Silver Birch Junction

The Edge

2010-11-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

This headland rears upward
into the spitting
and bluster of a gale wind:

A wind, like hate, that meets
the rise and rise of landscape into air.

Rising always,

pulling from the waves
the chalk bones
of a giant, a king,
the bones of a country.

Deaf in the whitening wind,
and whipped by hair
and feather spray, here,
straining just to hold the ground,
there is a salty melancholy
even in the leaning,

even in the rising heave of
vertigo and escaping,
in evaporation,
and in breath that burns.

Here is the line,
like a single dry and
fibrous blade of grass,
the cliff-edge, between bone
and aerial existence,
the place we come for coronation.

And these freezing tears
that the wind draws,
that make it hard to see the edge,
are nothing more than diamonds
for a crown.

Saint

2006-03-31T06:29:00.000-08:00

Putting him down on the bed and putting your body on his, drilling low for a high, while the radio plays Miserere from the kitchen, you are going to hate yourself in the morning because you can already see it in his eyes, that he’s looking for something which has nothing to do with you.

When I grow up I want to be a saint, and he always wanted this. So he kept his hips skinny and his bones brittle and his head always turned up slightly. He was eleven and he wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only way to leave anything behind. So when the boy with the dirty-grey t-shirt twisted his arm to the tip of his shoulder blades, it snapped. And something like the needles of a cold shower gasped all over, like having a body without skin and being kissed on the marbled fat.

And from the moment the boy with the dirty-grey t-shirt snapped his arm he was confirmed in his vocation.

He sought out dirty city churches where, at any moment, thick black-haired fingers might clamp his praying mouth and pull him to the shadows. The bishop later picking relic pieces from the floor would have them freeze-dried and encased in silver.

Look at the family album (actually a pile of photos in a box beneath his mum’s red slippers, resting while she watches telly). Every photo of him looks Victorian and in the yellow albumen he always has his eyes half-closed or closed. He went through martyrdom not puberty grew into its shape like adolescence, avoiding meat to stay as pale as milk and cultivate that ghost-light glow, that insubstantial look, the halo. All grown up he was only half a human, half the plastic, nauseating shape on an exotic lily.

When cancer got his mum he smiled slightly, eyes half-closed or closed throughout the funeral.

Putting him down on the bed and putting your body on his is like hitting a bird with a car at sixty miles an hour. Smack, crack, snap and a slight smile and head turned slightly up, eyes half-closed or closed so all the while you know you’re drilling a hole in a plaster statue to get at the coke the smugglers hid inside. Drilling low for a high of religious proportions because even though you know you’re destroying him (which is all he wants) you can’t but keep drilling. And it has nothing to do with you.

Naked

2005-12-03T04:34:00.000-08:00

There’s nothing else like the texture of skin: think about it! So, thinking themselves adventurous, they got out the razor. First from her groin, then from his fell a shower of golden filaments. They planted kissed on the newly naked flesh.

“Do my chest,” he said, she hesitated only a moment, “my legs…”

“My arms,” she said.

“My eyebrows… my head,” someone said, not just short, make me bald.”

Hours later, more naked than babies, they fell on each other, unable to stop touching, kissing and licking, thrilling at the strangeness of skin that had never been touched before.

Big Sister

2005-12-03T04:32:00.000-08:00

Through cracks in doors and curtains, pixie-like, Stephen’s eyes flashed over the bloom of his older sister’s skin. He saw her breasts slide over ribs, he saw her most intimate pink colours, he saw the stretch of her jaw, saw the saliva run over her chin. The young peeping-tom would run to his room, grabbing himself, often not making it to privacy before the shameful hot flush of orgasm.

These were his strongest coloured memories of childhood but now he could not be sure; was it her or the lean and willowy penis of her boyfriend that filled his imagination.

Gothic Suggestion

2005-12-03T04:30:00.000-08:00

For all the pretence of cynicism, for all the gothic, child-of-the-night regalia that hangs off their white skins, the four friends, two couples are innocent as adolescents when the time comes.

A suggestion made in the club where aspirations are pumped up by lights, bass and a screaming lyrical guitar and then they were sprawled naked on the floor of someone’s apartment, touching portions of each other’s limpid flesh.

Now, two slender cocks are squeezed together for the first time with ribs and flat nipples rubbing too while the girls, pale as moonlight, watch and move their hands slowly.

Priesthood

2005-12-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

The moonlight cast platinum shadows through the leaded church windows. In the dark there was a scuffle on gritty flagstones and some of the shadows moved. With a low moaning that could have been the wind, the procession to the altar began. White among the black robes was the loose draped body of the initiate, naked in the arms of the high priest: pieta. The chant rose like a sea swell, the insensate, trance filled body was laid on the altar.

