BOOKENDS; AN ACCOUNT OF YOUR DRINKS AND MY DESIRES

 

I used to sit here sipping cocktails I couldn’t afford
just because you sat here years before me, drinking
lust from lips that weren’t yours. I used to sit here
in the heady heat of all you had eaten of each other,
wondering if I stayed long enough would I be able
to taste what it was like to devour all that desire.

I used to come here to scribble down all I might one day
forget and I wondered if she forgot you as quickly
as she turned the page to the next date in her diary.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly.

This month is about kissing goodbye to Paris and its passion. When I returned to Paris four years ago, I lived in the 14th arrondissement, metro station Alesia, where the restaurant Le Zeyer still stands and serves. This was once the haunt of the desires of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, who lived down the road at 18 villa Seurat in 1931.

 

BOOKENDS; THIERRY’S LINE

 

One ordinary, rather hot summer night, nothing special,
nothing different, in my mind I ran my finger down
the line of hair that ran from your chest before disappearing
beneath your shorts as the breeze blew open your shirt
and I caught the smile in your eye as you read thoughts.

You, with your short dark hair amid a season of blondes
I was tiring of, you, who I never kissed or lay with,
who I never undressed outside of that dizzy dream.

Later that night, while fuelled on cocktails, you brushed
my finger along that same hair line, nothing said,
nothing promised, just that fine line between you and I,

you, with your eyes which shone that breathless night
towards a blue side of green, black jeans, red shirt
and a tan to stop just short of where that line disappeared.

You seemed like the first man I’d seen in such a long time
having been lost for a while in a sea of bleached boys,
all as harmless as they were hairless while I cavorted
about their sweet skins with careless concern for complacency.

But you looked like something else on that fortuitous night
as the setting sun sizzled and breezes briefly blew bodies bare.

That tremendous night when nothing really happened
except for the soft touch of that line I never managed to cross
and, more importantly, never managed to forget.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly.

This month is about looking back and the life and lust of summer nights in Paris in order to move on. The bar was La Tropic, a gin fizz on the terrace, by Les Halles, the summer was 1998 but the location of both the line and the man are now a mystery only the summer stars can shine a light on.

SHORT STORIES OF FEAR; WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME

 

 The Dead one

I woke to a mouth already swallowing the claustrophobic earth that mounded itself over my naked torso like crumble over stewed apples waiting to be crisped but I couldn’t feel the warmth of an oven, even buried, as I was, so close to the sparks of hell but, instead of digging down to join the demons dancing in the darkness, I ate my way up and out, through the crunch of earth now meeting the acid of my stomach, past the worms that wanted to wind their wills within this festering flesh still clinging to the bones of a body the day had pushed deep down into the darkness, although nothing works alone; the night has a moon while the day bears that ball of fire which burns through all the possibilities the light can shine upon and so, too, my demise did not happen alone but had his cowardly character carved all over its bloody finality. Oh, how we come and covet and then cum and croak. My name was Benjamin Grant when air was my everything and I wanted to taste all the world had to offer, when I thought I had found it all in him and his horny little hunger I mistook for happiness. Well, now I have no more need for a name and taste only decay, destruction, and a desire only death knows how to discern. And that desire will see his downfall.

 

The Other One, Still Alive

He woke up under a twisted blanket of sharp shadows, startled by a staggered pull of starved lungs begging for air and felt, instantly, the restriction of cold hands upon him, as if trying to close the circumference of his neck, all the while knowing the owner of those hands was nowhere near, all the while knowing what had become of him, all the time reminding himself that that man no longer sought out any air to fill his lifeless lungs in a body that would be nothing more than rotting flesh for fowl figures to feast upon, deep below the daylight, far from sight. He sat there, sweating in the middle of the bed with a fat man snoring beside him and, he imagined with a grim, his Tesla igniting gossip in the gobs of the next door neighbours, a bed once their bed, now his bed, recalling how he had dug, with his own hands, this former lover’s final resting place, a place he hoped never offered any rest, deep in the forest where only savage swine sought shelter, where only callous crows came to caw. He recalled the spot where he covered the cadaver, the one he once so openly cavorted upon, in the coarse, comfortless earth while he cried with a jolt of joy on front of the sudden stillness, the smashing silence that seemed even louder than the muffled screams his boyfriend had made the moment he had pulled the plastic bag down over his head from behind while he had been waiting for him, as usual, just as he had done every morning, for the previous 7 years, by the breakfast counter, in the kitchen. But that morning he suffocated from lack of air and a gulp of coffee he never managed to fully taste.

