“But to learn to dye is better than to study the ways of dying.”

– Sir Thomas Browne

Writing

He stalks with a lens,

Short hair and floral dresses:

Red,

Deep red.                                                          

The lens is a recollection,

Occurring at a wooden desk,

With a typewriter,

Tapped by fingers, clothed in black leather;

Dead skin masks for desperate hands.

No prints.

Writing violence.

The lens is a recollection,

Of short hair and floral dresses:

All unaware.

He wished to map rouge cartographies,

Upon thin skin,

Footprints on fleshy surfaces,

Raw,

Metal on dermis,

That is to be:                                                                                                                                   

I hope.

In the desk draw,

Contents draped in red taffeta:

A collection of daggers,

To inscribe violence,

On warm canvases.

The lens is a recollection,

Of walking, following,

Traipsing maps,

Over bodies.

Red Laughter

A white gallery,

The lights are on.

A collection of artwork, like poems but worse,

And two figures.

“On the mezzanine,” later the policeman whispers, “stands a statue, an irregular trail of blood, a dried sculpture of a tree.”

The white gallery, stained.

He saw through glass walls, first one and then another.

He became an exhibit to the world outside, an audience to the inside, gaping at murderous theatre.

Two figures struggled.

Black leather, all dead skin.

A hidden face.

A long, dark coat draped over an elaborate staircase, carved from barren bones.

And, finally, black gloves.

The writer?

The photographer?

A voyeur.

Auburn hair flows.

The woman screams but cannot be heard, cut down by sharpened barriers, runic pleas.

What did the killer want before the phosphorous night arrived?

Her clothes are also white, ripe for bloody painting.

Her hand reaches out,

Red with insides: a secret revealed, hydraulics laid bare.

I can see the mystery of life seeping from a cheap, white top.

A new architecture of ribs, meticulously rearranged,

Viewed through a gateway swaying on glistening hinges.

Screams silent, rivers running.

Her body, covered in smiling wounds,

Red laughter.

Beyond Glass Walls

A bloodied glove,

A red herring,

Stuffed down the side,

Like lost change and train tickets.

Fingers measuring the insides of a mouth,

And a gold zip running along the thumb: new, tight skin,

Fitted over old traumas,

Cavities of a mind left alone.                                                       

Am I numb to violence?

Malleable gold,

A spine of intricate jewellery,

Its properties: softness,

The pressure of a fist,

Slowly pushing into muscles, indenting skin; yellowing bruises,

Approaching Ilium.

I wouldn’t dirty my hands, of course.

The killer rearranges furniture,

Angling freezing joints into position,

Cracking bones into humiliating shapes.

He would watch.

I am watching.

Pause.

Coffee.

Play.

Crystalline

A park drenched by night,

Soul-black trees,

Sparkling dark.

A red mansion humming among hanging branches.

Eyelashes peel away, as easily as a tanner flaying calf skin.

He’s admiring flesh sinking into collar bones;

The shadows of it,

Each concave delicious, almost moulded by hand.

Before he arrived,

Who were you showing this body to?

Each movement a thousand creaks.                                                             

I think you heard him really.

You catch sight of crystalline presence, finally.

They both shimmer, old mirror blades,

Fear glinting back.

Strange smoothness occults sharper rage.

He lets it wander, stroking nightwear, allowing it whispering cuts,

Tearing first the straps,

Then long rips down lace and flowers. 

It’s what you think he wants.

And where then?

The coated fingers explore,

Rubbing the inside of her ruby mouth, caressing teeth,

Pushing down a flailing tongue.

There is nowhere to go.                                                            

The shock of realising he’s not after that.

This shaving knife,

Will cut ribbons,

From your being,

One thin stroke at a time;

But first,

One bludgeon, hammering the larynx door,

Demonic breathe,

Reduced to vibrations,

Of snapping chords seeing the first light of the outside world,

From a lamp smattered with deep red.

Prospecting

“She’s young and very beautiful. Would you like her to die?”

Don’t ask.

A room,

And rain on the windows of her eyelids: storm-heavy.

A blade, shunted like train carriages,

Through a nape.

Bluebottle buzzing, shock:

Alchemy, but murderous, finding its gold in vermillion rivers,

As old prospectors used to.

Fluids leaking,

Just like the gutter outside.

