[dead_battery]

(A very long silence.)
– But you have friends.
(A long silence.)
You have a lot of friends.
What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?
(A long silence.)
What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive?
(A long silence.)
What do you offer?
(Silence.)
a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall
near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten thousand
cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an
instant of accord body no longer expellent as the cockroaches
comprise a truth which no one ever utters
I had a night in which everything was revealed to me.
How can I speak again?
the broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself alone finds the room
in reality teeming and begs never to wake from the nightmare
and they were all there
every last one of them
and they knew my name
as I scuttled like a beetle along the backs of their chairs
Remember the light and believe the light
An instant of clarity before eternal night
don't let me forget

I am sad
I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve
I am bored and dissatisfied with everything
I am a complete failure as a person
I am guilty, I am being punished
I would like to kill myself
I used to be able to cry but now I am beyond tears
I have lost interest in other people
I can't make decisions
I can't eat
I can't sleep
I can't think
I cannot overcome my loneliness, my fear, my disgust
I am fat
I cannot write
I cannot love
My brother is dying, my lover is dying, I am killing them both
I am charging towards my death
I am terrified of medication
I cannot make love
I cannot fuck
I cannot be alone
I cannot be with others
My hips are too big
I dislike my genitals
At 4.48
when depression visits
I shall hang myself
to the sound of my lover's breathing
I do not want to die
I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have
decided to commit suicide

I do not want to live
I am jealous of my sleeping lover and cover his induced
unconsciousness
When he wakes he will envy my sleepless night of thought and
speech unslurred by medication
I have resigned myself to death this year
Some will call this self-indulgence
(they are lucky not to know its truth)
Some will know the simple fact of pain
This is becoming my normality
100
91
84
81
72
69
58
44
37 38
42
21 28
12
7
It wasn't for long, I wasn't there long. But drinking bitter black coffee I
catch that medicinal smell in a cloud of ancient tobacco and something
touches me in that still place and a wound form two years ago opens
like a cadaver and a long buried shame roars its foul decaying grief.
A room of expressionless faces string blankly at my pain, so
devoid of meaning there must be evil intent.
Dr This and Dr That and Dr Whatsit who's just passing and
thought he'd pop in to take the piss as well. Burning in a hot

tunnel of dismay, my humiliation complete as I shake without
reason and stumble over words and have nothing to say about
my 'illness' which anyway amounts only to knowing that there's
no point in anything because I'm going to die. And I am
deadlocked by that smooth psychiatric voice of reason which
tells me there is an objective reality in which my body and mind
are one. But I am not here and never have been. Dr This writes it
down and Dr That attempts a sympathetic murmur. Watching
me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my
skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic
drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why
everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of
my aching shame.
Shame shame shame.
Drown in your fucking shame.
Inscrutable doctors, sensible doctors, way-out doctors, doctors
you'd think were fucking patients if you weren't shown proof
otherwise, ask the same questions, put words in my mouth, offer
chemical cures for congenital anguish and cover each other's
arses until I want to scream for you, the only doctor who ever
touched me voluntarily, who looked me in the eye, who laughed
at my gallows humour spoken in the voice from the newly-dug
grave, who took the piss when I shaved my head, who lied and
said it was nice to see me. Who lied. And said it was nice to see
me. I trusted you, I loved you, and it's not losing you that hurts
me, but your bare-faced fucking falsehoods that masquerade as
medical notes.
Your truth, your lies, not mine.
And while I was believing that you were different and that you
maybe even felt the distress that sometimes flickered across
your face and threatened to erupt, you were covering your arse
too. Like every othoer stupid mortal cunt.
To my mind that's betrayal. And my mind is the subject of these
bewildered fragments.
Nothing can extinguish my anger.
And nothing can restore my faith.
This is not a world in which I wish to live.

