The story...

iiiiiiii ...

forever following the echoes of its own wordless screams, in which the syllabic sighs of death songs are interwoven as whirls within wind. spiraling into ...

... the belly of the abattoir. meat hooks invert from the cavity above. glisten. i hear the ingestions of her. breathless. where machinery & animal meet. where cleavings are. forever. meat altared on the slab beneath circular saws. & bled. with blades now rust. crusted sores now memories. flowing between bloodbricked storeys of the abattoir in lines once red. now coagulated. into memories. feeding into the intestinal glut of this mechanical beast. an animal. the outline of bones. inside. fractured tiles. a splintered carcass. obscured. inside a lurid wash of bodily secretions. & digestions. of phantasmagorical pieces of an undead animal. gorged on gore. falling beneath the butcher's blade. waiting where chains weighted. in the wings. beatings. stilled. distilled. into bloodclouded dreams where sheep counted. bloodlines of bewildered beasts. in their own stench.. smelling the heated iron odour of death. with the ironic taste of blood. nucleused. in memory. the cellular structure of cages. anatomies once. opened. displaying new bile. bodies. seg[men]ted. tapeworm trauma entering entrails. dead ends. in vein life. valved. the edges of wounds. blooddrains. hoses nozzled. hanging after washing. baptisms of blood. heartless. the liver in death. intestinally protracted torture. chambers. the slaughter-house a place of fading lights. lives.

orificed. opening. fissures in fleshfabric. extremities streaming. rivers & the riven. the silent. screaming. godriven. for carnages untold. dismembering. pulleys. all the leavers. all. the blood. all. remembering membranes pierced. braindead. pieces falling. apart. the game. jig-sawed memories. coagulating into the image of...

...phieda. fondly known as the memory collector to her few undead acquaintances. shuffling absently back & forth across the barren brickwork she appears to be a rather elderly spinster of sorts, complete with gossamer hair of a purplish hue. just the colour of twilight. intricately woven into a cocoon-shaped oblong like candy floss, it grandiosely adorns her grandmotherly face. a face at once managing to seem both sickly & sweet, almost like a grimacing black forest cake. the face of a voluptuary so debauched that all of life's pleasures seem to have flagrantly solidified beneath the facial skin drooping dementedly about her mucoused mouth. she falters momentarily, as if suddenly spellbound in fathomless thought, then resumes her shuffling. even her pale eyes protruding perilously from their swollen sockets seem so saturated with carnal images that they threaten to burst from their backdrop of depravity in a fecund flood awash with the fluids of fornication. her smile, however, is quite beautiful to behold. unless, at some point of her murderously slow movement, she appears to be looking straight at you as you hang there in half-shadow, transfixed. when it looks like she wants to kiss you. on the mouth. like she kissed the ragman.

once more she becomes motionless, remembering. saliva seeps between the fracid folds of her bloated body distending beneath the grotesquerie of her fanged face. she shudders, the reverberations of her pendulous bulk going unnoticed as she recalls with distaste how his memories tasted. how for weeks he had ridden the railroads, shivering night after night in a freight car filled with garlic. alone with his phial of fluids a shade darker than violet. how he had hungered. & tasted. & how she had so easily embraced him. kissed him. drunk deeply from his well of memories. a well filled with the spirit of metholated garlic.

memories ... their bodies meet ... memories of memories ... are cloven ... memories. a vast network of varicose veins spider webbed beneath her translucent skin seems to darken almost imperceptibly for a moment. a trick of the light, perhaps. or the vermillion manifestations of an illusory soul.

memories of memories. lifespans of transience. remembered. dismembered. ingested & all too soon forgotten. sometimes regurgitated, like the memories of the sick man. crawling into the belly of the abattoir with his foetal thoughts to die. thoughts of mother. suckling. of his wife & her poisoned milk. the taste of bitter almonds. losing himself in the labyrinths of his dying mind. arriving always at dead ends where his wife waited with a glass of milk. just like mother. smiling as she kissed him. with her mouth. tasting bitter almonds. feeling not healthy at all.

sometimes she ate the whole body. out of nostalgia. relived recent memories of her meal whenever the tapeworms turned in the entrails ; twisted beneath her teeth. consumed their memories of consummation. she watched them in intestinal glut, whitely writhing. the colour of milk. the colour of the sick man’s mind as she cradled him in her arms & kissed him with feeling. no, not healthy at all.

she wipes absently at her cavernous, wet, drooling mouth loosely wrapped around a false set of fanged dentures, mourning the fact that she can no longer feed on food of substance. memories are her lifeblood. fondly, she recollects the cannibal.

how she enticed him to the slaughter-house like a charnel fly to the promise of freshly flayed flesh. seducing him with the scent of glistening secretions, as moist as the orificed furls of unfolding flowers. remembering how she fed, ingesting his memories of ingested flesh. the first tender moment of his expressing undying love for his sweetheart by eating her. alive. feeling her still-beating heart slithering sinuously into his intestines. tasting her tears. the caress of her fingers beneath his skin. flesh of his flesh. blood of his blood. forever. or at least until the next bowel movement. his inhumane cravings feeding her desire to feed upon her own kind.

her appetite whet with images of all the blood, phieda shifts her bloatedness in a shapeless ballet -  shadow-work bisects blood-stained brick at weird angles - shuffling to a standstill at the centre of the slaughter-house. drools. distils her hunger into one desire. the forbidden feast. a menstrual apple.

