—–
He’s nearer the place where he thinks he saw the red. He pauses and looks around.
A few yards away, to his left: a little girl.
He’s never seen her before, but she’s familiar. She carries a basket and wears a red coat with a hood.
Am I the wolf? he thinks.
The idea that he might be the wolf in the story makes Mon anxious. He doesn’t feel qualified. He has neither the teeth nor the energy.
The girl doesn’t move. Her smile appears arch, but he can’t be sure.
He can’t be the wolf; she’s not scared.
Mon decides to ignore the girl and keep walking.
—–
After a time he looks back, but can’t see her.
The forest, like the plot, thickens.
—–
The more he considers it, the more he’s irritated at the thought that he’s in a hackneyed mythical forest.
—–
Mon whiles away the time by thinking up metaphors.
The trees are the bars of a prison.
The trees are the wolf’s teeth.
The trees are words.
If the trees are words, the forest is the story.
What does that make Mon? Punctuation? He has an affinity for the question mark.
If Mon is a question mark, where should he place himself? He can’t read the language of the trees.
—–
Walking still.
The uniformity of the forest is unpromising. Which way is out? Which way deeper in?
Every story needs a path.
—–
He sits on a stump.
It becomes fractionally darker, or so it seems.
Mon thinks about the knight, palely loitering in the poem.
Memories of books and pencils and words scratched into wood drag him into sleep.
—–
Mon dreams of the forest.
—–
Mon finds himself awake. He looks around. The forest is still there. But it is different. The trees look flat. Or maybe it isn’t the forest that is different. Maybe it’s the light. He remembers yesterday’s grey. This is yellowish. Like piss, he thinks.
The changed trees or pissy light make everything strange. No longer deep, dark woods, but something like a stage set.
He knocks against a tree. It wobbles. None of this is real, Mon reflects.
He decides to walk. It doesn’t matter where to. A walk is a walk.
—–
The light is above and behind him. He reasons that he must therefore be heading upstage.
Some of the trees are broken. Splintered branches, scratched paintwork.
—–
Still walking, as before, as yesterday, as usual.
—–
The stage, if it is a stage, is unusually deep. Mon pauses and looks back. Planks of wood silhouetted against amber light.
To his right and left, beyond the trees, darkness like a black curtain.
The heat from the lights is enervating.
—–
Yellow light at his back, heat all over him, scenery around him. No option but to keep walking.
—–
To occupy his mind, he thinks again about the knight in the poem.
—–
The girl in the red coat takes a seat in the dark auditorium and watches him recede.
He looks like a puppet.
Then he is gone.
13 poets in Hell
1
Paradise Lost is cast into the lake of fire. Satan tells John Milton to rewrite it in 140 characters or fewer.
2
Filippo Marinetti languishes in a dismal rural idyll. His hand, possessed, scrawls euphonic odes to the moon with a quill.
3
Henri Michaux floats through the eternal peace of his inner space. “Where are the monsters?” he wonders, unhappily.
4
“What’s this penty nonsense about ‘phantasmal gnomes?’” demands Pound. Eliot tries to explain, but he has lost his voices!
5
Wandering lonely as a cloud of smog through the city, Wordsworth looks into an oily puddle but can’t find his reflection.
6
Tristan Tzara cuts up a newspaper article into its individual words and scatters them. When they land they form sonnets.
7
Antonin Artaud wakes from troubled dreams, to find himself transformed into Pam Ayres.
8
Shakespeare sits in the drab fluorescence of a classroom. “Take out your copies of Macbeth,” mumbles the teacher.
9
Fluttering letters perch on the page, spelling APOLLINAIRE. Then a noise startles them and they disperse forever.
10
Coleridge scratches at the door. The visions are seeping into his lungs. Where’s the man from Porlock? When will this end?
11
SOMEONE TURNS
THE VOLUME UP
ON E E CUMMINGS
AND HE IS DEAFENED
AND FLATTENED
BY HIS OWN POEMS
12
William Blake realises that the physical universe is everything.
13
André Breton claws his way out of the negligée and lies, spent, on the tiled floor. Towers of washing-up await him.
The Managers
The Managers are always to be found in twos or threes, lumbering greyly.
