Love is… forever
Sniffing my computer screen it smells like Deletia.
I double click to open her file. Here she comes from the stillness of my hoard, slinking across the dusty display. Pulling the laptop toward my tin-ribs, leaning into its distorting light, I’m watching Deletia pixillating with the cyberprisms. The soundtrack is loud and sentimental, the action keeps running ahead of itself and there are too many extras for my liking, but the colour is true. Stroking the keyboard, fingering the mouse, my breath misting the screen, I’m trapped in a Deletia delirium.
She slipped out without me again.
Love is… a search engine.
She was wheeling a yellow and orange contraption through the dull, rectangular park – it rattled and wobbled beside her, thirty-two bright discs spinning from it’s happily deformed wire skeleton – a sprightly familiar, so very fragile, trundling breezily along. Rifled splendour blasted in a jet of flame with the force of a blow torch from this woman I saw. She was a forest fire rampaging through the empty rooms of any old afternoon, leaving vast furrows of hot ash in her wake.
Her companion shivered and clanged the hour. It was the time of my life.
‘I’m talking to you,’ she said, and from her mile long lips tumbled colours in rounded shapes glowing electric, bouncing toward me over the charred black grass.
‘I am faithless and feckless and bruised with knowing’ – her words quivered and bulged at
my feet. I marvelled at their soft edges, bowled over, ignoring the warning they conveyed.
‘I am Me-me You,’ I offered. Never had my name seemed more appropriate. At last, my Love.
‘Meet me in The Nag’s Head,’ she called out imperiously, as she blazed away in the other direction, pulling the odd construction behind her.
Those six wondrous words bobbed on my shoulders and melted into my ears, seeped their way into my dreams, saturated my desires with Deletia delight. I saved them to savour and tweak.
‘But when will that be?’ I whispered, her ashes blistering my tongue.
Love is… jewels on velveteen languishing in locked boxes.
A Wednesday lunchtime in The Nag’s Head. I was feeble and nursing a cold. Giving up on ever seeing Deletia again. Tired of frequenting this down-at-heel pub heaving with wrecks and ancients. Weary of hanging about hoping for a glimpse of her inferno. Thirteen livery years had gone by very slowly, never once seeing her face.
She arrived on a quickening storm of pale blossoms – tender, burning bride – and talked to me more than before. An orgy of words squelched around her, pulling me into her smouldering circle, close enough to singe.
I had been reading a self-help book that advised me on matters I usually handled badly. It didn’t have a chapter on Deletia – mistress of the runaway gob. How could I make her stop talking, long enough to notice I was there? I knew from my studies that nothing a human being does has a single motive, so I asked her to be my girl. She wrestled free from the sweating bodies of her speech and lisped with her Babycham tongue: ‘Your motives are so mournfully, transparently, sadly, sexily, trustingly, devotedly, unashamedly, unnecessarily, obviously, unabashedly single. Come, let us go back to your place and mingle.’
Love is… a black hole in a bed-sit.
Of course it was easy. That’s how Love is supposed to happen. No need for painful courtship, time-wasting romance, doubting days pulling petals from flowers, lingering by the ‘phone dreaming up ploys and manoeuvres.
Deletia and Me-me: we were orbiting another planet. Rotating in unexplored regions of deepest, delirious space – beyond the outer stratosphere, beyond convention and law. No gravity. Deletia time dimension. The darkest reaches of infinite nothingness overlaid with a shimmering grid, put there for us to cling to, at the boiling point of a star.
And we loved and we made love because love is
She loved me then
I looked at her
She smiled for me I saw her
She kissed me
She gave and she took me
She touched me
And she said
And I said
And we said
And we did
I didn’t think of consequences.
Her many mumbles grew into a writhing, flowering plant with fleshed stems and gashed petals, dripping. I rolled with her, the earthy perfume of her rare blooms smothering me, her probing tendrils pulsing through me, her words all for Me-me. My ears rang, my heart kept time with her restless, hollow caddy. My small mutterings were daisies to her hot-house fabrications. Weeds in the allotments, stragglers in the pasture. I sighed.
Deletia’s drivel drove me where I wanted to be, feeling everything and her.
Deletia grew a forest of legs, rollicking over my narrow bed, falling over me.
We held hands. She stroked my ragged fingernails, saying nothing much for hours. It was the time of my life.
