LAID UP   |   HEAVEN IS A MAD PLACE ON EARTH   |   PSYCHOSIS AS A REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON   |   A VISION OF ELVIS   |   THE NEED FOR A MENTAL PATIENTS UNION

by Debbie McNamara

This structure will make plywood of us all. And anything in-between at the threshold must go one way or the other. Did you ever go surfing? There's no need now. Did you enjoy cooking? Smoke enough and you'll eradicate those craving little taste buds. But the world turns on and there's no need to feel downhearted! If you have the stamina, you can collect bottle tops and get your prescription pain-relief for free! The news tells us snatches of the whole picture at high speed and the days have become too short to read a paper. Fact blends with fiction and we live in our own dream where there is only fantasy and no time zones unless, unless, you can carve your step and sift away, minimise your input in order to retain your sharpness, and relinquish the shadows. Can you pull away? Can you rouse yourself to reach the point where the air is clean? Do you still dare to hope that it will make a difference? Is there anything left to heal?   Remember the con of the salty soup. Maus. Fear. Ever feared for your life? Well, they've never. And now we are too tired to teach, and our brains are no longer retentive, and romanticism is redundant. Dark valley and natching of shrivelled gums! A beautiful model debauched into sallow candlegrease and love annihilation. But you know what? The flowers grow on. If you can bear to look at them, the flowers will remind you of everything. Don't get too comfortable in this maze of confusion. There is elsewhere.   One day, arriving to look upon the suffering of the poor little things as their predecessors gloated over photographs of perplexity (and maybe pick up one or two last moves) a one of the race apart sees with sudden atavistic fury that there are footprints. As it was predicted, Lilith picked up her hoard of gold teeth - her own - and walked. Realising suddenly that she'd been had, and that the only barrier between herself and life was the refusal to believe, she denounced the whole shebang as mass psychosis and hobbled off to buy a mini Sarong, and join the party elsewhere. This was no fun! Welcome to the green room. No belief, no fear.   And so the story goes: smearing butter on the dead, the gentle handled fish-knife and slow motion. In an effort to resurrect her passionate godlike man with all the enticements to recall a spirit back into a vacated body, she tempts with shot-through Marzipan, Bismark and Myrrh, greasing onto a clean pine top. She cares not if he lives, not as we know it, just so long as he is possessed of life. She is calm now after the shock and aftermath. She smears his hair with a little fat and places gold around his neck, saffron sun on his forehead in unutterable feeling, an ecstasy. She sings to the Lord in catholic prayer, the only ones that she knows, as she lauds the bones of his making and laments the freezing of his beauty.   Her weaving lasts for six days. On the seventh day she rests. She has worked assiduously on his behalf, her brief quavering, washing his succulent form in exposition of her Cancerian grief, inhaling the dust of many exhalations. She guards the lap, rests next door. On the seventh day she retires. The orchids are heavy and blue in their profusion. She has called Lakshmi, Krisna, Shiva, all the sisters in the Bible and miracle-givers of sacred texts, in writing and zither song.    On the seventh day she carries her empty heart out into the crocus morning of rude spring early growth and sits silent amid the raucous chorus, grey-eyed, head covered. She carries her material wealth around her ankles and is tempted just to walk. The wind is steady and seasonal and carries the cherubim in the sky low. Scudding eastwards. Toward the eventual cliffs. A long moment of weather changes, sunlight shafts into the late afternoon and the day is bearable. Ravens land on the silver Birch, scratch their talons and utter their guttural obscenities. At blue twilight a beam of light touches on her shoulder and her soul trembles at its junction with her being. As she turns her head he sits down beside her, glistening, wrapped in the jade cloth that she placed by him. Green-eyed he looks out at the sea of the land. Aghast with sensation, she remains simply in the moment. Her lament. The Gingerbread man. Jasmine and Nzir. There's something strange about the neighbours. Her lament has taken her heart, her joy, the freshness of her breathing. He turns to her in her pallor and smiles the irresistible smile of those who no longer ache. Something in her turns over. They kiss. He slips the tongue in. She remembers the laughter, in her own happy voice of the distance between now and the hereafter. She remembers that she ought to eat as befits the clock and she looks at him doubtfully. He offers her a slice of Bismark. She could have died laughing. All that work, and he moving. Like a magician he produces sweet almonds still in their rusting leaves, nectarines. Their lovemaking caused nutmeg pastries to appear, fully frosted, and champagne grapes to ripen.   