The Silent partner

So you arrived. You arrived unannounced and I didn’t even notice, with a limp and a smile, a hole in the back and oil stained face. You disappeared for so long with no explanation. I dismissed you from my memory because to think of you hurt too much, but you return intermittently and I’m grateful for that. You return in the skies above my head and the air as I walk down the street fending off attacks from imaginary enemies made flesh just by thinking about you.

               I turn down my vacuums and my pulse, the pace of reality burning holes in my retinas, my idiot ideas and purposeful gait already gaining momentum. You’ve change your shape again, from velociraptor to dreadful beaked hulk, from lively mannequin to pale dark shadow, from flailing disciple to sycophantic misanthrope. You changed your shape and I barely even noticed.

            Your desperate lunge towards the heart of me, your last push for distraction and idealism becomes outwardly punishing, my limbs like black pistons churning the earth for an answer, digging and ploughing my way through your webs and your lies, through the false hopes and many diversions. All the time your ever changing myriad faces delineate themselves into some form of conquest, surrounding me with fake odours and listless smells, the reality of dreams, the realness of concrete.

                  I change your dark smile and I keep your old clothes, in a bag, in a basket, in a hole in the wall, behind brick and old drawings, you hide away in these places. You lurk like dark meanings with malice and divinity. Black dogs on my shoulder are always the same, the four legged doom merchants twisting my mind, in between summer’s last grasp at a fortunate outcome, the vines. A populated masquerade in an abandoned mine, drowning dead miners and lipid excuses, five hundred televisions tuned to the wrong channel each and everyone crying loudly at me to find the right position, cling to the correct posture, the flowering idiocy of messed up mad puppets, a kitchen full of derision, knives and bad odours, codex and inert notions.

             A glib remark defining the way you see some situation, a thousand stark words making you flail and cry in despair, the last light of the day leaving you linear and clear, the oily residue beside your face when nothing makes sense. High tide moments in a listless display of festival blues, when your body wouldn’t make anymore movements. Eyelids broken with glass. Finger heavy.

           

              Terrestrial hints and marked lay-byes, the individual centre, a clouded junction between the last known icon and the beaten delay, you wanted to climb upon the statues of a fallen king and burrow hermetically like knives, like seaweed, wrapped like pastry in a sealed cabin for the wreckage of lost words, lost genuflection, the cross the star the holy sealed beautification.

                  Your body seemed disconnected like a lost infant farmer, no expression just poses and passes, a miscellany of litany and generosity climbs and fights its way to your surface painting, when all of the crystallized idolaters pass you around in the invisible church, genuine worship and protection, in my mind I wrap you in cotton and cellophane to hide you from all these worlds and jagged edges, cauterised listless progress hunters.

              You speed through the streets at night invisible to all, like a beam of string you inject each stone, in a maze the silent light spears close in on you and you howl like the first noise, a sub tone, a closed parade.

            Then you slipped away from the house quietly, I didn’t know you had gone, so slowly you closed the door, so chaotically you drift through my life without bastions of ritualistic goodbyes or half hearted denials, I outlived your expectations by three by four by five, you lowered your whole body one step at a time down my inky stairwell, the darkness materialising without my permission but there it was, there it wasn’t