—–
If you pass the Managers in a corridor it’s a good idea to say hello. They will probably return your greeting, as best they can.
—–
The Managers conduct meetings. They sit at the head of the table, waving their arms ponderously. Agreeable noises are music to their ears.
—–
The Managers believe in the Company. In devising a Five Year Plan to facilitate its great destiny, they verge on enthusiasm.
—–
The Managers are sometimes required to attend Company functions. They arrange themselves in a circle, like standing stones, and mutter. Their laughter is an uncertain rumble.
—–
At night the Managers store themselves in a small cupboard.
—–
The Managers are numerologists. They convene secretly to pore over papers and touch screens streaming with mystical figures. However, they have not mastered the numbers they fear and revere. When the statistics roar at them they tremble.
—–
In the sacred space of Meeting Room D, the Managers make human sacrifices to propitiate the terrible gods Profit and Performance Target.
—–
The Managers pray for Mammon’s Orgasm, the prophesied moment at which sales figures peak beyond all rational forecasts.
—–
The Managers decorate their fluorescent tube-lit temple with such hallowed iconography as bar graphs, dollar signs and motivational posters.
—–
Occasionally the Managers need to instruct those beneath them, so they employ their hieratic tongue, trusting it will have the desired effect, burbling the sacred phrases whose meanings are presumed lost: “blue sky thinking”, “close of play”, “let’s action that.” The indifference with which the words are greeted doesn't discourage them; they assume the power of the words operates on the soul and will manifest in some mysterious but beneficial way before their next pay review.
—–
The Managers won’t tolerate failure, even in each other. Unsuccessful Managers are ground into pâté and served with champagne and canapés at Company functions.
Once upon a tweet
Once upon a tweet there was a time but it was limited and the characters were few and cramped together and death beckoned impatiently as I typed.
Once upon a tweet there was a man who tried to build a house with words but made a world instead. Every door led to a new continent.
Once upon a tweet there was a story, curled tight in a box in a drawer in a ro
om. A little girl opened the box and saw herself in embryo.
Once upon a tweet there was a maze of storylines in the palm of the reader’s hand. The author wandered, lost.
Once upon a tweet a character was born in the prison of a brain cell. The author allowed him occasional parole.
Once upon a tweet there was a man who fell and became a monster. On the other side of the mirror, a monster learned to become a man.
Once upon a tweet I wrote myself in miniature.
Once upon a tweet a blade of grass became an impossible tower.
Once upon a tweet an image roosted on the edge of a precipice.
Once upon a tweet the reader chatted with the author and the story went its own way.
Once upon a tweet the reader dug for meaning and fell into his grave.
13 reflections on the House of Mirrors
For Viviana Hinojosa
1
There is no point trying to look beyond the surface. The surface is all.
2
The House of Mirrors appears to contain a dizzying multitude of rooms, but in reality there is only one: your bedroom.
3
Visitors to the House of Mirrors are asked to leave their dogs, shoes and heads at the door.
4
The House of Mirrors has several residents, including Eve, the Bird King and a gang of feral children.
5
I left a poem in the House of Mirrors. When I went back for it, the words had multiplied. Stanza breaks were pregnant pauses.
6
Meals and sleep are not permitted in the House of Mirrors; the dreams there depend on hunger and insomnia.
7
In the House of Mirrors, the concepts of reality and unreality are irrelevant.
8
Many enter the House of Mirrors, expecting to find themselves there. Instead, they are presented with voodoo dolls of their loved ones.
9
The House of Mirrors is more prison than playground.
10
All roads lead to the House of Mirrors.
11
The House of Mirrors smells of lavender, cinnamon and burning plastic.
12
The House of Mirrors is more theatre than domicile.
13
Windows are mirrors. Whatever you see through them is a reflection of yourself.
Story telling
Once upon a time there was a man who told a story about a deep, dark wood. He got lost in the telling.
Now his voice is a whisper of leaves.
Chess
The mannequins dream
of the silence and perfection
of the chessboard
the regular alternations
of light and dark.
Free market
The Bird King’s suits
sit
in a windowless office,
operating
the free market
through a system of levers,
sewers,
testosterone
and windup toys.
At the beginning of the end
At the beginning of the end, the mannequins stopped playing dead.