Settling to a circle the procession came to rest, the priests of the order opened their robes and a ring of penises filled and thickened with the rumble of bass voices. Hands moved, skins slipped back and moans of pleasure began to weave within the chant. The body on the altar stirred, it arched a bridge of fragile ribs upwards like the vaulted ceiling.

Strands of silver mixed with the platinum, looped into the air and fell in arches. Strings of seed splattered onto the soft skin and in his trance the initiate opened his mouth, darted his tongue. In the dark his body glowed with the sheen of his new life.

The Whole Truth… Not.

2005-12-03T04:28:00.001-08:00

“It’s my first time…” She flushed and teeth tugged her bottom lip.
“I know, and that’s why we do it this way. So you don’t get pregnant. Everyone does it at our age.” His weasel eyes shone down. As thin and white as inexperience itself, two lovers ruffled the sheets of first time love. She loved the coolness of his skin on hers, his devil eyes. He loved the soft skin, stretched between her breasts, where his tongue trailed. “Turn over.” Clumsy, she knocked against the hard pole in his groin and they giggled.

She heard him spit and dribble and heard the slip-slap as he smoothed the slime over himself. The end was hot, he butted up against her hole and began to slide. A ring of muscle loosened, spasmed and then something uncurled inside her. Driving down, he sank into heat and deep fire and pummelled. She yelped and arched and dug under to press her fingers into the other place. He lifted and sank, over and over. Too quickly he tightened and fell and she was flooded.

After, she said,
“Mmm… I love that.” Stop, catch of breath, “I mean, I loved that.”

You have to know where to look…

2005-12-03T04:28:00.000-08:00

… to see the pack of boys who move like wolves through the night: roof tops, docks and empty parking lots, swerving the trash and the tramps in the allies. A flash of walnut brown, bright eyes in the dark, the streetlight glow of a shaved head… that’s all you’d see without knowing.

But look up and focus. There on top of that building, where the concrete cracks: a small tribe of bodies, naked in the hot night, a bit more than silhouette if you look long enough. Thin arms like cables wrapped, backs twisted, sharp angles of hips and shoulder blades and mouths mashing into tongues; can you see?

Watch for Billy, he’s the leader, you’ll see that spike rise in his groin. Watch him pick his favourite bitch and bend him over the parapet, a strippling, lean. Can you hear it? It’ll get louder as Billy sinks in the bitch’s guts. And look another, sniffing round Billy’s ass, licking at his balls, nuzzling the stubble of his head into Billy’s crack. And now Billy has his, the rest fall in. Can you hear the howling? You’d never hear it if you didn’t know to listen.

Opening of a Novel

2005-12-02T09:55:00.000-08:00

Diary – Year Sixteen.

September

If I die before I’m sixteen, which could happen, I want my big brother Jack to carry the coffin. Not on his own: him and five tranny dwarves dressed as Snow White and all smoking pipes. He’d have to bend double to keep me level.

I want to be laid out too, in the living room at home. Take the front wheel off my bike and take off the tyre and the rim, then spray the spokes with gold paint and put it under my head in the coffin – my halo. I want my dead body to be wearing cream silk panties – the kind of thing a bride might wear. Then over that, I want one of those old-fashioned one-piece gymslips that boys used to wear as well as girls.

And I want my crotch stuffed with a sock or something so everyone who comes to pay their respects gets all guilty when they realise they can’t tear their eyes off my groin.

I want my mate Xoren to do my make up, something with lots of silver and glitter – because that might convince him that he is good for something. And the hair on my head should be died pink with little model butterflies all over.

And I want four of those seaside windmills stuck at each coffin-corner and a fan in the room so they move a bit. I want silver larmé to lie on in the coffin and just enough fairy-lights round the rim to make it sparkle.

Oh, and someone’s got to shave off these three hairs on my chest because I hate them and there’s no way I’m going to my grave with them. How long does it take for hair to stop growing after you die?

Young Man Dancing

2005-11-28T08:42:00.001-08:00

Its a small club
but the light-filled
smoke beams move quick

across the floor.
And you are small,
but not in this

intensity
of space and sound,
caught in circles

of light you seem
to rise like an
ascending Christ;

flesh with this much
power must be
turned into light.

Remember Me?

2005-11-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

Remember me. I was the boy
who exploded with the diamond
river of sweat between my shoulder-blades
and the cords of my neck

on New Year’s Eve when the strobe
took me and you watched my back
all night: hard and dented
like the metalwork of a beaten car.

You sucked on frosted vodka and orange
and I was exceptional!
Lean meat, skinned and marbled with fat
supple as whiplash and glittering

like windscreen glass
as gay as the rainbow swirl
of petrol being washed into the
gutter by the rain on my broken face.

