74. Setting a Whisky Fire
I want to talk of origins – of how I stood between the doors of Heaven – and of Earth – chose carefully and walked through. The change was seamless – like a tree fattening through its centuries.
Naked on the frost-skinned soil I argued with a field of rooks running circuits in a flooded ditch screaming for my tongue to be ripped out.
I became the breaker of demonic codes seeing every word as evidence of ancient cants, conspiracies an auspex drunk on secrets from the sky..
Embering dusk-light put signs in soft relief: constellations pecked by hens – the freckles on a barn owl’s face – pulse-clouds of starlings shoaling in the bloody currents of the winds.
When midnight came inside my father’s house I burnt my little finger down to bone. It didn’t hurt, it’s never healed – an alchemist, he tried to turn my burns back into words.
I poured myself a whisky fire – lay burnt and drunk – becoming something – and then nothing on the floor. In the end I took his pill – falling steeply into sleep.
Morning came like polaroid blue and green. Yellow peonies held us both on course until he stopped, and by the sundial told me what I’d always hoped was true.
Then two genial healers questioned me with gravity and smiling eyes. To send me back they needed two – by law it’s always two.
And I remember almost nothing else just the buzzing of a yellow sun the smell of poisons from the car that drove me quickly to that place
And how I blazed down arc-lit corridors and spat at rings of green-scrubbed men with acid drops in needles from their caravans of mind-detangling spice.
And how I asked the strangest question “What is yellow, green, and what is blue?” They are colours – words – they fade – with time,
28th July 2019