Before

her hand is overcome by the rise of sand, before the concrete and steel canyons dive down, seven miles beneath the ocean, before the storeys of mirrors have winked their last glint, buried under the piles of ice, before all cities lie dead, sinking down into the earth, their pictures of elephants indecipherable, the last of us humans wholly gone, unknowable other species roaming the land, taking to the air, ignorant of our fires, treading over our graves, that rot deep within the earth, unaware, as they bathe and hunt in the murky water that they like us will totally die – before all that, it is the details which will hurt the most:

The eyes of a statue, bullet holes now for her eyes. A church bell, a crumbling black shape - the flames having passed - a dot in the debris of a wasteland. A little child’s shoe, red, laces undone, broken in half in the rubble. The last bridge falling down, falling down. A piece of paper drifting over cracked concrete, reading “I wuv oo”. And scattered coins no hands pick up. And flimsy photobooth smiles. And, and, and.

What was the last poster you saw, pasted up upon a public wall? True, it will come to nothing. Yet we do not know, you nor I, whether this is tomorrow, or one thousand years. Nor by whose fist, or if by a human hand at all it will come - & not merely earth's fate, for now our sometimes-glowing land.

Perrier

The eye has been boasting again.

"The things I've seen! Satin, slipping from her shoulder like a shadow, that moon-white skin shining by the window. Both from a garden and a long-haul flight - a V of wings, ranging across twilight. Upturned glasses at the Savoy, and pop goes a cork. A face of wonder under a firework."

"Stop there," said I, Fist. "What's that I detect in your corner, Eye? A tiny dot of water, lingering and pointless. Tell it your stories: perhaps it will act as a prism, where this random rainbow of sights converts into a beautiful light, which then changes into a cry, a tear, in which the meaning of the sum of such moments - all the confusions, Eye, of your kaleidoscope - becomes perfectly clear."

Next: Nothing happended; except, I flicked open another can of fizzy water.

The Moon and Fist

The cold moon at last bears a fruit: it is a photograph.

And suddenly cities of children chant,

"All the cities of clouds and sea, all nations and all continents, all circuits of planes, all shipping lanes, all ocean and all mountains, all fists and words, all shadow and light, each day and night: look, see how they are part of the same element - the One World of Earth.

"Humans, quit your daily shout, and now simply ask: what have we all been squabbling about? Dissecting such a thing with a line, drawn like a dream on a map, warring over what is yours or what is mine, or giving our lives to some other trap. What?

"Hush now! Your answers speak no more than the silent moon. So instead picture life to my tune: the earth is one, as simple as the sun, so forget the dark and complex dreams of night, and drum out with me the words we know to be right: love and freedom, each day all day long, as simple and true as the sea is blue."

And I, Fist, answer:

"Such a song is not for me. The world is not just what you see. Picture invisible spirals of the Air, lifting a skirt on a street, rummaging such neat hair, feeding the trees, and the tree-slayers, displacing a piece of office paper - an invoice gets lost, and a worker gets sacked by the boss - or picture it rotting the corpses of the caesars, filtering through the earth, performing more invisivle work. Or, or, or.

"Cities of children, the life of air comes only to some. Your simplicities are your own loss, not the flags of a battle to be won. Without such a gloss, I still go on.

"And, yet, Air: The suffocated ones, Air, do not bring me their ghosts, as cold and grey as the moon, asking me what with my life I have done. I do not wish to confess. I do not wish to say, today, only this.

Fireless

Look close, look closer: the leaping light of desire no longer nudges up the crease of the trousers, and gone from the eyes are that flicker of flame, that hint of fire. The belly does not burn or tumble with want or curry, the feet do not flinch over hot coals, not in the step even the hint of a hurry.

Yes. Today, kids, it's a hangover. Here is the point to extinguish all your expectations. I do not even want to say fuck you, or fuck you.

Everything is fed-up, as simple as an element: the stomach sick of food, the brain blaming the blood for the hurt, the blood sluggish, stumbling in its run around the veins, and the lungs coughing and complaining, and I, Fist, to be frank bored of blogging. It is time for sleep, for bed, to fall into the depths of the duvet like rotten food turning to mulch, dropping down into the earth, the 50% cotton clothing devoured by centuries of worms and soil, drifting to the swimming black depths of oil, to rejoin the dinosaurs in total death, to slump, to stop...

I mean, time to search for stillness in a sleep, here upon this troubled earth which never stops spinning and spinning and spinning.