And then slices, spreading identity smoothly;

Autographed.

Droplets seeping into morning pillow musk,

A vague face already imprinted there.

Cutting, again and again,

Carving new forms.

Black hair, scrunched between slippery fingers,

Inward damp,

Living condensation.

Flailing as a bird with crystalline wings,

Diving finally towards the ground.

Was all this really in aid,

Of trauma locked within a painting?

I didn’t buy that twist.

Greek Occultism

Deceived eyes:

It was she who was stabbing he,

She: all along.                                                                                                

You didn’t see that coming.

Another – first dead,

Killed with dances,

And reincarnated,

By Greek occultism.

Her eyes, too,

Were pierced with pins,

Standing firm and tall,

In dark, dead pools,

Like the trees of the forest,

In rancid soil.

Her hands,

Committing atrocities,

Though gloveless,

In the glass gallery.

Cockroach Physics

Another mystery,

Of murder.

But first: a short shadow-play.

Garish wallpaper with dying flowers,

Silhouettes struggling to survive each other’s darkness.

The child audience watches, 

Like us, reflected.

A large gloom-blade wielded,

The echo of the last beginning;

Soon its metal will escape that shadow realm,

Into the repulsive present-now,

Bloodied at the child’s feet on the linoleum floor, 

And mine.

Cockroach physics dictates its inevitability:

“There’s a child singing in that house… Death… Blood…”

Bearing ribs, freshly opened from the spine outward,

Replayed on infantile cornea.

If it could be peeled, thinly,

Like a narrow layer of horsefly eye,

A patch of grey velvet,

Perhaps we could rewatch the shadow-play,

Until the horror was buried deep within the soul.

Marionette (with tied string limbs)

The glinting zip,

Clawing leather together,                                                                                   

Again.

White tiles, tinted yellow by determined dirt,

Shine-sodden grime.

And then other objects: a knitted voodoo doll – of sorts – raggedy with rough material that would rub and chafe if embraced by soft hands; red wool, with yellow pins, markers on the map of miniature organs; impaled over and over with tiny domestic daggers.

A plan forms: knife, cleaver, mechanised doll, piano wire.

The cleaver cuts a shoulder blade,

Through a tissue-thin kimono,

Patterned with light camellias on dark blue water.

Murky figures,

Turned you into a marionette,

Forever destined to repeat,

With the same brutality as piano scales learned,

With painful regularity,

Pressed into the spine by metronome ticks.

All seen by the clairvoyant’s eyes:

Through the false doorway of mirrored glass,

Mistaken for another painting.

But I saw the truth.

Luxuries

A farmhouse,

Comfortably far from Turin;

Femur masonry,

Holding this body of home together.

Brickwork, rough and jagged,

As glass protruding from skin,

Of a torso hidden beneath the floor.

Dolls hang from the rafters.

The tension rises.

A myna bird cries from the shadows,

In tune to the screech of a winding cassette.

Light is thrown from the torch in hand,

Pulsating rouge.

I notice the carpet, such a sickly design;

With all of the things she would have liked to have had in her life,

Before this isolation,

Outside of Turin,

Comforted only by dreary rugs and caged birds.

The slow maze littered with ornaments,

From happier times;

Commemorations of trips to museums,

Package holidays to London.

And now?

Little else,

Except the slow production of scarves and jumpers,

Watching their layers sprout from battling needles.

This should be tense and yet,

All I take in are home furnishing,

Moroccan rugs,

The luxuries of loneliness.

Ammonia

The figure slipped quickly out of the darkness, her darkness, a rustling nest for herself and her secrets with the myna bird that ended impaled, out of fear, on a knitting needle. That figure prowled, predicting movements, knowing her space better, as she had never known this space really, cloaked in shadows, lit only when steam reduced the tiles to a moist page. Single swipe, neither precise nor ill-thought, draped in black. The bathroom awaits, to drag this horror out until…

I must pause this.

It’s too much.