..

hanging in the filigree like an overripe fruit it watches the vampire: undead death waiting in the wings. it has followed phantom bloodlines to this place. to feed. on all the blood. the blood, all ...

crusted with cobwebs it falls. a wet sound splashes sensurround, covering the walls with crimson echoes ... weeps from circular saws ... floods forth like spilled memories from the ruptured skin of remembrance. a wound, luridly washed with watercolours of a homicidal hue. an embrace of appendages, an arachnidan waltz of fatal fumblings. the dance of death, or something familiar with flirtations with forever. intimate. closer than blood. which stains the slabwork. lapping at the cracks & fissures, tides torturously turning. sucking gluttonously at ruts split asunder. filled. drained. blood rains rippling like the body of a very fat old lady. dancing.

the shuffle stops. only an occasional twisting limb intrudes upon the gloom. even the sound slows its alliterative ambulation, settling sedately into a series of satisfied slurpings. they seep throughout the vampire’s cranial vault, mingling with the odours of anatomical severance. the reek of rent carcasses leaking their liquids, the insidious stench of rot. of dead animal pieces & strangely enough, dessert. of cherry pie. of black forest cake & candy floss

of apples.

so many flavours, so many memories. it digests them all as it stretches over the corpse, feeding.

iiiiiii ...

echoes. the eyes of the animal blind in light. flying the surreal skies it sees shapes in sound. movement in distortion. vibrations fix for it the location of life in the twilit topography which it traverses. to feed. sightlessly apprehending the minute twitchings of insects as they skitter between twigs & leaves. perceiving the brailleform of worms as they flinch  in their gossamer dreams. knowing space only as the distance between its mouth & the recipients of its wordless screams. & filling that fissure in the fabric of reality with its bat body. an assemblage of anatomical impossibilities, it is not the epitome of beauty. not quite a beast. neither bound in brutehood to dust nor unfettered in feathered fleshflight. weaving its warm-blooded way between heaven & hard ground in a grey-flower limbo of silhouettes & cold suns. unaware of the chimerical nature of its creation. until it is ...

... a reflection. mirrored. void of expression. a whole where there are only holes. filled with nothing. icy. faces. lined with gilt. a horrible geography of contours. expressing original sin. filling the fleshframes. androgynously unfulfilled. their worn masks genetically made up. in colours. that they are not. distorting. the image all. the lovers’ knot. joining at impossible angles. intertwined. in dust. initially. the shapes of the mirror. scaffolding illusions. shapeshifts therein. the truth lies in mirrors. in finite framework. wherein hangs nothing. with mirrors distorting. morphic metamorphoses. from dust to dust. clustered like grapes. twisted clothing. the scene. undressing the unseen. hearts & pulsating extremities. with blood in-between. flooding. fluid reflections of broken membranes. where breeding twins. images. trysted in pornographic detail. a look in glass. houses. wanderlandsand castles in the air. where bewildered the fairground girl walks. with her double. vision. the distortions of emptiness. fulfilling. the lover’s reflection. the other inside. the other. circles of spun glass. shining. light curves pregnant with meaning. inseminating nuclei. spiraling. forever between two. others mercurially fixated. eyes fool. filled. i see. the illusion of imagery. see in nothing. primally screaming. wordlessly.

narcissistic echoes. sound. a cross. lifespans of reproduction. reflecting a midnight peacock with a thousand & one i’s. its sable plumes all embracing ...

...h.p. eaton. an immaculately dressed “gentlewoman” conforming to the typical vampire stereotype in appearance, who rather fancies hirself as “the lover”. she stands before a mirror, preening. hir long black cape sweeps dramatically out behind hir, its ends curling in the dust. intricately, she applies make-up to hir gothic features, going to great lengths not to smear it on hir somber suit. dressing is hir favourite pastime. almost. finding new skin to slip into is better. its so... satisfying. it is scented seductions, starting in the dressing room & climaxing in an embrace of bodies. undressed. it is wet sounds after dark, those wordless shrieks of ecstasy. or otherwise. it is penetrating the unknown, gliding back & forth velvetly where the moon is a bloated womb. & it is so much more.

but sometimes they come to hir. like last night, quietly sneaking their filthy fleshframes, pulsating moistly with mingled juices, into the abandoned house of mirrors. giggling. thinking how bizarre it would be to do it here, amidst a carnival of contortions. she showed them. the depraved beasts. rutting, their laughter like high-pitched squeals to hir ears as they writhed in the dust. moaned, their sweating bodies rearing towards infinity.

glistened with the secretions of ecstasy. then shuddered, eyes bulging as they saw their own deaths. thousands of them, each a picture not so pretty at all. rather like visions of metamorphoses, stripping them of their nubile beauty. peeling back the layers, exposing them for what they were. animals. staring wide-eyed at their own disfiguration. mirrored. in each other. too drained to scream, to move, to breathe. perishing at the climax of their lives. two, drained.

the lover admires hir new body. fondles the firm flesh. feels the elasticity of hir new breasts, stretching towards infinity. strokes hirself. they really shouldn’t have come. it was courting death.

she laughs, & hir laughter is a cluster of grapes, fruity & full of double meanings. satirical. intoxicating. like forbidden fruit oozing with the juices of sexuality. it is a very knowing laugh indeed, ripe with the promise of carnal revelations. titilatingly tempting. & ageless.

& still laughing, she reflects on the twins. how she saw them in the dark. incestuously trysting together in a lovers’ knot. lying face to face. then changing, one inverted in relation to the other. blood relations. sexual relations. smearing each other with their secretions. staining their skin with the mark of the beast. covering each other, themselves, like animals. wild creatures of the field growing more & more depraved. & loving it. & it loving them. how she embraced them, intertwined, feeding off their energy. sucking at their suckings. tasting their bad taste, their kisses. receiving them as they gave, until spent, she was them. leaving them white-haired & staring, their mouths open, breathless. looking into infinity, & beyond. forever.

the lover pauses, hir make-up half-completed, gaping into the mirror in which she cannot see hir own reflection. she watches nothing, yawning abysmally, then notices the initials inscribed in dust upon the surface of the looking glass. circled with a heart they stare back at hir. a.e. they remind hir of alice. fair alice. hir first girl. kneeling in the dirt with her floral dress hitched up over her thighs, masturbating. hir eyes closed & her mouth opened. sighing wordlessly.