Pilgrimage to Dungeness

2005-11-28T08:41:00.000-08:00

(Dungeness was the home of gay saint, activist and film maker, Derek Jarman. In his last years he built a famous wilderness garden there)

Here is where a saint lived
but there’s ‘nothing to see,’
sign says, ‘move along please.’
Here there was a garden
spare and hard as driftwood,
wild as ragwort, iron
rusted homage to all
that pushes and survives.

But there’s nothing to sea,
beyond the single bank,
laid out in Zen patterns
around the reactor.

In the mizzle distance,
which is either the end
or the world’s beginning,
varieties of grey
are as beautiful soft
at the world’s dissolving
as the sound of one hand
applauding the saint’s life.

Next Trick

2005-11-28T08:40:00.000-08:00

My eyes were drawn to his thighs
to the bruises, blue inside.
The colours and the silent cries
on swollen lips and hips wide
open hung out this question.
Had this been pain or pleasure:
the pain of too much pressure
or the pleasure of a wince?

Blades

2005-11-20T07:41:00.000-08:00

Boys on wheels (boards or blades) scuttle the cracks of summer heat in the hard-court backing the beach with blades for hips that barely hold the jeans above the V and summer cracks of sweat where bodies split. Boys with coffee, cocoa, walnut tans of indolence and naked sun with swollen nipples darkening until they scream out ‘ripe! ripe!’ And puberty is hanging like a wire mesh around the ramps and dips and shoulder blades and cracks of bone through wooden skin. When dusk has lowered sunlight to the tone of tans and made the boys invisible they slink away but one at least tonight will lie on damp and sweaty sheets fingering the thought of what hangs heavy in the trousers of a man.

Carried Away

2005-11-20T07:40:00.002-08:00

You rub your cock that some poets call candy-stick and I call iron spike along the angled groove my groin provides your lips a limpet grip around my collar bone. Your toes are digging trenches nailing holes against the bottom of the bed. Your iron fingers make a fist of sheet an eagle’s talon-grasp and push to force our chests in curves apart and driving hips together mashed. And only in your eyes a clue that you are startled being carried off along a line so straight so mathematically pure a drive so new it tosses gravity about like wings and you fall upwards shooting into air. And only in your eyes the steel a fractured feather of surprise.

Unknowing Glance

2005-11-20T07:40:00.001-08:00

You have no name for what you’re feeling now a flock of birds inside your narrow chest is blustering. Your breath is catching sudden shallow fut-fut on your tongue. All this when you see me see you across the street before you know my name. You have no name forgotten as the quarter moon which hangs in morning skies dissolves to blue. I’m hoping I can be there when finally you pinion all those birds against your ribs wake up and spread your arms and howl the names against the moon. For now you have no name for what you’re feeling…

The Bedside Table

2005-11-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

Everything is ready for you. The cigarettes you can’t yet buy but smoke because they tighten your expression into urban prose and gravel-up your milk voice. The glasses that you left behind last time waiting balanced like a bird beside the bed clear eyes thin legs like you. The chewing gum the condoms and the cream the tissues and the crusty towel. And even now the metal smell of your first burning in a bed the air you moulded into curves with spinal twists and bony claws is waiting for you… the whole room waits for you.

Scab and The Virgin (Part 3)

2005-11-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

It had been raining for twenty-four hours when we got home, footsore, still clasping our trainers in shivering fingers. We walked all through the night. We hatched a plan, a hysterical, freaky, Scab-style plan.

In St Andrew’s, by the time we got there, it was light, a thin, grey light and a small Mass was going on. We sat at the back and listened to the prayers. The front two rows sufficed to hold all the worshippers and by the time the words travelled the long aisle down to us at the back they sounded like the bass on a Flechette track. Scab put his head in my lap for while, making a hiding place of dark wood. As the air around him heated up I could smell his unwashed clothes and the furniture polish. He slipped a hand under his head, which meant it was over my crotch, thin fingers again, massaging. Eventually, as I swelled in damp denim he slipped the zip, cold fingers wrapped me up, plied the spongy underside of my cock, slipped the skin back. Then it was his hot mouth and it seemed like a perfect blasphemy, Scab’s phone rang: the polyphonic theme from some kids TV show.

Heads turned at the front of the church but he was down below the pew and I just shrugged at them. Scab didn’t move so I hooked it out of his back pocket and flipped it.

“Hi mum.”

“You both together then?” she said, sounding pretty slurred, “where’ve you two been honey. I’ve been missing you.”

“What do you want mum?”

“I don’t feel so good honey. I want you home. Come home for a while eh?”

“Mum I’m busy.”

“Oh, it’s like that is it…” and it went downhill from there till Scab’s battery died.

I don’t know exactly what they do at Mass, but they were all at the rail eating and drinking at the same time that I was spilling into Scab’s mouth. We grabbed her when the service looked like it was ending. They barely noticed until we cracked her head off on the pillar and the first yells came as we sped through the doorway and into the rain.

