after 2012 came and went, he was disappointed. nothing much happened. he turned on the tv and it was still the same old war, life was still the same old gameshow with slightly different actors repeating the same old lines.

he sat on the morning train and looked at peoples faces and they seemed as asleep as ever. their eyes were open but they didn't seem alive. he listened to them speak and they all sounded like robots, programmed with the same story, the same 2.2 beta version of interaction. he started to make notes. he studied them.

at night, when he had removed his rather expensive striped silk noose and hung it on the back of the door next to his suit jacket, he would examine his notebook, read the snippets of conversation he had overheard and recorded.

the first thing he noticed was that people liked to talk about what they had seen on tv. they would speak so fondly of people who didn't exist, as if they were real. they would analyze every pretend situation and give their verdict as if it were a matter of life and death. this, he soon realised, was the only time people ever really seemed to come alive, when they were talking about these imaginary worlds and these imaginary places and these imaginary people.

alot of the time, people would repeat things they had read in a magazine or a newspaper. he heard the same story over and over again, like a pointless, stupid echo. even peoples lives seemed the same. every day a different face beside him on the train would recount the similar tale of the day before, meaningless anecdotes detailing some random child, or some random boyfriend, or some random car/holiday/house they had bought. it was like listening to the drone of a million and one ants, the pulse of the hive mind sweeping them from day to identical day.

he didn't know what to make of it all. he put on his tv and on every channel, people were dressing in the same clothes, trying to copy each other, people were going to plastic surgeons and demanding they be changed to look the same as someone else. people were all driving the same car, drinking the same cola, smoking the same cigarettes. they were all giving their children the same few names, all parting their hair in the same direction, all listening to the same music, all dying of the same diseases.

and he looked up from his notebook, and stared at the tie hanging on the back of the door. even that was the same. the same three diagonal stripes. and he looked at his shoes, and he thought, impossible! those were the same shoes a million other tired feet had worn before him.

and he got out his wallet and looked at his identity card. that grey, shocked, badly lit face didn't look anything like him. that name, printed underneath, that didn't capture the essence of who he was. how could it? he started to repeat his own name, over and over. it just sounded like noise, not like real words. it sounded no different to the squeak of a monkey in a zoo, or the squeak of any monkey, anywhere.

his ape heart beat furiously and he needed air.

he went outside and looked around. there was still enough light to see, so he lit a cigarette and started paying attention. he sat cross legged on the lawn, which he had trimmed to the same length as everyone else in his street, and looked at the grass. the more he looked, the more he noticed how no two blades were the same. they weren't even close.

he looked at the sky, at the clouds, and there was no symmetry. he went to bed feeling very confused.

the next morning on the train, he didn't make any notes, he just looked. he looked at the sea of faces in the same way he had looked at the grass but nothing stood out. it was just the same bland face over and over again, like some kind of repeating hologram.

some of the faces were male, and some were female, and some were old and some were fat and some were incredibly ugly, but when it came down to it it was just the same old face, repeating forever, a self-replicating fractal of identical skulls, to infinity. their lips moved and their eyes opened and closed but the more he looked, the more he could see that they were like animations in a perpetual loop. they never thought anything new, or expressed an opinion that was entirely their own, they were all stuck in one monotone vinyl groove, repeating themselves forever.

and he watched them disconnecting from the world, plugging themselves into music players so they wouldn't have to listen, texting each other so they wouldn't have to speak, and he thought, what the hell is this?

whenever one of them approached him at the water-cooler now, he didn't know what to say. he would just stare at their lips and hope he looked like he was listening. he lost all interest in girls, because eventually, no matter how pretty or different she appeared at first, all he could see was the dull grey face of his boss, writhing beneath him, and he would have to makes his apologies and leave.

he began to find he couldn't tell people apart anymore. his own face in the mirror every morning was the only thing that seemed real. all around him were programmed people following sub-routines he no longer understood. they went to work and came home and watched tv and went to sleep, then got up and went to work again, over and over again, as if they were sleep-walking, as if they had never fully been awake.

he was pretty sure he was awake. he turned the lights on and off in his room every now and then, because he was sure he had read that in dreams, this was impossible. he couldn't remember why.

he got out his notebooks again, tried to find an answer, or at least some meaning, anything. but it made no sense, and he cried with frustration.

and suddenly he remembered being a child, knocking on peoples doors and running away, scrambling behind the nearest bush and having to choke back laughter as a confused face would appear, staring blankly at their empty doorstep, looking this way and that, shaking their heads silently and going back inside.