I know what she does when she slips out without me.
Love is… a bed-slug insomniac.
Deletia left stains on my carpet and I’ve labelled them.
There’s a nasty green one by the door – that’s where her Love loitered. Its label says: ‘Hunted by the death-dogs that roam my wilderness. Deletia, where are you?’
There’s one shaped like Ireland, but that’s not where she’s gone – it’s brown and sticky, possibly regret. Its label says: ‘Deletia, I need your digital dilation. Down under.’
A milky wisp of a stain by the sink: ‘What is the world worth? Where is the magic? Answer me, Deletia.’
Attempting to get through to her by telecarpet communication was never going to work. Loving Deletia will get me nowhere because I am the wrong person. There is no right person for Deletia. And Deletia went wrong with me.
She is stretching far and wide beneath my thoughts when I’m awake and thinking. She is hovering about two inches above my dreams when I’m asleep and dreaming. She found it out: my need. And it became a dominant force. I drag it along. I lie. It drags me.
The ugliest stain is on my mind: ‘Deletia! You stitched me up!’
Love is… a mutating delinquent.
I have been playing the cuckold all year. It can’t go on. Where is she? Out in the snow in a skimpy dress, carrying that over-sized handbag stuffed with her weapons of choice: the lubricants and lipsticks, face-muck and fem spray, and her mobile – it was off when I rang – my fingers are itching to text her: ‘COME BACK!’
She left without saying goodbye. I was picking crumbs off the floor, wondering about germs and silverfish, especially the swollen shiny one I saw crawling out of the toilet. Used to be skinny black twitchers on this lino until I stopped washing it so often. Some days have holes where the twitchers go and the silverfish come out instead. Where is she?
I shall creep with the shadows of this night, sneak behind her strutting high-heels, throw myself on the mercy of the icy alleyways and the sharp edges of her encounters, like she does.
At a deserted junction where the snow has turned to slush and the street lights cast a sickening glamour, there she is: spread-eagled on the bonnet of a flashy sports car for some rich, spoilt lad. His mates are watching – they’re drooling as he lifts her thighs and shoves her backwards – they’re taking snap-shots and filming it with their mobiles, all of them jostling in line. Seven lanky lizards, taking their turns with Deletia.
Deletia is driven, given to the night.
Deletia is never sorry.
I am doubled-over and emptied, vomiting torrents of twitchers and silverfish in the cold gutters of her heartless abandon.
She’ll find her own way home.
I’ll creep back with the shadows.
Love is… nympholeptic haute couture.
Deletia moved in the morning after our first date, depositing her essentials around my bed-sit – a few fabulously fantastic possessions.
First came a skull studded with diamonds – the skull of her Father, she said – it was grinning inanely, twinkling and leering, every inch of bone covered with the hardest mineral known to man. She told me his glittering eye-sockets would be watching us, cavernous, all-knowing pits.
I giggled uncomfortably and said his skull was brainless and over-decorated, a poor overseer for our Love. Deletia shrugged and sat him on the table alongside my shambolic clutter – the overflowing ashtray, the stub of a candle, the dry core of an apple… a flyer from a club I’ll never go to… a postcard from a place I’ll never see.
Next came a pile of bricks. The type of bricks you build walls with.
She arranged them carefully in the middle of the carpet, laying them out one by one, rearranging them several times before she was satisfied. I didn’t ask what they meant but I could tell it was important to her. I shuffled awkwardly in the doorway, anxious, wishing I had a better plan, something to do as she deliberated, dragging each brick into its seemingly specific position.
I found it almost impossible to speak the stuff of ordinary life to Deletia. It seemed so piffling, so beneath her. She didn’t even drink tea. Only water from the tap or Babycham from those cute, trashy bottles. She brought her suitcase and it was full of only them. I had been expecting a fascinating tour of her clothes. She didn’t have any. Only what she stood up in. It was a dress to tell our Love by. This dress had a mind of its own, reflecting on our weather: our moods, problems, emotions and the objectives of each day.
That Thursday, the best Thursday of all, her dress was diaphanous and blushing, revealing parts of Deletia I had not seen before.
She loved me then.
Love is… a black cab with it’s clock ticking over.