In St George’s we had to climb carefully over the broken glass of the vestry window, kick through the door into the church. Scab found a statue with the dragon writhing under George’s meaty thighs. For a moment I thought Scab would change the plan, his hand strayed over those thighs and then up to the pecs under their moulded breastplate, all the while rubbing the flat of his other hand over his groin. Both grinning, which made it difficult but funny, we kissed and rubbed, didn’t even bother to hook our cocks out. Rough cloth and pressed crotches got us off and we took her head without any trouble out of the same vestry window. Dead painted eyes and tope skin and the remnants of a blue headscarf, she looked happy to be coming with us into the rain.

In St Anne’s we almost got the wrong girl…

In St Francis’ there were no statues at all.

“Shit,” said Scab looking at my crotch. But the game had made its own rules now and Scab seemed reluctant to break them so we moved on.

In the Market Street church with no name outside…

And still the rain kept coming like a shower of forgiveness and still we were barefoot like it gave us something to feel the wet grit underfoot and by the time it had been raining forty-eight hours both our cocks were sore and red, and our eyes were red round the rims and I was grinning sometimes as madly as Scab…

On the afternoon of the third day we rested. Naked on our bed, spooning, my arms wrapped round his shoulder and my cock thick but limp in the valley between his cheeks. I didn’t sleep but I could hear and feel his purring snore and snuffling noises. Every now and again I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror across the room: pale and looking pretty wasted. Mum looked in at one point and I kept my eyes closed. I don’t expect what she was grumbling as she stepped back out of the room was very kind but I couldn’t hear the words, only the sound. When we left again, into gathering shadows, I knew for sure we were never going back.

We made the evening papers. In the neon spill from the QuikStop they’ve got those bill boards with the crossed wires. We were there in damp newsprint: vandalism, blasphemy, sicko kids, desecration.

The strange thing was, that even though we now needed a bag to carry all her heads, it didn’t feel like desecration or any of those bad things. It felt like stepping out into warm sunshine in a never-ending field of tall grass.

“Hey, look at that,” said Scab grinning.

“Yeah. Might make tonight a bit tougher.”

Then fuck me, it was the priest walking down the road towards the shop. He saw us but there was nowhere to go. He had the white collar on too. We passed in the same pool of light where we first met up. He slowed down some, wary.

“No trouble now lads. Right?”

We didn’t say anything but Scab stuck his tongue out and waggled it like he was licking something obscene. An old lady came out of the shop right then and saw, she made a noise like, ‘awww’, and hurried away. I was sorry she saw that.

We passed. Father Dominic disappeared into the night. We still had things to do. It was Scab who’d decided on twelve, I don’t know why but I guess it was one of those ‘significant number’ things. If I’d thought about it I could have made a guess. So we were only half-way. There were some cop cars about but nothing serious – how many churches in a city this size? I guess too, no one thought the sicko kids would go at it again.

In Saint Agatha’s everything was gold and mosaic and we had a hard time telling which one was Mary. When we got her head off and tucked her away in the bag Scab got a bit agitated again. For the first time since St Aiden’s, to calm him down, I got us both naked. We got silly then and chased each other round the aisles like kids, cocks bouncing, balls like weights on springs. When we finally collided with a crack of wood at the corner of a pew I hooked my fingers into his hip bones and pulled him down. Scab looked like he did when I used to tickle him till he couldn’t speak. I straddled his snaky waist and held his arms down, bent down and licked a long line up his chest. Flat tongue pressed nipples like small beads and he tasted of salt and biscuits. His cock – long, thing, brittle – was under my ass. Just because, I reached back and pointed it up and then sat on it. I’d never been fucked before and it hurt, like stomach cramps, but I didn’t mind. I stayed on top and didn’t let him do any of the fucking. I knew I’d never be able to take it like he could but there was something satisfying about proving that we could plug in this way round if necessary. There was a hot tug somewhere down by his balls and something coiled and released and suddenly his eyes were closed on his smile and he lay still. Inside one of us there was a gurgling noise. I knelt up, wincing, drawing off his cock. It was only a small move from there to lean and angle mine right into his mouth. Maybe I was overcompensating but I fucked his head so hard it banged the floor.

What you need to know about Scab and getting sucked off by him is that, although he’s nothing but sharp angles and lumps of bone, he’s got lips like Botoxed cherries, they’re the only fleshy part of him. Feeling them grab at the base of your cock while the head end is buried in the wet mess of his tonsils is better than anything I ever called a blow-job before.

When we got up, there was an oblong of sweat and rain and sperm on the tiles.

St Nicholas’…

St Mark’s…

St Mary’s… of course, St Mary’s. I don’t know why we didn’t think of that sooner. Three heads tumbled into the bag there and between us we managed three orgasms, but mostly dry now and chaffed skin was beginning to weave a rawness into the pleasure.