feeling. the warm blood staining her fingertips. unseeing, touching her lips. tasting the flow of salt, just like tears. the tears inside. her wound obscured by the essence that flowed from within. tainting her flesh, her belly like a blood-red moon, hanging full with the pregnant promise of fertility. a lifespan of reproduction. of vital energy, enthusing alice’s body as she reached orgasm with her fingertips, laughing. wordlessly as her sighs, her silent screams. naming her lover.

insatiable.

recalling alice she invokes hir desire. the only one open to hir, calling hir. reaching out to embrace hir. to kiss hir. with its mouth. its whole body. enticing hir. baring itself to hir, nakedly tempting hir. because it was the one thing forbidden to hir. the unwritten law. a cluster of grapes, luring hir to feed. to drink deeply from its undead energies. to see hirself, at the moment of orgasm, in another’s eyes. another lover. screaming wordlessly.

..

suspended in the framework of the ancient house it watches the lover. hir make-up is applied in pornographic detail: vulval lips drip suggestively scarlet, cheeks blush with the hues of promiscuity, stretches of white flesh are puckered with purple in all the right places. in hir scents...

death. erotic as cleavage it falls: a gaping chasm, blacker than peacock plumes at midnight, casting no reflection. embracing the vampire with wordless laughter it grasps at clothing, exposes swollen protrusions, recesses of reproduction. of organic pleasure. it pants throatily, reveling in primal lubricity. skin slides over skin. tongues lick seductively, snake around flushing fruits of the flesh. orifices open, liquids spill on contorted bodies, spread like the branches of an ancient tree, the shade of wine. a blood vessel bursts. it drinks. lungs fill. thirsting for vitality, threshing flesh is rictused in mounting ecstasy.

life. orgasm. death.

with half-moon eyes it watches the creature change, mercurially. images melt like dust into mirrors. reflecting nothing... & everything.

iiiiii...

shades shift, worming weirdly in the gloam where the bat hangs from a tree. evenlight seeps subtly downwards, cloaking the ground in spectral obscurity. enprismed in foliage & flowers, colours flaunt their worn splendour. a leaf falls, darker than green. the petals of an indigo violet fold inwards, wrapping, like batwings around a somnolent fleshform. insects trill. in the sepia spill silhouettes sway, gaunt figurines in a play of light. shadowcast. the bat shifts, settles. ianthine wisps of rising mist hue the chill air. sound sounds purple. the wind blue. slitherings chameleon. silence kaleidoscopes like the vampyrotechnics of a dying sun. twilight unfolds the plumes of a jewel-bird. shades shift, becoming...

...the art of galleries. torturously twisting through cranial chambers. i taste. grotesque textures. alluring. fleshsculptures swaying in this place of hanging. babies frothing with rabies. suspended from the ceiling. life-like portraits of coitus interruptus. punctuating skewers in straight lines. the death cell. a viral inflection. lisping on the side sinister. foot irons buckling. straps of straight-jackets whipping confessions from nun. kicking the habit. needling taboo fetishes eyelashed with addictive aesthetics. skinning skin. stretching thin on the drawn rack. a malnourished venus. flytrap mentality. sketched vaguely. amorphous mass. candles with brimstone butterfly wings. framing scaffolds of flesh. artistically interpreted dictionaries. abbreviated moments truncated in spinal photography. still life. foetused in toilet bowls. flushed with watercolours like twilight abstractions. unred comic strips of flesh. eye bags of blood. apprehended in stained glass. sheets painted with the after-images of lovers. folding into each other like ink-blot sheep. embodying butcherslaughter. the cutting edge of insanity. balancing on tenterhooks. serpentined. scale drawings of blood. burroughs. of worms turning. to meat surreal seagulls. in the sanguine proportions of men. worshipping jackal-headed gods.

mythologically thinking along apollonian lines. etching. bisecting tables. instrumenting gynaecology. the art of appreciation. a double-headed beast. bellowing fire. consuming tasteful sprays of flowers. erasing gravestone rubbings. a brush with death. woman with fruit. canvassing mindscapes. the impressions of finger-painting children. sacrificed ears. listening to the fearful screaming at the sound of their own screams. demented drawings of breath & subsequent quarterings. a cubist god in a box...

...the aesthete. encoffined in the mausoleum of a prestigious surrealist artist, sadly now exsanguinated, it exists solely to gorge itself on aesthetics. of places. & other things. an amorphous mass of shapeshifting sentience, it has existed for centuries by extracting the essence of that which is alluringly unique. inhabiting it. becoming that which becomes it. then using its substance to feed. & being a most appreciative & intellectual creature, it is particularly fond of art.. especially the galleried grotesqueries of geniuses with a tendency towards the macabre. the fatal attraction of death, & victims, enthralls it. inspires it like the casket it now embodies. emblazoned with melted clockwork, the hands permanently fixed in a point in time just past the eleventh hour. resting in a wooden peace framing the contorted works of the rotting artist with horrific finality. but the time of thirst is upon it again. the corpse is desiccated, & long since have the colours faded from the oiled jaws of 'the man-trap'

dried bloodstains splattered the metal frame of the painting with a particular charm of their own, but it was one all too familiar. for the aesthete, perhaps, but obviously not for those bewitched admirers who shuffled closer to view the jagged detail of rustily lustring pine trees hanging heavy with coppery cones over the outstretched arms of a bronzed woman. too close. the fantastically filigreed brasswork on the coffin tremors as it tastes again the anticipation with which it waited. suspended in silver & steel eternity with baited breath. a surrealistic assemblage of aesthetically pleasing psychosis & teeth. wordlessly mouthing the language of temptation.