She was the phantom of your love-sick childhood playing yo-yo with your bubble-gum. She was a pink plastic hand-held device you saved your pocket money to buy. She was a robot made of pewter, you named her carefully and wiped snot-dollops from her nose. She wore rotating nipple tassels and a black satin cod-piece as she smirked at you from those top shelves. She whispered dark secrets about the birds and the bees. She wanted to play Doctors and Nurses. She had inquisitive fingers and made you eat her mud pies. She told you how to escape.
I know what she does when she slips out without you.
Love is… once upon a time and messily ever after.
I ran all the way home from work the next day, panting eagerly, slick with anticipation, imagining Deletia resplendent on my bed. Deletia outshining her Dad’s diamond skull. Deletia playing with her bricks. Deletia inhaling my absence and exhaling plumes of fire, her fierce glory absolving me and nullifying my tatty bed-sit.
I heard whimpers and grunts from behind my door. She was obviously in distress. Pulled up short, terrified, a stitch biting my side, I flung myself into the room to rescue Deletia from whatever foul agony was gripping her.
She was in the grips – she was struggling in the sausage-fingered grips – of my landlord. Their two pale bodies were knotted and squirming on my lovely little bed. An extensive, shiny purple penis jutted out where his nose used to be. Her tongue was tracing his nostrils. He had all five of his doddery legs locked around her ludicrously elongated neck. Her four plump breasts pillowed his quivering buttocks. Swollen veins roped his six grappling arms, bluey green snakes in pulsing patterns, pathways of aged sloth, rolling and rising with his stuttering tempo, sheathed by his grizzled skin. His inflated belly, sprouting a ponderous pelt, was balanced on my Deletia’s antic knees. He had ‘Give Me Head’ tattooed in bright red across his wrinkled forehead. I swear I’d never noticed that before.
His many rancid fingers circled her slender trotters.
They were caught in the throes of something much bigger than Me-me You.
Deletia’s eyes swivelled and held mine from the depths of this contorted embrace.
‘So what? So bloody what?!’ she said.
The stench of charred meat gushed from her parted lips. Windswept barbecues raged in the back-gardens of my suburbia.
I looked away first.
I didn’t know anything about infidelity. I thought it was something to do with music. I was right. My lover was playing a discordant tune on somebody else’s fiddle. I inhaled the fumes and exhaled plumes of panic. My eyes fell on the encrusted skull, it was sporting Deletia’s black knickers. ‘Friday’ was embroidered in shocking pink silks across the sodden gusset, primrose yellow hearts dotted the frills at the waist. They were upside-down, pulled over the hollowed eyes. Blind Man’s Buff. A blindfold for the audience. Perhaps her Father didn’t approve.
My landlord came to an abrupt halt. They pulled apart awkwardly, Deletia and my landlord did. They disentangled, disenchanted, became two separate bodies. His flubbery body. Her rubbery body.
He slunk out of my torched room with his nosy penis between his legs – which meant his head was stuck between his legs and he was bent right over, shuffling backwards, his sprawling sauce-pot swinging merrily – the git. The swollen tip of his sticky friend dragged, so sore, across my carpet, navigating the tumbled bricks, weeping a trail of ketchup.
My eyes found their way back to Deletia’s.
‘You didn’t think you could keep me all to yourself, did you?’ she asked indignantly.
Silence from Me-me. I opened the window. The bitter smoke poured out.
‘Greedy Me-me,’ she said, in a coaxing, baby-talk voice.
She wriggled back into her dress. It was clinging red Lycra.
By evening the dress was black velvet, smothered in sparkling white buttons, nine thousand of them sewn on by hand, in intricate, curving designs, following the contours of the thrilling shapes she made, as she knelt down before me to announce her Pearly Queen promises:
‘In this bed-sit, I will never again do it with anyone else but you.’
‘On Sundays, I will never do it with anyone else but you.’
‘On your Birthday, I will never do it with anyone else but you.
‘When you are with me, I will never do it with anyone else but you.’
‘And I will never Love anyone else but you.’
I know what she does when she slips out without me.
Love is… salad days tossed in vinegar regret.
To mark the occasion, she grabbed me by the waist and we jumped out the window. I clung onto her heavily laden skirts as they billowed with hot air and we flew above the roof-tops of the town.
There is too much of Deletia for one person to hold. She is not to be had. Deletia belongs to no-one, not even herself. This is what I told myself as I wooshed through damp castles of clouds with this woman of mine, this woman of yours – a reluctant traveller in her suffocating cosmos of overwhelming perspectives and skewed horizons.
