ROMANTIC HORROR STUDIES WORKSHOP

Each corresponding horror-scape 

Negates the previous with fresh 

Horror

Scape (s)

 

WHAT WAS IT ?

It was a reverse cat bandage

A reality brace

A black hole collapsing in on itself

An old shrew chewing an old shoe

Four thousand butterflies released from captivity

A burning city at night

Grape vines

Goose bumps

A package holiday from hell

A package holiday from heaven

Motivation just at the right time

The last chicken in the supermarket

A bumper harvest at the charity shop

A listless rainy day when you forced yourself to do yoga 

A distant figure on the marshes possibly tripping on acid

Last night’s washing up glistening in the sink

Tina the cat meowing at 5.30 am

Mist and fog our favourites

Will there be another pandemic?

Do we need flu jabs?

But what was it?

 A LITTLE BIT OF ENCOURAGEMENT

 

Is all it takes

whipped cream dreams ascend into the afternoon.

And what is the total cost of children?

And the meteorological data, do we have this?

The snake skin life behind us

The pasts all dodging each other crossing over the road to avoid awkward confrontations the street signs that were once important now gone.

Is it the gravity of age suddenly so heavy

that hurts our shoulders restricts our breathing?

 Cold songs haunted

cloud memories 

               the blinking of a traffic light eye.

 To A Smile

 

Run towards subtle joy. Congratulations under glass. 

A thousand year old Quran. 

Let’s take a walk together. We three. Me and my boys. 

Into the crowded museum’s ancient aura of tourism and coffee and wooden buddhas. After the bookshop but before incense. 

Must we make the same mistakes and is it taking without giving? 

What the hell are we learning here anyway? That gold was gold is gold? 

Fashioned in stone or precious metals signifying the ticket price minus two children plus lunch. 

Forge a new future from beetles' wings and alabaster to recast failure with bitter contempt. But walk on. Breath fire. Spread joy like ashes in the air. 

 

 Flying Buddha’s Revenge & Rebirth on the Blackwater Beltway

 

Dreary below

supine beneath deep banks

loping along the essential estuarine curvature 

ripping over the horizon

let’s be homeless on acid and belt the cosmos out of here

jumping through hard loops

bending out on time 

stumbling emergent into

incomparable fissures

legions of floating unrest

solidify on your breath

curling up to floating star light

hot essential phosphorescence  

hungry for everything abject

sitting quietly

on the door step of an endless milky night.

 A clacking sound, no,

 a beating sound,

 

in the rafters

 

 trivialise things always

 

yet stay entranced

 

 by hypnotic violence.

 

This day 

 

 

          of orange 

                               dances. 

connects earth to the lungs

       just bags of air?

bags of you

the same albumen is all over that opens 

the doors to a ruin?

             

               Blood pressure is 

                Brackish,

Piety softly driven insane by innate survival instincts,

Slowly introduce succour to the subject of a new nothing. 

Pitched towards the horizon goal.

Shopping push your way through heavy fruit; swoon against the 

protest flow.

 

Meanwhile 

 

discomfort ignites new folk horror aberrations

we watch the bladed stagger from grub to grub into white light 

beacons of harsh tranquility.

 

The returning images are just:- 

 

Mad  park avenues lined with bird shit. 

The undignified body groaning.

Bones creaking with remorse. 

Fumbles finding fury in perm-a-frosted moorings.

Up before dawn.

Something going on.

Never before like this.

 

SLOB STORY

The continued cough, a shallow echo all day for at least month. Like a shovel being driven into wet shale on a deserted building site at dawn. 

 

I would like to use the bathroom but know that there is somebody in there. Silently taking up time on pointless preparations. It makes me angry.

 

I have waited patiently for this moment.

 

For the contents of language to spill out across the counter. You scramble to pick them up and pile them back into your purse.

 

This does not alarm me, this shedding. Or it could be cells multiplying into a malignancy that breathes a shade: sobbing into the soothing darkness of a mid-winter afternoon, in Bloomsbury.

 

Somewhere you don’t belong. Picking up a pamphlet.

 

Off we go and away with consciousness.

The flesh that binds us to the bare bones of reality. 

 

Is all there is; 

 

all there ever will be. 

 Magnum Classic 

 

Hold hands in the burnt umber as Epping Forest Constables pass by clutching magnums in the sun shade. This is our forest birth right the horse dung decries. Two sugar lickers or hot chatting geniuses; while the stand-up comic places unnatural body movement in front of the camera. Close up on flammable parakeet green and red. Burst in like fly and destroy the ambience and it’s our world we’ll eat it up they fizz and crackle crashing against the window pain. You’re a grammar scammer don’t place your algorithms over this, pulled in a net to drag it back to hell. Follow the hard baked trail to the grotto’s mouth; the clock strikes three as we fart a collapse. Two jets collide falling upwards to the earth locked in a silent death spiral of mushroom clouds, messy tendrils and purple smoke.