the north-west passage, no less

In search of the north-west passage.

I travelled and unravelled weary and wary, in search of strangers to confess my loneliness to. I hoped for intimacy but expected harsh words and several elbow-jabs in the face and belly. The crux of everything begins and ends here, in the miserable mind. It's a good world if you don't weaken. I ask for nothing less than the prison of my own bed.

She was soppy and daft, wet behind the ears. She stared for too long, confessed the desire for coarse and strange hands to envelope her body, wrapping her in protective caresses, as cold as possessed north sea water. Her banal fantasies were unheard by the sterile mob of the night-drinkers, yuppie-sprogs with enough spondoolies to sup pretentious mixers with enviable undiscern. The sort that can even afford taxis. You know. We all had fantasies that we were forced to routinely report to the office psychiatrist to pass through the tests. You had a better chance of promotion than dissent. And promotion meant wage rise, rather than the freezes for all these years. My poor father was near-starvation since they'd frozen his wage after 2011. Thank fuck he'd bought his flat. He gave all his money to this hopelessly destitute individual who had stolen his interest. It was the only act of sadism I ever understood.

I felt so bruised I wanted to laugh and curse, sabotage all happiness with tepid cynicism. Curse the wine-weary women, discontent with crime novels and monsoon pig-skin lap-bags. Or the balding men, checked shirts and mass-manufactured tweed, manic laughing chops HA HA HA U DUN SAY

I felt like a collector of sad, self-minimising, lonely lives as I trawled through this mob of blanched faces, assuming this 2% of existence to confirm 98% of all their essence. Social beings, even these words are my dialogue - my message in a bottle - to some bored and ill other, turned wrong by inside-out hormones, choking up her lungs in some sorry but well-sanitised respite home of the not too distant future. But words become a bad habit, like biting one's nails in public, providing as much (no, less) evidence of my existence, with the same contempt for public audiences. They said of Pariah Masculine Writer's prose: (picture Sinclair, Salinger, Self, Home, all those ras-clarts) unreadable melancholy prose! Wine-needy! Worthless and verbose!

I've had enough. Beyond sitting in a maisonette in Clapton watching Trisha-Kyle tv and accusing my lone child of psychosomatic sorcery, I chart glorious misery. The sort of gutsy chap who uses the ferric crust of a scab to describe all human physique. Improvement via critique. So I called on my darling to provide illustration, the one with that job, you know, the one with the friend, that one yeah, blimey, and that sick-headed lover. We moderns are incapable of myth, only rumour. Hear me.

Darling: sat on me jack jones in anodyne public inn on ratty high street, anywhere-on-Thames. My words are blasphemous, so I exert myself through pox-laden looks. Definition by attraction. Clothes, wear. Without wallet, tv or PC - are you alive? So I mutter, between halves of cider (thanks Clive, yeah, can I ponce a fag, ta). They usually leave us in the end. I would tell them I was pregnant with their bleedin babies, but it was only desperate fantasy, impossible talk. There was something terrifying about all this lack of feeling. I wondered what other people were talking about, but then again, that was only in white middle class books. I made peace with dying. It was as easy as melting the frozen crusts of the north-west passage with the blood disease on the edge of my tongue.