Jazminda The Living Stage

Ladies and gentlemen, so glad to have your attention. I’d love to tell you what my name is, but sadly I’m none too sure what it is. Or what yours are. Thank you all so much for drawing my attention to this. As I was saying, there are many things between earth and heaven that we cannot understand. Indeed, one is before you now! I produce for you, here and now, the inconceivable wonder that is Jazminda the Living Stage! See his blood-red curtains; see how they ripple in gratitude of your attention! We found him, starved, soaked and shivering, behind a battered cinema block in the outskirts of Tropical Sofija. Yet he is here, for us all tonight! We fed him, as he asked us, without the crass medium of words, on young, ripe pomegranates, sheep’s milk and original copies of classic childhood stories. It is no small triumph that he can be here tonight – we can thank the power of Enid Blyton, her golliwog cronies and the magical might of the pomegranate that Jazminda is here at all. I feel his strong, feminine heartbeat, beneath my feet, and feel, in my cortex, his deep purr, sour as syrup. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not polish on his surface. It is not even soil! No, instead, Jazminda perspires pure blood plasma! Yes, that is correct, ladies and gentlemen! If Jazminda had the inclination to, he could save countless AIDS patients! Yet he does not. Instead, he wants to perform for us all! Yes, purr, my sweet, it is your time to shine! I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, as I get behind this piano, to think about possibility. Yes, The Corruption of Possibility will be shown on Jazminda tonight! You, sir! Yes, you – you lucky, callipered soul! Please, rise up onto Jazminda, and take a card. Just show it to the audience... Four of Diamonds, sir! Congratulations, you have all just witnessed the Corruption of Possibility. You had 52 cards to choose from, and yet fate has drawn you to this one – that which you had but a one in 52 chance of choosing. As you leave this stage, to the music of a mournful Yiddish choir, played in its entirety on this piano, please think about this... Oh, sir! You’ve fallen! Feel the unsettled throb of Jazminda inside your cerebellum and spinal cord! He is angered, and has consequently caused the great Republic of Andorra and Kuwait to declare war on the Sun and his devilishly handsome and suave brother-at-arms, Sister Moon! Jazminda can manifest this to you now, symbolically. See, behind the curtain that represents the line between consciousness and sanity: Liam Gallagher locked in mortal combat with his arch enemy, Andrew Sachs. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, due to Jazminda’s perfidious influence, their marriage has once again turned sour! See how Andrew Sachs, resplendent in the pelts of countless field mice, has sharpened a chicken bone, using his nails, whereas Liam Gallagher, defending the rights of cartography and clad in nutshells, is merely using a poor quality chair leg, sharpened on the teeth of the original members of Bon Jovi. None can say who will win. Yet you, sir, are in the enviable position of separating them! To avoid pressure, and the fear of making the wrong decision, it is not advised that you know that the wrong choice will lead to the loss of your wife... yet although it seems as though Gallagher, wielding the power of countless geographers, as he does, would seem to be the logical choice, I’m afraid it wasn’t the one necessary to save your wife. She is, as we speak, being sold on the Mediterranean Stock Exchange of Lithuania and Paraguay. The price of her soul? A single groat. Tonight, this is shown by Tim Wannacott struggling to use an open window. Thank you very much, I have been Somebody. And this is Jazminda the Living Stage. I thank you for your time and your cytoplasm. I leave you with the thought that I was once called decadent. I stuffed him with peacock feathers and the concentrated juice of an albino oyster. Moltsumesc!

Tropical Crawling Leylandii Passion

Feeble sun and strong clouds,
Black beaches in Paris.
What’s in a name?
You can feel it in the bone-cage.
Can’t breathe in the dark. We won’t have to after the bomb.
Coffee with Gary Kasparov. We can’t avoid having to
Look at each other: deep blue keeps getting deeper.
Your move, Butler. Horror fractures.
We raise our voices for peanuts and ketchup.
Invert it. No. You – please – away. Lizards!
He emptied the fridge. I’m not safe. It’ll be my thigh next.
She had: the head: of a sheep. Excuse me; Ethiopian children laugh as the waves break.
Silver sea foam, sun, sand, scream to a sigh. The beach seems lighter.
The path hums over my head and we’re together now.