–Have you made any plans?
–Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself.
–All those things together?
–It couldn't possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.
(Silence.)
–It wouldn't work.
–Of course it would.
–It wouldn't work. You'd start to feel sleepy from the overdose
and wouldn't have the energy to cut your wrists.
(Silence.)
–I'd be standing on a chair with a noose around my neck.
(Silence.)
– If you were alone do you think you might harm yourself?
–I'm scared I might.
–Could that be protective?
–Yes. It's fear that keeps me away from the train tracks. I just
hope to God that death is the fucking end. I feel like I'm eighty
years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.
–That's a metaphor, not reality.
–It's a simile.
–That's not reality.
–It's not a metaphor, it's a simile, but even if it were, the defining
feature of a metaphor is that it's real.
(A long silence.)
–You are not eighty years old.
(Silence.)
Are you?

(A silence.)
Are you?
(A silence.)
Or are you?
(A long silence.)
–Do you despise all unhappy people or is it me specifically?
–I don't despise you. It's not your fault. You're ill.
–I don't think so.
–No?
–No. I'm depressed. Depression is anger. It's what you did, who
was there and who you're blaming.
–And who are you blaming?
–Myself.
Body and soul can never be married
I need to become who I already am and will bellow forever at this
incongruity which has committed me to hell
Insoluble hoping cannot uphold me
I will drown in dysphoria
in the cold black pond of my self
the pit of my immaterial mind
How can I return to form
now my formal thought has gone?
Not a life that I could countenance.
They will love me for that which destroys me
the sword in my dreams
the dust of my thoughts
the sickness that breeds in the folds of my mind

Every compliment takes a piece of my soul
An expressionist nag
Stalling between two fools
They know nothing –
I have always walked free
Last in a long line of literary kleptomaniacs
(a time honoured tradition)
Theft is the holy act
On a twisted path to expression
A glut of exclamation marks spells impending nervous breakdown
Just a word on a page and there is the drama
I write for the dead
the unborn
After 4.48 I shall not speak again
I have reached the end of his dreary and repugnant tale of a sense interned
in an alien carcass and lumpen by the malignant spirit of the moral
majority
I have been dead for a long time
Back to my roots
I sing without hope on the boundary
RSVP ASAP
Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on
I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful
physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe
that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
(Silence.)

And I go out at six in the morning and start my search for you. If I've
dreamt a message of a street or a pub or a station I go there. And I wait
for you.
(Silence.)
You know, I really feel like I'm being manipulated.
(Silence.)
I've never in my life had a problem giving another person what they
want. But no one's ever been able to do that for me. No one touches me,
no one gets near me. But now you've touched me somewhere so fucking
deep I can't believe and I can't be that for you. Because I can't find you.
(Silence.)
What does she look like?
And how will I know her when I see her?
She'll die, she'll die, she'll only fucking die.
(Silence.)
Do you think it's possible for a person to be born in the wrong body?
(Silence.)
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you for rejecting me by never being there,
fuck you for making me feel shit about myself, fuck you for bleeding
the fucking love and life out of me, fuck my father for fucking up my
life for good and fuck my mother for not leaving him, but most of all,
fuck you God for making me love a person who does not exist,
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.
–Oh dear, what's happened to your arm?
–I cut it.
–That's a very immature, attention seeking thing to do. Did it give
you relief?
–No.
–Did it relieve the tension?

–No.
–Did it give you relief?
(Silence.)
Did it give you relief?
–No.
–I don't understand why you did that.
–Than ask.
–Did it relieve the tension?
(A long silence.)
Can I look?
–No.
–I'd like to look, to see if it's infected.
–No.
(Silence.)
–I thought you might do this. Lots of people do. It relieves the
tension.
–Have you ever done it?
–...
–No. Far too fucking sane and sensible. I don't know where you
read that, but it does not relieve the tension.
(Silence.)
Why don't you ask me why?
Why did I cut my arm?
–Would you like to tell me?
–Yes.
- Then tell me.