The tiles are tasteless, no wonder she lived pleasure-blind; even her mirrors are tortuous, reflecting sickly childhood blues. She is barely aware as the tap spouts water, burning hot, so stifling it escapes as steam rather than gathering in the porcelain bath. Hands loop under arms, in aid; an old cripple in desperate need of cleansing. She knows what is happening, the ache throbbing, struggling blindly. A head goes under, frightful stinging, relentless heat, not just upon skin but upon eyes and teeth and gums; burning every inch and scrap of being, as acid would. A distracted drowning, until the throat gulps for owed air, like drinking paving tar or smelted gold. Back again, under the molten fountain. Skin bubbling, turning to pink mounds, fleshy earth piled up on a compost heap. Even gums are spreading, growing over teeth to express this life, augmented under a new regime. Cheeks cave in, turning to stew that could be served in earthenware pots. How will she live, she thinks, with overgrown gums? The ground calls, that figure departs, coat wet, dead-skin gloves failing to bubble, their life stripped long ago by ammonia in warehouse vats. Scrawls of a final plea on wet tiles, with bloated fingers, pupils dripping. Another figure glides within, ready to guide her from this ugly room to better things.

Mechanisms

If you were to dream of mechanised boys,

Wandering with rigid arms,

It would look like this.

A laughing grimace,

And a stride so wide,

That its mechanisms overcompensate,

Rendering the living, cog-worked corpse,

Afloat.

What of the laughing face,

Whose mouth mimes in frozen glare?

Tinkling laughter, half whirring,

A fear that distracts,

From other creeping footsteps. 

I was scared in all honesty.

He lashes out, the old man, at the clockwork child,

Smashing its china skull,

Metallic innards of which,

Spill onto the floor like hairpins.

The man is drowned in stinking relief: it was just an automaton,

Not a real killer.

He was naïve.

Out comes the woman, leather clad,

His mouth driven onto the marble corners,

Of fireplaces, bright as the dummy’s incisors.

His own clattering to the floor,

In bloodied clumps.

Feeling new holes with a desperate tongue where,

Walls of natural ceramics once stood, protected.

He reaches his desk, before hands lift him.

The heavy, sweating body rearranged quickly;

Knife, silver devil, seeks his life-line,

Digging into muscled machines;

Cogs of ligament and fatty acids,

Before encountering the throat’s walls.

Falling Men

Behind marble pillars,

Eyes stare, rancid rage,

Caged, endless lines of bloody ganglions.

The pillar maintains the station, vital structures,

For crushed vessels,

And transparent bodies.

Gaggles of photographers, flitting, snapping, gossiping.

A bright day for murder.

The awaiting man falls, greeting churning axels,

Finding thin solitude between metal strips.

I wanted more from this.

It was so quick,

No tension or teasing:

No leather.

A Painting, Alive

Revisiting the painting, for pleasure,

Hidden,

Like other magnolia portraits,

With smiles and gouged eyes.

A secret mirror;

The killer reflected,

Whose portrait haunted them.

Age-grey skin, dropping into wallpaper daydreams,

And the portrait is alive, walking towards you,

Dribbling stories of hospitals:

“No one can force me back…”

The woman and her spectral flower,

Limp on her lapel,

And her necklace;

A thin noose.

Her breath rasping,

Black hair, torn and shining fury.                                                                    

I’d never have guessed.

Art deco lifts,

Bright gold and patterned glass,

The killer in chase,

Sounding her ancient, clattering bones,

Like a soothsayer jangling a cloth-bag of teeth,

In order to witness the future.

That necklace,

Wrapped around the ornate door;

Slow strangulation of a bird-crazed neck,

Vibrating with screams,

Before it falls:

The head, it tumbles,

Hissing.                                                                                                        

Clean cut.

Crimson Men

She cut her hand on the blue vase,

In fear.

Can we watch something else?

Pink blood gathers,

In thick pools,

Crucifix kindness,                                                                                               

Slowed for pleasure.

No, we can’t.

The men,

Fleeing over Gatling rooftops,

Footsteps rendered machinegun volleys,

And a lift’s vertical corridor,

A last path.

Groaning height forces his hands out,

Grabbing at rough wires,

Which sand fingers to bloody bone,

As gravity unites him with the oily earth.

The House Where Erasmus Fled

Outside the house where Erasmus fled,

From Swiss persecution,

Students now chain their bikes to lampposts.

Its pink walls, innards,

Cocoon the dance academy.

Storm brewed, pink and blue light.                                                               

Rain melts all,

Statues and churches like wicked witches.