& feeding.

as it needs to feast again. the sepulchral gloom is enthused with an alien life of its own as the aesthete’s thirst for a fleshframe of quintessential beauty ripples outwards. seeking a scaffolding reminiscent of that which it acquired in the waxworks. where it twisted its sentience into the fibers of rope, twining around itself like a moebian serpent. in the hanging room.

where individuals paid for the privilege of slipping into that infamous noose. with a myriad of involuntary bodily spasms. indrawn breath, never exhaled. abbreviated words, lives. with black-faced asphyxiation. & yes, with blood. always with blood.

staining the sky with shades on the far side of the spectrum, the aesthete emerges from the mausoleum, groping its way towards the gallery. the ethereal wash of its passage pictorially punctuates the air with the after-images of bats, dyeing. penetrating the inner sanctuary of the artwork house, it thirstily searches for a fleshhold. like a still life, which does just that. it pauses at a painting entitled 'the virus' maniacal swirls & projections protrude from the canvass in psychedelic detail. surrounding it an elastic frame of synthetic skin is stretched. it ponders the possibilities. of penetration. inhabiting hosts off which it could feed at a cellular level. distorting the structure of nuclei. mutating them. becoming them. & them it: the death cell. ingenious. closer to creation than blood. a molecular metaphor, but too contagious. it had worn the mask of genocide before, animating the artistry of a painter who became the single-testicled father of a nation. & scourge of another. painting apocalyptic pictures with fire.

the aesthete thirsted for something more personal than nuclear destruction.

its gloom intensifies as it is confronted with an etching of egyptian afterlife. anubis presides at the scales where souls are balanced with feathers. the twilit creature desires not to play god with insubstantial spirits. its hardly as good as the real thing. it moves on.

'the virgin'. engraved immaculately in stone she statuesquely stands with arms of forgiveness outstretched. her stained-glass gaze seems to penetrate the shadowshift, blazing with an inner ghost-light. her smile is gentle, veiled. as is her womanly form, cupped within the fluid cone of her swirling shroud. inviolate. an atmosphere of impenetrable sexuality seethes around her alabaster skin. incensed, it seeps beneath her dress. embraces her ecstatically. beads her breast. becomes the icon of virtue that she is. amidst the massed aesthetics of temptation. where it knew the nosferatu flocked. to worship that which symbolized their eternal lives. nocturnal lives. half-lives of deaths relived in shadowland. a land of hungers. of the flesh. & the blood. all the titillating, satiating, slippily elusive, intoxicating, wetly warm blood. which pulsed purest in a vestal vessel.

the untouched. she who is religiously devoted to keeping her temple veil unrent. the virgin.

..

it has come to this place of appreciation in an attempt to admire its own aesthetics. a vampirical consummation. its desire. embodied in the art of another. awaiting...

the bells toll, & it is in the tintinnabulation of their knell, rising in reverberating swirls, only to settle in silence upon the shoulders of the girl. it is in a bloodflux of colours, paletted upon cold stone. it is in an innocent drawing. this death. it is in inkwells, the fathomless flow of poets. in dreamscapes, wallpapered with the dreamless ones who twist not their imaginations to see the collages that spill in surreal rivers over the fading fabric of reality. pencil-crayoned psychoses of children scribbled in church aisles, saying the song words a schizophrenic god sings to hirself, in fragments. it is in fragments, the art of eating oneself & never knowing until only the mouth is left. until it is not, leaving only the impression of a solitary observer, drenched in the aesthetics of its own aloneness.

iiiii...

pipistrelle. the song of the bat slivers the silence as airborne it weaves between greenery & dead leaves in a wickerwork world of sticks & their exaggerated projections. glimpsed against the gibbous moon it is an ink stain of illusions, spelling out the scripts of shadowplays as it flits over white & into half-light. fades in shade. re-emerges like a second coming. or futures of fecundity seen in dead-cell seepage from a menstrual womb. a curse. purpurfargade ansiktet.  in the ancient rom,  tongue of the gypsies, it is a child of the night-flowers. seeded in fleshsoils flaccid. blooming on the fracid blood of the twilight realm. living a half-life of hungers, of strange spillings & stranger refillings. a varsel, a changeling whose terrible beauty is the fall of a severed orchid into a sea of fluid mercury. or, to some, a dubbuk. a demon to be exorcised from within...

... the labyrinthine mind of the asylum. where talismen in white coats ward off in-spiring dreams of the godchurch persona with straight-jacketed heads. minotaun between confronting the monster within or shackling it without. seeing the metaphoric butterflies with inkblot eyes. reflectively playing psychiatrics with cognition. the elemental units of esoteric shock therapy. burning temples. the neural bridges between. spirit. & matter. padding in cells. empty as skyclad thoughts. drooling mindlessly. whispering in sane spells of treatmentality. the schizophrenic charm of doctors. hydeing in sanatoriums. the beasts turning to their creators only to be issued with fool’s-capped declarations of certifiability. instituted by mind-surgeons wielding electricity & rubber mouth-bits. strapped to rocking-horse memories of childhood. abuse. of mind-altaring medication. madcapped in transparent containers. of vial thoughts. encapsulating psychedelic visions of razor-toothed apertures in wombs spawning crustaceans with foolmoon faces in lunar seas. furtively nurturing freudian slips taken from the tree of life. to extremities. the familiar & the unknown...