The sky was big that night. Deletia was big too. I was microscopic. Deletia loomed, zooming in and swooping out, holding me close, letting me go, pulling me towards her then pushing me away. I was floating light and fragile as a wish. I didn’t ever want to come down. I flew out of the frame, leaving her again, never leaving. The monotonous return to the perpetual departure. To have her always, again. To have her again, again.
Love is… a celibate sexual force.
Our last conversations were slabs of rock, monstrous monologues with stranded limbs poking out at awkward angles, flailing, signalling in silence or frozen in ‘Fuck Off’ gestures. Her eyeballs were sunken in craggy outcrops, balefully following the dandelions I waved in surrender. No replies. No exchanges. No Love.
I am so very sorry.
Deletia is driven, given to the night.
Deletia is never sorry.
When I’m walking the death-dogs huge blooms choke my path. I’m tied by the neck to a racing need, it’s dragging me along – we’re on the road to Deletia. All is bleak without her in this purple neighbourhood.
She blessed the bed I lie upon
Cursed the bed I lie upon
Blooded the bed
Burnt the bed
The bed
I lie.
Crowd scene. Hearing her curdled cream accents, seeing her schooled orange hair.
Flashback. She is my Elvis with tits, wearing a gold push-up bra.
Car chase. Gasping at her faster faces, speeding against abstract ground.
Everywhere. Nowhere. Always.
I’m trapped in a Deletia delirium.
The last time she slipped out without me she never, ever came back.
Love is… a sprawling shrine.
I once saw thousands of tiny terracotta men crawling up her legs and marching over her belly, intent on pleasing her.
Deletia is the size of the world.
She fiddles.
I burn.
I Love Deletia.
Every other fucker does too.
Love is… deleted.
For the women who jumped out the window
For the women who flew out the picture
For the women who fell out of love
For the women who fell to pieces
Now I’m deleting Deletia
Now I’m deleting Me-me
Deletia and Me-me deleted
Deleted together and never to part.
Penny Goring
Sniffing my computer screen it smells like Deletia.
I double click to open her file. Here she comes from the stillness of my hoard, slinking across the dusty display. Pulling the laptop toward my tin-ribs, leaning into its distorting light, I’m watching Deletia pixillating with the cyberprisms. The soundtrack is loud and sentimental, the action keeps running ahead of itself and there are too many extras for my liking, but the colour is true. Stroking the keyboard, fingering the mouse, my breath misting the screen, I’m trapped in a Deletia delirium.
She slipped out without me again.
Love is… a search engine.
She was wheeling a yellow and orange contraption through the dull, rectangular park – it rattled and wobbled beside her, thirty-two bright discs spinning from it’s happily deformed wire skeleton – a sprightly familiar, so very fragile, trundling breezily along. Rifled splendour blasted in a jet of flame with the force of a blow torch from this woman I saw. She was a forest fire rampaging through the empty rooms of any old afternoon, leaving vast furrows of hot ash in her wake.
Her companion shivered and clanged the hour. It was the time of my life.
‘I’m talking to you,’ she said, and from her mile long lips tumbled colours in rounded shapes glowing electric, bouncing toward me over the charred black grass.
‘I am faithless and feckless and bruised with knowing’ – her words quivered and bulged at
my feet. I marvelled at their soft edges, bowled over, ignoring the warning they conveyed.
‘I am Me-me You,’ I offered. Never had my name seemed more appropriate. At last, my Love.
‘Meet me in The Nag’s Head,’ she called out imperiously, as she blazed away in the other direction, pulling the odd construction behind her.
Those six wondrous words bobbed on my shoulders and melted into my ears, seeped their way into my dreams, saturated my desires with Deletia delight. I saved them to savour and tweak.
‘But when will that be?’ I whispered, her ashes blistering my tongue.
Love is… jewels on velveteen languishing in locked boxes.
A Wednesday lunchtime in The Nag’s Head. I was feeble and nursing a cold. Giving up on ever seeing Deletia again. Tired of frequenting this down-at-heel pub heaving with wrecks and ancients. Weary of hanging about hoping for a glimpse of her inferno. Thirteen livery years had gone by very slowly, never once seeing her face.