 

The Dead one

You came into the bathroom, once our bathroom, once our choice of towels and tiles, once the place where I would take you in the shower, against the glass, my fingers in your mouth, my breath on the back of your neck and your body bending into mine. You came in and stood by the toilet, pissing, without lifting the seat, without lifting up the fucking seat. You were still half asleep, totally naked but half asleep. You wore that nakedness often on front of me as if it was something I could never again fit into. You were always standing, posing, looking for the right light to fall upon your flesh. I had thought you meant to tease but now I realise how you saw it more as a torture. You didn’t notice as I moved from behind the door, didn’t hear me step into position behind you, you didn’t even hear me as I sniffed your scent one last time. But there was nothing. I was dead, I didn’t breathe, didn’t sleep, didn’t fuck, didn’t piss, and I couldn’t even smell. You had taken all that from me, a month ago, on an ordinary morning that had barely found its light. You’d grown tired and wanted new attention, someone new to look at with admiration so you could look back and swoon at your own reflection in their eyes. Maybe that was why I chose to break one of the mirrors in the downstairs hallway, earlier, before I’d crept up the stairs and took my position. And then, there I was, standing behind you, not fucking you, not smelling you, no longer a lover of you, raising my right arm, bringing it up and out and around until the shard of glass I was holding caught my reflection just before it found the softness of your socket. Did you have a moment to catch the look in my eyes, watching you, in the glass, before it pierced its way through your eye?

 

To be continued…

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

DELICATE DESIRES

 

We dangle delicacies
(far from looking delicate)
to tempt the beasts
to play ferocious
for our pleasure,
for our entertainment.
We put money
on the beast
who can be more brutal
than the bunch.
We are intrigued
by the beasts
whose nature
we’ve changed,
caught and caged,
who we’ve tempered
and tamed
in our need
to remind ourselves
who is the man and
who is the beast.

We dangle delicacies
(desperately delicately)
on front of animals
so as not look at ourselves
and see the beasts
we’ve become.

  

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

This is a week of considering creation; creative, caged or carnal 

THIS HISSING IN THE SUMMER

 

Summer
as the city
slips into slumber,
after last night’s thunder,
as skin slides from winter’s
shawls and shackles and pitches
itself proudly in parks where not even
dogs bark, where shadows have sunk
into sweaty
soil as feverish
fingers smooth skin
with soothing oil. Summer
in the city and temperatures
are oozing over bodies, all tease
and no breeze to appease. Summer
in the city and the music mellows as fellows
fold frowns
into bottom drawers
with winter wishes and curate
concerns toward sunset kisses. Summer
in the city and she unfurls her curls like foliage
finding form over greedy grass, and he goes green
with envy and furrows his frenzy as the fountain flows
with full force, unabashedly, and he grows as greedy as the grass
while her
curves caress
his consciousness
and he wilts in watchful
wantonness while I wait for kisses
caught on Spanish lips that creep along
the current of sweeping storms and sensual
shifts, we are ships crossing under starlight, snakes
slivering over sheets, I am not his, he is not mine, he is not
hers and still not mine, we cast concern into the ripples that sink in ocean
beds
too deep
to remember and
too cold for concern,
ripples that are arousing now
beneath these fountains now flowing,
in the park, in the sunlight, in the summer,
in the city. Summer in the city and babies are sleeping
in buggies buried under bushes while nannies’ doze and daddies
delight in their sweet blooming rose. Summer shines on the city and
streets slip
from worries
and rushes to brushes
with light and lazy, humming
hazy harmonies like he once strummed
upon my strings a serenade sweet enough
to sweep us to older days, other days, days of revolution
and voices that shone as bright as this burning sun, and on
to simpler days of lemonade and laughter. Remember laughter,
back before the pitter patter of drought and disaster? We are just people
passing
through parks,
looking for stars
in between the sunlight,
looking for fleeting kisses,
treats that are never free, saints
and snakes all hissing across lawns
in summer. Summer in the city but somewhere
out there, beyond the sleeping stars and the deep blue sky,
someone is probably crying and another, senselessly, about to die.