Office Fire

Hands of heat drag paint from the walls. Smoke sparks at the corners of beige machines, which soon will begin to ooze off the bench, as flame licks along the carpet, burns the desk to charcoal, and gone are the paperwork and filing, gone the year-planner, and the tick of the clock above the swivel chair - and then, hurtling through the third floor window, the microwave with its madness of metal that's done all this - the office fire - metal secretly placed by a fist - and out it comes, shattering the glass, flying free as a punching fist at last - before finally exploding, mid-air like a firework. And, below, a certain Fist in a pocket offers silent applause. How often have the eyes of a slave at a desk dreamed of such action, how often.

But it was not like that. The door to the kitchen: black smoke streams out from the edges of that oblong. A finger presses a fire alarm. Half an hour working out that the electric hob came back on, after a power cut, too close to the new diposable cups. Soon we're let back in, escaping the world of chats and thin drizzle, to the office and electronic world, permeated by partly-burnt plastic, the kitchen sealed off, and Fist left limp in a pocket.

An hour

to kill. & into the mouth I could pop a pill, or rise (fine Fist) as troops pour past, or push the pleasure-flesh between the legs, or scramble up a pirate mast, or slice off the local's heads, or film a peace rally, or plot to shoot Mahatma Gandhi - all that could be I, Fist, in this hour to kill.

Or... or tidy the desk. Click the buttons of some on-line test. Eat another cookie. Google for pussy. Massage the shoulder. Blog about how I'm just killing time, as the hours grow one older, with this little waltz through the corners of a mind. A little waltz, a little dance of mine: as if it were I, Fist, who chooses to dance so, and not Time that dicates to Fist how I pass - at best pausing to ask: if this hour was your last, did you spend it best?

190

The Eyes - tired of wandering from clock, to computer screens, to train windows - glance instead at the left wrist.

Where, earlier, I, Fist, had scribbled this:

"190."

"That?" I explained. "A mnemonic, a note, of a record required to be looked up. Excel or Access, for the day after this."

But The Eyes, depressed and drooped, said:

"Uh uh. It is another random office order, from a chain of command, that works like a machine. Life ticks on like a clock, numbered and mathematical. And like the record you request, you are no more than statistical, just as the warmth of a computer is no more than electrical. Random, without value, and producing nothing. And - let's be fully honest - what more is the body than a cipher, for the success of your species, coded in such famous spirals?

"More, Fist, more? Just as the 190 will be washed away from the wrist, so will you and every life be removed, one final day, from the whole of the universe, when nothing becomes of time and space. No touch or trace, no internet page, no recorded speech, no faded photo will remain. Nothing escapes that Law."

Silence.

"Ahh, shut up," said I, Fist. "Like you did in school, where such things are taught to tame creatures such as I and you, who, once upon a time, combined like this: I pressed down upon your closed lids, and in the inexplicable magic of defiance, we made amongst the bruised colour of night, galaxies of uncountable and enduring stars."

Flowers and Fists

An eyelash that just floated into view, painted and beautiful, fluttering like a butterfly, rushes, rushes by - past the oblong of the office door, humming along the hush of the corridor - and has, now, gone.

From its whispers, from the darting flashes of dark lashes, I, Fist, seemed to detect a hint of something that went like this:

"So what, Fist, if a finger lingers above a button, ready to remove a city? So what, that the face of any other may lie broken by a fist in a second? Between the thighs do failing lives remain fecund, and the city, full of fists and fumes, is equally bounteous with blooms; why write only of that, and not of this?"

I'll ponder it.

"Why not buttercups and roses, the dandelion and tulip? Why not run through the market with flowers by the fistful? To bring life into loveliness by what you think, surely is more than a turn of phrase, or a technical trick?"

Don't Do Blogs

All day, all day long, I've been getting the same piece of lip from the tongue.

"Don't do blogs. Instead play chess, or fetch yourself an ice. Outside now it's simply warm and nice. Little goes on in the office, and your blog - what point, what profit?"

There the tongue lolls, red like a devil, as sultry as a muse. Now its whispers have burgeoned like a bruise. The legs ask to be lazed about on a desk. The brain request nothing more than the routine as a test.

Just show me naked women, say the eyes, while the stomach mentions something about pies. The bare left wrist envies the wall - with its decoration by a standard clock, while the knees cannot even be bothered to knock, as all-in-all, the world spins on.

"Lethargy and laze," mutters the whole wide body, in some weird daze.

"Don't do blogs?" I ask back. "But, look. It's done."

This One Goes Out To...

... all my lady readers. Yes, you, the ladies. Because thanks to you (I guess) CityFist is now ranked number one in this google search. So thanks, raunchyfat girls, my wonderful readers. Each and every one of you.