She arrived on a quickening storm of pale blossoms – tender, burning bride – and talked to me more than before. An orgy of words squelched around her, pulling me into her smouldering circle, close enough to singe.
I had been reading a self-help book that advised me on matters I usually handled badly. It didn’t have a chapter on Deletia – mistress of the runaway gob. How could I make her stop talking, long enough to notice I was there? I knew from my studies that nothing a human being does has a single motive, so I asked her to be my girl. She wrestled free from the sweating bodies of her speech and lisped with her Babycham tongue: ‘Your motives are so mournfully, transparently, sadly, sexily, trustingly, devotedly, unashamedly, unnecessarily, obviously, unabashedly single. Come, let us go back to your place and mingle.’
Love is… a black hole in a bed-sit.
Of course it was easy. That’s how Love is supposed to happen. No need for painful courtship, time-wasting romance, doubting days pulling petals from flowers, lingering by the ‘phone dreaming up ploys and manoeuvres.
Deletia and Me-me: we were orbiting another planet. Rotating in unexplored regions of deepest, delirious space – beyond the outer stratosphere, beyond convention and law. No gravity. Deletia time dimension. The darkest reaches of infinite nothingness overlaid with a shimmering grid, put there for us to cling to, at the boiling point of a star.
And we loved and we made love because love is
She loved me then
I looked at her
She smiled for me I saw her
She kissed me
She gave and she took me
She touched me
And she said
And I said
And we said
And we did
I didn’t think of consequences.
Her many mumbles grew into a writhing, flowering plant with fleshed stems and gashed petals, dripping. I rolled with her, the earthy perfume of her rare blooms smothering me, her probing tendrils pulsing through me, her words all for Me-me. My ears rang, my heart kept time with her restless, hollow caddy. My small mutterings were daisies to her hot-house fabrications. Weeds in the allotments, stragglers in the pasture. I sighed.
Deletia’s drivel drove me where I wanted to be, feeling everything and her.
Deletia grew a forest of legs, rollicking over my narrow bed, falling over me.
We held hands. She stroked my ragged fingernails, saying nothing much for hours. It was the time of my life.
I know what she does when she slips out without me.
Love is… a bed-slug insomniac.
Deletia left stains on my carpet and I’ve labelled them.
There’s a nasty green one by the door – that’s where her Love loitered. Its label says: ‘Hunted by the death-dogs that roam my wilderness. Deletia, where are you?’
There’s one shaped like Ireland, but that’s not where she’s gone – it’s brown and sticky, possibly regret. Its label says: ‘Deletia, I need your digital dilation. Down under.’
A milky wisp of a stain by the sink: ‘What is the world worth? Where is the magic? Answer me, Deletia.’
Attempting to get through to her by telecarpet communication was never going to work. Loving Deletia will get me nowhere because I am the wrong person. There is no right person for Deletia. And Deletia went wrong with me.
She is stretching far and wide beneath my thoughts when I’m awake and thinking. She is hovering about two inches above my dreams when I’m asleep and dreaming. She found it out: my need. And it became a dominant force. I drag it along. I lie. It drags me.
The ugliest stain is on my mind: ‘Deletia! You stitched me up!’
Love is… a mutating delinquent.
I have been playing the cuckold all year. It can’t go on. Where is she? Out in the snow in a skimpy dress, carrying that over-sized handbag stuffed with her weapons of choice: the lubricants and lipsticks, face-muck and fem spray, and her mobile – it was off when I rang – my fingers are itching to text her: ‘COME BACK!’
She left without saying goodbye. I was picking crumbs off the floor, wondering about germs and silverfish, especially the swollen shiny one I saw crawling out of the toilet. Used to be skinny black twitchers on this lino until I stopped washing it so often. Some days have holes where the twitchers go and the silverfish come out instead. Where is she?
I shall creep with the shadows of this night, sneak behind her strutting high-heels, throw myself on the mercy of the icy alleyways and the sharp edges of her encounters, like she does.
At a deserted junction where the snow has turned to slush and the street lights cast a sickening glamour, there she is: spread-eagled on the bonnet of a flashy sports car for some rich, spoilt lad. His mates are watching – they’re drooling as he lifts her thighs and shoves her backwards – they’re taking snap-shots and filming it with their mobiles, all of them jostling in line. Seven lanky lizards, taking their turns with Deletia.