   

All words and paintings by Damien B. Donnelly

This is a re post from a series of mine inspired by the artistry of Joni Mitchell

 

THE CURRENT OF CREAMY COFFEE

 

I sink beneath your skin
like sea
sweeping over sand,
you, a thousand grains
glistening
while I wash over you
in warm waves,
your salty sweat

sweet

below my current.

I slip between your lips
like cream
coming into coffee,
our senses fired
like frothed fluid
as we pound passion
into fragile
flesh

once fresh,
now feverish,
once timid,

now tasted

once begun,
we can never go back

You are now the sea
and I the sand,
upon your back,

I am now the coffee
and you have taken

to the cream.

A WHISPER IN THE FADING LIGHT

 

I heard them marching through the streets of Madrid, at midnight, under the first floor moonlight as you sang me songs strung from their souls, men marching a million miles away, a million years away from the momentary memory we were making, your fingers stroking the strings I’d pulled too tight on the guitar now clutched to your chest like I had been, or you on mine (I recall only feeling with fleeting time, not the practicalities of posture or position).

I heard them marching upon the melody you were making, like the music we had just made that would never be bright enough to linger on into lyrics, but you brought them from your history into my home beneath a still shouldering moonlight straddled on the first floor; a shining witness to the totality of our all and nothing, to how much closer we were getting and how much more like strangers we had become.

I took your cigarettes to my lips and watched the smoke burn to a whisper in the fading light of our afterglow and wondered how your words (more meaty than meaningful after midnight) could stick so to the softening skin, like my sweat and your scent, afterwards, after we’d come and before you’d left me humming a song from streets I’d never known but could taste on the tip of my tongue like something familiar, once favoured, long since forgotten.

Might marches upon steaming streets,
melodies make moments beneath the moon,
memory is often all we can hope for.

HUNGER, A SHORT TALE OF HORROR

 

The Man.

The morning was a challenge from the offset. One of those days when I should’ve stayed in bed; the milk had curdled in the crippled cardboard carton so my coffee was black and bitter before I accidentally downed half of it over the front of the shirt I’d spent too long pressing into creases; irons are not for early morning idiots. All the other office shirts were in the basket or, more honestly, on the bathroom floor by the basket; the comforts of no longer being caught up in cohabitation; you can’t be a cantankerous cunt anymore about this chaos Carol! So, as I ditched the idea of looking pressed and presentable and pulled on a pair of chinos, I came face to face, or skull to skull, with my reflection between the bathroom mirror and the other one on the door behind me. Horrifically, after 40 years of being covered in thick brown hair, there was my scalp looking at me through a miserable thin tuft on the back of my skull. That was all I needed; age creeping up on me from behind; fucking hell, just as I was getting back out there again I realized there was less of me to market.

Suddenly, crippled by a follicle challenge, I grabbed a baseball cap! And I’d thought I was carefree and vain-less all this time. Now I understood that carefree and vain-less were cords barely tethered to youth like umbilical cords before the suckers are snipped. Fuck. Something else to worry about. Shaved head or Rogaine? Shaving was surely the cheaper and possibly the more honest option I thought as I pulled the door shut and remembered my bag was still sitting on the counter in the kitchen. When I finally stepped onto the train I remembered I’d left the cap in the bathroom after I’d gone back for the bag only to grow distracted by further investigation of the hairless head, losing another 20 minutes while the cap disintegrated into insignificance as hairs were counted and carefully weaved into something looking like a first attempt nest made by a blind bird who couldn’t give a toss! Fortunately, I wasn’t the only follically challenged 40 something on the carriage, although the rest looked sharper in their tailored suits while I looked like I was trying to reattach that cord to youth. How sweet birds fly by so quickly! Should adults really be allowed to poke fun at themselves in the spirit of Causal Friday’s, I wondered as I looked at my watch and realized it was already well past 10am and I still had another hour of commuting to go? Casual was coming no matter what! No, this was not the best start to a Friday morning, or to any morning. And then, suddenly, there she was, that woman. Fuck!