...a nameless thing. being a sublime travesty of the natural order to which it is oblivious, this hideous beast slumbers at the threshold of imagination, padded in the heads of catatonic inmates of arkham asylum. all former occultists. seditiously its tentacles caress the scar-tissue of a recent lobotomy. its latest residence. it hisses syllibantly, loud enough only for the silently screaming inmate to hear. in his mind. where ritual incantations which opened gateways to other dimensions are as inhumed seeds, lying dormant where once they sprouted verdantly, growing into esoteric trees only to bear strange fruit. terrible fruit. the ectoplasmic variety thriving so abundantly in those twilit realms where the ineffably ugly thing fed. & from whence it enticed other things into reality, past doorways which they returned with pieces of occultist in their mouths. & other nebulous orifices. vital pieces. like the cognitive structures which kept one from screaming uncontrollably.

slithering appreciatively into a discomforting panorama of nightmares, the entity thinks of the necromancer’s top hat. how it crowned his regal head, hanging tangled with lank tendrils of sable hair, with hollow dignity. a most spacious & charismatic hat, although somewhat battered.

a fitting abode for something with a medusa-like mass of multi-suckered appendages to secrete itself in. occasionally twitching, it thinks of some of the fragments they found gibbering at the graveside knee-deep in freshly turned turf. of others they didn’t. ones mangled beyond recognition as they were dragged through impossible portals in space & time by something best left nameless. least it return. to play the game. settled now in its spongy grey chamber, the creature contentedly remembers its undead life with the resurrection man. who drooled all the way to this asylum. who beseeched, then screamed incessantly for his hat. which was quite alright with its crustacean-like occupant. it had found a new home.

the tentacled tenant abided in its black-carpeted apartment until the time of the hunger came upon it again. sliding moistly from its confines, it discovered the presence of a peculiar species of prey in the sanatorium. stalking the white-corridored maze of unexpected twistings & turnings, it stumbled upon the very real manifestations of psychosis. the ectoplasmic eyeballs of paranoia. ethereally winged figments of the imagination. thus begun the game.

it would dormantly lie dreaming in the deadzone of someone’s head, waiting while the monstrous denizens of madland bred & multiplied in their padded foam paradise. growing fatter off the fertile flux of lunar seas. squirming & salivating like their straight-jacketed creators. contorting foolmoon faces into the masks of hysteria as they shed invisible skin, metamorphosising into ink-blot butterflies which pierced with pallid proboscises the cortical membranes of brains. injecting anti-coagulants into thoughtscapes. then sucking. as a thing without a name would suck them. through sickle-toothed apertures in its amorphously shifting tentacles. after playing with them. vicious mindgames which sent their bleeding sentiences squealing down the labyrinthine passages of the madhouse. always to dead ends. where frenetically it would ingest juices rich with the psychic flotsam of psychotically cluttered lives. spent drowning in the kaleidoscopic maelstroms of their own drool. & occasionally, succumbing to the incomprehensibly alien callings of its shiftless existence, it would vacate the vacuous headspaces of the asylum, & scuttle its cuttlefished form towards the pentagrammed world of dabblers in the dark arts. forever to return, encrypted in the cranial vault of an occultist. to play.

but there was a time, during the gestative period of its evolution, when it had not relied on the human animal for its sustenance. or used its brainscape as a temporary dwelling in the course of its nomadic existence. before mankind it was. & after the extinction of the puny species, it would be. timelessly. unencumbered by fetters of the flesh. of matter. feeding as it did ere primitive hominids fabricated with foetal simplicity the gateways through which they expelled the ancient one from the physical realm. appointing it to that which exists apart from, yet paradoxically a part of, the arc of the space-time continuum, accessible only through ritualistic re-enactment of certain aspects of the primal story genetically imprinted in mortal make-up. aspects ultimately interwoven with the transports of ecstasy, which facilitated passage to the realm of that creative dynamic which spawned the thing with no name. to which it would now return, to cannibalistically feast at the womb of its progenitor. from which it would in time be reborn, incarnated with corporeal cravings. the period of incubation was almost upon it. but first it needed to feed. where unique punctures in the fabric of things were made in a ritual peculiar to that nightbrood of which it was one.

the vampire.

..

unobserved it sights the bloodsucker. dribbling desire animates the mythological mass that masquerades as its body as the nameless one squirms amongst scarred neural networks charred by electric shock therapy. smelling of fruitcake, slightly overdone. full of...

pustular eruptions blister & burst, cascading from temporal lobes like crepuscular visions of a turbulent sea, its surface disturbed by the frenzy of an unseen creature feeding in cyclic ebbs & tides of liquid lunatic smiles sliding over rocking-horse patterned cribs filled with lashing fairy-tails untold as morbid cysts seeping from mental cases of skin & bones are thrown in divinatory dementia together with tarot card houses of fools falling into the fanged abyss where nothingness is the midwifery of witches spawning themselves in roe-mania reflected as ripples of storytime blood flooding the asylum floor. staining the limpid corpse of a vampire. & the wing-tips of another.

iiii...

beating like thin sticks on the skin of a funeral drum batwings carry the creature in its broken flight over the dusk-cloaked dustscape. jagging suddenly to the side sinister, it silences the shrill whirrings of insects in a cluster of thistles, spilling hidden liquids in calligraphical detail upon anonymous leaves. then for a spell its frenetic flutterings become the curving black letters of a child’s scribbling against a slate-grey background of in-betweens as it spirals senselessly over no-man’s-land tangles of rambling rosegrowth. & still its wings beat. conveying a bag of blood over alien terrain. its movement as transient as the eerie passings to & fro of a ghost lost in machinery. the anatomical mechanisms of its motion beating like...

...the heart of clockwork. thrumming with a rhythmic vibration. animating the minute. machinery of cognition. the wheels within. wheels turning. tides of purple blood. picturesquely depicting the transience of twilight. that taboo interspace between sun & moon. where fleshfetish fantasies wear halowe'en masks. made of glass. milk-bottle sentiment. twisted like empty candy wrappers. encapsulating the void of reason. meticulously measured in moments of madness. the moth-faced manifestations of inflamed thoughts. lustring in cells of dust. mortally coiled. wellsprings of youth. winding. like arterial vines serpentined over playground fences. ringing. the bell's knell. spelling lessons of longevity. its corporeal expression evolving out of the multitudinous deaths of mankind. the stairwell being wrought with contorted meaning. in spires. spiraling moonwards. where the cuckoo flew. over morphean dreamscapes of dust. clustered in sandpiles for hourglass-figured girl-children to play in. forever. eyeless foetuses secreted inside grandfather timepieces by a chronos-eyed insomniac. psychedelically stippled like a finger-painted fruitbat. flapping across the pastel-hued horizons of a child's imagination. where fields of passion fruit are the feasts of puppets. suspended on strings. genetically twisted into the hunchbacked form of...