And not just of all of you as individual girls, either. But to all of each of you: to all those monstrous lardchambers, to every single one of those innumerable stones, to each stretch of blubber wrapped around you, your vast thighs, juggernaut breasts, and the flabby cheeks under your eyes, to each of those chunks of chub you bring home - to I, Fist - each time you click over here. Not just to the thin person inside of you, the one waiting to come out. This one goes out to the whole of you.

You know, you raunchyfat girls, my ladies, sometimes, the eye likes to picture you, as you lumber about the globe each and every day: every ten minutes cooling off in some internet cafe, for a surf and a snack, or sinking further into your squeaky swivel chair, as the intern goes past your office at a sneak (reciting their usual prayer: to avoid your lunch time order, of five hot dogs, two cokes, and a double cheese burger). The long black clothing worn loose, the whatever-it-is excuse, the gay friends who you just *so* love, the huff and the puff, you know the stuff - whatever any slurs the eye can think of.

But at night, the little fat of the eyelids falls down upon the eyes. It snuggles up against the egg-perfect surface. Blinds the simple whites, the blue and black. Then the blood on each of the lids back - the purple spread, the dots of colour, the lines of deep red - form images instead, shapes driven by the bang of the pulse, the incessant tide of dark bloody wants, and the empty space in the bed echoes with lacks, and the memory is gone of whatever it is I, Fist, grope for here in the office each day, and as your tiny vaginas descend through the ceiling, your anonymous breasts bob up and down at the window, and your fats fly about all over the place, filling the loneliness, one thing becomes clear: what counts is the raunchiness.