he put on his trainers and went into the street. he knocked on his neighbours door. noone came. so he tried the next, and the next, and the next. he didn't bother running away. he knocked more and more furiously, shouting hello. he peered through windows. in each house, people were huddled around their tvs, while cold plasma light streamed the same images onto their empty eyeballs. in each house, people just sat and stared, barely noticing each other, or his face, pressed against the glass.

he went home and closed the door. this had to be a dream. a dream within a dream, with no waking. he got into bed and closed his eyes.

and as he slept, the meat robots did not once break their gaze, did not lift their hollow eyes from the screen. they watched every second of his dreaming. the last free human, his soul just a film, his mind their entertainment.

and they sat around, plugged directly in, chasing every last synaptic wave, every last abstract, confused, hyper-real thought, absorbing every memory, until all that was left was a tiny spark, feeding them with liquid light, and he was just a spot, fading into darkness on the screen.

i lie in my tamba and listen to the jungle. she whispers like a green ghost, a solar wind. i hear leaves uncurl, i hear silver fronds unfolding. i am motionless, eyes cast deep into the forest floor, searching for the plant spirit. and through the dense, still air, i see a tiny bush begin to move, the radial leaves shake and tingle.

with jaguar grace i am on my feet and moving, i run with the silence of the hunt, over sinew of vine, over creeping fern, through mud, through shallow stagnant pools that smell of the deepest forest, not once disturbing the gentle hum of a thousand tiny canopy birds singing at the sun.

and in the distance, a purple flash and silver sparks, and i break through into a clearing and kneel at the bed of a shallow stream, and i splash my face with water. i wait.

i hear a voice; it comes like the rasping of reeds, an old woman's voice, as ancient as the giant vines and thicker than a thousand men. and in my heart, an icaros, and i start to sing.

and with every line, i am back on my feet and moving, slower this time, my body pushing forward in waves, as if am a puppet to the words. she sings me on. each step of this insane dance brings me closer and somehow i am back in my tamba, nestled in my pile of leaves, eyes shut, her voice receeding back towards the sky, lost above the canopy.

and from out of the blackness comes the face of a white man, floating above the forest in a metal boat with the wings of a great bird. and i look into his eyes, the empty pale eyes of a skull, seeing nothing, dead at heart, and i see his dream. and his dream is of blackened skies, and desert wastes, and poisoned water, and the jungle is gone. and i see a billion tiny faces staring at a billion tiny glowing screens, and they are watching their dreams! and these are more like nightmares, and demons rise up through these boxes, and these people, they just sit and invite them into their heads, this flow of visions straight through their eyes, and they are watching each other die in so many terrible ways. and they can shape-shift too, but they don't use the plants. they go to sleep and others crowd round and take knives to their faces and cut their skin like sun-dried hide and re-arrange it and when they wake up they are someone else, forever. like making masks.

and i remember my father, spearing fish in the waterfall, and my mother, chewing manioc and spitting it into an old clay jug, and i see the faces of a thousand ancestors swim before me as trees fall and the ground shakes.

i leap from my tamba and run into the wall of green, and every step burns like an ant-bite, and my icaros has become a scream, and my jaguar howl pierces everything. and then i am in the clearing, and above me roars an angry silver bird, a wreathe of spear-tips revolving at its head. it is louder than a waterfall. i am stung in the face by sand and fallen forest dirt as it breathes its terrible breath from above.

and from within it's head, which catches the sun like a pool, lightning flash, again and again. and it just hovers above me, moving in slow circles, flash flash flash. 

and i pick up a handful of stones, and start throwing them into the air, over and over, and i realise i am still screaming. and the surface of the pool boils and waves underneath the bird, and the grass is blown flat and my hair is pulled back from my face. so i run into the water, and look straight up at the bird, and i bring my palms down flat against the water again and again, and i command it in the darkest words of the brujo to retreat. 

i duck down under the water and when i emerge, the bird is circling, and then away. all i can hear, as those violent wings beat upward, is my own heart, and my own breath, and the ripples of the red water, meeting the edges of the pool. 

and i know of a world, a broken, empty world where nothing has any meaning, and see that it lies just beyond the edge of the green. i see the shiny locusts of oblivion cutting swathes through the trees, shaving the land. i see these white ghosts at the edge of our village, each embrace bringing a sickness so otherwordly no plant has been dreamed yet to cure.

so i find the oldest, thickest trueno caapi vine, and cut a piece the size of my forearm. i fill my cloth bag with chacruna leaves and i take them back to my tamba, and start a fire. i collect water from the pool and fill my cooking pot. i layer shredded sections of vine and then cover them with leaves. i watch the pot boil, and stare into the flames, and amongst the smoke and steam, the words of my intention are almost visible.