At the beginning of the end, words cracked in two and Hell poured out of them.
At the beginning of the end, all the lights went out and we heard a crowd shouting and laughing. The singing started later.
At the beginning of the end, planes fell from the sky. Some were mistaken for avenging angels.
At the beginning of the end, water gushed from our taps. We couldn’t stop it. Soon, the flooding erased history.
At the beginning of the end, the mirrors gave back diminished images. We shuffled, emaciated, in the dark glass.
At the beginning of the end, our dogs found their wolfishness. Cats paraded triumphally through the screaming streets.
At the beginning of the end, the dead rose and we were shocked that they could speak, that words wormed from their ruined mouths.
At the beginning of the end, day and night swapped clothing. The sun and moon clashed during the exchange.
At the beginning of the end, mathematics murdered the masses.
At the beginning of the end, the clocks laughed and gave up their secrets.
At the beginning of the end, Barbie and Ken toyed with us, placed us in compromising poses.
At the beginning of the end, our beliefs hemorrhaged from our eyes, our ears, our noses, our mouths, leaving us empty, dried up, still.
At the beginning of the end, snow monsters set fire to the fractured palaces of trade.
At the beginning of the end, we found solace in eating. Everything was fair game. Cannibalism was the most comforting of our peccadilloes.
At the beginning of the end, we got caught in the mechanisms of desire and bled over our smartphones.
At the beginning of the end, we found real piranhas in the stream of images.
At the beginning of the end, money burned in the labyrinth.
At the beginning of the end, grinning men with big ideas lit napalm cigars.
At the beginning of the end, the trees clasped us to their bark, cooed over us, nursed us, gathered us into them, became our coffins.
Music box
The music box has a terrible secret.
Lift her lid
and she’ll sing it to you
in a faltering voice.
13 imaginary friends
1
He had 13 imaginary friends. They knew him better than his mother did.
2
His imaginary friends were all born of a cat on the night of a blood moon.
3
His imaginary friends had grey skin and red eyes, giving them the appearance of dead people. Their cheeks flushed silver when they blushed.
4
His imaginary friends had held a grudge against him for thirty years. They never forgave him for neglecting them by playing with living children.
5
His imaginary friends regularly gathered in the folds of his curtains, whispering about him.
6
Sometimes, while he slept, his imaginary friends opened the curtains, turned on the lights and displayed him in the window like a mannequin.
7
His imaginary friends were stage managers, orchestrating the bleak theatre of his life.
8
Having sex was difficult with his imaginary friends present.
9
Whenever he saw them on the station platform or in a coffee shop, his imaginary friends would look right through him, as if he didn’t exist.
10
Once, his imaginary friends killed a pigeon and left it on his doorstep. It was intended as an ambiguously threatening message.
11
His imaginary friends maintained their sangfroid by using his fridge as their chillout zone.
12
His imaginary friends were more real than his house, his car, his job, his girlfriend, his parents, his past, his desires, his life.
13
Whenever his imaginary friends felt tired they folded themselves in half and slept under the rug in his living room.
Eve in the House of Mirrors: 13 fragments
1
On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Eve woke to find herself transformed into a gigantic chess piece made of zeros and ones.
2
Eve gazed so long at her smartphone that she found herself falling into it.
3
She fell for a time that may have been short or long or infinite. During her descent she became conscious of her nakedness.
4
Finally, when all the numbers had run out, she landed in a pool of herself. Her lungs filled with the words that made her story.
5
The words rearranged themselves and became other stories. Eve’s head popped off, revealing another, smaller, younger Eve inside the shell of her body.
6
The younger Eve was
a child. She kept a secret: her twin sister was coiled up in her head, like a snake.
7
Eve (a child pretending to be a woman or a woman pretending to be a child) stood in the House of Mirrors. Even when standing still she could feel herself falling.
8
The mirrors gave back her image, augmented, altered. Her eyes were magnified. Her mouth was a red contraption that exterminated wolves.
9
Something like a plucked turkey followed her. It wore a broken crown. Whenever she turned to look, the shadows shielded it from her gaze.
10
All of the voices in the House of Mirrors belonged to Eve, though she didn’t recognise them. Most were in a language she had forgotten.