Hospital Corners (an excerpt from Broken Ladders, Vol. 3 The Chronicles Of The Auto-Generator)

Hospital corners and a small bloodstain on rough sheets pink scratchy blanket and low cheery colours that depress me even more than the woman who drove me here. And it’s back to where we started, where I found you mad screaming naked and beautiful and here I am, here you soon shall be where we always end.

We cluster round the orderly, one flame for a dozen smokes. The old light next to me coughs and sputter from octogenarian lips. She bore the long drawn face of an Edvard Munch portrait. Soon enough for memories of Iceland and the hotel cubical, four by eight, with two collapsible bunks and a shower/sink and the wall mounted speaker always on with only the most primitive volume control, the soundtrack of ‘Star Wars’ all growls and bleeps and buzz rapping sounds and Han Solo taunting his companions in some Nordic tongue I don’t yet recognize and occasional blasts of music. And tomorrow we board the plane sitting smack-dab in the middle of lava floes and steaming thermal vents, the air so cold my thin overcoat cannot withstand white blonde masses packed into open air steaming public swimming pools. The plane flies low over scarred landscape and in my adolescence I can see the trolls and elves of Nordic myth consciousness cavort within the cracks and fissures of the tortured island. Airborne above the Artic Ocean tiny shards of icebergs and whale pods and I eat sweet Icelandic caviar and bitter Belgian chocolate as we wing our way towards England and terrorism and Wiccan biker gangs with no room in their theology for New Age harmony only hard kicks and the old ways of blood for Satan, to quote their leader. They, at least, were honest enough but the boat is a barge all welded steel reflecting the red-light whores of Wolverhampton as we float safe and ignorant upon the murky flotsam strewn canal God has prepared for us and sometimes it helps to hear Jimi talking as he and Lou Reed and the Dublin Cowboy take a hike down my emotions. They wear heavy boots but they walk so gently.

‘I’m sorry, but the nearest we can be translated is either as a mathematical formula or as a dense construct of geometric principles. Chaos theory. Quantum Social Mechanics. Media manipulation has become the true measure of political power in the age of interactive media democracy. I wish I could afford a computer. I wish I really knew how to draw one.’

‘That’s very good, Thomas, but you’re not being honest with yourself. We’ll keep working at this until you agree with our conclusion. Try another 500mg.’

Vision has fragmented again. Every time I sharpen my focus it all blurs and shatters. I’m assed-out again. This time an impromptu social gathering. She has let every promise fall to ash in pursuit of her desires and I say nothing, paralyzed, as it were, by Post-Modern Male Sensitivity. Times passage quickly erases all innate advantages. A level playing field is rather unfair, especially when the other team has paid off the referee.

Thick smoke catches the sun, highlights a single spiderline wafting from the lamppost as two birds zip by as one beneath the bright October sky. What one feels in inexpressively real. ‘Words don’t come easy,’ and she manages to give me writers block! Unfuckingbelievable! I am so tired. I desire stable structures within this chaos. How do I come to terms with the mess that has become my life? I know order can be imposed but there is no order without tyranny. How does one break the cycle of chaotic stasis? And who is that crazy kid flippin’ on the sax like it’s 1953 all over again and round these parts that ain’t to far away. Turtles fly against the dunes, birds against the sand. Arcing shadows zip with natal urgency towards the sea. Heavy wings of death hover above beneath the burning sky. Misstep, flip, and all is lost. ‘She’s so full of shit, pretentious bitch. How dare she?’ Yet, hadn’t I dared? The consequences of love stretch eternal fibres through the emotions. Success is labelled a pink balloon aloft among dark urban canyons. We all dance, we all rhythm gyrate. We are driven and constricted. Eternal constructs are ill-suited to temporal etiquette. The mountains are frozen. Divide my love into nanometres, damn, that’s ludicrously small. She was the kinda electric spark that set every set of testes in the joint on edge. And she moved like a backbeat-kickrythm licking lips, insecurely sucking social poisons and mistaking it for something amorphous and positive. And I loved her for it, loved her for it all. The lights shimmer round the smoke. Dig? And she’s swaying tropic palm fronds and the lump in my throat is in direct proportion to the tears in my left eye, exclusive, the tension wire of broken promises and impregnable doubt run the length of the city, connecting our spirits in unhealthy symbioses. It’s so hard to disconnect loves precious memory lacerates rhythmic soul found wanting, guilty of doubt and fear and envy. No precious thing invades the night. I hold tight my suspicious love, cool passion, doubtful affection. Love partakes of pain and fear taints every sunny day. If I say ‘I love you’ can it ever be more than words? There burns no flame in my charred breast to warm the cold night laying siege to your wounded heart. Desire senses mere sparks. What passion in the face of decay? What can I offer you without reservation? Only a ghost of a smile and semi-loyal friendship. No, not even that. Love is too false and deadly a word. I seek fresh thoughts to decorate my feelings for you, every ghost a fading image that once, perhaps, was labelled love, blight stricken, and watered with miserly tears by the very inmates of God’s own asylum.