Each cobblestone locks in multiple screams;

The tread of a footstep,

Crushing a thousand voices,

Silenced into winter soil.

Allegro

“Go to the window,”

She thinks, “find the scratching.”

It reminds of things:

A cat’s claws upon a closed door.

A saw dragged slowly across copper pipes.

A fork’s prong against withered teeth.

In her friend’s bathroom,

Of sighing architecture,

The blue outside teases black light,

A foray into deathly hours.

Soon: eyes, simply eyes,                            

Like mine, staring at this spectacle.

Dirty arms with long, avarice nails meet her,

And then:

Grabbing, manic pleasure, filthy desire for destruction of slender girls, dragged slowly towards broken shards; frozen faces crushed against the pane, like curious children at the reptile house. Pressure bulging, skin on ice, spreading flat the sadness of her face, wider and wider, like her polluted eyes, before the smash; and a shower of razors, cutting as knives, through raw meat. Jagged edges upon a throat, cuts arising, leaking secrets over despoiled features, dragged to the roof, like a naughty child, organs scoured as dirty dishes, with a dunce’s hat atop.

Clattering sounds, the chest torn asunder,

Ripped to the sound of paper.

Rosy, beating machine,

Explored again and again with precise splinters,

A curious blade.

But still she breaths,

With pouting lips of wounds.

Can this violence go on?                                                                         

 My eyes strain with bloodiness.

Rope snakes over an exhausted neck,

Another rain shower, this time of rubric,

Mosaic designs,

That cast small plays of light and colour,

Upon the dizzying floor,

On better days.

The dancing body falls,

And its final allegro of organic junk,

Tips out.

Königsplatz

“It builds the blood,” the doctor suggested.

A thick soup of nutrients for thin dancers.

The blind man was less lucky.

His footsteps, alone, in the pantheon:

Murder is lonely.

Echoing the insipid waltz from the ballet room.

Spirits of birds,

Hover in shadow,

And so many shadows to choose.

Ionic pillars support the night,

And long arches of collarbone.

Königsplatz breathes heavily,

Gulps of ghosts, real evil;

Footsteps of thousands in rage,

Reduced to the single, blind pianist;

And his rabid dog.

What is that winged spectre,

The one passing instructions in shadow-tongue?

“Poor David, torn to pieces: It’s incredible!”

As if such violence wasn’t housed there,                                                                                         

Already.

Before,

In days when black swarms,

Swallowed the pantheon’s light,

With uniforms,

Before jaws of a friend,

Withdrew the blind man’s trachea,

From its warm standing,

We realised bloody history,

Still lesser, in ghosts,

Than reality:

“Maybe there’s a hex on the place.”                                                   

Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

The Torn

Who knew that a blade,

Touching gently the intimacies of a latch,

Could be so daunting?

Or tender.

Trying in vain,

To describe the sound,

Pains her:

As if small coins, perhaps,

Had squeezed their way,

Through the neck,

Of a wine bottle.

I doubt she is considering this fully,

However.

Quiet blue walls,

And boxes containing carnations.

A small envelope window frame:

Escape, she must escape,

From caresses.

Into a lethal cavern,

Littered with cutting wire.

Its branches and glistening stems,

Wrapping further,

As hair caught in a brush.                                                                              

The knife to the throat sounded ,

Like school reports being torn,

In anger,

 By disappointed parents;

Little futures seemingly lost.

Witching

“But what does it mean to be a witch?”

It is,

Perhaps,

A desire,

To seek agency outdoors.

I begin to feel it,

Rise within,

The watching pleasure,

Second-hand hunger,

Violence,

On pixelated screens.

Or am I distracting myself,

From the reality,

Grey,

And painful,

Of having watched all of this,

With ritual yearning,

And not been moved or disgusted?

Pins strike black pupils,

Stood firmly in rotten iris-mud.

Cackling,

At deep red wrists,

And a neck decorated with ornate wounds.

Wooden skin revealed,

By scrying knitting needles.

The corpse at peace,

Once again,

No longer in contretemps.

Flames welcome them,

And Erasmus’ house is no more.

I imagine crushing their bodies to dust,

With diamond teeth,

Grinding down bones,

Scratching uselessly,

Helplessly,

Against jewelled surfaces,

With unstoppable incisors.

But the credits are rolling.

