Fictions

Creative Writing

Evil Tangles

By karm · January 24, 2017

Freezing myths chilled her when recalled by a sound, a smell, a sign. She knew the past would haunt her always but she didn’t know quite which pasts were real, embellished, imagined; the drugs and the drink and time had polluted them, never ridding her of them as she had for years intended. They remained stained and indelible, smearing her present with the blood of innocence spilt by rough hands and vulgar breaths; guilt infused by tricks and taunts and lies and threats. The tendrils of fear still drove deep and still strangled her as the fear of the judgement of others if the truth were known. She could not see that she was pure victim and not the impure accomplice he had convinced her of being. Evil is stark when viewed from outside, insipid in its throttling woven grasp for the ensnared, but evil all the same.

Justice seeks no compassion

By karm · January 5, 2017

He was a fool fooled; like most men, sense is lost in lust. The visual hides the intent as the visceral is masked by beauty; the murderess is made up as lover with lips poised to impart the caress of a purple aconite kiss. Hook. Line. Sunken.

She breathed a heavy thick sigh. It was done. Asleep and dying, she left him for the last time.

Revenge doesn’t settle the heart, and whilst it quells the rage in its noisy place the dull ache is amplified by absence and realisation. It was the price to pay as justice has little compassion for the judge or the condemned.

Havana Nights

By karm · November 24, 2016

The heat wiped a wet hand across their bursting skin as they entwined, each trying to match the rhythm of their partner. For them the suspension of time was betrayed as the noises of their passion from smothering inaccurate lips and bodies writhing in sheets mingled with the stultifying air and the call of the city streets through the open double windows. As life ground on as usual below, their lives, they had yet to notice, had changed forever. Friends cannot become lovers and remain friends. There is a divide, and it is more bitter than colycinthe when trodden on. The point of no return was missed in the fire and desire; consequences became so diminished as to be of no consequence. But the flames of passion can also turn out to be the fuel of rage and to this there are always the most serious of consequences to which lovers, when embarking on love never notice or take heed of. In the end, there is nothing mutual about pain and loss except the names and the democratic fact that we all encounter them as unintended and uninvited enemies.

Walker in the Woods

By karm · September 21, 2016

Looking deep into the drab recesses of the evening wood is to look into the moonless flat night. The greens and browns are diluted into greys and shadowy blacks. Walking therein unfurls the details of trunk and branch and variety, like a slowly focussing eye after deep sleep, many haunting shapes of faces and night creeps are stolen quietly from the imagination by familiarity and proximity and recognition. In that coliseum of spired darkness there is life, from the crack of branch under foot, to flaps and rustles as frightened birds flit from perch to safer perch to avoid the unwelcome interloper. Silence moves and then breaks, scurrying can be heard if one only has the patience and quietude to just wait and see. It is a kingdom of the unseen, of the invisible, the camouflaged and consequently of fear. Fear is strong when inspired by the unknown, or worse the unknowable, for that is the fuel that feeds the unlit echoing cave of the mind. The woods at night are mystery, amazement and fear rolled into dark corners and unclear sharp shapes. It is the playground for the mind’s wicked temptations, yet it is just the woods at night; they are not foreboding evil, they are not haunted nor are they prowled, except by us, for we are the monsters here, we are the things we should fear.

Déjà vu

By karm · September 18, 2016

I see houses

Rows and rows of coffins

Lives unscripted

Worlds full of losses

And then I get this feeling inside

That I’ve been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor…

I see black clouds

Tumbling and crashing

Innocent eyes filled

With hopes in ashes

And then I get this feeling inside

That I have been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor

I am empty from the pain

That I am back here again

Still nothing to offer

An empty hollow coffer

Full of wasted tears

Full of wasted years.

I see blue mist

Flowers at the equinox

Truth runs fleetingly

Escapes like the red fox

And then I get this feeling inside

That I’ve been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor…

I see your face

Scarred with my love

I ruin beauty

With the things I sing of

And then I get this feeling inside

That I have been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor

I am empty from the pain

That I am back here again

Still nothing to offer

An empty hollow coffer

Full of wasted tears

Full of wasted years.

III

I see red suns

Setting over mountains

I see black smoke

Steaming from highways

And then I get this feeling inside

That I have been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor…

Worlds on fire

Spitting on all of us

Consequences roosting

Hindsight’s deep cuts

And then I get this feeling inside

That I have been here before

And when I try to hide

I end up crying on the floor

I am empty from the pain

That I am back here again

Still nothing to offer

An empty hollow coffer

Full of wasted tears

Full of wasted years.

Less than One

By karm · September 12, 2016

I am my father’s son

I try to be a man’s man

Tough when I can

Provide for my family

I don’t turn and run

I stay

He left

Whatever the reason, the excuse

He started afresh somewhere else with someone else

With other people

But not with me

How can I be my father’s son?