and i throw in white flowers shaped like bells, and i murmur " toe' " over and over and this centres me. i keep on calling her forth, and i hear the spirit of datura stirring in the darkness, choosing her form. and i know that when that silver bird returns, with it's white-faced men, empty-souls filled with dead-knowledge, trying to swap our land for clothes and flat shiny beads that can be exchanged for anything, even love, i will be ready. i will intoxicate them with my dreams, i will make them see.

the saddest part is, every ten years i have to start again. ten years feels like ten minutes, when you're as old as me. i can't even remember when i was born. all i can remember is that at some point, i was a child, back in the days before mirrors, staring at the backs of knees, stung in the face by long grass. before the hunger set in.

and i can look back across centuries, maybe even millenia. oceans of time. i am as constant as breath and keep on going. those endless faces, they change so rapidly that they all blur into one. just voiceless ghosts. but every now and then, there is an original. an old-soul. you remember them from dreams, maybe, or from the black worlds of anti-matter before you were born. they look into your eyes, void-deep, and it burns straight through. like a sunspot that never fades. or a hole in your soul, if you have one.

and so you seek them out, you run through countless seasons, chasing shadows, your heart an insane and empty compass, navigating wildly. they become magnetic north, your everlasting attachment. but you will be denied until the end of time.

so anyway, i start again. i can never grow old, but those faces around me, they sag and they crease, the hair thins and turns grey. so on i go. or else my cover is blown. and him, he's always one step ahead. hunted like prey over space and time.

and sometimes you forget, you become so immersed, you succumb to the illusion of the present, and you feel so weak that all you can do is go home, and put on your best dress, and HUNT.

and later on, when you've left them sleeping, you look in the mirror and that sunspot is still a sorry silver coal in the hollow of your eye, and you blink away the tears, and his voice starts whispering. and he repeats those words over and over again, from that millisecond when he loved you, and you know you can never stop. 

so you're chasing him down. and one year you're kissing GIs and waiting for the bomb, another you're tuning in and dropping out, another still you're handing out fruit in a warehouse in Brixton, while a tiny white pill dissolves on your tongue. love-heart. and you get more and more out of your head but with every blink you see his face and you crash into another decade, leaving friends and lovers behind, starting again and again and again. and friends children and grand-children, one face replacing the next, and still you go on.

and eventually you evolve, and you learn to feed on thoughts instead, so you target the weak, and now it is into your office these fragile prey troop, and as they explain their miasma of pains, you grow fat and strong and your battle-scars heal and you feel READY. you'll find him. soon you will be able to shape-shift too. and overhead, the sunspot tumours the sky.

so as you're fucking, the music is violent, and all this feels like a smack in the face, but when that flash comes you are ready, and you breathe his energy into you and you know you just added another ten years, you've bought a little more time. and this makes you smile and bless him, he thinks it was him. and you're putting on your underwear and your eyes are empty and you don't hear a word he says. and you don't look back, and you don't see him close the door.

and you see the movies, and you read the books, and you know what they say. but they're wrong. noone knows what it's like, not really. and all these soulless people, these paper stars, they struggle for immortality through TV, and yours is like a punishment, the prison of the hyper-real. here you are, serving a million lifetimes, sucking out peoples souls with unbelievable clarity; the victims, they never forget your face, and are haunted until the end of time by that stellar cold in your eye. and The Logos starts to speak and it's your voice they hear but by then you are lightyears away. you are caught by the lip on his terrible fish-hook and you fear you will never smile again.

and so you execute precisely. just a little bit of life-force, here and there. you steal soul and memories and leave an empty space that borders on stupidity. you create vacant lots, zealots, followers. bastard children, who think of nothing but you. everything is framed by you. and you just don't give a shit. they are beneath you. your eye is trained on the sun. on him.

and you have so much time to sit and think. you ignore the letters, the phone-calls, the knocks on the door. you've taken all you need from them. and maybe it's like they say, a vampire creates others of it's kind, so these people are desperate and hollow inside, hungry for you. you've taken their very core away and they don't even realise, they don't understand how it works, the art of feeding. but you've taken away their pain as well as everything else. it's a kindness, really. and you sit in the dark and smoke and you put on records, but they are all spoiled now, they hold too many memories. you're absolutely choked with other peoples emotions, but yours still float on the top, like terrible foam.

