This Darkness Mine by G.R. Yeates

take bad jobs, fuck one way only and drink until we puke out our intestines.
    Good ropey fun.
    Oh, that’s fine.
    Good clean and legal.
    Let me ink an X on my throat.
    Write under it, boot heel to be ground in here.
    This is the life!
    ****** 
    This happens:
    Crying man makes a gun-shape with his hand.
    Sticks the barrel in his mouth.
    Someone shouts “Bang!”
    Does he die?
     ******
    The contradictions fly by, dashing themselves into pieces on the contours of the square, falling to earth, sinking into warm slime. An amoeba lies on the surface, tanning itself thoughtless.
    There is life here. 
    My flesh is borrowed and grows around me. Good disguise for the mayhem migrating through the riot-air. My stolen meat soaks it up. Too dead to notice, it does not twitch. Smelling of an addict’s weak liver, I stroll casually through the carnival-riot.
    We could have touched stars, seen worlds born and burn, woven cascades of nova light into the fantastic souls of our children.
    But no, not to be.
    Instead we have done this.
    Gasoline, petrol and carbon markings around a toxic hole in space. Stumps of brick and mortar poking through and a cracked wine glass drifting by. A tracery of skin crusted with scabs and fatal disease, the last trace of the human race.
     
    A moment of stasis, static and broken connections. Corporate merging. Association by default. Communications fail. All breaks down. Redundancy is rife. Sacking occurs. Unneeded staff shot in the back of the head with a .45 revolver cut from pig iron with a kitchen knife. Brought back to life and set to work. The rest are sacked. In body bags. Black bin liner sacks. Out the back door. In the bins. Children light fires and the bins rocket up into twilight skies, bursting so attractively.
     
    Old people file by. Last of the Great Rioters. Spirit of ‘77. Oh yeah. Age brings back the wisdom of the womb, hated as Alzheimer’s until we forget to(o). All the good, all the bad, all the in-between. Wiped away as lactating arsehole gets wiped clean. Readjust the elastic strap on adult nappies. Feed back on famine-flat teats, milking the whiskey. Drawing strains of a substance with no name. Look at it vacant and hold it up to the light.
    Evaporation process kicks in.
    The young call it angel hair.
    We olds know better.
    Our fossilised cunts on the display racks of the museum. Glass case integrity is compromised by sticky titty-age fingers. The wrinkles, the folds, no longer supple and soft. The gristle and grime well-settled. How I want it to be. Draw out the death-rattle of old age’s pension. Give it to her. Let the dead flies hatch and lie. 
    She’s all parallel lines, missing universal curves. The Round is not sitting on the Square. Music gets in through the papercut tear. Fluttering through from atrophied universes. Pause to listen and hear them verge on collapse. Cockroach-worms nibble at the dimension-line scaffolds crumbling the D-branes. You nibble her toes the same way. There is the intersection point - white-hot - your tongue slips into salt cervical sanctuary. The scaffolds are bleeding stumps of fingers and the old universe, in erosion, deconstitutes itself with heavy, erratic sighs. You hear them as the tyres slip-slide on the motorway. She’s all broken lines, mixing cruddy bits of pain in with the hurt.
    The intersection waits.
    Iron teeth, hungry and torn.
    Put your foot down.
    Take her with you, over the edge.
    Shot of you.
    Going down the cliff.
    A car in flames. 
    Chaos and hermetic burns skin the Ghetto walls, wearing them down into piecemeal studs in the reality septum. So many colours and all of them look black to me. They suck on your finger like stunted foetuses seeking wet titty. They stink of something fungal grown from spoiled cheese, making me, the unwashed mortal, feel like aristocracy. So far, so very Colgate.
    Something is on the other side and that’s why the diggers are in with me, burning singes my nostril hairs down to stumps and holes.