...father time. a very old man, he staggers distractedly around the bell-tower, waiting for the clock to sound the hour. countless reverberations have taken their toll. a shock of strikingly white hair winds chaotically about his haggard features, highlighting midnight eyes depthlessly sunken within sagging skin spiraled with centuries of wrinkling. as he myopically squints into the gathering gloom a facial

tick

momentarily glyphs his features. forms senseless expressions of phantasia instantaneously fading nonsensically into nothingness. the curse of chronology.

or the result of living forever between extremes beneath the arc of the pendulum. a sickle smile on his lips, he listens.

the nursery school is nestled behind the tentative outgrowth of granadilla tendrils scribbled across a playground fence. cradled in quietude criss-crossed with obscure insect thrummings, the crèche is settled in a pastel-hued semi-slumber. which is intermittently disturbed with the solitary meanderings of wind-driven leaves, or flapping scatterings of bats. night approaches, encroaches.

& with its fairytale onflow, perhaps someone who... who has a few moments. he knows he need only ask. like he asked the milkman.

who spilt. who suddenly slipping in pools of himself felt the split-seconds of his milk-bottle life dripping from apertures rapaciously opened in his pale skin. seeing the mortality of anatomy within. glimpsing a flicker-book god reflected in shards of shattered glass. the moon in milk.

fragmented

his insular existence scattered about his forlorn form. fallen. as it devolved. dissolved.

in a trickle. the sound of cellular seepage. organ music. sonorously flowing in synchronistic symphonies over the foetal fleshling floating alone between rows of bottles. undelivered.

the placental form gentled from waters then dark. sentimentally wept over. kept in a grandfather clock. forever.

his features flicker as he remembers his youth. newly infused with time. fading always. in a ripple of wrinkles. which once & once again

tick

tocsin. the song of clockwork. shockingly loud. ringing, ringing, bringing him abruptly back to his restless reality. from where, lost in embryonic reverie, he was, agelessly. orchestrating rituals with machinery.

startled, as he invariably is at bell-toll despite his meticulous measurement of moments, his consuming obsession with punctuality, he jerks upright in puppet-like animation. the tangled-string profusion of laughlines that is his face knots. twists itself into a caricature of paranoia. just like the mask the candyman wore.

halowe’en. when witches wove fantastical tapestries with broomstick looms below a changeling moon. when girl-children capering in crimson were wolf. when the friendly man came out to play with his psychoactive sweet-bag full of magickal treats. smiling. behind his mask.

& yes, of course he had a moment for the old man. he had all the time in the world. but wouldn’t granddad first like a fruit pastel? or some candy? all different flavours. very different. ha ha. he gave all the kiddies some. & weren’t we all children at heart?

ha ha. his laughter was the transience of sentience, the wingspan of thoughts, a pendulum in a void. relative only to itself, & [of course] all the blood. which, before the hollow echoes of his hilarity had faded, psychedelically stippled the smiling man. who was no longer smiling. of course. ha ha.

just bleeding. metamorphic moments. encapsulated. his ageless form. a twisted wrapper. an empty bag of blood-flavoured sentiment. sucked like sweets.

feeding time.

immortally coiling the cogs of a clock. an amniotic occupant. behind glass. doors opened. exposing the inner workings. hiding the flesh. pastime.

a sweetmeat secretion. glistening. like a falling teardrop. the victim of an unexpected

tick

or treat. he is never certain. fondling leathery wings, the vampire ponders for an instant. there are always those who ignore the curfew. the nightwalkers. & yes, their tiny deaths do satisfy him. momentarily.

& of course there are the children. he is especially fond of children. but not in a grandfatherly way. in other... unspeakably carnal ways. as the staircase girl found out, in a dreamy moment of

dust. there was so much dust covering the pretty iron flowers on the stairwell railing. so easy to draw pictures in, as she followed the spiraling vines upwards. towards the little room at the top. being careful not to let any get on her dress. the one with ripening fruit on it. the purplish kind, just like the colour of the sky at bedtime. which was soon, but didn’t the light look so pretty as it filtered weakly through the windows above. where the tiny room was. where there was more dust to scribble in. where

the sandman wanted to play with her. she didn’t see him at first. then a fluid movement near the roof caught her eye. & all of a sudden he was there next to her. covered in dust. & yes, it was true that he could fly. she could fly too, if she wanted to. if she took off all her clothes. & let him touch her. where

passion fruit prints raggedly patterned the floor. upon which, puddled in placental fluids, a very old man fondled the foetal remains of his hunger-lust & thought of the innards of timepieces. where things

tick

of course. there was only ever one desire. to feast on those fruit fraught with the seeds of time. blood relations. the lovers of longevity. unraveling arthritic wings the vampire grimaces, then zig zags jaggedly moonwards. the night is young, & the subtle scent of granadilla blooms perfumes the air.

..

suspended like a pendulum in space it awaits. in that ethereal interzone between sun & moon. where silence is the pause between heartbeats. the breathlessness of flight. death on dark wings. circling. circling. circling. & falling.

iii...

fleshflapping. floating groundwards towards greenswards as a blank sheet of paper would. wordlessly.

falling...

falling...

falling...

with membranous wings stretching towards infinity. void of thought. twisting through thin air.

spiraling...

spiraling...

spiraling...