and sometimes you just get on the train and spend hours going nowhere, all the world a green bruise, and you let  yourself listen to those songs and you have to blink into the sun to hide your tears. and so you chose another victim right there on the platform and you're just biding your time but you know no matter how many lives you swallow, no matter how many years you gain, it will never be enough. even living forever. imagining an everlasting k-hole of time: your heart like an ice-berg before a child with a single match. it all just seems impossible. if only you could forget!

and of course, you have your ways of trying; lines of white powder, wine-glasses murky with pink liquid, small bitter pills; but none match that first high, that pure, clean, natural buzz. happiness? it's all just a matter of chemistry to you now anyway. you've thought about it often enough to know it was a clash of hormones and endorphins and pheremones. you could almost write an equation for it, that's how textbook-pure biology it all was. it amuses you to devalue it like this, to make it seem insignificant, or at the very least, as inevitable as matter. just rocks in space. a dead comet in endless free-fall, blackened and burned and dead. like you, from the neck up.

and you wish it was all just as easy as a stake through the heart, but yours is diamond-hard. yours is coal. and it has been broken and crushed and as sharp as windscreen glass for years now, and yet here you are. the living dead. you curse the one who gave you this hunger and took away even the promise of the grave, and how he knew exactly what he was doing. but one day, one day, maybe you'll find him, and with a single kiss you will pour into him all the sorrows of the world. it will choke him completely.

and oh yeah, this was about me, but i'm just saying. it's how it would be for you too.

it started off small. a tiny project. a gift. it was a gesture of love, it was showing how completely and utterly i gave myself to you.

i used to love painting you; these walls are lined with a million different versions of your face, your body, your hair. i couldn't help it; every time i looked at you it was like looking at a masterpiece. and we would be sitting outside some pavement cafe, drinking coffee, watching people go by and i would look up at you in your cloud of sun, with your perfect prism of bones, and i wouldn't be able to stop myself from sketching you. anything would do; a paper napkin, a bus ticket, the palm of my hand.

and in those days when we were apart, i would disconnect from the world and smoke myself stupid. i would be high on paint fumes and the image of you, and i would stay up for nights on end just painting, my fingertips sore and skinned from rubbing against the canvas. i would touch you into being. these hands that had known your body could recreate you from the ether and pin you like a butterfly.

it felt like stealing your soul, but you were stealing mine. for every drop of my blood, sweat and tears that mixed with the paint, bringing you to second life, the more you infiltrated my every cell and molecule. i was adam creating you from my rib, but forever more the hollow space would echo and ache.

see, you were a complicated sculpture, an impossible puzzle of melting angles, just a blur beneath me, a snow-angel against the sheets. the impression where you lay became the holiest of shrouds. 

this is what i think now, your face everywhere i look. even going to the fridge for milk, your face, your face, your face, tiny little sketches, each corner skewered in place with a magnet. a stamp collection shrine to the queen of my world.

and it is all i have, this crowd of you, this sea of eyes, always watching. those eyes that have seen me curse and cry and fall to my knees and carve your name on my arm over and over. those eyes have seen me punch the walls, or lie like the dead for days, completely out of it, knowing nothing, drifting slowly towards the ceiling in a haze of shimmering light. and they have seen me crash back to earth, seen my body become too big for me, seen me buckle under its weight and crawl under the covers to cry myself blind.

and they can see me now, and my masterpiece. it's called, "All of Me". i have mixed cuttings of my own hair into the paint. real tears, real sweat, real saliva. and as i lean back against the canvas, a real, blasted, bloody hole blooms like a sick rose as the shot-gun shell tears through the empty space where my heart used to be.

when everyone disappeared, at first i was glad. when overnight the world emptied & i awoke alone as if from some terrible dream, i simply lit a cigarette and stared at the sky. things would be easier now there was just me.

it did not particularly matter where everyone had gone, or why. i liked the empty streets, the silence, the freedom to walk into other peoples houses, to sleep in their beds, wear their clothes, eat their food. i spent hours reading diaries, reconstructing ghosts from those scribbled words and photographs; i watched home movies and felt close to these strangers who did not exist anymore. i filled my days with other peoples memories, wandering from house to house, opening drawers, taking souvenirs.

i had never been able to drive, but that didn't matter now. the world was filled with abandoned cars; if i crashed one, i simply took another. i raced against invisible traffic, mounting pavements, doing wild u-turns until the petrol ran out. in the rearview mirror, my eyes were blasted and empty. and suddenly i thought of you, and floored that fucker til i was crashing through your gate, spinning to a stand-still in the middle of your lawn.

