Scattered Ashes
Lay a man without eyes digging with rotund nails representing sponsors of
death and fragrant stones in the land of saxophones, who finance your trips to
the windswept TV stands.
Where do you want to go? Knowledge in habitual cascades, eating dust like
a skyscraper. Or maybe the rye bread stuffed in your bellybutton freaks nasty
and delightful—you need to cut down on your pork life, man, jump onto the
lesions of the marble vein and give Oasis a go.
I’ve never seen sunflower oil or balaclavas by the sea and now I have a
date with my twin sister.
She’s a pizza base topped with a little bit of hexagon and I throw a
breaker ball full of salt cellars.
Walking in black surprising deserters I feel the need for bricks and
mortar and an apple with a falling bullet.
I have bare feet and carry a bundle of carefully crafted insults wrapped
in a beating heart rucksack.
It’s like there’s blood everywhere.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Rip the plug, see the light, aim the cross hairs at the grassy knoll.
Receipts and tea. Regrets.
If not me, when? My grandma grasped my tongue and now my stomach is full
of snails and electrolytes. To the shops!
In town, elephants crush stretchmark beer cans in troughs of Gatorade and
doubles of Bob Dylan. No more adverts here please.
Actually, I’ve got a hankering for a dishwasher woman stashed in a car
bonnet, so I fall through the cracks of my local elevator and fly through
nameless nights in a fluffy net blanket. You’re sick and bored and
spectacular.
Among the pebbles I’m French kissed by the doom-mongers—it hurts when I
pee and I see shades of black under a mask of serene white patios.
A cow in cobwebs marches to a dry heave bump and a magical mystery
grandfather clock. Forensics dust for salted snacks.
The doctor is everywhere—in the ballroom, in the funeral home and on
tiptoes. Dinosaurs flip coins and suck on open wounds. I’m on a serotonin
fountain in the hospital for frozen chairs.
God, it’s sunny in here.
But I’ve got to go. I have a date with a serial killer with a stubbed toe
and a giant cartwheel headache.
At the shop, I plonk my elaborate design on the Formica shelf and raise
my shrinking bloody eyebrows. My loopy fingernail moons displace water.
No, no, no, says cashier as a revolution fills a five thousand capacity
bread bin.
Oh man, I need another episode of Seinfeld.
Facts and Opinions
Haroon speaks of ethereal beings with oceans in their eyes. He says they
merge with fire, and eat petrol stations. They float high above buildings where
workaholic spinsters gaze at fish tanks, wearing coffee stains like
smiles.
They strike! he cries over immortal traffic. It’s all entirely
natural!
He takes another puff of his apple shisha—the diary on his lap fluttering
in the snow.
Haroon needs a a fountain pen, a shovel, maybe even a family.
Nancy, however, needs long tea breaks. She has torture sessions in the
desert, under a funkadelic sun. She likes theories and dead-end junky friends,
who scare me with their blackened lips and punctured feet.
It’s all inside, she says. We must congregate in smoke-filled rooms, tear
off our bloody plasters, and suck on the open wounds. This is the way.
No, it isn’t, I whisper.
My good friend Ranj is still alive but was buried six years ago in an
open coffin. He has designs on political realities. He wants croissants, beer,
and the next world war.
Take me shopping with your private blog, he says, because my flat has
been ruined by credit cards. He’s a knowing loon.
Get a job, I say.
You get one first, he says with a tooth pick on his tongue.
Barney knows his way around town—he’s got long fingers and strange hair.
He believes in women and his revolutionary fragrance wafts through gutters and
porcelain walls.
I’ve been here many times, he says mysteriously. This is not a test, just
reach out and feel the breeze.
I don’t know what he’s on about, but who am I to argue? I’ve got a halo
over my head and bloody dagger eyes. I can’t get enough, it’s atrocious.
Let’s have a vote. Who here has a thirst for twenty-twenty vision?
Either way I have my eye on you, and that’s a documented fact.
An Advert Can Be Beautiful in The Right Shade of Death
Highway billboards pose with aviator shades and subliminal messages,
wading through puddles of horror.
A will, prepared by cutthroat lawyers to fleece my dad’s nearest and
dearest, falls flat. He wanted everything; he got nearly nothing—just like in
the movies. So, I advise him to settle for a coffin with wheels—the undertaker
says it’s the best.
Standing on the funeral parlour’s mezzanine floor, I gaze at the adverts
for the afterlife, and I feel nothing but heartfelt resentment.
The war is over, so commercials can thrive again. Profit margins soar.
Banksy expresses my feelings in a way I cannot—like his mural by the riverside
projects. Basically, I’m saying I couldn’t care less.
Look at the VHS on the dusty shelf—an archive of famous lies; look at the
government players, seducing virgins in nationwide broadcasts; look at the shop
windows as mannequins fly too close to the sun.
Did you know psychosis can drown soldiers in the deep sea? Don’t worry,
it’ll all be supervised and filmed for the public—and usually only one in ten
will die.
We know this much at least: there is sense in compiling a fortress of
well-thumbed books, and there’s safety in numbers, but the clear consumer
favourite is the mother’s milk, because it tastes like mirror balls and mosquito
blood.
Alpha Male
The alpha male has a tattoo of his mother on his arm, inked in fire and
thorns, next to a soft-boiled egg. Yet he hardly ever calls—except to leave
strange morse code messages when she falls off her skateboard.
His mum regrets feeding him penny sweets as a child—and the sleeping
pills. And she’s sure the men who came round at midnight, posing as
supermodels, dashed his youthful dreams of falconry. Were they alpha males
too?
The alpha male hates the way his girlfriend does press-ups in night
clubs, how she paints her body with dust and vomit. He sinks into a horrid
gloom. It’s like there’s dental floss in his lungs, and teeth in his gut. It
must be her fault.
There are a few alpha males out tonight. They wear venetian blinds and
body cams like uniforms. They have pre-rolled chocolate crepes stuffed in their
pockets.
Alpha males don’t look each other in the eye. If they do, they’ll be
jinxed, even if they’re pretty boys with passports, painted brown. So, they
revel in the neon lights smeared like jam across the sky. They eat, they
drink.
The alpha male is unhappy at work. It’s full of guilty washing machines
and primal screams, and his boss has a birthmark like a boomerang. It’s time to
quit.
So, he wants to branch out and embrace new ventures.
He wants to buy an elite footballer and build a sporting empire.
He wants to forge a new self in a country he can’t pronounce.
He wants to swim in a project paperclip wonderland, until he breaks on
through to the other side—dreaming big, acting fast, and wiping his sticky
palms against the rings of Saturn.
Tim Frank