The Woman.

No one seemed to notice me. Not one single person looked up or over at my less than concealed condition. You could be naked on the underground and the so-called best of British would simply turn back to their digital Daily Mail as if nothing was wrong. But it was wrong. I wasn’t naked but I was a disturbing sight, to say the least. I couldn’t even tell you what I was wearing. I’d grabbed whatever was nearest to my trembling hand and had fled the scene. I was still shaking as I emptied my bag over the turnstile to find my Oyster card. I was still trembling as I boarded the escalator, descending into more and more chaos, as if hell was waiting for me below or was it back there, where I’d run from or was it truly inside me and running was pointless? I slid down by the white defaced walls and past the pressing faces of pressured commuters desperate to make connections in a world that was falling apart. Starry tuned singers caught open mouthed and c-list celebrities tuning up talentless vocal cords glared at me from posters postulating the latest 90’s band of one-hit-wonders to get their Westend debut before they fell thankfully back into obscurity just before the press defecated all over them and their despicable hunger. Their desperate gaze seemed to say more about me than I wanted. I shivered when the train pulled up along the packed platform, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. Crowds can be the coldest of cages for those of us who know what it is to be an animal.

When the doors shut they seemed to seal out all the air and my lungs gasped at the nothingness and that’s when it broke.

That’s when I broke and the tears burst from my eyes like hot springs through the dessert sand but there was no relief with the onslaught, only a feeling of more and more of less and less. Life had come to a standstill as the wheels turned along tracks that could lead me nowhere. Moving in motions of motionless, soiling every minute, every track in burning tears. Was this what it meant to be on the run? Was this what escape felt like? All your energy fixed on getting somewhere other than where you were while all other forces grounded you in where you’d come from. Moving is just geography, only psychology knows why the mind holds us forever locked onto the moment that broke us.

As we exited a tunnel, light smashed its way through the windows and I thought my skin would literally burn from its intensity. I thought everyone would cower in front of my overly exposed lack of composure. I thought they would. But this was Britain, London to be exact and the underground going overground to be precise. No one reacted to anything on this tiny tube. There was no room on crowded trains for expressions of fear or concern. Stiff upper lips sealed us shut in silence. Resilience rendered us immune to public displays of emotion. And then I saw him. Dark hair, disheveled, distracted by something he seemed to have forgotten, like that immunity I mentioned, but he was looking at me, right at me, there in the burning light of the moving train that wasn’t taking me anywhere and yet he stopped to see me. He actually stopped looking for what he was missing and saw me. Me. And then he came towards me while he rummaged in his trouser pocket for something.

The Man.

Four hours we spent together as the causal morning fell into late afternoon, not at my desk, not in my office, not

under the watchful eye of my boss who spent more time creating nothing than making something, but on a terrace, sitting still as the city raced past us, under pressure to proceed, to perfect, to preform. But somehow, sitting there in the midst of the growing sunlight as spring stretched into summer with a complete stranger, I felt no pressure at all. How was that fucking possible, I asked myself? With Carol and all her concerns and insistances on commitments, that six year sentence with Carol in Colchester (now served and severed), all I’d felt was pressure. They say you need to peal back the layers slowly to get to know someone but Carol took that literally and every day I felt her pulling more and more skin from my already tingling and taunt flesh. Carol, the pressure cooker whose thermostat was permanent broken. Not even sex released a degree or two. Even there she was vocal on where, when and how. For the one thing that actually required heat, she certainly had a way of cooling things down. But here, on a casually passing Friday, on a green wrought iron seat with one leg worn down to a wobble, under a lilac tree that was making someone at the table behind me sneeze, I sat in a relative state of tranquility with a woman who I’d offered a tissue to as the train tore obliviously along its tracks and somehow, in her acceptance of that flimsy piece of pliable paper to mend the pain, we ended up losing a Friday together, telling each other things that didn’t matter, truths that I hadn’t even told friends and yet nothing really of any importance, if that makes sense. We were just two strangers floating through random thoughts, two people sitting still in the middle of a city that couldn’t stop moving.