100 Facts About Fist

1. Several bloggers have commented that they find the character of Fist elusive.
2. Quite possibly this list will change all that!
3. Perhaps it is working already.
4. Fact 4: I like comments on my blog (so do inform Fist.)
5. It is late, he is tired and hungover; possibly not in an appropriate mood for Facts.
6. He did not notice being born; was born asleep, and in fact for the first year of life barely moved – never crawled, my mother assures – and mostly spent that time sat against a sofa with toys arranged around him in a semi-circle; contemplating them, perhaps.
7. At university there were such long bus journeys from here to here, everyone drunk or hungover, talking away about the latest lay, or homework trouble or idiot tutor, or where they ended up last night, or how much they managed to drink, and once upon a time from the window the following came into view: a man in a turban sat cross-legged in a field, with a perfect semicircle of cows arranged around him, which he slowly fed with fistfuls of grass, one by one by one.
8. Years later, I sliced through delicious steak here and here.
9. Once upon a time, a silly and drunk young man was in the way of my exit from a tube train here; so I pushed him out through the doors, pinned him against a sign, the left fist pointing a finger up at his face, ordering: “Never get in my way again.”
10. He hasn’t.
11. Probably he was a trainee Doctor; maybe one day he will find this fist bleeding in an Emergency room, remember the face – laid about before him unconscious, defenceless, and in need – and decide to amputate.
12. Certainly the young doctor will have put his fists to a better purpose than I, Fist, over the years since then.
13. An orgasm a day keeps bad moods away.
14. I’m not sure if he’s had sex this year, but there was an awful lot last year.
15. I have never fisted a vagina or anus, but once or twice or thrice, or whatever number sounds nice, the thumb has pushed its way over a woman’s face, the bony flesh of her cheeks, the plateau under the chin, and then gone into the mouth, working itself over the lips, around the gums, the teeth; the other fingers gripping the skull, as it teased the tongue.
16. I spy with my little eye on that ex-girlfriend’s blog via proxify.com or anonymizer.com each and every working day; she has no idea.
17. We’re still friends and meet and chat a lot, and I must say rather pleasantly, at that; behind her back, I accurately name her the “slut-whore ex.”
18. The sofa and the bath are, imho, mankind’s greatest inventions.
19. He likes to say, at dinner parties, that Civilisation should have stopped there.
20. He’s never been in love.
21. He’s told six different women he’s been in love with them.
22. They said that they were in love with him, too – first.
23. He once pretended he didn’t hear a girlfriend mumble ‘I love you’ when she was drunk and sleepy, and so never said it to her.
24. She only came once from the cock through the entirety of their relationship.
25. Statistically, it seems, the cock is of an average size for a white man.
26. Annoyingly, it’s a grower not a shower.
27. He has never received penis enlargement spam.
28. He lives just around the corner from Deek.
29. Probably they know each other’s faces from passing by on the street, or slumping in a pub, or playing ballgames in a local park.
30. He has no real wish to meet Deek.
31. He plays a lot of chess on-line; finds the game fascinating, even has the odd book about its history and the human comedy of it all.
32. He has only ever won one truly satisfying and complete game of chess; the pleasure was flabbergasting, the memory still lovely.
33. He likes to get incredibly drunk and then beat people at chess while he is blindfolded.
34. Most of his friends have grown rather weary of doing this, but not of talking it up; it’s almost legendary.
35. He’d like to play two games simultaneously and blindfolded, but no victims have volunteered for this humiliation.
36. He doesn’t think The Game of Chess part of The Waste Land is particularly remarkable, unlike The Fire Sermon and the other really famous and often-quoted sections.
37. For a while, his soul was under the sway of this book, then this book, then this, then this; they perched in the palm like doves of truth.
38. He does not like to see the earth from the moon, or to name it as a whole too much; there is no thought, no language, to grasp this swirling ball of man and nature; unknown and unnamed marvels and murders nest in each and every moment.
39. Nonetheless, he credits thought and credits the banal and very big fact that all of us actually exist really rather highly; the Treatise reviewed here is his current guide, influence, love; whatever you want to call it, he does not know what to call it.
40. He would like to tell you what to read and why.
41. See links above, excepting Larkin.
42. It is an island mentality, he knows, behind this wish; the belief in closure and control that comes with it, that makes a utility out of culture.
43. Art has no purpose says I, Fist.
44. Yet it serves us, sometimes rescues us, and carries weight.
45. This is all getting rather intellectual.
46. I, Fist, along with the left fist, plays the piano – jazz, mostly – badly.
47. I have had my fingernails painted more than once.
48. I have had my nails painted less than thrice.
49. I have never had a bone broken.
50. He is an INFP.
51. He is lazy.
52. He is overweight.
53. He has started going to the gym again.
54. He likes exercise.
55. Throughout most of his haphazard life, he has let others make decisions for him.
56. Recently he decided to go part-time in his job, to try to make a career of writing; that begins on June 1st.
57. Control is beyond him.
58. He likes being wished luck.
59. Not so keen on love.
60. The slut-whore ex used to orgasm all the time during sex – with him.
61. She, an artless and promiscuous lover before, said it changed her view of sex and intimacy entirely.
62. The other week, enormously drunk, she got fucked by two strangers at a party.
63. She has never told him this.
64. I distrust existentialism.
65. When watching his father breathe his final breath, laid out in the hospice on his death bed, green with cancer and fat with drugs, he noticed the time was three minutes to seven o’clock.
66. They, his father and him, never found an appropriate way to speak to each other; about things in common, or about difficulties.
67. When I was 13, my Dad went mad; approximately recovered by the time I was 18, only to be diagnosed with cancer, which killed him when I was 21.
68. Them the breaks.
69. Nonetheless, he is partly responsible for their failure to properly speak.
70. One year exactly after the death, he assaulted a stranger on a tube train.
71. He has been beaten up.
72. He owns boxing gloves.
73. The story of Narcissus and Echo is the most profound story he knows.
74. Perhaps he does not know it really, though; for to know is to suffer, with the seer Tiresias anyway.
75. He believes that the most towering of 20th Century intellectual thought – Freud, Foucault, Lacan, say – can be best understood by referring to the story of Narcissus and Echo, which disrobe their symposia as parochial bungalows dressed grandly as regal palaces.
76. He has a lot of friends and fun in his life.
77. None of his friends know about this.
78. The word ‘happy’ is one of his least favourite.
79. ‘Defenestrate’, ‘swerve’ and ‘labyrinthine’ some of his most favourite.
80. Nothing I have typed out has he found truly satisfying and complete.
81. Nor is that the point, the aim, the purpose, the ambition…
82. He holds it likely that Czeslaw Milosz was profoundly right in stating this: that happiness has the smell of freshly baked bread.
83. I like nature, and miss it somewhat, here now in the city.
84. I do not know what the future holds for us.
85. I find the clues worrying, distressing.
86. Into his mouth I have put: alcohol, cigarettes, magic mushrooms, marijuana, ecstasy, coffee and sugar, and cocaine in the nose.
87. He finds marijuana easily the most pleasurable of those; if you disagree, either you need a better dealer, or he does.
88. He smokes marijuana very little nowadays.
89. Not a big fan of the 69.
90. 90! I am struggling to find eleven more facts worth stating about myself, but best not to waste these final moments.
91. Ten now.
92. Did I mention the elusive thing?
93. He was quite good at mathematics, studied it as an undergraduate.
94. He quit drama at school to get away from a drama queen girlfriend, whom thought their love perpetual and eternal; incidentally, her name was not Juliet.
95. He hated performing on stage; but devising plays, improvising, directing, rehearsing – he misses them.
96. He’s been bitten by the same dog twice.
97. He used to fear dogs a lot more before that.
98. He has immensely elaborate and indecipherable dreams.
99. I like the blogosphere and, probably, I like you too.
100. He thinks soap-opera and sci-fi (amongst other things) are partly appealing because they make humans simpler to understand, easier to witness, and more recognisable than that which is real.