In reeking stink of psychic trashcan wherein all efforts to maintain a sweet, sheened loveliness are thwarted, my personal battle against it all begins here, in a festering adrenal gland which, despite the ablutions involving olive soap at regular intervals, still runs into overdrive and takes my once-fresh corpse sagging along with it. I can no longer enter the kingdom of the Body Shop without dutifully masking-up at the door. Every month I am psychologically ground into some jerk's marble ashtray and I walk away from the encounter each time, determined to breathe calmly.   Valium enabled public transport to become a possibility again: but woe be to the self-medicator who does not inhabit a pharmacy. I have colluded with Diamond White and the offerings of the Jutland peninsula in order to approximate the optimum satiation of my main tantalisation and healing force, which is currently in the hands of an ex-squaddie on a mission to lose all of his friends and generally piss off everybody that he meets.   So, another day off sick, laid-up, wondering how I'm going to get my hands on my medical needs without becoming a sylvan shadow in the meantime, with heavier tread than should be the case owing to the backlog of contretemps and general hecticness in the heavens at the present time.  I have the answer. A six a.m. start and farewell to ginswilling malcontent associates seeking to be heard. A new start. A simple diet, except for when entertaining when exquisite preparation and many courses of tit-bits shall tease the taste buds from forbearance into sustained and understated climax of sensation. The year of silence and the hands. My vows shall be to be talked out, evading questions, focus outward, to concentrate fully on others, keep lists, remain with my heart, keep a cool head and a fast spark, speak my mind. And the best laid plans shall at last be realised. I look forward to seeing the flowers. By that time I should be able to smell.   There was a rock on the edge of the shoreline, chains and manacles upon it, where the remains of a servitude long past could be discovered.   I am introduced to a being I don't necessarily want to know, who hits on me hard in the "I need you" vein, and so I try and the fact ensues that I guess that I end up as being something for him, albeit not too willingly on my part¼ it was a wrong connection from the start¼ portents warned¼ quadrants of the city were sealed off in the convulsions of a bus crash on their first meeting, on the second he saw somebody knocked off their trike and get injured, by the time that he had held her for a brief moment with a reflection of her own spirit, borrowed for the occasion, the Ulster Prods were emboldened enough to savage a lady barrister tooth from bone to show their noblesse after talk had been stable at tables, then presenting Engloid accents with justifications that invited the derision of the Ombudsmen and soon after India launched its first cruise after over a year of abstinence.     I approach my Sugar Loaf Mountain resplendent in the carbon-dated knowledge of this species, this supposition of every fact, life, experience and invention, its knowledge of the winds and the power of the earth, its feeling of flabby root encroachment, the thrill of buds and harvest of pollen.   Gifted are we on earth.   Today my mind is on the things of the sea, the trinkets of the ocean, the endless wheel of rotational mathematics, the waves and pools having spent the morning in quadri-dance (peculiar muscle pain for two weeks now) and feeling the need for a top-floor flat to prevent the upward-vortex suck of energy, attributable to many current factors, not least self-annoyance today at missing three appointments knowingly, laid-up again with no way to reach my medicine.   Yeah, language got mashed too - that was a while back now, and I am recovering but still keeping close to the wave. And there is just a gradual reintroduction to those echelons, and my remembrance of fantastical longings encased as an alabaster egg inside a gilded spool, within each and every atom in this, my hologram. So, hanging there in virtual space almost half-amused, clock-watching until the millennium plus fifty, sans appetite or desire or anything like that, evoking the response of a surging mass of wailing and gnashing, and the rending of nature and the squalling of lightning: like the script to the apocalypse in visual form, written up there in big typeface for the future, to play us out in style to the closing chord of the big cathode tube in the sky. And the silence before the final anthem, the catching of your last breath which we all share, all lungs united in a final gasp of exultant jubilation.   I go into my millennium with my bone structure intact, and grateful for such assets as my vertebrae. Thank you to the crawly floppy things who pushed us up and out of the soup.