The worm stirs in the ashes of the grate. Holy Mother but it has eyes.
It’s Basque. My earlobes tingle with his teeth and I hope the city’s safer.
Sirens sing at me out of railway carriages.
Ticket? Why not just take my tongue? You vulture.
The snow’s thick under my head and heavy in it. No chilblains in Hell, boyo.
Centipedes move in my bed. Don’t look, it enrages them.
The window moves and tiny doctors sigh. Don’t touch me with those hands.  How many fingers?
They stroke me like a side of beef. Heart.
We should take a break if we’re here to work. The water froze in the pipes last year.
Jefferson Airplane chase rabbits in, until reason takes over.
I doubt anyone would blame me if it never happened, but that’s a lot of pressure for one man.
I must have heard that twenty times. I can’t read when they’re around. The words make patterns.
My house creaks as it settles, and the leaves blow up to the windows.
You can’t fault the flooring, but you can sure try if that tickles your prostate.

The sleepwalkers awake! Laugh/cry/frown/sing it’s not like any of it’s different.
Outsource your dreams to the private sector.
Over the KKK rally, the mighty eagle soars triumphant.
Gallagher blood wars rage between the studios; you could call it love.
Who the devil has time to count in solar seconds nowadays?
It’s quiet up here. She’s haunting me. Yellow eyes in the fog.
I thought I thought it too well today. The Republic of Heaven never changes so as I notice.
Leylandii: the biggest ‘fuck you’ to the future.
Insects busy themselves over the lawn. A grey carpet around my feet.
A generation asks itself about Daniel Hooper, the mighty swamp bought to its knees.
Drop the stone under the radar and pull up the blinds.
You Marxist swine, get your eyes out of my face! You’re ill.
Please, patronise me like the thinking reeds amongst the cattle.
Iron your shirt and buckle your shoes, see if we can’t shift our Walpurgis Blues.

Sleep

Sleep

I’m not sure if anyone likes mirrors very much. Certainly, seeing yourself, something that you would naturally never do, suspended in a piece of glass, and following your every move exactly, isn’t comforting! I’ve been trying to think about my early memories of them, but I never had one in my room as a child – there were plenty in my house, but for the life of me, I can’t remember one in my childhood bedroom. Nobody in my family was particularly image-conscious, so I never spent much time preening myself in front of them. But they weren’t alien to me, dotted around the house, there in case we needed to remind ourselves what we looked like.

 I think you need to understand what kind of child I was for this story to make sense. I was always strange, I think. Maybe it was due to my genes, or some sort of long-forgotten emotional trauma, or even my mother’s devoted attitude to parenting (never leaving me alone for more than two minutes). Me, I think it was just a case of ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’. (That’s a metaphor, obviously, for an over-active imagination, a strange genetic makeup and the way I was raised coming together to give me all the trouble I had). Retrospectively, I think that I must have had a sleep disorder: my mother was convinced that from the age of about two onwards, I simply didn’t sleep. Certainly, I hated it when the lights were out – I’d lie there, winding myself up until I was too afraid to shut my eyes and too stubborn to cry. I wouldn’t sleep a wink and I’d promptly do the same thing the next night. My mother eventually picked up on this, and I was dragged to a huge number of ‘specialists’ who were meant to diagnose my ‘problem’. They diligently compared notes, accused one another of being wrong, then came up with some so called ‘bright ideas’ (none of which helped in the slightest) and referred me elsewhere. I think I just grew out of it when I was about five: I don’t remember anything unusual after I started school.  Maybe, with hindsight, not being able to shut my brain down was the first curse of having such an overactive mind, and it was being stretched academically that helped to calm it down. (Well, academically stretched once they worked out that I could actually read before I got there). But I had a healthy, normal childhood for a good many years after that, and everyone, me included, thought that I’d just grown out of ‘that silly phase’.