That Moment

or this moment: the fist flying through the air, the face of the stranger breaking open, the glasses falling from the face, the face crying after them with blood, the features losing their family resemblance, the snug shape of the skin smeared and stretched, the crack of the bone of the nose as it breaks - that moment when a fist breaks a face, drunk and on drugs and unamused by the random Dutch - or that other moment: the one feared by Dr. Strangelove, when a fist rests its finger by a button, a button that will break a city, bring down a city, obliterate a city, and by the button the fist lingers a little, lights a last cigarette, or cigar, the vapour blue and lazy, and the towers wait, ready to tumble, and the windows quiver, ready for the burning to fling and to fall, and the boundaries on the maps are ready to be rendered as meaningless as rubble, as if the drawing of a child all crude and wrong, then all torn up, or rather, torn from the face of the earth - or any other moment a human decides at the drop of a hat to destroy a human - tell me, someone, when the only record of a life is blood forced out of a face by a fist, smeared upon the rubble, dribbling through the ruins - what would you keep from today, tucked away in the corner of your fist, tucked away from all such moments, what survivor would you offer the desolate future, what seed, aside from the brutal will to eat?

That was

you, was it, sprinting from the police station, stuffing bundles of vending-machine popcorn up your jacket, collapsing to giggles on the pavement, and handing them back to the man bounding up, who was swearing something in Dutch; that was you, was it, finding someone's Volvo outside open at night, and falling asleep on the front seat, after a spliff, and returning to the waking world to run off with a child's kite, buried at the back of the glove compartment, that you never flew and that is now lost; and that was you, was it too, at first light giving the taxi directions, and then simply standing there, at the open car door, silent and statuesque, until off he drove with another fare; and you, staring across the massive Maas on mushrooms until each wave, each detail, became an undecipherable blur of shape and size, the image growing larger than all life before retreating to a point; and you lying on the grass and lighting another joint as the pigeon lady came, covered with bread and standing in a cross like Christ for the masses to peck, as down the pack swept, or was that a dream; and that was you, was it, infatuated with the whores in the window shops (that one with those glasses, black bra and panties, can at most have been 17), one after another after another; that was you, was it, man of leisure, man about town, there with no other guide than Allen Ginsberg and your best friend from School - he whom at 10 looked up 'existentialism' in some dictionary or other other, along with the dirty words, and concluded that 'utterly free in a meaningless universe' was he; and set his soul on Holland.

Holland, where now, like me and maybe you, he sends out electronic messages from behind a desk in an office; he just emailed me this, and is somehow still laughing unchanged, Hahahahaha, to a you that was.

An Office - Late Last Night

"Papers and folders hunker down on desks, dotted about the room like nervous creatures, not knowing which hands will toy with them next. Blinds become black stripes in the twilight - the city twilight for which no birds come to sing - and the telephones crouch in silent poise, ready to ring. Darkness, near night, spreads like a blanket across the details of the day, and the office shades into shapes of dark grey, without flutter or feature. While here and there, a green or red dot of lonely light.

"Behind me the door echoed its thud, & I headed straight for the drugs. The filing cabinet in the corner. Key in the pencil pot. Open the bottom drawer. In a food bag, in an envelope, in a jiffy bag, in a carrier bag - there it was. Right at the back. Like she, my dealer, said.

"What was that? Who what where? There, the footsteps outside. Echoing along on the stair. Hide - shadows breath at the glass of the door. Security Guards.

"And then the lights come on and in the guards stroll, with a nod and wink out comes a rizla, and Dave offers to roll; out are pulled the empty chairs, banished the ghosts of night, and we all sit round for puff after puff after puff, never having enough. At six in the morning the cleaners come, nervously at first, then in a line, one after one after one, till all are done. It's the management next - and then the early birds - aka the nervous wrecks - for whom it seems to relax best - and -

"And, Fist!" he rambled on. "Fist! This little daydream of mine, yesterday, after the first smoke in a long time, made you remember all this - all that from years ago? Maybe the mellow tingles touched you too, silly Fist!"

"They stopped at the wrist," I answered. "What do such Rotterdam fantasies say to you now, years later? Where is your friend from the student flats? Such stories drift in and out of cities like ghosts, or anonymous men through offices, ghosts of a great connected human family, of the feeling of the homely, here in this unhomely world..." (I would go on, but already another haze of smoke has begun to unfurl.)