The Woman.

Jason used to bring me to places I’d never considered of interest, used to, used to introduce me to things I never thought would (things I already knew wouldn’t) be ‘my cup of tea’ as my grandmother was supposed to say, but, in truth, she would say things like ‘what would I be doing in a place like that’ or ‘I’d rather slit my wrists.’ She wasn’t as cultured, so to speak, as my grandfather. That being one of the many reasons my grandfather’s family rapidly rationed their allowances after he refused to marry someone whose parents had a similar knowledge of bulging bank balances and connections considered correct. My grandmother brought him down to earth with a crash and a discovery of hard graft along with a greatly reduced waistline which in turn increased his healthline. My grandmother didn’t give a damn about social status or what the correct skirt length was at the time. Dad once referred to her as the ‘tramp in trousers’- and that was his mother. My grandfather was a good man, tasty, from the little I remember of him and from the tales my father used to tell me, but there were underlying tones that tarnished Dad’s pride in this own father. A regret and an anger, in part, that life could have been easier had other choices been made. A resentment that, as a working man, he had to climb from the bottom up as opposed to taking over prized positions at the top as our cousins did due to the decisions their parents once made based on what could have been called provisions for the future. My grandfather rejected those considerations in order to accept the woman he loved, to embrace her passion for life and truth and utterly unmasked honesty, decked out in trousers or not.

Honesty, I thought to myself, while I gave a stranger a brief outline of my family’s history, at least my fathers family history, in part because I didn’t want to tell him about myself directly, or go into my mother’s less explainable lineage. Perhaps I was trying to tell him the reason behind why he found me standing in a crowded underground flooded with tears, me that is, not the train itself. Perhaps I was trying to cover up all that had happened and hoped that my grandfather’s decisions to go against the wishes of his betters would excuse my morning. Perhaps. Perhaps I just needed to be masked in something other than the remains of the fresh blood I had just showered off my still tingling skin. Perhaps, unlike the tramp in trousers, I needed a mask to seek refuge beneath. Perhaps I took similar refuge behind the tears. It brought me an offer of a tissue after all, and this seat in the sunshine with the briefest of breezes blowing away certain things I don’t want to think about right now. Not here, not in front of him. I should ask him his name at some point, before it’s too late. Although I knew Jason’s name and that made no difference and mother knew my father’s name for more than 30 years and yet that also made no difference in the end, when her true taste took over. Then again, I never knew my grandfather’s real name either. Tasty though he was.

The Man.

We somehow made it all the way back to mine, having avoided the office or any work entirely, about 5pm. I remember thinking it was funny to see the front of the brown bricked house with its aging trunk of the wisteria, now past it’s bloom, still caught in the final caress of daylight. My office hours tended towards late in the night and weekends were either indoors, in cinemas or in pubs forgetting what outside light was like in place of pints to make minds feel lighter. She had somehow followed me home, not followed exactly, I had wanted her to come with me, in fact I was growing ravenous to have her; a hunger I had never felt before, but I don’t think we’d really discussed what to do or where to go. Home seemed to offer a little more privacy for the girl who’d first appeared not that many hours earlier in a torrent of tears. She hadn’t told me what it was all about yet. I guessed a break up and not her choice, if I was being totally honest, while a part of me hoped she was already looking for the rebound. If I’m not being clear, let me take the opportunity now, I had no objection to being her rebound. Or rather, that afternoon, with that shaft of light splitting the window of my lonely apartment, I had no objection to anything!