The rain had been solid for three days until the streets were rainforest thick. It was the third day (maybe). The roof of the multi-storey was a shallow, painfully bright mirror of water. Steam rose across the concrete pan. Everything was light and rising. The heads of twelve beautiful women fell out of the bag and made cracking noises as they hit the ground.

“Shit,” I said, “what’ve we done?”

Scab grinned…

We took six each, bundled into crossed arms. The car park was on the dockside. From the top, up there, we could get a clear shot. Each one took a different trajectory; each flew through surprised seagulls in a different way, some spun others flew straight. Some splashed lightly as they disappeared beneath the gunmetal swell, others made deep, deep plopping sounds.

And when the last one was gone I looked up and nudged Scab to do the same. There was a rainbow. And I laughed because I knew that story and it was too perfect.

“Time to go?” said Scab, grinning…

The End

Scab and the Virgin (Part 2)

2005-11-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

I grabbed at Scab’s neck. My tongue pushed into his grin and up against the wet heat behind his teeth. His cock poked my thigh: my cock, his belly. He was so thin, my arms around his shoulders.

Spit, spit and spit. We gobbed in our hands and took spit from each others mouths on three fingers at a time and slicked my cock and his crack, sinking to cold flagstones, cold and hard as bones. Scab shivered as I pushed his shoulders down.

When he was twelve mum found Scab under our bed with a piece of broken mirror and her best lippy. She dragged him out by the ankle and he cut his thumb on the mirror struggling, he’s still got a livid white line there.

“Boys don’t wear makeup you stupid fuck” she screamed.

“Why not?” Scab’s voice was weaker than hers.

“Cos it’s poisonous to boys is why. Do it again and you’ll die,” and she went on screaming. And she ripped his clothes off, I mean literally, so he was screaming too where tough seams cut him. It was really ugly. More so when she found a pair of her crotchless panties under his jeans. The screaming got so loud it hurt. “You’re gonna die and don’t think I’ll miss you either”. He was twelve and naked in front of his mum. I remember the sick, boiling pink colour of rage and shame that flushed him head to toe. She dragged him, dumped him in the bath, poured the water too hot and there was more raging. I think it was that day he started going butt naked around the house, even when we were all home. Never once after that did I see him blush or hide.

What I’m saying is: it’s not like I hadn’t seen him naked before…

When we were little we shared the bath, we spent hours drawing fake tattoos on each other’s backsides with biro, we shared a bed for God’s sake, still jerked off next to each other most nights, we did tricks together – but somehow we’d never got around to this. I’d never tasted his tongue. I’d never had the wet head of my cock pressing into the give of his wet hole.

And it gave, something soft opened like hot paste. Ribs, like cathedral vaults in an earthquake, shook. All the while that look on his face, a grin of course, but concentration too, a frown and a grin and his lips open, pouting, somehow red in the dark shadows when everything else was shades of grey. And like no one else I’d ever fucked he kept his eyes open and on mine. His eyes were in mine, still, fixed, stars…

Feeling his insides balloon around me, his skin rub mine in unexpected places, his breath like a furnace on my face, things felt different and the same as before. It was just like waking up in the morning and finding him wrapped round me, it was like hugging his shoulders in a roll of carpet, it was like squeezing into the same bath as kids, but it was hellish and holy too. It was all here on the floor of the church, now in the freshly baked, the flat-twisted muscle and sinew frame, the sheen of new adulthood. Everything mum told me, (‘you’re the oldest, you have to look out for him’) sometimes in tears behind a bottle of clear spirits, (‘I don’t know what I’d do without you to help out, I can’t look after him all on my own, you have to help, you do help’) sometimes screaming half way between rage and laughter, (‘a fucking queer that’s what he is, do something with him will you, get him out of here, I can’t fucking look at him’- Scab, wrinkle-faced in the corner) all those things she said, I was doing, inside him, wrapped around him, pummelling hard against flagstones.

Like a porn star I pulled out to come and sprayed Scab and the altar steps. Slapping and slapping and slapping his palm on the floor Scab brought himself off and his come pumped into pools in rib valleys. I’d never touched his before. I put my hand in it and rubbed and then in his panting mouth where he sucked.

And when we looked up Dom was a running shadow. Bang, bang, bang on the floor and a flap of long coat and the door banging open and suddenly the noise of the rain was in the church and we were alone.

“Hey!” I yelled after him, “Hey! Hey!” I looked down at Scab, “the fucker didn’t pay us.”

The thick door banged in the wind. We were through it running, jeans on, everything else bunched and hanging from our hands. The rain hit us, sprayed us and flushed off the sperm and Scab was glowing again. I don’t think we ever meant to catch him, we ran, barefoot, till our lungs were burning and we were both laughing and kicking silver feathers of spray at each other off the top of large puddles. Rain in the streetlights looked like snow.