Cities of Ghosts

"Go to Amsterdam, just for a weekend; and return home with one thousand new sights and stories: about meeting lunatics in the coffee shops, about watching madmen snort speed on the train, about hysterical nutters hanging off the lazy trams screaming, about chemically crazed kids in the bare intense clubs dancing faster than you thought possible, and the fools floundering in the canals each night, the tourists taking photos on the canals all day, about the grinning jibberers skinning up on street corners, about the shaky stumbling addicts snorting drugs against blank walls.

"Expect stories about taking drugs: what-happened-on-super-skunk, about sitting still, quietly, for a very very long time, a long time, very very, somewhere, with someone, else, and forgetting, forgetting everything, what was that last bit, don’t know, forgotten, about sex-shows and bizarre magazine images, about hours of giggles, about what and who fell into a canal, about seeing Jesus on the pool table thanks to magic mushrooms, legal and sold over the counter don’t you know, about having a smoke on a street stood next to a smiling mellow copper. About crack-heads on every corner making you feel paranoid along with the dealers left-right-and-centre, about avoiding pick-pockets despite being battered, about the police station in the red-light district: on one side of it a brothel, on the other a coffee shop, about getting clattered and stealing bikes at 4am. About cunningly using the public transport system without paying, about the hotel slept in from 8 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon, about the culinary nirvana of McDonalds, which never tasted so good.

"Or instead do the whole thing properly: go to the vast Dutch port and city of Rotterdam, not for a weekend, but for three months, for January and February and March. That’s twenty times longer than a weekend. And there’s half-again more coffee shops in Rotterdam than in Amsterdam, so roughly double the available quantity of drugs. And there’s no tourists: making Rotterdam skunk half the price of Amsterdam skunk, and double the quality. Treble.

"Rotterdam, a real world city, a town without tourists, not like that little vice cul-de-sac up the coast (which is only a train-ride away anyway); Rotterdam, not just a city sating the simple desires of foreigners for escapism and vice, but a real part of Holland, not just a cauldron conjuring sights and stories for tourists, with whores for witches and drugs for broth. So: go for six weeks, and after quick multiplication, you can expect to return home with … about a million stories about drugs, about nutcases, about the Dutch, about the sex, and some truths about another country. About a million stories to be expected from three months in Rotterdam, rent-free, admittedly on a shoestring budget, but staying there with your best mate from school in the student flats. Perfect. About a million stories about mad people and taking drugs and both. Sat in a cold waiting room, you must be excited for the first time in months.

"Rotterdam, Rotterdam. Rotterdam: town without tourists, place without a trail of photo opportunities provided by neat maps sold by fake friendly locals on corners, a stretch of land without people there for the banal excitement of having a holiday memory consisting of ‘something different’ now found in a photo album under a coffee table; place of people living daily lives, same routine, same street, not visiting some quick and easy gallery for foreigners with video cameras after a cultural fix to talk about in distant dinner parties, but ordinary Dutch people sitting in the same places, places of routine, meaningful repetition, rounding the same bend most days, boarding the same tram and paying the same fare, muttering at the same stuff and spreading jokes amongst each other. Not for tourists, not for travellers, not for nothing but normal life, hardcore Dutch life. And life that starts anew."

Remember that? I, Fist, asked him this afternoon. Remember that? He'll get back to you tomorrow.

Cigarette

begs the sweat crawling down the neck, cigarette bangs the drums at the side of the head, cigarette wheezes each lung, itches the feet, jiggles the legs; bones click and crack, and through the flesh of the cheek strange fluids drip, then pour on to the tongue, as up the throat ashen slugs run. Cigarette, come explode this city of suffering flesh like a bomb, cigarette.

- So reports the belly button. And I, Fist, reply:

"You, massive empty dot in the middle, buried and blind amidst the black - the black of the forest of hairs, of the hills of fat, of the night-cover of clothing - you through whom once upon a time in the womb all goodness flowed - you, inferior button for whom a stray bit of fluff is a fine catch - do shut up. All you are is an absence, a gap, the path back is a cord forever cut, and for you nothing can compensate that. You speak only with the voice of total lack - an ever empty cave, a vortex of rumbling echoes, transforming every phrase into a whine for this or for that.

"The body, true, is awash with a chemical war, but will not surrender to you. Beyond the blue rivers of my veins, the hill-lets of my knuckles, the street-like grids of skin and the traffic-crashes of the paper-cuts, perch the angel-white crescents of the finger tips: I offer them as sacrifice and substitute to the tongue, the teeth, the lips."

(Although, in the laconic left-hand there sits a lighter - waiting and ready for fire and smoke. It, the left fist casually, teasingly, flicks.)