...the navel of imagination. where it is.

 the colour of blood.

red thoughts.

the texture of blood.

the filigreed fabric of loneliness.

the comfort of blood.

unnatural relations.

the movement of blood.

that which exists between eclipse & imagination.

the fluidity of blood.

inspiration.

the taboo of blood.

creative compositions of psychosis.

the essence of blood.

paradox.

the gateway of blood.

a space beyond time.

the realm of blood.

the porphyrial flesh of authenticity.

the substance of blood.

dreams.

the nourishment of blood.

incarnadine metaphors of dust.

the contents of blood.

figments of a fictitious imagination.

the aesthetics of blood.

juxtapositions of schizophrenic personas.

the reason of blood.

fulfillment of matter.

the taint of blood.

sacrificial innocence.

the temptation of blood.

chastity of the rose.

the secret of blood.

menstrual desire, menstrual pleasure, menstrual fulfillment, menstrual guilt & the fruit of suffering.

the feeling of blood.

moons of ecstasy.

the mythology of blood.

sentience.

the sight of blood.

scarlet perception.

the root of blood.

worm-toothed death.

the timelessness of blood.

infinity incarnate.

the illusion of blood.

vines of horological longevity.

the lifespan of blood.

mortality.

the taste of blood.

a sense of chaos.

the scent of blood.

perfumed memories between the petals of a rose.

the remembrance of blood.

birth.

the name of blood.

ineffable.

the silence of blood.

alatheia.

the love of blood.

a mosquito-headed god who is...

...abstract. wondrously winged it flitters from flowershadow to shadow, the musky scent of roses perfuming its body. or bodies, for its flesh is expressed in the form of siamese children of opposite sexes, joined at the navel. the exquisite symmetry of its figure is off-balanced only where gender manifests, which is rare for the creature seems to be in a state of perpetual self-copulation. engaged thus in an act of such intense self-awareness, not even the grotesque reality of its proboscised heads seems to detract from its sense of introspective appreciation. shimmering & shivering deliciously, it glides over silent bedrows, glistening.

the rosegarden is where they walk. the wordless ones. the quiet ones. living like ghosts in a world of crushed petals & dreams. old children, ones who have known what dust is, for they have been living in it for too long. once upon a time it drifted ashore from the depths of a black sea & engulfed them. & now they have forgotten how to play. but not how to scream. inside. which they do, as they tread the red soil of the grounds surrounding the home for autistic children. where coloured balloons droop like deflated hopes & unpaged story-books tell tales of childhood abjection. where something in the shrubbery feeds on the abstract aspects of their suffering.

the concepts which cannot be pencil-crayoned on paper. or scribbled in sand. which cannot be apprehended with any of the senses. those which are related to the colour red. & especially to blood.

hovering over the interwoven grove of rambling roses covering the gazebo at the centre of the garden, abstract is reminded of its occasional acquaintance, the aesthete. how they shared a similar taste in blood. & the familiar taste of it. when kissy wandered amongst the thorns.

bewildered.

lost in that pathless darkland which was her mind, snarled by roots unseen & scratched by branches in-between. a stick figure girl not knowing that the pain she never felt stemmed from an aesthetically pleasing rosebud. covered in blood. hers. streaming in fairytale mazes through the dustscaped dreamland sweeping over her suddenly sleepy body, which coiled anaemically into the foetal position she was eventually found in by the matron.

a woman with the milk-white uniformity of complexion that hints of mindless nurturing & selfless giving.

a woman indistinguishable from any of the multitudinous generic expressions of that which is nature.

a woman bewildered.

a woman who with bloodlines staining the fabric of her dress cradled the old-young cadaver of a forever-sleeping child in her breast as she wove her hysterical way through roses redder than before. wondering. why the bleeding never ceased.

( in the heart of the house... )

a woman whose revelation of the secret of blood drew her from the depths of the garden...

( ...there burnt a fire. before... )

...where passion once enflowered in the form of a girl grew cold as...

( ...its flickering flames... )

...its essence...

( ...there knelt a redheaded child. contemplating. )

...pooled about her knees while she raised stained fingertips to her face...

( that which is... )

...seeing...

( ...abstract.)

...the reality...

( nothing. grasped... )

...of death cupped...

( ...in its hands. )

...in her hands.

(its mind. )

a woman whose thoughts were the things within a pandorean toybox of adult games...

( puzzled. )

...as she returned with her burden to the white walls within which words were unspoken. where dreams gathered dust where in the heart of the house there burnt a fire. where she saw herself reflected in the eyes of a child, its red hair knotted & its mouth rictused in a silent scream as it knelt before an unread comic book of life. glimpsing the abstract. laughing. seeing slit skin spilling...

...blood.

...blood.

...blood. that which is abstract coagulates into the expression of one desire: to feast perpetually on the wormenform fruit of itself...

...blood.

..

within the gazebo wings throb as fiery passions.

where once there was one there is now its reflection. it has come unto this place to feed. on the grounds of blood. the fruit forbidden. the vampires circle. contemplating. that which is abstract.

within the gazebo wings throb as fiery passions.

& then, as dust unto dust, they merge. in a marriage of flesh & blood, & all that it is an expression of. from which one emerges.

& like scattered comic strips of flesh restructured in order, or a puzzle pictured, the fragments are finally pieced...