Deletia is driven, given to the night.
Deletia is never sorry.
I am doubled-over and emptied, vomiting torrents of twitchers and silverfish in the cold gutters of her heartless abandon.
She’ll find her own way home.
I’ll creep back with the shadows.
Love is… nympholeptic haute couture.
Deletia moved in the morning after our first date, depositing her essentials around my bed-sit – a few fabulously fantastic possessions.
First came a skull studded with diamonds – the skull of her Father, she said – it was grinning inanely, twinkling and leering, every inch of bone covered with the hardest mineral known to man. She told me his glittering eye-sockets would be watching us, cavernous, all-knowing pits.
I giggled uncomfortably and said his skull was brainless and over-decorated, a poor overseer for our Love. Deletia shrugged and sat him on the table alongside my shambolic clutter – the overflowing ashtray, the stub of a candle, the dry core of an apple… a flyer from a club I’ll never go to… a postcard from a place I’ll never see.
Next came a pile of bricks. The type of bricks you build walls with.
She arranged them carefully in the middle of the carpet, laying them out one by one, rearranging them several times before she was satisfied. I didn’t ask what they meant but I could tell it was important to her. I shuffled awkwardly in the doorway, anxious, wishing I had a better plan, something to do as she deliberated, dragging each brick into its seemingly specific position.
I found it almost impossible to speak the stuff of ordinary life to Deletia. It seemed so piffling, so beneath her. She didn’t even drink tea. Only water from the tap or Babycham from those cute, trashy bottles. She brought her suitcase and it was full of only them. I had been expecting a fascinating tour of her clothes. She didn’t have any. Only what she stood up in. It was a dress to tell our Love by. This dress had a mind of its own, reflecting on our weather: our moods, problems, emotions and the objectives of each day.
That Thursday, the best Thursday of all, her dress was diaphanous and blushing, revealing parts of Deletia I had not seen before.
She loved me then.
Love is… a black cab with it’s clock ticking over.
She was the phantom of your love-sick childhood playing yo-yo with your bubble-gum. She was a pink plastic hand-held device you saved your pocket money to buy. She was a robot made of pewter, you named her carefully and wiped snot-dollops from her nose. She wore rotating nipple tassels and a black satin cod-piece as she smirked at you from those top shelves. She whispered dark secrets about the birds and the bees. She wanted to play Doctors and Nurses. She had inquisitive fingers and made you eat her mud pies. She told you how to escape.
I know what she does when she slips out without you.
Love is… once upon a time and messily ever after.
I ran all the way home from work the next day, panting eagerly, slick with anticipation, imagining Deletia resplendent on my bed. Deletia outshining her Dad’s diamond skull. Deletia playing with her bricks. Deletia inhaling my absence and exhaling plumes of fire, her fierce glory absolving me and nullifying my tatty bed-sit.
I heard whimpers and grunts from behind my door. She was obviously in distress. Pulled up short, terrified, a stitch biting my side, I flung myself into the room to rescue Deletia from whatever foul agony was gripping her.
She was in the grips – she was struggling in the sausage-fingered grips – of my landlord. Their two pale bodies were knotted and squirming on my lovely little bed. An extensive, shiny purple penis jutted out where his nose used to be. Her tongue was tracing his nostrils. He had all five of his doddery legs locked around her ludicrously elongated neck. Her four plump breasts pillowed his quivering buttocks. Swollen veins roped his six grappling arms, bluey green snakes in pulsing patterns, pathways of aged sloth, rolling and rising with his stuttering tempo, sheathed by his grizzled skin. His inflated belly, sprouting a ponderous pelt, was balanced on my Deletia’s antic knees. He had ‘Give Me Head’ tattooed in bright red across his wrinkled forehead. I swear I’d never noticed that before.
His many rancid fingers circled her slender trotters.
They were caught in the throes of something much bigger than Me-me You.
Deletia’s eyes swivelled and held mine from the depths of this contorted embrace.
‘So what? So bloody what?!’ she said.
The stench of charred meat gushed from her parted lips. Windswept barbecues raged in the back-gardens of my suburbia.
I looked away first.