I am my mother’s son

I try to be an empathetic man

As gentle as I can

I confuse anger and love

But I will not back down

I stay

She left

She took another

A lover

She had taken him long before now

It is why my father left it is said

It was the process of my mother leaving

In stages

Cutting the maternal bonds

That weighed and weighs like rusty anchors dragging

She brought that lover home

He slept in my father’s bed

He slept in my father’s room

He slept in my father’s house

But he was not father to anyone

He with my mother left

How can I be my mother’s son

III

I am my father’s son

I am my mother’s son

They told me they loved me, they told me they didn’t like me

A child should not be divided like that

Dislike will scar the man

Make the man

Negate the man

I am the son

And I have come home

Less than one.

Writing words and words when written

By karm · September 10, 2016

‘I write in order to peruse myself.’

– Henri Michaux

‘I write in order to pursue myself!’

-KarM

When I write it comes from nowhere and ends up solid. Inscribed and fixed on paper, on a digital page. Words fill space, yet are composed of shaped space.

The letters emerge and words form and ideas coalesce. Appointments can be kept and essential items remembered at supermarkets.

It is a strange magic, digestible, transferable, they are mine alone to be shared for any who see them, so they are my part of a shared inheritance; they are my words, they can convict me, they can get me fired, they did get me married, but as much as they are mine alone they don’t belong to me: I am renting them, leasing them, borrowing them, reordering them, playing with them.

So it may be that words are nothing but signs, they direct and they point but the horizon is broad, there is no one place at which they settle.

Words cannot be translated unless I craft them with precision, dedicate them to a form and framework, socially compatible citizenship, citizenship of shared sign consumption.

Yet still they are translated in myriad ways, is there a right way to read my words? Do I inform myself through them? Do I inform of myself through them? Psychologists earn money from this.

Life is written every day, everyday life is written every day. There are different modes and speeds and different times and places and moods. The newspapers, the headlines on telly, the bus ticket, the cab receipt, and the numbers punched on tills for shopping bills. There is a recording of signs pointing to where your life has been; a trail of crumbs through the woods of existence. It leads in circles. From the registrars note about your birth to the full stop on the registrars note on your death. It is extended through an elegant obituary for those with friends and families or who have fallen into graves from high places, but the government make mention of even the pauper, albeit in cold, blank terms.

The poor are never loved by government machinery, instead they are hidden by words such as ‘scrounger’, ‘selfish’, ‘lazy’.

Words begin in space; they describe space and that which space forms from its absence. Space is around a chair but not exactly where the chair is, except between the fibres and crevices, the braces and glue. Words describe space when it is no longer space but another thing.

Words are borders; they describe coasts and boundaries and give them names – sometimes they create countries. They instigate wars and are signatures to peace. They are causes and consequences, they are love and they are hate.

Words are keys to unlock the mysteries of the inner to the outer, to be ingested back again from the guru to the gut. They clarify maps and tables and graphs so we can measure and know what we measure. A number can be a word but can a word be a number?

Numbers and words live together in minds and on keyboards. They inhabit every size and every shape. They are descriptions and facts, fairytales and love.

We are human because words let our consciousness talk to us.

Without words we would be indescribable.

We are in the end, the words in our heads.

Control

By karm · September 3, 2016

He erupted like the seat belt pulled taut in an emergency stop, tight, straight and restricting. His breath was short and sharply inhaled and he glowered from a dark overhanging frown down at the boy. Even so his flaring anger was of such violence that it signalled its own end before any lasting damage could be felt. The boy, initially stultifying his own breathing in the whirl of the man’s anger, saw in that storm the premonition of its end and so relaxed and thought instead of what he might do tomorrow to get an even more excited reaction from the headmaster!

Rain of the Song Bird

By karm · August 28, 2016

As the rain tapped onto the window before running down the panes, falling on furrowed red bricks and turning invisible in the lush grass at the foot of stone walls, she fell in his arms like a crumpled bird, wings folded, wings broken, helpless little bird with a heaving chest and darting desperate eyes. She strained with hope that he loved her, that her collapsing confession would bring a peace to her longing, to her lonely limp nights; nights of grey and cold and creaking creeping ghouls of isolation. She fluttered without flight, she struggled without fight waiting for the judgement of his stone words that would entomb her fate. ‘My god,’ he breathed heavily, ‘I never thought I would hear it… I, I always dreamt I would say it,’ he paused for a heartbeat like the executioner taking final aim with his axe, ‘Mavie, I love you too!’ Bird caught. Bird caged. Song bird singing in the rain.

Sunflowers

By karm · August 7, 2016

Sunflowers beat down burning brittle shadows overhead as we embrace, hidden from humanity by our fixated eyes, glazed and gazing at the beginning of our love. We have only fantasies for now. We refuse to see that it may simply be that we end like the husks of those sunflowers shredding in a fading summer. But cares are for those who have forgotten such heartbeats as ours, who no longer whisper the orisons of paramours, who melt themselves into mundane automatism, who have forgotten the adventure of standing tiptoe on the precipice of love. We care for today, tomorrow is a dream that is a million miles away as we bask in the beauty of the instances braided together by the shadow of the sunflowers, burning.

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