Here's some writing if anyone's interested. It's currently with an illustrator who, when he finishes another piece of mine, will be doing etching style prints to go with the text. Any comments or criticism much appreciated...
----
Jim
Jim collected parts of himself. He was a fine purveyor of himself. As he came apart, naturally disintegrating with age, he would scoop up the fragments - rare finds - and keep them in jars. Antiques of himself: pickled and preserved - caught in time - like flies in amber, each part a memory. And the jars, lined along the wall like some pathology library, read like a diary of decay. Milk teeth and baby skin, slowly giving way to yellowed nails and broken tears.
But it wasn't just his body and flesh: exhalations of happiness, the tiny quakes of laughter, snatched from the air like butterflies, lay pinned to the ether; the drops of sadness culled from the flood; and the cracked and dry desert of anger pressed up against the storm of love.
Just years, nothing more.
Jim would periodically alter his order, re-align the years, re-read himself and pull new lives from the jars: different configurations - choking and gagging newborns. He would raise his other selves like children who would disobey him in the same way that he disobeyed time. Every year would bring new decay, more permutations of himself until the years proliferated him exponentially. The pressure of Time's destruction became reversed: as the years ravaged his crumbling body, new life bounded from the wreckage.
New species, chimeras, strange amalgamations of hair follicles, cataracts, skin crust and smiles were regurgitated from the shelves of his life. Limping and half-formed, unique disfigurements, moved hand in hand with their radiant brothers, perfect constructions.
Jim was a god of himself, a fine dictator of himself. New life depended on the good will of Jim's present; his unhappiness would precipitate a cataclysm of fresh deformity. And he was ruthless with his selves. The relentless persistence of time and age scoring new wounds on the future, time turning in on itself: a pupa suffocated by its own chrysalis.
Jim, an unwitting alchemist, had torn time in two; drew new life from shit. One time moves onwards, destroys and creates, pulsing and oscillating its natural rhythms, and another flails demented, snared in the present. An immediate chaos of past and future lived out through Jim's grotesques; a time maddened by its own existence.
Inexorably Jim's home, an asylum of personal mutation, became over-run by these splinters of his narcissism. These possibilities, miscarried by time, but pulled mewling and screaming into life, crawled up the walls, soaked themselves through the ceiling and swarmed the floors. But Jim was delirious with himself, addicted to his own self-insemination: ordering, re-ordering, replenishing.
Inevitably his natural disintegration became too slow; his collection, his brood, needed more. And so when time failed to pull him apart, Jim began to martyr fresh skin, let blood, worry bone, open sinews. And when Jim's offerings became scant or insufficient, his body unable to clot and knit before a new wave of demands fell before him, his infant selves would begin to suckle fresh generations: an endless cycle of incessant gorging and tearing; a mutual delving into and sharing of selves, passing back and forth and back and forth, Jim's selves consuming himself
On the floor wrapped up in folds of old flesh
In the doorway. Against the wall. Skinned bones on hardwood floors. Teeth on eyes. Happiness. Gristle and tendons; blood on the sofa. A fleeting moment of shame. Fingers. A tongue kissing itself.
Hopeful.
Jim.
Memories of dried smiles. Pot pourri. Dripping spittle and viscera. Skin on skin on a dirty carpet. Clarity.
Jim.
Jim. Jim.
Pressing down. Dry retching hair.
Jim. Jim.
Pleasure. Eating. Waves of nausea.
Lost.
Jim.
Panic.
Jim
Jim?
In the hallway, a hard oak-wood old bookshelf, bevelled edges, carved pawed legs and a fine film of dust. Many books.
An enamel basin with dull taps and mottled mold.
Formica shelving, pretty trinkets: an Eiffel Tower, a porcelain bear driving a car over a stone bridge. A tiny crystal vase.
A paisley cushion, almost threadbare.
Ten year old Christmas cards, sent by himself to himself, in a drawer with a tub full of pens.
A worn linoleum kitchen floor.