...together in the apartment of mr. grieves.

wallpapered with one-eyed rocking horses, the attic of the game factory is an assemblage of kindergarten psychosis & dust. puppets severed from their strings genuflect in the post-playtime debris of bored games & abandoned fleshtoys. of ouija planchettes & tarot exhibitions. marbles, lost. of misplaced pieces. laddered snakes. the colour of flamingoes, croquet balls. of solitary knights & blow-up barbie dolls. balloons, too. fading like the shades of a colour-by-numbers sunset. which dapple the vulturine features of the once-trenchcoated man as he contemplates the cracks jigsawed across the ceiling. thinking about the art of killing.

moist. moister. moisture seeps, rivulets, coagulates in the hollow beneath his eye-patch. he thinks not to wipe it away, his hands being where they are. doing what they are doing. but it wasn’t always this way.

there was once upon a time when senseless suffering left the metallic aftertaste of shame in his mouth. whenever he saw the innocents bleeding, their lives spilt in crimson carnage. but that was before his... metamorphosis.

before the twilightsight. the visions. the wings. when he was... one of them. not the creature of carrion he is now. following forever the juggernaut of death as it furrows the fields of men, a swathe of sickled corpses trickling in its wake. now the taste of their blood lingers in his mouth. his life. lifted on wings.

fluttering

his one eyelid is a pandorean nightmare of openings & closings as he thinks of the blood. that anonymous circle of after-dark lifeforms who subscribe to a very exclusive club. one whose mythological members gathered once in a blue moon over drinks darker than damask to mingle with their own kind. one of whom was feeding on the forbidden. as well he knows, for with his shift of shape, of sentience, came the visions. the psychic slide-shows flickering in slow motion within the projection room of his mind, which haunt him with the tantalizing transience of strip-tease ghosts. exposing not the orifices of insemination, but wounds. ruptures in skin. glistening. which he witnesses through the eyes of a bat.

fluttering

about her face the feathery filigree of midnight wings. flickerframing the ineffable truth that she is. k. a raven-haired girl with the lush sexfruit of her lips suggestively slit, a lurid ooze of licentiousness seething within. the seductress. an icon of lust with thin ankles & a smile full of autumnal passions. waiting. to spill. wordlessly she arches her back, her purple-nailed fingertips grasping the flightful air. then the ridiculous sheets beneath her, with their still-life fruit & plastic flower designs. her fingertips claw. feeling surreal skin. slithering inside her like worms in freshly turned turf. wriggling, aware of the mad-bird realm of inhibition stretching above, she thrusts her skyclad thoughts upwards. embracing.

the impossible dimensions of twilight. or nowhere. one would imagine she had just flown in out of nowhere. & she appeared to be returning there. wisps of glume & the hollow husks of windblown leaves patterned her ragged-scattered hair. tattered ends of cloth flapped as black banners about her, wrapped her in their fragments, creating the impression that she was a zone-tripping ecstasy junkie in search of the ultimate experience. which she was. which she had perhaps desired to finally find as she crossed the threshold of...

[ enter freely & of your own will ]

...the bloodvine.

where she seduced the grieve to the cacophonic caterwauling of violins. tarnished candelabras dripped with viscous liquids; her lips with something sweeter than nectar, more sensuous than the moltenform wax that stippled the surface of glass at which they sat. beneath the bloom of a potplanted belladonna, listening in the nightshade to the muted hissings of the full moon menagerie maneuvering in waltztrance around them. some seditiously sipping bloody marys as their somber suits whispered & rustled conspiratorially over the intrigue of underbelly-of-deadthing-pale bodies. dancing. amidst shadowshift vistas of vampiricism swathed in the sepia phosphorescence of indigo half-light. ancient shufflings. the glint of antique brooches at the throats of wearers infinitely older. dry humour on lips often wet. reflecting the tastes of whet minds. forgetting the disillusionment of her lapses into addiction to the more degraded, animalistic pleasures practiced by mankind as she fingered the fragile stem of her rose-patterned goblet & with her violet eyes bewitched the psychic detective in...

the bloodvine.

where he fell in love with the assimilator to the mating-cat wailing of violins. or was it compassion? oblivious to the obvious, he had drunken deeply from the depthless well of her beauty. a skin-thin illusion masking the carnal knowledge she certainly possessed. embodied. a mystery with lipstick. pointedly flicking her tongue over well-polished fangs as she purred words distended with double meanings in the sultry air. where the tendrils of grappling vines groped over the torpid topography of tremendous pitcher-plants, their tumescence tremulous with the internal indignity of fleshthings freshly ingested. hanging gardens. suspended on strings from the bloodred brickwork above. beneath which he allowed himself to be bewitched; as he drowned in the viscous liquids of her violet eyes finding himself at last in...

...his apartment.

naked words on their lips. kissing. telling of desire. very telling.

hers the black berries of the last elusive ecstasy, lust-clustered in the furthest reaches of the twilight zone, their alien atropia secreted behind the weird doorway of the undreamed. & her, searching for centuries. for he who had the final key for the portal which opened onto the grove of godhood.

his the wormenform fruit of knowledge, hanging heavy with the sickly sweet scent of slowly rotting sap faintly perfuming the air. & him a fruitbat.

naked words on their lips. kissing. telling of desire. very telling. like a lurid slash of cherry-flavoured lipstick on skin.

the once-trenchcoated man embraces the flowergirl, the arc of her belly a blood-red moon hanging full with the promise of fertility against his. the fluidity of their movement possesses a terrible beauty, like a white orchid floating on a seething sea of mercury. their shapes merge timelessly, trysting together in a lovers’ knot. lying face to face. then changing, one inverted in relation to the other. circumscribing a circle.

skin slides over skin. tongues lick seductively, snake around flushing fruits of the flesh. orifices open, liquids spill on contorted bodies, spread like branches of an ancient tree, the shade of wine. shapes merge timelessly, stretching suicidally into each other. becoming one creature at the moment of orgasm

..

& its death is poetry:

a woman of flowers who before the mirror stood

& in its depths fathomless saw fragmented

hir autumnal form in the gardens of godhood

where the anatomy of a feast was reflected

ii...

forever following the echoes of its own wordless screams, the bat spirals inside the attic of the game factory. falling. where piercing the inverted fleshfabric of a naked bed a stake is impaled. rooted in blood. which blossoms from the mouth of an androgynous god who assassinated in schizophrenic lapses its own personas. feasting on the flesh of its flesh. the blood of its blood. leaving it at the end of an infinity of abstracted bloodlines drenched in the aesthetics of its own aloneness. laughing. seeing itself in fragments. the fragments being the story. & in the beginning was one word.

“ i... “