair, the living-room door stayed shut. My spying-eye peeps through the keyhole and it is possible to see dust fall on morphinans: colour fade into white noise. The abstract changes in content and distribution, the body [may be] consumed as fuel. Orlando imposes a threatening acquiescence/approbation/ desiccant/glasslike. He is like an animal that I can no longer distinguish: even more beautiful than when we first interacted. Silence, we agreed. We simply preferred silence. Slumped forward. The weight of Orlando's incoherent body propels the chair, setting off on a linear the little brass wheels scrape the surface of the parquet flooring. Orlando, facedown. The phantoms of personal space are more alive than the living here. On the other side of the door, reckless voices, begin sorrowing, vast as an ever-renewed crowd in tonality and scale. Screams too copious to grasp according to their needs. Voices I fail to handle unerring due to my intimidation of them. You know Orlando? There is no sound as truthful as I am: damaging my body myself. I have found All Orlando's intrusions come bitesize torn by Payara’s teeth … in these fantasies gnawing as quietly on the agony of perceived isolation. Out of reach of the telephone. Just out of reach of anyone loyal. Surely he can't be trying to hear how he passes the time of day? Won’t say anything benevolent beside the shrillness, a voice as clear as quietly as couth as any teeth that bite the disagreeable animal of truth.

We rise to the clapping hands that waken us from our torpor.

work-in-progress. ...

[neillien]

Wear a coat of glass, the first image accurately representing a state of consciousness. Carry an axe, a small but vital incident... thought intruder acts in pursuit of happiness. Fights against itself

Go ahead, put anything in your mouth.

Dark toy

[neillien]

is love /whatever noise is,

3 retarded months after he left, I have been unable to stop thinking of Puff Guts. Sometimes I bleed weeks of poor health for him. Expressions of abandonment-rage and my loathing of a new guardian in my life. All the flowers, the bedroom looking like a funeral phenomenon. The bed, a coffin my legs won't fit into - I tried, and thought carefully about how to punish my feet for not cooperating, but pain sometimes is done with talking. Besides,there was no one to phone that Tuesday. Admittedly I didn’t answer several repeat withheld number calls /. No voicemail. No voice-note. So, whoever text me an axiom last night, thanks love. In black and white it read, revere the dead. I laughed, cringing. I used to address a plastic icon when he danced, swinging from the car's rear-view mirror. The ghost and synthetic celebration of Samhain. The darker half of the year approaching like a beetle. Coaldust between us. Bite back. Cut it out. Holding my breath … like a curious child I play dead. The freakish inclusion of a few squandered hours into my afternoon blackening a chaste room with a sick-day melancholy. I miss you.

[neillien]

Story based on Antediluvian sex-role stereotypes.

All colour fading into white denim and shoulder pads. Aunt Grace wore her hair lacquered/and teeth veneered. A fake brunette with big tits. A heaving, busty imitation of television’s Dynasty actresses. the self-proclaimed bitch of Shoreditch Street. Took no prisoners. Her vices were the Clothes Show, a successful BBC TV show, Martini’s and cigarettes and the clothes show were the things that Aunt Grace preferred to anything Uncle John presented outside of that, drank or stole, begged were worthless. John worked sub-rosa/ 'under the thumb' dad would laugh. He had had ambition once Uncle John had told me in a frank moment during a hand-job I'd given him whilst simultaneously pleasuring myself: I forget what the ambition was but whatever it was Aunt Grace put a stop to it. I remember him callously telling me so. It was Christmas Day. Uncle John had worn a red paper crown when he collapsed over the dining table whilst enjoying the Turkey roast and trimmings. The family at the table all thought he was joking but the Uncle John was never an ass. A giant prick, yes but not a man to caper. He died, crest fallen with a gravy and cranberry sauce moustache/ dad won a compass in the cracker he shared and pulled with his elder brother. For us, the nephews one niece it was forbidden to touch Uncle Jake he was very sensitive about feelings and immodesty. I fancied it was because he was acid Uncle John’s skin excreted a sweaty velour that gave a nasty rash if you so much as brushed the edge of your finger against his mask. It was okay to play footsie or unzip his fly tug at him and squeeze his balls when no one else was there but that didn’t happen too often. Too busy posing elsewhere for photographs with his arm cosseting his wife’s to die for waist. Grace always wore belts that never pinch an inch. Whenever Grace lost a little more weight she’d enjoy starting new holes instead; smiling like Goons on trips out with the freaks from Darby and Joan rotary Club. Grace & uncle John gave money that Christmas - if I remember, and HMV vouchers. The couple came with eponyms, throwback clothes and attitudes that baffled our younger less decadent senses. God knows I tried. And Aunt Grace! She had the temerity to tell me she hated MY HAIR: she said it made me look like a sissy-girl.

Secretly how delighted I felt.

First draft/ no edits.

[neillien]

[neillien]

Petting Zoo …

Perhaps we have already met vicariously in the imagination of our loneliness? You whine. And I smile a single zebra stripe, grin. Maniacal. Because I am dreadful. Starved to the pointe of emaciation. Your body is the same, pale and thin, only your flesh seems inviolable. I describe your actions as abstemious, a memorial for your soul complete in itself. Pleasure perhaps to compare: we shall be broken. Fingers burnt to cinders. It is time you ate. And all there is to eat are two alligator pears picked before they are fully mature, and they may rot before ripening and it is doing my fucking head in. Your small round head and augmented mouth giving me what for. Criminal tear-like facial streaks pouring scorn from your murderous eyes... turning me out. what is Southern slang for tail, hindquarter and flank. At first I thought you were starved and tempted by the most rotted males. I am fetid. A particular blend. Full of unfettered queer. In the popular culture, I only see sphinxes. Equivalent men betwixt and between perceived masculinity. You with your ancient sabre tooth and pharisaic conscience does my head-in. I am an eidolon unseen by you yet watched like a hawk from the Osprey-like circles you make around my ego. Dead below the waist. Some awful meal stale in your stomach.

first draft/ incomplete.