Looking back, things started to go awry in my third year of secondary school. Up until then, I think I’d settled in quite well, with no pressing troubles and plenty of friends. Certainly, we all did things that most 13 year olds do: talk about (gratuitously violent, X-rated) films we claimed to have watched, irritated everyone else in the school and made some (occasionally) very accurate guesses as to what drunkenness and sexual encounters were ACTUALLY like (we were 13 –  pubescent imagination has no limits). If I were to sum up this period of my life, I think I would probably settle for the word ‘bluff’. But I was thoroughly enjoying myself: the work wasn’t too hard, and my friends and I got into plenty of healthy mischief. All things considered, though, I didn’t think that early secondary school was a good time to admit to being afraid of the dark. It hadn’t been constant at all: in fact, it hadn’t worried me for years, not since I stopped playing childish make-believe and actually went to sleep at night. But when I was 13, it came back with a vengeance. One night, for some unknown reason, I couldn’t bring myself to shut my eyes, and so I just lay there, listening to the night-noises in my house: the eaves settling, the central heating, the grey roar of the motorway. I turned my head towards the darkest corner of my room, and, no doubt due to some half-forgotten story, I thought I saw something a shade or two darker than the rest of the room. Oh, it sounds laughable now, a young teenager’s mind playing tricks on him; his imagination or an old sweater or something. I think I knew in my heart of hearts that it would turn out to be either one of those things if I was weak enough to turn on the light. But I refused to do that – maybe, deep down, I enjoyed being scared. So, that night, I pulled the covers up over my eyes, and just lay there, with the darkness pressing in around me and my mind amplifying every tiny noise to deafening levels. Quite what I was hiding from, I didn’t know then, and I certainly know now. Doubtless, some damn-fool therapist would try to tell me: something deliciously Freudian, no doubt, like the latent power of my mind, or doubts over my sexuality. In fact, I’m certain that that classic failsafe the Oedipus Complex would come out to play. Either way, that first night was the template for the next four years or so. I wonder now why I didn’t just sleep with the light on – that surely would have fixed everything. But I didn’t want to compromise my masculinity. Machismo is everything to a 13 year old, and I thought that by admitting a weakness, and not trying to fix it, I was losing ‘man-points’, as we called them. But after a while, lying in the dark became more of a dogma than a decision. I thought that if I fought it early on, it might make me stronger later. I promised myself I wouldn’t cave in. I refused to let my panic win.

Looking back now, I’m sure developing a sudden, irrational fear of the dark at the age of 12 wasn’t a good sign for my mental health. My problems all seemed to escalate after that, aided and abetted, no doubt, by the re-emergence of my trusty old sleep disorder. I began to suffer with depression, which I could ignore up to a point if I kept busy. Plus, nobody would have taken a 12 year old with depression seriously. It’d just be ‘teen angst’, or ‘growing up’, or maybe the most worrying, ‘only your imagination’. I could pretend it was any one of those, and I think I did, until I reached about 14 or 15, when things got dramatically worse. My insomnia reached a sort of fever pitch, where I would actually just not sleep for nights on end, then stagger, zombie-like through school. When I made it home, I would snatch a few hours sleep in the afternoon, and then lie awake, night after night in the dark, eyes wide open, boring a hole into the ceiling. I jumped at every tiny noise, real or imagined, and I begged for oblivion to come for me. What’s worse, I started to exhibit some worrying symptoms of a fundamentally damaged psyche (extreme paranoia, manic laughter for no reason, inexplicable physical violence directed at people that looked smug, or happy, or satisfied, even spending hours washing my hands because I touched an animal). I started smoking, pretending to enjoy the heady feeling. I smoked openly, hoping someone would notice; maybe ask me if I was alright. I largely used smoking as something to do on those long sleepless nights, focusing on the smoke so I wasn’t thinking about anything else. My mother must have noticed the stink of tobacco in my room, but chose to ignore it, no doubt thinking to herself that “boys will be boys”. Nevertheless, I firmly maintain that all this was leading up to what happened next.