And suddenly Scab was cursing and shaking and swearing and, far too loud, making a noise like screaming and laughing at the same time. Black windows all around us stayed black but I thought not for long, there’d be lights coming on soon if he didn’t shut up: scary kid. I dragged him away from the windows and into a small hard court and he finally calmed down.

“What the fuck was all that about?” I said, still out of breath. I was guessing that everything mixed up had got him too excited, a bit hysterical. He didn’t say at first.

to be continued...

Scab and The Virgin (Part 1)

2005-11-14T04:26:00.000-08:00

The rain was solid for three days until the streets were rainforest-thick with it. The water filled gutters and washed over roads. It fell in thick dribbles from every high corner and ledge; it beat mad drums on bins and bus shelters. Breathing was like drinking and it was so hot!

I say it was three days but only because it’s more impressive to use a significant number. I don’t really remember but I know it wasn’t seven or forty.

On the Third Day (maybe), it stopped raining and the sky was all white glare. The roof of the multi-storey was a shallow, painfully bright mirror of water. Steam rose across the concrete pan, unearthly. Everything was light and rising.

Scab – who is almost my half-brother – and I’ll tell you later why I call him Scab because it’s disgusting but not very interesting – he was struggling to get a heavy bag off his back. When it came free of bony shoulders, he unzipped it and tipped it. The heads of twelve beautiful women fell out and made cracking noises as they hit the ground.

“Shit,” I said, “what’ve we done?”

Scab grinned…

Three days before, just as the rain started, dark at 2p.m., Scab skipped out. He’s got blond hair that looks bottled but isn’t and there’s a bald patch just off centre on his crown – worms I guess – scabby too, hence the name. He’s got this shiny face which most often is cracked up with a mad smile like he’s high all the time (he’s not). Sometimes, instead, when he’s upset his face crinkles up like foil off a chocolate bar – still shiny. He said he’d met a guy down the docks the night before, got fifty quid for a blow job. That’s more than we normally get; I thought it was some business-type passing through the ferry-port. Scab said not, but didn’t tell me more right then because I was watching The Simpsons and he could tell I wasn’t that interested. Just as the rain started, Scab was going out for more.

“If he wants to fuck you: get more,” I yelled after him.

Scab grinned…

Later – the rain’s been falling twelve hours now – Scab introduced me: all three of us huddled on a metre of pavement outside the QuikStop, the hoarding keeps the rain off. The guy’s called Dominic, ‘Dom’ for short, which he tells you with a kind of half-wink which I thought was pretty gross. Still, Dom seems to get Scab, so I was polite.

In the yellow of the streetlights, Dom looked ill, I guess we all did. He was in his forties maybe, thick black eyebrows dripping rain over a wet and pock-marked face. Not unhandsome, not good looking but attractive in a dangerous kind of way. Scab’s type definitely! There were several awkward, silent seconds when Scab introduced me: scuffing feet.

Sometimes when we meet up with new guys, we tell them we’re brothers, which we almost are. You have to judge it right though. Some guys get off on that, others are turned off.

“Oh come on.” Said Scab eventually, “it’s too fucking wet to be shy, let’s get it on yeah?”

“Where d’you wanna go?” I asked, looking into the bright, blank interior of the shop then across the road spitting like cooking fat under fast tyres. Dom shrugged but Scab took off round the corner. Dom and I looked at each other.

“Fifty each?” I said. He snorted, wiped rain off his face.

“Seventy-five between you.”

“Fuck, whatever,” I said. Water was draining down the ridge of my spine. I just wanted to get home.

There was an alley. It wasn’t covered, but being narrow it made the rain seem lighter. Along one wall was a strip of dry ground. Scab backed Dom to the wall. Dom’s long coat pressed the brick, misshaping him. Grit and rubbish scratched as Dom’s feet and Scab’s knees found a position.

The cock, flopping out, was thick and knarled like dockside rope and uncut, a dark circle of head already squeezing out from the hood. In Scab’s thin fingers it pumped up, got thick. Skin slipped back and Scab took it between wet lips. Dom’s head sunk forward so he could see Scab’s pink mouth stretch. I stood a way back. I watched the rain pour off plastered strands of Scab’s hair, roll his nose and run down Dom’s cock.

Big hands with thick knuckles crunched up some wet blond and pulled Scab’s head deeper onto Dom’s cock. Twice it slipped out, sprang up and Dom smacked Scab’s face with its full weight. Scab had that look in his eyes, he gets it sometimes, like praying. The boy scares me but he was grinning…

Scab had one hand in Dom’s fly, mauling the sack. With his free hand he beckoned. I shrugged and went over, knelt down. Something sharp bit my knee. Scab’s eyes met mine as his cheeks bulged and rain and spittle mixed on his lips: bright, pale eyes like a saint in an old picture.