Buttons

that flush fists of faeces down and away into the city of sewers, or that keep the city of flesh from the touch of fist, closing blouses above and the jeans below like this, or made when we fall from the kingdom of the womb, to a city of coos saying how sweet the babe, that light a lamp or tell the time in Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, any city of time world-over, chaffing the fist on the edge of the wrist, buttons of the world, bow down and be jealous of this:



She - pictured here puking city-sized quantities of cum all over her face - made me it to display, to link, to press. Not made for trading on the streets, or statistics of civic efficiency, or for some fashion display, or the rationalized controls of a city, and a tiny link no doubt; a link that signifies nonetheless something larger that exists: the city of friendship.

The City and Sex

The girls from downunder coated en masse in cum, draped over sofas as naked and as drunk as anyone, drugs lining up in the kitchen again, as Kirsten cleans up the puke off the floor; the suave hand waving au revoir, to the maid the kid and the wife, off for golf Fifi, while phoning for the ass of some belle de jour; and the back alley behind the library over the road, where (a reward for their half-hearted and hung-over Sunday practice in the park) some teenage girls circle jerk half the local footy team; and the guys in raves reduced to jelly in a dark corner, waking to shit out a gang’s worth of HIV-plus ejaculate next morning; and the animal fun and the family fistings; and the wife swaps and slave children; and the lustful licking each other under umbrellas, never soaked enough; and dull husbands fattening in the suburbs amongst their whippet-thin wives, ordering their fists never to finger the bosom of their secretary – their boner banging about beneath their desk, and coming like Christmas a coronary, and always the hope of a brief holiday, in the quiet comfy hospital, before the end of their upright lives; and midnight, in the carparks, where drivers swap women amongst each other, rapid against the lampposts like stray mongrel dogs; where saying oneself is truly in love says no more than a fist does, when entering some cheap glove: ah this style is warm, or suits fist, or will do – well – just about – well – its kinky enough and it kinda fits:

O city, are you a symphony of sex, a melody made of promiscuity, a harmony of the horny, an orchestra of orgasms, a throbbing tune, beating and bounding through days, nights, whole human lives?

Or, O City, an olympic-sized cunt-shaped love super-stadium, for all the spunk-javelins of the world to launch at?

Or, O City, like half the blogosphere – bundles of lusting language and sexual reportage, against the democratic and multicoloured backdrops of LiveJournal and blogger, where an Average Joe, a John Q. Public, clinically depressed, IQ155, loves vaginas and breasts but just not blondes, not Fist but the surveys and respondents, where Brett and Hiromi make a picnic made of panties, such a pretty picture of a perfect couple, or where some sub worships her wondrous cactus, snagging her begs and breasts and bloods until she bursts, the bastard; or, or, or

“Such freedom!” announced his Eye. “Sparkling and shimmering, like the stars upon the sky, as eternal and lovely as an eye.”

“No, not like those super-terrestrial lands,” said the Tongue, slavering. “For the nymphs are here in the world, to be held in both of the hands.”

“Quite so,” said the Cock, an aristocrat. “Let us go have sex with the whole wide open world.”

But at that, the Feet protested about too much effort.

And I, Fist, have to confess: I was feeling rather bored by all of this.

“Look, eyes,” I said. “Undress every woman, would you? And then, tongue, lick every crevice, would you? And cock, coax your way into every corner? Come, come. We’ve pictured all this before with Grandmamma, and your Mother, too – she who looks like you – although ancient and saggéd, true.

“And what about those Americans, whose features crowd under five coatings of fat? Or the hunchback nuns, with their atrophied cunts? O, why this city of the mind’s eyes, made of imagination … Look, here’s another you wouldn't wish to x-ray: the painfully thin, like when you were seven years old, and the Ethiopian story that the news told - those African women, nothing more than a naked balloon for a stomach, added to a bundle of bones? Bones, bones, bones!”

“Alone,” sounded the echo in the China cave of the ears. “You are alone. Alone, alone, alone.”

Talk Shit

Really, he cannot bear to face it. Cock flopped out, the fists of faeces getting ready to rock out - and, then, as down he lowers his butt, the horror, the horror of the toilet seat still hot.

Equally, those harsh facts from biology; unbearable. Smell is made from the molecules of actual stuff, not some different substance given off, as with the reflections of light.

Thus: the stinky air here is dotted with the sharp snap of actual shit, actual shit; it lolls about the lips, nests in the nose, enters him through the eye holes.

And so, only moments before, here his housemate's body must have hovered. This exact spot. Squeezing out the body-sifted debris. Sausage, fried bread, ice-cream and lager.