The Woman.

I felt him stir in the bed beside me, a stranger in a stranger’s room in a city that no longer moved for me or at least a city that I had just moved away from, mentally, if not yet geographically. But it would happen soon, it had before. I till my father died, (can i say died?) we had never moved but his death brought about a change in our lives, his death was a necessity to ensure our survival.

It was now 24 hours since I had severed the cord to my ties here in this city of constant commuters, constantly commuting. But there was no commotion, no chaos, no consequences, I had severed cords before.

Eventually, the man next to me got up and made breakfast. I took a shower silently and let the warm water wash away the last vestiages of the woman I had turned myself into over the past 5 years. The London girl I had become when I thought I had no choice but to escape my past, my

Mother, our bloodline. Back then I had no idea that I had absolutely no choice in the matter. Running was a waste of time. Hunger only increases after a race!

When I wandered out into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around my waist and my breasts bare, I had no thought other than to let him fuck me again. It had been wild the night before, the evening before, the afternoon before. We had been wreakless strangers taking sustenance from a situation neither of us understood or even questioned. And then I noticed the blood on the counter.

Fresh blood, lying, longing, beckoning me towards it and again I was consumed by a hunger that had nothing to do with the human I thought I was and everything regarding the monster I had once tried to hide. The cannibal that Jason had met briefly yesterday morning in the bathroom, after his shower, after he’d shaved, after he’d cut his neck so deeply that the blood flowed down his naked chest like a raging river and when he called me to help him, all I could do was give in to the hunger that had laid dormant for so long. My

fingers found their way to his flesh, to the cut he thought I was trying to close until he felt my lips lean in to the liquid and I began to devour the red river running.

Afterwards, I closed his still open eyes that no longer held the possibility of vision before I found favor with the flavor that lay within the taste of his face.

Back in the kitchen, the man was holding up his right arm with a knife cut in his finger and leaning with his left towards the tap as the morning light stole across the crisp white washed wooden floors. There will be stains, I thought immediately as I came closer to the prey, already wounded, already distracted by the loss of blood. Humans are easier to devour when distracted, are so much tastier when fear twists through their viens.

I turned him around and took his hand in mine, bringing it up to my beating breast as I squeezed his hand tighter and the blood shoot across my bare breasts. It was more than excitement, it was deeper than sex, it was the all I needed, all I tired once to hide and now the only thing I knew I had to become. He was already on the floor before I broke through the first bone with my teeth. The floors were stained, just like I thought.

He’d seen me on the train yesterday morning. He’d smelt it, I’d smelt it; a hunger rising between us. He’d fed on me all night and his desire had been abated. As I walked down the stairs, away from his apartment, I knew my hunger was only beginning and, like my mother still running wild through a city far away like wolves roam the wilderness, mine would never be abated.

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

THE KIND OF CREATURES WE ARE 

 

Strange are the creatures we are
beyond the bones that break
and the backs that bare,
striving to question our own conception
within this creation ever depleting

(and yet we all want more).

Strange are the creatures we are
beyond the fingers that fondle
and the footprints that fade,
striving to find a love completely,
a comfort to cover the concrete

(that we poured on the soil ourselves).

Strange are the creatures we are
beyond the blood that feeds
and the flesh that festers,
striving to hold the stars in our hands
now that our planet we’ve pulled apart

(the greener grass of another galaxy).

Strange are the creatures we are
beyond the tongues that taste
and the eyes that envy,
striving to have all that we can hold
not thinking what we’ll leave behind

(not thinking of those we leave behind).

Strange the creatures we are
beyond the heart that hurts
and the needs not enough,
striving to stay afloat within the fear
yet laughing as we’re carried away.

Strange the creatures,
these creatures we are.

All words and drawings by Damien B. Donnelly

PERFUMED POISON 

 

Coffee and smoke;

A perfumed poison,
Linger,
Devour and drink

This thing,

This delicious desire;
You naked,

I need a cup,

A kiss,

A breath of you,
One morning to make an eternity.

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

Inspired by the poetry magnet oracle.