an immersion into a solitude so deep, you’ll vanish
James Davies
Image: Simon Taylor
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i set my machine up to do an infinite outer-space enviro, with the same character multiplied in variations, on a chessboard/mesh landscape, dancing – busting squares, rolling, wriggling – to warpy music and occasional harsh growling. snowflakes and dandelion clocks swirling and falling. gigantic, stone, garden ornaments; relics of classical civilization littered as if someone’s got bored doing some manual additions. my character is metallic, something of a hybrid of bacchus and medusa, with pupil-less eyes like sculptures. then i decided i should go for lulling guitars; dreamy. do it filming it in the ‘real’ world. say uptown manhattan.
i made some more characters walk about, all curvaceous, looking like having the feel of plastic kids’ dolls. i said to them all, you can do the same thing up in a blue night sky, or a red sky.
the real people have gone. there’s no purpose to what you’re doing i clarified to them but that’s not a problem. you can just stay as you are or re-form as something else or make little modifications to yourself, like change your face, change your nose if you like. you don’t have to be out there, you don’t have to do it bistro or barista.
it’s tempting to say to them that you could also go into a room that has walls covered with rotating wallpaper, patterned in computer game graphics – yellows and blues. trip this part out a bit. get super doped. do it to drone music. your arm and hand open and close like bicep curls, but softer like tulip petals. you are saying have a look at my meringue hair-do, which, actually, is straighter than meringue now i think about it, more like a set of clustered tennis-ball-sized helium balloons in emerald and sapphire. who’s the music by man? i’ve got a cheap cherub’s head here superglued onto something else, maybe a humongous titanium warhammer. i just don’t get it. i come in and out of feeling it.
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so long as i keep on the move my spiritual home is everywhere. i got the sign-off from the doctor and read the cool posters. but in the end, as you know, you can’t do it outdoors so you’re left with sucking on the supertoot. the microbes from the sucker go through the brewing bit and dash into the bloodstream like cartoon health and safety promo gremlins.
i’m logged now. i can do. i can done. and can be done.
this place is infinite, without variety. i first find myself in a room void of anything. i sort of touch the walls and then feel a vibration that feels half-good, so i keep rubbing what looks like polished cement. i fetish it for a while then swap it into an artisan deli, posh mumsy. i take a whole wheel of blue cheese and snap bits off, increasing the speed to X800 so that it’s gone faster than a kid repeat taps a gaming mouse.
a text box appears. the options are ‘drink the restorative juice = ten dollars’ or ‘feel real sick’. i vote ‘sick’. i get a judder to my sinuses that make my belly feel bloated. the plush vids appropriate eastern mysticism; they say that a few comedowns every now and then is just a laugh it off jingle, and part of my learning journey. but when i come out of an room i feel like mustard and I can’t shake it.
my cat is sprawled, dosing on the bed. he’s happy not evolving, oblivious to my nuances. don’t matter to a cat if you’re trying to do a long distance walking by standing still or with some hot date cooking oeuf on cocotte.
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nextdoor wants what i’ve got so she uploads it onto hers. she promises not to make it too much like mine but it already looks pretty much the same: milk blue hair-do and silver space band jumpsuits. blanc blancmange comes on thru the mind-piece again. and he’s telling me what i want to hear. it’s gross but it’s private. the ones who don’t have my particular freaks have their own guy too, who can do the same thing. some of them choose mid-radical, like me. some of them choose things like visit a bookclub with ten versions of themselves all dressed in different costumes. they call the cat who invited them to bookclub ‘my one’. the picture shows him with a greedy face that says ‘erection’. the brochure says the experience is ‘psychic-well-being’.
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such sadness in this pic, whichever way you look at it. you can go back to that time and all its happiness. or you can remember father leaving, later – all that sadness and all the shock, with its root in something specific yet concealed by uncurable timidity, and also – dizzying in the contradictions – rooted in things unknown and unsayable.
if you isolate the pic from the rest of the book (imagine it as the entire totality of the artwork) it has such a malicious silence, like the way an 'early reader' book can speak to the adult remembering being child, about the traumas of education and school.
looking at this pic on the page, in this sticky, smoky, dark bar, i have so many alternatives available. i could go and kill someone cold in the street, pay for sex at a taxi rank, mooch around the pigeoned plaza, order a pizza and eat meat without it reneging on my vegetarianism, but instead i choose to sit down and write a book which i then read, as if i am not the author.
this reading is basically the only thing that i'm doing but i'm not fully on it, still distracted by anything. in this place i get offered crappy choices; limited like north south east west. would i like a mocktail, and if so which one? do i want a tune on the jukebox - muzak or retro? would i like to stay at the bar or move to a table by the window? whatever decisions i make, the scene is essentially set. if other customers are reading books they are reading books that have no pages.