I didn’t know anything about infidelity. I thought it was something to do with music. I was right. My lover was playing a discordant tune on somebody else’s fiddle. I inhaled the fumes and exhaled plumes of panic. My eyes fell on the encrusted skull, it was sporting Deletia’s black knickers. ‘Friday’ was embroidered in shocking pink silks across the sodden gusset, primrose yellow hearts dotted the frills at the waist. They were upside-down, pulled over the hollowed eyes. Blind Man’s Buff. A blindfold for the audience. Perhaps her Father didn’t approve.
My landlord came to an abrupt halt. They pulled apart awkwardly, Deletia and my landlord did. They disentangled, disenchanted, became two separate bodies. His flubbery body. Her rubbery body.
He slunk out of my torched room with his nosy penis between his legs – which meant his head was stuck between his legs and he was bent right over, shuffling backwards, his sprawling sauce-pot swinging merrily – the git. The swollen tip of his sticky friend dragged, so sore, across my carpet, navigating the tumbled bricks, weeping a trail of ketchup.
My eyes found their way back to Deletia’s.
‘You didn’t think you could keep me all to yourself, did you?’ she asked indignantly.
Silence from Me-me. I opened the window. The bitter smoke poured out.
‘Greedy Me-me,’ she said, in a coaxing, baby-talk voice.
She wriggled back into her dress. It was clinging red Lycra.
By evening the dress was black velvet, smothered in sparkling white buttons, nine thousand of them sewn on by hand, in intricate, curving designs, following the contours of the thrilling shapes she made, as she knelt down before me to announce her Pearly Queen promises:
‘In this bed-sit, I will never again do it with anyone else but you.’
‘On Sundays, I will never do it with anyone else but you.’
‘On your Birthday, I will never do it with anyone else but you.
‘When you are with me, I will never do it with anyone else but you.’
‘And I will never Love anyone else but you.’
I know what she does when she slips out without me.
Love is… salad days tossed in vinegar regret.
To mark the occasion, she grabbed me by the waist and we jumped out the window. I clung onto her heavily laden skirts as they billowed with hot air and we flew above the roof-tops of the town.
There is too much of Deletia for one person to hold. She is not to be had. Deletia belongs to no-one, not even herself. This is what I told myself as I wooshed through damp castles of clouds with this woman of mine, this woman of yours – a reluctant traveller in her suffocating cosmos of overwhelming perspectives and skewed horizons.
The sky was big that night. Deletia was big too. I was microscopic. Deletia loomed, zooming in and swooping out, holding me close, letting me go, pulling me towards her then pushing me away. I was floating light and fragile as a wish. I didn’t ever want to come down. I flew out of the frame, leaving her again, never leaving. The monotonous return to the perpetual departure. To have her always, again. To have her again, again.
Love is… a celibate sexual force.
Our last conversations were slabs of rock, monstrous monologues with stranded limbs poking out at awkward angles, flailing, signalling in silence or frozen in ‘Fuck Off’ gestures. Her eyeballs were sunken in craggy outcrops, balefully following the dandelions I waved in surrender. No replies. No exchanges. No Love.
I am so very sorry.
Deletia is driven, given to the night.
Deletia is never sorry.
When I’m walking the death-dogs huge blooms choke my path. I’m tied by the neck to a racing need, it’s dragging me along – we’re on the road to Deletia. All is bleak without her in this purple neighbourhood.
She blessed the bed I lie upon
Cursed the bed I lie upon
Blooded the bed
Burnt the bed
The bed
I lie.
Crowd scene. Hearing her curdled cream accents, seeing her schooled orange hair.
Flashback. She is my Elvis with tits, wearing a gold push-up bra.
Car chase. Gasping at her faster faces, speeding against abstract ground.
Everywhere. Nowhere. Always.
I’m trapped in a Deletia delirium.
The last time she slipped out without me she never, ever came back.
Love is… a sprawling shrine.
I once saw thousands of tiny terracotta men crawling up her legs and marching over her belly, intent on pleasing her.
Deletia is the size of the world.
She fiddles.
I burn.
I Love Deletia.
Every other fucker does too.
Love is… deleted.
For the women who jumped out the window
For the women who flew out the picture
For the women who fell out of love
For the women who fell to pieces
Now I’m deleting Deletia
Now I’m deleting Me-me
Deletia and Me-me deleted
Deleted together and never to part.
Penny Goring
2 comments:
damm her work is amazing. Penny I hope you get published. You have a great eye for talent Chris
Love it ,
Jonno.
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