A heavy hand came to rest on my head too but didn’t try to grab hair. Scab let the slick, dark knob-end escape and it bounced between us. We spent a while on either side mashing lips and tongues up and down the length. It was like playing the mouth organ Mary (that’s mum) bought us once. The only sound was grunting and the hiss of rain. Every now and again Scab’s lips touched mine around the springy meat; that was a freaky feeling, weird.

I had to close my eyes after a while because Scab was freaking me out with that mad smile, even round a mouthful of penis. He was staring right at me.

The grunting stopped and some of the tension in Dom’s cock sagged away.

“I want to fuck you both,” he said. We stopped and stared up. Scab looking madly happy, me I guess thinking the world was going mad.

“Not here” I said, perhaps a bit too strongly, “and it’ll cost you more.”

“Where then?” said Scab wiping his mouth.

“I’ve got somewhere we can go” said Dom, “Come on, it’s not far.”

I guess I was expecting a hotel, some kind of dive but not…

We followed the flapping black coat through alleys and across waste-ground. The guy knew the area too well, he was no suit passing through the city. A gothic wedding-cake, iced in black soot, a church rose out of the angles of the alleys; walls fell away around us until St Aiden’s stood in front of us in its own small urban clearing. Facets of stained glass took on the sodium yellow and glinted like cat’s eyes up and down the wall. It was a tombstone gone mad and a time bomb placed in a wrong century. I gaped as Dom got keys from his pocket: huge keys like knuckledusters and just as menacing. Scab grinned…

It wasn’t the big door he opened. I wondered what size key you needed for that. We followed through the black wooden opening. I tried to catch Scab’s eye, perhaps to get out of it, but he wasn’t looking. Inside it wasn’t pitch black but the light seemed black, filtered through coloured glass that had all turned black itself. Dry arched space rose over us and opened and opened.

Dom strode up the aisle like he owned the place. I couldn’t believe it when he stopped to take candle out of a stand in front of Mary, flipped a lighter, lit it and dug it onto a spike. He crossed himself. Then we followed up to the altar and there were four massive steps in front of it. He was on the top one and we were below looking confused. Well I was; Scab was grinning…

“Strip off,” he said, and suddenly his voice sounded deeper and heavier. I could imagine him preaching to the empty spaces here. So Scab and I both started peeling. Something weird happened to Scab as his skin appeared, he lit up, his skin had a kind of reflected glow, that pale, skinny body got hit by some invisible beam of heavenly light and he was almost humming with it. It’s weird getting naked in a church. The air in there was cool and slippery and it touched your skin like dead fingers. If Scab was feeling it he didn’t show it. His shivering was all from the cold and wet and his thin cock was standing straight up, shivering too, with the skin peeled and the head bright like a traffic signal.

Suddenly I was remembering the big roll of carpet. The big grey carpet that smelt of dust and dry rubber and lay on the boards in the living room for ages when we were little. The old man called Jack from downstairs gave it to my mum. He said he’d come and lay it too, with proper underlay and grip-rods; he never did, but we were always nice to him after that. Some nights when there was too much noise, shouting, dogs, glass, kids screaming, I’d lie in bed wondering why no-one else wanted to know what was going wrong. Some nights like that I’d creep to the living room, knowing which boards cracked and squeaked when you trod on them, and crawl into the roll. And some nights there’d be a scratching a few minutes later and Scab would crawl in too. I remember dirty underpants in my face and painful elbows and the faint smell of piss as he wriggled to get in beside me. Then it was all rubber and rope and dust, there was dry skin, fluttering and warm and most of all it was quiet. We must have been so small, my arms round his shoulders, to get in that roll.
And I was remembering those dreams you have where you’re all naked but don’t notice, in the shops, in the street, until people start yelling and pointing.

“I want to see you fuck him.” The voice was like dark chocolate and mud and had the richness of an old hymn sung by old people in an old place: with all the deception of all those things too.

I was going to protest but Scab was standing there in skin rendered like new plaster, raised eyebrows, half a grin, waiting for my reaction and testing.

My cock was filling to making blood sausage that knocked my palm where I had my hand covering myself, half-coy, hot to the touch. I still shivered as though the air was groping me. I wanted to protect Scab from something, I never felt that before. But, and it took a bitten lip, hard thinking and a sip of my own blood before I’d admit it, I wanted to fuck him too.

Scab was grinning…

My stomach was tumbling, sharp things inside. When I was fourteen I hit a man from down the road in the face. I hit him so hard his teeth broke under my knuckles and split skin. I hit him because he beat up on his wife and that particular day, I saw him do it. That was how I felt again, now, like the few seconds before I hit him, there was a voltage in my arm, now in the church it was all over me.