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i went with friends to buy my favourite smoothie. i felt sad the next day cos rex wasn’t there but two new people were appeared – gina c (straight brown hair, fringe and a white tee) and the shitly named rb3cxxxfunkemup. gina c smiled but rb3 was doing some weird shit, clearly somebody else’s. and my knock-knock jokes, which i’d paid premium for, fell super flat.
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hello kitten wang. they let me out to see the walnut tree. it’s thriving. she is saying that i should go ‘talk to gav’ but i didn’t come here to speak to gav. what’s been going on the past year i say; you said you’d never dye your hair. but gavin likes it dyed. does he like you in that power suit i say. no that was my idea she says. then she exits without saying goodbye. she’s gone but it feels like buffering too. the character’s still there in front of me; sort of floppy.
leaving the skin behind’s so rude i think, so i exit too and treat myself to an orange ginger turmeric goodness. ethereal music plays for ten then swipes.
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over breakfast – blushed grape and autumn pear compote – dr honolulu takes me to one side: “mike,” he says (i don’t know why he calls me mike), “mike, great progress you’re making.” he nuzzles me in his device and shoots me a wink. “why don’t we try a different dose today?” he’s named this particular mindshow 110% hinge fix. am i watching for practical reasons or to increase my asmr potential i wonder? “if that doesn’t work we can just go back to the coke bubbles and chopsticks,” he says, “but honestly mike, i think that before you know it you’ll be getting out the right side of bed and tucking into a smashed avocado on rye.”
is he value for money? what’s he actually floating? i used up my last two rewards on his cosmic advice: one to reach out to this impartial-angel, second to level him up, turning him all chai latte.
in the interrogation room the heavies show me a photo, all grainy, of me eating dim sum with dr h. “look at the photo,” one of them says, trying to get a confession, “you’re eating that right now with him, outside at the mart.” “how can i be?” i argue, “i’m still at the hostel they created yesterday, near that square with the nice fountain, trying to get the hot tap to work.”
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these zombies are lobotomised. a fricassee of goat brain in a coconut shell. lacking panache, a utility tray in a mess hall is left unwashed. i feel bad for them but i still might as well blow their brains out otherwise it's just hang around in this caff in this retail park.
as they bam blast splat urrghh in front of me i reload and wander around. i soup up with tats and bangles, generate bliss chorals, lie in a dry bathtub, done a nectarines, done a yoghurts, now swap a spoon.
missed out on premium benefits cos i fluked the easter eggs. in my private elocution lessons i can say 'everyone i've ever loved lives here together in this pergola' and i can say 'we lay down in a field of cut grass and smelled the soccer paint'. but i’m running out of hearts and it really looks like i might have to go back before the start, run ten miles for cigarettes but this time with grey hair and at least one twisted ankle.
finally i'm dead at an early morning bus stop. gurning and swaying in rags, disbelieving and tense, dressed up sharp. headphones play glockenspeil and processed guitars. then fades stops.
mindfuck intra-tanoy relays today's think-bait aromatherapy. opposite, dolls do manicures and gif-wink. these dicks are easy to parse. it's the cheeky acronym, general english grads that are the clue to making me wanna jump.
James Davies’s writing includes many books of poetry, including stack from Carcanet, an exploration of minimalism and alternative walking practices, and it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall from Pamenar, in which pairs of lines push and pull between bliss and bathos creating a magical fuzziness. He is also the author of some prose texts including the Oulipian psychedelic romantic comedy When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank’s Transporter (Crater Press), written in collaboration with Philip Terry, and The Wood Pigeons (Dostoevsky Wanabee), a slenderising of a quiet night in for two. More at www.jamesdaviespoetry.com