The Three Mothers

A sharp implement cuts open,

Crumbling pages of The Three Mothers,

Telling of the misfortunes,

Of an alchemist,

Whose soft gold never materialised.

The three – an occult number –

A triangular summoning.

Outside the mansion,

Of the Mother of Sighs,

The streets writhe in pink and blue:                                                        

Witches need the same lighting,

It’s continuity.

“Lots of books have houses of the damned.”

Such a polite way of saying,

Really,

That our lives are governed,

By the dead.

A Sunken Room

Down the steps,

Into the basement,

Shaped as a kidney,

A cavity filled with water.

But wait: a flooded room.

A sunken chamber, with wet walls and drowned furnishings. Admire its décor; the broken ceiling with Victorian panels, sprouting a chandelier that sways in the current; its dirty design swirls with flowers and ornate elaborations. The liquid has preserved it, as a sample jar filled with deathly creatures housed in the proud collections of nineteenth-century biologists. Chairs move gently as the woman swims among them, her broach – with Yale key – fallen through, descending, slowed.

Oxygen is calling,

Back for air,

Then down.

What are those paintings on the wall? A terrible trinity. They match the squalid vines of the rug, with the opulence of a lost time, and thoughts of Hell in Latin script. And a marble fireplace, equally smooth, growing with old designs that bubble with trapped time. To its left, a fireplace set, with poker and bronze tongs to pick at loose coal.

The door, framed with a boarder, strict and straight as its era. Is there someone knocking? Knocking heads, soaking mandibles drifting to the ground with half-cracked laughs. The woman, unaware, out of breath, dress clinging, seeking the gateway to the dry world, away from the Victorian cavern; a taxidermy of yesteryear, marked by swaying bodies. Their faces mauled, chewed and opened; all-ligament’s smiling mask, all-bone’s alcohol-free concealer. She must not join the parlour mortuary.

The air delicious as it floods her ribcage.

Lonely bodies sit back,

Waiting for news, 

Or loved ones.

Gravel from the Library Garden

The red chamber,

Of the bibliothèque.

A doorway no one sees,

And the alchemist,

I wonder if he ever succeeded.

Trying once more,

To turn worthless gravel,

Into precious stones.

I know his loneliness.

Perhaps luck,

Would be better met,

If those black leather gloves,

Weren’t zipped,

So tightly.

Paper-chain heads decapitated,

A hanging woman,

A gecko devouring a trapped insect,

I wonder if he, too, made lists.

Cassia

A clumsy stranger with a knife,

Lodged deep in his back,

Like an ancient sword,

In cragged stone,

Is spilling himself over the woman,

As he leaves this life.

What on Earth are you watching?

After her drenching,

In gory rain,

The blade finds her, too,

Meticulously spreading,

The inner dimensions,

Of her spinal column, 

Why don’t you watch nice films?

She flees,

Yet her structure is collapsing,

Inwardly,

Bursting through linen drapery,                                                                

Can you come back later?

Thin, red fingers,

Breaking out,

Of some womblike prison,

Or cassia veil.

Only a sick person would enjoy this.

You’re overreacting,

But you’re neither,

Right or wrong.

Spider-leg digits,

Crooked,

Measure the inches,

Of her face,

Before a final touch;

Folding her bones,

Inside out.

The pleasure is clear.

Why don’t you watch nice films?

On Screen

“No it’s paint, not blood.”

Nails,

And window-frame smiles,

Pinned within,

Homemade guillotines.

I watch,

As a man is eaten,

By hoards of soft rats,

And I wonder,

Of strange pleasures,

In being devoured,

By many mouths.

The drowned cats,

In the dirty sack,

Writhe in anger.

She was the witch,

The black banshee, 

I’m lost.

“Someone will take your hand,”                                                                                

I cannot see reality.

And death soon slips away.                                                                                

Eject

Shall we go for another?

Explore the deep red realms?

The shining disc,

Alluring:

Do we dare?

I hear someone shout “cut!”,

And the machinery,

Ceases.

With Erasmus’ enlightened sketches,

However,

I still worry,

As the reel ends,

Why my hands,

Clothed in black leather,

Hold a bloody blade.

Perhaps somewhere,

I am standing over,

A body: 

A man’s body.

Credits.

Darkness.

Static.

End.

You killed me.

Lo so.