and inside your house, i felt afraid as i climbed the stairs. i kicked off the shoes of some long gone girl and continued barefoot, barely able to breathe.

opening your bedroom door, i became a tiny flower in the middle of a tidal wave. i could do nothing under the weight of those memories but sink to my knees and dissolve into brine. i was a mermaid turned to foam once again.

i crawled into your bed, and was drowned all over again by the scent of you, and i lay there and cried for days, turning your pillow black. and i put on one of your t-shirts and i listened to your music and i read your books and i slept in the hollow where your body once lay and i cursed god in every conceivable language.

and i realised i was like Argus, lying patiently at the gates of Ithaca, waiting for you. an abandoned and forgotten pet, dreaming of your touch. it did not matter that everyone else was gone, because for me the world had ended with your goodbye and everything else apart from your return was meaningless.

and then i realised that i was the ghost, waiting for you on the other side, but that you would never come, because you had the whole world and a whole lifetime to fill and all i had was the bitter memory of what i had thrown away, and every time i closed my eyes those final, pathetic seconds would flash before my eyes, a sea of red expanding from each wrist, a tide of valentines roses congealed against a worn old carpet. and my own eyes, empty as the lights went out, forever fixed on the shadow of you, out of reach until the end of time. 

I dream of my Father. I overhear him say to my Mother, of me, "You know, I only half-loved her" and I am filled with rage, the kind of rage that has me kick skirting boards, and dig my nails into the palms of my hands.

I felt the end of the world visit me in my bed. She crawled along my bones and whispered into my brain, stroked back the hair from my brow and promised me sleep. She was two dozen small pills and I vomited her against the duvet and knew she was wrong. But her fingertips had known me and my eyes became her eyes & nothing ever looked the same again. I could look upon a child and feel only a tiny cellular death.

New life only seemed to emphasise the duality of human time: their clock ticking towards completion and mine toward being obsolete in body and mind. Skeleton rising up through the skin.
Every glance into the mirror confirmed this gradual decay: a hair silvering at my crown, the fine lines gathering in the hollows where a smile was carved. Seeing not the joy in creating a life but the finality of that which already exists, racing toward nothingness.

And the burden of such an instinctive, biologically driven love. Eternal life only possible through the continuation of our genes. One fundamental way of cheating death on a small scale.
And I told myself this as the life seeped away from between my legs and they stuck the IV in my arm and filled me with someone else’s blood and somewhere a tiny spark burned out and left a hole in the sky.
Just something I lost.

praying to the wrong god with useless witchcraft; a dyslexic heart making no sense at all of the spell-book of the stupid.

my soul was completely stolen, not sold. i got nothing in return. your name became a terrible mantra & sent it's echoes to the future back, promising a miracle and delivering an atom-bomb of regret. & you're still in my head. you rise like the dead through the dark water of dreaming. your eyes, that tangle-weed green, burning holes in my lungs until i sink finally down and am lost to the fishes. i crawl into a sandcastle of dead dreams and turn to foam in the morning air.

does your hand hurt? try the other one.

try holding back the hurricane, the landslide, the neutron star implosion. try holding up the sky, try waiting for the miracle. no really. i want you to. try parting a sea of dreams, try picking up dry dust bones from the ocean floor, try looking at the fossil of your own skull and wondering if it was human. i dare you.

and do you listen to music at night? does she?

or does she break to the sound of your voice, a poltergeist repeating the words of the dead, or the words of the herd still raping her head?

the silence is never complete. not even when empires dissolve at her feet and the stars of oblivion melt  tar from the streets and then drown you.

the next time they were together, they were drawn like impossible magnets but their eyes would not meet. their indifference was calculated. she kept touching her hair while inside her tears fell like paper snow and almost choked her. he smoked his cigarettes like the prop that they were and kept his head turned away. he kept his mind blank and pure and empty. he filled his belly with drink. he started watching her out of the corner of his eye. she did not look at him once. her eyes passed over him as if he was not there, as if he was little more substantial than vapour. he watched her raise her glass, watched those lips crush against it as they had against his own. but still he felt nothing.

she kept on breathing, but she struggled. she kept on talking, the words kept coming, but she wasn't really there. in her head she was light years away. in her head, towers were falling, tidal waves rolling, stars exploding. in her head, the void had opened and everything from death to birth and inbetween was meaningless. she could see only him. and she felt nothing. she was as numb as the dead.

they were both so happy.

and later on, alone in his room, he felt glad that it had all been so easy.

and later on, alone in her room, she was gone.