JACK FRANCIS’ ROOM ✼ TASK OO2.
doorways don’t represent opportunity to you, they represent privacy -- you’ve double locked it just to keep your secrets in, even taped the keyhole over lest a prying eye find insight there. should they know where to look, it’s a pan’s labyrnth of intrigue, teeth in a box in a bedside dresser, revolver beneath a floorboard, your memoirs stashed under lock and key. keys take your fancy only when attached to strings -- you’d rather write on the visceral skin of a typewriter than a laptop, still, there’s one in the back of the wardrobe, rarely used, half-forgotten.
oh, the places you will go -- maps with thumb tacks following the plot arc of your flee from fate and pershaps the iron bars, blood on your hands you can’t quite wash out, the deities in oxford plaster smirking down from pinewood bookshelves. chess games, half-complete, you play agaist your intoxicated selves, while lines snorted over holy bible skins, the sound of your late night violin stringing enough to keep the neighbours out of bed. let them howl.
at a glance, it’s the room of an academic, piled high with novels and verse, canvases depicting hauntingly beatuiful women and in some cases, their demise, still dripping oil paint onto newspaper. colour’s never taken your fancy -- you work in shades of white and black, and linger in the grey area -- shades of the earth in browns and greens leak in, but it’s an industrial scene, wooden floorboards ( you ripped the garish carpets up yourself ) and white sheets. some nights you’ll bring a girl back from the floor below, hope she’s rough and claws your skin, find them speckled red in the morning -- yours or hers? it’s hard to tell.