One night, having lain awake for hour after countless hour, I realised I needed to urinate. I knew I couldn’t sleep with a full bladder, but I also knew that I would only wake myself up further by emptying it. I tried to ignore it, but nature won, so I dragged myself out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, the light burning my tortured eyes. I glanced habitually around at the room that I could have drawn with my eyes shut. There were some hideous brown and yellow tiles on the floor, which showed a pattern that you had to look for to be able to see. The bath was on the right as you walked in, veiled with the mildewed and translucent shower curtains. The bathroom cabinet (complete with mirror) was on one wall, directly opposite the shaving mirror over the sink. I finished, and started to wash my hands in the sink, and automatically glanced up into the little mirror. In it, behind me, I saw myself. Standing behind my own reflection.

My family told me that I screamed. That part, I don’t remember, but can only assume that it was when I looked into the eyes over my own shoulder. The rest of the events are burnt into my memory. Ostensibly, what I saw - but couldn’t have seen - were my own features, but twisted and distorted. I – it - was wearing an ugly expression, more like a smirk or a sneer than my smile. But the eyes... I won’t be rid of them, no matter how long I live. They were the worst of it all. They were filled with cold anger, devoid of any of the tiredness etched into my real face. They looked darker, and were staring steadily into my own.

It felt like hours that I stood there, unable to move, barely breathing, but it can’t have been more than a heartbeat. Something, to this day I don’t know what, broke the spell. I turned round. Some deep, primal part of my brain had balled my hands into fists. I threw one of them at where this... apparition should have been. I can vividly remember my fist hitting the cabinet with a bittersweet crunch. The world seemed to slow down – the cracks spread out like a spider web from where my fist hit the glass, and the world split into a  myriad of tiny mirrors, all showing something different. I did the same to the other pane of the cabinet mirror, the pain building slowly in my hand and the blood starting to flow down my wrist. The last thing I can remember is doing the same to the little shaving mirror, but by then, I was starting to fade. I saw myself for the last time, in the thousand tiny mirror shards as the world shifted, and I became dead to it.

I was woken up by the door being kicked down. Yes – I was woken up. My family had heard me screaming, then three little thuds, followed by a bigger one as I hit the floor. I was told afterwards that it was like a scene from a B-movie – me lying on the floor, with splintered mirrors and blood everywhere. My mother panicked, as people like her are fond of doing, and called an ambulance. (Completely unnecessarily, I thought.) I only realised afterwards that it wasn’t just the injuries that were worrying her.

When in hospital, I did my best impression of someone with PTSD, which I suppose now wasn’t hugely far from the truth. I was very heavily tranquilised, so I mostly enjoyed sleeping untroubled. I say untroubled, I was regularly disturbed by a carousel of (unspecific) ‘experts’. They asked me countless strange questions, about my likes and dislikes, my relationship with my parents, my friends, with figures of authority.  They generally didn’t give too much of a reaction to whatever I said, but a few things got to them. One was how much I hated mirrors – they always shifted a bit when I said that, so I said it a lot.

After a couple of weeks, they moved me here. It’s just another hospital to me. Quite a few ‘specialists’ sat with me at the beginning to ask the same questions all over again, but that stopped after a while. It’s quite peaceful now that they’ve finally left me more or less alone. I’m getting plenty of sleep now. Deep and dreamless, just the way I like it. But the ‘specialists’ say some strange things on the infrequent occasions when they do talk to me now. At the moment, they keep asking me why I attacked that simpering nurse with the crucifix and the birthmark. That’s nonsense, for a start. That kind of behaviour’s for mad people.

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