“Bring me the head of John the Baptist.” I don’t know where that came from! Maybe from a story at school, maybe from the GOD Channel; somewhere, like electricity jumping a gap, the whole situation, my tongue, my head, all connected and that was what came out: bring me the head of John the Baptist.

“What?” said Dom, loosing something of the calm of his voice to a rising pitch.

“Bring me the head of John the Baptist,” I said again, slowly beginning to realise what I meant. “You want me to fuck him? That’s a big thing, so you gotta do something big too.”

He didn’t know what to say. In the long pause, the rain came against the tall windows in waves saying ‘rush, rush,’ and the wind said ‘this, this,’ against the black bricks. I had one foot on the path to Hell perhaps. I realised I didn’t mind putting both feet on it and going for a stroll so long as Scab came with me.

“No. Her.” I said then, pointing to where the single candle burned, ‘bring me her head.’

"You’ve got to be fucking joking.”

“I’m not joking. Bring me her head and you can watch me stick it up his guts. Don’t do it and Scab tells everyone he knows that he sucked off a priest. You are a priest aren’t you?”

This time in the silence the rain said, ‘yes, yes.’

Scab flicked absentmindedly at his groin with skinny fingers and grinned…

Dom didn’t say another word to us that night. After that it was our church not his. He came down off the altar steps, walked to the statue and blew out the candle into a cupped palm like it was his last breath. Then, all I could see was a heaving of shadows and then there was a crack like lightning overhead. Dom came back and gave me her head, the size and weight of a fruit. Plaster motes fell from her neck through my fingers. He didn’t get back on the steps; he sat in the front pew with his elbows on his knees.

to be continued...

The Sudden Importance of Sex

2005-11-11T10:07:00.000-08:00

When I walked in she was sucking
on him like a baby-doll; all
bubble perm; all fifties film star.

Between gurgles she was giggles
and insubstantial celluloid,
blue flames in the heat of his crotch.

His belly like a beer barrell
and beer can cock. He was solid.
Black hairs crawled around his navel.

As if they were playing Scrabble
he waved me in beyond the door:
what I had come to say, I said.

It seemed as unimportant now,
under the sudden importance of sex,
as she did, lodged between his thighs.

View From an Urban Train

2005-11-11T10:06:00.000-08:00

The young man was wanking high-up
in a desperate window.
Counting glass up from the bottom
and counting in from the left,
both ways it made double figures.

His skin, the colour of nutmeg
was swirling and watery
like ice in alcohol melting
taking a lonely pleasure,
lazy, as his only answer
to being numbered so high
being so far back in the line.

Dead Boy

2005-11-11T10:05:00.000-08:00

Becalmed in a meringue
of white silk;
a mahogany frame,
glass beads spilling his fingers.

A voltage in my arm
would twine my fingers
in his cold knuckles
or stroke him.

Half-mother, half-lover,
I would kiss him
fourteen times, for each
year of his death.

The traditional sounds
Of mourning
muffle in the front room
and on the doorstep.

Here, like anything
utterly still
is only beauty
and intimacy.

His name, said over and over,
like any word,
becomes just a matter
of teeth, lips and tongue.

Remember Me?

2005-11-11T10:04:00.001-08:00

Night Fishing

2005-11-11T10:04:00.000-08:00

Man and boy, sewn to the sea
by a barbed needle
and a thread of silence.

Their faces to the slapping
of liquid black and the
perfect curve of the underswell.

The art is to pull death
from the grip of the moon.
The art is silence and surcease.

The sea dandles them.
The moon empties them
of breath. The surge and swell

spreads their lives wider
and further than their
thoughts have ever been.

Invitation to a Family

2005-11-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

Come little star, (hoped for but unbelieved),
to this fractured fun house of oily mirrors.

Fall from milk-black distances of teardrop
and pin-prick, to these sour-milk curtains.

Come at my wishing because my heat
was never enough. Come and shore up slant walls.

I was never enough, for all my playing,
never a Sampson or a Christopher.

Give them fission and a nuclear blaze.
give them green retinal burns.

I was never enough to unlock the knot.
Please come, little star, and be my brother.

The Secret

2005-11-11T10:02:00.000-08:00

involves the touching of skin to skin: hushed
museum statues
and movement in the air
between immovable pediments.

It is a moth in my breath, stuttering
over a cracked tongue.
trying to speak it, brings the sick
shape of orchids to my mouth.

My Brother Penis

2005-11-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

Began as a nut
in a silver-birch junction
with a map of walnut
wrinkles tight beneath;

beached into driftwood
that smelled of the
same salt
I was pulled from;

darkened to a plum
of guilty sweetness
and the tart taste of stars
on the tongue;

became a tunnel under the sea
and a route to something primitive
and finally, gorged on imagination,
was a myth never sung.