Musk.
Silence.
Jim collected parts of himself. Jim lived all alone.
----
Jim
Jim collected parts of himself. He was a fine purveyor of himself. As he came apart, naturally disintegrating with age, he would scoop up the fragments - rare finds - and keep them in jars. Antiques of himself: pickled and preserved - caught in time - like flies in amber, each part a memory. And the jars, lined along the wall like some pathology library, read like a diary of decay. Milk teeth and baby skin, slowly giving way to yellowed nails and broken tears.
But it wasn't just his body and flesh: exhalations of happiness, the tiny quakes of laughter, snatched from the air like butterflies, lay pinned to the ether; the drops of sadness culled from the flood; and the cracked and dry desert of anger pressed up against the storm of love.
Just years, nothing more.
Jim would periodically alter his order, re-align the years, re-read himself and pull new lives from the jars: different configurations - choking and gagging newborns. He would raise his other selves like children who would disobey him in the same way that he disobeyed time. Every year would bring new decay, more permutations of himself until the years proliferated him exponentially. The pressure of Time's destruction became reversed: as the years ravaged his crumbling body, new life bounded from the wreckage.
New species, chimeras, strange amalgamations of hair follicles, cataracts, skin crust and smiles were regurgitated from the shelves of his life. Limping and half-formed, unique disfigurements, moved hand in hand with their radiant brothers, perfect constructions.
Jim was a god of himself, a fine dictator of himself. New life depended on the good will of Jim's present; his unhappiness would precipitate a cataclysm of fresh deformity. And he was ruthless with his selves. The relentless persistence of time and age scoring new wounds on the future, time turning in on itself: a pupa suffocated by its own chrysalis.
Jim, an unwitting alchemist, had torn time in two; drew new life from shit. One time moves onwards, destroys and creates, pulsing and oscillating its natural rhythms, and another flails demented, snared in the present. An immediate chaos of past and future lived out through Jim's grotesques; a time maddened by its own existence.
Inexorably Jim's home, an asylum of personal mutation, became over-run by these splinters of his narcissism. These possibilities, miscarried by time, but pulled mewling and screaming into life, crawled up the walls, soaked themselves through the ceiling and swarmed the floors. But Jim was delirious with himself, addicted to his own self-insemination: ordering, re-ordering, replenishing.
Inevitably his natural disintegration became too slow; his collection, his brood, needed more. And so when time failed to pull him apart, Jim began to martyr fresh skin, let blood, worry bone, open sinews. And when Jim's offerings became scant or insufficient, his body unable to clot and knit before a new wave of demands fell before him, his infant selves would begin to suckle fresh generations: an endless cycle of incessant gorging and tearing; a mutual delving into and sharing of selves, passing back and forth and back and forth, Jim's selves consuming himself
On the floor wrapped up in folds of old flesh
In the doorway. Against the wall. Skinned bones on hardwood floors. Teeth on eyes. Happiness. Gristle and tendons; blood on the sofa. A fleeting moment of shame. Fingers. A tongue kissing itself.
Hopeful.
Jim.
Memories of dried smiles. Pot pourri. Dripping spittle and viscera. Skin on skin on a dirty carpet. Clarity.
Jim.
Jim. Jim.
Pressing down. Dry retching hair.
Jim. Jim.
Pleasure. Eating. Waves of nausea.
Lost.
Jim.
Panic.
Jim
Jim?
In the hallway, a hard oak-wood old bookshelf, bevelled edges, carved pawed legs and a fine film of dust. Many books.
An enamel basin with dull taps and mottled mold.
Formica shelving, pretty trinkets: an Eiffel Tower, a porcelain bear driving a car over a stone bridge. A tiny crystal vase.
A paisley cushion, almost threadbare.
Ten year old Christmas cards, sent by himself to himself, in a drawer with a tub full of pens.
A worn linoleum kitchen floor.
Musk.
Silence.
Jim collected parts of himself. Jim lived all alone.