Revolting and pointless, surely, he thinks, to realise it. Such cruel facts of life as these - they are about us always, enough, anyway; so much human pollution of humans. Shut up, he tells himself, and just get on with it. Stop talking. Stop talking shit.

I, Fist, of course, have something else to say.

"Underneath the indignity, might you not sense a little story? Of having shared with your housemate's survivors a little moment that forms a memory? Like a blog entry does? Or more like a little touch of connection, like a comment is?" But he shakes his head. Enough of grandiose claims, he thinks, enough of faking some function out of the dirt of our lives, he doesn't feel like it at all.

"Something else, then," I said, meandering on, as if in the maze of the city, amongst walls made of mirrors and unknown corners. "Surrender that responsible feeling, which clambers for a hidden logic to hide the horror and shame, that groping hunger for pride. And then carry on anyway - with the search for words in common amongst the shit, with the attempt to name things which matter - even only if in a random form, say of an acrostic."

*** Guest Post : MUSS ***

Muss's fingers have this tale to tell:

Muss has collapsed on the side of the bed, exhausted. But with her face flushed. Nipples, hard. Blood, pounding. Still, aching, and unfilled.

We - her fingers - reach down again, find the folds again, that are unsatisfied still, with our clumsy fumbles. We, her fingers, are not big enough. Not thick enough. Not round enough. Not smooth enough. Not warm enough. Please forget us, we say to her, please forget us artless things, in and on and of your body.

Or remember us on the body of that lover, then bring us back inside of you. Remember the girl with thick black hair: it poured down her back, it tangled around us. Remember that boy and his smooth, hairless skin, and how they then caressed him. Remember - rounded nipples, and long hard shafts, and the wetness - and - and - and - and -

- AND -

- and then she let go of us, draping us down the side of the bed, exhausted and collapsed, but not as before.

What do the bits of your body say about you? Tell me. Be my guest.

Cities and Minds

“Tell me,” one day I, Fist, asked of The Brain, “tell me this. Look about the city: what are you?

“Are you, Brain, those five towers there, flying higher than birds, tallest and proudest, cleaned each day by slaves to a gleam, a world within a world formed to your own design - all that that started with a clear, good plan, which, one day, found a solid place for foundation, then building began, rapid and efficient – and now you overtake the rest, a light placed atop your crest for all the ants below to worship? Grown from a single point like a tree, from a seed? Onwards, upwards, free; as solid as a fist, but flying, but punching? Are you like those five towers, that fist the roof of the sky, like five penises fisting a vagina all at once, groping into the black innards of woman, fisting up at the mysterious dark matter, that is perforated with points of light, an alien perfection fisted with your own perfect purpose?

“Or, or, or. Or are you like the city as a whole? Dark and disorderly, all hidden corners and wrong turns? A corpse rotting in black bag there, a tiger locked up in a bedroom here? Twisting canyons made of concrete, mirrors, and steel; flinching imperceptibly, as a stray snake writhes below, beneath a thundering wheel? All blare and bluster, all lurching litter, and some random name – Paris, London, New York; Moscow, Baghdad, Hades – chosen to make the mass of messiness seem part of the same? (But where an innocent and stupid child might, in obscure, neat gardens, for a moment run happy and wild?)”

The brain likes the luxury of such speculation. Retreats from the dirty window, mouthing that such metaphors deserve real contemplation. Then, a call into the comfort comes – from the left foot’s little toe.

Something like this, Little Toe’s tale runs: “Would you call my crescent of calcium a finger-nail moon? Would you call my dotting of hairs an oasis – perched amidst the tumbling dunes? I am the size and length of a lozenge; am I baklava, liquorice? A sugar sweet flavoured with artificial orange? No; you know full well I have only one human life – in which to march with me to the drums, and their demands from the day, or dance amongst the delights of night, or allow a lady to paint me purple, say, or leave me sparkling after sex, cooling out under the end of the duvet, or stroll the streets for whatever marvel comes next. So I am Little Toe only, with only one life, and without like. Brain, for you it is the same – you are not a tower rising in space, not tears creasing the contours of a face, not a city drowning in rain, not a desert dotted with oases of drugs and sex. Although I admit it is more complex, it is the same for the toe as for the brain.”

“No,” I, Fist, replied. “No, Toe – and how annoying! What a pretty picture I was just painting! The brain will prove you wrong: throw you like an unwanted worker from its top tower, or pluck you from its neat city garden like an unruly flower. You, he will amputate! Apologise toe, before it’s too late!”

Then the Little Toe became a little itch, that to peace and silence Fist failed to scratch.

And he, man, uncertain, stammered out that: “A ludicrous and existing thing I am … and now - like a lame fool, unlike tower or city - surprise, I seem to be laughing …”